And as an addendum, "optical" applies of course to not only visible light, but infrared as well. This seems obvious to you and me, but a lot of people don't make the connection right away.
Well, some infrared. But, yes, I've come to think of everything shorter than 1 micron as "optical" even though our eye can't see all of that.
...every other optical telescope in the world nowadays.
CCDs did more to revolutionize astronomy in the 20th century than the Hubble Space Telescope did. They enabled the HST, but also effectively multiplied the size of all ground-based telescopes by a factor of 10-- although it's not so simple as that, as CCDs provide a host of other advantages really making quantitative imaging possible.
CCDs were huge for astronomy. The "CCD revolution" in the 80's (at least 10 years before most people had really heard of digital cameras) made a big difference.
That might finally stem some of the tide of people in Astronomy using Macs for everything... they'd then have to seriously consider Linux if they wanted something to be Unix-based.
It would also remove Apple as the "other" platform. Right now, if asked "do you only support Windows," most people will say, "Oh, yeah, we support Macs too, so we support everybody." With Mac down the tubes, there is another obvious "second" desktop platform.... (And, by support, I'm not so much interested in software as I am in Internet hookups, going places and being able to hook in my laptop to a display, etc.)
Too bad the whole thing is just one crack delusion.
The Cambridge University team expects to submit the first of its results to a leading astrophysics journal in the next few weeks.
I don't like this "press release before publication" mode of doing science. It's all about making sure that you get the attention and public recognition, and not about propery distributing the results so that others can understand and evaluate what you've done. Alas, it seems that Marketing Is All in the modern world, and not just in the USA any more. You can be sure that the institutions who house these scientists love to get the attention and so forth.
I'd be happier if the paper had already been accepted by some real journal, with a preprint available on www.arxiv.org. As it is... we have a press release and a pop-sci article about an intersting result that's hard to truly evaluate. The article is mostly good and sounds reliable, but in my experience these pop-sci articles usually get something wrong. (For instance, even though 10,000 degrees sounds "hot", given the likely mass of the Dark Matter particle, it still is "cold" in the cosmological sense of "cold dark matter", which really means "nonrelativistic dark matter". I'm not sure how much of a surprise that temperature is, but it's probably not enough to make CDM wrong.)
It's always fun to watch people on Slashdot without a clue what they're talking about dismiss so much of our current understanding of cosmology with such an unjustified supercilious attitude.
I was hoping that this would provide some real evidence for Dark Matter. I have a problem with something so massive which, as far as I can see, is invented to explain a single fact: the anomalously fast rotation of galaxies....and the anomolously high velocity dispersion of clusters, and matter evolution models that go from the observed fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background to the observed distribution of matter today, and the anomalous amount of gravitational lensing seen in various cluters...
The galaxy rotation curves are the cleanest and best piece of evidence, but there's a lot of evidence for dark matter. It's a major paradigm in astronomy, without which quite a number of things would be lacking an explanation.
Then there are games like that dreadful Lord of the Rings series on the X-Box, which seem to be 90% cut scenes (and those are actually just low-ish resolution clips from the movie.) Bleah.
C'mon, there was plenty of mindless button-mashing in between the cut scenes....
Governments and large industry consortia are unhappy because Google is offering too much individual freedom....
Civil liberties advocates are unahppy because Google is collaborating with a government to restrict individual freedom....
I am grouchy about what Google is doing in China, but this article does give me pause. I'd rather see Google survive and take on all those other repressive forces (which are hard at work in democratic countries to convince us that we have to be restricted from information to protect ourselves and to protect our economies) than have it go down because of its evil work in China. (What I'd really like to see is Google stand up to China and stand up to all of the others, but oh well. Google is a publicly traded company now, so it really is just a matter of time until "Don't be evil" turns into "evil, good, whatever, just maximize shareholder value.")
OK. Lots of discussion about who's fault it is, etc. etc.
Here's the question I have: what card or cards *do work*, *without ndiswrapper*. (I don't want to use binary-only windows drivers. Please don't engage in a philosophical discussion, because there's lots of that above. Just take it as a boundary condition.)
Several years ago, when I asked this question, the answer was get the Lucent Orinoco Gold cards. There were some others that worked as well, but those you could know would work. Unfortunately, Lucent sold the Orinoco name, so there are now cards out there under that name that aren't the same thing, but if you can find a Lucent Orinoco gold card, that's a working 802.11b card.
What cards work with *free drivers* and minimum hassle? 802.11b? 802.11g? I'm particularly interested in PCMCIA cards. Right now, if I had to get another wireless card, I'd probably go ebaying for an old Lucent Orinoco card... which doesn't help with 802.11g, of course. There are a *lot* of cards out there, and most of them don't work with Linux. But some must; which ones are they?
FAQs on wireless with Linux should very clearly say, "Just buy one of these!" Distributions ought to maintain that list for their distribution, ideally.
This is what we used to do in the good old days with video cards (and still do, if we want 3D, which is yet another sob story that goes along with wireless), ethernet cards, sound cards, and so forth.
As long as I continue to get Microsoft Word files in the E-mail when text would have sufficied, or (when not) instead of something generically supported like PDF, *and* when people look at me funny when I try to explain that Microsoft Word isn't a general format (doesn't everybody have Word? it comes with all computers now!), Microsoft will effectively be a monopoly.
When I can request that that particular proprietary format not be used as the only or default format for broadcast E-mails without being seen as a zealot, then Microsoft may no longer be (effectively) a monopoly.
The same goes to some extent for PowerPoint files. It bugs me to no end that at scientific conferences, we're told we must use PowerPoint.
A movie's greatness is not, in my opinion, directly proportional to how "hard-hitting" it is.
No, but in the right movie, it can help. It helped in this movie.
Anyone who thinks that characters need to die in order to make a movie plausible has a very warped sense of reality.
Anyone who thinks that reality is what makes for a good film has a warped sense of cinema. Plausibility, often. Verisimilitude, often. But reality: almost never.
This movie was good, in my opinion, and the fact that the characters had to sacrifice two of their loved and treasured companions while going through hell to do what they needed to do is part of what made the movie good. It made it even more powerful for those of us who had a pre-existing connection ourselves to the characters through the series Firefly. And, no, it wasn't the best thing if you wanted to make more movies and TV shows with Wash in it, but in retrospect that wasn't even going to happen anyway! And if it was... well, loss can still make for good film.
Who can tell me? The Best Releases of Xbox - call it the best 50 - what are they?
Of the games I've played, here are some of my favorites. Note that your tastes may well not match mine, so you may like some I didn't, and dislike some I did.
Must haves: All three of the Grand Theft Auto series. These are probably my favorite.
Halo and Halo 2. Both are excellent, the latter is a very well-done networked FPS. Halo (the first one) was notable to me as a well done FPS, with cut scene-to-action transitions nearly seamless, a good save/checkpoint system that was non-intrusive yet useful, and good NPC AI. The second one likewise.
Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel, and Jade Empire. (JE was made by the same company as KOTOR, and feels similar in some ways.) These are RPGs, not so much action based (although some of JE is), so if that's not your thing, you won't like them. But they're extremely engrossing.
Splinter Cell. A third-person sneaker. I haven't played either of the two sequels, but will eventually. Excellent.
Morrowind. Some didn't like it; I really did.
Madden. I've played more 2004 than 2005. If you like football, this is great. If you don't care for football, give it a pass.
Burnout 3. Great racing game.
Star Wars Battlefront.
Ones to Miss: Return of the King. It got rated well and a lot of people like it, but I found it to be just a button-masher, and irritating as a result,
Enter the Matrix. It's not bad, but there are better games out there. It is kind of neat to see the extra movie footage with the characters from Matrix Reloaded, and to see the additional continuity that does fit into (and is referred to) in the movies, but the gameplay isn't quite good enough to live up to it all.
Fable. OK, I did kinda like this one. But it just doesn't live up nearly to the standard set by KOTOR, KOTOR II, and JE. Only play this one if you're really a computer RPG junkie and just want more.
Ones I'm Lukewarm about: D&D Dark Alliance. A third-person shooter, really. Sort of has a roleplaying element to it, that gets thinner as you go along. It entertained me, but I guess I should probably have ranked it below Fable. (Fable's hype downgraded it for me.)
Rainbox Six 3. Again, it's pretty fun, and a lot of people like it a lot, but I wouldn't rank it as a "must see". When it comes to Tom Clancy genre games, I enjoyed Splinter Cell more.
As a confirmed video game junkie I have mixed feelings toward the "next generation" consoles. I don't think that we've really maxed out the current generation yet, especially the xbox, but now we're moving on. The 360 is at a price point that makes it easier for me to Just Say No, at least for now.
Heh. Yeah, I only got an Xbox after they were $150 and I spent a lot of time rationalizing that it was OK to buy a Microsoft thing. I eventually came up with the dissembling cognitive dissonance-resolver that I'd be happy if Microsoft were to take off as a games company and give up on Windows and all that other stuff that I find so threatening.
But the Xbox 360... well, I got my Xbox late, so there are lots of great games I haven't played yet... and, heck, I could probably enjoy my gaming experience for the next few months with nothing other than the only game I've played for the last month (GTA:SA). Yeah, lots of life left in that thing. I may get a 360 when it's price is low because it's in it's last year of "prime time" life.
I predict that at least for another year, we'll still see a few new games for the Xbox. There are a lot of them out there. Halo 3 and the next Morrowind, no, but I'll bite my patience and wait a few years to play those.
In the UK, from play.com, a complete season of Babylon 5 is £24.99 for 6 DVDs (22 episodes). FireFly is £23.99 for 4 DVDs (14 episodes). The absolute price points are almost the same, and the per-episode price of FireFly is substantially higher. In spite of this, FireFly is still selling more.
Huh. In the US, the B5 seasons go for $80ish new, while the Firefly set goes for $30ish new. There is a clear difference in price. The price/episode is actually fairly close (altough even there, Firefly is a small win), but the absolute price point... well, $80 is a lot to spend all at once on something that's purely fluffly/discretionary/disposable income sort of stuff.
But, damn, the fact that they killed Wash and that they were willing to kill Wash is what gave the movie much of it's power.
I came out of that movie thinking, gee, that was a hard-hitting movie. The fact that Wash got killed, and the way that he did, was in the forefront of my mind when I thought that.
Did I like it that Wash died? No! But I think it helped make for a great film. I didn't like it in the sense that I liked Wash and wanted him not dead... but I didn't think that it made the movie bad, nor did I see it as a slap in the face. Indeed, it made the movie stronger. The depth of the suffering and challenge that the characters went through in that movie would have been more implausible if they all came through it alive. If you aren't ever willing to kill off characters you really care about, then it becomes harder and harder to sustain any thrill or fear for the characters you really care about when watching any movie or series.
Frankly, Firefly fans who saw that as a slap in the face to them wanted not good film and a good story, but wanted to be coddled with warm and fluffy stories of mock danger about their favorite people. It's not really what Whedon does. Watch Star Trek for that kind of thing; there, you only have to worry about a character's life after you've heard about contract disputes or dissatisification with the show on the part of one of the actors.
I had that problem too, i wanted to take someone to see it but it was no where to be found by then. If you dont hammer the box office the first week nowdays you're history. Even with an order of magnatude more screens than the good old days, they dont last any longer than they used to:(
I don't think they last as long as they used to. I remember seeing Radiers of the Lost Ark four times over a long summer vacation when I was a kid. That movie stayed on the big screen for many months. No movie now, no matter how big, stays on the big screen that long. I do admit that I'm speaking from impressions and anecdotal evidence here, but the impression I have is that movies in the theater are far more transient than they used to be. Similarly, the over-hyped "should be a hit" movies are far more common than they used to be.
I might make some comparison to the short-attention-span culture we have going nowadays, where everything must be "right now" and where anything that's older than a few (minutes/days/weeks/months) is considered at best a has-been. But, then, I'm not a sociologist, so I probably don't know what I'm talking about. But, who knows, the fact that a movie must get lots of attention in the first week is probably connected to the fact that a video game has to get lots of sales in the first few weeks, that the shelf life of a new fiction book in bookstores is at best weeks, and that kids these days don't seem to want to pay attention to anything that comes in bursts of longer than 30 seconds.
I would note that with it being a short series, it is substantially less expensive than a full season run of a TV show on DVD. There has to be some sort of price point break that people will be willing to shell out for a shorter series.
I know it's true for me; I bought the firefly DVD's, but haven't bought the B5 DVDs. Partly that's because I taped (on VHS) B5 the first time it was on. But I would like to get those DVDs. I just haven't managed to convince myself I have the disposable cash to blow on it. One of these years, I'll probably buy them used (whereas I bought Firefly new).
If Firefly had lasted a full season, and the DVD costs were proportionately higher, I suspect that it would have sold fewer DVD boxed sets than it has.
Dude, I've been writing Perl for Physics for 13 or so years, and many know many other people who've done similarly.
The goal is not to find the One True Programming Language, nor even to show that what we're using is best. It's to get stuff done in the service of what we are really trying to do. I've got the long-term experience to know that Perl works for that, regardless as to whether or not it offends lots of the rest of you.
I'll agree with you, if you can tell me you've made an honest attempt to try other similarly high-level languages (i.e. not C) and found them wanting.
Not that I need your approval, but: I've written huge things in C and C++. I've written medium-sized things in Java. I've done FORTRAN and Pascal in the past. I've dabbled with LISP. I've written huge things in IDL. I am passingly familiar with Python. I know Perl very well, and have written things of all sizes (well, not so much really huge things, but some moderately large things) in Perl.
And, from all of that experience, if the Physics students only learn one language, I would recommend it be either Perl or Python. Really, I'd love it if they all knew C++ and enough Unix scripting so that Perl was second nature. But if they're just gonna learn one thing-- Perl is about the best choice. Yeah, Python is good too, but other than esoteric arguments of current-approved syntactical correctness that are irrelevant to the common Physics student, there really isn't a strong reason to prefer one over the other.
I'm sorry that my tastest don't meet with your approval. Actually, that's a lie. I really couldn't care less that my tastes don't meet with your approval.
Re: argument to self-authority, I sure as HELL am going to trust my judgement as to what will work well for my students ahead of some bee-in-his-bonnet-Perl-hating Slashdot poster!! These students aren't going to go on to be programmers. They just need to be able to do some basic programming-- loops, reading and writing files, manipulating numbers, that kind of thing. Hell, most physicists above the age of 40 use the worst sort of non-procedural (never mind non-object-oriented) FORTRAN you've ever seen. But even there, they can get stuff done. That's really what it's all about: not being blessed with the Holy Approval of some CS geek or another, but about getting stuff done.
They aren't experiencing weightlessness due to a combination of being in a low orbit (rather than outer space where the weightlessness is)
Augh! I hate it when I see statements like this. This may be technically correct, but the implication is wrong.
Astronauts even in high orbit experience weightlessnes not because they are outside of the influence of the Earth's gravitational field, but because they are in free fall.
The Space Shuttle goes into low Earth orbit, yet the astronauts experience weightlessness. Why? Because the Shuttle is in free fall-- it is falling at a rate that exactly matches the pull of gravity, so the environment around the astronauts (the walls of the shuttle) fall at the same rate as they do. They're also in orbit-- they're falling at just the right rate so that they never hit the ground. (It's reasonably valid to think of it that they are falling towards the ground, but also moving sideways fast enough so that they get out of the way before the hit the ground.)
Hey, I'm not talking "typical desktop users" here. I'm talking Physics graduate students. It's a serious handicap if they don't know some basic programming and don't know their way around the Unix filesystem.
I know and use many programming languages, but Perl is not something that anyone outside of a programming professional "ought to know". If anything, it's the opposite: they ought to stay away from it, and learn a language with a halfway sane syntax and semantics, as opposed to a warmed-over Unixy shell scripting language that went through a brief period of overuse during the dotcom bubble.
Hey, you love your language, I'll love mine.
The truth is that I don't care if they know Perl or something else. I'm not asking professional-level programming here. I'm asking them to Get Shit Done with Unix. Read files, write files, multiply a column of numbers by something else, plot something. It's the sort of stuff I used to do in C back when I was in grad school, but is easier to do in Perl. Perl is a great language for Getting Shit Done for many of us, even if it doesn't satisfy somebody's anal-retentive definition of Proper.
Slashdot Mirror
And as an addendum, "optical" applies of course to not only visible light, but infrared as well. This seems obvious to you and me, but a lot of people don't make the connection right away.
Well, some infrared. But, yes, I've come to think of everything shorter than 1 micron as "optical" even though our eye can't see all of that.
Which 'scope are you at?
-Rob
...every other optical telescope in the world nowadays.
CCDs did more to revolutionize astronomy in the 20th century than the Hubble Space Telescope did. They enabled the HST, but also effectively multiplied the size of all ground-based telescopes by a factor of 10-- although it's not so simple as that, as CCDs provide a host of other advantages really making quantitative imaging possible.
CCDs were huge for astronomy. The "CCD revolution" in the 80's (at least 10 years before most people had really heard of digital cameras) made a big difference.
That might finally stem some of the tide of people in Astronomy using Macs for everything... they'd then have to seriously consider Linux if they wanted something to be Unix-based.
It would also remove Apple as the "other" platform. Right now, if asked "do you only support Windows," most people will say, "Oh, yeah, we support Macs too, so we support everybody." With Mac down the tubes, there is another obvious "second" desktop platform.... (And, by support, I'm not so much interested in software as I am in Internet hookups, going places and being able to hook in my laptop to a display, etc.)
Too bad the whole thing is just one crack delusion.
-Rob
How about the idiots who, for example, think Bush is comparable to Hitler?
Here's one way in which they're comparable: Godwin's Law. Say something about Bush, and it can completely and irrelevantly hijack a thread.
-Rob
Here's what makes me unhappy:
The Cambridge University team expects to submit the first of its results to a leading astrophysics journal in the next few weeks.
I don't like this "press release before publication" mode of doing science. It's all about making sure that you get the attention and public recognition, and not about propery distributing the results so that others can understand and evaluate what you've done. Alas, it seems that Marketing Is All in the modern world, and not just in the USA any more. You can be sure that the institutions who house these scientists love to get the attention and so forth.
I'd be happier if the paper had already been accepted by some real journal, with a preprint available on www.arxiv.org. As it is... we have a press release and a pop-sci article about an intersting result that's hard to truly evaluate. The article is mostly good and sounds reliable, but in my experience these pop-sci articles usually get something wrong. (For instance, even though 10,000 degrees sounds "hot", given the likely mass of the Dark Matter particle, it still is "cold" in the cosmological sense of "cold dark matter", which really means "nonrelativistic dark matter". I'm not sure how much of a surprise that temperature is, but it's probably not enough to make CDM wrong.)
-Rob
It's always fun to watch people on Slashdot without a clue what they're talking about dismiss so much of our current understanding of cosmology with such an unjustified supercilious attitude.
-Rob
I was hoping that this would provide some real evidence for Dark Matter. I have a problem with something so massive which, as far as I can see, is invented to explain a single fact: the anomalously fast rotation of galaxies. ...and the anomolously high velocity dispersion of clusters, and matter evolution models that go from the observed fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background to the observed distribution of matter today, and the anomalous amount of gravitational lensing seen in various cluters...
The galaxy rotation curves are the cleanest and best piece of evidence, but there's a lot of evidence for dark matter. It's a major paradigm in astronomy, without which quite a number of things would be lacking an explanation.
-Rob
Then there are games like that dreadful Lord of the Rings series on the X-Box, which seem to be 90% cut scenes (and those are actually just low-ish resolution clips from the movie.) Bleah.
C'mon, there was plenty of mindless button-mashing in between the cut scenes....
Governments and large industry consortia are unhappy because Google is offering too much individual freedom....
Civil liberties advocates are unahppy because Google is collaborating with a government to restrict individual freedom....
I am grouchy about what Google is doing in China, but this article does give me pause. I'd rather see Google survive and take on all those other repressive forces (which are hard at work in democratic countries to convince us that we have to be restricted from information to protect ourselves and to protect our economies) than have it go down because of its evil work in China. (What I'd really like to see is Google stand up to China and stand up to all of the others, but oh well. Google is a publicly traded company now, so it really is just a matter of time until "Don't be evil" turns into "evil, good, whatever, just maximize shareholder value.")
-Rob
OK. Lots of discussion about who's fault it is, etc. etc.
Here's the question I have: what card or cards *do work*, *without ndiswrapper*. (I don't want to use binary-only windows drivers. Please don't engage in a philosophical discussion, because there's lots of that above. Just take it as a boundary condition.)
Several years ago, when I asked this question, the answer was get the Lucent Orinoco Gold cards. There were some others that worked as well, but those you could know would work. Unfortunately, Lucent sold the Orinoco name, so there are now cards out there under that name that aren't the same thing, but if you can find a Lucent Orinoco gold card, that's a working 802.11b card.
What cards work with *free drivers* and minimum hassle? 802.11b? 802.11g? I'm particularly interested in PCMCIA cards. Right now, if I had to get another wireless card, I'd probably go ebaying for an old Lucent Orinoco card... which doesn't help with 802.11g, of course. There are a *lot* of cards out there, and most of them don't work with Linux. But some must; which ones are they?
FAQs on wireless with Linux should very clearly say, "Just buy one of these!" Distributions ought to maintain that list for their distribution, ideally.
This is what we used to do in the good old days with video cards (and still do, if we want 3D, which is yet another sob story that goes along with wireless), ethernet cards, sound cards, and so forth.
-Rob
As long as I continue to get Microsoft Word files in the E-mail when text would have sufficied, or (when not) instead of something generically supported like PDF, *and* when people look at me funny when I try to explain that Microsoft Word isn't a general format (doesn't everybody have Word? it comes with all computers now!), Microsoft will effectively be a monopoly.
When I can request that that particular proprietary format not be used as the only or default format for broadcast E-mails without being seen as a zealot, then Microsoft may no longer be (effectively) a monopoly.
The same goes to some extent for PowerPoint files. It bugs me to no end that at scientific conferences, we're told we must use PowerPoint.
-Rob
A movie's greatness is not, in my opinion, directly proportional to how "hard-hitting" it is.
No, but in the right movie, it can help. It helped in this movie.
Anyone who thinks that characters need to die in order to make a movie plausible has a very warped sense of reality.
Anyone who thinks that reality is what makes for a good film has a warped sense of cinema. Plausibility, often. Verisimilitude, often. But reality: almost never.
This movie was good, in my opinion, and the fact that the characters had to sacrifice two of their loved and treasured companions while going through hell to do what they needed to do is part of what made the movie good. It made it even more powerful for those of us who had a pre-existing connection ourselves to the characters through the series Firefly. And, no, it wasn't the best thing if you wanted to make more movies and TV shows with Wash in it, but in retrospect that wasn't even going to happen anyway! And if it was... well, loss can still make for good film.
-Rob
Who can tell me? The Best Releases of Xbox - call it the best 50 - what are they?
Of the games I've played, here are some of my favorites. Note that your tastes may well not match mine, so you may like some I didn't, and dislike some I did.
Must haves: All three of the Grand Theft Auto series. These are probably my favorite.
Halo and Halo 2. Both are excellent, the latter is a very well-done networked FPS. Halo (the first one) was notable to me as a well done FPS, with cut scene-to-action transitions nearly seamless, a good save/checkpoint system that was non-intrusive yet useful, and good NPC AI. The second one likewise.
Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel, and Jade Empire. (JE was made by the same company as KOTOR, and feels similar in some ways.) These are RPGs, not so much action based (although some of JE is), so if that's not your thing, you won't like them. But they're extremely engrossing.
Splinter Cell. A third-person sneaker. I haven't played either of the two sequels, but will eventually. Excellent.
Morrowind. Some didn't like it; I really did.
Madden. I've played more 2004 than 2005. If you like football, this is great. If you don't care for football, give it a pass.
Burnout 3. Great racing game.
Star Wars Battlefront.
Ones to Miss: Return of the King. It got rated well and a lot of people like it, but I found it to be just a button-masher, and irritating as a result,
Enter the Matrix. It's not bad, but there are better games out there. It is kind of neat to see the extra movie footage with the characters from Matrix Reloaded, and to see the additional continuity that does fit into (and is referred to) in the movies, but the gameplay isn't quite good enough to live up to it all.
Fable. OK, I did kinda like this one. But it just doesn't live up nearly to the standard set by KOTOR, KOTOR II, and JE. Only play this one if you're really a computer RPG junkie and just want more.
Ones I'm Lukewarm about: D&D Dark Alliance. A third-person shooter, really. Sort of has a roleplaying element to it, that gets thinner as you go along. It entertained me, but I guess I should probably have ranked it below Fable. (Fable's hype downgraded it for me.)
Rainbox Six 3. Again, it's pretty fun, and a lot of people like it a lot, but I wouldn't rank it as a "must see". When it comes to Tom Clancy genre games, I enjoyed Splinter Cell more.
All just IMHO.
-Rob
As a confirmed video game junkie I have mixed feelings toward the "next generation" consoles. I don't think that we've really maxed out the current generation yet, especially the xbox, but now we're moving on. The 360 is at a price point that makes it easier for me to Just Say No, at least for now.
Heh. Yeah, I only got an Xbox after they were $150 and I spent a lot of time rationalizing that it was OK to buy a Microsoft thing. I eventually came up with the dissembling cognitive dissonance-resolver that I'd be happy if Microsoft were to take off as a games company and give up on Windows and all that other stuff that I find so threatening.
But the Xbox 360... well, I got my Xbox late, so there are lots of great games I haven't played yet... and, heck, I could probably enjoy my gaming experience for the next few months with nothing other than the only game I've played for the last month (GTA:SA). Yeah, lots of life left in that thing. I may get a 360 when it's price is low because it's in it's last year of "prime time" life.
I predict that at least for another year, we'll still see a few new games for the Xbox. There are a lot of them out there. Halo 3 and the next Morrowind, no, but I'll bite my patience and wait a few years to play those.
-Rob
In the UK, from play.com, a complete season of Babylon 5 is £24.99 for 6 DVDs (22 episodes). FireFly is £23.99 for 4 DVDs (14 episodes). The absolute price points are almost the same, and the per-episode price of FireFly is substantially higher. In spite of this, FireFly is still selling more.
Huh. In the US, the B5 seasons go for $80ish new, while the Firefly set goes for $30ish new. There is a clear difference in price. The price/episode is actually fairly close (altough even there, Firefly is a small win), but the absolute price point... well, $80 is a lot to spend all at once on something that's purely fluffly/discretionary/disposable income sort of stuff.
-Rob
But, damn, the fact that they killed Wash and that they were willing to kill Wash is what gave the movie much of it's power.
I came out of that movie thinking, gee, that was a hard-hitting movie. The fact that Wash got killed, and the way that he did, was in the forefront of my mind when I thought that.
Did I like it that Wash died? No! But I think it helped make for a great film. I didn't like it in the sense that I liked Wash and wanted him not dead... but I didn't think that it made the movie bad, nor did I see it as a slap in the face. Indeed, it made the movie stronger. The depth of the suffering and challenge that the characters went through in that movie would have been more implausible if they all came through it alive. If you aren't ever willing to kill off characters you really care about, then it becomes harder and harder to sustain any thrill or fear for the characters you really care about when watching any movie or series.
Frankly, Firefly fans who saw that as a slap in the face to them wanted not good film and a good story, but wanted to be coddled with warm and fluffy stories of mock danger about their favorite people. It's not really what Whedon does. Watch Star Trek for that kind of thing; there, you only have to worry about a character's life after you've heard about contract disputes or dissatisification with the show on the part of one of the actors.
-Rob
I had that problem too, i wanted to take someone to see it but it was no where to be found by then. If you dont hammer the box office the first week nowdays you're history. Even with an order of magnatude more screens than the good old days, they dont last any longer than they used to :(
I don't think they last as long as they used to. I remember seeing Radiers of the Lost Ark four times over a long summer vacation when I was a kid. That movie stayed on the big screen for many months. No movie now, no matter how big, stays on the big screen that long. I do admit that I'm speaking from impressions and anecdotal evidence here, but the impression I have is that movies in the theater are far more transient than they used to be. Similarly, the over-hyped "should be a hit" movies are far more common than they used to be.
I might make some comparison to the short-attention-span culture we have going nowadays, where everything must be "right now" and where anything that's older than a few (minutes/days/weeks/months) is considered at best a has-been. But, then, I'm not a sociologist, so I probably don't know what I'm talking about. But, who knows, the fact that a movie must get lots of attention in the first week is probably connected to the fact that a video game has to get lots of sales in the first few weeks, that the shelf life of a new fiction book in bookstores is at best weeks, and that kids these days don't seem to want to pay attention to anything that comes in bursts of longer than 30 seconds.
-Rob
I would note that with it being a short series, it is substantially less expensive than a full season run of a TV show on DVD. There has to be some sort of price point break that people will be willing to shell out for a shorter series.
I know it's true for me; I bought the firefly DVD's, but haven't bought the B5 DVDs. Partly that's because I taped (on VHS) B5 the first time it was on. But I would like to get those DVDs. I just haven't managed to convince myself I have the disposable cash to blow on it. One of these years, I'll probably buy them used (whereas I bought Firefly new).
If Firefly had lasted a full season, and the DVD costs were proportionately higher, I suspect that it would have sold fewer DVD boxed sets than it has.
-Rob
Dude, I've been writing Perl for Physics for 13 or so years, and many know many other people who've done similarly.
The goal is not to find the One True Programming Language, nor even to show that what we're using is best. It's to get stuff done in the service of what we are really trying to do. I've got the long-term experience to know that Perl works for that, regardless as to whether or not it offends lots of the rest of you.
-Rob
I'll agree with you, if you can tell me you've made an honest attempt to try other similarly high-level languages (i.e. not C) and found them wanting.
Not that I need your approval, but: I've written huge things in C and C++. I've written medium-sized things in Java. I've done FORTRAN and Pascal in the past. I've dabbled with LISP. I've written huge things in IDL. I am passingly familiar with Python. I know Perl very well, and have written things of all sizes (well, not so much really huge things, but some moderately large things) in Perl.
And, from all of that experience, if the Physics students only learn one language, I would recommend it be either Perl or Python. Really, I'd love it if they all knew C++ and enough Unix scripting so that Perl was second nature. But if they're just gonna learn one thing-- Perl is about the best choice. Yeah, Python is good too, but other than esoteric arguments of current-approved syntactical correctness that are irrelevant to the common Physics student, there really isn't a strong reason to prefer one over the other.
I'm sorry that my tastest don't meet with your approval. Actually, that's a lie. I really couldn't care less that my tastes don't meet with your approval.
Re: argument to self-authority, I sure as HELL am going to trust my judgement as to what will work well for my students ahead of some bee-in-his-bonnet-Perl-hating Slashdot poster!! These students aren't going to go on to be programmers. They just need to be able to do some basic programming-- loops, reading and writing files, manipulating numbers, that kind of thing. Hell, most physicists above the age of 40 use the worst sort of non-procedural (never mind non-object-oriented) FORTRAN you've ever seen. But even there, they can get stuff done. That's really what it's all about: not being blessed with the Holy Approval of some CS geek or another, but about getting stuff done.
-Rob
They aren't experiencing weightlessness due to a combination of being in a low orbit (rather than outer space where the weightlessness is)
Augh! I hate it when I see statements like this. This may be technically correct, but the implication is wrong.Astronauts even in high orbit experience weightlessnes not because they are outside of the influence of the Earth's gravitational field, but because they are in free fall.
The Space Shuttle goes into low Earth orbit, yet the astronauts experience weightlessness. Why? Because the Shuttle is in free fall-- it is falling at a rate that exactly matches the pull of gravity, so the environment around the astronauts (the walls of the shuttle) fall at the same rate as they do. They're also in orbit-- they're falling at just the right rate so that they never hit the ground. (It's reasonably valid to think of it that they are falling towards the ground, but also moving sideways fast enough so that they get out of the way before the hit the ground.)
-Rob
Again, by and large, I'm not talking about developing big programs here. I'm talking about Getting Shit Done.
-Rob
I'm saying that Perl is not an appropriate choice of language for a physics student.
As a physics professor, I would guess that I'm WAY better qualified to judge that than you are. Sorry about ruining your religion and all.
-Rob
Linux on The Desktop: Death by Evangelism.
Hey, I'm not talking "typical desktop users" here. I'm talking Physics graduate students. It's a serious handicap if they don't know some basic programming and don't know their way around the Unix filesystem.
-Rob
I know and use many programming languages, but Perl is not something that anyone outside of a programming professional "ought to know". If anything, it's the opposite: they ought to stay away from it, and learn a language with a halfway sane syntax and semantics, as opposed to a warmed-over Unixy shell scripting language that went through a brief period of overuse during the dotcom bubble.
Hey, you love your language, I'll love mine.
The truth is that I don't care if they know Perl or something else. I'm not asking professional-level programming here. I'm asking them to Get Shit Done with Unix. Read files, write files, multiply a column of numbers by something else, plot something. It's the sort of stuff I used to do in C back when I was in grad school, but is easier to do in Perl. Perl is a great language for Getting Shit Done for many of us, even if it doesn't satisfy somebody's anal-retentive definition of Proper.
-Rob