Here's a question: is it fair to say that the romanticization of sci-fi, in its quest for more female audienceship, has castrated the genre? I see a lot of upper-class Victorian nonsense in modern Trek.
No it's not fair.
Patrick Stewart was a wonderful actor in Baron Munchausen, and on stage, but most of his past work was victorian in nature, therefore the character he brought out in TNG had these victorian qualities.
I don't think it went that way to "get women" at all. I think it went that way mostly to Patrick Stuarts looks and acting style. It set the mood for all ST series to follow.
Picture Patrick playing Kirk. Doesn't work does it?
Since i'm gettin some replies on this thread, lets continue it:D
One of the greatest things about TOS was the way they handled moral dilema's of the day. Things like racism, corupt rulers, equality umungst social classes were all things TOS dealed with on a show by show basis that you RARELY see in any of the new crap.
For instance, I would love to see an anology to current events done in a new series. Kirk finds 2 planets warring with one another, and discovers mass grave sites on one of the planets. What does he do?
Or.
Kirk comes across a species doing large scale enviromental damage to a class M planet for it's dylithium crystals. What does he do?
Or
Endagered species. Kirk has to stop the off planet smuggling of endagered species.
There are a ton of great show ideas that could be done using modern society. Why isn't it being done? Because ST has become PC. I doubt todays writers would touch the whole terrorist/WMD issue for fear of being called terrorist themselves.
I wonder if this would be cheaper for short render work than purchasing a faster CPU.
It would be neat if they had blade servers that had a liquid nitrogen tanks. When a work order is recieved, a truck comes in and fills a liquid nitrogen storage tank. Then it's fed into the blade cabinet. Once all the cpu's in the blade are at running overclock tempature turn the whole thing on.
Sorry but technological changes don't cause instant DNA updates. I guess if you ever got in a car accident, based on your own ethics, it would be "adapt or die" for you also.
I shouldn't reply to AC's but i will.
If I die in a car accident, it's my own damn fault for getting behind the wheel of a car, no matter who's *fault* it is. Risky behavior by any creature of any intellect can result in death.
Most fish don't swim around dam outlets for a damn good reason. They've learned that they *DIE* there if they get sucked up into the dam pipe.
Birds are more capable than a fish. A bird *should* know better than to swoop down on squirrels around windmills. After 20 years i'm sure the only ones flying into them now are the really stupid ones. The smarter ones have since left for safer feeding ground.
Considering pigeons, which are even dumber than Kestrals, can learn to not only adapt, but *use* cars to their advantage is astounding.
Just because i'm smarter than another person, does that mean I have to go out of my way *protect* that person? Just because a few birds are too stupid, or stubborn to move onto safer feeding ground, does that mean I have to go out of my way to protect them? I don't think so.
Altimont pass is surround by many other places for these birds to feed. Sure there should be help for handicapped or injured birds, but if a dumb/stubborn one flies into a blender, better off the species I say.
The problem is that there are several carnivorous birds (birds of prey) getting caught up in the mills is due mainly to the ground squirrel population.
The bay area has a problem with violent pit bulls. Especially oakland. For the salary of one person, a truck, gas, and poison you could probably afford to maintain an army of 100 the most violent abandoned dogs. (Those that cannot be placed into homes)
You wouldn't even need real fences to contain them. Radio fence collars would work just fine and would be substancially cheaper.
I live in San Jose, very close to altimont pass. I don't watch birds as a hobby, but when I do watch them it's because of my facination with flight.
As sorry as it sounds (22k birds dead) it's plain old Darwinism. Adapt or die basically.
Next time you're near an overpass populated with pigeons, take the time to watch them, and I mean REALLY watch them. I've noticed a behavior these birds have on freeway's I call "Car Surfing"
Lately i've noticed that the pigeons on the highway 17 camden av overpass won't leave thier roost until there are cars passing underneath. I'm guessing the cars going 60mph below them must produce some sort of small air wave, because the birds never seem to smash into them. They swoop down, grab that little updraft of wind from the car below, and get launched another 30-40 feet into the air.
These birds have adapated to having 1ton+ metal boxes moving around their flight path. Not only have they adapted, but they've learned to use it to their advantage.
As far as altimont pass is concerned, i'm sure the ratio of Kestral/Eagles to common birds is pretty low. I would bet the majority of the birds dying are blackbirds or doves. Carnivoires are oppertunistic, living or dead if it's meat they're going to go for it. So i'm sure most of these accidents with the exotic preditors have nothing to do with the windmills, and much to do with the altimont pass groundskeepers not cleaning up the dead carrion. Perhaps if they made it a part of their daily job to toss all the dead birds in the back of their pickup and move them to a safer place for the preditorial birds to eat, we would see less deaths.
Until that happens though, what we will see is a fine example of these birds adapting to their enviroment. The stupid ones will be weeded out of the genepool.
I think we would all like to see more Shatner Star Trek. Either in a starring role or as a director. There is just something TNG-DS9-Voy, ect are just missing from TOS.
I want my captain to be a womanizing manwhore fucking green aliens around the universe. Not some pansy bald headed geriatric who flys around with pinochio and Klingons that have butts on their forheads (we never did find out WHY Klingons had such a drastic change in appearance, other than worf saying "It's something we don't like to talk about")
I could go on and on about what I don't like about the new ST stuff, like Janeway from Voyager, why does she sound like she smokes 2 packs a day, yet we never see her light up? Or why does scott bakula have a dog on enterprise? How come Cisco never puts the beat down on that Ferengi bar he KNOWS would sell out the station for a few bars of gold pressed latinum?
Please....For the love of....God.... Bring us back our captain. With the cost of special effects so cheap these days, i'm sure something really cool could be produced for less than they spend on these new series.
Ya but CCCP can get servers too. On top of that they're located in the bay area, where stuff from chinese boats come in, so our prices out here tend to be a lot cheaper. Apple computer (if they're going that route) is also out here...
And who's bandwidth/location is superior? There might actually be a cost benifit for him (since the space he'll save at his own ISP he could then rent out)
CCCP doesn't just hand it out to anyone. There is a lot of back and forth e-mails between CCCP to qualify if a site is truly non-profit community based.
Ya the name may be funky, but their connections to the world of ISP's could knock a house over.
I'm referring to he.net. Hurricane Electric. (pun was intentional) I think CCCP is sort of a side project for HE. HE also serves as one of mysqls mirrors, and hold local Lug (Linux User Group) meetings on the site, where attendies can attatch their laptops too the local network there (how cool is that? we're talkin over 45mbps pipe!)
I recommend talking to CCCP. I've had a few e-mail exchanges with the guys that run it, they really do answer all inquiries and are very friendly. It's not $20k but maybe they can help out somehow.
Several of you took issue with the price comparison, saying that you if you ordered the parts from the cheapest sources and built the Opteron yourself, you could get it for under $3000. I believe you. A do-it-yourself system is much cheaper. But there's no such thing as a build-your-own Power Mac. That's why we compared it to an Opteron from a "we build it for you and guarantee the whole thing" company like Xicomputer.
Under $3000 you say??? And your total was how much??
The total rose to $4107.
Shit, give me a call, I'd even buy a plane ticket and fricken hand deliver it if you allowed me a $1200 dollar markup.
Re:Screw weird, this is the *COOL* present thread!
on
Weird Presents Anyone?
·
· Score: 1, Funny
I found it funny that she was advocating downloading and achiving pr0n.
I found it sick that you even considered that thought.
It's CHRISTmas, not TROLLmas you ignorant jack off.
Screw weird, this is the *COOL* present thread!
on
Weird Presents Anyone?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Along with the usual sweaters, socks and underwear I get every year, this year I got something special..
My mother in law excitedly handed me my gift this year with a big grin on her face. I opened the box and what was there?
A seagate Barricuda 7200rpm 120gig hard drive!
"Now you can download more movies and burn them to dvd (vcd)" she says.
Large capacity hard drives, the gift that keeps on giving all year long:D
Why would you think that recent technology is any more reliable than older stuff?
It's very simple why older stuff is more durable.
When you increase failure tolerances, you increase the chance of a failure. A hard drive with 10 sectors is 10 times more likely to have something go wrong with it than a hard drive with 1 sector (Of course nobody makes a HD that useless, just using it to illustrate my point)
This not only applies to hard drives, but it applies to silicon as well. More transistors on a chip means more places for it to go wrong.
I think there's some murpheys law that says just that. The more complex a machine, the more that can go wrong with it.
wtf are you going to do out in the middle of nowhere with a laptop? Leave the fucking computer at home and spend time actually being outdoors hiking or fishing. Read a book, spend time with your man or woman, anything but a computer.
What if he doesn't know how to be outdoors and he needs the internet for survival tips?
Father bought it as a kit, i was like 5 or 6 at the time, mostly I helped put the keys on the keypad.
For those wondering WTF is a super elf, or what kind of stuff it did, well it could do a lot for the time.
Old man programmed some sort of music synth on it. We also spent hours typing in programs (stuff like that stupid cowbow game) I was too young to understand what was going on internally, I just knew it was the closest thing I had to an atari 2600 at the time.
Dude I got an idea that will totally blow yours away (warning, office space reference coming)
See I want to make this mat, and printed on the map will be different "conclusions" You lay the map down, and you jump as far as you can. Depenending on how far you jump, determines your conclusion.
I remember this one customer who had a PC based stepper motor controller running on a 8088 epson. (They used the machine for routing out a patterns in wood cabinets) Their sysadmin thought it would be a great idea to upgrade it to a 486, after which everthing broke. (well it still worked, but the timing for moving planks on/off the routing table, and cutting the actual design was totally screwed up)
After looking at the Qbasic code, I saw the original programmer did all their timing with for/next loops. AH HA! I said to myself. The faster machine made the loops run faster, thereby screwing up the timing. I just did a best guess and increased the delay in the loop, everything was happy after that.
I think the USB chip in them costs like $5 bucks or something. So it's an added $5 bucks per controller that doesn't really have to be there.
Well, ok it has to be there, but why doesn't gravis make some sort of multitap USB device so they can crank out cheaper joysticks that don't need USB chips in them. Since USB i've noticed most true analog joysticks are using cheaper potentiometers, probably to offset the cost of the USB chip.
He should sue the outsourcing company for slander and libel (since they probably handed his employer a report stating he was a security risk)
Of course it all depends on what context he was fired for. Are we getting the whole story here? Did you do any activities that could be considered a security risk?
If it can walk, it can crawl. It has on board high resolution cameras and wireless networking capabilities.
Send a bunch of them to mars. Have them collect mineral samples to a centralized lab/solar panel/bot recharger. As long as they can survive entry and bouncing around the ground.
It could perform search and assist functions in collapsed buildings. People die of dehydration in those situations. Send QRIO down there to crawl around the rubble (although dogs/humans are cheaper)
It could run the pullstring through the rafters or under the floorboards when I install cat5 runs.
I could remotely control it from home and never have to go into the office again. If someone needs me to look at something, I simply have them place the QRIO in front of the monitor/keyboard and type stuff out.
Wow, these are less than the price of a new car, and I could "rent" them to corporations who wanted to outsource their IT departments. An army of QRIOs controlled by some sweatshop labor in india, i'll make a mint!
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a question: is it fair to say that the romanticization of sci-fi, in its quest for more female audienceship, has castrated the genre? I see a lot of upper-class Victorian nonsense in modern Trek.
No it's not fair.
Patrick Stewart was a wonderful actor in Baron Munchausen, and on stage, but most of his past work was victorian in nature, therefore the character he brought out in TNG had these victorian qualities.
I don't think it went that way to "get women" at all. I think it went that way mostly to Patrick Stuarts looks and acting style. It set the mood for all ST series to follow.
Picture Patrick playing Kirk. Doesn't work does it?
Why don't we make him read this /. story as punishment? Maybe reading what all of us have to say might make him see the light.
Since i'm gettin some replies on this thread, lets continue it :D
One of the greatest things about TOS was the way they handled moral dilema's of the day. Things like racism, corupt rulers, equality umungst social classes were all things TOS dealed with on a show by show basis that you RARELY see in any of the new crap.
For instance, I would love to see an anology to current events done in a new series. Kirk finds 2 planets warring with one another, and discovers mass grave sites on one of the planets. What does he do?
Or.
Kirk comes across a species doing large scale enviromental damage to a class M planet for it's dylithium crystals. What does he do?
Or
Endagered species. Kirk has to stop the off planet smuggling of endagered species.
There are a ton of great show ideas that could be done using modern society. Why isn't it being done? Because ST has become PC. I doubt todays writers would touch the whole terrorist/WMD issue for fear of being called terrorist themselves.
I wonder if this would be cheaper for short render work than purchasing a faster CPU.
It would be neat if they had blade servers that had a liquid nitrogen tanks. When a work order is recieved, a truck comes in and fills a liquid nitrogen storage tank. Then it's fed into the blade cabinet. Once all the cpu's in the blade are at running overclock tempature turn the whole thing on.
Sorry but technological changes don't cause instant DNA updates. I guess if you ever got in a car accident, based on your own ethics, it would be "adapt or die" for you also.
I shouldn't reply to AC's but i will.
If I die in a car accident, it's my own damn fault for getting behind the wheel of a car, no matter who's *fault* it is. Risky behavior by any creature of any intellect can result in death.
Most fish don't swim around dam outlets for a damn good reason. They've learned that they *DIE* there if they get sucked up into the dam pipe.
Birds are more capable than a fish. A bird *should* know better than to swoop down on squirrels around windmills. After 20 years i'm sure the only ones flying into them now are the really stupid ones. The smarter ones have since left for safer feeding ground.
Considering pigeons, which are even dumber than Kestrals, can learn to not only adapt, but *use* cars to their advantage is astounding.
Just because i'm smarter than another person, does that mean I have to go out of my way *protect* that person? Just because a few birds are too stupid, or stubborn to move onto safer feeding ground, does that mean I have to go out of my way to protect them? I don't think so.
Altimont pass is surround by many other places for these birds to feed.
Sure there should be help for handicapped or injured birds, but if a dumb/stubborn one flies into a blender, better off the species I say.
I should have gotten this all in one thread for the mod points but...
You wouldn't even need real fences to contain them. Radio fence collars would work just fine and would be substancially cheaper.
Sort of ironic, but the dogs would be protecting the power source of their radio fence.
The problem is that there are several carnivorous birds (birds of prey) getting caught up in the mills is due mainly to the ground squirrel population.
The bay area has a problem with violent pit bulls. Especially oakland. For the salary of one person, a truck, gas, and poison you could probably afford to maintain an army of 100 the most violent abandoned dogs. (Those that cannot be placed into homes)
You wouldn't even need real fences to contain them. Radio fence collars would work just fine and would be substancially cheaper.
I live in San Jose, very close to altimont pass. I don't watch birds as a hobby, but when I do watch them it's because of my facination with flight.
As sorry as it sounds (22k birds dead) it's plain old Darwinism. Adapt or die basically.
Next time you're near an overpass populated with pigeons, take the time to watch them, and I mean REALLY watch them. I've noticed a behavior these birds have on freeway's I call "Car Surfing"
Lately i've noticed that the pigeons on the highway 17 camden av overpass won't leave thier roost until there are cars passing underneath. I'm guessing the cars going 60mph below them must produce some sort of small air wave, because the birds never seem to smash into them. They swoop down, grab that little updraft of wind from the car below, and get launched another 30-40 feet into the air.
These birds have adapated to having 1ton+ metal boxes moving around their flight path. Not only have they adapted, but they've learned to use it to their advantage.
As far as altimont pass is concerned, i'm sure the ratio of Kestral/Eagles to common birds is pretty low. I would bet the majority of the birds dying are blackbirds or doves. Carnivoires are oppertunistic, living or dead if it's meat they're going to go for it. So i'm sure most of these accidents with the exotic preditors have nothing to do with the windmills, and much to do with the altimont pass groundskeepers not cleaning up the dead carrion. Perhaps if they made it a part of their daily job to toss all the dead birds in the back of their pickup and move them to a safer place for the preditorial birds to eat, we would see less deaths.
Until that happens though, what we will see is a fine example of these birds adapting to their enviroment. The stupid ones will be weeded out of the genepool.
I think we would all like to see more Shatner Star Trek. Either in a starring role or as a director. There is just something TNG-DS9-Voy, ect are just missing from TOS.
I want my captain to be a womanizing manwhore fucking green aliens around the universe. Not some pansy bald headed geriatric who flys around with pinochio and Klingons that have butts on their forheads (we never did find out WHY Klingons had such a drastic change in appearance, other than worf saying "It's something we don't like to talk about")
I could go on and on about what I don't like about the new ST stuff, like Janeway from Voyager, why does she sound like she smokes 2 packs a day, yet we never see her light up? Or why does scott bakula have a dog on enterprise? How come Cisco never puts the beat down on that Ferengi bar he KNOWS would sell out the station for a few bars of gold pressed latinum?
Please....For the love of....God.... Bring us back our captain. With the cost of special effects so cheap these days, i'm sure something really cool could be produced for less than they spend on these new series.
Ya but CCCP can get servers too. On top of that they're located in the bay area, where stuff from chinese boats come in, so our prices out here tend to be a lot cheaper. Apple computer (if they're going that route) is also out here...
And who's bandwidth/location is superior? There might actually be a cost benifit for him (since the space he'll save at his own ISP he could then rent out)
CCCP doesn't just hand it out to anyone. There is a lot of back and forth e-mails between CCCP to qualify if a site is truly non-profit community based.
Ya the name may be funky, but their connections to the world of ISP's could knock a house over.
I'm referring to he.net. Hurricane Electric. (pun was intentional) I think CCCP is sort of a side project for HE. HE also serves as one of mysqls mirrors, and hold local Lug (Linux User Group) meetings on the site, where attendies can attatch their laptops too the local network there (how cool is that? we're talkin over 45mbps pipe!)
You can trust them, so who cares about the name?
I recommend talking to CCCP.
I've had a few e-mail exchanges with the guys that run it, they really do answer
all inquiries and are very friendly. It's not $20k but maybe they can help out somehow.
Several of you took issue with the price comparison, saying that you if you ordered the parts from the cheapest sources and built the Opteron yourself, you could get it for under $3000. I believe you. A do-it-yourself system is much cheaper. But there's no such thing as a build-your-own Power Mac. That's why we compared it to an Opteron from a "we build it for you and guarantee the whole thing" company like Xicomputer.
Under $3000 you say??? And your total was how much??
The total rose to $4107.
Shit, give me a call, I'd even buy a plane ticket and fricken hand deliver it if you allowed me a $1200 dollar markup.
I found it funny that she was advocating downloading and achiving pr0n.
I found it sick that you even considered that thought.
It's CHRISTmas, not TROLLmas you ignorant jack off.
Along with the usual sweaters, socks and underwear I get every year, this year I got something special..
:D
My mother in law excitedly handed me my gift this year with a big grin on her face. I opened the box and what was there?
A seagate Barricuda 7200rpm 120gig hard drive!
"Now you can download more movies and burn them to dvd (vcd)" she says.
Large capacity hard drives, the gift that keeps on giving all year long
Why would you think that recent technology is any more reliable than older stuff?
It's very simple why older stuff is more durable.
When you increase failure tolerances, you increase the chance of a failure. A hard drive with 10 sectors is 10 times more likely to have something go wrong with it than a hard drive with 1 sector (Of course nobody makes a HD that useless, just using it to illustrate my point)
This not only applies to hard drives, but it applies to silicon as well. More transistors on a chip means more places for it to go wrong.
I think there's some murpheys law that says just that. The more complex a machine, the more that can go wrong with it.
I hope people can see this.
Since we suck at seeing blue, couldn't the blue bit depth be reduced in the video codec? Or even a indexed blue pallete with less colors?
That would make for better video compression right?
1. Go to the top of your dorm/office/apartment
2. ????
3. Tiny little peices smashed on the street
wtf are you going to do out in the middle of nowhere with a laptop? Leave the fucking computer at home and spend time actually being outdoors hiking or fishing. Read a book, spend time with your man or woman, anything but a computer.
What if he doesn't know how to be outdoors and he needs the internet for survival tips?
Father bought it as a kit, i was like 5 or 6 at the time, mostly I helped put the keys on the keypad.
For those wondering WTF is a super elf, or what kind of stuff it did, well it could do a lot for the time.
Old man programmed some sort of music synth on it. We also spent hours typing in programs (stuff like that stupid cowbow game) I was too young to understand what was going on internally, I just knew it was the closest thing I had to an atari 2600 at the time.
Dude I got an idea that will totally blow yours away (warning, office space reference coming)
See I want to make this mat, and printed on the map will be different "conclusions" You lay the map down, and you jump as far as you can. Depenending on how far you jump, determines your conclusion.
I call it, jumping to conclusions.
I know a lot of companies use Qbasic for stepper motor control.
here
I remember this one customer who had a PC based stepper motor controller running on a 8088 epson. (They used the machine for routing out a patterns in wood cabinets) Their sysadmin thought it would be a great idea to upgrade it to a 486, after which everthing broke. (well it still worked, but the timing for moving planks on/off the routing table, and cutting the actual design was totally screwed up)
After looking at the Qbasic code, I saw the original programmer did all their timing with for/next loops. AH HA! I said to myself. The faster machine made the loops run faster, thereby screwing up the timing. I just did a best guess and increased the delay in the loop, everything was happy after that.
I think the USB chip in them costs like $5 bucks or something. So it's an added $5 bucks per controller that doesn't really have to be there.
Well, ok it has to be there, but why doesn't gravis make some sort of multitap USB device so they can crank out cheaper joysticks that don't need USB chips in them. Since USB i've noticed most true analog joysticks are using cheaper potentiometers, probably to offset the cost of the USB chip.
He should sue the outsourcing company for slander and libel (since they probably handed his employer a report stating he was a security risk)
Of course it all depends on what context he was fired for. Are we getting the whole story here? Did you do any activities that could be considered a security risk?
If it can walk, it can crawl. It has on board high resolution cameras and wireless networking capabilities.
Send a bunch of them to mars. Have them collect mineral samples to a centralized lab/solar panel/bot recharger. As long as they can survive entry and bouncing around the ground.
It could perform search and assist functions in collapsed buildings. People die of dehydration in those situations. Send QRIO down there to crawl around the rubble (although dogs/humans are cheaper)
It could run the pullstring through the rafters or under the floorboards when I install cat5 runs.
I could remotely control it from home and never have to go into the office again. If someone needs me to look at something, I simply have them place the QRIO in front of the monitor/keyboard and type stuff out.
Wow, these are less than the price of a new car, and I could "rent" them to corporations who wanted to outsource their IT departments. An army of QRIOs controlled by some sweatshop labor in india, i'll make a mint!