I've been using my Logitech iFeel mouse, which has tactile feedback, for over a year now. I like it a lot; it's reassuring that widgets in windows are "bumpy". I guess it's like moving to a real keyboard after having used a membrane keyboard. It even works in some games, most notably Black & White which actually had missions that would only appear with a force-feedback mouse.
But unfortunately, iFeel mice have been available for a long time now, but it doesn't seem like they're catching on. People don't seem to want to spend even the extra $20 or so for the feature.
No wonder there have been a lot fewer spelling mistakes in the past few days...robots use spellchecking.
Really, you think spam works? I don't, here's why.
on
Spam Doesn't Work?
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· Score: 2
I don't have any proof of that, so I cannot believe it.
I do have proof that people THINK it works, so I get a lot of spam. I do have proof that there are people with a vested interest in promoting the idea that spam works; the people who sell spam tools. I have heard the argument that "if only one out of 100,000 people buys, it works", but I always counteract that with, "if only one out of 100,000 people is pissed enough at the spam to seek revenge or even just waste enough of the spammers time, it ceases to make money."
What I firmly believe is that the only people making money off of spam are the spam service sellers; I think the spam service sellers lie and say lots of people are making money off of spam. I think this is enough to ensure that I'll get lots of spam.
I can't help but feel I'm being trolled, but what the heck. ReplayTV is a DVR box pretty much just like Tivo; check out ReplayTV's web site for more info.
A big part of the reason that Orwell's 1984 didn't come true is because we had Orwell to warn us. I can't think of any other book which has had such impact on freedom and human rights in this century.
That would imply that they've been on the air for eight years.:)
Re:Kronos Quartet?
on
Space Music
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· Score: 3, Funny
I don't think it's possible, although maybe someone else can help me out. Kronos Quartet was formed in 1973; I don't think that the Klingon homeworld was actually called "Kronos" in the original series. It wasn't used until after the formation of the "Kronos Quartet". But then again, I'm not a Trek expert. Anybody out there have a definitive reference on when the word "Kronos" was first used in the Star Trek mythos?
so you feel its OK to pass students who would waste there employers time having to run a compiler over and over again because they where not trained to pay attention to what they are doing?
Why don't you just show them how to use the help system, then pass them? after all, they can look it up online.
Don't be so obtuse; of course that's not what we did. Quick, without looking: what are the arguments passed into "strtok()"? Personally, I don't know for sure, and that doesn't matter, because "man strtok" gets me the answer on the rare occasion that I need to use it. But it doesn't tell me when I want to use the function, or how to use it in a tokenizer, and as it turns out, I do know that part. And that's the kind of thing that's more interesting to test for. Memorization monkies aren't good employees; good problem solvers are.
But perhaps you have a point; clearly, your grammar and spelling teachers weren't strict enough.
Windows XP, eXtreme Programming, XPCOM, eXperience Points, "Cross Platform", and now this. It's got to be one of the most overloaded acronyms of all time.
I used to teach a class to engineering freshman, and part of the course was writing code in Matlab. There are in fact a bunch of matlab questions that you can ask that aren't just writing code, but you really don't get complete coverage unless you have the student put some code on the page.
Additionally, there probably was some cheating going on with the homeworks (this was a large class taught to all freshman, with relatively small programming assignments. It would be difficult to prove someone was cheating.) We needed a controlled environment where this couldn't happen.
However, we all realized how crappy this was for the student, and we graded the assignment more like it was psuedocode. If the code had obvious typos, we ignored those. If they were close on syntax, but a little unclear on the API, we usually let it slide, too. (We understand when online you can look that stuff up with the online help.) The thing we stressed was the overall algorithm itself, as well as a demonstration that the student knew how to use matlab. (After all, as a TA, I'm taking programming courses myself; I have some idea of what's reasonable to expect and what's not)
If you do have a written CS test, and the prof does mark you off for syntax errors, I would probably go in and (politely) complain. Say, "I made a typo which would have been caught by the compiler, but I got the gist correct." If you demonstrate that you know what you're talking about, and you're not a jerk about it, and the professor's not a total jerk, I bet you'll get most of the points back. (We would do this all the time, especially if the student could clearly explain what they were trying to do.)
If the professor or TA is a jerk, all bets are off, though. But if they're a jerk, they aren't interested in being fair anyway, so you were screwed from the start. We've all been there. Sorry.
You missed my point. I'm saying I've started thinking that the video card IS the "main processor", and is where you spend the most money. Your recommended system is pretty much the one I just built myself.
When building a system to play modern 3d games, I've started thinking about the video CPU as the "main processor", and the Athlon or Intel CPU on the motherboard as the "coprocessor". This way, I can sort of trick myself into being comfortable spending $300+ on the "main processor" and a mere $150 on the "coprocessor".
If you're not in it for the games, that philosophy doesn't really apply. Since I have want to play the latest games right away, I need to have MS Windows on that system. The OS condemns the machine to being a toy, so my philosophy above pretty much makes sense.;)
Not that it's definitive, but Ace's Hardware has a
"SPECmine" page that lets you search known SPEC ratings for various processors. On SPECfp2000, the results are:
1050 MHZ UltraSPARC-III Cu: 827 Peak, 701 Base
1733 Athlon XP: 660 Peak, 613 Base
900 UltraSPARC-III 482 Peak, 427 Base
So the high-end UltraSPARC outperforms the Athlon by a healthy margin. (I mentioned in my earlier post the 900 UltraSPARC-III Cu, but the SPECmine doesn't have results for that exact processor. I'd expect it to perform at about 90% of the 1050Mhz version).
You can use the SPECmine to find the SPECInt results, and the Athlon does in fact beat the UltraSPARC (749 v. 610). So you're paying for floating point performance on the Sun part, but you actually pay an integer performance penalty.
In real life, the Blade feels like a REALLY fast system, in spite of the SPECInt numbers. Perhaps that massive 8MB cache doesn't help the SPECInt numbers, but pays off in day-to-day tasks? I can't explain it, and maybe it's just "This machine cost $20K+, it must be fast", but I'd definitely prefer the Blade to my current Athlon home system... If cost were no object.
On the other hand, cost is an object, which is why my current home system IS an Athlon. But don't knock the Blade system; it's outrageously priced, but it's one boss machine.
Not that bad. Their CPUs, on the other hand...
on
Solaris 9: Sticker Shock
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· Score: 3, Informative
For the older and lower end machines, this might have an impact on the wallet, but for their modern high end workstations, $249 for an OS license is pretty cheap compared the the price of that second processor.
For example, click on one of the Blade 2000 systems on this page. Go down to the part where it says, " 900-MHz UltraSPARC III Cu Processor with 8-MB External Cache [add $4,500.00]". Now that's a spicy meatball. (It is a helluva processor, but 4.5k makes me gasp).
I do sort of feel bad for the old timers with older systems, but if they're trying to be cheap, they do have the option of sticking with the same OS, or switching to Linux. Solaris really is a solid OS, and for a lot of people, $249 will be definitely worth the cost.
Wow! You manage to bring this up every time they release a "bug-fix-only, no-new-features, release candidate"! And you know it! And you complain anyway, every time! And use exclamation marks, too!
I shall look forward to seeing your same post again when Mozilla 1.0PR1 comes out, when Mozilla 1.0PR2 comes out, and Mozilla 1.0 Final comes out, too.
When they said "you're not getting a pony for Christmas. Maybe for Easter," they meant it. Does this suck? Maybe. Do you have to whine about it every time? Apparently.
The rinky-dink Electronics Boutique here in Thousand Oaks, California still has a collector's tin copy of Quake 3 for Linux on the shelves. But I think that's part of the problem.
If your programming in C++ why aren't you searching for "::function_name" or "class_name::function_name" instead of "^function_name"?
It's a matter of semantics, but I tend to think of the class name as part of the function name. So I do grep for "^class_name::member_function_name" all the time.
If you mention the function name in comments, it's easy to have "[A-Za-z0-9_] function_name" show up. I suspect I'd have problems enforcing the "space between the function name and the paren only in the definition", because it involves vigilance everywhere. (In other words, people who's natural instinct to put in that space when calling the function have to change their habit everywhere.) But if you can enforce it, it's probably not a bad rule. I still like the "^function_name" rule because it takes effort only when initially writing the function, and it isn't going to show up in comments (unless you really indent your comments weird).
I too really liked Gattaca. In fact, if I were going have a problem with it being listed as one of the best "Science Fiction Movies Of All Time", it's that based on current trends, sometime in the near future it's going to not be fiction anymore.
P.S. Off topic, but cool anyway: This is obvious to some, obtuse to others: the letters in "Gattaca" are the same four letters used to label the nucleotides in DNA. Neat.
I can only blame the fact that I was posting to slashdot late at night, and also not in the enivronment of an editor, because I would really format functions like this (at least in C++):
int function_name(int x, int y) { int* z; printf("hello\n"); return 99; }
Briefly, the important points are this:
The return type has a newline after it, so the function name is rammed up against the left side. This way, the regexp "^function_name" will only appear one place in all of the code, at the function definition. Now you can type "egrep ^function_name *.C" and get what you were looking for.
The braces are rammed up against the left wall. In vi (which I don't use often) you can easily jump to such braces (I belive "[[" and "]]", though I could be wrong), making function navigation easier.
Four spaces for indent. Yeah, Gnu uses two and Linux uses eight (or is it a tab?); however, in my opinion, two isn't visually distinctive enough, and eight is excessive and wastes screen space. I know the Gnu people and the Linux people can both justify their decision, but to me, four just looks better. (If it's not clear to you why non-power-of-two indents are aesthetically unappealing, you should reconsider being a programmer.)
Spaces for indent, never tabs. See JWZ's
document "Tabs vs. Spaces" to see why. He also explains how to set up emacs and vi to do the right thing for indent.
Eighty columns, unless you really can't fit it in. It's much easier to print code formatted to eighty. If you never print code, then it's much easier to merge code side-by-side if it's formatted to eighty. In this day and age of reallyLengthyVariableNamesAndAPIS, it can be tough, so if you have to break this rule in rare cases, it's ok, but only if you tried your hardest.
I've been programming in Java a lot recently, though, where all your functions are in a class scope and therefore the "ram it up against the left" set of tricks doesn't really work. In this case, I tend to format like my original example. Mostly, I think, just to save vertical space.
I tend not to use multiple declarations per line; the problems outweigh the positives (With multiple declarations: You cannot comment variable usage later, it's (slightly) more typing to refactor code by removing or changing variables, and there's the problem you bring up).
Once you've adopted that rule, it's a lot clearer (and closer to the truth) to use "type*", since the actual type of "var1" in your example is "pointer to type", not "type".
It's also the style Bjarne uses in his code, if that makes any difference to you.
Take a look at this function, and tell me if there's a bug:
void foo(void) { int* x = 0; int y = *x; }
Easy, the bug's the SEGV, right? Take a look at the same function, this time with comments:
// Function: cause_segv // Description: Causes a SEGV for testing purposes void cause_segv(void) { int* x = 0; int y = *x; }
The point? A bug is unwanted behaviorm, but that only makes sense if you've defined what the correct behavior is. My example is trivial, but often this is a real concern. Function "bar(int,int)" returns null whenever one of the arguments is negative--is that a bug or a feature? Your function has a goal in life, a contractual obligation to do something; make sure it's clear what that something is.
Note that if you choose good function and good variable names, a simple one or two line comment at the beginning is usually sufficient to document whe function's intended behavior.
I also find that an "assert()" or two on the arguments at the top of the function makes it clear what values the function accepts, and which one the function doesn't handle. It's an easy way to document the contractual obligations of the function.
Stuff not to put in comments is stuff that's easily devised from the code. Check this out:
// Function: square // Inputs: int x // Outputs: int // Used by: pythagorean(int,int) // Description: returns x squared int square(int x) { return x*x; }
Did the "Inputs" or "Outputs" add any value? That information appears again, two lines below in the function definition, and it's guaranteed to be correct there (unlike the comment which will be out-of-date and wrong when we change "square" to work on longs). The "Used by" might have added some value, if it was correct, but as it turns out it's out of date, and 15 other functions now use "square". Any information better derived looking at the code should be left off. Any information which can be better found using "grep" or "find in files" should be left off. Any information that will probably be out of date at some point should be left off. Heck, in this situation even the description is probably extra verbiage, since it doesn't really help anyone. (I'd probably put it in out of habit anyway, though...so sue me:)
This is a terrible review
on
Review: U-571
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· Score: 3, Funny
Yes, the movie U-571 was historically inaccurate, and it also failed to entertain in many ways, but this "review" is hardly any better. The reviewer has an obvious agenda, and the review reads more like an seventh-grade book report than a professional criticism. There's a time and a place for this kind of "review" (like, say, April 2000 when it would have been relevant) but I'd prefer not to see this kind of thing on Slashdot again.
U-571 is a "film" starring almost no one you've heard of, directed by some guy...
This is true, if you've never heard of Matthew McConaughey (Contact), Bill Paxton(Apollo 13), Harvey Keitel (Pulp Fiction), and Jon Bon Jovi (Ally McBeal). And couldn't the reviewer be bothered actually name the director he's blaming for this? (I guess he does later, although he misspells director Jonathan Mostow's name "Mastow" every single time)
The only reason for this $90 million mess is to prove that, in the words of Jonathan Mastow, "Das Boot was based on a lie".
A more complete version of this quote, if you care, is from the Washington Post, and reads, " "based on a lie" because "[...] it pretended that the captains and crews were submariners first, and only incidentally Nazis. They were dedicated Nazis; they had to be to fight that hard." Did "Das Boot" underemphasize the Nazi patriotism of the German submariners? I don't know, but it seems like a valid viewpoint to try to express.
...some ensigns and whatnots (played like scraps of dirty sheet styrene by some guys you've never heard of)
Apparently, every movie made by Hollywood that doesn't have an "All-Star" cast with already established actors is bad, since it might star actors I've never heard of.
The Evilll electrician of U-571 tries to signal the destroyer overhead, and someone finally kills the evilllll SS-Nazi Gestapo Sea Killer electrician! Yay! Onward with the gratuitous stereotyping of our former enemies!
Wow, a WWII movie that portrays the Germans as the bad guys. That's a new one, aside from the ten-thousand other WWII movies.
Is U571 inaccurate? Sure, the tale told never happened, and the historical events closest to this tale were done by the British, not the Americans.
Does that really matter on a sort of ho-hum movie like this, that few watched, even fewer remember, and nobody thinks is anything but mild entertainment? Nope.
I look forward to your review of Pearl Harbor in 2004, though.
Re:Insult to British
on
Review: U-571
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· Score: 3, Funny
If the US's closest ally, Britain, see's Hollywood's constant rewriting of history as an insult you can start to understand some of the indignance that breeds in the Arab world.
Wait a second... the reason that terrorists blew up the WTC was because they were mad about the movie U-571? Jeez, Hollywood should be more careful next time.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using my Logitech iFeel mouse, which has tactile feedback, for over a year now. I like it a lot; it's reassuring that widgets in windows are "bumpy". I guess it's like moving to a real keyboard after having used a membrane keyboard. It even works in some games, most notably Black & White which actually had missions that would only appear with a force-feedback mouse.
But unfortunately, iFeel mice have been available for a long time now, but it doesn't seem like they're catching on. People don't seem to want to spend even the extra $20 or so for the feature.
No wonder there have been a lot fewer spelling mistakes in the past few days...robots use spellchecking.
I don't have any proof of that, so I cannot believe it.
I do have proof that people THINK it works, so I get a lot of spam. I do have proof that there are people with a vested interest in promoting the idea that spam works; the people who sell spam tools. I have heard the argument that "if only one out of 100,000 people buys, it works", but I always counteract that with, "if only one out of 100,000 people is pissed enough at the spam to seek revenge or even just waste enough of the spammers time, it ceases to make money."
What I firmly believe is that the only people making money off of spam are the spam service sellers; I think the spam service sellers lie and say lots of people are making money off of spam. I think this is enough to ensure that I'll get lots of spam.
Alright, I see...you were making fun of the misspelling of "Replay" as "Reply". Never mind.
I can't help but feel I'm being trolled, but what the heck. ReplayTV is a DVR box pretty much just like Tivo; check out ReplayTV's web site for more info.
A big part of the reason that Orwell's 1984 didn't come true is because we had Orwell to warn us. I can't think of any other book which has had such impact on freedom and human rights in this century.
Despite six witty, intelligent seasons,
That would imply that they've been on the air for eight years. :)
I don't think it's possible, although maybe someone else can help me out. Kronos Quartet was formed in 1973; I don't think that the Klingon homeworld was actually called "Kronos" in the original series. It wasn't used until after the formation of the "Kronos Quartet". But then again, I'm not a Trek expert. Anybody out there have a definitive reference on when the word "Kronos" was first used in the Star Trek mythos?
so you feel its OK to pass students who would waste there employers time having to run a compiler over and over again because they where not trained to pay attention to what they are doing? Why don't you just show them how to use the help system, then pass them? after all, they can look it up online.
Don't be so obtuse; of course that's not what we did. Quick, without looking: what are the arguments passed into "strtok()"? Personally, I don't know for sure, and that doesn't matter, because "man strtok" gets me the answer on the rare occasion that I need to use it. But it doesn't tell me when I want to use the function, or how to use it in a tokenizer, and as it turns out, I do know that part. And that's the kind of thing that's more interesting to test for. Memorization monkies aren't good employees; good problem solvers are.
But perhaps you have a point; clearly, your grammar and spelling teachers weren't strict enough.
Windows XP, eXtreme Programming, XPCOM, eXperience Points, "Cross Platform", and now this. It's got to be one of the most overloaded acronyms of all time.
I used to teach a class to engineering freshman, and part of the course was writing code in Matlab. There are in fact a bunch of matlab questions that you can ask that aren't just writing code, but you really don't get complete coverage unless you have the student put some code on the page.
Additionally, there probably was some cheating going on with the homeworks (this was a large class taught to all freshman, with relatively small programming assignments. It would be difficult to prove someone was cheating.) We needed a controlled environment where this couldn't happen.
However, we all realized how crappy this was for the student, and we graded the assignment more like it was psuedocode. If the code had obvious typos, we ignored those. If they were close on syntax, but a little unclear on the API, we usually let it slide, too. (We understand when online you can look that stuff up with the online help.) The thing we stressed was the overall algorithm itself, as well as a demonstration that the student knew how to use matlab. (After all, as a TA, I'm taking programming courses myself; I have some idea of what's reasonable to expect and what's not)
If you do have a written CS test, and the prof does mark you off for syntax errors, I would probably go in and (politely) complain. Say, "I made a typo which would have been caught by the compiler, but I got the gist correct." If you demonstrate that you know what you're talking about, and you're not a jerk about it, and the professor's not a total jerk, I bet you'll get most of the points back. (We would do this all the time, especially if the student could clearly explain what they were trying to do.)
If the professor or TA is a jerk, all bets are off, though. But if they're a jerk, they aren't interested in being fair anyway, so you were screwed from the start. We've all been there. Sorry.
The launch codes that enable the president to launch a nuclear attack could probably be considered the most valuable "password" ever.
You missed my point. I'm saying I've started thinking that the video card IS the "main processor", and is where you spend the most money. Your recommended system is pretty much the one I just built myself.
When building a system to play modern 3d games, I've started thinking about the video CPU as the "main processor", and the Athlon or Intel CPU on the motherboard as the "coprocessor". This way, I can sort of trick myself into being comfortable spending $300+ on the "main processor" and a mere $150 on the "coprocessor".
If you're not in it for the games, that philosophy doesn't really apply. Since I have want to play the latest games right away, I need to have MS Windows on that system. The OS condemns the machine to being a toy, so my philosophy above pretty much makes sense. ;)
Not that it's definitive, but Ace's Hardware has a "SPECmine" page that lets you search known SPEC ratings for various processors. On SPECfp2000, the results are:
So the high-end UltraSPARC outperforms the Athlon by a healthy margin. (I mentioned in my earlier post the 900 UltraSPARC-III Cu, but the SPECmine doesn't have results for that exact processor. I'd expect it to perform at about 90% of the 1050Mhz version).
You can use the SPECmine to find the SPECInt results, and the Athlon does in fact beat the UltraSPARC (749 v. 610). So you're paying for floating point performance on the Sun part, but you actually pay an integer performance penalty.
In real life, the Blade feels like a REALLY fast system, in spite of the SPECInt numbers. Perhaps that massive 8MB cache doesn't help the SPECInt numbers, but pays off in day-to-day tasks? I can't explain it, and maybe it's just "This machine cost $20K+, it must be fast", but I'd definitely prefer the Blade to my current Athlon home system... If cost were no object.
On the other hand, cost is an object, which is why my current home system IS an Athlon. But don't knock the Blade system; it's outrageously priced, but it's one boss machine.
For the older and lower end machines, this might have an impact on the wallet, but for their modern high end workstations, $249 for an OS license is pretty cheap compared the the price of that second processor.
For example, click on one of the Blade 2000 systems on this page. Go down to the part where it says, " 900-MHz UltraSPARC III Cu Processor with 8-MB External Cache [add $4,500.00]". Now that's a spicy meatball. (It is a helluva processor, but 4.5k makes me gasp).
I do sort of feel bad for the old timers with older systems, but if they're trying to be cheap, they do have the option of sticking with the same OS, or switching to Linux. Solaris really is a solid OS, and for a lot of people, $249 will be definitely worth the cost.
Wow! You manage to bring this up every time they release a "bug-fix-only, no-new-features, release candidate"! And you know it! And you complain anyway, every time! And use exclamation marks, too!
I shall look forward to seeing your same post again when Mozilla 1.0PR1 comes out, when Mozilla 1.0PR2 comes out, and Mozilla 1.0 Final comes out, too.
When they said "you're not getting a pony for Christmas. Maybe for Easter," they meant it. Does this suck? Maybe. Do you have to whine about it every time? Apparently.
Cheers.
The rinky-dink Electronics Boutique here in Thousand Oaks, California still has a collector's tin copy of Quake 3 for Linux on the shelves. But I think that's part of the problem.
If your programming in C++ why aren't you searching for "::function_name" or "class_name::function_name" instead of "^function_name"?
It's a matter of semantics, but I tend to think of the class name as part of the function name. So I do grep for "^class_name::member_function_name" all the time.
If you mention the function name in comments, it's easy to have "[A-Za-z0-9_] function_name" show up. I suspect I'd have problems enforcing the "space between the function name and the paren only in the definition", because it involves vigilance everywhere. (In other words, people who's natural instinct to put in that space when calling the function have to change their habit everywhere.) But if you can enforce it, it's probably not a bad rule. I still like the "^function_name" rule because it takes effort only when initially writing the function, and it isn't going to show up in comments (unless you really indent your comments weird).
I too really liked Gattaca. In fact, if I were going have a problem with it being listed as one of the best "Science Fiction Movies Of All Time", it's that based on current trends, sometime in the near future it's going to not be fiction anymore.
P.S. Off topic, but cool anyway: This is obvious to some, obtuse to others: the letters in "Gattaca" are the same four letters used to label the nucleotides in DNA. Neat.
I can only blame the fact that I was posting to slashdot late at night, and also not in the enivronment of an editor, because I would really format functions like this (at least in C++):
Briefly, the important points are this:
I've been programming in Java a lot recently, though, where all your functions are in a class scope and therefore the "ram it up against the left" set of tricks doesn't really work. In this case, I tend to format like my original example. Mostly, I think, just to save vertical space.
I tend not to use multiple declarations per line; the problems outweigh the positives (With multiple declarations: You cannot comment variable usage later, it's (slightly) more typing to refactor code by removing or changing variables, and there's the problem you bring up).
Once you've adopted that rule, it's a lot clearer (and closer to the truth) to use "type*", since the actual type of "var1" in your example is "pointer to type", not "type".
It's also the style Bjarne uses in his code, if that makes any difference to you.
Take a look at this function, and tell me if there's a bug:
Easy, the bug's the SEGV, right? Take a look at the same function, this time with comments:
The point? A bug is unwanted behaviorm, but that only makes sense if you've defined what the correct behavior is. My example is trivial, but often this is a real concern. Function "bar(int,int)" returns null whenever one of the arguments is negative--is that a bug or a feature? Your function has a goal in life, a contractual obligation to do something; make sure it's clear what that something is.
Note that if you choose good function and good variable names, a simple one or two line comment at the beginning is usually sufficient to document whe function's intended behavior.
I also find that an "assert()" or two on the arguments at the top of the function makes it clear what values the function accepts, and which one the function doesn't handle. It's an easy way to document the contractual obligations of the function.
Stuff not to put in comments is stuff that's easily devised from the code. Check this out:
Did the "Inputs" or "Outputs" add any value? That information appears again, two lines below in the function definition, and it's guaranteed to be correct there (unlike the comment which will be out-of-date and wrong when we change "square" to work on longs). The "Used by" might have added some value, if it was correct, but as it turns out it's out of date, and 15 other functions now use "square". Any information better derived looking at the code should be left off. Any information which can be better found using "grep" or "find in files" should be left off. Any information that will probably be out of date at some point should be left off. Heck, in this situation even the description is probably extra verbiage, since it doesn't really help anyone. (I'd probably put it in out of habit anyway, though...so sue me:)
Yes, the movie U-571 was historically inaccurate, and it also failed to entertain in many ways, but this "review" is hardly any better. The reviewer has an obvious agenda, and the review reads more like an seventh-grade book report than a professional criticism. There's a time and a place for this kind of "review" (like, say, April 2000 when it would have been relevant) but I'd prefer not to see this kind of thing on Slashdot again.
U-571 is a "film" starring almost no one you've heard of, directed by some guy...
This is true, if you've never heard of Matthew McConaughey (Contact), Bill Paxton(Apollo 13), Harvey Keitel (Pulp Fiction), and Jon Bon Jovi (Ally McBeal). And couldn't the reviewer be bothered actually name the director he's blaming for this? (I guess he does later, although he misspells director Jonathan Mostow's name "Mastow" every single time)
The only reason for this $90 million mess is to prove that, in the words of Jonathan Mastow, "Das Boot was based on a lie".
A more complete version of this quote, if you care, is from the Washington Post, and reads, " "based on a lie" because "[...] it pretended that the captains and crews were submariners first, and only incidentally Nazis. They were dedicated Nazis; they had to be to fight that hard." Did "Das Boot" underemphasize the Nazi patriotism of the German submariners? I don't know, but it seems like a valid viewpoint to try to express.
Apparently, every movie made by Hollywood that doesn't have an "All-Star" cast with already established actors is bad, since it might star actors I've never heard of.
The Evilll electrician of U-571 tries to signal the destroyer overhead, and someone finally kills the evilllll SS-Nazi Gestapo Sea Killer electrician! Yay! Onward with the gratuitous stereotyping of our former enemies!
Wow, a WWII movie that portrays the Germans as the bad guys. That's a new one, aside from the ten-thousand other WWII movies.
Is U571 inaccurate? Sure, the tale told never happened, and the historical events closest to this tale were done by the British, not the Americans. Does that really matter on a sort of ho-hum movie like this, that few watched, even fewer remember, and nobody thinks is anything but mild entertainment? Nope.
I look forward to your review of Pearl Harbor in 2004, though.
If the US's closest ally, Britain, see's Hollywood's constant rewriting of history as an insult you can start to understand some of the indignance that breeds in the Arab world.
Wait a second... the reason that terrorists blew up the WTC was because they were mad about the movie U-571? Jeez, Hollywood should be more careful next time.