I think there is such a thing as the "perfect movie": one where there is no way to improve it except to change the whole idea of the film. In other words, nothing better could have been done with the concept/story, even if that concept or story is not something I'm particularly interested in.
Alien, Fifth Element, My Cousin Vinney, the original Planet of the Apes, The Quiet Man, 7 Samurai (not particularly forgotten, that one), The Princess Bride, The Cincinnati Kid, Soylent Green, The Sting are some of the perfects in my book.
The fascism meme (fascism as in "power trough violence") was replaced by the democracy meme,
The exact opposite of the shift that occurred at the same time amongst the aristocracy of America, in fact.
TWW
Re:Found it. Here is a link to the pics
on
4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
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· Score: 1
Then why are you against taking out the man who kills more children than anyone else?
No one is against that, but that's just an excuse that Bush et al use - they don't give a flying fuck about dead Iraqi children. What they do care about, according to Rumsfeld, is oil.
Any geologist will tell you that since 1965 the world has discovered only one barrel of oil for every two consumed. American oil production is in decline (including Alaska) so is the oil production of:
Australia
Indonesia
Argentina
Norway
Columbia
The United Kingdom
South Africa
Plus, Venezuela has suddenly stopped being a reliable source.
The only parts of the world which are not in decline and producing significent amounts of oil are the Middle East and Russia.
The US needs Iraq's oil and needs it urgently so that major production (~3x current Iraq levels) can be brought on line before the oil price starts to skyrocket. It may be true that they could just buy it of Saddam but that would leave someone else's hand on the tap once the crunch comes. That is a threat to the US way of life that Donald, Dick, George, and Condaleezza (all big-time oil people) won't allow.
Iraq will also serve as a base for attacking Saudi Arabia if and when it finally collapses into militant Islamic civil-war (peacekeeping forces, of course. Making those oil wells. peaceful will be very important).
Rumsfeld has planned for this war for years and has, until it started, made no secret of the fact that it was about oil and that he just wanted an excuse to go in. He wanted to go in on 9/12, before any evidence could have been in that Iraq had anything to do with the previous day' events. As it turned out, 9/11 was a Saudi-based plot but we have to all pretend it wasn't at least until the US have a major military base in the region, and its own major oil supply, and can start talking tough.
Dead or tortured children have nothing to do with this war except as a way of getting saps to support it. Rumsfeld didn't give a toss about people being gased when he shook Saddam's hand and told him he'd try to get him some biological weapons to go with the chemical ones he was already using and that the nice CIA men were helping to "calibrate" for him.
As ever, the good old boys in the military have the killer app for this sort of bandwidth, and of course, they don't have to worry about "legal", they've got the power. Your tax dollars at work...
TrueType won. Get over it. Integrate it. Anti-alias it out of the box.
Um, I have 160 TT font files installed on my system, and have had for years. They all anti-alias just fine. What battle are you still fighting?
Create a standard window manager.
Why bother? Most people use KDE or GNOME which have duplicated Windows' mistakes enough that Windows users can enjoy the crippled environment that they're used to with just about zero training or explanation. The rest of us can use WindowMaker or whatever to actually have a useful desktop.
Well, in case you haven't noticed, the most widespread use of network transparent GUI is Citrix.
Never heard of it, but then I have X, so why should I care? Why throw out the network transparency? Why not make it even better? I use it a lot and many others use it every day. It works and works well (from the end-user's POV). I can't see why anyone wants to throw out one of X's only real features.
I can assemble a completely random machine, have an install as easy as Windows, and NOT have to recompile a kernal each time I change something, Windows is going to stay maintstream.
The fact that manufacturers spend the time to make drivers for Windows is not a reflection of the quality of Windows itself.
Plus, you could just compile all the kernel modules at once instead of having to recompile when you change your setup. That's effectively what Windows does.
TWW
Re:It's not about the oil
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
It is our present government's official position that Iraq has also used that wealth to aid an attack on US soil. This position may never be proven or disproven.
I think the burden is very clearly on the government to prove it. Since there is zero evidence of it and since Saddam and Bin Laden are know to despise each other (Saddam is an "infidel" according to Bin Laden) it is not enough to just say "well, I don't know; it might be true, and it might not". When the probability of it being true is so small, that's not a reasonable position.
So far the only attempt they've made is to show some "Al-Qaeda" training camps in a patch of desert somewhere in Iraq. Even if that's what they were, given the size and tech-level of Iraq, this is no better than saying that the US government is directly responsible for terrorist attacks on the UK because the IRA has some training camps somewhere in the Montana woods.
Radar low-observability is designed to foil all radio frequencies.
Its worth remembering that the US always exagerates its successes by a factor of about 3; I doubt very much that the stealth "feature" is as good as they claim, although it is certainly good.
It's undeniable though that Iraq has neither the resources nor the expertise to construct such a radar.
Perhaps the Chinese installed one while they were putting in the fiber-optic comand and control system. Perhaps the CIA sold them one. Who knows? Nobody's going to tell us!
Umm, Iraq is a pretty useless place to put a military base.
It's actually a great place on the strategic level: in the middle east with a port and no annoying ruling family to go begging to for flying permission.
America has already spent orders of magnitudes more money trying to 'contain' Iraq than it spends on oil.
Money that would have been spent on the military anyway.
And it's not going to be America's oil, the oil belongs to the Iraqi people.
Ha ha!
The Bush administration has made that quite clear.
If this is true, there is no way the technology to detect our stealths was developed in Iraq.
They did shoot one down once, I think. Perhaps they found a wavelength that the stealth fails at? If I were them I would have spent a lot of time trying different things on any captured F117 remains.
If the all the U.S. wanted was Iraqi oil, why didn't we just buy it from Saddam
Because it's cheaper to just take it? Plus, you get a free military base and lots and lots of real-world training for your troops. After all, do you think the money spent on this war would not have been spent on the military anyway?
Having said that, I think oil is number three on the list of reasons for this war; the military base is the #1 priority.
I never thought I'd see a news item on the BBC with an image called "38972221_meachassualt203body.jpg"!
TWW
Re:It's not about the oil
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
You are right in that it's not about oil, but the oil is a handy bonus. What it is about is giving the US a permanent military base in the region that does not have to worry about being kicked out by the local government or ask permission to fly over. The second main reason is simply to establish the point that the US can do what it wants to who it wants when it wants and the UN can't do shit about it.
On the other hand, if oil had nothing to do with it then Afghanistan would have been good enough on both of the main counts.
Try to remember just how important oil is to everyone involved on a personal level: I mean Condoleezza Rice has a tanker named after her! It unlikely that oil will ever have NOTHING to do with what this unelected junta does.
TWW
Re:Over reaction by the US and UK
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 2, Interesting
there are no chemical weapons,
I'd be surprised if there are none at all, but I doubt that there is any long range (ie, over 100 mile) delivery systems. Perhaps Blair is regretting refusing to sign that early-day motion calling on the then UK government to stop selling chemical plant equipment to Iraq? (I seriously doubt that he cares one way or the other, actually).
As someone who was caught in two IRA bombs that were planted in Manchester/UK I will tell you that the biggest recruiter for terrorism is violence.
I lost my grandmother and a friend to the NI troubles and I agree 100%
A UK PM that's prepared to send our soldiers to die in order to establish the principle that the occupent of the White House can pick who's allowed to be in charge of any country in the world is nothing more than a traitor.
Obviously, Saddam is an evil bastard, but what happens if Bush decides to continue on to N. Korea (probably okay with most people), or to Burma (Ah, where's that again?), or Cuba (maybe we need to think about this, Mr Bush. Mr Bush? Hello?) or... The dog is off the leash and good luck getting him back on.
And what does the UK get in return? The opportunity to be a target for all the "Islamic warriors" that this attack is going to spawn. Whoopie. So much better than waiting until the end of the summer and having everyone agree to a real coalition.
TWW
Re:Is there anywhere one can download SUSE?
on
SuSE 8.2 Announced
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· Score: 1
SuSE costs money and if you don't like it don't buy it.
Well, I think that was the original poster's point: s/he doesn't want to buy it if s/he doesn't like it. My experence of SuSE is that it is so bunged full of stuff that a free download has only a fraction of the utility of the bought version simply due to the lack of a manual. Why not let people try it on the basis that those that like it will buy the "real" thing to get the manuals?
Also, of course, when you say "Why should they give away all their hardwork for free." you are implying that the SuSE team wrote the whole thing and that they did not rely on the freely-available tools (such as QT, gcc, Xine etc) that others allowed them to download to make their distro as good as it is.
So? If I hand you a document which starts with <HTML> and you say "Is this an XML document? I don't know what to do with this!" it's not me that's being the prat.
And what version of HTML can you tell by the HTML tag? 1.0? 3.0? 4.01?
That should be an attribute of the HTML tag. Pretty simple stuff, even if it mattered - the whole point of HTML is that the renderer is allowed the flexibility to ignore unrecognised or obsolete tags and adapt to circumstances such as media, colour space, layout restrictions etc. The version is more important for the writer who wants to know what is likely to be understood by current parsers. All this "Oh, I don't know what sort of document that could be, I can't validate it." is just pretentious fopism engendered by people on the W3C XML board that are more intent on making sure they have a job than actually producing anything useful.
I am curious about why XML is necessarily "difficult to read/edit" unless you are referring to the actual presence of tags.
You have misunderstood the point of my rant: I was going further afield than Office and into the entire realm of "XML for everything". Obviously in the case of a word processor the program itself is all the editor you need but this is not the case when talking about config files etc. That covers your comments on the libraries too.
I assume you also dislike this about HTML4 and HTML4.01.
Yes, I do. There is no need for the doctype tag when there is a <HTML> tag already in global use. If the version is important then it can be an attribute of the HTML tag.
I also assume that you dislike the hassle of adding the redundant html, title and head
No, they are not redundant; they indicate structure. The doctype tage adds nothing that the HTML tag does not cover or could have easily been extended to cover; doctype is the redundant information here.
as well as the even more redundant closing tags like with
and the all lower case crap probably is not helping your attitude either.
I don't use/p, and hardly anyone else does and the ability to use lower case is a strength. Case sensitivity is a mistake in all computing languages whether it is a programming language or a markup language.
Perhaps it might be best to stick to HTML and even use WYSIWYG editors.
I'm happy doing all my HTML in Emacs (text editor), thanks.
Proprietary binary format organized much like a child's toy chest... good
No, DOCUMENTED file formats, binary or not: better than not documented. Non-binary better if user-friendly.
Choice of not using MS Office or its files (or even MS systems and components like ADO, OLE, LMNOP) to edit such files... bad
Is OLE still going? Ah, that takes me back. But anyway - Choice to use any editor is good.
Ability to use existing XML tools, systems and code base to read/write this format... bad
The requirement is bad; the ability is good.
Ability to use ANY XML PARSER and frankly any XML API (or even do it line by line like any other formatted text) as opposed to being locked into specific proprietary tools... bad
No, that's good. However, XML adds a complexity to, for example, config files which actually makes it harder to work with them in a lot of cases. It is this "XML for everything, no matter how small" attitude (which you clearly don't have) that really winds me up.
Ability to use any ol text editor now to gain access (leads into parsing, as in above) to the files now... bad
This is really the second point again: the need is the problem, not the ability.
Right, I think we've established that this item is rubbish (or at least the summary/. posted); let's talk about XML for a minute. From the article:
"Prior to this evolution, the only way to effectively interact and exchange information was to standardize on a specific platform, using specific applications (including exact version synchronization), and specific file formats. Literally everyone had to agree on the same proprietary stack, top to bottom."
This is the same old load of nonsense pro-XML people come out with all the time. The fact is that only the file format had to be agreed in the "dark days" before XML came to our rescue. Now that we have XML, of course, all we have to agree on is, er, the file format. If I don't know what schema you're using then your file is of very limited use to me. So we have to agree, just like before. And, just like before, if someone doesn't want to say what their schema is (by hardwiring the understanding of it into their binary, for example) everyone else is pretty well screwed and having to break out the hex-editors.
What, other than a very inefficient file format that is difficult to read/edit does XML get us? Apart from a single parser library (which is now a dependancy, of course) I can't see any real reason to use it.
Put it this way: if MS rigourously documented the Word file format why would we care about whether it was XML or not?
And don't get me started on XHTML! "Your document does not have a doctype". It's goddamned HTML, that what "doctype" it is...
Since a lot of the bugs prevented the depth that had been designed from actually appearing in the game - some creatures, many quests, a lot of the little details of the villagers were absent - there was little scope for exploring the other approaches when the game came out.
A lot of these bugs took a long time to be patched by which time the novelty had worn off and the limitations of the creature AI and the game in general had become very evident. One example being the inability of villagers to actually grow enough food for themselves. Even the zombies on level 4 died of starvation.
The starving zombies were one of several cases of Star Trekitus, where a storyline is played out and when it's over it has no effect on the world. The villagers being all dead did not prevent the headman coming out to talk to you and killing the ogre did not prevent his re-appearing later and doing the exacy same actions.
Also, remember what was promised in the hype. At the end of the day there was little new in B+W over, for example, PowerMonger, except in the graphics department.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there is such a thing as the "perfect movie": one where there is no way to improve it except to change the whole idea of the film. In other words, nothing better could have been done with the concept/story, even if that concept or story is not something I'm particularly interested in.
Alien, Fifth Element, My Cousin Vinney, the original Planet of the Apes, The Quiet Man, 7 Samurai (not particularly forgotten, that one), The Princess Bride, The Cincinnati Kid, Soylent Green, The Sting are some of the perfects in my book.
TWW
The exact opposite of the shift that occurred at the same time amongst the aristocracy of America, in fact.
TWW
No one is against that, but that's just an excuse that Bush et al use - they don't give a flying fuck about dead Iraqi children. What they do care about, according to Rumsfeld, is oil.
Any geologist will tell you that since 1965 the world has discovered only one barrel of oil for every two consumed. American oil production is in decline (including Alaska) so is the oil production of:
Plus, Venezuela has suddenly stopped being a reliable source.
The only parts of the world which are not in decline and producing significent amounts of oil are the Middle East and Russia.
The US needs Iraq's oil and needs it urgently so that major production (~3x current Iraq levels) can be brought on line before the oil price starts to skyrocket. It may be true that they could just buy it of Saddam but that would leave someone else's hand on the tap once the crunch comes. That is a threat to the US way of life that Donald, Dick, George, and Condaleezza (all big-time oil people) won't allow.
Iraq will also serve as a base for attacking Saudi Arabia if and when it finally collapses into militant Islamic civil-war (peacekeeping forces, of course. Making those oil wells. peaceful will be very important).
Rumsfeld has planned for this war for years and has, until it started, made no secret of the fact that it was about oil and that he just wanted an excuse to go in. He wanted to go in on 9/12, before any evidence could have been in that Iraq had anything to do with the previous day' events. As it turned out, 9/11 was a Saudi-based plot but we have to all pretend it wasn't at least until the US have a major military base in the region, and its own major oil supply, and can start talking tough.
Dead or tortured children have nothing to do with this war except as a way of getting saps to support it. Rumsfeld didn't give a toss about people being gased when he shook Saddam's hand and told him he'd try to get him some biological weapons to go with the chemical ones he was already using and that the nice CIA men were helping to "calibrate" for him.
TWW
Did you fall asleep and bang your head off the keyboard?
TWW
TWW
TWW
Um, I have 160 TT font files installed on my system, and have had for years. They all anti-alias just fine. What battle are you still fighting?
Create a standard window manager.
Why bother? Most people use KDE or GNOME which have duplicated Windows' mistakes enough that Windows users can enjoy the crippled environment that they're used to with just about zero training or explanation. The rest of us can use WindowMaker or whatever to actually have a useful desktop.
Well, in case you haven't noticed, the most widespread use of network transparent GUI is Citrix.
Never heard of it, but then I have X, so why should I care? Why throw out the network transparency? Why not make it even better? I use it a lot and many others use it every day. It works and works well (from the end-user's POV). I can't see why anyone wants to throw out one of X's only real features.
TWW
TWW
If you'd ever used Windows 1 or 2 you would know why!
TWW
The fact that manufacturers spend the time to make drivers for Windows is not a reflection of the quality of Windows itself.
Plus, you could just compile all the kernel modules at once instead of having to recompile when you change your setup. That's effectively what Windows does.
TWW
I think the burden is very clearly on the government to prove it. Since there is zero evidence of it and since Saddam and Bin Laden are know to despise each other (Saddam is an "infidel" according to Bin Laden) it is not enough to just say "well, I don't know; it might be true, and it might not". When the probability of it being true is so small, that's not a reasonable position.
So far the only attempt they've made is to show some "Al-Qaeda" training camps in a patch of desert somewhere in Iraq. Even if that's what they were, given the size and tech-level of Iraq, this is no better than saying that the US government is directly responsible for terrorist attacks on the UK because the IRA has some training camps somewhere in the Montana woods.
TWW
Its worth remembering that the US always exagerates its successes by a factor of about 3; I doubt very much that the stealth "feature" is as good as they claim, although it is certainly good.
It's undeniable though that Iraq has neither the resources nor the expertise to construct such a radar.
Perhaps the Chinese installed one while they were putting in the fiber-optic comand and control system. Perhaps the CIA sold them one. Who knows? Nobody's going to tell us!
TWW
It's actually a great place on the strategic level: in the middle east with a port and no annoying ruling family to go begging to for flying permission.
America has already spent orders of magnitudes more money trying to 'contain' Iraq than it spends on oil.
Money that would have been spent on the military anyway.
And it's not going to be America's oil, the oil belongs to the Iraqi people.
Ha ha!
The Bush administration has made that quite clear.
Yes, he's so trustworthy, insn't he!?
TWW
They did shoot one down once, I think. Perhaps they found a wavelength that the stealth fails at? If I were them I would have spent a lot of time trying different things on any captured F117 remains.
TWW
Because it's cheaper to just take it? Plus, you get a free military base and lots and lots of real-world training for your troops. After all, do you think the money spent on this war would not have been spent on the military anyway?
Having said that, I think oil is number three on the list of reasons for this war; the military base is the #1 priority.
TWW
TWW
On the other hand, if oil had nothing to do with it then Afghanistan would have been good enough on both of the main counts.
Try to remember just how important oil is to everyone involved on a personal level: I mean Condoleezza Rice has a tanker named after her! It unlikely that oil will ever have NOTHING to do with what this unelected junta does.
TWW
I'd be surprised if there are none at all, but I doubt that there is any long range (ie, over 100 mile) delivery systems. Perhaps Blair is regretting refusing to sign that early-day motion calling on the then UK government to stop selling chemical plant equipment to Iraq? (I seriously doubt that he cares one way or the other, actually).
As someone who was caught in two IRA bombs that were planted in Manchester/UK I will tell you that the biggest recruiter for terrorism is violence.
I lost my grandmother and a friend to the NI troubles and I agree 100%
TWW
Obviously, Saddam is an evil bastard, but what happens if Bush decides to continue on to N. Korea (probably okay with most people), or to Burma (Ah, where's that again?), or Cuba (maybe we need to think about this, Mr Bush. Mr Bush? Hello?) or... The dog is off the leash and good luck getting him back on.
And what does the UK get in return? The opportunity to be a target for all the "Islamic warriors" that this attack is going to spawn. Whoopie. So much better than waiting until the end of the summer and having everyone agree to a real coalition.
TWW
Well, I think that was the original poster's point: s/he doesn't want to buy it if s/he doesn't like it. My experence of SuSE is that it is so bunged full of stuff that a free download has only a fraction of the utility of the bought version simply due to the lack of a manual. Why not let people try it on the basis that those that like it will buy the "real" thing to get the manuals?
Also, of course, when you say "Why should they give away all their hardwork for free." you are implying that the SuSE team wrote the whole thing and that they did not rely on the freely-available tools (such as QT, gcc, Xine etc) that others allowed them to download to make their distro as good as it is.
TWW
Any XML doc could have HTML as a tag.
So? If I hand you a document which starts with <HTML> and you say "Is this an XML document? I don't know what to do with this!" it's not me that's being the prat.
And what version of HTML can you tell by the HTML tag? 1.0? 3.0? 4.01?
That should be an attribute of the HTML tag. Pretty simple stuff, even if it mattered - the whole point of HTML is that the renderer is allowed the flexibility to ignore unrecognised or obsolete tags and adapt to circumstances such as media, colour space, layout restrictions etc. The version is more important for the writer who wants to know what is likely to be understood by current parsers. All this "Oh, I don't know what sort of document that could be, I can't validate it." is just pretentious fopism engendered by people on the W3C XML board that are more intent on making sure they have a job than actually producing anything useful.
TWW
You have misunderstood the point of my rant: I was going further afield than Office and into the entire realm of "XML for everything". Obviously in the case of a word processor the program itself is all the editor you need but this is not the case when talking about config files etc. That covers your comments on the libraries too.
I assume you also dislike this about HTML4 and HTML4.01.
Yes, I do. There is no need for the doctype tag when there is a <HTML> tag already in global use. If the version is important then it can be an attribute of the HTML tag.
I also assume that you dislike the hassle of adding the redundant html, title and head
No, they are not redundant; they indicate structure. The doctype tage adds nothing that the HTML tag does not cover or could have easily been extended to cover; doctype is the redundant information here.
as well as the even more redundant closing tags like with
and the all lower case crap probably is not helping your attitude either.I don't use /p, and hardly anyone else does and the ability to use lower case is a strength. Case sensitivity is a mistake in all computing languages whether it is a programming language or a markup language.
Perhaps it might be best to stick to HTML and even use WYSIWYG editors.
I'm happy doing all my HTML in Emacs (text editor), thanks.
Proprietary binary format organized much like a child's toy chest... good
No, DOCUMENTED file formats, binary or not: better than not documented. Non-binary better if user-friendly.
Choice of not using MS Office or its files (or even MS systems and components like ADO, OLE, LMNOP) to edit such files... bad
Is OLE still going? Ah, that takes me back. But anyway - Choice to use any editor is good.
Ability to use existing XML tools, systems and code base to read/write this format... bad
The requirement is bad; the ability is good.
Ability to use ANY XML PARSER and frankly any XML API (or even do it line by line like any other formatted text) as opposed to being locked into specific proprietary tools... bad
No, that's good. However, XML adds a complexity to, for example, config files which actually makes it harder to work with them in a lot of cases. It is this "XML for everything, no matter how small" attitude (which you clearly don't have) that really winds me up.
Ability to use any ol text editor now to gain access (leads into parsing, as in above) to the files now... bad
This is really the second point again: the need is the problem, not the ability.
TWW
The <HTML> tag at the top is a bit of a clue.
TWW
"Prior to this evolution, the only way to effectively interact and exchange information was to standardize on a specific platform, using specific applications (including exact version synchronization), and specific file formats. Literally everyone had to agree on the same proprietary stack, top to bottom."
This is the same old load of nonsense pro-XML people come out with all the time. The fact is that only the file format had to be agreed in the "dark days" before XML came to our rescue. Now that we have XML, of course, all we have to agree on is, er, the file format. If I don't know what schema you're using then your file is of very limited use to me. So we have to agree, just like before. And, just like before, if someone doesn't want to say what their schema is (by hardwiring the understanding of it into their binary, for example) everyone else is pretty well screwed and having to break out the hex-editors.
What, other than a very inefficient file format that is difficult to read/edit does XML get us? Apart from a single parser library (which is now a dependancy, of course) I can't see any real reason to use it.
Put it this way: if MS rigourously documented the Word file format why would we care about whether it was XML or not?
And don't get me started on XHTML! "Your document does not have a doctype". It's goddamned HTML, that what "doctype" it is...
TWW
Since a lot of the bugs prevented the depth that had been designed from actually appearing in the game - some creatures, many quests, a lot of the little details of the villagers were absent - there was little scope for exploring the other approaches when the game came out.
A lot of these bugs took a long time to be patched by which time the novelty had worn off and the limitations of the creature AI and the game in general had become very evident. One example being the inability of villagers to actually grow enough food for themselves. Even the zombies on level 4 died of starvation.
The starving zombies were one of several cases of Star Trekitus, where a storyline is played out and when it's over it has no effect on the world. The villagers being all dead did not prevent the headman coming out to talk to you and killing the ogre did not prevent his re-appearing later and doing the exacy same actions.
Also, remember what was promised in the hype. At the end of the day there was little new in B+W over, for example, PowerMonger, except in the graphics department.
TWW