Look, if these athletes were up-front and simply say, "I'm in it for the money and glory", I wouldn't be so caustic about this whole issue.
First of all, most of them are very up-front about being in it for money and glory.
Secondly: Yes you would. Admit it.
Any athelete will tell you that they would be thrilled about having their picture on the front of a Wheaties box. I wish more/.ers would admit that they work with technology for the money and the bragging rights among their geek friends.
Oh, by the way, thanks for posting your resume on your website. I now know for a fact that I have a shitload more RDBMS experience than you do, and no longer feel compelled to justify my observations to you. Have a nice day.
You said yourself that postgres is, in fact, slower than MySQL. There's a lot of good reasons why it's slower. An enterprise-level database needs certain features (which MySQL lacks) which will always cause a performance hit.
Even had you not conceded that point (which makes everything I said *fact*, rather than *FUD*), I don't really feel like I need you to tell me how spiffy postgres is, because, like I said, I use postgres all the time, and have compared its speed to enough other systems to know how well it performs.
What astonishes me most of all about all your whining about "FUD" was that, when I posted my original message, I actually thought it would be the MySQL fans that would be more likey to get pissed off at me (for calling MySQL a rake to potgres's tractor). The fact that you took that post, which basically said that both DBMS's have their uses, as a "FUD" attack on postgres leads me to the only possible conclusion, that any conversation with you must be like walking on egg shells, because you are too fucking touchy. Take a few breaths, re-read my original post, and you just might realize that it was posted by somebody with no agenda against your favorite program.
Atheletes who accept endorsements (which make it possible for them to realize their dreams of testing the limits of humanity's physical potential), are not selling their souls.
They are selling shoes.
There seems to be an attitude among some on/. that commerce is somehow evil by its very nature. When you grow up, you may learn that all this commerce is what makes civilization possible.
"Not to mention Kermit The Damn Frog!!!" --Jimmy James
the rules of the olympics have been very strict regarding political statements at the games.
Good thing nobody told Jesse Owens. His solid kicking of Nazi "master race" ass in '35 has got to be one of the most effective political statement in sports history, and one of the most thrilling athletic feats since Pheidippides made his legendary two-day run.
Actually that's because every year, NBC simply decides that you only REALLY want to see any sport where Americans will probably (99.9% chance) get a medal, preferrably a gold.
Interesting theory, but the US was a lead-pipe cinch to get the Gold in basketball, and NBC did not air a single game in its entirety. IIRC, they did not show ANY game of ANY team sport without interruption.
Warning: ranting tirade coming. Skip to the next post if that bothers you...
This year, I started to watch during the pair's figure skating (or whatever the hell you call it.) A Canadian duo was skating to "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" by Pink Floyd... sounded cool enough to watch for a few minutes. I gotta say that I just don't get TV skating coverage. I mean, here you have (usually) really good music, while beatiful women dance around on a pair of metal slivers in sexy little costumes, and they have a trio of commentators jabbering away through the whole fucking thing like we're watching a football game or something! STFU! We can see that she hit the landing right, we don't need you to tell us. I would turn the sound off, but the music is part of the show, dammit. It's supposed to be art, not fucking golf. Stop talking!
A premium pay-per-view olympic coverage which provided access to all games, commentary free, would be worth plenty to those who actually like watching this stuff.... but because NBC failed once (with their half-assed and ill-conceived "Triple Cast"), we won't see anything like that any time soon.
Except when you talk about "international competion" in Eurpoe, you are talking about games between countries who are each no bigger than one of our 50 states. National championships in the US (or in US leagues that include Canada) are every bit as big of a deal as a Eurpoean championship.
Asia is much bigger, but then again, your point about basketball in China is kind of silly. The best player in the history of Chinese basketball is currently not even on the starting line-up of his newly adopted NBA team (the Dallas Mavericks).
1. The acronym "FUD" does not mean "saying bad things about a program". FUD stands for "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt". Spreading FUD would be saying something like "you better not have your company depend on Java, because Sun might be out of business in a few months." It's only FUD if you are trying to make people AFRAID of using a product. If you think that scaring people away from postgres was the main thrust of my post, you need to read it again. To say postgres is slower than MySQL is not spreading FUD, it's stating a fact. A fact that I am well aware of, because I use PostgreSQL 7.1 every damned day, both at work, and in my own home projects.
2. The word "notorious" does not mean extreme. It means "well noted". Since even you, who is obviously a passionate defender of all things postgres, acknowledge that MySQL is at least slightly faster, my statement was essentially correct.
Learn what words mean before you start shooting your mouth off.
The tempered scale was needed so you could build a keyboard instrument capable of playing in tune in more than one key. Otherwise, a keyboard tuned to one scale would sound horribly dissonent when playing chords for another scale. Every Fifth, Fourth, and Octive on a tempered keyboard is perfect (there's lots of web sites that breakdown the wavelengh patterns of the perfect fifth... feel free to check it out if you care), and the thirds and chromatic notes are fudged a little bit to make that possible for every note on the keyboard.
Comparing Postgres to MySQL is less like comparing vi to emacs, and more like comparing a full-sized John Deere tractor to a garden rake. Only a fool would plow a 200-acre farm with a rake, likewise you will regret it if you drive farming equipment through the wife's flower bed.
Postgres is rock solid, but notoriously slow. MySQL is wicked fast, but doesn't scale well.
Which should people use? Both. They are free, so it's not like you can only have one. Use PostgreSQL for your heavy lifting when you can't afford the Oracle license, use MySQL when speed is all that counts. Wasn't that easy? Now let's all get along.
Keep in mind that when you abbreviate PostgreSQL to "Postgres", you're really talking about a seperate, older product.
I guess it doesn't really matter, since Postgres is long gone, but it still annoys me every time I see it
To call PostgreSQL a "seperate" product is not entirely acurate. The reason for the name change (first to Postgres95, and later to PostgreSQL), was because they dumped the PostQuel query language in favor of good ol' SQL. Under the hood, it's still the same DBMS (although somewhat enhanced and several versions more mature).
Go to PostgreSQL.org, and you will discover that in the opening pages of their tutorial is the following line:
The terms "Postgres" and "PostgreSQL" will be used interchangeably to refer to the software that accompanies this documentation.
So if you have a problem with people saying "postgres" instead of "postgreskew-ell", take it up with the folks writing the documentation.
However, what about the analog nature of the environment? What about things like microphones, minute air currents, etc. Not everything can be digitized, and, at a point, "imperfections" in the environment are going to be present no matter what the sampling rate.
Correct. Also, your speakers need to reproduce the sound by vibrating the air in your listening room, and then your room itself can distort the sound even more.
That is why Hi-Fi is really still as much an art as it is a science. The specs of a particular device do not matter as much as how well the system as a whole (from the studio or recording hall to your living room) creates the illusion that you are actually listening to an orchestra on a stage, or a jazz quintet is a nice-sounding room.
You are falling into the "perfect sound forever" myth of CD audio quality.
The measurements most often used to measure audio quality statistically (S/N ratio, frequency response, etc.) were developped in the days of analog recording, and were therefore based on those things which analog systems tended to produce poorly. When digital recording came along, people looked at the statistic as said "Amazing! There is now wow or flutter, massive dynamic range, and the noise floor is even lower than the amp it's plugged into!" But then those who owned the top-end analog systems (the ones who did the best job overcoming the shortcomings of analog), and found that 44.1, 16-bit audio samples, while pretty darn good, didn't quite as faithfully capture the timbre of human voices, or violins, or flutes, etc. quite as well as their analog gear did.
Now most of the problems associated with "the digital sound" were really due to the poor error-correction methods and shoddy D/A converters of early CD players. Most of those "analog forever" zealots changed their position during the mid 90's, when higher quality digital components became available and the realized that the bad sound they were hearing was not the fault of the sample rate, but the fault of the electronics.
Still, most audiophiles tend to agree that the human ear can perceive the difference in sound generated by a 96 KHz system vs. the 44.1 rate you get from today's CD's. The only problem is, 95% of the consumer market is listening to their albums on $400 all-in-one stereo systems they bought at Target, on cheap-assed car systems, or those ridiculous Bose "wave" systems they saw on the late-night infomercials... so they will never hear the difference anyway.
They Might be Giants simply don't do much in the way of CD's anymore. They've gone to digital in a big way.
Setting aside that CD's are already digital, you are completely wrong.
Since leaving Electra Records (the label under which they recorded thier biggest college radio hits), they have made 4 CD's: "John Henry", "Factory Showroom", "Severe Tire Damage", and "Mink Car", as well as 2 "EP" CD's: "Why Does The Sun Shine" and their recent Christmas album. They are also releasing a children's album on CD, called "No". John Linnell (half of the TMBG line-up) released a solo CD last year called "State Songs", while John Flansburgh (the other half) released "It's Fun To Steal" with his side band, Mono Puff.
The did release one, and only one, MP3 only album, called "Long Tall Weekend", about 2 years ago, which was really a collection of projects from their Dial-a-Song material that they decided some of their hard-core fans would be willing to pay for.
Their latest album, "Mink Car", just came out on Rounder Records a few months ago.
Playing ball or whatever is far less intellectually stimulating than most video games.
Actually, there is a tremendous ammount of intellectual stimulation to the game of baseball, if you take the time to actually understand the game.
The problem that most bookish types have with the game is that they were probably stuck on the bench or hidden in right field because their athletic prowess was far behind their peers. Since people far less smart than them had far more success during their early childhood, the bias is towards assuming that sports are for thick-skulled brutes.
I suggest you pick up a copy of Leonard Koppett's 1967 book "The Thinking Fan's Guide To Baseball" to get a glimpse of what I am talking about. It's a little dated, but it's a very good start.
No they don't. They can try, but they have no right to post to somebody else's mailing list and expect it to be accepted.
Actually, they do. Thos who run the list also have the right to delete those posts, or ban the user.
In both cases (excluding windows users from your message, or excluding those who do exclude windows users) it comes down the the right of free association, which I think is a Good Thing.
Personally, I think what he is doing is kind of funny. I suspect even those who use OE get a chuckle out of his antics (except those who really need to lighten up).
If by "the artists themselves" you mean the rich fucks like Prince and Courtey Love whining about how the labels have "exploited" them, save your pity for somebody with real problems. Actual struggling artists would LOVE the chance to be exploited like that. Courtney Love's problem is that she pissed all her money away, not that she didn't make millions off her shitty albums.
And as for Britney Spears getting popular through the Internet before the Big Evil Record companies came along, you are being suckered. Miss Spears has been a Disney product since early childhood. How to you think an average looking, pre-pubescent girl got all that buzz when the net is absolutely crowded with bands that nobody gives a shit about? Because the Disney machine was pimping her stuff from day one, that's how. The story that she came out of nowhere and gained a huge following before she was signed is a myth.
Name one popular musician who became a multi-millionaire without the aid of a label, and I will agree that the labels don't add much value anymore.
The truth is, it's the "artist" who adds little value. Disney made Bridney Spears a star, by hiring the right people to record the background tracks, dressing her up in kinky schoolgirl costumes on MTV, pushing her album on radio stations they own or have deals with, promoting her on nearly every media (most of which they own), and doing what it takes to make sure that every 12 year old girl in America knows her on sight, memorized her lyrics, and wants to be just like her. Britney spears is not the producer of a product... she is the product.
The Marxist theory (pardon my typo) posits that the capitalist owns the 'ways and means'
It most certainly does not.
What Marxism teaches is that in a capitalst society the upper class controls the means of production... which is a silly observation because "the upper class" is defined as "those who own a lot of stuff", so of course they own the ways and means, that's what makes them upper class.
Marx believed that, in an ideal world, the means of production should be controlled by the workers. This seemingly simple idea has lead to the deaths of tens of millions of people, and the abject poverty of entire nations who should have been filthy rich, had class envy not made Marx's words sound so appealing when coming from the mouths of men like Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot.
The trouble with Marx is that he never really proposed a better alternative to capitalsm which could actually be implemented in the real world. All he really knew for sure was that working in a factory sucks. He was a product of the failures of early industrialism more than anything else.
When you have that much talk and so little actions, what's the point? The hero doesn't have to overcome anything. It just appears to me the that the tick was just a wanna-be!!!!
You just answered your own question. The Tick was, in fact, a wanna-be superhero.
Some of the features that have been inherited from the old IBM's and Compaqs should probably be reconsidered.
For a lot of systems that were made and sold Back In The Day, the power supply was, wisely, in a separate box from the mobo. The CPU is not the only heat source on a PC... Setting the power supply behind your desk, away from the case, might make a small system a lot easier to do.
Also, we have been keeping the keyboard as a separate component ever since the old 8086 days... but is that always the best way to go?
It seems to me that the perfect reduced-footprint destop PC design would look a little like a laptop PC with no screen, a nicer keyboard, and no touchpad... perhaps with a cable output for bridging to an optional stand-alone box for PCI expansion cards (for those who want the flexibility).
The end result: a latter-day C-64. Ahh, nostalgia...
Re:Jeez Louise, Man - Where's the Villainy?
on
The Tick to be Cancelled
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Villains, you say? I think your memory of the book might be a little colored. The fact is that the book seldom focused on fighting villians at all! Let's review, shall we? (spoiler warning)
Issue 1: The Tick jumps around buildings, meets some ninjas (but does not bother to fight them much, as they clearly pose no threat to him whatsoever), sits in a diner and argues with a waiter about being a tick, passes out and wakes up in a subway tunnel, is rescued by "Clark", a badly disguised superhero.
Issue 2: Tick spends the entire issue trying to become Clark's friend, mostly pissing him off.
Issue 3: The Tick actually fights some Ninjas, but 90% of the book is dialogue between Tick and Oedipus, or funny dialogue among the ninjas.
Issue 4: More ninjas, but mostly time spent getting to know Arthur and Paul The Samurai.
Issue 5: Ninja story resolved.
Issue 6: Tick fights The Red Scare, who is not, in fact, a real villain, but an actor hired to pretend he is a villain. A lot of the focus is really on building the relationship between Arthur and Tick. ("You're not... funny, are you?")
Issue 7: Chairface.
That's right, folks, it took 7 issues (of a comic that only ran for 12) before the first major villain was actually introduced.
And then from there... Issue 8 Tick and Arthur argue with Arthur's sister, and decide to leave the City.
Issue 9 is a road trip story.
Issue 10 is more road trippin'
Issue 11, Tick and Arthur coping with New York superhero culture.
Issue 12, Tick moves into his new home.
The truth is that The Tick live-action show, with all of the time spend hanging around exchanging funny dialogue, was much closer in pace and tone to the original than the cartoon was. The cartoon could not really spend time pondering stuff like the sexuality of superheroes (which the book did A LOT, although in more subtle ways that the recent show did). Most of the fights in the comic were over in one or two panels, as the Tick was so absurdly hard for anybody to seriously hurt.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, most of them are very up-front about being in it for money and glory.
Secondly: Yes you would. Admit it.
Any athelete will tell you that they would be thrilled about having their picture on the front of a Wheaties box. I wish more /.ers would admit that they work with technology for the money and the bragging rights among their geek friends.
Oh, by the way, thanks for posting your resume on your website. I now know for a fact that I have a shitload more RDBMS experience than you do, and no longer feel compelled to justify my observations to you. Have a nice day.
Even had you not conceded that point (which makes everything I said *fact*, rather than *FUD*), I don't really feel like I need you to tell me how spiffy postgres is, because, like I said, I use postgres all the time, and have compared its speed to enough other systems to know how well it performs.
What astonishes me most of all about all your whining about "FUD" was that, when I posted my original message, I actually thought it would be the MySQL fans that would be more likey to get pissed off at me (for calling MySQL a rake to potgres's tractor). The fact that you took that post, which basically said that both DBMS's have their uses, as a "FUD" attack on postgres leads me to the only possible conclusion, that any conversation with you must be like walking on egg shells, because you are too fucking touchy. Take a few breaths, re-read my original post, and you just might realize that it was posted by somebody with no agenda against your favorite program.
They are selling shoes.
There seems to be an attitude among some on /. that commerce is somehow evil by its very nature. When you grow up, you may learn that all this commerce is what makes civilization possible.
"Not to mention Kermit The Damn Frog!!!" --Jimmy James
Good thing nobody told Jesse Owens. His solid kicking of Nazi "master race" ass in '35 has got to be one of the most effective political statement in sports history, and one of the most thrilling athletic feats since Pheidippides made his legendary two-day run.
Interesting theory, but the US was a lead-pipe cinch to get the Gold in basketball, and NBC did not air a single game in its entirety. IIRC, they did not show ANY game of ANY team sport without interruption.
Warning: ranting tirade coming. Skip to the next post if that bothers you...
This year, I started to watch during the pair's figure skating (or whatever the hell you call it.) A Canadian duo was skating to "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" by Pink Floyd... sounded cool enough to watch for a few minutes. I gotta say that I just don't get TV skating coverage. I mean, here you have (usually) really good music, while beatiful women dance around on a pair of metal slivers in sexy little costumes, and they have a trio of commentators jabbering away through the whole fucking thing like we're watching a football game or something! STFU! We can see that she hit the landing right, we don't need you to tell us. I would turn the sound off, but the music is part of the show, dammit. It's supposed to be art, not fucking golf. Stop talking!
A premium pay-per-view olympic coverage which provided access to all games, commentary free, would be worth plenty to those who actually like watching this stuff.... but because NBC failed once (with their half-assed and ill-conceived "Triple Cast"), we won't see anything like that any time soon.
Asia is much bigger, but then again, your point about basketball in China is kind of silly. The best player in the history of Chinese basketball is currently not even on the starting line-up of his newly adopted NBA team (the Dallas Mavericks).
2. The word "notorious" does not mean extreme. It means "well noted". Since even you, who is obviously a passionate defender of all things postgres, acknowledge that MySQL is at least slightly faster, my statement was essentially correct.
Learn what words mean before you start shooting your mouth off.
So, you agree that postgres is slower, but it's FUD when I say it's slower. Whatever, dude.
The tempered scale was needed so you could build a keyboard instrument capable of playing in tune in more than one key. Otherwise, a keyboard tuned to one scale would sound horribly dissonent when playing chords for another scale. Every Fifth, Fourth, and Octive on a tempered keyboard is perfect (there's lots of web sites that breakdown the wavelengh patterns of the perfect fifth... feel free to check it out if you care), and the thirds and chromatic notes are fudged a little bit to make that possible for every note on the keyboard.
Postgres is rock solid, but notoriously slow. MySQL is wicked fast, but doesn't scale well.
Which should people use? Both. They are free, so it's not like you can only have one. Use PostgreSQL for your heavy lifting when you can't afford the Oracle license, use MySQL when speed is all that counts. Wasn't that easy? Now let's all get along.
I guess it doesn't really matter, since Postgres is long gone, but it still annoys me every time I see it
To call PostgreSQL a "seperate" product is not entirely acurate. The reason for the name change (first to Postgres95, and later to PostgreSQL), was because they dumped the PostQuel query language in favor of good ol' SQL. Under the hood, it's still the same DBMS (although somewhat enhanced and several versions more mature).
Go to PostgreSQL.org, and you will discover that in the opening pages of their tutorial is the following line:
So if you have a problem with people saying "postgres" instead of "postgreskew-ell", take it up with the folks writing the documentation.
Correct. Also, your speakers need to reproduce the sound by vibrating the air in your listening room, and then your room itself can distort the sound even more.
That is why Hi-Fi is really still as much an art as it is a science. The specs of a particular device do not matter as much as how well the system as a whole (from the studio or recording hall to your living room) creates the illusion that you are actually listening to an orchestra on a stage, or a jazz quintet is a nice-sounding room.
If you were a subscriber, rather than somebody who just likes to talk about how cool it is, you would probably already know that.
Unfortunately for emusic, a lot more slashdotters wanted to praise it than actually get it.
The measurements most often used to measure audio quality statistically (S/N ratio, frequency response, etc.) were developped in the days of analog recording, and were therefore based on those things which analog systems tended to produce poorly. When digital recording came along, people looked at the statistic as said "Amazing! There is now wow or flutter, massive dynamic range, and the noise floor is even lower than the amp it's plugged into!" But then those who owned the top-end analog systems (the ones who did the best job overcoming the shortcomings of analog), and found that 44.1, 16-bit audio samples, while pretty darn good, didn't quite as faithfully capture the timbre of human voices, or violins, or flutes, etc. quite as well as their analog gear did.
Now most of the problems associated with "the digital sound" were really due to the poor error-correction methods and shoddy D/A converters of early CD players. Most of those "analog forever" zealots changed their position during the mid 90's, when higher quality digital components became available and the realized that the bad sound they were hearing was not the fault of the sample rate, but the fault of the electronics.
Still, most audiophiles tend to agree that the human ear can perceive the difference in sound generated by a 96 KHz system vs. the 44.1 rate you get from today's CD's. The only problem is, 95% of the consumer market is listening to their albums on $400 all-in-one stereo systems they bought at Target, on cheap-assed car systems, or those ridiculous Bose "wave" systems they saw on the late-night infomercials... so they will never hear the difference anyway.
They Might be Giants simply don't do much in the way of CD's anymore. They've gone to digital in a big way.
Setting aside that CD's are already digital, you are completely wrong.
Since leaving Electra Records (the label under which they recorded thier biggest college radio hits), they have made 4 CD's: "John Henry", "Factory Showroom", "Severe Tire Damage", and "Mink Car", as well as 2 "EP" CD's: "Why Does The Sun Shine" and their recent Christmas album. They are also releasing a children's album on CD, called "No". John Linnell (half of the TMBG line-up) released a solo CD last year called "State Songs", while John Flansburgh (the other half) released "It's Fun To Steal" with his side band, Mono Puff.
The did release one, and only one, MP3 only album, called "Long Tall Weekend", about 2 years ago, which was really a collection of projects from their Dial-a-Song material that they decided some of their hard-core fans would be willing to pay for.
Their latest album, "Mink Car", just came out on Rounder Records a few months ago.
Actually, there is a tremendous ammount of intellectual stimulation to the game of baseball, if you take the time to actually understand the game.
The problem that most bookish types have with the game is that they were probably stuck on the bench or hidden in right field because their athletic prowess was far behind their peers. Since people far less smart than them had far more success during their early childhood, the bias is towards assuming that sports are for thick-skulled brutes.
I suggest you pick up a copy of Leonard Koppett's 1967 book "The Thinking Fan's Guide To Baseball" to get a glimpse of what I am talking about. It's a little dated, but it's a very good start.
I don't think we can split the hairs much finer than that.
Actually, they do. Thos who run the list also have the right to delete those posts, or ban the user.
In both cases (excluding windows users from your message, or excluding those who do exclude windows users) it comes down the the right of free association, which I think is a Good Thing.
Personally, I think what he is doing is kind of funny. I suspect even those who use OE get a chuckle out of his antics (except those who really need to lighten up).
If by "the artists themselves" you mean the rich fucks like Prince and Courtey Love whining about how the labels have "exploited" them, save your pity for somebody with real problems. Actual struggling artists would LOVE the chance to be exploited like that. Courtney Love's problem is that she pissed all her money away, not that she didn't make millions off her shitty albums.
And as for Britney Spears getting popular through the Internet before the Big Evil Record companies came along, you are being suckered. Miss Spears has been a Disney product since early childhood. How to you think an average looking, pre-pubescent girl got all that buzz when the net is absolutely crowded with bands that nobody gives a shit about? Because the Disney machine was pimping her stuff from day one, that's how. The story that she came out of nowhere and gained a huge following before she was signed is a myth.
The truth is, it's the "artist" who adds little value. Disney made Bridney Spears a star, by hiring the right people to record the background tracks, dressing her up in kinky schoolgirl costumes on MTV, pushing her album on radio stations they own or have deals with, promoting her on nearly every media (most of which they own), and doing what it takes to make sure that every 12 year old girl in America knows her on sight, memorized her lyrics, and wants to be just like her. Britney spears is not the producer of a product... she is the product.
It most certainly does not.
What Marxism teaches is that in a capitalst society the upper class controls the means of production... which is a silly observation because "the upper class" is defined as "those who own a lot of stuff", so of course they own the ways and means, that's what makes them upper class.
Marx believed that, in an ideal world, the means of production should be controlled by the workers. This seemingly simple idea has lead to the deaths of tens of millions of people, and the abject poverty of entire nations who should have been filthy rich, had class envy not made Marx's words sound so appealing when coming from the mouths of men like Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot.
The trouble with Marx is that he never really proposed a better alternative to capitalsm which could actually be implemented in the real world. All he really knew for sure was that working in a factory sucks. He was a product of the failures of early industrialism more than anything else.
You just answered your own question. The Tick was, in fact, a wanna-be superhero.
For a lot of systems that were made and sold Back In The Day, the power supply was, wisely, in a separate box from the mobo. The CPU is not the only heat source on a PC... Setting the power supply behind your desk, away from the case, might make a small system a lot easier to do.
Also, we have been keeping the keyboard as a separate component ever since the old 8086 days... but is that always the best way to go?
It seems to me that the perfect reduced-footprint destop PC design would look a little like a laptop PC with no screen, a nicer keyboard, and no touchpad... perhaps with a cable output for bridging to an optional stand-alone box for PCI expansion cards (for those who want the flexibility).
The end result: a latter-day C-64. Ahh, nostalgia...
Issue 1: The Tick jumps around buildings, meets some ninjas (but does not bother to fight them much, as they clearly pose no threat to him whatsoever), sits in a diner and argues with a waiter about being a tick, passes out and wakes up in a subway tunnel, is rescued by "Clark", a badly disguised superhero.
Issue 2: Tick spends the entire issue trying to become Clark's friend, mostly pissing him off.
Issue 3: The Tick actually fights some Ninjas, but 90% of the book is dialogue between Tick and Oedipus, or funny dialogue among the ninjas.
Issue 4: More ninjas, but mostly time spent getting to know Arthur and Paul The Samurai.
Issue 5: Ninja story resolved.
Issue 6: Tick fights The Red Scare, who is not, in fact, a real villain, but an actor hired to pretend he is a villain. A lot of the focus is really on building the relationship between Arthur and Tick. ("You're not... funny, are you?")
Issue 7: Chairface.
That's right, folks, it took 7 issues (of a comic that only ran for 12) before the first major villain was actually introduced.
And then from there... Issue 8 Tick and Arthur argue with Arthur's sister, and decide to leave the City.
Issue 9 is a road trip story.
Issue 10 is more road trippin'
Issue 11, Tick and Arthur coping with New York superhero culture.
Issue 12, Tick moves into his new home.
The truth is that The Tick live-action show, with all of the time spend hanging around exchanging funny dialogue, was much closer in pace and tone to the original than the cartoon was. The cartoon could not really spend time pondering stuff like the sexuality of superheroes (which the book did A LOT, although in more subtle ways that the recent show did). Most of the fights in the comic were over in one or two panels, as the Tick was so absurdly hard for anybody to seriously hurt.