I started 15 years ago with the temp job. For what it's worth, nearly every job I have held has required a BS to even apply for it. I have routinely ignored that requirement to my benefit.
Once you have the opportunity to speak with an employer and can recommend improvements before even setting foot inside the company, their concerns about a degree slide away.
For the original poster, I'd concentrate on the developers who make the stuff he is supporting. Start talking to his immediate employer (the outsourcer) to see if he can get on the team that reports back to the client company. Once there, he has an opportunity to share insight regarding the customer complaints. Sharing insight includes sharing common troubleshooting paths, detailing workarounds he may have devised, and providing information on modifications that might be made to improve the software (I'm assuming this is software support). Once he's talking to the core dev/QA teams, he has a chance to prove himself and be on their minds when they wish to hire more staff.
The most important thing, though, is that he has to break his malaise regarding the software and the customers. He will never make a positive impression if he just comes across as being fed up with his job. When I'm looking to tech support for possible hires, I want the people that care about the product because they're the ones who want to improve it.
I dropped out of college after a year and a half to take a temp job doing network support. That start eventually took me through a number of software quality assurance and IT jobs to the point that I ended up as the Director of IT for a mid-size company. I'm now back in QA, serving as a lead for a team of four testers that specialize in network deployments.
Mind you, I'm not making six figures, so I may be a failure depending on one's measure of success, but I make a very comfortable living considering my regional location (central PA). And seeing as I have no college debt, my sub-six figure salary serves me well.
So please, spare me the "you must finish college" crap. For what I wanted to know and the jobs I wanted to do, tinkering in my spare time and on work time was sufficient to learn what I needed to progress. I have been thrust into many situations that were beyond me, but learning rapidly under that pressure, and being paid to do it, has been more beneficial to me than paying money to an institution to prove my reliability.
Bear in mind we are specifically talking about going from a tech support job to something else somewhat related but not on the front lines. I obviously would not suggest avoiding college if one wanted to build bridges or do surgery. In IT and software, however, there are more than enough opportunities to learn and grow on the fly that make college unnecessary.
You'd be surprised how long they live in the US, too. I recently sold off a number of my consoles and games. Of the items offered, my Nintendo 64 and all of my N64 games sold in a single day to a variety of people who either needed replacement hardware or just wanted more games for their existing N64s. I was completely blown away that there was still demand for that console.
"This is beyond Vendor Lockin, it's antitrust lawsuits begging to happen."
Actually, it's neither. There are lots of software packages that do not go through any form of Windows certification, whether it be "Games for Windows" or simply "Made for Windows".
Developers and publishers are free to sell their product for use on the Windows platform without acquiring a Windows cert logo even if it uses OpenGL, so I see neither lockin nor grounds for an anti-trust lawsuit here.
This all in one connected system, when exposed to alcohol, may also take up industrial design, asking questions about the meaning of life, and wooing Virginia Madsen.
Blizzard wouldn't do it. They couldn't even stand the idea of somebody emulating their Diablo servers so that people who bought the game could play it somewhere other than battle.net.
There's a difference between making money accessible and mandating a store carry a robust big and tall selection. The money is created, distributed, and managed by the federal government. As such, it carries certain restrictions and regulations that must apply to the entire nation or to anyone outside of this nation who converts it between currencies. Wal-Mart is a corporation and, as such, chooses its product selection to best result in profitability. The government does not directly regulate product selection.
Does it set rules for how the building is constructed, how the employees are treated, how Wal-Mart's practices impact the citizenry? Sure, but that's far different than telling Wal-Mart whether or not to carry large pants. The two are not comparable.
Before I continue, let me go ahead an proclaim my bias. I have a nearly 5 year old son with cerebral palsy who requires the use of a wheelchair.
I find interesting the statement that we're in a situation where the "rights of the few outweigh the rights of the many". I rather think of it as "the rights of the few supplement the rights of the many". What rights have been denied people so that those with handicaps might better interact with our society and contribute to the economy? Buildings with ramps and elevators still have stairs. Money printed to be accessible will still be visually discernible. Electric outlets placed slightly higher on a wall do not make them any less useful for others. Lowered curbs can still be traversed by those able to walk.
The only right denied is, possibly, the right to deny. In the case of this possible alteration to currency, you are stating that it absolutely should be the case that the US government should shun some millions of its citizens to avoid easing their spending and decrease their independence. But why should it do that? What sense does that make?
According to numbers from 1995, 37.7 million people in the US have a disability that impedes them from engaging in normal activity (http://www.infouse.com/disabilitydata/disability/ 1_1.php). The ADA is meant to set standards that make life a little easier for those folks. It also helps the likely 70 million other people that provide care for those people. Because of the ADA, my wife and I are able to wheel my son into stores, restaurants, libraries, and recreation areas so that we may enjoy time together in the same environments as everyone else. Certainly, there are many areas still off limits to us with a wheelchair, but we wish there weren't.
I should say, however, that when we run into that situation, we choose simply to not patronize such businesses. I wouldn't feel quite as laissez faire about running into the same restrictions in a government building, though. We understand that not all of society should bend to the benefit of our son, but we're very thankful when society enables us to participate. THAT is what the ADA is all about - participation. It does so in a heavy-handed way by legislating standards of access, but if it did not exist, those 37.7 million people would just be SOL.
Suppose we did go back to those old Republic roots. The nation's disabled citizens would either be institutionalized or kept at home. Considering the fun I've had with my son going camping, hiking accessible trails, flying to DisneyWorld, browsing for books, shopping for Halloween costumes, standing at the base of a towering Lincoln, et cetera, I'm glad that there is something in place to lessen our obstacles as we experience our neighborhood, our state, and our nation.
I would like for my son to one day be able to hold a job, be able to vote, be able to travel, and be able to have a home with his family. The ADA aids in all those things.
Actually, when the N64 stuck with the cartridge format, there was plenty of complaining. Publishers were hyped by the fact that pressing CDs for the PS1 was going to be incredibly cheap while publishing for the N64 required exorbitant royalty payments to Nintendo along with the high cost of cartridge manufacture.
Gamers complained, too, because the use of the cartridge jacked up the price of the games. It was not uncommon to drop $70 for a title, a price that now brings wailing and gnashing of teeth from the masses (even though it is now the normal price for "collector's edition" releases).
There were pro-cartridge folks. Their main argument in favor was the reduction of load times and the inherent durability of cartridges in the hands of children and clumsy adults.
You know what's funny, though? When XP was released, everybody was saying it was going to be a pile of shit and that 2000 was awesome.
Hopefully, we'll all be able to have a reunion when the next Microsoft OS is released and somebody says, "Vista is everything I want in an OS. This next version of Windows is going to be shit."
That's great and all, but depending on the time of year, Windows will see that many games released in a week.
I'm not belittling your effort, but you are using a very short list of titles released over the last few years to show how progress is being made for Linux gaming. That progress is glacial in the world of gaming.
Linux is just not well suited to be a gaming OS. Linux library developers just can't seem to ever decide something is "good enough" to be a standard across all distros, leading to a jumbled mess of possible configurations. It is then left up to developers to decide which distributions and libraries they'll support, which may further cut down on the potential audience for their native titles. Then there are the drivers that never seem quite up to par, the need to check for dependencies, the lack of standard interfaces, the inability to make any of this easy for users...
I tried Linux gaming for quite some time, was a TransGamer subscriber, bought titles from Loki, even have my Q3Arena Linux tin and wide boxes of Linux Quake 1 and 2, but it was just too much of a pain to game in Linux, so I gave it up.
I appreciate your efforts, but you yourself realize you're doing it on principle and not for massive profit. Most publishers are looking more for massive profit. The jumbled mess that is supporting Linux drains those profits, resulting in lack of mainstream gaming support for the platform.
Honestly, if folks were to program a unified set of libraries for Linux gaming and could deny themselves the desire to code continual innovations for a year (let it stabilize), there might be some outside interest in wider support.
It just so happens, however, that GPL'd code rarely sits still. Somebody always takes it and does one better, creating confusion as to which version should be the standard, supported one. Microsoft, monolith that it is, at least provides stability in DirectX. Developers can code to it and know that they've got a few years before they have to worry about any major overhauls.
Linux developers can't go a few months without worrying about supporting a whole new distro of the OS.
Ha ha, what? I distinctly recall some Halo patching going on with the first Xbox, so their policy wasn't exactly solid before the 360.
There were also patches for Splinter Cell, WrestleMania 21, Unreal Championship, Stacked, and Rainbow Six 3.
Mind you, that's not very many patched titles considering the number of releases for the Xbox, but it does suggest that patching Xbox games was not verboten.
A list of four people who purchased PSPs now constitutes being "huge clients"?
Looks to me like a few folks ordering PSPs to see whether or not Lik-Sang was actually fulfilling orders with PSPs from other territories. It isn't as though Sony Computer Entertainment Europe was withholding PSPs from its executives, forcing them to go to Lik-Sang.
It's no different, really, than any company purchasing a competitor's product to evaluate or investigate it. Maybe Lik-Sang should have been a little more suspicious of products ordered by folks with Sony addresses. And maybe they should be a little less willing to put customer information in a petulant press release.
They could have brought that information up during the court proceedings had they actually sent someone there to defend them. Which they did not. Lik-Sang thought they could hide behind Hong Kong jurisdiction and law, only to find that they were wrong. Now they're crying about it publicly. They could have ceased shipments of PSPs a year ago when the suit was filed (filed, mind you, AFTER Sony had won two similar lawsuits against other PSP importers - the chance of Sony winning a third time was quite good) and avoided having to close shop, but they chose to ignore the situation and lost.
It's their own damn fault for not 1) paying attention to precedent and 2) defending themselves in court.
Re:Quit While You're Ahead
on
An Ode To Al
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Here's hoping somebody can fix the current system, because NetFlix and I are at a stalemate. With 1,324 movies rated, NetFlix gives me 0 recommendations because it has become quite confused about my taste in films.
Once, I rented and liked a Devo DVD, so it recommended every band with a concert movie, but I don't like every band and started marking things "Not interested". Then, I added a Sarah Silverman disc to my queue, which NetFlix took to mean that I love all stand-up comics, especially those on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. But I'm not really interested in all comics, so I had to mark them "Not interested". Then I checked out a few documentaries, sending NetFlix into an excited state where it recommended all kinds of uninteresting docudramas. "Not interested".
At this point, NetFlix thinks I'm not interested in anything even though I have a number of films rated 3 stars or greater.
But maybe its recommendations are right... Maybe Sarah Silverman and Bill Engvall really are for the same crowd.
There are probably two factors. The first is that the audience receptive to music gaming is probably smaller on the PC. The PC is FPS and RTS centric.
Second, music games rely on fairly strict timing performance. The variety of PC hardware means that timing windows may be unpredictable from machine to machine. Certainly, this has not hampered StepMania, but that's free.
While I do value footage from the Ottawa Tulipfest, there's a world of difference between an indy label posting all of its videos in the hopes of somebody noticing their artists exist and a major label, part of a cabal that has been fighting digital distribution for years, breaking down and finally realizing that putting their 3-4 minute advertisements in front of millions might actually help them rather than hurt them.
So, while it is not true that Warner is the first music label ever to post vids to YouTube, they are the first MAJOR music label.
Had somebody in the mailroom been outed as the leaker, would we be hearing about this at all? With all the rulings that have stated employees have no reason to expect privacy when it comes to the use of company resources (phones, e-mail, Internet use), I'm sure a lower level employee would have been easily and quietly dismissed.
But since this happened to a suit... all the other suits got scared and decided to attack?
What do we want? The films we saw in the theaters preserved on a modern consumer media.
I'm pretty happy with these DVDs. It's disappointing that Lucas treats the original releases like ugly step-children now that he has beautiful kids that he much prefers, but I'll take what I can get.
I don't understand the attitude of "get a reel and a projector if you want the original". The Star Wars films, for as flawed as they are, represent some truly historic American cinema. It is a classic regardless of its warts.
To continue ignoring the films in their original form would be the same as never having the original black and white Citizen Kane available because the new colorized version with CGI effects and a whole new ending is so much more visually appealing and heightens the experience by having the protagonist defeat the alien chicken at the end.
Where is the harm in wanting to enjoy the story as it was originally told?
I'd actually prefer consoles to standardize and become built into consumer electronics so that developers and consumers can really get to work on a stable and long lasting platform. Imagine the possibilities. There is a lot to be said for standards.
You might want ot look into a little something called "3DO" - it was a standardized console that was licensed out to multiple hardware manufacturers so that possibilities could be imagined.
Paying for a hi-def format bundled with a videogame machine for $600 doesn't seem so outrageous in comparison. Assuming the game portion isn't terrible.
The problem is that we're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. You don't have to explain anything. Unless they have PROOF that you did something illegal, keep your mouth shut.
Handy idea, that. Except that these days, you can be "detained" indefinitely while they decide whether or not they have enough resources to manufacture the proof.
So go ahead, keep your mouth shut. Enjoy your vacation in sunny Guantanamo.
As a fairly avid Star Wars fanboy, I appreciated and enjoyed Genndy's take on the Star Wars universe. The art direction was great. The dialog, true to the action roots planted by Samurai Jack, was sparse but effective. The battles had a good sense of excitement to them, much unlike the fights seen in the recent Eps 1-3.
I'm curious to hear why you thought Clone Wars sucked.
Slashdot Mirror
I started 15 years ago with the temp job. For what it's worth, nearly every job I have held has required a BS to even apply for it. I have routinely ignored that requirement to my benefit.
Once you have the opportunity to speak with an employer and can recommend improvements before even setting foot inside the company, their concerns about a degree slide away.
For the original poster, I'd concentrate on the developers who make the stuff he is supporting. Start talking to his immediate employer (the outsourcer) to see if he can get on the team that reports back to the client company. Once there, he has an opportunity to share insight regarding the customer complaints. Sharing insight includes sharing common troubleshooting paths, detailing workarounds he may have devised, and providing information on modifications that might be made to improve the software (I'm assuming this is software support). Once he's talking to the core dev/QA teams, he has a chance to prove himself and be on their minds when they wish to hire more staff.
The most important thing, though, is that he has to break his malaise regarding the software and the customers. He will never make a positive impression if he just comes across as being fed up with his job. When I'm looking to tech support for possible hires, I want the people that care about the product because they're the ones who want to improve it.
Ha, okay.
I dropped out of college after a year and a half to take a temp job doing network support. That start eventually took me through a number of software quality assurance and IT jobs to the point that I ended up as the Director of IT for a mid-size company. I'm now back in QA, serving as a lead for a team of four testers that specialize in network deployments.
Mind you, I'm not making six figures, so I may be a failure depending on one's measure of success, but I make a very comfortable living considering my regional location (central PA). And seeing as I have no college debt, my sub-six figure salary serves me well.
So please, spare me the "you must finish college" crap. For what I wanted to know and the jobs I wanted to do, tinkering in my spare time and on work time was sufficient to learn what I needed to progress. I have been thrust into many situations that were beyond me, but learning rapidly under that pressure, and being paid to do it, has been more beneficial to me than paying money to an institution to prove my reliability.
Bear in mind we are specifically talking about going from a tech support job to something else somewhat related but not on the front lines. I obviously would not suggest avoiding college if one wanted to build bridges or do surgery. In IT and software, however, there are more than enough opportunities to learn and grow on the fly that make college unnecessary.
You'd be surprised how long they live in the US, too. I recently sold off a number of my consoles and games. Of the items offered, my Nintendo 64 and all of my N64 games sold in a single day to a variety of people who either needed replacement hardware or just wanted more games for their existing N64s. I was completely blown away that there was still demand for that console.
"This is beyond Vendor Lockin, it's antitrust lawsuits begging to happen."
Actually, it's neither. There are lots of software packages that do not go through any form of Windows certification, whether it be "Games for Windows" or simply "Made for Windows".
Developers and publishers are free to sell their product for use on the Windows platform without acquiring a Windows cert logo even if it uses OpenGL, so I see neither lockin nor grounds for an anti-trust lawsuit here.
This all in one connected system, when exposed to alcohol, may also take up industrial design, asking questions about the meaning of life, and wooing Virginia Madsen.
Blizzard wouldn't do it. They couldn't even stand the idea of somebody emulating their Diablo servers so that people who bought the game could play it somewhere other than battle.net.
See: bnetd
Unfortunately, what you just quoted relates directly to accommodations made by an employer for a disabled employee.
Currency is not an employee of the federal government, nor are the users of said currency. Undue hardship, as defined in your example, does not apply.
There's a difference between making money accessible and mandating a store carry a robust big and tall selection. The money is created, distributed, and managed by the federal government. As such, it carries certain restrictions and regulations that must apply to the entire nation or to anyone outside of this nation who converts it between currencies. Wal-Mart is a corporation and, as such, chooses its product selection to best result in profitability. The government does not directly regulate product selection.
/ 1_1.php). The ADA is meant to set standards that make life a little easier for those folks. It also helps the likely 70 million other people that provide care for those people. Because of the ADA, my wife and I are able to wheel my son into stores, restaurants, libraries, and recreation areas so that we may enjoy time together in the same environments as everyone else. Certainly, there are many areas still off limits to us with a wheelchair, but we wish there weren't.
Does it set rules for how the building is constructed, how the employees are treated, how Wal-Mart's practices impact the citizenry? Sure, but that's far different than telling Wal-Mart whether or not to carry large pants. The two are not comparable.
Before I continue, let me go ahead an proclaim my bias. I have a nearly 5 year old son with cerebral palsy who requires the use of a wheelchair.
I find interesting the statement that we're in a situation where the "rights of the few outweigh the rights of the many". I rather think of it as "the rights of the few supplement the rights of the many". What rights have been denied people so that those with handicaps might better interact with our society and contribute to the economy? Buildings with ramps and elevators still have stairs. Money printed to be accessible will still be visually discernible. Electric outlets placed slightly higher on a wall do not make them any less useful for others. Lowered curbs can still be traversed by those able to walk.
The only right denied is, possibly, the right to deny. In the case of this possible alteration to currency, you are stating that it absolutely should be the case that the US government should shun some millions of its citizens to avoid easing their spending and decrease their independence. But why should it do that? What sense does that make?
According to numbers from 1995, 37.7 million people in the US have a disability that impedes them from engaging in normal activity (http://www.infouse.com/disabilitydata/disability
I should say, however, that when we run into that situation, we choose simply to not patronize such businesses. I wouldn't feel quite as laissez faire about running into the same restrictions in a government building, though. We understand that not all of society should bend to the benefit of our son, but we're very thankful when society enables us to participate. THAT is what the ADA is all about - participation. It does so in a heavy-handed way by legislating standards of access, but if it did not exist, those 37.7 million people would just be SOL.
Suppose we did go back to those old Republic roots. The nation's disabled citizens would either be institutionalized or kept at home. Considering the fun I've had with my son going camping, hiking accessible trails, flying to DisneyWorld, browsing for books, shopping for Halloween costumes, standing at the base of a towering Lincoln, et cetera, I'm glad that there is something in place to lessen our obstacles as we experience our neighborhood, our state, and our nation.
I would like for my son to one day be able to hold a job, be able to vote, be able to travel, and be able to have a home with his family. The ADA aids in all those things.
Actually, when the N64 stuck with the cartridge format, there was plenty of complaining. Publishers were hyped by the fact that pressing CDs for the PS1 was going to be incredibly cheap while publishing for the N64 required exorbitant royalty payments to Nintendo along with the high cost of cartridge manufacture.
Gamers complained, too, because the use of the cartridge jacked up the price of the games. It was not uncommon to drop $70 for a title, a price that now brings wailing and gnashing of teeth from the masses (even though it is now the normal price for "collector's edition" releases).
There were pro-cartridge folks. Their main argument in favor was the reduction of load times and the inherent durability of cartridges in the hands of children and clumsy adults.
Zero.
You know what's funny, though? When XP was released, everybody was saying it was going to be a pile of shit and that 2000 was awesome.
Hopefully, we'll all be able to have a reunion when the next Microsoft OS is released and somebody says, "Vista is everything I want in an OS. This next version of Windows is going to be shit."
I'm not belittling your effort, but you are using a very short list of titles released over the last few years to show how progress is being made for Linux gaming. That progress is glacial in the world of gaming.
Linux is just not well suited to be a gaming OS. Linux library developers just can't seem to ever decide something is "good enough" to be a standard across all distros, leading to a jumbled mess of possible configurations. It is then left up to developers to decide which distributions and libraries they'll support, which may further cut down on the potential audience for their native titles. Then there are the drivers that never seem quite up to par, the need to check for dependencies, the lack of standard interfaces, the inability to make any of this easy for users...
I tried Linux gaming for quite some time, was a TransGamer subscriber, bought titles from Loki, even have my Q3Arena Linux tin and wide boxes of Linux Quake 1 and 2, but it was just too much of a pain to game in Linux, so I gave it up.
I appreciate your efforts, but you yourself realize you're doing it on principle and not for massive profit. Most publishers are looking more for massive profit. The jumbled mess that is supporting Linux drains those profits, resulting in lack of mainstream gaming support for the platform.
Honestly, if folks were to program a unified set of libraries for Linux gaming and could deny themselves the desire to code continual innovations for a year (let it stabilize), there might be some outside interest in wider support.
It just so happens, however, that GPL'd code rarely sits still. Somebody always takes it and does one better, creating confusion as to which version should be the standard, supported one. Microsoft, monolith that it is, at least provides stability in DirectX. Developers can code to it and know that they've got a few years before they have to worry about any major overhauls.
Linux developers can't go a few months without worrying about supporting a whole new distro of the OS.
Ha ha, what? I distinctly recall some Halo patching going on with the first Xbox, so their policy wasn't exactly solid before the 360.
There were also patches for Splinter Cell, WrestleMania 21, Unreal Championship, Stacked, and Rainbow Six 3.
Mind you, that's not very many patched titles considering the number of releases for the Xbox, but it does suggest that patching Xbox games was not verboten.
A list of four people who purchased PSPs now constitutes being "huge clients"?
Looks to me like a few folks ordering PSPs to see whether or not Lik-Sang was actually fulfilling orders with PSPs from other territories. It isn't as though Sony Computer Entertainment Europe was withholding PSPs from its executives, forcing them to go to Lik-Sang.
It's no different, really, than any company purchasing a competitor's product to evaluate or investigate it. Maybe Lik-Sang should have been a little more suspicious of products ordered by folks with Sony addresses. And maybe they should be a little less willing to put customer information in a petulant press release.
They could have brought that information up during the court proceedings had they actually sent someone there to defend them. Which they did not. Lik-Sang thought they could hide behind Hong Kong jurisdiction and law, only to find that they were wrong. Now they're crying about it publicly. They could have ceased shipments of PSPs a year ago when the suit was filed (filed, mind you, AFTER Sony had won two similar lawsuits against other PSP importers - the chance of Sony winning a third time was quite good) and avoided having to close shop, but they chose to ignore the situation and lost.
It's their own damn fault for not 1) paying attention to precedent and 2) defending themselves in court.
Did you just... Was that... a shout out?!
Here's hoping somebody can fix the current system, because NetFlix and I are at a stalemate. With 1,324 movies rated, NetFlix gives me 0 recommendations because it has become quite confused about my taste in films.
Once, I rented and liked a Devo DVD, so it recommended every band with a concert movie, but I don't like every band and started marking things "Not interested". Then, I added a Sarah Silverman disc to my queue, which NetFlix took to mean that I love all stand-up comics, especially those on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. But I'm not really interested in all comics, so I had to mark them "Not interested". Then I checked out a few documentaries, sending NetFlix into an excited state where it recommended all kinds of uninteresting docudramas. "Not interested".
At this point, NetFlix thinks I'm not interested in anything even though I have a number of films rated 3 stars or greater.
But maybe its recommendations are right... Maybe Sarah Silverman and Bill Engvall really are for the same crowd.
There are probably two factors. The first is that the audience receptive to music gaming is probably smaller on the PC. The PC is FPS and RTS centric.
Second, music games rely on fairly strict timing performance. The variety of PC hardware means that timing windows may be unpredictable from machine to machine. Certainly, this has not hampered StepMania, but that's free.
While I do value footage from the Ottawa Tulipfest, there's a world of difference between an indy label posting all of its videos in the hopes of somebody noticing their artists exist and a major label, part of a cabal that has been fighting digital distribution for years, breaking down and finally realizing that putting their 3-4 minute advertisements in front of millions might actually help them rather than hurt them.
So, while it is not true that Warner is the first music label ever to post vids to YouTube, they are the first MAJOR music label.
Had somebody in the mailroom been outed as the leaker, would we be hearing about this at all? With all the rulings that have stated employees have no reason to expect privacy when it comes to the use of company resources (phones, e-mail, Internet use), I'm sure a lower level employee would have been easily and quietly dismissed.
But since this happened to a suit... all the other suits got scared and decided to attack?
Interesting.
What do we want? The films we saw in the theaters preserved on a modern consumer media.
I'm pretty happy with these DVDs. It's disappointing that Lucas treats the original releases like ugly step-children now that he has beautiful kids that he much prefers, but I'll take what I can get.
I don't understand the attitude of "get a reel and a projector if you want the original". The Star Wars films, for as flawed as they are, represent some truly historic American cinema. It is a classic regardless of its warts.
To continue ignoring the films in their original form would be the same as never having the original black and white Citizen Kane available because the new colorized version with CGI effects and a whole new ending is so much more visually appealing and heightens the experience by having the protagonist defeat the alien chicken at the end.
Where is the harm in wanting to enjoy the story as it was originally told?
I'd actually prefer consoles to standardize and become built into consumer electronics so that developers and consumers can really get to work on a stable and long lasting platform. Imagine the possibilities. There is a lot to be said for standards.
You might want ot look into a little something called "3DO" - it was a standardized console that was licensed out to multiple hardware manufacturers so that possibilities could be imagined.
It failed miserably.
DVD players started off at a fairly reasonable price? My first player was a consumer-level Toshiba SD-3107 for $700.
s ion/1280081.html
Of course, there was also the cheap 2107 for $500.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/televi
Paying for a hi-def format bundled with a videogame machine for $600 doesn't seem so outrageous in comparison. Assuming the game portion isn't terrible.
How, exactly, can the author claim the build time is only 30 minutes ("0.5 hours") while at the same time bemoaning the loss of their welder?
If a project requires welding, I think that moves it squarely outside of "amateur" territory.
When I was a kid, especially in '82 (age 9), I didn't really focus on the directing, writing, and point of a film.
Handy idea, that. Except that these days, you can be "detained" indefinitely while they decide whether or not they have enough resources to manufacture the proof.
So go ahead, keep your mouth shut. Enjoy your vacation in sunny Guantanamo.
Seriously? Sucked?
As a fairly avid Star Wars fanboy, I appreciated and enjoyed Genndy's take on the Star Wars universe. The art direction was great. The dialog, true to the action roots planted by Samurai Jack, was sparse but effective. The battles had a good sense of excitement to them, much unlike the fights seen in the recent Eps 1-3.
I'm curious to hear why you thought Clone Wars sucked.