I have this episode sitting on my TiVo right now, and you're almost right. This is one of my favorite NTZ eps, so allow me to summarize:
The wife and kid are out of town at a relative's house.
The nuclear detonation is from an accident at a nearby airbase while the crews were preparing the planes in case of war.
The 'scavengers' Joe Mantegna and his buddy hear are actually recovery crews looking for survivors, and bulldozing the contaminated rubble into as small an area as possible prior to encasing it in the concrete dome later to be known as the "Peace Dome."
Eventually Joe Mantegna's buddy goes stir crazy and leaves the shelter, against Mantegna's wishes. He later returns and begs for readmission to the shelter, but Mantegna refuses because the buddy is now contaminated.
The ending is great-- the camera focuses in on Joe Mantegna, sitting alone in his shelter/tomb... it slowly pulls back, 'through' the door and into the dead world outside. Mantegna's buddy is lying dead outside the door, IIRC. We get to see a lot of blackened rubble and destroyed cars (think the scenes from 2029 in the Terminator flicks), and it's dark as night. The camera keeps pulling back, and then goes through another wall, and boom, suddenly there's birds singing, green grass, blue sky, and sunshine. Cut to a reporter who fills the audience in on the Peace Dome. Then we see the wife and kid. Presumably the wife knows Mantegna is still in there, but has decided that since he was so overbearing and loved the shelter so much, she'll just let him die in it so she can be free.
...is the first book ever to be published that could fit on a single Post-It note-- with an 18-point typeface.
Re:Logitech leaving out us Lefties!
on
Hardware Bytes
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Have you thought of the logistics involved in this? Mfg's would have two designs for each model of mouse that supports this.
It is not a logistical nightmare, it's been done before. Logitech used to have most if not all of their "-handed" mice in versions for lefties and righties-- up until the early to mid 1990's. I don't remember if they did this, but I would think just an "R" or "L" somewhere in the part number would take care of the problem of telling them apart for inventory management.
A nice, obvious "LEFT HANDED" or "RIGHT HANDED" sticker on the box should take care of most of the retarded-customer issues (but there will always be a few lunkheads who don't notice the sticker).
Since lefties are about 10% of the population, vendors would simply order about 1/10 as many lefty mice as righty, and everyone would be happy.
I would imagine Logitech doesn't make two version of their mice anymore for the same reason you can't find a [Logitech-made] OS X driver for any of their webcams... they've gotten cheap and lazy and don't want to serve everyone-- just the lowest common denominator (righties and Windows users).
The current model is cool, but like the reviewer, I want more features-- a little more intelligence and autonomy, for one thing.
I'd like it to be able to locate and drive into its recharger when it's done. I'd like it to be able to empty its own dirt cup. A decent solution for both issues above would be to make the recharger a raised platform with a small ramp the Roomba must negotiate. Have dirt cup open from underneath like a railroad hopper car, and let it empty into a larger dirt receptacle beneath the recharger that I could dump out weekly.
I'd also like to be able to set it to run only when I'm at work, and to set it do do high-traffic rooms more often than others.
Additionally, I'd like Roomba to be a little smarter about where it's been-- maybe have an option to load a floorplan into it, and have it 'know' where it is relative to its recharger station at all times during its run.
I'd be more than willing to pay $400-500 for such a beast.
~Philly
Read each other's thoughts??? Ugh!
on
Christmas in 2050
·
· Score: 3, Funny
There might be technology allowing us to read each others minds...
Great... I can envision myself being bankrupted the first time I get a song stuck in my head for an entire day-- because I'm sure the RIAA will buy the laws to make them privy to my thoughts, and will demand a licensing fee for each separate instance that I thought about the song.
John Hammond: All major theme parks have delays. When they opened Disneyland in 1956, nothing worked. Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, but John, if the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists.
I'm so glad Disney will be filling in the 'malfunctioning attraction consumes tourists' void that has been present in their theme parks. Let's all cross our fingers and hope they program the t-rex with a taste for laywers!
I dumped my Comcast cable modem for SpeakEasy DSL just about a year ago, and I've never been happier with an ISP.
I've never had an outage, I can (and do) run servers in my house to handle my own mail, www, etc. Their phone reps are courteous and don't suffer total brain shutdown when I mention the magic sentence, "I'm using a Mac."-- not that I've needed support beyond a little help sorting out a password issue when I wanted to configure the INCLUDED dial-up access in case I needed it.
When I needed an additional IP address last year, I called them up and had one in a couple minutes. I just upgraded my service from 608K down/128K up to 1.5M down/384K up, and it was not a hassle at all. Since my employer chips in $50/month of my ISP charges, this higher speed service now costs me $40 per month, the same I was paying a year ago for my cable modem with all of its restrictions.
To all Slashgeeks who are able: If you have a choice, go with SpeakEasy-- you won't regret it!
Back in 1999 at my last job, one of our clients had us order them a huge plasma display. They had nowhere to store it while waiting for the custom roadie case to be built that it was going to be riding in while it travelled to different trade shows around the country, so we hung on to it and, uh, "tested" it for them.
One day, a video crew came to shoot some tape of our execs for some promotional video or something they were putting together. We didn't have a really cool backdrop, so we were asked to set up the plasma display and just put a huge company logo on the screen, and the talking heads would have that behind them.
The shoot went almost all day. When they left, I went in to take apart what we rigged up for them. When I powered off the plasma display, I was startled to see that the company logo had burned in.
If memory serves, the burn-in faded a bit over time (with further use of the unit) and was no longer noticable-- this happened after the roadie case finally showed up, but the client changed their minds and tried to weasel out of the expense and stick us with a display we didn't need.
I actually submitted this one to Wired last week when they originally posted the request for submissions.
Those fuckwits at Quark have been pissing on their customers for years, and now they're making my life harder because I have to deal with supporting the Classic environment instead of being able to make a clean break to OS X.
I've heard that this way-overdue version of XPress has been the final straw for many of Quark's customers, and they're finally dropping XPress for Adobe InDesign. Quark's customer-hostility has done more to sell copies of InDesign than anything dreamed up by the folks in Marketing at Adobe.
Yes, that's one of the ones I linked to in my original post-- I've read that, and its sequel, "Rising Storm." Both were very good.
The "Dark Futures" book by the other author I mentioned is interesting in another way... it has two timelines told in alternating chapters: One that diverges from T2 in that Sarah *didn't* go after Miles Dyson, and she and John just went into hiding, and Judgment Day happened as foretold; another that picks up the story in 2001 after the successful destruction of Dyson's work-- Sarah and John are living their lives quietly in South America after preventing Judgment Day, but then one day some strange people come calling...
Mr. Cameron, I thought you could do better than that.
James Cameron is sitting this one out, AFAIK. He didn't direct this one, and I think he only got writing credit on the IMDB listing because he has to, since he created the characters.
I think he felt there was no need for another sequel. To a degree, I agree with him. But on the other hand, I'm looking forward to checking out the continuation of the story on the big screen.
I'm so dying for a continuation of the story, in fact, that I've devoured the books that have been written to do so. There are two so far by S.M.Stirling, and one so far by Russell Blackford. They are not related to what's going to happen in Terminator 3, they take different paths. Having read all of them, it takes a little effort to keep the storylines straight. But it's definitely worth it-- the books make reference to the most minute details mentioned or seen in the movies, which (obsessive Terminator fan that I am) I find very satisfying.
This was available for the Atari 2600, and called "Circus Atari." The Sears-branded version was called simply "Circus." It was a paddle game, kind of fun.
I'm sure there's a 2600 emulator floating around the net somewhere, and a ROM dump of every cart ever made for the Atari wouldn't make a dent in a Zip disk's capacity.
There was nothing more fun than smacking the computer players into an oil patch or off the track.
Spoken like someone who's never played the later games in the Road Rash series (on Genesis, or even better, 3DO). Don't get me wrong, I liked Excitebike a lot at one time-- but taking a pipe, chain, or nunchucks to the head of one of your fellow riders, or kicking him/her into the path of an oncoming car, is much more enjoyable.:-)
Depends... if everything is in good shape you might be able to get a fair price on eBay for the whole thing, for someone who is just starting out collecting and wants the (presumably) large amount of commons you (likely) have.
You might want to jot down the game titles and do a little Googling (be sure to check rec.games.video.classic) and see if you've got any hidden gems that are actually worth something by themselves.
Oh, God, I remember the Sears "Wishbook" (dunno if that was the official name, but that's what everyone I knew called it)-- thick as a mid-sized city's yellow pages, and chock full of holiday dreams.... man, that takes me back.
It is definitely not around anymore, though-- I don't remember what year it was when they stopped producing it, but I remember it was a news item when they did. That day, I mourned the loss of yet another small slice of my childhood.
...people are offended by their God damned intrusiveness. When I hit a web page, I want the key information on that page to hit me between the eyes as soon as the page loads-- but on many pages there are so many friggin' ads at the top of the page that I have to scroll down to see any more than an article headline.
ZDNet, with their disappearing, content-shifting, HUGE-ASS, in-page popup particularly draws my ire. That stupid thing never vanishes and makes the content move until I'm about to click on a link to a story I want to read-- then of course, the link is no longer under my cursor and the click either doesn't register or brings up a different page that I don't want to read. This is almost as bright an idea as Microsoft's 'disappearing unused menu items'.
If the IAB's conclusion is that bigger = more effective, then the IAB must be made up entirely of people who think that foreigners will suddenly understand English if you speak it slowly and loudly enough while talking to them. Idiots.
I have a Panasonic VCR from 1987 (normal -sized front-loader, but this was still way back when you had to manually tune in each preset channel) that still worked fine until a couple years ago. I had it in my office at work, and I think it ate a power surge one weekend when some strong thunderstorms rolled through. I can't bring myself to throw it out-- one of these days I may crack it open and see if there's anything I can do to bring it back from the dead.
I just sold my very first component CD player, also a 1987 Panasonic model, on eBay. It still works great.
I've got a Zenith 19" color TV from 1983 that is still going strong, as well.
Conversely, my 1995 Sony component MiniDisc player that I also just sold on eBay had to go out for repair when it was barely more than a year old. My Sony shelf system from 1994 had to be fixed once as well, and so did two of a Sony cordless phone/answering machine combo that I had that dated back to 1992. I've got a 1994 25" RCA TV in my bedroom that is starting to fail.
By my experience, one could draw the conclusion that 80's = good, 90's = crap.
Slashdot Mirror
I have this episode sitting on my TiVo right now, and you're almost right. This is one of my favorite NTZ eps, so allow me to summarize:
The wife and kid are out of town at a relative's house.
The nuclear detonation is from an accident at a nearby airbase while the crews were preparing the planes in case of war.
The 'scavengers' Joe Mantegna and his buddy hear are actually recovery crews looking for survivors, and bulldozing the contaminated rubble into as small an area as possible prior to encasing it in the concrete dome later to be known as the "Peace Dome."
Eventually Joe Mantegna's buddy goes stir crazy and leaves the shelter, against Mantegna's wishes. He later returns and begs for readmission to the shelter, but Mantegna refuses because the buddy is now contaminated.
The ending is great-- the camera focuses in on Joe Mantegna, sitting alone in his shelter/tomb... it slowly pulls back, 'through' the door and into the dead world outside. Mantegna's buddy is lying dead outside the door, IIRC. We get to see a lot of blackened rubble and destroyed cars (think the scenes from 2029 in the Terminator flicks), and it's dark as night. The camera keeps pulling back, and then goes through another wall, and boom, suddenly there's birds singing, green grass, blue sky, and sunshine. Cut to a reporter who fills the audience in on the Peace Dome. Then we see the wife and kid. Presumably the wife knows Mantegna is still in there, but has decided that since he was so overbearing and loved the shelter so much, she'll just let him die in it so she can be free.
~Philly
I haven't used that particular drive, but I can tell you that I've never had a problem with a LaCie product.
~Philly
...is the first book ever to be published that could fit on a single Post-It note-- with an 18-point typeface.
Have you thought of the logistics involved in this? Mfg's would have two designs for each model of mouse that supports this.
It is not a logistical nightmare, it's been done before. Logitech used to have most if not all of their "-handed" mice in versions for lefties and righties-- up until the early to mid 1990's. I don't remember if they did this, but I would think just an "R" or "L" somewhere in the part number would take care of the problem of telling them apart for inventory management.
A nice, obvious "LEFT HANDED" or "RIGHT HANDED" sticker on the box should take care of most of the retarded-customer issues (but there will always be a few lunkheads who don't notice the sticker).
Since lefties are about 10% of the population, vendors would simply order about 1/10 as many lefty mice as righty, and everyone would be happy.
I would imagine Logitech doesn't make two version of their mice anymore for the same reason you can't find a [Logitech-made] OS X driver for any of their webcams... they've gotten cheap and lazy and don't want to serve everyone-- just the lowest common denominator (righties and Windows users).
~Philly
The current model is cool, but like the reviewer, I want more features-- a little more intelligence and autonomy, for one thing.
I'd like it to be able to locate and drive into its recharger when it's done.
I'd like it to be able to empty its own dirt cup.
A decent solution for both issues above would be to make the recharger a raised platform with a small ramp the Roomba must negotiate. Have dirt cup open from underneath like a railroad hopper car, and let it empty into a larger dirt receptacle beneath the recharger that I could dump out weekly.
I'd also like to be able to set it to run only when I'm at work, and to set it do do high-traffic rooms more often than others.
Additionally, I'd like Roomba to be a little smarter about where it's been-- maybe have an option to load a floorplan into it, and have it 'know' where it is relative to its recharger station at all times during its run.
I'd be more than willing to pay $400-500 for such a beast.
~Philly
There might be technology allowing us to read each others minds...
Great... I can envision myself being bankrupted the first time I get a song stuck in my head for an entire day-- because I'm sure the RIAA will buy the laws to make them privy to my thoughts, and will demand a licensing fee for each separate instance that I thought about the song.
~Philly
...given the unabashed greed of the music industry, we'll probably have to pay every time our cell phones ring when a copyrighted ringtone is used.
"Quick! Answer it on the first ring or it's another dollar to the RIAA!"
~Philly
Personally, this reminds me of the little green blobs on the covers of the Hitchhiker's Guide books.
You mean, this guy? Yeah, that was my first thought, too.
Someone should fashion an add-on kit of two posable arms and an adhesive mouth-with-stuck-out-tongue, and sell it to fans of the HHGTTG books.
~Philly
Hit the wrong 'reply' link.
This should be a reply to this post.
~Philly
That's funny. I'm on a Mac and yet my mouse has two buttons and a scroll wheel that can be a 3rd button.
And what are these "floppies" of which you speak?
~Philly
John Hammond: All major theme parks have delays. When they opened Disneyland in 1956, nothing worked.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, but John, if the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists.
I'm so glad Disney will be filling in the 'malfunctioning attraction consumes tourists' void that has been present in their theme parks.
Let's all cross our fingers and hope they program the t-rex with a taste for laywers!
~Philly
I dumped my Comcast cable modem for SpeakEasy DSL just about a year ago, and I've never been happier with an ISP.
I've never had an outage, I can (and do) run servers in my house to handle my own mail, www, etc. Their phone reps are courteous and don't suffer total brain shutdown when I mention the magic sentence, "I'm using a Mac."-- not that I've needed support beyond a little help sorting out a password issue when I wanted to configure the INCLUDED dial-up access in case I needed it.
When I needed an additional IP address last year, I called them up and had one in a couple minutes. I just upgraded my service from 608K down/128K up to 1.5M down/384K up, and it was not a hassle at all. Since my employer chips in $50/month of my ISP charges, this higher speed service now costs me $40 per month, the same I was paying a year ago for my cable modem with all of its restrictions.
To all Slashgeeks who are able: If you have a choice, go with SpeakEasy-- you won't regret it!
~Philly
Back in 1999 at my last job, one of our clients had us order them a huge plasma display. They had nowhere to store it while waiting for the custom roadie case to be built that it was going to be riding in while it travelled to different trade shows around the country, so we hung on to it and, uh, "tested" it for them.
One day, a video crew came to shoot some tape of our execs for some promotional video or something they were putting together. We didn't have a really cool backdrop, so we were asked to set up the plasma display and just put a huge company logo on the screen, and the talking heads would have that behind them.
The shoot went almost all day. When they left, I went in to take apart what we rigged up for them. When I powered off the plasma display, I was startled to see that the company logo had burned in.
If memory serves, the burn-in faded a bit over time (with further use of the unit) and was no longer noticable-- this happened after the roadie case finally showed up, but the client changed their minds and tried to weasel out of the expense and stick us with a display we didn't need.
~Philly
'Serious' one: "Colossus World Control Headquarters" (or something very close to this, I haven't seen the movie in a while.)
Funny one: "Home of the WOPR"
~Philly
I actually submitted this one to Wired last week when they originally posted the request for submissions.
Those fuckwits at Quark have been pissing on their customers for years, and now they're making my life harder because I have to deal with supporting the Classic environment instead of being able to make a clean break to OS X.
I've heard that this way-overdue version of XPress has been the final straw for many of Quark's customers, and they're finally dropping XPress for Adobe InDesign. Quark's customer-hostility has done more to sell copies of InDesign than anything dreamed up by the folks in Marketing at Adobe.
~Philly
Yes, that's one of the ones I linked to in my original post-- I've read that, and its sequel, "Rising Storm." Both were very good.
The "Dark Futures" book by the other author I mentioned is interesting in another way... it has two timelines told in alternating chapters: One that diverges from T2 in that Sarah *didn't* go after Miles Dyson, and she and John just went into hiding, and Judgment Day happened as foretold; another that picks up the story in 2001 after the successful destruction of Dyson's work-- Sarah and John are living their lives quietly in South America after preventing Judgment Day, but then one day some strange people come calling...
~Philly
Mr. Cameron, I thought you could do better than that.
James Cameron is sitting this one out, AFAIK. He didn't direct this one, and I think he only got writing credit on the IMDB listing because he has to, since he created the characters.
I think he felt there was no need for another sequel. To a degree, I agree with him. But on the other hand, I'm looking forward to checking out the continuation of the story on the big screen.
I'm so dying for a continuation of the story, in fact, that I've devoured the books that have been written to do so. There are two so far by S.M. Stirling, and one so far by Russell Blackford. They are not related to what's going to happen in Terminator 3, they take different paths. Having read all of them, it takes a little effort to keep the storylines straight. But it's definitely worth it-- the books make reference to the most minute details mentioned or seen in the movies, which (obsessive Terminator fan that I am) I find very satisfying.
~Philly
This was available for the Atari 2600, and called "Circus Atari." The Sears-branded version was called simply "Circus." It was a paddle game, kind of fun.
I'm sure there's a 2600 emulator floating around the net somewhere, and a ROM dump of every cart ever made for the Atari wouldn't make a dent in a Zip disk's capacity.
~Philly
There was nothing more fun than smacking the computer players into an oil patch or off the track.
:-)
Spoken like someone who's never played the later games in the Road Rash series (on Genesis, or even better, 3DO). Don't get me wrong, I liked Excitebike a lot at one time-- but taking a pipe, chain, or nunchucks to the head of one of your fellow riders, or kicking him/her into the path of an oncoming car, is much more enjoyable.
~Philly
Depends... if everything is in good shape you might be able to get a fair price on eBay for the whole thing, for someone who is just starting out collecting and wants the (presumably) large amount of commons you (likely) have.
You might want to jot down the game titles and do a little Googling (be sure to check rec.games.video.classic) and see if you've got any hidden gems that are actually worth something by themselves.
~Philly
I've always wanted to put one on an 'up' escalator at a mall or something.
~Philly
Oh, God, I remember the Sears "Wishbook" (dunno if that was the official name, but that's what everyone I knew called it)-- thick as a mid-sized city's yellow pages, and chock full of holiday dreams.... man, that takes me back.
It is definitely not around anymore, though-- I don't remember what year it was when they stopped producing it, but I remember it was a news item when they did. That day, I mourned the loss of yet another small slice of my childhood.
~Philly
Will version II of the suit also screw up your short-term memory and give you bad skin?
No, but it will make you afraid to drive faster than 25mph, and you'll have the turn signal on all the time whether you're turning or not.
~Philly
...people are offended by their God damned intrusiveness. When I hit a web page, I want the key information on that page to hit me between the eyes as soon as the page loads-- but on many pages there are so many friggin' ads at the top of the page that I have to scroll down to see any more than an article headline.
ZDNet, with their disappearing, content-shifting, HUGE-ASS, in-page popup particularly draws my ire. That stupid thing never vanishes and makes the content move until I'm about to click on a link to a story I want to read-- then of course, the link is no longer under my cursor and the click either doesn't register or brings up a different page that I don't want to read. This is almost as bright an idea as Microsoft's 'disappearing unused menu items'.
If the IAB's conclusion is that bigger = more effective, then the IAB must be made up entirely of people who think that foreigners will suddenly understand English if you speak it slowly and loudly enough while talking to them. Idiots.
~Philly
I have a Panasonic VCR from 1987 (normal -sized front-loader, but this was still way back when you had to manually tune in each preset channel) that still worked fine until a couple years ago. I had it in my office at work, and I think it ate a power surge one weekend when some strong thunderstorms rolled through. I can't bring myself to throw it out-- one of these days I may crack it open and see if there's anything I can do to bring it back from the dead.
I just sold my very first component CD player, also a 1987 Panasonic model, on eBay. It still works great.
I've got a Zenith 19" color TV from 1983 that is still going strong, as well.
Conversely, my 1995 Sony component MiniDisc player that I also just sold on eBay had to go out for repair when it was barely more than a year old. My Sony shelf system from 1994 had to be fixed once as well, and so did two of a Sony cordless phone/answering machine combo that I had that dated back to 1992. I've got a 1994 25" RCA TV in my bedroom that is starting to fail.
By my experience, one could draw the conclusion that 80's = good, 90's = crap.
~Philly