The campiest part of the movie was the jump-cut to the epilogue. (Warning: Spoiler ahead... although I'm spoiling a really bad movie, I thought I would warn you anyway.)
Drive out into the middle of Antarctica, run out of gas, enter an alien ship, escape the ship, ship blows up real good... Scully and Mulder are safe & sound in the middle of a frozen wasteland, near the south pole, with no food, shelter, transportation, communication, or suitable clothing. On top of that, one of them is almost completely incapacitated. CUT TO: Debriefing in the FBI headquarters. I could not stop laughing.
The one good part of the whole movie was early on when Dana got stung by a killer bee, and clinically described each of her rapidly-developing symptoms as she slowly passed out. That was pretty damn funny, and captured the spirit of her character better than any single episode of the show I can think of.
Take that, and the bomb scene from the beginning, and you would have the first half-hour of a pretty good episode of the show. Instead, we get 90 minutes of loose ends not being tied, along with plenty of Ghostbusters slime.
Any actress that can wear a conservative, navy-blue suit and still look hotter than the surface of an overclocked Pentium III chip that ran overnight with no fan or heatsink... that woman merits every second of TV screen time she gets.
If the writing continues to be as bad as it was last year, I might turn the sound off, but I will not change the channel.:)
Better yet, all websites that object to censorware could agree to use a flesh-tone background on their page instead of a Blue Ribbon or a black page. Suddenly, their product would render the browser useless.:)
Compared to what it cost them to have Avery Brooks talk about the lack of flying cars on prime-time TV several times a week, $200 million is a drop in the bucket.
It looks like they are hoping to help Linux grow as a client desktop environment, where it will compete with Windows, rather than at the enterprise level, where it might someday chip away at AIX. (Yes, I know Solaris is kicking AIX's a??, but IBM is still a player in the UNIX scene, and does not want to compete with free beer.)
It could be a smart move for them, but it also makes me wonder if they are doing this because they are still a little bitter from the whole Windows-vs.-OS/2 thing.:)
As expected, several people made knee-jerk responses to my harmless little deadpan riff, unable to fathom than an American might actually be fully aware of the subtle joys of international soccer, but thinks it is kind of funny to behave according to stereotype.
You Europeans are so sure that we are all a bunch of clueless nationalists, that you immediately assume that I'm serious when I make silly comments like refering to a rugby scrum as a "group hug".
What if he intended to eventually set up shop as a commercial site? Perhaps selling the kind of trinkets and crap they have at the impulse racks of Christian bookstores? Wouldn't.com be the way to go then?
Sorry for the mistype. I meant to say I did not care for the game until seeing Cris Carter play. Such is the disadvantage of editing on the fly.
Also, in case you did not notice, my jibes at soccer (and England) were entirely sarcastic. I might as well point that out pre-emptively before some humorless drone barks at me for being so jingoistic about steering wheels. I really don't have the stomach for another "you typical USians" lecture today.
Slashdot comes from the USA, where football is a game that involves 300 pound titans able to run like olypic sprinters, who put on kevlar helmets and smash into each other while playing a game that is similar to rugby (except there is nothing like the group-hug war known as the "scrum", and the fans don't frequently kill one another).
Soccer, known as football in coutries where the steering wheel is on the wrong side, is a completely different game, where opposable thumbs are redundant, little guys run up and down a field kicking a ball for about an hour, and goals are scored about once every two games.
I know it's not considered very "geeky" to like American football, but as a spectator event I really enjoy all the tactics involved. Every time a play ends, the game stops while each team plans their next move. Brute strength and ignorace is usefull on the offensive line, but the winning team is often the one that managed to out-think their opponent.
(Also, Cris Carter of the Minnesota Vikings single-handedly turned me into a fan. I cared for the game until the first time I saw him make a one-handed catch that was over 7 feet out of bounds, keeping both toes on the ground inside the line while hovering horizontally a few inches above the ground... knowing that he was about to get slammed in the ribs by his defender. Jordan, Pele, and Ali were all great, but when I discovered how frequently such nearly-inhuman feats are performed in the game of football, my Sunday afternoons were booked.)
A good organist knows what their performance will sound like, so not being able to hear themselves is an obstacle they can deal with.
It's different for an ensemble, because in order to create a musical expression, you need to be able to hear each other. Otherwise it would be like Fred and Ginger filming their dance moves in two different studios and having a digital effects guy patch them together.
Shortly before writing the story and lyrics for The Wall, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd made the observation that most stadium rock concerts had more in common with a Nuremberg rally than an orchestra performance. It's not really about the music, so much as it is about seeing your "teen idols" on the stage, shouting out the words of the songs along with them, and standing among 50,000-or-so people all expressing the same emotion.
Artists have already taken to projecting themselves on massive screens, a logical extention of the huge wall shadows and Big Suit used by the Talking Heads in the Johnathan Demme concert movie "Stop Making Sense", or the massive portraits of Stalin and Chairman Mao that were once hung on buildings during political appearances.
It would be interesting to see if the crowd would react as strongly to a projected image knowing that the artist is not actually on stage at all. (Bono of U2 sang a couple of songs from the backstage dressing room during the ZOO-TV tour, and the crowd seemed to go along with it).
I'm betting that somebody from the Disney corral of kiddie-stars (Brittany Spears, N'Sync, etc.) will be the first to try it. Their performances are pretty much phoned in anyway.
You could sync them up by having them hear a "click track" (i.e. a bunch of electronic metronomes that were synchronized in the same room and then shipped out to them) and not hearing each other. Then you would have all of the sound sources sent to a mixer that has delays built in to each track so they can sync up the incoming tracks according to the distance from the broadcast studio where each player is performing.
Of course, that would not at all be the same as "playing together", but it would be almost as good as a typical commercial multi-tracked recording, which would be good enough to produce plenty of hype.
Just because somebody questions the need for another heroin PSA running every 10 minutes on late-night TV does not mean that he is unconcerned about heroin abuse.
Some of the people posting here remind me a little of the Seinfeld episode where the crowd from an AIDS walk beat the crap out of Kramer because he chose not to wear a red ribbon while marching with them. If we are not as big of a zealot as them, we are Part Of The Problem as far as they are concerned.
On the surface, MacOS9 looks like a good example, because it behaves a lot like older versions of the MacOS, but the truth is that it contains precious little of the old "System 7" code from 10 years ago. Ever since the PowerPC Macs came out, the OS code has been gradually switched over to be optimized for the new architecture.
The MacOS was never written to be easilly portable the way UNIX was. That's one of its main strengths (tight integration with the hardware) as well as one of its main weaknesses (over-reliance on a handful of hardware makers like Motorolla).
By the time 8.6 came out, there was very little of the old '040-centric code left.
IIRC, Apple gives away MacOS 7.5.3 and older from their web page. (Alas, free beer only... no source code.)
Your example is not completely wrong though... there are a few core chucks that they simply can't replace without creating huge compatibility issues. (Hence the total change to Mach-based OSX, along with the whole "carbon" migration kludge to keep their old customers & developers from abandoning them while the software catches up.)
Nope, you missed my point entirely, which was that most of the/. regulars already know about every issue that Katz raised, and everything that you had to say as well.
If you are really concerned about the privacy of J. Random Newbie, then an artcle in Time (or, better yet, a story on one of the thousands of prime-time "news" shows) would probably be a much better way to reach them.
The average Joe on the street might be shocked by the book that Katz is reviewing, but the average Joe does not read Slashdot, and has probably never heard of this book (unless he was channel surfing when the author was on McNiel/Lehrer last week).
This is another in a long line of articles in which Jon Katz has failed to think about the fact that his words here are being read almost exclusively by geeks who are already deeply entrenched in the "net culture" that he is trying to study as an outsider.
It's like watching Jane Goodall trying to explain her findings to the apes.
That's why most electrical engineers, either haven't heard of him, or are taught to scoff at the mention of his name.
Gawd, this is exactly why Tesla cultists annoy the piss out of me.
EVERYBODY who has ever studied the history of the industrial age has not only heard of Tesla, but is well aware of his major contributions. You do not possess any 'leet arcane knowledge about a "forgotten" inventor. We all know who the f??? he was. Some of us read about him in grade school. Even stoned-out cover bands from the 80's knew about him. You know nothing that has not already been discussed about him; you just have an over-inflated opinion of him.
He was one of many, many inventors who, like Edison, made some important contributions to the field. Nothing more. Get over it. Quickly.
If a corporation has your Visa number, than several persons do as well.
I know reading Jon Katz leaves you with the impression that corporations are entirely made up of robots, but the "Operator" who is "standing by" waiting for you to order your set of knives that can cut through a tin can as if it were hot butter is a person, and a person who could easilly jot down or memorize 16 digits and an expiration date.
The guy who said privacy is a superstition is 100% right. Even if you have never owned a computer I can know almost everything about you within a week, including your SSN, how late you usually get in to work each morning, and what kind of stuff you prefer to buy at the local "adult book store". All I would really need is to know who you are and have the will to research it.
Back in the days before "no-fault" divorce, private investigators made a living off the fact that it is almost impossible for anything to remain a secret, if somebody really wants to know.
Ummm... Apple was the top computer maker in the world back in the Apple II days. Every elemetary school teacher in America had seen one.
So what Sculley accomplished was that he built a household brand into a household brand.
Also worth noting is that the bulk of the early success that Apple enjoyed with the Macintosh came before Steve Jobs was ousted.
You gotta give the suits some credit for their successes, like the PowerPC transition, but the Scully/Spindler era will be remembered for the "Perfoma" line (just like a Macintosh, but without all those pesky high-quality components), and for nearly bankrupting a multi-million dollar company that had Sony-esque brand recognition.
The problem is that the home recording market is fairly evenly split between PC's and Macs. Macs may have had firewire as a standard for the last year, but PC's almost never have them. If you make your device a firewire system instead of a card, you cut out half of your potential market.
(Now, it seems to me that the way to go is to built a firewire device, and then bundle a firewire card in the version that you sell to PC and older Mac users.)
For live audio editing and/or MIDI sync, operating across a LAN is probably not the way to go. To do HD recording, you really need an App like CuBase running on the same box as the drive you are writing to, and that drive had better be fast. Macs have historically been Darn Good at this sort of thing, but I know people who go the PC route and have been happy with the results.
(So far, Linux music apps lag waaayyy behind, so the choice is really Windows vs. Mac in this case.)
Slashdot Mirror
Drive out into the middle of Antarctica, run out of gas, enter an alien ship, escape the ship, ship blows up real good... Scully and Mulder are safe & sound in the middle of a frozen wasteland, near the south pole, with no food, shelter, transportation, communication, or suitable clothing. On top of that, one of them is almost completely incapacitated. CUT TO: Debriefing in the FBI headquarters. I could not stop laughing.
The one good part of the whole movie was early on when Dana got stung by a killer bee, and clinically described each of her rapidly-developing symptoms as she slowly passed out. That was pretty damn funny, and captured the spirit of her character better than any single episode of the show I can think of.
Take that, and the bomb scene from the beginning, and you would have the first half-hour of a pretty good episode of the show. Instead, we get 90 minutes of loose ends not being tied, along with plenty of Ghostbusters slime.
If the writing continues to be as bad as it was last year, I might turn the sound off, but I will not change the channel. :)
Better yet, all websites that object to censorware could agree to use a flesh-tone background on their page instead of a Blue Ribbon or a black page. Suddenly, their product would render the browser useless. :)
If you are going to make it these days, you're going to need some seeeeerious software... that's why IBM is moving towards Linux.
Their red wines are almost as good as the ones from California and Australia (at 3 times the price.)
Also, the South of France is the only place in the world that produces good oboe reeds.
Oh yea, and Voltaire was French, so they ain't all bad.
That's about all the non-sucky French stuff I can think of, off the top of my head...
Here is the smiley, for the humor impaired. :)
Compared to what it cost them to have Avery Brooks talk about the lack of flying cars on prime-time TV several times a week, $200 million is a drop in the bucket.
It could be a smart move for them, but it also makes me wonder if they are doing this because they are still a little bitter from the whole Windows-vs.-OS/2 thing. :)
(Sorry, but the whole debate was kind of reminding me of Dennis Leary's stand-up act, particularilly his USA rant from the song, a* hole .)
You Europeans are so sure that we are all a bunch of clueless nationalists, that you immediately assume that I'm serious when I make silly comments like refering to a rugby scrum as a "group hug".
Try to learn to lighten up a little, people.
He was refering to Hitler's rallies, not modern Nuremberg.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, really pays any attention to the .com and .org distinction anymore anyway. Here is an example. ; Here is another
Also, in case you did not notice, my jibes at soccer (and England) were entirely sarcastic. I might as well point that out pre-emptively before some humorless drone barks at me for being so jingoistic about steering wheels. I really don't have the stomach for another "you typical USians" lecture today.
Slashdot comes from the USA, where football is a game that involves 300 pound titans able to run like olypic sprinters, who put on kevlar helmets and smash into each other while playing a game that is similar to rugby (except there is nothing like the group-hug war known as the "scrum", and the fans don't frequently kill one another).
Soccer, known as football in coutries where the steering wheel is on the wrong side, is a completely different game, where opposable thumbs are redundant, little guys run up and down a field kicking a ball for about an hour, and goals are scored about once every two games.
I know it's not considered very "geeky" to like American football, but as a spectator event I really enjoy all the tactics involved. Every time a play ends, the game stops while each team plans their next move. Brute strength and ignorace is usefull on the offensive line, but the winning team is often the one that managed to out-think their opponent.
(Also, Cris Carter of the Minnesota Vikings single-handedly turned me into a fan. I cared for the game until the first time I saw him make a one-handed catch that was over 7 feet out of bounds, keeping both toes on the ground inside the line while hovering horizontally a few inches above the ground... knowing that he was about to get slammed in the ribs by his defender. Jordan, Pele, and Ali were all great, but when I discovered how frequently such nearly-inhuman feats are performed in the game of football, my Sunday afternoons were booked.)
It's different for an ensemble, because in order to create a musical expression, you need to be able to hear each other. Otherwise it would be like Fred and Ginger filming their dance moves in two different studios and having a digital effects guy patch them together.
Artists have already taken to projecting themselves on massive screens, a logical extention of the huge wall shadows and Big Suit used by the Talking Heads in the Johnathan Demme concert movie "Stop Making Sense", or the massive portraits of Stalin and Chairman Mao that were once hung on buildings during political appearances.
It would be interesting to see if the crowd would react as strongly to a projected image knowing that the artist is not actually on stage at all. (Bono of U2 sang a couple of songs from the backstage dressing room during the ZOO-TV tour, and the crowd seemed to go along with it).
I'm betting that somebody from the Disney corral of kiddie-stars (Brittany Spears, N'Sync, etc.) will be the first to try it. Their performances are pretty much phoned in anyway.
Of course, that would not at all be the same as "playing together", but it would be almost as good as a typical commercial multi-tracked recording, which would be good enough to produce plenty of hype.
Just because somebody questions the need for another heroin PSA running every 10 minutes on late-night TV does not mean that he is unconcerned about heroin abuse.
Some of the people posting here remind me a little of the Seinfeld episode where the crowd from an AIDS walk beat the crap out of Kramer because he chose not to wear a red ribbon while marching with them. If we are not as big of a zealot as them, we are Part Of The Problem as far as they are concerned.
The MacOS was never written to be easilly portable the way UNIX was. That's one of its main strengths (tight integration with the hardware) as well as one of its main weaknesses (over-reliance on a handful of hardware makers like Motorolla).
By the time 8.6 came out, there was very little of the old '040-centric code left.
IIRC, Apple gives away MacOS 7.5.3 and older from their web page. (Alas, free beer only... no source code.)
Your example is not completely wrong though... there are a few core chucks that they simply can't replace without creating huge compatibility issues. (Hence the total change to Mach-based OSX, along with the whole "carbon" migration kludge to keep their old customers & developers from abandoning them while the software catches up.)
If you are really concerned about the privacy of J. Random Newbie, then an artcle in Time (or, better yet, a story on one of the thousands of prime-time "news" shows) would probably be a much better way to reach them.
The average Joe on the street might be shocked by the book that Katz is reviewing, but the average Joe does not read Slashdot, and has probably never heard of this book (unless he was channel surfing when the author was on McNiel/Lehrer last week).
This is another in a long line of articles in which Jon Katz has failed to think about the fact that his words here are being read almost exclusively by geeks who are already deeply entrenched in the "net culture" that he is trying to study as an outsider.
It's like watching Jane Goodall trying to explain her findings to the apes.
Gawd, this is exactly why Tesla cultists annoy the piss out of me.
EVERYBODY who has ever studied the history of the industrial age has not only heard of Tesla, but is well aware of his major contributions. You do not possess any 'leet arcane knowledge about a "forgotten" inventor. We all know who the f??? he was. Some of us read about him in grade school. Even stoned-out cover bands from the 80's knew about him. You know nothing that has not already been discussed about him; you just have an over-inflated opinion of him.
He was one of many, many inventors who, like Edison, made some important contributions to the field. Nothing more. Get over it. Quickly.
I know reading Jon Katz leaves you with the impression that corporations are entirely made up of robots, but the "Operator" who is "standing by" waiting for you to order your set of knives that can cut through a tin can as if it were hot butter is a person, and a person who could easilly jot down or memorize 16 digits and an expiration date.
The guy who said privacy is a superstition is 100% right. Even if you have never owned a computer I can know almost everything about you within a week, including your SSN, how late you usually get in to work each morning, and what kind of stuff you prefer to buy at the local "adult book store". All I would really need is to know who you are and have the will to research it.
Back in the days before "no-fault" divorce, private investigators made a living off the fact that it is almost impossible for anything to remain a secret, if somebody really wants to know.
Ummm... Apple was the top computer maker in the world back in the Apple II days. Every elemetary school teacher in America had seen one.
So what Sculley accomplished was that he built a household brand into a household brand.
Also worth noting is that the bulk of the early success that Apple enjoyed with the Macintosh came before Steve Jobs was ousted.
You gotta give the suits some credit for their successes, like the PowerPC transition, but the Scully/Spindler era will be remembered for the "Perfoma" line (just like a Macintosh, but without all those pesky high-quality components), and for nearly bankrupting a multi-million dollar company that had Sony-esque brand recognition.
(Now, it seems to me that the way to go is to built a firewire device, and then bundle a firewire card in the version that you sell to PC and older Mac users.)
(So far, Linux music apps lag waaayyy behind, so the choice is really Windows vs. Mac in this case.)