Vista should be #1 on the list of the absolute worst products of all time. It is garbage. It is trash. It is vile. It is stupid. It is evil. It is retarded. It is rubbish. The price tag on it should be a four-digit negative number, meaning that if you buy it, THEY pay YOU for it.
You know what/. needs? Cross-article commenting. The article just prior to this one was about a new scanner to detect nukes. This article is about a body scanner. Combine the two, and viola! You've got a detector that can tell if someone is carrying a suitcase nuke and if they have any health issues, too! That's what cross-article commenting is all about. It's kind of like cross-site scripting, only much different.
Seriously though, I think this is an excellent advance, since some people really have claustrophobic problems being in those MRI scanners, and X-rays are kind of dangerous as they are currently.
1. Use common sense. 2. The website should tell you to use common sense. (i.e., chat online before speaking on the phone; speak a lot before agreeing to meet; meet somewhere public the first few times; meet their friends and family and see if they look normal. remember if you marry someone you're marrying their family, and if their family is psycho, chances are they are psycho too, even if they behave normal for a while). 3. The website should detail if background checks are done and if so, which ones. 4. It doesn't require a state law to deal with the problem of background checks.
Ok, you know what, this is ridiculous./. keeps doing this. The article is not by Schneieieieieir or however you spel his name. The article is by John Tehranian. And, yes, that is just about the jist of the problems with copyright. You know what? Welcome to the Law. As a certain author (I think it was Dickens) wrote in a book called Bleak House, "The Law is concerned with nothing but the Law," IIRC. And that's how the Law works. Government makes up zillions of laws that make no sense and don't serve to accomplish anything. Half the time, the laws contradict each other. Imagine how crazy life would be if the law said that you MUST drive on a red light, and another law said you MUST NOT drive on a red light. Then all you have to do is park a police officer next to a red light. No matter what people do, they get a ticket. The situation isn't quite that bad when it comes to traffic laws, luckily, but it IS that bad when it comes to other things. What it all boils down to is SELECTIVE ENFORCEMENT. They make up contradicting laws so that if you piss off the wrong person and they want to get you, all they have to do is match up perfectly legitimate activities with whatever law says they're illegal and they got you. Same goes for civil laws. If you think about it, it's in the best interest of corporations with barges full of money to have lots of contradictory laws so that they can create lawsuits and then file motion after motion until the competitor's resources run out and they are put out of business. There's another thing, too, that makes these big corporations immune. If YOU want to go after them because you have a legitimate claim, they'll dig up lots of places where you're infringing on THEIR copyrights just by existing and breathing, and so you'd better drop your claims or they'll hunt you down and cut your head off and stick it on a pig pole. Then some bumbling idiot like Darl comes along thinking he can play the legal lottery, but he didn't realize that Linus has more resources at his disposal than the Borg up in Regmond.
Wouldn't it be cool if some disgruntled worker gets fired from the BSA and then turns around and rats the BSA out to the BSA? He'd have to get a reward, and the BSA would have to charge itself a hefty fine.
Yeah Jesus, but you forget one thing: There was a book published called The Bible Code, and they demonstrated through experimentation that codes were found in this Torah text that could not be found in any other text of similar size that was tried in the experiment. Bottom line? Put infinite monkeys at infinite keyboards for an infinite amount of time and let them pound away and one will produce the entire works of Shakespeare. Put one monkey at one keyboard for one day and he'll produce that operating system for you, duplicated bug-for-bug.
ha ha!! I got pirst fost! I'm gonna go and get all my friends and show him what a cool person I am, and how my giant existence is fulfilled by having earned pirst fost on/.!! The whole world is watching, and I know that everyone cares. This is a huge event.
"All bullies are cowards. Appeasement of bullies doesn't work. Standing up to bullies and fighting back has a much higher success rate."
You know, I bet that if I wrote, "Bush is right. We need to fight the terrorists on their own turf, not cower away and wait for them to blow us up," I bet that a zillion/.ers would jump out of the woodwork and tell me what a damn fool I am. But when we're talking about the RIAA, heck, anyone will agree that we should fight and not let them walk all over us.
There's one difference between the above two scenarios. Well, actually there are many differences. The RIAA deals in music. The terrorists deal in blowing up skyscrapers, airplanes, and whatever else they can, full of innocent people, just because they (the terrorists) are a lower life form than the cockroach. We should NEVER appease the terrorists. We should NEVER negotiate with them. We should fight back, on their turf, and get rid of the threat.
Bush is right. Bush didn't lie. (The WMD's were all moved to Syria before the U.S.-set deadline for Saddam to come clean prior to the war. The intelligence community knows this. Obviously, since the aforementioned WMDs were removed from Iraq, no WMDs were found in Iraq)
Oh yeah, and one other thing. The head terrorists are the biggest cowards in the world. They send their kids, brothers, cousins, friends out to blow themselves up in a marketplace or to crash an airplane and kill themselves and hundreds of innocent people, while they, the leaders, hide in a rabbit hole like Saddam hid in. Or they launch missiles at their neighbors (cough Israel cough) from a schoolyard, or from next to a house where a family with many kids lives, or from similar places where they know they won't be attacked, because the people they hate, unlike them, actually think that life is sacred and therefore won't risk harming innocent children.
heh heh. That is very, very cool. I wonder if the original game cartridges that shipped in those good ol' days actually contained the source code to the game, and whether or not the folks making the darn thing knew about it.
All this talk about source code reminds me of a certain theory I once heard relating to the discovery of closed source code. The five books of Moses are the first five books of the Holy Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Some believe that this text, in the original Hebrew, was created 974 generations prior to the creation of our Universe, that it is the blueprint for the Universe (that would be something like source code, I suppose), that the entire purpose of the Universe is to carry out the word of this text, and that it was revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai after the exodus from ancient Egypt. It is further believed that this text (the original Hebrew, that is) contains all knowledge. Of course, it doesn't just spell everything out to you in a verbose manner. If it did, it would be a million billion trillion quadrillion zillion googolplexes of chapters long, each chapter comprising about a billion pages, each page printed in a type 1 font on a 8.5 lightyear by 11 lightyear sheet of paper, with margins of 1 nanometer on all sides, single-spaced. Nope. It's terse and encoded in ways that we, as humans, haven't discovered yet. Well, if we'd bother to read the darn thing, we might figure out a thing or two. But that's besides the point. Suffice it to say that, assuming we knew how to decode the information contained therein, we could then access the library of all possible knowledge.
Now let's talk about a certain operating system produced by an unpopular group I'll call the Borg, for brevity. The entire source code to that system is kept secret by the Borg, undoubtedly because knowledge of it by the wider population would undermine the futility of resistance to assimilation into the Borg collective. Another statement can be made about said source code: It is a subset (and a tiny subset at that) of all knowledge. Well, since the source code to this operating system is a subset of all knowledge, and since all knowledge is, as we've said, contained in the aforementioned five books of Moses, then all you have to do is figure out the encoding, write a program that decompresses this library of all knowledge (we'll call it gunzipmoses), and then simply decompress this source code from the rest of the material. To think that the Borg are so careful to keep their source code secret, yet it could be downloaded from the Bible, is almost as funny as this Zelda thing having its own source code in random padding in the game's image.
Bet that makes you wanna go out and read the Bible now, doesn't it?
And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.
A matter/antimatter reactor could blow up the whole solar system. Then again, it could provide the warp engines required to build Star Trek style starships.
In other news, $C0 today decided to sue itself, because it discovered that $C0 has been using $C0 source code. "It's a recursive lawsuit," said a spokesperson for the company. "We saw those Coke billboards that said they should sue themselves, and decided we should do the same."
It would be very cool if the knowledge obtained from this could be used to fly unmanned drones around for military purposes. It would certainly save a lot of lives.
RTFBS stands for Read The Bullshit. (The F is silent.) Duh, I just finished RTFBSing, and I think these guys are nuts. This is not a troll. This is really my opinion on the matter. And that's all I have to say about that.
Honestly, I was so completely disappointed by the sequel trilogy, that it really broke my heart. The first three movies (which are parts 4, 5, and 6, just to clarify) were so incredible that it really opened peoples' minds up to things that had never really been envisioned before. I'm not old enough to have experienced this myself, but I was told that when Star Wars first hit the theaters, right at that first scene where the big huge spaceship thingie comes flying in from above the camera, people literally said, "Oh my God." The story was something incredible, mixing incredibly innovative science fiction with an element of spirituality and ancient wisdom; the movie was an incredible performance of this, with great actors, amazing special effects.... to make a long story short, it is clear that an incredible amount of thought, innovation, and effort went into making these three movies something out of this galaxy. Today, these movies do have a bit of an old fashioned feel to them, but aside from adding a pinch of nostalgia, it really shows that the movie had soul as opposed to just special effects and lines recited by actors. There was something behind the movie itself.
The later three movies, parts 1, 2, and 3, were a disappointment because the 25 or so years that elapsed since the first Star Wars was filmed have brought us some incredible advances in filmmaking technology, making it possible to portray nonexistent or currently impossible things as if they were perfectly real. This should mean that movies should be better now, not worse. Unfortunately, exactly the opposite has happened. So much emphasis has been placed on making the scenes in Star Wars look incredible that it seems as if the story line has really suffered. Suppose that the original Star Wars were duplicated exactly, but using today's technology to make the scenes look more incredible. That is how the later three movies should have been. Instead, it seems all made up as an afterthought.
Please don't mod this troll or something like that. These really are my thoughts about this subject. That's all I have to say about that.
Dude. Why is it that Locutus of Redmond always behaves like that jealous bully at school that beats up the other kids and takes their lunch money, not because he needs it, but just because he can't stand the thought of others having it? Look at this music player thing for example. Locutus saw that Apple is making money selling a music player, so he became jealous and decided to do what his company Microborg, always does: Make cheap imitations of good products, use marketing and sheer power to put the technically superior company out of business, and leave consumers stuck with expensive but defective products as their only choice. The next thing you know, Locutus will realize that there's money to be made in selling refrigerators, and he'll start doing that too, putting all the established companies out of business and giving consumers no choice but to buy refrigerators that heat up every so often for no explicable reason, spoiling the food inside, and then Microborg's marketing power will be used to convince the world that this is okay. Oh and did I mention that Microborg, in the past, sent recruiters to the campuses of its competitors, to recruit their best people in an effort to put more nails in the competitors' coffins?
In other words: "We are Microborg. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Lower your shields and stand by to be assimilated. Resistance is futile."
I have an idea to be at the office and telecommute at the same time: Invent the holodeck.
The office space would actually be a giant holodeck with holographic cubicles and other holographic office equipment. At each employee's home, a much smaller holodeck would be installed. These holodecks would be designed similarly to the ones in Star Trek, but with one small difference: These holodecks would use a superset of the X11 protocol.
Employees at their home holodeck would feel exactly as though they were at the office. Those who physically commute to the office would feel the same way. The residual self images of all the employees logged in to all the holodecks at any given moment would be mapped onto the big office holodeck as well as onto all the smaller holodecks at all the employees' homes.
Besides saving on gasoline, hours wasted commuting, and traffic jams caused on the nation's highways and streets, this approach would have a few additional benefits as well. For one thing, besides purchasing the holodeck, the employer would not have to buy any other equipment or supplies. All desks, chairs, computer workstations, pens, pencils, post-it notepads, lights, water coolers, vending machines, carpets, and those annoying inspirational posters that say things like Teamwork or Persistence, would all be holographically implemented. This would save big on costs for everyone.
How to fight obesity: Invent the holodeck. People won't sit in front of computer screens anymore, typing away their day at a keyboard, only to finish, drive home (another sitting activity), sit on the couch, and drink a beer. In the holodeck, computer work will become much more interactive and visual, utilizing objects like those with which we interact every day. For example, computer programmers debugging a program would don chemical safety suits and chase down monster-size holographic cockroaches with holographic bug spray. More difficult bugs would be searched for in a role-playing Sherlock Holmes mystery case. Microsoft Windows would be implemented as a holographic custom window store. UNIX would be implemented as a group of lurking demons in a fiery hell. Video games, especially first person shooters, would require running, jumping, ducking, etc., all of which would cause our kids to be thin and muscular, not to mention great fighters. eBooks would be physical holographic books that you could read all day long, but not remove from the holodeck. (Recall that matter in the holodeck ceases to exist outside the holodeck's borders.) Emails would appear as physical envelopes. Those with big attachments would arrive in large UPS packages. While doing office productivity work, jumping through bureaucratic hoops would mean just that: Jumping through fire rings at a circus. Security would consist of physical barriers. A firewall would be implemented as a large, thick stone dam, with allowed services leaking in through holes in the dam. Users would wear condoms to avoid getting viruses while in the holodeck (although holographic viruses will cease to exist once taken outside the holodeck). When logging in, you would knock on an old wooden door that has a small eye-door built in to it. A burly man inside would ask for your password, which you would whisper. Get it wrong and he'll kick your ass (this doubles as a video game). Hackers would show up with a gun. I think that computing in general would make a lot more sense, and it would certainly keep people thinner.
The calendar used by the Jewish religion for thousands of years provides a very interesting solution to the problem of synchronizing the way we keep time with the phenomena of the universe. First, the calendar is based on both the sun and the moon. The sun provides the annual cycle which includes seasons, as well as the daily cycle which includes sunrise and sunset. The moon provides the monthly cycle. Because the moon and the sun together create a pretty complicated pattern, this calendar has a slightly different setup each year, and its cycle repeats every nineteen years. This synchronizes the sun and moon, the daily cycle and the seasonal cycles. Furthermore, because days are shorter in winter and longer in summer, time is kept using a proportional hour. An "hour" in this timekeeping system is defined as 1/12th of the amount of time there is daylight. So an hour in winter might be as short as 45 minutes, and in summer it might be as long as 1 hour and 25 minutes. This calendar and timekeeping system is still in use, and has been for thousands of years.
It would be cool if we kept time this way. It would mean that your computer would work faster in the winter, since the definition of a nanosecond would be such that more processor cycles would elapse per fixed unit of time. This makes sense since the cooler weather of winter would help in terms of processor cooling due, which would be necessary given the increased speed in winter.
People just want software to do what it's supposed to do. People want to get stuff done. If you're a kid writing a report, you want it done so you can go outside and play. If you're an adult doing research for an R&D project, you want it done so you can get paid. Software that does cute animations and junk like that is stupid because that detracts from its purpose. Not that Firefox does stupid animations but you get the picture.
Forget this "nanny state" nonsense. Why does the federal government need to get involved in video games now? This is not the purpose of government. Parents should supervise their children.
I don't think Apple peaked. There are some broken things in Leopard. The one that drives me up the wall is X11 being seriously, seriously broken. I can't even get Tiger's X11 to work properly in Leopard. However, there are some wonderful improvements. The printing system is so vastly improved that it justifies keeping Leopard. The new voice, Alex, sounds so real it's almost frightening, which is good because I like to have my computer read stuff to me. As for X11, it's not really an Apple component so I can't really blame them. I run X11 apps in a FreeBSD 5.5 virtual machine under VMware Fusion. It's not as elegant as having X windows on the same desktop as Quartz windows, but oh well.
As for iMovie in iLife '08, give it a chance. I think it's a vast improvement over iMovie '06. For one, it's now a non-destructive editor. Secondly, I have been able to produce significantly better results with it and much faster than with the old version.
Slashdot Mirror
Vista should be #1 on the list of the absolute worst products of all time. It is garbage. It is trash. It is vile. It is stupid. It is evil. It is retarded. It is rubbish. The price tag on it should be a four-digit negative number, meaning that if you buy it, THEY pay YOU for it.
What? There is a bug in some part of the Mac? No, it couldn't be. I must have read wrong.
Oh, this problem involves Boot Camp, eh? Well, what do you expect? Put Windows on a computer and you should expect Windows-style results. Bricks.
Seriously though, I think this is an excellent advance, since some people really have claustrophobic problems being in those MRI scanners, and X-rays are kind of dangerous as they are currently.
1. Use common sense.
2. The website should tell you to use common sense. (i.e., chat online before speaking on the phone; speak a lot before agreeing to meet; meet somewhere public the first few times; meet their friends and family and see if they look normal. remember if you marry someone you're marrying their family, and if their family is psycho, chances are they are psycho too, even if they behave normal for a while).
3. The website should detail if background checks are done and if so, which ones.
4. It doesn't require a state law to deal with the problem of background checks.
Ok, you know what, this is ridiculous. /. keeps doing this. The article is not by Schneieieieieir or however you spel his name. The article is by John Tehranian. And, yes, that is just about the jist of the problems with copyright. You know what? Welcome to the Law. As a certain author (I think it was Dickens) wrote in a book called Bleak House, "The Law is concerned with nothing but the Law," IIRC. And that's how the Law works. Government makes up zillions of laws that make no sense and don't serve to accomplish anything. Half the time, the laws contradict each other. Imagine how crazy life would be if the law said that you MUST drive on a red light, and another law said you MUST NOT drive on a red light. Then all you have to do is park a police officer next to a red light. No matter what people do, they get a ticket. The situation isn't quite that bad when it comes to traffic laws, luckily, but it IS that bad when it comes to other things. What it all boils down to is SELECTIVE ENFORCEMENT. They make up contradicting laws so that if you piss off the wrong person and they want to get you, all they have to do is match up perfectly legitimate activities with whatever law says they're illegal and they got you. Same goes for civil laws. If you think about it, it's in the best interest of corporations with barges full of money to have lots of contradictory laws so that they can create lawsuits and then file motion after motion until the competitor's resources run out and they are put out of business. There's another thing, too, that makes these big corporations immune. If YOU want to go after them because you have a legitimate claim, they'll dig up lots of places where you're infringing on THEIR copyrights just by existing and breathing, and so you'd better drop your claims or they'll hunt you down and cut your head off and stick it on a pig pole. Then some bumbling idiot like Darl comes along thinking he can play the legal lottery, but he didn't realize that Linus has more resources at his disposal than the Borg up in Regmond.
This is good because I don't know about you but I wouldn't want my city to be
Wouldn't it be cool if some disgruntled worker gets fired from the BSA and then turns around and rats the BSA out to the BSA? He'd have to get a reward, and the BSA would have to charge itself a hefty fine.
Yeah Jesus, but you forget one thing: There was a book published called The Bible Code, and they demonstrated through experimentation that codes were found in this Torah text that could not be found in any other text of similar size that was tried in the experiment. Bottom line? Put infinite monkeys at infinite keyboards for an infinite amount of time and let them pound away and one will produce the entire works of Shakespeare. Put one monkey at one keyboard for one day and he'll produce that operating system for you, duplicated bug-for-bug.
Microsoft is inferior to Google.
Google is superior to Microsoft.
Microsoft is not as good as Google.
Whoosh! Whoosh! Bam! Crash!
/me ducks to avoid flying chairs.
pirst fost!!
ha ha!! I got pirst fost! I'm gonna go and get all my friends and show him what a cool person I am, and how my giant existence is fulfilled by having earned pirst fost on /.!! The whole world is watching, and I know that everyone cares. This is a huge event.
"All bullies are cowards. Appeasement of bullies doesn't work. Standing up to bullies and fighting back has a much higher success rate."
You know, I bet that if I wrote, "Bush is right. We need to fight the terrorists on their own turf, not cower away and wait for them to blow us up," I bet that a zillion /.ers would jump out of the woodwork and tell me what a damn fool I am. But when we're talking about the RIAA, heck, anyone will agree that we should fight and not let them walk all over us.
There's one difference between the above two scenarios. Well, actually there are many differences. The RIAA deals in music. The terrorists deal in blowing up skyscrapers, airplanes, and whatever else they can, full of innocent people, just because they (the terrorists) are a lower life form than the cockroach. We should NEVER appease the terrorists. We should NEVER negotiate with them. We should fight back, on their turf, and get rid of the threat.
Bush is right. Bush didn't lie. (The WMD's were all moved to Syria before the U.S.-set deadline for Saddam to come clean prior to the war. The intelligence community knows this. Obviously, since the aforementioned WMDs were removed from Iraq, no WMDs were found in Iraq)
Oh yeah, and one other thing. The head terrorists are the biggest cowards in the world. They send their kids, brothers, cousins, friends out to blow themselves up in a marketplace or to crash an airplane and kill themselves and hundreds of innocent people, while they, the leaders, hide in a rabbit hole like Saddam hid in. Or they launch missiles at their neighbors (cough Israel cough) from a schoolyard, or from next to a house where a family with many kids lives, or from similar places where they know they won't be attacked, because the people they hate, unlike them, actually think that life is sacred and therefore won't risk harming innocent children.
heh heh. That is very, very cool. I wonder if the original game cartridges that shipped in those good ol' days actually contained the source code to the game, and whether or not the folks making the darn thing knew about it.
All this talk about source code reminds me of a certain theory I once heard relating to the discovery of closed source code. The five books of Moses are the first five books of the Holy Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Some believe that this text, in the original Hebrew, was created 974 generations prior to the creation of our Universe, that it is the blueprint for the Universe (that would be something like source code, I suppose), that the entire purpose of the Universe is to carry out the word of this text, and that it was revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai after the exodus from ancient Egypt. It is further believed that this text (the original Hebrew, that is) contains all knowledge. Of course, it doesn't just spell everything out to you in a verbose manner. If it did, it would be a million billion trillion quadrillion zillion googolplexes of chapters long, each chapter comprising about a billion pages, each page printed in a type 1 font on a 8.5 lightyear by 11 lightyear sheet of paper, with margins of 1 nanometer on all sides, single-spaced. Nope. It's terse and encoded in ways that we, as humans, haven't discovered yet. Well, if we'd bother to read the darn thing, we might figure out a thing or two. But that's besides the point. Suffice it to say that, assuming we knew how to decode the information contained therein, we could then access the library of all possible knowledge.
Now let's talk about a certain operating system produced by an unpopular group I'll call the Borg, for brevity. The entire source code to that system is kept secret by the Borg, undoubtedly because knowledge of it by the wider population would undermine the futility of resistance to assimilation into the Borg collective. Another statement can be made about said source code: It is a subset (and a tiny subset at that) of all knowledge. Well, since the source code to this operating system is a subset of all knowledge, and since all knowledge is, as we've said, contained in the aforementioned five books of Moses, then all you have to do is figure out the encoding, write a program that decompresses this library of all knowledge (we'll call it gunzipmoses), and then simply decompress this source code from the rest of the material. To think that the Borg are so careful to keep their source code secret, yet it could be downloaded from the Bible, is almost as funny as this Zelda thing having its own source code in random padding in the game's image.
Bet that makes you wanna go out and read the Bible now, doesn't it?
And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.
- Revelation 22:1
A matter/antimatter reactor could blow up the whole solar system. Then again, it could provide the warp engines required to build Star Trek style starships.
In other news, $C0 today decided to sue itself, because it discovered that $C0 has been using $C0 source code. "It's a recursive lawsuit," said a spokesperson for the company. "We saw those Coke billboards that said they should sue themselves, and decided we should do the same."
It would be very cool if the knowledge obtained from this could be used to fly unmanned drones around for military purposes. It would certainly save a lot of lives.
RTFBS stands for Read The Bullshit. (The F is silent.) Duh, I just finished RTFBSing, and I think these guys are nuts. This is not a troll. This is really my opinion on the matter. And that's all I have to say about that.
Honestly, I was so completely disappointed by the sequel trilogy, that it really broke my heart. The first three movies (which are parts 4, 5, and 6, just to clarify) were so incredible that it really opened peoples' minds up to things that had never really been envisioned before. I'm not old enough to have experienced this myself, but I was told that when Star Wars first hit the theaters, right at that first scene where the big huge spaceship thingie comes flying in from above the camera, people literally said, "Oh my God." The story was something incredible, mixing incredibly innovative science fiction with an element of spirituality and ancient wisdom; the movie was an incredible performance of this, with great actors, amazing special effects.... to make a long story short, it is clear that an incredible amount of thought, innovation, and effort went into making these three movies something out of this galaxy. Today, these movies do have a bit of an old fashioned feel to them, but aside from adding a pinch of nostalgia, it really shows that the movie had soul as opposed to just special effects and lines recited by actors. There was something behind the movie itself.
The later three movies, parts 1, 2, and 3, were a disappointment because the 25 or so years that elapsed since the first Star Wars was filmed have brought us some incredible advances in filmmaking technology, making it possible to portray nonexistent or currently impossible things as if they were perfectly real. This should mean that movies should be better now, not worse. Unfortunately, exactly the opposite has happened. So much emphasis has been placed on making the scenes in Star Wars look incredible that it seems as if the story line has really suffered. Suppose that the original Star Wars were duplicated exactly, but using today's technology to make the scenes look more incredible. That is how the later three movies should have been. Instead, it seems all made up as an afterthought.
Please don't mod this troll or something like that. These really are my thoughts about this subject. That's all I have to say about that.
Dude. Why is it that Locutus of Redmond always behaves like that jealous bully at school that beats up the other kids and takes their lunch money, not because he needs it, but just because he can't stand the thought of others having it? Look at this music player thing for example. Locutus saw that Apple is making money selling a music player, so he became jealous and decided to do what his company Microborg, always does: Make cheap imitations of good products, use marketing and sheer power to put the technically superior company out of business, and leave consumers stuck with expensive but defective products as their only choice. The next thing you know, Locutus will realize that there's money to be made in selling refrigerators, and he'll start doing that too, putting all the established companies out of business and giving consumers no choice but to buy refrigerators that heat up every so often for no explicable reason, spoiling the food inside, and then Microborg's marketing power will be used to convince the world that this is okay. Oh and did I mention that Microborg, in the past, sent recruiters to the campuses of its competitors, to recruit their best people in an effort to put more nails in the competitors' coffins?
In other words: "We are Microborg. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Lower your shields and stand by to be assimilated. Resistance is futile."
See the holodeck post I made in the story that came just before this one. Note the part about hackers.
I have an idea to be at the office and telecommute at the same time: Invent the holodeck.
The office space would actually be a giant holodeck with holographic cubicles and other holographic office equipment. At each employee's home, a much smaller holodeck would be installed. These holodecks would be designed similarly to the ones in Star Trek, but with one small difference: These holodecks would use a superset of the X11 protocol.
Employees at their home holodeck would feel exactly as though they were at the office. Those who physically commute to the office would feel the same way. The residual self images of all the employees logged in to all the holodecks at any given moment would be mapped onto the big office holodeck as well as onto all the smaller holodecks at all the employees' homes.
Besides saving on gasoline, hours wasted commuting, and traffic jams caused on the nation's highways and streets, this approach would have a few additional benefits as well. For one thing, besides purchasing the holodeck, the employer would not have to buy any other equipment or supplies. All desks, chairs, computer workstations, pens, pencils, post-it notepads, lights, water coolers, vending machines, carpets, and those annoying inspirational posters that say things like Teamwork or Persistence, would all be holographically implemented. This would save big on costs for everyone.
How to fight obesity: Invent the holodeck. People won't sit in front of computer screens anymore, typing away their day at a keyboard, only to finish, drive home (another sitting activity), sit on the couch, and drink a beer. In the holodeck, computer work will become much more interactive and visual, utilizing objects like those with which we interact every day. For example, computer programmers debugging a program would don chemical safety suits and chase down monster-size holographic cockroaches with holographic bug spray. More difficult bugs would be searched for in a role-playing Sherlock Holmes mystery case. Microsoft Windows would be implemented as a holographic custom window store. UNIX would be implemented as a group of lurking demons in a fiery hell. Video games, especially first person shooters, would require running, jumping, ducking, etc., all of which would cause our kids to be thin and muscular, not to mention great fighters. eBooks would be physical holographic books that you could read all day long, but not remove from the holodeck. (Recall that matter in the holodeck ceases to exist outside the holodeck's borders.) Emails would appear as physical envelopes. Those with big attachments would arrive in large UPS packages. While doing office productivity work, jumping through bureaucratic hoops would mean just that: Jumping through fire rings at a circus. Security would consist of physical barriers. A firewall would be implemented as a large, thick stone dam, with allowed services leaking in through holes in the dam. Users would wear condoms to avoid getting viruses while in the holodeck (although holographic viruses will cease to exist once taken outside the holodeck). When logging in, you would knock on an old wooden door that has a small eye-door built in to it. A burly man inside would ask for your password, which you would whisper. Get it wrong and he'll kick your ass (this doubles as a video game). Hackers would show up with a gun. I think that computing in general would make a lot more sense, and it would certainly keep people thinner.
The calendar used by the Jewish religion for thousands of years provides a very interesting solution to the problem of synchronizing the way we keep time with the phenomena of the universe. First, the calendar is based on both the sun and the moon. The sun provides the annual cycle which includes seasons, as well as the daily cycle which includes sunrise and sunset. The moon provides the monthly cycle. Because the moon and the sun together create a pretty complicated pattern, this calendar has a slightly different setup each year, and its cycle repeats every nineteen years. This synchronizes the sun and moon, the daily cycle and the seasonal cycles. Furthermore, because days are shorter in winter and longer in summer, time is kept using a proportional hour. An "hour" in this timekeeping system is defined as 1/12th of the amount of time there is daylight. So an hour in winter might be as short as 45 minutes, and in summer it might be as long as 1 hour and 25 minutes. This calendar and timekeeping system is still in use, and has been for thousands of years.
It would be cool if we kept time this way. It would mean that your computer would work faster in the winter, since the definition of a nanosecond would be such that more processor cycles would elapse per fixed unit of time. This makes sense since the cooler weather of winter would help in terms of processor cooling due, which would be necessary given the increased speed in winter.
People just want software to do what it's supposed to do. People want to get stuff done. If you're a kid writing a report, you want it done so you can go outside and play. If you're an adult doing research for an R&D project, you want it done so you can get paid. Software that does cute animations and junk like that is stupid because that detracts from its purpose. Not that Firefox does stupid animations but you get the picture.
Forget this "nanny state" nonsense. Why does the federal government need to get involved in video games now? This is not the purpose of government. Parents should supervise their children.
I don't think Apple peaked. There are some broken things in Leopard. The one that drives me up the wall is X11 being seriously, seriously broken. I can't even get Tiger's X11 to work properly in Leopard. However, there are some wonderful improvements. The printing system is so vastly improved that it justifies keeping Leopard. The new voice, Alex, sounds so real it's almost frightening, which is good because I like to have my computer read stuff to me. As for X11, it's not really an Apple component so I can't really blame them. I run X11 apps in a FreeBSD 5.5 virtual machine under VMware Fusion. It's not as elegant as having X windows on the same desktop as Quartz windows, but oh well.
As for iMovie in iLife '08, give it a chance. I think it's a vast improvement over iMovie '06. For one, it's now a non-destructive editor. Secondly, I have been able to produce significantly better results with it and much faster than with the old version.