At every choice presented to either the Republic, or the Jedi council, they make the chose wrong; it really was quite impressive. The emperor didn't even need the use of the force, he was doing such a good job of destroying the republic and the Jedi without it.
The Jedi come across as particularly pathetic in this new series of movies. Tell me, someone, is Obi Wan supposed to be a particularly competant Jedi, because he loses his lightsaber in ALL THREE PREQUELS! Isn't the first day of lightsaber training where they tell you "Do NOT lose your lightsaber. If it starts to slip from your hand (or belt), immediately force pull it back into your hand. We will now practice this for the next 14 months." Of course, he also fairly easily defeated a four lightsaber wielding mechanical jedi-killing contraption... Guess he has his good days and bad days, as a Jedi.
Secondly, how the heck does the Emperor get the drop on four top-echelon Jedi with their lightsabers already drawn, and kill three of them in about a second and a half? I say, give me that Sith training, because the Jedi are kinda lame.
Also, how often can Obi Wan really get knocked unconscious for 10 minutes, as he was in the last TWO movies, without showing signs of brain damage? Of course, he DID train Anakin, so maybe he just isn't too bright.
And Yoda? Oh boy... You should have left for Dagoba years earlier. Believe me, I still think you are a kick-ass with a lightsaber, but your intuitive powers with the force leave a LOT to be desired. It's great that you can see about two seconds into the future, but really, you need some help in longer term future predicting and character assessment. Way to legitimize that clone army in ep. II, BTW.
Hey, does force push not work through a cockpit window? Too bad, Obi-Wan, because it would've really been helpful to push those little robots off your ship when they are about 3 feet away. Luckily for you they didn't just explode, like a normal weapon.
sigh... Well, at least it is over and Lucas can get back to re-making episodes 4-6 with non-stop screen mayhem and spectacle, which is clearly what people are clamoring for. Right? Guys?
(Yes, it is childish flaming; despite its flaws I thought the latest movie had a few good moments and was tolerable; at least it got a bit better as it went along)
Of course, predicting climate, and predicting "weather" in two weeks are totally different beasts alogether. I can't tell you what day it will snow in December (up in the Sierras), but I can tell you it'll be colder that month than in July or August. I'd even make a $1000 bet on it.
That said, my camping trip to the backwoods of Yosemite, in late June, just got cancelled because they are STILL getting new snow up there; in June! So, it's a funny ol' world.
The more I think about it, the more I believe the Pentium M is the single most important chip technology released by any chip maker in the past decade. More important than the P4, more import than the AMD K7 or K8 (!), more important than the G3, G4, or G5. (I'll ignore the embedded market).
I'd sworn off Intel chips, especially w/ the P4 and Intel's other blundering and bullying. But you gotta have respect for the Pentium M, to so successfully fill an important market niche (lower power/lower heat) where Intel had essentially NO viable contender before. Think about it; Transmeta, Cyrix, VIA, AMD, even the various PowerPC makers all used to laugh at Intel's offering, and then the Pentium M came along. And now, Intel will probably own the laptop market for quite some time to come. Well, okay, they already did, but until the Pentium M, they never deserved to.:)
I'm still amazed at how versatile the descendants of the Pentium Pro have turned out to be, and as a Mac user, I'll probably end up with a Pentium M based Mac laptop in the future, and not have to cringe at the prospect.
That said, I wish AMD the best of luck, because I truly think they helped Intel to reform its ways a little (my last Intel chip was the 300Mhz Celeron w/ onboard cache; nearly everything since, until the Pentium M, has been embarrasing, IMO) And hopefully, there will also be many an application for the IBM Power descendants as the years go by.
I've coined the term "Liberaltarian" to describe myself, basically someone who was always fairly liberal in thought, but who has come to find some value in the strength of libertarian ideas.
I've voted both Green and Libertarian as of late (and yes, in San Francisco, that isn't just futile; we came respectably close to having a Green party mayor)
Anyway, I hope the phrase catches on for those liberals who are still just a bit too uncomfortable with the "libertarian" moniker, but who are seeing more value in the Libertarian party.
Airplane! (brief frontal boob flash).
Plus shit hitting the fan, which upset my mom much more than me seeing boobies.
Walkabout had all manner of inappropriate (on paper) for kids grossness and stuff in it. Awesome that it was G. I've seen Jenny Agutter naked on TV twice! (Walkabout and Logan's Run, both on your list). The 70's weren't all bad...
"Lost in America" came out in 1985 (it was about yuppies), so how was he promoting it on Conan O'Brien (which started in '92 or '93). I assume you mean he was on Johhny Carson's show?
Good point, though. Brooks is a hilarious guy (he was always good on Carson). Any fan of his should rent Critical Care, a somewhat mediocre movie with some hilarious Albert Brooks moments.
I've seen people in the theatre, with their infants, to watch Saving Private Ryan (I know because the baby cried right from the start). I've sat in front of parents who brought their daughter (I'd estimate not more than age 13, based on looks and voice) to see The Exorcist, with the kid asking the WHOLE TIME to leave because she was scared.
The average parent is basically a fuckwit, IMO, with these being more extreme cases.
Sedition was and is a crime punishable by death in the U.S. The second amendment allowed for a military that was (in part) controlled and regulated by the states (rather than only being a vast federal entity). It was a hedge for the states against federal power. I wouldn't say that the founders wanted more revolution, but they certainly were wary of a strong, bullying federal power, and gave the states some authority to stand up to one.
Of course, a strong, bullying federal government emerged rather quickly anyway.
That video is plain stupid. So, everyone who lost a family member on Flight 77 is lying? Those people who were on that flight, and called home when it was highjacked, were also lying? If flight 77 didn't hit the pentagon, where did it end up?
This is by far the most interesting ramification of this particular conspiracy theory, if it were true, and that video ignores it completely. This particular conspiracy is an insult to reason.
In a nutshell, it comes from a slide at a developer's conference, indicating the kind of machines that may be around for Longhorn's lifetime, and that the OS should be able to take advantage of such high specs, not that it will require such high specs.
Re:Still no word from the pr0n industry
on
Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD
·
· Score: 1
It appears you are correct (w/ perhaps some caveats) that HD-DVDs could be created that would be able to play on current DVD players. So I apologize for doubting you, and I thank you for setting me straight.
Re:Still no word from the pr0n industry
on
Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD
·
· Score: 1
> HD-DVD's are encoded in such a way that they will still play in most old DVD players too
Nonsense! I'd love to see a link to evidence indicating this is true. The codecs used couldn't support this, nor could the current laser pickup, etc. It is prima facie nonsense.
Compression, not normalization
on
Normalizing Music?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
What you want is 'compression', not normalization. I don't mean data compression (ie. making smaller file), btw.
Music studio use "compressors" to reduce the dynamic range of sound. Ones that work in real time have to be a bit sophisticated (sliding window, like you said), but doing it offline is easier, since you can know the max and min sound values beforehand.
I don't know what tools are out there in PC land, hopefully someone will answer. But I will mention that I used to have a portable CD player with a built in compressor (to help keep your music above the ambient background noise, espicially when driving) and it was GREAT! It is a feature that I don't see much in portable devices anymore, which surprises me...
Anyway, hopefully this might give you a new term to google for, at least. Try searching for "dynamic range compressor", or something...
Alright, I found some windows plugins that might help; Anyone with some Linux/MacOs/Unix equivalents?
http://www.divx-digest.com/software/tfm_filter.h tm l http://www.divx-digest.com/software/dedynamic.h tml
Only a liberal can spin massive borrowing and huge increases in government economic influence, as a bad thing. Ask an Economist whether the massive increase in government spending and government employment was good for the ecomony, he'll tell you that if Bush had spent more, using more borrowed money, it would have helped even more than it did.
Here is what I don't understand about the "Liberal Democrats":
They say the economy is in the shitter. They say that Bush's massive spending increases, with drastically reduced revenues, were bad.
Now, you must realize that anyone with a clue knows that one way to stimulate an economy is to let the government spend more of the people's money.
Also, for everyone that claims the economy sucks, Bush did this, and Bush did that, I just remember that:
I now make a bit more than I did 4 years ago (but many my friends who worked in the private sector have been unemployed for months or years) I am in the process of saving to maybe one day be able to afford to buy a house or condo (hopefully the government will keep interest rates low, despite massive debt and the possibility of higher inflation). I am funded by government money (but science related, not war related, so I may lose my funding this year) I am happy (and it has nothing to do with the election or president)
You are wrong. What you describe is more like an assertion.
Handling bad user input might be a case where you would use an exception, and bad user input will CERTAINLY occur. Or resource allocation. Or a host of other things outside the programmer's control.
Good implementations will have a fast path (the common case) and a less fast path (the exceptional case). In many implementation, these can be as fast or faster than predicates (ie. if-then error handling blocks everywhere)
Exceptions, in C++, are mostly used to ensure proper destruction of objects, even under exceptional circumstances. For that purpose, they are fairly well suited.
Just as people unfairly attack "goto" in C (which is invaluable for maintaining code readability in the face of difficult error handling), some people attack C++ exceptions. Each has its place in their respective language.
The voltage doesn't matter; it's the wattage. So, you probably won't need more than 120V for future machines, but you may need better wiring so that more amps can be carried to it without blowing a fuse (or lighting your house on fire).
Re:That's it. I'm done with Slashdot.
on
Decipher
·
· Score: 1
Ummm, check the slashdot id number, buddy. I've been contributing to "your" tribal village for easily more than 5 years.
Okay. I'll go back to complaining about how dumb our president sounds when he speaks, and how embarrasing it is to have England send their Prime Minister over to give a speech to Congress that inspires more American patriotism in me than anything our puppet-with-a-corporate-stick-up-his-ass could ever hope to say.
G W Bush's current actions affect me, and everyone I know, in almost uniformly bad ways (although thank God I have stock that pays dividends).
Does that satisfy you, or was it merely a rhetorical question?
That's it. I'm done with Slashdot.
on
Decipher
·
· Score: 1
Maybe I'll occasionally scoot through. But I'm deleting the bookmark, and taking at least six weeks off from this site. Laziness like this is just inexcusable. Bye all, and thanks for all the fish.
Re:Another review: Planet of the Apes
on
Decipher
·
· Score: 1
Ironically, the book "Planet of the Apes" has a much different ending than the movie. If I were a teacher, and student gave this review of the "book", I'd punish them.
Slashdot Mirror
SPOILERS
At every choice presented to either the Republic, or the Jedi council, they make the chose wrong; it really was quite impressive. The emperor didn't even need the use of the force, he was doing such a good job of destroying the republic and the Jedi without it.
The Jedi come across as particularly pathetic in this new series of movies. Tell me, someone, is Obi Wan supposed to be a particularly competant Jedi, because he loses his lightsaber in ALL THREE PREQUELS! Isn't the first day of lightsaber training where they tell you "Do NOT lose your lightsaber. If it starts to slip from your hand (or belt), immediately force pull it back into your hand. We will now practice this for the next 14 months." Of course, he also fairly easily defeated a four lightsaber wielding mechanical jedi-killing contraption... Guess he has his good days and bad days, as a Jedi.
Secondly, how the heck does the Emperor get the drop on four top-echelon Jedi with their lightsabers already drawn, and kill three of them in about a second and a half? I say, give me that Sith training, because the Jedi are kinda lame.
Also, how often can Obi Wan really get knocked unconscious for 10 minutes, as he was in the last TWO movies, without showing signs of brain damage? Of course, he DID train Anakin, so maybe he just isn't too bright.
And Yoda? Oh boy... You should have left for Dagoba years earlier. Believe me, I still think you are a kick-ass with a lightsaber, but your intuitive powers with the force leave a LOT to be desired. It's great that you can see about two seconds into the future, but really, you need some help in longer term future predicting and character assessment. Way to legitimize that clone army in ep. II, BTW.
Hey, does force push not work through a cockpit window? Too bad, Obi-Wan, because it would've really been helpful to push those little robots off your ship when they are about 3 feet away. Luckily for you they didn't just explode, like a normal weapon.
sigh... Well, at least it is over and Lucas can get back to re-making episodes 4-6 with non-stop screen mayhem and spectacle, which is clearly what people are clamoring for. Right? Guys?
(Yes, it is childish flaming; despite its flaws I thought the latest movie had a few good moments and was tolerable; at least it got a bit better as it went along)
Hey, as Dave Barry said, the NASA motto is: "This motto alone cost $18 billion."
Of course, predicting climate, and predicting "weather" in two weeks are totally different beasts alogether. I can't tell you what day it will snow in December (up in the Sierras), but I can tell you it'll be colder that month than in July or August. I'd even make a $1000 bet on it.
That said, my camping trip to the backwoods of Yosemite, in late June, just got cancelled because they are STILL getting new snow up there; in June! So, it's a funny ol' world.
Ummm... It's more like, don't buy GM, they only came along after Ford created the car industry.
And of course, people aren't buying crappy GM cars these days, but that's another story.
The more I think about it, the more I believe the Pentium M is the single most important chip technology released by any chip maker in the past decade. More important than the P4, more import than the AMD K7 or K8 (!), more important than the G3, G4, or G5. (I'll ignore the embedded market).
:)
I'd sworn off Intel chips, especially w/ the P4 and Intel's other blundering and bullying. But you gotta have respect for the Pentium M, to so successfully fill an important market niche (lower power/lower heat) where Intel had essentially NO viable contender before. Think about it; Transmeta, Cyrix, VIA, AMD, even the various PowerPC makers all used to laugh at Intel's offering, and then the Pentium M came along. And now, Intel will probably own the laptop market for quite some time to come. Well, okay, they already did, but until the Pentium M, they never deserved to.
I'm still amazed at how versatile the descendants of the Pentium Pro have turned out to be, and as a Mac user, I'll probably end up with a Pentium M based Mac laptop in the future, and not have to cringe at the prospect.
That said, I wish AMD the best of luck, because I truly think they helped Intel to reform its ways a little (my last Intel chip was the 300Mhz Celeron w/ onboard cache; nearly everything since, until the Pentium M, has been embarrasing, IMO) And hopefully, there will also be many an application for the IBM Power descendants as the years go by.
I've coined the term "Liberaltarian" to describe myself, basically someone who was always fairly liberal in thought, but who has come to find some value in the strength of libertarian ideas.
I've voted both Green and Libertarian as of late (and yes, in San Francisco, that isn't just futile; we came respectably close to having a Green party mayor)
Anyway, I hope the phrase catches on for those liberals who are still just a bit too uncomfortable with the "libertarian" moniker, but who are seeing more value in the Libertarian party.
Everytime I try to read your comment, my modem disconne...LOST CARRIER
Airplane! (brief frontal boob flash).
Plus shit hitting the fan, which upset my mom much more than me seeing boobies.
Walkabout had all manner of inappropriate (on paper) for kids grossness and stuff in it. Awesome that it was G. I've seen Jenny Agutter naked on TV twice! (Walkabout and Logan's Run, both on your list). The 70's weren't all bad...
"Lost in America" came out in 1985 (it was about yuppies), so how was he promoting it on Conan O'Brien (which started in '92 or '93). I assume you mean he was on Johhny Carson's show?
Good point, though. Brooks is a hilarious guy (he was always good on Carson). Any fan of his should rent Critical Care, a somewhat mediocre movie with some hilarious Albert Brooks moments.
I've seen people in the theatre, with their infants, to watch Saving Private Ryan (I know because the baby cried right from the start). I've sat in front of parents who brought their daughter (I'd estimate not more than age 13, based on looks and voice) to see The Exorcist, with the kid asking the WHOLE TIME to leave because she was scared.
The average parent is basically a fuckwit, IMO, with these being more extreme cases.
Sedition was and is a crime punishable by death in the U.S. The second amendment allowed for a military that was (in part) controlled and regulated by the states (rather than only being a vast federal entity). It was a hedge for the states against federal power. I wouldn't say that the founders wanted more revolution, but they certainly were wary of a strong, bullying federal power, and gave the states some authority to stand up to one.
Of course, a strong, bullying federal government emerged rather quickly anyway.
That video is plain stupid. So, everyone who lost a family member on Flight 77 is lying? Those people who were on that flight, and called home when it was highjacked, were also lying? If flight 77 didn't hit the pentagon, where did it end up?
This is by far the most interesting ramification of this particular conspiracy theory, if it were true, and that video ignores it completely. This particular conspiracy is an insult to reason.
http://technovia.typepad.com/technovia/2004/05/lon ghorn_specs_.html
In a nutshell, it comes from a slide at a developer's conference, indicating the kind of machines that may be around for Longhorn's lifetime, and that the OS should be able to take advantage of such high specs, not that it will require such high specs.
It appears you are correct (w/ perhaps some caveats) that HD-DVDs could be created that would be able to play on current DVD players. So I apologize for doubting you, and I thank you for setting me straight.
> HD-DVD's are encoded in such a way that they will still play in most old DVD players too
Nonsense! I'd love to see a link to evidence indicating this is true. The codecs used couldn't support this, nor could the current laser pickup, etc. It is prima facie nonsense.
What you want is 'compression', not normalization. I don't mean data compression (ie. making smaller file), btw.
h tm lh tml
Music studio use "compressors" to reduce the dynamic range of sound. Ones that work in real time have to be a bit sophisticated (sliding window, like you said), but doing it offline is easier, since you can know the max and min sound values beforehand.
I don't know what tools are out there in PC land, hopefully someone will answer. But I will mention that I used to have a portable CD player with a built in compressor (to help keep your music above the ambient background noise, espicially when driving) and it was GREAT! It is a feature that I don't see much in portable devices anymore, which surprises me...
Anyway, hopefully this might give you a new term to google for, at least. Try searching for "dynamic range compressor", or something...
Alright, I found some windows plugins that might help; Anyone with some Linux/MacOs/Unix equivalents?
http://www.divx-digest.com/software/tfm_filter.
http://www.divx-digest.com/software/dedynamic.
Only a liberal can spin massive borrowing and huge increases in government economic influence, as a bad thing. Ask an Economist whether the massive increase in government spending and government employment was good for the ecomony, he'll tell you that if Bush had spent more, using more borrowed money, it would have helped even more than it did.
Here is what I don't understand about the "Liberal Democrats":
They say the economy is in the shitter.
They say that Bush's massive spending increases, with drastically reduced revenues, were bad.
Now, you must realize that anyone with a clue knows that one way to stimulate an economy is to let the government spend more of the people's money.
Also, for everyone that claims the economy sucks, Bush did this, and Bush did that, I just remember that:
I now make a bit more than I did 4 years ago (but many my friends who worked in the private sector have been unemployed for months or years)
I am in the process of saving to maybe one day be able to afford to buy a house or condo (hopefully the government will keep interest rates low, despite massive debt and the possibility of higher inflation).
I am funded by government money (but science related, not war related, so I may lose my funding this year)
I am happy (and it has nothing to do with the election or president)
You are wrong. What you describe is more like an assertion.
Handling bad user input might be a case where you would use an exception, and bad user input will CERTAINLY occur. Or resource allocation. Or a host of other things outside the programmer's control.
Good implementations will have a fast path (the common case) and a less fast path (the exceptional case). In many implementation, these can be as fast or faster than predicates (ie. if-then error handling blocks everywhere)
Exceptions, in C++, are mostly used to ensure proper destruction of objects, even under exceptional circumstances. For that purpose, they are fairly well suited.
Just as people unfairly attack "goto" in C (which is invaluable for maintaining code readability in the face of difficult error handling), some people attack C++ exceptions. Each has its place in their respective language.
The voltage doesn't matter; it's the wattage. So, you probably won't need more than 120V for future machines, but you may need better wiring so that more amps can be carried to it without blowing a fuse (or lighting your house on fire).
Ummm, check the slashdot id number, buddy. I've been contributing to "your" tribal village for easily more than 5 years.
Okay. I'll go back to complaining about how dumb our president sounds when he speaks, and how embarrasing it is to have England send their Prime Minister over to give a speech to Congress that inspires more American patriotism in me than anything our puppet-with-a-corporate-stick-up-his-ass could ever hope to say.
G W Bush's current actions affect me, and everyone I know, in almost uniformly bad ways (although thank God I have stock that pays dividends).
Does that satisfy you, or was it merely a rhetorical question?
Maybe I'll occasionally scoot through. But I'm deleting the bookmark, and taking at least six weeks off from this site. Laziness like this is just inexcusable. Bye all, and thanks for all the fish.
Ironically, the book "Planet of the Apes" has a much different ending than the movie. If I were a teacher, and student gave this review of the "book", I'd punish them.
And the Republicans did it to Clinton. This is standard operating procedure (sadly).
Which is more than can be said for George W. Bush when he was caught drinking and driving.