Lots of those people have hepatitis and shit like that
You'll be allright as long as you don't have sex with them on the bus, or exchange blood samples.
No seriously, you are paranoid. Anytime you get out of your house you're going to be exposed to all kinds of people and germs. Unless you're an hermit or live in a bubble, it can't be avoided. I don't know Santa Cruz (or even where it is) but there are billions of people in the world that take public transportation daily (granted, few of those in the US) and somehow, they survive the experience...
You are correct, I don't have a problem with special effects per se (didn't I say that in the first post?) I have a problem with the way they seem to be a good substitute for a plot. In other words, if it dazzle the audience enough, they may not notice the lack of a good plot. This is what I (and many people) refer as the "Hollywood formula" for a blockbuster. $$$ + special effects + dreamy eyed beautiful woman (to go with weak romance subplot) = blockbuster.
And to get back on topic, when they adapt books to movie they tend to do that too - like adding whole scenes whose only purpose is to show off a bunch of effects (or cater to a made up romance subplot with dreamy eyed woman). Hopefully they won't do it with this book.
I am not saying that SW I/II could have been done without special effects - indeed you can't make a movie in that genre without special effects by the truck load. But they are perfect example of movies where there are scenes or characters created for no other reasons than to show off special effects. That's what I would consider crossing the line between special effects supporting the movie and the movie supporting the special effect.
In the case of Armageddon, this movie wouldn't have existed (which would have been a good thing) if it wasn't for the "formula". I imagine studio exec saying "we need to produce a summer blockbuster that costs a lot of money and dazzles with effects, let's write a story to fit it!" rather than the other way around.
I guess the difference between you and me is that you (presumably) consider the movies you listed good. I consider maybe 5 of those good. The other ones were probably created to support the special effect platform (Van Helsing certainly comes to mind there). Also, some of the ones I consider good in your list (Last Samurai, Bourne Supremacy, Kill Bill) are not really special effects movie - big budget maybe, but they all just rely on good old fashioned acting and a good story, with a few explosions here and there. It's funny I was just watching the Bonus DVD on Last Samurai last night - special effects are few and simple - they are not impressive by today's standards. Everything you see (the village, etc) they built either on a sound stage or in New Zealand. All the costumes are hand crafted, lots of training of the actors in sword fighting, and good old fashioned acting.
Don't get me wrong, I am not an artsy movie kindda guy. I like action movies and I like special effects. It's just that many of the big budget movies (most?) produced in the last decade or so are not any good, in spite of the excellent special effects. Some examples of my own to illustrate that faulty Hollywood "blockbusters" formula: Armageddon, Star Wars I + II - but there are so many others like that...
I guess he was probably refering to big budgets where a big budget is not required. Great (and expensive) special effects are great where/when needed. But many film makers seems to overuse them for no apparent other reason that they have too much to spend.
Also there seem to be this mentality in Hollywood that movie can't succeed unless it is cram-packed with non-stop scene after scene of mind boggling special effects. They CAN get in the way of the story.
So you're right, there is nothing inherently wrong with special effect, only with the Hollywood formula of more_money + more_special_effects = instant_sucess.
It's not just the cube shape that's part of the trademark. It's the colors, the number of segments, etc. This knockoff could probably have not broken the trademark if they have varied the design a little bit more.
But they can take everything you own... House, car, etc (depending on the state you live in). And I am not sure that bankrupcy will cover you for this kind of debt.
With Adelphia the HD cable box is $3/month more than the non-HD digital cable box with no additional programming costs. I have an HD ready TV but I am not willing to pay $3 (or $2, or $1) more for the same network channels. No offense to NBC, but watching The West Wing in HDTV is not a very compelling reason for me to pay *anything* extra.
If they want people adopting HDTV they can't charge a penny extra over the regular stuff. If they want people adopting HDTV even FASTER, then it should actually be cheaper.
PS: They also have HBO and ESPN in HD, but I am not an HBO subscriber and I don't watch sports so those two are lost on me.
First of all, I don't think that NPR presents their opinions in the news. They may provide other people analysis, observations and opinions (like experts, UN, people on the ground, whatever) to complement the facts - something I would expect from any respectable news source (and every news source I ever heard/read/watch does that, some better than others) and they present all the sides of the argument (when there is more than one side to present). So, no, I stick to my statement, I don't think NPR has a bias.
Yes, they have commentaries in some of their programs like All Things Considered which are announced as such and frankly, are pretty even handed - whatever their bias is, I haven't found it, they're all over the map. For example in these elections times, I've heard commentaries pro and against both candidates with about the same proportion, often back to back. Again, no bias that I've found there.
NPR is a pretty good source for news, yes. They are non-profit, and they do quality in-depth work that I haven't seen or heard in any other medium yet. If they have a bias, I have not seen it yet. But I guess from your perspective, anything that doesn't agree with you has a bias, right?
Do you expect *anything* on slashdot to be anything but hearsay? Unless there are climatologists hanging out on slashdot (someone unlikely) everything will be hearsay. Quoting websites, newscasts, etc is pretty much the way it works here.
You would think they do, but the truth of the matter if that they don't unless they have to (if the box is damaged, or missing content, or whatever). Read this story.
Selling items on ebay is rather time intensive process. There are not too many sellers able to do the kind of volume Newegg would have to do to implement your suggestion. It would not be cost effective - and again, their margins are not large enough for that kind of stuff (both the returns, and the the selling on ebay).
I don't think that's what he was refering to, but if he was - then he's out of his mind. All he is ever going to "touch" is the display model. There is not one store that I know of that will let you open up the box (especially most items are wrapped in those things you can only open with scisors these days) just so that you can make sure it "feel" the same as the display model. Not gonna happen.
Also there is no store than that I know off that will open the box and plug in a monitor just so you can see if all the pixels are working.
But again, I don't think it's what he was refering to. He was refering to he can't judge the "feel" of an item by the specs on a website. I can relate to that.
Everything manufactured has tolerances (you know, plus or minus something). The tighter the tolerance, the more expensive. If you want a perfect product (to the extend that is at all possible) you have two choices:
1. buy one from a brand that advertise that - you will pay a premium 2. buy a "normal" one and hope you will get lucky
As it stand, all the LCD display manufacturers do not consider their product defective if it has a relatively low number of dead pixels (1-8 or so). Which means that Newegg would have to "eat" the costs of the return since they can't in turn pass those on to the manufacturer. A place like BestBuy takes the return no question asked - they eat the costs, which they can afford to do considering that everything they sell is over priced to begin with (not to mantion they'll just repackage it and sell it as new). Newegg can't.
I go look at the stuff in a store like BestBuy (specifically to see if it feels rights in my hands, etc) then I buy it on NewEgg for cheaper (and not taxes).
Occasionally when I just couldn't wait, I bought it at BestBuy AND at Newegg, and when the Newegg shipment arrives, I'd return the one I bought at BestBuy.
But I rarely ever buy anything at retail stores like BestBuy or CompUSA. Their prices are NEVER competitive.
You don't need to install XP SP1 if you're going to install XP SP2. Also, don't forget to install the Office XP service packs as well, same with Visual Studio.
4 hours???? How on earth did it ever take that long? By the way - maybe I should have specified - I am talking about easy to install distributions like Fedora or RedHat. Not some of the fringe distros that downloads the packages and/or compile them at install time or have very bad installers (i.e. Debian).
You can do a Fedora/RedHat server install with very very few clicks and prompts in less 30 minutes on decent hardware (greater than 2GHz CPU, 250MB of RAM). IF you want to customize it death (by hand selecting packages to install) - maybe 1 hour. Dependencies from selecting packages manually are automatically resolved by the way. I have never seen "million dialogs saying 'xyz depends on this library'" - I have seen one at the end of selecting packages at which point you can safely click OK (since presumably the packages you selected you wanted, and therefore you want the dependencies as well).
If it took you 4 hours to do it, well, that's because you wanted to take 4 hours to do it, not because it had to take 4 hours to do it. You can indeed tweak it to death which is a luxury that Linux gives you, not a neccessity.
Patches can be downloaded and installed automatically. Unlike in Windows world, I have never seen an update ever breaking anything (again, with the RedHat and Fedora distributions.) If you don't want to install them automatically - fine - the update process is no more difficult than Windows Update.
XP does install in about 30 minutes as well, yes I agree with that. Of course that just gives you the OS, a browser and a Media player.
You are right that TCO is more than the license. What MS has been trying to say is that Windows is cheaper to install and run. Which is a whole lot of crap if you ask me - installing linux on hardware that's on the HCL is trivial and takes half the time of Windows. Running it, well - it runs itself (especially for a file server, we're not talking about a fancy application server here). So in the case of the grand-parent poster, I think to look at just the licensing cost is pretty valid. The cost of running Windows and Linux will essentially be the same (arguably Windows would cost more because of the non-stop deluge of viruses and worms not yet affecting Linux world)
also check httpd.conf - there is a MaxClients directive in there. I was not aware there was a hardcoded limit of 256 in apache itself, that seems a little bit odd.
Interesting how the CPU load is still essentially zero, though.
Not really, this is a bunch of static content. I wouldn't expect your CPU load to be anything but zero. Your bottlenecks would be bandwidth and disk I/O.
snicker all you want, Linux is the newcomer on the block so it's gonna be a while for it to be the number one player. However, it is gaining faster than any other platform in the enterprise right now - even Microsoft has admitted that much recently.
My misunderstanding. When you (and him) say "ASP.NET" you're really talking specifically about WebForms. There is nothing inherently IE specific with ASP.NET, only with the crappy webforms in VS.NET (yes, I know, webforms are a core new feature of ASP.NET). I use ASP.NET without the webforms - I wouldn't touch them, and in my opinion, no respectable web developer would either.
Your theory has several gaping holes. Here are two of them:
1. Microsoft hires a whole lot of people "whose and job and living depended on making good software" yet they produce mediocre software at best
2. Linux is getting worked on by a whole lot of people "whose and job and living depended on making good software". In fact, right about every major kernel "hacker" is getting paid to do it these days (Linus included).
The bottom line: getting paid to do something is complete unrelated to quality. At best, it doesn't matter either way. At worse, it actually interferes with quality if these programmers are slaves to rigid release schedules, feature creep (often demanded by marketing), etc.
I am not saying that Solaris is bad. Just saying your reason why doesn't hold up.
ASP.NET is a server-side scripting language. There is no reason why it would cause a web page not to work with Firefox (other than the usual poor web developer syndrome that is not really language specific).
Yes it would, come on - think about it. You encrypted his directory (without his will). You want something to decrypt it. That's extortion. It doesn't matter if it's money, or just his email address. Still extortion.
Here is one of the definition from the link you so gracefully provided: " the act or practice of wresting anything from a person by force, by threats, or by any undue exercise of power" (the power in this case is the one you granted yourself by encrypting data that doesn't belong to you).
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of those people have hepatitis and shit like that
You'll be allright as long as you don't have sex with them on the bus, or exchange blood samples.
No seriously, you are paranoid. Anytime you get out of your house you're going to be exposed to all kinds of people and germs. Unless you're an hermit or live in a bubble, it can't be avoided. I don't know Santa Cruz (or even where it is) but there are billions of people in the world that take public transportation daily (granted, few of those in the US) and somehow, they survive the experience...
You are correct, I don't have a problem with special effects per se (didn't I say that in the first post?) I have a problem with the way they seem to be a good substitute for a plot. In other words, if it dazzle the audience enough, they may not notice the lack of a good plot. This is what I (and many people) refer as the "Hollywood formula" for a blockbuster. $$$ + special effects + dreamy eyed beautiful woman (to go with weak romance subplot) = blockbuster.
And to get back on topic, when they adapt books to movie they tend to do that too - like adding whole scenes whose only purpose is to show off a bunch of effects (or cater to a made up romance subplot with dreamy eyed woman). Hopefully they won't do it with this book.
I am not saying that SW I/II could have been done without special effects - indeed you can't make a movie in that genre without special effects by the truck load. But they are perfect example of movies where there are scenes or characters created for no other reasons than to show off special effects. That's what I would consider crossing the line between special effects supporting the movie and the movie supporting the special effect.
In the case of Armageddon, this movie wouldn't have existed (which would have been a good thing) if it wasn't for the "formula". I imagine studio exec saying "we need to produce a summer blockbuster that costs a lot of money and dazzles with effects, let's write a story to fit it!" rather than the other way around.
I guess the difference between you and me is that you (presumably) consider the movies you listed good. I consider maybe 5 of those good. The other ones were probably created to support the special effect platform (Van Helsing certainly comes to mind there). Also, some of the ones I consider good in your list (Last Samurai, Bourne Supremacy, Kill Bill) are not really special effects movie - big budget maybe, but they all just rely on good old fashioned acting and a good story, with a few explosions here and there. It's funny I was just watching the Bonus DVD on Last Samurai last night - special effects are few and simple - they are not impressive by today's standards. Everything you see (the village, etc) they built either on a sound stage or in New Zealand. All the costumes are hand crafted, lots of training of the actors in sword fighting, and good old fashioned acting.
Don't get me wrong, I am not an artsy movie kindda guy. I like action movies and I like special effects. It's just that many of the big budget movies (most?) produced in the last decade or so are not any good, in spite of the excellent special effects. Some examples of my own to illustrate that faulty Hollywood "blockbusters" formula: Armageddon, Star Wars I + II - but there are so many others like that...
I guess he was probably refering to big budgets where a big budget is not required. Great (and expensive) special effects are great where/when needed. But many film makers seems to overuse them for no apparent other reason that they have too much to spend.
Also there seem to be this mentality in Hollywood that movie can't succeed unless it is cram-packed with non-stop scene after scene of mind boggling special effects. They CAN get in the way of the story.
So you're right, there is nothing inherently wrong with special effect, only with the Hollywood formula of more_money + more_special_effects = instant_sucess.
It's not just the cube shape that's part of the trademark. It's the colors, the number of segments, etc. This knockoff could probably have not broken the trademark if they have varied the design a little bit more.
But they can take everything you own... House, car, etc (depending on the state you live in). And I am not sure that bankrupcy will cover you for this kind of debt.
With Adelphia the HD cable box is $3/month more than the non-HD digital cable box with no additional programming costs. I have an HD ready TV but I am not willing to pay $3 (or $2, or $1) more for the same network channels. No offense to NBC, but watching The West Wing in HDTV is not a very compelling reason for me to pay *anything* extra.
If they want people adopting HDTV they can't charge a penny extra over the regular stuff. If they want people adopting HDTV even FASTER, then it should actually be cheaper.
PS: They also have HBO and ESPN in HD, but I am not an HBO subscriber and I don't watch sports so those two are lost on me.
First of all, I don't think that NPR presents their opinions in the news. They may provide other people analysis, observations and opinions (like experts, UN, people on the ground, whatever) to complement the facts - something I would expect from any respectable news source (and every news source I ever heard/read/watch does that, some better than others) and they present all the sides of the argument (when there is more than one side to present). So, no, I stick to my statement, I don't think NPR has a bias.
Yes, they have commentaries in some of their programs like All Things Considered which are announced as such and frankly, are pretty even handed - whatever their bias is, I haven't found it, they're all over the map. For example in these elections times, I've heard commentaries pro and against both candidates with about the same proportion, often back to back. Again, no bias that I've found there.
NPR is a pretty good source for news, yes. They are non-profit, and they do quality in-depth work that I haven't seen or heard in any other medium yet. If they have a bias, I have not seen it yet. But I guess from your perspective, anything that doesn't agree with you has a bias, right?
Do you expect *anything* on slashdot to be anything but hearsay? Unless there are climatologists hanging out on slashdot (someone unlikely) everything will be hearsay. Quoting websites, newscasts, etc is pretty much the way it works here.
You would think they do, but the truth of the matter if that they don't unless they have to (if the box is damaged, or missing content, or whatever). Read this story.
Selling items on ebay is rather time intensive process. There are not too many sellers able to do the kind of volume Newegg would have to do to implement your suggestion. It would not be cost effective - and again, their margins are not large enough for that kind of stuff (both the returns, and the the selling on ebay).
I don't think that's what he was refering to, but if he was - then he's out of his mind. All he is ever going to "touch" is the display model. There is not one store that I know of that will let you open up the box (especially most items are wrapped in those things you can only open with scisors these days) just so that you can make sure it "feel" the same as the display model. Not gonna happen.
Also there is no store than that I know off that will open the box and plug in a monitor just so you can see if all the pixels are working.
But again, I don't think it's what he was refering to. He was refering to he can't judge the "feel" of an item by the specs on a website. I can relate to that.
Everything manufactured has tolerances (you know, plus or minus something). The tighter the tolerance, the more expensive. If you want a perfect product (to the extend that is at all possible) you have two choices:
1. buy one from a brand that advertise that - you will pay a premium
2. buy a "normal" one and hope you will get lucky
As it stand, all the LCD display manufacturers do not consider their product defective if it has a relatively low number of dead pixels (1-8 or so). Which means that Newegg would have to "eat" the costs of the return since they can't in turn pass those on to the manufacturer. A place like BestBuy takes the return no question asked - they eat the costs, which they can afford to do considering that everything they sell is over priced to begin with (not to mantion they'll just repackage it and sell it as new). Newegg can't.
I do this all time....
I go look at the stuff in a store like BestBuy (specifically to see if it feels rights in my hands, etc) then I buy it on NewEgg for cheaper (and not taxes).
Occasionally when I just couldn't wait, I bought it at BestBuy AND at Newegg, and when the Newegg shipment arrives, I'd return the one I bought at BestBuy.
But I rarely ever buy anything at retail stores like BestBuy or CompUSA. Their prices are NEVER competitive.
You don't need to install XP SP1 if you're going to install XP SP2. Also, don't forget to install the Office XP service packs as well, same with Visual Studio.
4 hours???? How on earth did it ever take that long? By the way - maybe I should have specified - I am talking about easy to install distributions like Fedora or RedHat. Not some of the fringe distros that downloads the packages and/or compile them at install time or have very bad installers (i.e. Debian).
You can do a Fedora/RedHat server install with very very few clicks and prompts in less 30 minutes on decent hardware (greater than 2GHz CPU, 250MB of RAM). IF you want to customize it death (by hand selecting packages to install) - maybe 1 hour. Dependencies from selecting packages manually are automatically resolved by the way. I have never seen "million dialogs saying 'xyz depends on this library'" - I have seen one at the end of selecting packages at which point you can safely click OK (since presumably the packages you selected you wanted, and therefore you want the dependencies as well).
If it took you 4 hours to do it, well, that's because you wanted to take 4 hours to do it, not because it had to take 4 hours to do it. You can indeed tweak it to death which is a luxury that Linux gives you, not a neccessity.
Patches can be downloaded and installed automatically. Unlike in Windows world, I have never seen an update ever breaking anything (again, with the RedHat and Fedora distributions.) If you don't want to install them automatically - fine - the update process is no more difficult than Windows Update.
XP does install in about 30 minutes as well, yes I agree with that. Of course that just gives you the OS, a browser and a Media player.
You are right that TCO is more than the license. What MS has been trying to say is that Windows is cheaper to install and run. Which is a whole lot of crap if you ask me - installing linux on hardware that's on the HCL is trivial and takes half the time of Windows. Running it, well - it runs itself (especially for a file server, we're not talking about a fancy application server here). So in the case of the grand-parent poster, I think to look at just the licensing cost is pretty valid. The cost of running Windows and Linux will essentially be the same (arguably Windows would cost more because of the non-stop deluge of viruses and worms not yet affecting Linux world)
also check httpd.conf - there is a MaxClients directive in there. I was not aware there was a hardcoded limit of 256 in apache itself, that seems a little bit odd.
Interesting how the CPU load is still essentially zero, though.
Not really, this is a bunch of static content. I wouldn't expect your CPU load to be anything but zero. Your bottlenecks would be bandwidth and disk I/O.
snicker all you want, Linux is the newcomer on the block so it's gonna be a while for it to be the number one player. However, it is gaining faster than any other platform in the enterprise right now - even Microsoft has admitted that much recently.
My misunderstanding. When you (and him) say "ASP.NET" you're really talking specifically about WebForms. There is nothing inherently IE specific with ASP.NET, only with the crappy webforms in VS.NET (yes, I know, webforms are a core new feature of ASP.NET). I use ASP.NET without the webforms - I wouldn't touch them, and in my opinion, no respectable web developer would either.
Your theory has several gaping holes. Here are two of them:
1. Microsoft hires a whole lot of people "whose and job and living depended on making good software" yet they produce mediocre software at best
2. Linux is getting worked on by a whole lot of people "whose and job and living depended on making good software". In fact, right about every major kernel "hacker" is getting paid to do it these days (Linus included).
The bottom line: getting paid to do something is complete unrelated to quality. At best, it doesn't matter either way. At worse, it actually interferes with quality if these programmers are slaves to rigid release schedules, feature creep (often demanded by marketing), etc.
I am not saying that Solaris is bad. Just saying your reason why doesn't hold up.
ASP.NET is a server-side scripting language. There is no reason why it would cause a web page not to work with Firefox (other than the usual poor web developer syndrome that is not really language specific).
Yes it would, come on - think about it. You encrypted his directory (without his will). You want something to decrypt it. That's extortion. It doesn't matter if it's money, or just his email address. Still extortion.
Here is one of the definition from the link you so gracefully provided: " the act or practice of wresting anything from a person by force, by threats, or by any undue exercise of power" (the power in this case is the one you granted yourself by encrypting data that doesn't belong to you).
It's not even a close call.