Roger Ebert (don't laugh until you've read his column- the TV show DOESN'T COUNT): http://www.sun-times.com/output/ebert1/wk p-news-bl ade22f.html
Excerpts: The movie is an improvement on "Blade" (1998), which was pretty good. [...] This news is conveyed by a vampire leader whose brain can be dimly seen through a light blue translucent plastic shell, more evidence of the design influence of the original iMac. [...] You can sense the difference between a movie that's a technical exercise ("Resident Evil") and one steamed in the dread cauldrons of the filmmaker's imagination.
I loaded it on my box several weeks ago after seeing the other review mentioned here on Slashdot (as part of my neverending quest to have a linux distro that I can use that all my friends aren't using... the last one being Debian, which has the amazingly-cool apt-get and the amazingly-annoying Rage-pro-doesn't-work-with-X bug.
So, installed it. Ran into a couple oddities on an older machine (p166, Rage Pro, dual NICs, serial mouse and ancient keyboard), but got it up and running. After digging around for the non-existent Firewall/Internet-Sharing software in the review (for several hours... Bad first reviewer! That doesn't exist!), I gave up and found the 4 lines I needed in a How-to on their.org site. Implemented, and so far so good. Up and running for several weeks.
All in all, pretty good. But, for example: my mouse stopped working. No idea why. But I can't fix it, that I can (as a newbie Linux user) tell! It automatically starts in X, so I need to be able to get to the control panel somehow. No luck. And for the average user, what then? Oh, and on my ancient system, it's Slow. Sloooooooooooow......
So, we'll see if I can get the mouse up. If not, next distro...... SuSe!
Newton still useful, depending on what you want to
on
Low-end Laptops?
·
· Score: 2
I still use mine, and a friend (who bought one on my recommendation from ebay last year) does too. It's all in what you want to do. Buy one on ebay with a keyboard, slap in an old megahertz/3com modem or 10bt nic, and away you go. Surf the web (I recommend Newt's Cape), download for viewing later. Use the keyboard and type notes, documents, etc into either Notepad or NewtWorks (NewtWorks was part of the premium bundle that you could buy separately). Check email. Read Usenet.
Granted, it's not going to be screamingly fast, but I promise that you can't type faster than it can display. It's all in what you want to do with it. Mine works as my ultimate notepad, PDA, web browser, and newsreader. I've used it on 2-week-long trips away from the office where it worked out better than my laptop. And on ebay you can probably get it for 200-300$.
Interesting... how much revenue will they get for allowing X-10 ads vs revenue lost due to people leaving in droves? Almost sounds like it's in slashdot's interests to make it _almost_ annoying enough to leave. Tough balancing act.
But, WTF, it's $5. As someone said, "Libertarians, put your money where your mouth is". Okie-doke.
Actually, JMS said that there were two reasons he decided to do this new show: 1) Complete creative control 2) Big budget. He could make "his idea" of the show a reality.
And, just to be a karma whore... straight from JMS on rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated:
I haven't talked a lot about Jeremiah here because, basically, I haven't had time to put my thoughts together due to the rigors of actually *making* the thing. But we're now closing in on the premiere, and I figured this might be a good time to start laying out some of the information. (This will, however, be kinda brief because I'm fighting a bit of a fever and intend to go lay down after this.)
The Showtime series tracks the aftermath of the Big Death, which wiped out roughly six billion people, anyone over the age of puberty. It's now 15 years later, and people have been ridinng on the ashes of the old world for the most part, the available resources slowly declining and running out. It's a moment of transition: either the decline continues, or now that they are adults, people start to rebuild a new world out of the ashes of the old one. The question is what shape will that world take, and who gets to choose?
Our lead character, Jeremiah (Luke Perry) is a wanderer, trying to find out what happened to his father, who disappeared during the last days of the Big Death while en route to a locale specified only as Valhalla Sector. He wants to find out the end of the story. Along the way, he encounters our other lead, Kurdy (Malcolm Jamal-Warner), also a drifter, and the two are thrown together by circumstance into a duo. The two-hour premiere follows their lives, the dangers they encounter, establishes the world of our series, and sets the stage for a new dawn.
Basically, I wanted to do a post-apocalyptic series that wasn't all darkness and grimness...I wanted to tell a story about hope, that this isn't about endings, it's about beginnings. When the Black Death hit, lots of people thought it was the end of the world. It wasn't. What followed the Black Death was the Renaissance, a new beginning, as our characters face a new beginning. [JMS continued with an episode list]
Does this mean that the movie Sneakers....
on
Factoring Breakthrough?
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
I thought that it was bigger than that, that if they had used the copyrights to [create|maintain] a monopoly(?), that they could lose those copyrights.
If that's true, what happens to those artists? Did they just totally screwed due to their labels? And if so, is that justice or justified?
I tried to roll it out, but with real bad success. I'm a relative basic PGP/GPG user, so take this for what it's worth.
I created a basic, plain-jane key, exported the public key, and sent it out to several installations using PGP. Unanimously, they couldn't get it to work. 4 different sites, each with a similar problem. On their side, the program would choke on adding the key. I tried creating side keys, sub keys, etc, etc. On some I think it was due to the real PGP not dealing with El Gamal correctly, on others the key size was probably screwy, but overall it didn't work.
I had been really looking forward to using GPG for this, but not in this case.
That being said- try it out. You may very well have better luck than I. I hope so.
There's a whole system still based around the punch cards. The cards don't exist anymore, but WYLBUR still acts that way. It's viewed as another computer system by the undergrads. I think at one point (92?) they were trying to incorporate email. Just figured I'd throw that in there. As a user, you really wouldn't notice, except that you HAD to obey the 80-character rule. And since they were teaching COBOL and FORTRAN and the like on it, the JCLs all kinda made sense. Hmmm....
But aren't you going to need a programmer around to code for the cluster anyway (IANAC: I am not a cluster)? If so, why not just hire a programmer who can ALSO do Altivec optimizations? This is not a "one or the other", you can have both. Say you pay an extra 5-10k$/year for that ability. You recouped that in the first week or so.
(IANAC: I know not everything can use Altivec, but a lot of calculations can.)
IIRC, the U.S. has this. There are tiered VHS tapes, one set that sell at your local store for $10-20, and another for the movie rental stores that cost $100. I know that there was a big uproar over The Matrix - if it didn't clear 200$ million, the only VHS copy would be available for rental stores, so you'd have to pay $100 for it. The only difference between the tapes, I believe, was that one had a different "don't show this in public" warning or something like that. Would someone who work(s|ed) at a movie store like to join in?
Jeopardy Online's sysop:
on
Pay to Play
·
· Score: 2
sql> select e_mail from Customer where first_name = 'Preston' and Games_Played>200
3 things, probably mentioned elsewhere:
1) Visual Pinball, www.visualpinball.com ; make your own Pinball game; this looks a lot like the old Pinball Construction Kit, but obviously updated. Very intriguing, thus far.
2) Pro Pinball - The Web, Timeshock, and Big Race USA. Of the 3, Timeshock is probably the best (The Web is a bit simplistic, and Big Race USA has too few things to do), and the graphics go all the way up to 1900x1200 or so. An utterly fantastic pinball game, physics are spot on and the design of the table is great. I'm sure you can find it somewhere online or on Ebay.
3) Williams Pinball Classics - just released, 4 tables for $20, and they're all based on old tables. From what I've read it has a couple of dud tables, but since there won't be any more Pro Pinball games (Epic deciding to get out of it after mediocre sales for BRUSA), this is as good as you'll get, which still isn't too bad.
To be honest, they don't want us using their service, but we're a necessary evil. We actually USE the product, and that's a problem, since it costs them money to provide it. They'd much rather have Joe Homeowner who pays $50 a month and uses it like a dialup account, going and visiting the provider's sites, etc, etc. (Think @Home's Excite pages). That's basically free money. No slowdowns due to overusage, no pesky NNTP servers needed, just a web site and a modicum of bandwidth. The geek community is a problem: we drive a lot of business their way, but we're also the most vocal about problems.
There's a lot more money to be made from the ignorant than from the informed.
I seem to remember (but can't find) an article about a way to lower, by 50%, the refresh rate of an LCD panel. The best part was that it had nothing to do with the physical panel itself, but the hardware used to drive it. I don't even see it mentioned here, so what happened to it?
It's also the little label. If it doesn't have the little icon, normal people might pass it up because obviously it's something screwy, like one of those newfangled mp3 thingies or something. Of course, I could be wrong. Happens lots, actually.
Re:Re killing the newton...
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 2
No problemo. *grin*
I hadn't heard about Steve liking the emate, though I wouldn't be surprised. The emate was brilliant in its own way, even compared to the Newton-in-its-case-with-keyboard.
I still fondly reminisce about the 2-week work trip where my laptop wouldn't dial in, so I used my Newton to get all my Lotus Notes email (using Cadenza), having it open Word Documents, sending in my Expense Report (based off their Excel Spreadsheet, imported into Newton Works), etc, etc.
I don't really _hate_ to say it, but isn't this a bit of "too little, too late"? Everyone who's at least marginally interested has a DVD player already, and I'm not really seeing the huge need by consumers for another DVD player. My parents have one, my friends all have one, my inlaws got one last year, etc, etc. I can't imagine that, by the time these things are available, that it'll be more than a niche thing.
That being said, give it 10 years. Microsoft might be able to 0wn it, but considering that it's Apex that's looking into it, I think it's more of a "geek enabler" thing than anything else.
I think the best part was basically:
RRR: Put these Sunglasses on.
TTL: No
RRR: Yes
TTL: No
RRR: Let's wrestle.
TTL: Okay.
(hilarity ensues; apparently the 'Cripple Fight' in South Park was inspired by this, as it was drawn out and painful to watch)
[TTL Wins]
TTL: I win, therefore I will put the sunglasses on.
Hey, gotta love it when the savior of the world is wrestling the future president of the galaxy. Makes it seem more... real, somehow.
*snicker*
Re:Re killing the newton...
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 2
Two things, briefly:
The multi-connector for the 2x00 was on the top, not the bottom. And it wound up being kinda useful... a couple people have turned it into an Audio in/out jack.
The Newton project was irrelevant to Anderson; they'd already spun it off, and Newton Inc (?) had several sales already lined up; Apple killed a lot of their momentum since no-one knew if Apple (or the Newton) would even be around. Once they had been spun off, things looked really good for the Newt. Why Apple spun them back in is an unknown to this day.
Slashdot Mirror
Roger Ebert (don't laugh until you've read his column- the TV show DOESN'T COUNT):k p-news-bl ade22f.html
http://www.sun-times.com/output/ebert1/w
Excerpts:
The movie is an improvement on "Blade" (1998), which was pretty good.
[...]
This news is conveyed by a vampire leader whose brain can be dimly seen through a light blue translucent plastic shell, more evidence of the design influence of the original iMac.
[...]
You can sense the difference between a movie that's a technical exercise ("Resident Evil") and one steamed in the dread cauldrons of the filmmaker's imagination.
Waist-side? You mean "wayside".
>1/3 the size of the uncompressed original
so, about 320kbps. Sounds about right for the postings I've seen lately.
I loaded it on my box several weeks ago after seeing the other review mentioned here on Slashdot (as part of my neverending quest to have a linux distro that I can use that all my friends aren't using... the last one being Debian, which has the amazingly-cool apt-get and the amazingly-annoying Rage-pro-doesn't-work-with-X bug.
.org site. Implemented, and so far so good. Up and running for several weeks.
So, installed it. Ran into a couple oddities on an older machine (p166, Rage Pro, dual NICs, serial mouse and ancient keyboard), but got it up and running. After digging around for the non-existent Firewall/Internet-Sharing software in the review (for several hours... Bad first reviewer! That doesn't exist!), I gave up and found the 4 lines I needed in a How-to on their
All in all, pretty good. But, for example: my mouse stopped working. No idea why. But I can't fix it, that I can (as a newbie Linux user) tell! It automatically starts in X, so I need to be able to get to the control panel somehow. No luck. And for the average user, what then? Oh, and on my ancient system, it's Slow. Sloooooooooooow......
So, we'll see if I can get the mouse up. If not, next distro...... SuSe!
I still use mine, and a friend (who bought one on my recommendation from ebay last year) does too. It's all in what you want to do. Buy one on ebay with a keyboard, slap in an old megahertz/3com modem or 10bt nic, and away you go. Surf the web (I recommend Newt's Cape), download for viewing later. Use the keyboard and type notes, documents, etc into either Notepad or NewtWorks (NewtWorks was part of the premium bundle that you could buy separately). Check email. Read Usenet.
Granted, it's not going to be screamingly fast, but I promise that you can't type faster than it can display. It's all in what you want to do with it. Mine works as my ultimate notepad, PDA, web browser, and newsreader. I've used it on 2-week-long trips away from the office where it worked out better than my laptop. And on ebay you can probably get it for 200-300$.
Interesting... how much revenue will they get for allowing X-10 ads vs revenue lost due to people leaving in droves? Almost sounds like it's in slashdot's interests to make it _almost_ annoying enough to leave. Tough balancing act.
But, WTF, it's $5. As someone said, "Libertarians, put your money where your mouth is". Okie-doke.
Actually, JMS said that there were two reasons he decided to do this new show:
1) Complete creative control
2) Big budget. He could make "his idea" of the show a reality.
And, just to be a karma whore... straight from JMS on rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated:
I haven't talked a lot about Jeremiah here because, basically, I haven't had time to put my thoughts together due to the rigors of actually *making* the
thing. But we're now closing in on the premiere, and I figured this might be a good time to start laying out some of the information. (This will, however, be kinda brief because I'm fighting a bit of a fever and intend to go lay down after this.)
The Showtime series tracks the aftermath of the Big Death, which wiped out roughly six billion people, anyone over the age of puberty. It's now 15 years
later, and people have been ridinng on the ashes of the old world for the most part, the available resources slowly declining and running out. It's a moment of transition: either the decline continues, or now that they are adults, people start to rebuild a new world out of the ashes of the old one. The question is what shape will that world take, and who gets to choose?
Our lead character, Jeremiah (Luke Perry) is a wanderer, trying to find out what happened to his father, who disappeared during the last days of the Big Death while en route to a locale specified only as Valhalla Sector. He wants to find out the end of the story. Along the way, he encounters our other lead, Kurdy (Malcolm Jamal-Warner), also a drifter, and the two are thrown together by circumstance into a duo. The two-hour premiere follows their lives, the dangers they encounter, establishes the world of our series, and sets the stage for a new dawn.
Basically, I wanted to do a post-apocalyptic series that wasn't all darkness and grimness...I wanted to tell a story about hope, that this isn't about
endings, it's about beginnings. When the Black Death hit, lots of people thought it was the end of the world. It wasn't. What followed the Black Death was the Renaissance, a new beginning, as our characters face a new beginning.
[JMS continued with an episode list]
is now viewed as technically sound? :)
I thought that it was bigger than that, that if they had used the copyrights to [create|maintain] a monopoly(?), that they could lose those copyrights.
If that's true, what happens to those artists? Did they just totally screwed due to their labels? And if so, is that justice or justified?
I tried to roll it out, but with real bad success. I'm a relative basic PGP/GPG user, so take this for what it's worth.
I created a basic, plain-jane key, exported the public key, and sent it out to several installations using PGP. Unanimously, they couldn't get it to work. 4 different sites, each with a similar problem. On their side, the program would choke on adding the key. I tried creating side keys, sub keys, etc, etc. On some I think it was due to the real PGP not dealing with El Gamal correctly, on others the key size was probably screwy, but overall it didn't work.
I had been really looking forward to using GPG for this, but not in this case.
That being said- try it out. You may very well have better luck than I. I hope so.
There's a whole system still based around the punch cards. The cards don't exist anymore, but WYLBUR still acts that way. It's viewed as another computer system by the undergrads. I think at one point (92?) they were trying to incorporate email. Just figured I'd throw that in there. As a user, you really wouldn't notice, except that you HAD to obey the 80-character rule. And since they were teaching COBOL and FORTRAN and the like on it, the JCLs all kinda made sense. Hmmm....
But aren't you going to need a programmer around to code for the cluster anyway (IANAC: I am not a cluster)? If so, why not just hire a programmer who can ALSO do Altivec optimizations? This is not a "one or the other", you can have both. Say you pay an extra 5-10k$/year for that ability. You recouped that in the first week or so.
(IANAC: I know not everything can use Altivec, but a lot of calculations can.)
IIRC, the U.S. has this. There are tiered VHS tapes, one set that sell at your local store for $10-20, and another for the movie rental stores that cost $100. I know that there was a big uproar over The Matrix - if it didn't clear 200$ million, the only VHS copy would be available for rental stores, so you'd have to pay $100 for it. The only difference between the tapes, I believe, was that one had a different "don't show this in public" warning or something like that. Would someone who work(s|ed) at a movie store like to join in?
sql> select e_mail from Customer where first_name = 'Preston' and Games_Played>200
3 things, probably mentioned elsewhere:
1) Visual Pinball, www.visualpinball.com ; make your own Pinball game; this looks a lot like the old Pinball Construction Kit, but obviously updated. Very intriguing, thus far.
2) Pro Pinball - The Web, Timeshock, and Big Race USA. Of the 3, Timeshock is probably the best (The Web is a bit simplistic, and Big Race USA has too few things to do), and the graphics go all the way up to 1900x1200 or so. An utterly fantastic pinball game, physics are spot on and the design of the table is great. I'm sure you can find it somewhere online or on Ebay.
3) Williams Pinball Classics - just released, 4 tables for $20, and they're all based on old tables. From what I've read it has a couple of dud tables, but since there won't be any more Pro Pinball games (Epic deciding to get out of it after mediocre sales for BRUSA), this is as good as you'll get, which still isn't too bad.
Now that I've read most of the thread, I've gotta ask:
Anyone else feel as dumb as me?
To be honest, they don't want us using their service, but we're a necessary evil. We actually USE the product, and that's a problem, since it costs them money to provide it. They'd much rather have Joe Homeowner who pays $50 a month and uses it like a dialup account, going and visiting the provider's sites, etc, etc. (Think @Home's Excite pages). That's basically free money. No slowdowns due to overusage, no pesky NNTP servers needed, just a web site and a modicum of bandwidth. The geek community is a problem: we drive a lot of business their way, but we're also the most vocal about problems.
There's a lot more money to be made from the ignorant than from the informed.
I seem to remember (but can't find) an article about a way to lower, by 50%, the refresh rate of an LCD panel. The best part was that it had nothing to do with the physical panel itself, but the hardware used to drive it. I don't even see it mentioned here, so what happened to it?
Anyone? Bueller?
The AC won't be modded up enough, so let me repeat.
>>20gb would likely take something like *two days*.
>That's FUD.
>It took me 11 hours to put all 34 gigs of my music on an external USB drive
Oh, so only 22 hours. My bad.
It's also the little label. If it doesn't have the little icon, normal people might pass it up because obviously it's something screwy, like one of those newfangled mp3 thingies or something. Of course, I could be wrong. Happens lots, actually.
No problemo. *grin*
I hadn't heard about Steve liking the emate, though I wouldn't be surprised. The emate was brilliant in its own way, even compared to the Newton-in-its-case-with-keyboard.
I still fondly reminisce about the 2-week work trip where my laptop wouldn't dial in, so I used my Newton to get all my Lotus Notes email (using Cadenza), having it open Word Documents, sending in my Expense Report (based off their Excel Spreadsheet, imported into Newton Works), etc, etc.
I don't really _hate_ to say it, but isn't this a bit of "too little, too late"? Everyone who's at least marginally interested has a DVD player already, and I'm not really seeing the huge need by consumers for another DVD player. My parents have one, my friends all have one, my inlaws got one last year, etc, etc. I can't imagine that, by the time these things are available, that it'll be more than a niche thing.
That being said, give it 10 years. Microsoft might be able to 0wn it, but considering that it's Apex that's looking into it, I think it's more of a "geek enabler" thing than anything else.
I think the best part was basically:
RRR: Put these Sunglasses on.
TTL: No
RRR: Yes
TTL: No
RRR: Let's wrestle.
TTL: Okay.
(hilarity ensues; apparently the 'Cripple Fight' in South Park was inspired by this, as it was drawn out and painful to watch)
[TTL Wins]
TTL: I win, therefore I will put the sunglasses on.
Hey, gotta love it when the savior of the world is wrestling the future president of the galaxy. Makes it seem more... real, somehow.
*snicker*