My code library consists of everything I've written in the last 10 years or so. It very well could be everything from every company I've worked with, but with a few exceptions, none of that code would be worth having.
I don't blatently copy old code from old projects and old jobs (by the way, what happens when a company ceases to exist), but usually it's along the lines of... "I've done this before... now how did I do that?... Oh, yeah" and move on.
I probably wouldn't bother to see it, except I know my kids will want to, and it's more fun with kids since they have no preconceptions.
And let's face it, whether the movies suck to us or not, the kids are the intended audience. It's too bad, though, because the best kids entertainment (Warner Brothers cartoons, Old Disney movies) is also good entertainment for adults.
When my kids were younger (around 3-5 range) I found they would watch _anything_ animated. Back when Dilbert was on TV, or at least the first four episodes or so before I decided it sucked, I watched it and "Home Movies" would follow. If anyone has seen that show, its pace of catatonic and the squiggle-vision animation was just quarter-assed. The ad-libbed dialog was soporific, but my kids stood there transfixed. Finally after about 5 minutes I turned it off and we all went on. Now I realize that show was actually not a kid's show (and that some people really liked it), but the point it, kids will watch anything. The excellent artist and entertainers will _still_ give them quality material that their parents will enjoy. I think Lucas has more or less given up on that.
The recent parody of Lucas on the Simpsons was amusing, but it was also so heavy-handed as to almost seem sad, but I bet most of us/. types enjoyed it.
Don't forget merchandizing, which probably doubles the revenue from ads.
"The Simpsons Hit and Run" was an awesome game and probably made a bundle, and there have been many video games (of varying quality) over the years. Then there's T-shirts, toys, books, Krusty Brand Eyewash... the list is enormous.
They probably made more than the government-financed PBS made on Barney in his heyday, and they aren't even on the government dole.
We are greatly interested in joining your fine association. Enclosed please find six congressmen and two senators as per your membership requirements. We wish to share our copy protection technology, which involves quantum entanglement. Any attempt to copy the CD will destroy the universe. As you can tell, this will completely eliminate piracy and will ensure our reliance on 19th-century distribution methods will continue to bring us profits for years to come.
Well, we planned on making the jewel case out of strange matter to counter the increased gravity. The only problem was that the CD would have cost a hundred and fifteen quintillion dollars, but the artwork is nice.
I had a great business plan to sell superluminal CD's to help people lose weight, but since the customers would lose weight before buying the CD's, they wouldn't bother to order in the first place.
I'm afraid if I go through with it, the causality paradox might cause the universe to explode.
I hearken back further to the days when uninstalling meant "del foobar.exe".
This is, unless you are Microsoft, whose apps essentially become part of the OS when installed, it could still be almost that simple today. It's absurd that you need special apps to make up for the fact that uninstall programs often just fail (ORK? Norton Antivirus?)
PBS? Isn't that just Well vitriolic political commentaries about the evils of the right?
Actually to answer my own question, no. They are not that vitrolic.
You are completely leaving out the great quantity of good things on TV. There are plenty of great educational shows on TLC and Discovery, the History Channel, the Travel Channel, etc.
And let's not forget "The Simpsons".
And "Mystery Science Theater 3000" although technically it's not on TV anymore, even in reruns.
Exactly. Be that as it may, while the Mormons have (some) really good ideas regarding their morals and emphasis on family life, the religion bears only a superficial similarity to Christianity and is not considered as such by the true Christian denominations (who rarely agree on anything). It has all the same terminologies, but the words all mean different things, and ultimately is is based on ideas that were made up by people, much like Scientology.
Of course, we all deserve to be modded to negative umpteen for being egregiously Off-Topic.
You know, there's probably some truth to that, and my comment was quite flippant. But the fact remains that the whole religion is based on historical events that no non-Mormon historian has ever seen evidence of. This is not true for every other major religion where you can find diverse historical sources for things like events in the Bible, or people like Jesus or Mohammed.
The only question I have about the Mormon religion is that if it is so enlightened and make so much sense, why is it secret? Why has the Mormon church been compared to the Soviet bureaucracy? If this is based on the word of God, why does it need to be hidden?
One agreed-upon qualification is being formed round by its own gravity. I'm not sure if that applies to Sedna.
It most certainly does. The threshold for sphericalness (what a word, or maybe not!) due to gravity is something like a hundred or two hundred miles. Several of the larger, um, asteroids are spherical.
It's a reasonable criterion, but then we'd already have 20+ planets, and you'd have to define the acceptable tolerance for "sphere". The Earth is about 1/1000 off from being a sphere (9 miles wider diameter at the equator than from pole to pole), and with Jupiter, it's much more significant. Of course, that's due to rotation...
I didn't mean to say that there wasn't some of that stuff, but there wasn't nearly enough to be realistic in my mind. The disappearing bodies was the most egregious thing.
I will happily agree that they haven't been consistent about this. The problem is that by looking the other way, they have allowed things to get so bad that (to wit: The Superbowl Halftime Show, of which the booby was only a small part) a large part of the public finds it offensive. As usual, the government waits until the problem gets out of hand and then overracts.
I would argue they should have been doing this all along. Television worked fine for more than 50 years without F-bombs and boobies and every third commercial showing a women in her skivvies. The problem with relying only on the market for the public airwaves is that you are subjecting everyone to the lowest common denominator.
As an example, I love to watch "The Simpsons" with my kids every night at 6:00 and 6:30, and while the show is occasionally offensive (and I know the episodes well enough to know when to change the channel), it's the commercials that are horrible. Ads for violent or smutty movies, which like I mentioned above almost always seem to show women dancing around in their underwear (not to mention the soft-core porn of Bally commercials (they are actual better in the last few months) or the less soft-core porn of Victoria's Secret (which, in addition to objectifying women, seems to want to teach us that sticking-out ribs is sexy). Now I'm not a prude that would shriek in terror at any flash of skin (like the Superbowl, which I'd turned off after about 3 notes of that horrible so-called "music", and thus missed the hoohah), but that it objectifies women. It teaches us that they are to be gawked at, leered at, and if we can't see what we want we should just tear off clothes. And of course the overarching message is that casual sex is the be-all, end-all of human striving.
So, no the government hasn't been consistent, but I for one think they are getting back to where they should have been all along. Most of/. is college-aged or slightly older. I bet if you poll people who have children like I do, you will find the opinion moving more towards mine. A twenty-one year old can watch all this garbage and put it in perspective (if not become totally desensitized to it), but I don't care what anyone says (because I know better!), a seven-year-old or a ten-year-old can't. If children could exercise that level of judgement, they'd be adults.
SS2 was an awesome game with an incredible spooky atmosphere, but there was the glaring problem of everything being pristine and clean... even broken stuff. Worse, there were no no bodies, debris and very little damage in the environment. And of course, killed enemies would disappear shortly after being dispatched. I realize this was a technological limitation (the game came out 5 years ago), but I think it's one of the biggest barriers to real immersion in an environment. If I'm walking in a derelict spaceship overrun with zombies and cyborgs, there should be bodies everywhere and lots and lots of busted stuff. Also, if I'm struting around with a plasma rifle, I want to be able to blow stuff up. Descent 3 provided black scorch marks on the walls if you shot at them, but I want to see chunks of metal or masonry flying around and if I spent enough time and ammo, I want to be able to blow my way through walls or doors or really abuse the environment in other ways. When this happens, it will seem like VR compared to today's games.
So all Howard Stern has to do is go on XM, or cable (wait, he _did_ that.)
The FCC only regulates radio and broadcast TV, and in 2004 these are rapidly becoming a small fraction of the available media.
You can cry censorship and First Amendment rights till you're blue in the face, but it's perfectly reasonable to set aside a small part of the media and allow the government to regulate it to a reasonable level.
This doesn't violate anyone's rights and no one is holding a gun to Howard Stern's head saying he can't say anything he wants on other media. Besides, I have a hard time believing someone as obviously smart as he having such a hard time not coming up with something else to talk about besides lesbians.
Actually, the _worst_ software is often the most expensive: Vertical applications that cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per seat. You are paying for very specialized functionality, and are often dedicating an employee or employees to using the software. Companies that do these kinds of packages have little or no incentive to make them usable because they often have little or no competition. If you're the only one who makes this specialized software, your customers are locked in, so you keep them just slightly less than ticked off enough to stop doing business with you.
Either that your Rational or Real, or in many cases, Microsoft and you simply hate your customers.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in the Northern Hemisphere. I have two him-i-spheres.
My code library consists of everything I've written in the last 10 years or so. It very well could be everything from every company I've worked with, but with a few exceptions, none of that code would be worth having.
I don't blatently copy old code from old projects and old jobs (by the way, what happens when a company ceases to exist), but usually it's along the lines of... "I've done this before... now how did I do that?... Oh, yeah" and move on.
Or Star Wars III: Just Fork It Over, Fanboy
/. types enjoyed it.
I probably wouldn't bother to see it, except I know my kids will want to, and it's more fun with kids since they have no preconceptions.
And let's face it, whether the movies suck to us or not, the kids are the intended audience. It's too bad, though, because the best kids entertainment (Warner Brothers cartoons, Old Disney movies) is also good entertainment for adults.
When my kids were younger (around 3-5 range) I found they would watch _anything_ animated. Back when Dilbert was on TV, or at least the first four episodes or so before I decided it sucked, I watched it and "Home Movies" would follow. If anyone has seen that show, its pace of catatonic and the squiggle-vision animation was just quarter-assed. The ad-libbed dialog was soporific, but my kids stood there transfixed. Finally after about 5 minutes I turned it off and we all went on. Now I realize that show was actually not a kid's show (and that some people really liked it), but the point it, kids will watch anything. The excellent artist and entertainers will _still_ give them quality material that their parents will enjoy. I think Lucas has more or less given up on that.
The recent parody of Lucas on the Simpsons was amusing, but it was also so heavy-handed as to almost seem sad, but I bet most of us
Don't forget merchandizing, which probably doubles the revenue from ads.
"The Simpsons Hit and Run" was an awesome game and probably made a bundle, and there have been many video games (of varying quality) over the years. Then there's T-shirts, toys, books, Krusty Brand Eyewash... the list is enormous.
They probably made more than the government-financed PBS made on Barney in his heyday, and they aren't even on the government dole.
Dear RIAA:
We are greatly interested in joining your fine association. Enclosed please find six congressmen and two senators as per your membership requirements. We wish to share our copy protection technology, which involves quantum entanglement. Any attempt to copy the CD will destroy the universe. As you can tell, this will completely eliminate piracy and will ensure our reliance on 19th-century distribution methods will continue to bring us profits for years to come.
Well, we planned on making the jewel case out of strange matter to counter the increased gravity. The only problem was that the CD would have cost a hundred and fifteen quintillion dollars, but the artwork is nice.
I had a great business plan to sell superluminal CD's to help people lose weight, but since the customers would lose weight before buying the CD's, they wouldn't bother to order in the first place.
I'm afraid if I go through with it, the causality paradox might cause the universe to explode.
That figures.
;-)
Why does Apple get certain things so right and Micrsoft can't even come close? I mean MS steals everything else...
Oh well, you still pay about a 25% premium for identical hardware.
I hearken back further to the days when uninstalling meant "del foobar.exe".
This is, unless you are Microsoft, whose apps essentially become part of the OS when installed, it could still be almost that simple today. It's absurd that you need special apps to make up for the fact that uninstall programs often just fail (ORK? Norton Antivirus?)
Not the Sci-Fi channel, that's for sure. Most of their stuff is low-bedget horror movies.
PBS? Isn't that just Well vitriolic political commentaries about the evils of the right?
Actually to answer my own question, no. They are not that vitrolic.
You are completely leaving out the great quantity of good things on TV. There are plenty of great educational shows on TLC and Discovery, the History Channel, the Travel Channel, etc.
And let's not forget "The Simpsons".
And "Mystery Science Theater 3000" although technically it's not on TV anymore, even in reruns.
Actually, the following quote was heard at NASA, but didn't make it into the press releases:
/me hurriedly dons a gray uniform and pins a watercolor set to his chest
"That's no planet... it's a space station."
I, for one, welcome our new Imperial overlords.
As endorsed by the Space Pope!
Me? I'd rather stick to something mainstream like Oprahism or Voodoo.
Exactly. Be that as it may, while the Mormons have (some) really good ideas regarding their morals and emphasis on family life, the religion bears only a superficial similarity to Christianity and is not considered as such by the true Christian denominations (who rarely agree on anything). It has all the same terminologies, but the words all mean different things, and ultimately is is based on ideas that were made up by people, much like Scientology.
Of course, we all deserve to be modded to negative umpteen for being egregiously Off-Topic.
Yes, well, you can find similar endorsements of communism, devil worship, pedophilia and top 40 music if you look hard enough.
Being a "journalist" and "going everywhere" are hardly credentials.
You know, there's probably some truth to that, and my comment was quite flippant. But the fact remains that the whole religion is based on historical events that no non-Mormon historian has ever seen evidence of. This is not true for every other major religion where you can find diverse historical sources for things like events in the Bible, or people like Jesus or Mohammed.
The only question I have about the Mormon religion is that if it is so enlightened and make so much sense, why is it secret? Why has the Mormon church been compared to the Soviet bureaucracy? If this is based on the word of God, why does it need to be hidden?
I know exactly why.
Not the ones _I_ blew away. ;-)
...and from what I've read of the Mormon mythology, they'd've had spaceships in there too, but no one had come up with the concept yet.
It's all really just a metaphysical Ponzi scheme.
One agreed-upon qualification is being formed round by its own gravity. I'm not sure if that applies to Sedna.
It most certainly does. The threshold for sphericalness (what a word, or maybe not!) due to gravity is something like a hundred or two hundred miles. Several of the larger, um, asteroids are spherical.
It's a reasonable criterion, but then we'd already have 20+ planets, and you'd have to define the acceptable tolerance for "sphere". The Earth is about 1/1000 off from being a sphere (9 miles wider diameter at the equator than from pole to pole), and with Jupiter, it's much more significant. Of course, that's due to rotation...
This debate could go on forever.
I didn't mean to say that there wasn't some of that stuff, but there wasn't nearly enough to be realistic in my mind. The disappearing bodies was the most egregious thing.
I will happily agree that they haven't been consistent about this. The problem is that by looking the other way, they have allowed things to get so bad that (to wit: The Superbowl Halftime Show, of which the booby was only a small part) a large part of the public finds it offensive. As usual, the government waits until the problem gets out of hand and then overracts.
/. is college-aged or slightly older. I bet if you poll people who have children like I do, you will find the opinion moving more towards mine. A twenty-one year old can watch all this garbage and put it in perspective (if not become totally desensitized to it), but I don't care what anyone says (because I know better!), a seven-year-old or a ten-year-old can't. If children could exercise that level of judgement, they'd be adults.
I would argue they should have been doing this all along. Television worked fine for more than 50 years without F-bombs and boobies and every third commercial showing a women in her skivvies. The problem with relying only on the market for the public airwaves is that you are subjecting everyone to the lowest common denominator.
As an example, I love to watch "The Simpsons" with my kids every night at 6:00 and 6:30, and while the show is occasionally offensive (and I know the episodes well enough to know when to change the channel), it's the commercials that are horrible. Ads for violent or smutty movies, which like I mentioned above almost always seem to show women dancing around in their underwear (not to mention the soft-core porn of Bally commercials (they are actual better in the last few months) or the less soft-core porn of Victoria's Secret (which, in addition to objectifying women, seems to want to teach us that sticking-out ribs is sexy). Now I'm not a prude that would shriek in terror at any flash of skin (like the Superbowl, which I'd turned off after about 3 notes of that horrible so-called "music", and thus missed the hoohah), but that it objectifies women. It teaches us that they are to be gawked at, leered at, and if we can't see what we want we should just tear off clothes. And of course the overarching message is that casual sex is the be-all, end-all of human striving.
So, no the government hasn't been consistent, but I for one think they are getting back to where they should have been all along. Most of
SS2 was an awesome game with an incredible spooky atmosphere, but there was the glaring problem of everything being pristine and clean... even broken stuff. Worse, there were no no bodies, debris and very little damage in the environment. And of course, killed enemies would disappear shortly after being dispatched. I realize this was a technological limitation (the game came out 5 years ago), but I think it's one of the biggest barriers to real immersion in an environment. If I'm walking in a derelict spaceship overrun with zombies and cyborgs, there should be bodies everywhere and lots and lots of busted stuff. Also, if I'm struting around with a plasma rifle, I want to be able to blow stuff up. Descent 3 provided black scorch marks on the walls if you shot at them, but I want to see chunks of metal or masonry flying around and if I spent enough time and ammo, I want to be able to blow my way through walls or doors or really abuse the environment in other ways. When this happens, it will seem like VR compared to today's games.
So all Howard Stern has to do is go on XM, or cable (wait, he _did_ that.)
The FCC only regulates radio and broadcast TV, and in 2004 these are rapidly becoming a small fraction of the available media.
You can cry censorship and First Amendment rights till you're blue in the face, but it's perfectly reasonable to set aside a small part of the media and allow the government to regulate it to a reasonable level.
This doesn't violate anyone's rights and no one is holding a gun to Howard Stern's head saying he can't say anything he wants on other media. Besides, I have a hard time believing someone as obviously smart as he having such a hard time not coming up with something else to talk about besides lesbians.
Actually, the _worst_ software is often the most expensive: Vertical applications that cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per seat. You are paying for very specialized functionality, and are often dedicating an employee or employees to using the software. Companies that do these kinds of packages have little or no incentive to make them usable because they often have little or no competition. If you're the only one who makes this specialized software, your customers are locked in, so you keep them just slightly less than ticked off enough to stop doing business with you.
Either that your Rational or Real, or in many cases, Microsoft and you simply hate your customers.
...because of anti-trust reasons. It would be a monopoly on "sucks".