It's become very hip over the last 10 years to insist that Empire Strikes Back, considered by far the weakest of the three by most people back in 1987 when Jedi came out, was the best of the series. There's certainly a lot it has going for it... IMHO, Empire would have been the best film if:
1. They didn't have that lame vision quest scene in the swamp where Like fights a phantom Darth Vader, and sees his own face under the helemt. That scene was dull, long, and pointless.
2. It didn't take them 47 minutes of tearful melodrama to lower a shackled Han Solo into the carbonite chamber. What? It wasn't 47 minutes? Sure felt like it.
3. Mark Hammel didn't go so over-the-top during the "I'm your father" scene. Was anybody actually moved by the sight of him blubbering out "NOOOOOOOOO"? Anyone at all?
4. It actually had an ending, or even a climax. The final scene was just, "The Empire just kicked our asses for 90 minutes. Let's stare our a window."
The best Star Wars movie was Star Wars.
Empire and Jedi had some nice moments, but nothing that beats the first time you saw kind, soft-spoken old Ben whip his lightsaber out of nowhere and cut off that guy's arm for the first time.
Or the very first time Harrison Ford did what became his action-movie signature: Chase the bad guys off-screen, then come running back the other way being chased by them.
Or the sight of Darth Vader, a person we knew almost nothing about yet except that he was big, spooky, and in charge, preparing to drug and torture Princess Leah.
Not to mention the introduction of the guns on the Falcon, the dogfight on the surface of the death star, the "land speeder" that looked like a hovering Dodge Charger convertable, R2 & 3PO walking through the middle of a firefight almost unnoticed, Han getting sick of Greedo's BS and shooting him under the table, Luke being a little short to be a stormtrooper, R2 being adviced to let the wookie win. The list goes on. All cherrished memories. Make my Star Wars the first one. It stood alone as a complete story worth watching, and is the only one that does.
If an iBook is "just out of warranty", you can still buy the extended warranty (AppleCare, 3 years for about $250, IIRC), and get it repaired for no cost beyond the warranty extention.
Extended warranties are a joke when it comes to most electronics, but laptop computers see enough abuse over three years that it's not a bad idea.
1. The level of light behind my display will change throughout the day according to how much sunlight is hitting that window.
2. Birds and baseballs can fly into my computer screen, costing me a lot of money and taking away precious web browsing and TV watching time while I'm getting a replacement window.
3. I live in Minnesota, where gas-filled triple-pane windows are commonplace, to help insulate against our sub-zero (F) winters. How well would this LCD retain heat?
I think you are misstating the cause and effect here... SUVs are less expensive than a car of similar size because of CAFE.
Actually, that was my exact point.
I will agree that the safety of big SUV's is a factor for some people, to a point... except for the fact that the #1 truck in America is the Ford F-150, which had the absolute worst off-set front-side crash test rating of any truck on the market. Worse than a lot of compact cars. The engine compartment fails to absorb much impact, resulting in the cab space becoming completely crushed.
(They updated it this year, and I have not seen the new results, but the F-150 design up until 2003 was a death trap, and sold like hotcakes.)
Come to think of it, why would japanese animation be any different? millions if not billions are spent by American's for anime. You really think the consumers care where it came from? As long as the story is still good, I don't think it matters at all. That just proves the market is there, just no American companies are exploiting it.
Anime was very much a niche market until companies like ADV, Pioneer, and Bandai started releasing relatively inexpensive DVD's (at about the same time that "Adult Swim" on the cartoon network started to bring a broader audience to anime for grown-ups like Cowboy Bebop.)
You can now get the entire series of "Princess Nine" for less that $40 on line, compared to the early 90's when owning an entire run of a series would cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
The recent success of anime (go to any Best Buy and see how big the section has become!) is an indicator of an emerging market. Over the next 5 years or so, Hollywood might start to see the potential and exploit it, but if you told somebody in 1990 that "romance" cartoons like Tenchi or Boys Over Flowers would become major sellers in the United States, they never would have believed you. The only anime selling well in the 80s were dubbed kids shows on television, and porno on VHS.
(By the way: Believe the hype about Princess Nine, especially in the original Japanese w/ subtitles. American TV has never produced a sports-themed show that's even half as good.)
Re:Nope, most people don't...
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Upgrade Your eMac
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You are a perfect example of my need to re-emphasize rule 1.
Although with Mononoke Hime, they hired expensive pretty boys to do the voice work anyway, because star power is still the most reliable way to sell movie tickets.
Okay, maybe "pretty boy" is not really a valid way to describe Billy Bob Thornton, but you get the idea.
Nobody makes them because they don't sell, and they don't sell because nobody makes them.
Not really. I could name dozens of animated features that failed miserably. (Lord of the Rings, anybody?)
Re:% of people who upgrade?
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Upgrade Your eMac
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No, it's a myth that people are buying SUV's for the fantasy of off-roading.
People buy SUV's because the CAFE standards have made it nearly impossible for a middle-class family to own a large car. Vehicles with truck frames are exempt from these standards, so the SUV (and to a lesser extent, the mini-van) have replaced both the station wagon and the luxury sedan. Notice that nobody makes station wagons anymore, and Lincoln no longer makes the Town Car.
The AWD and 4WD are popular packages because they make the vehicles safer for on-road driving. This is especially true in places like my home state of Minnesota, where snow, ice, and sleet are all factors which can compromise your ability to control the vehicle.
After seeing the art and animation from such films as "Tarzan" "Hercules" and "The Emperor's New Groove", I put it to you that many of the Disney animators deserved to be laid off. Feel free to hold whatever opinion you like about the writing and voice acting, but the bottom line is that those movies looked like ass.
Animated feature-length movies are not made for adult audiences very often in the US because the truth is, they just don't sell very well. You could make the case that movies like "Final Fantasy" and "Titan AE" bombed because they were painfully dull and poorly written, but the fact remains that there has yet to be a successful American full-length animated feature which wasn't considered a "family" movie in the US. Ever. The closest you could possibly get is "Heavy Metal", which enjoys a cult following (mostly among 12-year old kids and stoners, both of whom like looking at the cartoon boobies.)
The images in the dock are not file icons. They are shortcut buttons. There are many ways in which the do not behave like other icons. They scale and move around when you increase the dock population, or manually resize the dock. They only show names on mouse-over. They do not require a double-click to open. They "bounce" when an app is launching, and have indicator arrows to show when an app is running.
The fact that they are removed by dragging them off the dock is just one more example of how they don't behave like regular icons because they are not supposed to.
Try this, if you have an OS X Mac:
1. Choose an application you don't have on the dock. 2. Open the Applications directory in the Finder window. 3. Drag the icon from the finder window to the desktop. Notice how the icon moved from the Applications directory to your desktop directory. 4. Now drag that same application from your desktop to the Dock. Notice how the application icon is still on the desktop even though there is an icon which looks just like it in the dock now. Still think you should be able to drag that image from the dock to the desktop? If you did, what would you want the OS to do with the original, which is also on the desktop? Certainly not replace it, since the Dock icon is really just a pointer which directs the OS to the real file. Perhaps rename it to "Duplicate of FOO" or "Shortcut to FOO"? Also a piss-poor solution.
Instead, you drag things off the dock when you no longer want a dock shortcut for them. Dock shortcuts do not belong on the desktop, so dragging them from the dock to the desktop is the perfect way to get rid of them.
The Dock "poof", while cute, is inconsistent, unexpected and destructive behaviour.
It's not inconsistent behavior. It works the same way every time. It's not "unexpected" behavior, unless you've set yourself up with wrong expectations by using other (re: inferior) dock-like apps, such as the awful mess that is the MS-Windows Taskbar. Finally, it's not destructive, because you are not erasing any files, simply getting rid of an easily-replaceable shortcut pointer.
Re:Nope, most people don't...
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· Score: 4, Informative
Bah. I voided my eMac warranty with upgrades less than an hour after I bought it! It's a fantastic machine to hack around with. I will give this little bit of advice, though:
Step 1: Know what the fuck you are doing.
Working on an eMac can kill you. I'm not saying that figuratively, I mean that if you touch the wrong parts just the wrong way, you can receive enough of a shock to stop a healthy young heart, and die. So if you don't know the proper way to work around exposed CRT's, make a point of learning before you even consider working on an eMac beyond a simple memory upgrade. Almost everything on the eMac is nestled inside a little Pita Pocket of shielding nestled under the picture tube. So do me a favor, and don't get yourself killed just for the sake of a little extra HD space. Buying a firewire drive is a lot cheaper than funeral services these days.
You mean those "classic MacOS zealots" who have been buying Macintoshes for twenty years, making sure the company doesn't die like it's supposed to have done every year since 1985? Gosh, I wonder why Apple wants to keep THOSE losers happy.
First of all, I've been using Macs since the System 6 days, and Apple ][ systems before that, so stop getting your panties in a twist by assuming that I'm some Windows bigot who's calling you a "loser" (your word, not mine.)
Secondly, my point was not that there was anything wrong with throwing old-school Mac users a bone... only that that there was no functional reason for keeping the HD icon on the desktop anymore, apart from keeping people like you from bitching about its loss. (Not that it matters, you appear to have just shifted all that bitch energy to complaining about the lack of a menu which OS X doesn't really need.)
Wheel mouse buttons work in OS X by default. Just plug in nearly any USB wheel mouse, and you're scrolling away.
Middle-button text editing, a popular staple of Linux geeks, is not present, but the drag & drop features are powerful enough that you will never miss it, once you get used to the new OS.
The reason why this would be an improvement is that, in its current incarnation, it's very easy to accidently carry out an irreversable operation; removing an item from the dock.
You are wrong twice in that one sentence.
1. It's not an easy mistake to make, you need to drag icons fully off of and away from the dock to remove them.
2. It's not an irreversable mistake. Just open the Applications folder and drag the icon of the app in question back onto the dock. Done.
One reason not to do this is that almost every time I see an OS X desktop (including mine), it only has one icon on it: the HDD.
Since 10.3, my desktop has become even simpler, as I went into the finder preferences and removed the HD icon display from my desktop. (It's really only there to keep classic MacOS zealots happy, because it's actually very redundant. The finder icon in the dock gets you everything you need now.)
Actually, the finder's side-bar icons makes OS X 10.3 feel more like NeXT to me than it ever has. It may look kind of goofy, but I find it to be extremely useful. (Certainly more useful than any "explore" navigation window in any flavor of MS-Windows!)
there's loads of detail in there you miss unless you watch sections of it in slow motion
Or unless you use this other technique I've developed called "paying attention."
Clockwork Orange had detail that you could only see in slow motion (do freeze-frames during the second home invasion scene at the moment he murders the yoga woman. Subliminal abstract art.) HHG did not have "good graphics for the time." We are talking about the 1980s here, as in after Star Wars, Tron, etc. Even sci-fi TV we are talking about the era of Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, and the "V" mini-series.
Things didn't look "a bit tacky"; they looked fake. Fake as in "why has that actor got a cheap mannequin head on his shoulder?" fake. Also, the deck of the ship utterly failed to look squalid. They didn't have the budget for "squalid", so they settled for "dark."
You are kidding, right? The animated graphics (along with everything else about the effects) on that show were so bad they made Dr. Who look like Return of the Jedi. The editing was mostly awful, too, as was most of the supporting cast beyond the main players.
Find me two college kids who want to clean hotel rooms for minimum wage in all of Minnesota, and I will be impressed. Find enough to staff the hundreds of hotels just in the Minneapolis airport corridor, and you will have performed a miracle.
Those same kids can make ten bucks an hour (plus tips) pouring coffee at Caribou, and they know it. Why would anybody who can speak English well enough to hold a job like that want to clean toilets?
I do hope that you realize that people that act like you will NEVER have any employee loyalty.
I would expect not, seeing as I'm not an employer. I'm a programmer, and I get paid what I get paid because I provide value to the company that they couldn't get from Bangalore. If somebody came a long who could do my job as well for less, I might be let go... but at the same time, if somebody came along offering me more for the same work, I would seriously consider leaving. It's called "at will" employment, and I would not have it any other way. If you don't like it, move to a communist nation where you are guaranteed a job regardless of whether you are worth it.
paper MCSE's willing to work cheap. Some will some will not. The U.S. does not and never will need H1Bs to do ANY JOB!!!
Spoken like somebody who doesn't know anyone who's tried to run a hotel. If you think you can find American-born citizens who are interested in cleaning up bathrooms and bedrooms for strangers at minimum wage, you are clearly some kind of nut.
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1. They didn't have that lame vision quest scene in the swamp where Like fights a phantom Darth Vader, and sees his own face under the helemt. That scene was dull, long, and pointless.
2. It didn't take them 47 minutes of tearful melodrama to lower a shackled Han Solo into the carbonite chamber. What? It wasn't 47 minutes? Sure felt like it.
3. Mark Hammel didn't go so over-the-top during the "I'm your father" scene. Was anybody actually moved by the sight of him blubbering out "NOOOOOOOOO"? Anyone at all?
4. It actually had an ending, or even a climax. The final scene was just, "The Empire just kicked our asses for 90 minutes. Let's stare our a window."
The best Star Wars movie was Star Wars.
Empire and Jedi had some nice moments, but nothing that beats the first time you saw kind, soft-spoken old Ben whip his lightsaber out of nowhere and cut off that guy's arm for the first time.
Or the very first time Harrison Ford did what became his action-movie signature: Chase the bad guys off-screen, then come running back the other way being chased by them.
Or the sight of Darth Vader, a person we knew almost nothing about yet except that he was big, spooky, and in charge, preparing to drug and torture Princess Leah.
Not to mention the introduction of the guns on the Falcon, the dogfight on the surface of the death star, the "land speeder" that looked like a hovering Dodge Charger convertable, R2 & 3PO walking through the middle of a firefight almost unnoticed, Han getting sick of Greedo's BS and shooting him under the table, Luke being a little short to be a stormtrooper, R2 being adviced to let the wookie win. The list goes on. All cherrished memories. Make my Star Wars the first one. It stood alone as a complete story worth watching, and is the only one that does.
I have it, but how does that help me when the Wolves game is on, and there's a hole in my TV from the kids playing stickball outside?
Extended warranties are a joke when it comes to most electronics, but laptop computers see enough abuse over three years that it's not a bad idea.
1. The level of light behind my display will change throughout the day according to how much sunlight is hitting that window.
2. Birds and baseballs can fly into my computer screen, costing me a lot of money and taking away precious web browsing and TV watching time while I'm getting a replacement window.
3. I live in Minnesota, where gas-filled triple-pane windows are commonplace, to help insulate against our sub-zero (F) winters. How well would this LCD retain heat?
Actually, that was my exact point.
I will agree that the safety of big SUV's is a factor for some people, to a point... except for the fact that the #1 truck in America is the Ford F-150, which had the absolute worst off-set front-side crash test rating of any truck on the market. Worse than a lot of compact cars. The engine compartment fails to absorb much impact, resulting in the cab space becoming completely crushed.
(They updated it this year, and I have not seen the new results, but the F-150 design up until 2003 was a death trap, and sold like hotcakes.)
Anime was very much a niche market until companies like ADV, Pioneer, and Bandai started releasing relatively inexpensive DVD's (at about the same time that "Adult Swim" on the cartoon network started to bring a broader audience to anime for grown-ups like Cowboy Bebop.)
You can now get the entire series of "Princess Nine" for less that $40 on line, compared to the early 90's when owning an entire run of a series would cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
The recent success of anime (go to any Best Buy and see how big the section has become!) is an indicator of an emerging market. Over the next 5 years or so, Hollywood might start to see the potential and exploit it, but if you told somebody in 1990 that "romance" cartoons like Tenchi or Boys Over Flowers would become major sellers in the United States, they never would have believed you. The only anime selling well in the 80s were dubbed kids shows on television, and porno on VHS.
(By the way: Believe the hype about Princess Nine, especially in the original Japanese w/ subtitles. American TV has never produced a sports-themed show that's even half as good.)
Rule 1: Know what the fuck you are doing!
A CRT can kill you, even if it is unplugged.
Okay, maybe "pretty boy" is not really a valid way to describe Billy Bob Thornton, but you get the idea.
Not really. I could name dozens of animated features that failed miserably. (Lord of the Rings, anybody?)
People buy SUV's because the CAFE standards have made it nearly impossible for a middle-class family to own a large car. Vehicles with truck frames are exempt from these standards, so the SUV (and to a lesser extent, the mini-van) have replaced both the station wagon and the luxury sedan. Notice that nobody makes station wagons anymore, and Lincoln no longer makes the Town Car.
The AWD and 4WD are popular packages because they make the vehicles safer for on-road driving. This is especially true in places like my home state of Minnesota, where snow, ice, and sleet are all factors which can compromise your ability to control the vehicle.
Animated feature-length movies are not made for adult audiences very often in the US because the truth is, they just don't sell very well. You could make the case that movies like "Final Fantasy" and "Titan AE" bombed because they were painfully dull and poorly written, but the fact remains that there has yet to be a successful American full-length animated feature which wasn't considered a "family" movie in the US. Ever. The closest you could possibly get is "Heavy Metal", which enjoys a cult following (mostly among 12-year old kids and stoners, both of whom like looking at the cartoon boobies.)
The fact that they are removed by dragging them off the dock is just one more example of how they don't behave like regular icons because they are not supposed to.
Try this, if you have an OS X Mac:
1. Choose an application you don't have on the dock.
2. Open the Applications directory in the Finder window.
3. Drag the icon from the finder window to the desktop. Notice how the icon moved from the Applications directory to your desktop directory.
4. Now drag that same application from your desktop to the Dock. Notice how the application icon is still on the desktop even though there is an icon which looks just like it in the dock now. Still think you should be able to drag that image from the dock to the desktop? If you did, what would you want the OS to do with the original, which is also on the desktop? Certainly not replace it, since the Dock icon is really just a pointer which directs the OS to the real file. Perhaps rename it to "Duplicate of FOO" or "Shortcut to FOO"? Also a piss-poor solution.
Instead, you drag things off the dock when you no longer want a dock shortcut for them. Dock shortcuts do not belong on the desktop, so dragging them from the dock to the desktop is the perfect way to get rid of them.
The Dock "poof", while cute, is inconsistent, unexpected and destructive behaviour.
It's not inconsistent behavior. It works the same way every time. It's not "unexpected" behavior, unless you've set yourself up with wrong expectations by using other (re: inferior) dock-like apps, such as the awful mess that is the MS-Windows Taskbar. Finally, it's not destructive, because you are not erasing any files, simply getting rid of an easily-replaceable shortcut pointer.
Step 1: Know what the fuck you are doing.
Working on an eMac can kill you. I'm not saying that figuratively, I mean that if you touch the wrong parts just the wrong way, you can receive enough of a shock to stop a healthy young heart, and die. So if you don't know the proper way to work around exposed CRT's, make a point of learning before you even consider working on an eMac beyond a simple memory upgrade. Almost everything on the eMac is nestled inside a little Pita Pocket of shielding nestled under the picture tube. So do me a favor, and don't get yourself killed just for the sake of a little extra HD space. Buying a firewire drive is a lot cheaper than funeral services these days.
First of all, I've been using Macs since the System 6 days, and Apple ][ systems before that, so stop getting your panties in a twist by assuming that I'm some Windows bigot who's calling you a "loser" (your word, not mine.)
Secondly, my point was not that there was anything wrong with throwing old-school Mac users a bone... only that that there was no functional reason for keeping the HD icon on the desktop anymore, apart from keeping people like you from bitching about its loss. (Not that it matters, you appear to have just shifted all that bitch energy to complaining about the lack of a menu which OS X doesn't really need.)
Middle-button text editing, a popular staple of Linux geeks, is not present, but the drag & drop features are powerful enough that you will never miss it, once you get used to the new OS.
You are wrong twice in that one sentence.
1. It's not an easy mistake to make, you need to drag icons fully off of and away from the dock to remove them.
2. It's not an irreversable mistake. Just open the Applications folder and drag the icon of the app in question back onto the dock. Done.
Since 10.3, my desktop has become even simpler, as I went into the finder preferences and removed the HD icon display from my desktop. (It's really only there to keep classic MacOS zealots happy, because it's actually very redundant. The finder icon in the dock gets you everything you need now.)
Actually, the finder's side-bar icons makes OS X 10.3 feel more like NeXT to me than it ever has. It may look kind of goofy, but I find it to be extremely useful. (Certainly more useful than any "explore" navigation window in any flavor of MS-Windows!)
YMMV
Or unless you use this other technique I've developed called "paying attention."
Clockwork Orange had detail that you could only see in slow motion (do freeze-frames during the second home invasion scene at the moment he murders the yoga woman. Subliminal abstract art.) HHG did not have "good graphics for the time." We are talking about the 1980s here, as in after Star Wars, Tron, etc. Even sci-fi TV we are talking about the era of Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, and the "V" mini-series.
Things didn't look "a bit tacky"; they looked fake. Fake as in "why has that actor got a cheap mannequin head on his shoulder?" fake. Also, the deck of the ship utterly failed to look squalid. They didn't have the budget for "squalid", so they settled for "dark."
You are kidding, right? The animated graphics (along with everything else about the effects) on that show were so bad they made Dr. Who look like Return of the Jedi. The editing was mostly awful, too, as was most of the supporting cast beyond the main players.
In America, we call them "crosswalks" as they don't really look much like zebra stripes at all.
(Insert RedvsBlue.com "why do you call it a wart-hog? I think it looks more like a puma" joke here.)
Ah, the old jokes are still sometimes the best...
To be extremely meticulous, it would require one (1) shitload, or 2 times 10 to the power of a hell of a lot.
Past tense... as in "back in the 70s"?
Find me two college kids who want to clean hotel rooms for minimum wage in all of Minnesota, and I will be impressed. Find enough to staff the hundreds of hotels just in the Minneapolis airport corridor, and you will have performed a miracle.
Those same kids can make ten bucks an hour (plus tips) pouring coffee at Caribou, and they know it. Why would anybody who can speak English well enough to hold a job like that want to clean toilets?
I would expect not, seeing as I'm not an employer. I'm a programmer, and I get paid what I get paid because I provide value to the company that they couldn't get from Bangalore. If somebody came a long who could do my job as well for less, I might be let go... but at the same time, if somebody came along offering me more for the same work, I would seriously consider leaving. It's called "at will" employment, and I would not have it any other way. If you don't like it, move to a communist nation where you are guaranteed a job regardless of whether you are worth it.
paper MCSE's willing to work cheap. Some will some will not. The U.S. does not and never will need H1Bs to do ANY JOB!!!
Spoken like somebody who doesn't know anyone who's tried to run a hotel. If you think you can find American-born citizens who are interested in cleaning up bathrooms and bedrooms for strangers at minimum wage, you are clearly some kind of nut.