Not knowing the difference between a polygon and a megabyte is not going to help anybody, and it just shows that a) you don't care about your job and b) you shouldn't be in that line of work.
To somebody working at a toy store as a checkout clerk, those words sound like made-up jargon from Star Trek: Voyager. Only a complete dick would expect the high-school drop-out working the register to have any clue what she was asking about.
In terms of visual style, it borrowed from 'Alice in Wonderland' as much as it did from anime. It's also notable that Chihiro wasn't drawn in stereotypical "big-eyes cute" fashion; in fact, she looked fairly ordinary, which I guess was all to the benefit of the film.
You know where the "big eyes" thing in Japanese animation came from originally?
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
The big-eyed style of the dwarfs in that movie clued Japanese artists in to the fact that you can convey a heck of a lot of emotion, humor, and context to the viewer very simply with an exaggerated pair of eyes. Over the years, it's become a craft in and of itself.
Anime is not so weird and alien once to take a few minutes to grok it properly.
And yes, Miyazaki is totally an anime director. His crew have gone on to create some of the most popular anime shows out there, such as Neon Genesis Evangelion. (Made by the guy who animated the warrior-gods in Miyazaki's first film, "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.")
Apple: Microsoft, we are going to build Intel based machines and move our resources to OS X for Intel (which has been running for the past 5 years), all our apps will get ported and we will get dev kits out NOW to all our biggest Apple developers. However our OS X will be limited to use with the Intel hardware WE build. You will support this effort of course with Office for the Intel Mac won't you? It would be unfortunate if we had to release OS X for the generic x86 market wouldn't it?
In other words, "DON'T FUCK WITH US!" Apple is holding a big fucking gun to Microsofts head and I like it.
Nothing good comes of holding a gun to somebody's head. If you point a gun at somebody, you damn well better be ready to pull the trigger. Here is how Microsoft would respond to such a threat:
Microsoft: Nah. You go ahead an do whatever you like Apple. We will decide whether to sell Office for OS X ourselves based on whether it makes us money or not. All of your users are addicted to MS-Office, so we could easily spike your entire platform into oblivion pretty much any time we want. We are, after all, the ones who drove you into that tiny little niche market of yours in the first place. MWAHHahahaha....
If you are going to teach Biology at all, you simply must teach students about evolution. They can choose not to believe it if they wish, but an understanding of evolutionary theory is the foundation of all modern western biology, including genetics, anatomy, and medicine.
You have to know this shit in order to function in the scientific community or continue biological studies beyond High School.
You don't need to know anything about religion to be prepared for college studies (unless you are preparing for a Bible college...)
Simple as that. For any HS to be a realistic means of prepping for college, there has to be science classes, and the have to include evolution in the curriculum.
The obvious proof that Genesis, if literal, is incomplete is the sentencing of Cain.
For murdering his brother, he was cast out to wander, and was to be shunned by civilization everywhere he went.
That kind of implies that there are already people all over the place, doesn't it?
There's a very simple alternate interpretation: Many of the events in Genesis are specifically speaking of what happened in the Garden of Eden, which may or may not be an actual physical location on Earth... likely not.
Another place where fundamentalists must accept that Genesis is incomplete is the Great Flood.
If we all derived from a single family only four thousand years ago (or so), it would be very easy to prove with modern genetics. Clearly the Flood was only referring to the area in which Noah lived, and people in the far reaches of Asia, Europe, and Africa were not impacted at all. (To say nothing of the Americas, where we know there were both people and animals that far back.)
So if the Bible is the Truth, it's not the whole Truth. As soon as one wraps their head around that concept, it's a little easier to see the difference between various sects of Christianity as relatively minor points of dogma.
I, for example, do not believe in a "Young Earth" or even so-called "Intelligent Design." That's not to say I disbelieve in God or my own salvation via Christ, it's just that I view a great deal of the flowery language in the scriptures as exactly that. At the same time, I have no problems whatsoever sitting down for a drink with a creationist without getting into a heated debate over the differences in sequence between Genesis chapters 1 and 2. What they make of the creation story, and what they choose to teach their home-schooled kids about it, doesn't really impact my life in any way. There are far more important issues in the world to get worked up over.
A century ago, virtually all christian sects had no problem with the scientific conclusion that the Earth is several billion years old.
Starting in the 1960s, and just reaching a fever pitch, we have millions of christians who swear that their bible/religion/church says that the Earth is only 6000 years old.
Wow. You never heard of the Scopes Monkey Trials, huh?
(Hint: That was back in 1925, and along with the failure of prohibition signaled the winding down of a "revivalist" period which goes back to the 1890s, and the radical abolitionist movements several decades before that. Fundamentalism in America is a lot older than you seem to think it is.)
Didn't your High School force you to sit through the movie versionof that shitty play?
For all I know, the word "bad" refers to the Baddies, a now-extinct group that was killed off in the Great Genocide of 12633 BC.
My point is that there are actual people actually alive today who can feel hurt by the reference. Take that for whatever you think it's worth.
Yes, Romany people are rare in America, but not entirely unheard of... and Slashdot is read outside of America a lot (as we are all constantly reminded.)
Secondly, you probably were blissfully unaware of it, but the word has racist origins.
It's short for "gypsy", and the common use implies that all Romany people (14th-Century immigrants to Europe from Northern India) are swindlers and crooks.
It's kind of like how if a bigot is given a low-ball offer on something they are selling, they might use "Jew" as a verb to describe what happened to them.
I'm the last person to tell somebody else what words to use and what not to use, but now that you know better, I wish to suggest that you keep in mind that the Internet is a big place, and there are some folk out there who will have hurt feelings every time you use a slang derivitive of their ethnic background to describe getting ripped off.
I posted that breakdown of "Friends" partly to debunk this completely stupid story, but mostly to just be a general smart-ass. I was really only hoping to get a laugh or two out of people... Now look what happens. Somebody modded me up as "Informative", and most of the replies have been from people who want to either fact-check my post or argue with my (obviously completely subjective) rankings!
How sad is it that I've kicked off an entire thread discussing things like the early career of Courtney Cox Arquette and the physical-comedy value of trendy cosmetic treatments? Is everybody else also stuck running large jobs on slow computers today?
At least your math correction led to an amusing punch line. Thanks for that.
Bad fashion choices only count as injuries if you are a flaming homosexual, and even then you should manage to get over it without a lot of therapy.
If you think a bad spray-on tan counts as the same thing as Basil Faulty falling off a ladder, you've clearly been watching way too much "Will and Grace."
Delany. Right you are. You obviously know your chick shows better than me.
Anyway, she wasn't quite a celebrity, but was still the most-well known of the bunch at the time. Her IMDB record shows that she did a heck of a lot of TV in the late 80s and early 90s, including a brief stint as Alex's girlfriend on Family Ties.
Mea Culpa. I originally gave them a 0 for S, but then remembered Rachel's riches-to-rags story in season 1, and upgraded it... but forgot to carry that through the rest of the formula.
This is why God created the computerized spreadsheet. To avoid these kinds of errors.
Okay... Actually, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston created the computerized spreadshee... but I gotta figure God must have had it in mind when He created Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston.
I think it's nice that they've come up with a half assed justification to prefer their favourite comedies, but it really isn't significantly less subjective than asking a random person whether they like the show or not.
Agreed.
As with all mathematical solutions, one should insist that they show their work.
Let's apply this "formula" to the recent NBC sitcom, "Friends."
R: 3.
At the time of the show's start, Courney Cox was far and away the most recognizable celebrity on the show, due to her recent stint on the failed CBS drama "China Beach", and the fact that she was the girl who danced with Springsteen in that music video. Almost nobody remembered that Jenifer Aniston was in "Leprechan."
D: Zero. The characters all had rather low opinions of themselves, considering that they lived in the best two apartments in all of New York City.
3 x 0 = 0
V: 8.
It didn't suit everybody's tastes, but love it or hate it, the dialog on that show was its greatest strength. Otherwise dull scenes hinged entirely on the Chandler character just happening to think of the funniest thing you could possibly say at any given moment.
0 + 8 = 8
F: 1
There was an episode where Joey got a hernia from lifting weights, and I think Rachel bumped her head once or twice, but never badly enough to mess up Jenifer Aniston's perfect hair. I believe that was pretty much it.
8 x 1 = 8
S: 1
All six characters began the show as twentysomethings who were just starting out in life, and happened to luck into huge rent-controlled apartments. While wealth varied, class differences were pretty much non-existant. The poorest two character on the show in the first season, Joey, was the richest several years later. It seems that it was originally planned that the story of Rachel's fall and rise (Jewish American Princess - coffee shop girl - fashion-world executive) was to be one of the main story arcs, but it was almost never exploited beyond the first one or two episodes.
8 + 1 = 9
A: 10
The characters on Friends always came out on top. Even the worst disasters which came up were understood by the audience to be temporary setbacks. Just about every crazy scheme in the pursuit of either sex or money tended to pan out.
A good example is the "hernia" episode I mentioned earlier. Joey gets a hernia, but he had let his insurance lapse, and needed a paying acting job to get medical coverage for the surgery. After several failed auditions, he lands a part playing a dying man, because the pain of his injury made him so convincing as somebody who was suffering.
8 / 10 = 0.8
In other words, by this formula, Friends had no chance of ever catching on with TV audiences! What the hell was NBC thinking when they put that show in the slot once occupied by The Cosby Show and Cheers!?!?!?
Since the show ended it's miserable ratings failure of a run, NBC has been showing The Apprentice, starring Donald Trump, in that time slot. By this formula, The Apprentice has a much better chance of success as a sitcom.
That is a risk, yes. On the other hand, if more and more people start buying Macs which can "run anything" natively, then market share may rise to the point that devs will have to meet customer demands to provide a "real" OS X version of the software.
Still, even without Apple getting behind it, I suspect you will eventually see a new version of WINE overtaking VLC as the single most popular free software download for OS X. Apple can't really stop it from happening once they start using Windows-compatable hardware, so they might as well embrace it.
From a single-user desktop perspective, Linux is cool for two reasons and two reasons only:
1. Free as in beer.
Back in the day, nearly every flavor of Unix cost a fortune and ran only on expensive hardware. Linux (and various *BSD flavors) offered college kids and BOFH's-in-training a chance to create a Unix-like sandbox on commodity hardware so they could learn the ins and outs of cron jobs, shell scripts, etc.
This has become less of an issue these days, when $500 gets you a Mac mini with a very nice unix-ish OS, and many of the alternative Unix flavors have either become free, become cheap, or have simply gone away.
2. Free as in speech.
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of tiresome zealotry out there... and yes, the voices of hard-core Free Software cheerleaders have mostly been drowned out on Slashdot over the last couple years, but there still are a lot of "Stalmanist" idealists out there who firmly believe that Free Software often not only results in better code, but also makes the world a better place.
When one takes a close look at Apache, Firefox, and bash, that point is hard to argue with. When one looks at all the great stuff which has been derrived from Open Source in the commercial market (BSD's TCP/IP implementation in Windows, OS X's "Darwin" codebase, etc.) it becomes even more obvious how important the Free Software movement has been to modern computing.
So while the "average" user may never really have a reason to want Linux on their home PC, that's not really the point. In addition to becoming a legitimate server OS, Linux still appeals to that (relatively small) group of people who demand an OS which is free in one sense of the word or the other (or both.)
Slashdot Mirror
Brilliant! Kudos for that link. It made my whole week.
Not knowing the difference between a polygon and a megabyte is not going to help anybody, and it just shows that a) you don't care about your job and b) you shouldn't be in that line of work.
To somebody working at a toy store as a checkout clerk, those words sound like made-up jargon from Star Trek: Voyager. Only a complete dick would expect the high-school drop-out working the register to have any clue what she was asking about.
Well, he would say that. He spent his whole life writing children's stories for fifty-year olds.
I keed, I keed! I love the Clive Staples Lewis! I keed because I love!
In terms of visual style, it borrowed from 'Alice in Wonderland' as much as it did from anime. It's also notable that Chihiro wasn't drawn in stereotypical "big-eyes cute" fashion; in fact, she looked fairly ordinary, which I guess was all to the benefit of the film.
You know where the "big eyes" thing in Japanese animation came from originally?
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
The big-eyed style of the dwarfs in that movie clued Japanese artists in to the fact that you can convey a heck of a lot of emotion, humor, and context to the viewer very simply with an exaggerated pair of eyes. Over the years, it's become a craft in and of itself.
Anime is not so weird and alien once to take a few minutes to grok it properly.
And yes, Miyazaki is totally an anime director. His crew have gone on to create some of the most popular anime shows out there, such as Neon Genesis Evangelion. (Made by the guy who animated the warrior-gods in Miyazaki's first film, "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.")
That story was bullshit.
You claim that OS X for PC was leaked? Link to a torrent of it, or STFU.
Apple: Microsoft, we are going to build Intel based machines and move our resources to OS X for Intel (which has been running for the past 5 years), all our apps will get ported and we will get dev kits out NOW to all our biggest Apple developers. However our OS X will be limited to use with the Intel hardware WE build. You will support this effort of course with Office for the Intel Mac won't you? It would be unfortunate if we had to release OS X for the generic x86 market wouldn't it?
In other words, "DON'T FUCK WITH US!" Apple is holding a big fucking gun to Microsofts head and I like it.
Nothing good comes of holding a gun to somebody's head. If you point a gun at somebody, you damn well better be ready to pull the trigger. Here is how Microsoft would respond to such a threat:
Microsoft: Nah. You go ahead an do whatever you like Apple. We will decide whether to sell Office for OS X ourselves based on whether it makes us money or not. All of your users are addicted to MS-Office, so we could easily spike your entire platform into oblivion pretty much any time we want. We are, after all, the ones who drove you into that tiny little niche market of yours in the first place. MWAHHahahaha....
Slashdotted at 2:20 AM.
Looks like the reaction is just a big blue "Q"
Why not just teach neither in public schools.
If you are going to teach Biology at all, you simply must teach students about evolution. They can choose not to believe it if they wish, but an understanding of evolutionary theory is the foundation of all modern western biology, including genetics, anatomy, and medicine.
You have to know this shit in order to function in the scientific community or continue biological studies beyond High School.
You don't need to know anything about religion to be prepared for college studies (unless you are preparing for a Bible college...)
Simple as that. For any HS to be a realistic means of prepping for college, there has to be science classes, and the have to include evolution in the curriculum.
The obvious proof that Genesis, if literal, is incomplete is the sentencing of Cain.
For murdering his brother, he was cast out to wander, and was to be shunned by civilization everywhere he went.
That kind of implies that there are already people all over the place, doesn't it?
There's a very simple alternate interpretation: Many of the events in Genesis are specifically speaking of what happened in the Garden of Eden, which may or may not be an actual physical location on Earth... likely not.
Another place where fundamentalists must accept that Genesis is incomplete is the Great Flood.
If we all derived from a single family only four thousand years ago (or so), it would be very easy to prove with modern genetics. Clearly the Flood was only referring to the area in which Noah lived, and people in the far reaches of Asia, Europe, and Africa were not impacted at all. (To say nothing of the Americas, where we know there were both people and animals that far back.)
So if the Bible is the Truth, it's not the whole Truth. As soon as one wraps their head around that concept, it's a little easier to see the difference between various sects of Christianity as relatively minor points of dogma.
I, for example, do not believe in a "Young Earth" or even so-called "Intelligent Design." That's not to say I disbelieve in God or my own salvation via Christ, it's just that I view a great deal of the flowery language in the scriptures as exactly that. At the same time, I have no problems whatsoever sitting down for a drink with a creationist without getting into a heated debate over the differences in sequence between Genesis chapters 1 and 2. What they make of the creation story, and what they choose to teach their home-schooled kids about it, doesn't really impact my life in any way. There are far more important issues in the world to get worked up over.
A century ago, virtually all christian sects had no problem with the scientific conclusion that the Earth is several billion years old.
Starting in the 1960s, and just reaching a fever pitch, we have millions of christians who swear that their bible/religion/church says that the Earth is only 6000 years old.
Wow. You never heard of the Scopes Monkey Trials, huh?
(Hint: That was back in 1925, and along with the failure of prohibition signaled the winding down of a "revivalist" period which goes back to the 1890s, and the radical abolitionist movements several decades before that. Fundamentalism in America is a lot older than you seem to think it is.)
Didn't your High School force you to sit through the movie versionof that shitty play?
I suppose I should have said "relatively rare" (as compared with various parts of Europe.)
For all I know, the word "bad" refers to the Baddies, a now-extinct group that was killed off in the Great Genocide of 12633 BC.
My point is that there are actual people actually alive today who can feel hurt by the reference. Take that for whatever you think it's worth.
Yes, Romany people are rare in America, but not entirely unheard of... and Slashdot is read outside of America a lot (as we are all constantly reminded.)
what a jip.
First of all, it's spelled "gyp", not "jip."
Secondly, you probably were blissfully unaware of it, but the word has racist origins.
It's short for "gypsy", and the common use implies that all Romany people (14th-Century immigrants to Europe from Northern India) are swindlers and crooks.
It's kind of like how if a bigot is given a low-ball offer on something they are selling, they might use "Jew" as a verb to describe what happened to them.
I'm the last person to tell somebody else what words to use and what not to use, but now that you know better, I wish to suggest that you keep in mind that the Internet is a big place, and there are some folk out there who will have hurt feelings every time you use a slang derivitive of their ethnic background to describe getting ripped off.
Now you know... and knowing is half the battle.
Go Joe!
Given Microsoft's history, they will then make a second attempt... which will burn down, fall over, and then sink into the swamp.
But Microsoft usually doesn't give up just because of two massive failures, and rarely loses on their third try at something.
Also, all of them had delusions of grandeur at one time or another [Ross' PhD, Joey's soap stardom, Monica's catering, etc.]
Those aren't delusions of grandeur.
Earning a PhD, landing a starring TV role, owning your own business... that would be actual grandeur.
A delusion of grandeur would be if Rachel thought she was the best waitress in all of New York.
By the way, what the hell is the matter with us?
I posted that breakdown of "Friends" partly to debunk this completely stupid story, but mostly to just be a general smart-ass. I was really only hoping to get a laugh or two out of people... Now look what happens. Somebody modded me up as "Informative", and most of the replies have been from people who want to either fact-check my post or argue with my (obviously completely subjective) rankings!
How sad is it that I've kicked off an entire thread discussing things like the early career of Courtney Cox Arquette and the physical-comedy value of trendy cosmetic treatments? Is everybody else also stuck running large jobs on slow computers today?
At least your math correction led to an amusing punch line. Thanks for that.
Except that "Friends" was a big hit in England, as American sitcoms go.
The whole reason "Coupling" was made in the first place was to produce a more British (and slightly more naughty) version of "Friends."
Not surprizingly, the attempt by the same writers to Americanize "Coupling" and sell it back to us fell flat.
The tanning spray, the ultra-white teeth, etc.
Bad fashion choices only count as injuries if you are a flaming homosexual, and even then you should manage to get over it without a lot of therapy.
If you think a bad spray-on tan counts as the same thing as Basil Faulty falling off a ladder, you've clearly been watching way too much "Will and Grace."
Delany. Right you are. You obviously know your chick shows better than me.
Anyway, she wasn't quite a celebrity, but was still the most-well known of the bunch at the time. Her IMDB record shows that she did a heck of a lot of TV in the late 80s and early 90s, including a brief stint as Alex's girlfriend on Family Ties.
Mea Culpa. I originally gave them a 0 for S, but then remembered Rachel's riches-to-rags story in season 1, and upgraded it... but forgot to carry that through the rest of the formula.
This is why God created the computerized spreadsheet. To avoid these kinds of errors.
Okay... Actually, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston created the computerized spreadshee... but I gotta figure God must have had it in mind when He created Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston.
I think it's nice that they've come up with a half assed justification to prefer their favourite comedies, but it really isn't significantly less subjective than asking a random person whether they like the show or not.
Agreed.
As with all mathematical solutions, one should insist that they show their work.
Bah.
Let's apply this "formula" to the recent NBC sitcom, "Friends."
R: 3.
At the time of the show's start, Courney Cox was far and away the most recognizable celebrity on the show, due to her recent stint on the failed CBS drama "China Beach", and the fact that she was the girl who danced with Springsteen in that music video. Almost nobody remembered that Jenifer Aniston was in "Leprechan."
D: Zero. The characters all had rather low opinions of themselves, considering that they lived in the best two apartments in all of New York City.
3 x 0 = 0
V: 8.
It didn't suit everybody's tastes, but love it or hate it, the dialog on that show was its greatest strength. Otherwise dull scenes hinged entirely on the Chandler character just happening to think of the funniest thing you could possibly say at any given moment.
0 + 8 = 8
F: 1
There was an episode where Joey got a hernia from lifting weights, and I think Rachel bumped her head once or twice, but never badly enough to mess up Jenifer Aniston's perfect hair. I believe that was pretty much it.
8 x 1 = 8
S: 1
All six characters began the show as twentysomethings who were just starting out in life, and happened to luck into huge rent-controlled apartments. While wealth varied, class differences were pretty much non-existant. The poorest two character on the show in the first season, Joey, was the richest several years later. It seems that it was originally planned that the story of Rachel's fall and rise (Jewish American Princess - coffee shop girl - fashion-world executive) was to be one of the main story arcs, but it was almost never exploited beyond the first one or two episodes.
8 + 1 = 9
A: 10
The characters on Friends always came out on top. Even the worst disasters which came up were understood by the audience to be temporary setbacks. Just about every crazy scheme in the pursuit of either sex or money tended to pan out.
A good example is the "hernia" episode I mentioned earlier. Joey gets a hernia, but he had let his insurance lapse, and needed a paying acting job to get medical coverage for the surgery. After several failed auditions, he lands a part playing a dying man, because the pain of his injury made him so convincing as somebody who was suffering.
8 / 10 = 0.8
In other words, by this formula, Friends had no chance of ever catching on with TV audiences! What the hell was NBC thinking when they put that show in the slot once occupied by The Cosby Show and Cheers!?!?!?
Since the show ended it's miserable ratings failure of a run, NBC has been showing The Apprentice, starring Donald Trump, in that time slot. By this formula, The Apprentice has a much better chance of success as a sitcom.
That is a risk, yes. On the other hand, if more and more people start buying Macs which can "run anything" natively, then market share may rise to the point that devs will have to meet customer demands to provide a "real" OS X version of the software.
Still, even without Apple getting behind it, I suspect you will eventually see a new version of WINE overtaking VLC as the single most popular free software download for OS X. Apple can't really stop it from happening once they start using Windows-compatable hardware, so they might as well embrace it.
When VPC runs on a future x86 Mac it should run at full speed.
I think you mean:
If VPC runs on a future x86 Mac, it could well turn out that almost nobody will need it, thanks to WINE.
Why buy Windows, when you can emulate the API set for free?
From a single-user desktop perspective, Linux is cool for two reasons and two reasons only:
1. Free as in beer.
Back in the day, nearly every flavor of Unix cost a fortune and ran only on expensive hardware. Linux (and various *BSD flavors) offered college kids and BOFH's-in-training a chance to create a Unix-like sandbox on commodity hardware so they could learn the ins and outs of cron jobs, shell scripts, etc.
This has become less of an issue these days, when $500 gets you a Mac mini with a very nice unix-ish OS, and many of the alternative Unix flavors have either become free, become cheap, or have simply gone away.
2. Free as in speech.
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of tiresome zealotry out there... and yes, the voices of hard-core Free Software cheerleaders have mostly been drowned out on Slashdot over the last couple years, but there still are a lot of "Stalmanist" idealists out there who firmly believe that Free Software often not only results in better code, but also makes the world a better place.
When one takes a close look at Apache, Firefox, and bash, that point is hard to argue with. When one looks at all the great stuff which has been derrived from Open Source in the commercial market (BSD's TCP/IP implementation in Windows, OS X's "Darwin" codebase, etc.) it becomes even more obvious how important the Free Software movement has been to modern computing.
So while the "average" user may never really have a reason to want Linux on their home PC, that's not really the point. In addition to becoming a legitimate server OS, Linux still appeals to that (relatively small) group of people who demand an OS which is free in one sense of the word or the other (or both.)