To me, the release of "Mr. Deeds" was an IQ test. Anyone stupid enough to pay for it or download it or otherwise expend any kind of resource in acquisition of that movie, after seeing the trailer, deserves what he gets, and gets no sympathy from me.
If you want a movie worth watching, why not get the original, starring a real actor, directed by a real director, who is a 1000 times better than the room-temperature-IQ-mouth-breathers behind most current movies. Not to mention that it's also the inspiration for the excellent Rush song, "Cinderella Man".
If you own a PVR the cable companies aren't your friend?
Until the advent of satellite TV cable companies were usually a monopoly in any given area, free to offer crappy service with grainy, fuzzy and/or snowy pictures and raise prices apparently with impunity (I'm sure there was some legislation in place, but it never seemed to help). No matter how much you hated the service, they were the only game in town if you wanted more than the local broadcasts.
Now that they are competing on merits (I'm sure they have bought and are buying legislators, too) against the likes of DirecTV, which is a completely new generation of TV, a quantum leap ahead of cable, IMO, they are complaining and whining to anyone who will listen.
Once the Feds relaxed that screw-the-consumer law regarding satellite companies not being allowed to deliver local channels (an issue for Simpsons fan like me!), there was no reason at all for me to keep cable. Satellite has broadcast-quality, even DVD quality picture, much less outage time (when cable goes out, it's often out for a day or more till they can dig up and repair the problem), in 3 years I've only seen DirecTV off for much more than hour once. In each case satellite outages was caused by a big thunderstorm, and the reception problems seldom last more than 30-60 minutes.
I know many people have issues with DirecTV and their ilk, but cable companies are like horse and buggy manufacturers in the early 1900's. They'd better adapt fast* rather than sitting around griping about PVR's (which are here to stay in one form or another DMCA be damned), or they will die out quickly and no one but they will be crying.
* Ever see "Body by Fisher" in a car? Fisher started out in the buggy business.
...and Greg Bear wrote about nano before Neal Stephenson (see "Blood Music" from the late 70's) or "City of Angels" for a really well-though-out example of nano-technology in everyday life.
Just because Crichton is just getting into nano now doesn't mean it won't be a good story. I read "Andromeda Strain" one afternoon in the late 70's when I was in high school and it was a great read. I read it again a couple years ago and still enjoyed it. It's OK if MC is targetting a wider audience than NS or GB, the book could still be good.
Believe it or not, there is intelligent fiction that makes it into the best-selling lists. I haven't read this book, but another author, who happens to be my favorite, Terry Pratchett, is quite big in the U.S. and huge in the U.K. I've been a fan since "The Light Fantastic" and I was quite surprised how popular he ended up being since his books are often quite complex and the humor is often both subtle and obscure (how many popular authors do you know who routinely make Latin puns?).
It's my understanding that MSG didn't come into common use until the early 20th century. Long enough to mess up the current generations.
Of course we Americans eat much more MSG (and other sources of glutamte: hydrolized vegetable protein, autolyzed (or torula) yeast, caseinate) than anyone else, so that theory won't hold. Despite the growing awareness that MSG is an "excitotoxin" and might cause various neural dysfunctions, it is still a common additive in prepared foods.
Good point. But if you are using Windows and _not_ using 4NT or something like cygwin that gives you a *nix-type shell then you get all the hassles you deserve.
Filename completion rules!
I'm pretty sure that something like "c:\progra*\borlan*\projects" works fine with cmd.exe if the wildcards reduce to a unique filename.
It's still relevant. Micros~1 still uses the old ISO-9660 (or whatever it is) CD format that forces 8.3 and they still have all their download files in cryptic, uselessly named 8.3 filenames. It's 2002, yet for naming conventions, Microsoft is still in 1992.
Here's a hint, world! No one uses DOS anymore! We don't need 8.3 filenames!
Re: Even Horizon is NOT a sci-fi movie
on
Review: Solaris
·
· Score: 2
What you say might be true, but it seemed about halfway through the movie that there wasn't going to be any real point to it except "Pointless scary stuff happens." and when you reach the end, that's what it ends up being.
Ultimately, the movie boils down to "Pointless scary stuff happens.", and to me, was like watching someone else play Doom. The sets, while very cool-looking, seemed contrived to provide an environment for "pointless scary stuff happening" than showing a real functioning space ship. And while the cast was good (Sam Neill did good "creepy", you end up with a feeling of futility because you soon realize that they only thing you're going to get for the rest of the movie is "[ointless scary stuff happening".
I upgraded to the latest player and listened to about a half hour of part 1.1 successfully. Very nice, but I'd prefer a version that is maybe about 6 time faster or so. It's very peaceful and pretty, but the tension starts to build after waiting for the next change after a couple of minutes.:-)
Just kidding. Seriously, you have a great idea, metacosm.
This license is a joke. First off, how can you include such a vague term as "violations of human rights" in a legal agreement in the first place without including pages and pages that define it... you can find someone somewhere that will argue anything is a violation of human rights (capitalism for one, and it's not hard to find people who will argue that).
Like the parent poster's, this is just more handwaving by people in an attempt to look like they care, but without any real action to back it up, it just looks like hypocrisy. It's kind of like all the useless legislation that gets passed not to fix a problem, but so that to the less-informed, the politicians LOOK like they are doing something.
Just more babble in a world that has too much babble and not enough deeds. Something as simple as helping out at the local food bank can make a difference. This is something I do that's easy and fun and you actually get to see the people you are helping (something that almost never happens in my career).
"Think globally, act locally." is a good philosophy in my mind, because that's the only way most of us can make a difference. This is much better than some stupid, if well-meant, misplaced manifesto in a software license.
I'd like to hear about more "hypercites". People who do lots of good, but don't go around making a big deal about it.
Yeah, I just wish I could get that POS Real software to work... all I get is silence. Why do people continue to use this perpertually broken software by a company that sucks away your privacy like a vampire?!
Actually the liner notes from that album don't mention the 16/33 RPM, but it did talk about the fact that the music was just barely audible and Eno couldn't get up to fix it. "Discrete Music", which is a great album, is meant to be listened to at a very low volume (i.e., "ambient").
Using tape loops and various analog "sampling" technologies he created 3 alternate versions of the Canon on side 2 played, for lack of better word, "sideways", each progressively more dissonant. Side 1 is the same idea, but uses, I believe different music.
Of course we all know that there is a right to privacy implied in the Constitution. In the biggest legal non sequitur of the 20th century, that right to privacy means you have the right to have an abortion, but of course, it does not give you a right to privacy.
It's a ripe slice of hippie-generation kitsch (kind of "Up With People" meets "Laugh-In") with fresh-faced teenagers with primary-colored T-shirts and oversized buttons with quips like "Hobbits unite!" and "Appoint Leonard Nimoy to the U.N.", wearing oversized rubber pointed ears and mincing and hopping about in a most undignified manner, and Nimoy looking dapper, if dated, with a black blazer, white turtleneck and the Spock haircut (but no ears), looking very relaxed and happy.
"Empire" was much more grown up, but large parts of "Jedi" were as cartoony as episode 1.
The problem with Episode 1, was that while it really did have a pretty grown-up plot, the grown-up plot was given short shrift so Lucas could show us 21 minutes of Jake Lloyd going "Yippee!", 47 minutes of droids being blown up and chopped in half, 67 minutes of teeth-grindingly annoying Jar-Jar antics and 153 minutes of min-numbing pod racing. The plot, while very interesting, seemed like an afterthought, and was shoe-horned into a couple of short scenes, even though there was much more story to tell.
Episode II was good for pure action, but the lame attempts at characterization dashed any chance of being able to take the characters seriously.
Anakin: "My mother was killed so I became a mass-murderer!"
Amidala: "There, there. That's OK. We all go on a killing spree once in a while. Let's get married and have twins."
Anakin: "For no reason, I don't have a father."
Amidala: "Parthenogenesis is so-o-o-o cute. Can Jar-Jar be our best man?"
Anakin: "I'm just angry all the time."
Amidala: "Hush, dear. We're late for your aqualung fitting."
My understanding is that Windows does this to help maintain file system integrity... turning off a Windows box without shutting down is much less risky than with Linux, as I understand it. The trade-off is performance, and when I have lots of stuff going on, sometimes the whole system will freeze for several seconds or more while the disk thrashes. If I get really stupid and launch something memory-intensive when the machine is already low on RAM the system can go dead for several minutes. It's pretty easy to avoid that, usually.
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If you want a movie worth watching, why not get the original, starring a real actor, directed by a real director, who is a 1000 times better than the room-temperature-IQ-mouth-breathers behind most current movies. Not to mention that it's also the inspiration for the excellent Rush song, "Cinderella Man".
Does that count the 800-bazillion dollars they spent hyping the thing once they realized they had a hit on their hands?
If they had been selling a cut of "The Phantom Menace" before Jar-jar was added they would have made a killing.
Of course, maybe it just would have been Ahmed whatsisname with that stupid puppet head on.
...but themselves.
If you own a PVR the cable companies aren't your friend?
Until the advent of satellite TV cable companies were usually a monopoly in any given area, free to offer crappy service with grainy, fuzzy and/or snowy pictures and raise prices apparently with impunity (I'm sure there was some legislation in place, but it never seemed to help). No matter how much you hated the service, they were the only game in town if you wanted more than the local broadcasts.
Now that they are competing on merits (I'm sure they have bought and are buying legislators, too) against the likes of DirecTV, which is a completely new generation of TV, a quantum leap ahead of cable, IMO, they are complaining and whining to anyone who will listen.
Once the Feds relaxed that screw-the-consumer law regarding satellite companies not being allowed to deliver local channels (an issue for Simpsons fan like me!), there was no reason at all for me to keep cable. Satellite has broadcast-quality, even DVD quality picture, much less outage time (when cable goes out, it's often out for a day or more till they can dig up and repair the problem), in 3 years I've only seen DirecTV off for much more than hour once. In each case satellite outages was caused by a big thunderstorm, and the reception problems seldom last more than 30-60 minutes.
I know many people have issues with DirecTV and their ilk, but cable companies are like horse and buggy manufacturers in the early 1900's. They'd better adapt fast* rather than sitting around griping about PVR's (which are here to stay in one form or another DMCA be damned), or they will die out quickly and no one but they will be crying.
* Ever see "Body by Fisher" in a car? Fisher started out in the buggy business.
...and Greg Bear wrote about nano before Neal Stephenson (see "Blood Music" from the late 70's) or "City of Angels" for a really well-though-out example of nano-technology in everyday life.
Just because Crichton is just getting into nano now doesn't mean it won't be a good story. I read "Andromeda Strain" one afternoon in the late 70's when I was in high school and it was a great read. I read it again a couple years ago and still enjoyed it. It's OK if MC is targetting a wider audience than NS or GB, the book could still be good.
Believe it or not, there is intelligent fiction that makes it into the best-selling lists. I haven't read this book, but another author, who happens to be my favorite, Terry Pratchett, is quite big in the U.S. and huge in the U.K. I've been a fan since "The Light Fantastic" and I was quite surprised how popular he ended up being since his books are often quite complex and the humor is often both subtle and obscure (how many popular authors do you know who routinely make Latin puns?).
It's my understanding that MSG didn't come into common use until the early 20th century. Long enough to mess up the current generations.
Of course we Americans eat much more MSG (and other sources of glutamte: hydrolized vegetable protein, autolyzed (or torula) yeast, caseinate) than anyone else, so that theory won't hold. Despite the growing awareness that MSG is an "excitotoxin" and might cause various neural dysfunctions, it is still a common additive in prepared foods.
Don't forget the fact that 2/3 of the consonants in the language are silent.
75% percent? If only 75% of TV series were crap I'd be amazed! I'd place the number more at 90% or higher.
Good point. But if you are using Windows and _not_ using 4NT or something like cygwin that gives you a *nix-type shell then you get all the hassles you deserve.
Filename completion rules!
I'm pretty sure that something like "c:\progra*\borlan*\projects" works fine with cmd.exe if the wildcards reduce to a unique filename.
It's still relevant. Micros~1 still uses the old ISO-9660 (or whatever it is) CD format that forces 8.3 and they still have all their download files in cryptic, uselessly named 8.3 filenames. It's 2002, yet for naming conventions, Microsoft is still in 1992.
Here's a hint, world! No one uses DOS anymore! We don't need 8.3 filenames!
Yeah, they can take my meat away from me when they can pry it from my cold, dead, greasy fingers.
Man, I wish I could spend all day coming up with inane assertions and then writing books about it and getting paid for it.
Of course the meter is arbitrary! Until you get down to the quantum level EVERYTHING is arbitrary. That's the way the universe works!
Geez!
Yeah, what comes after "peta-"?
What you say might be true, but it seemed about halfway through the movie that there wasn't going to be any real point to it except "Pointless scary stuff happens." and when you reach the end, that's what it ends up being.
Ultimately, the movie boils down to "Pointless scary stuff happens.", and to me, was like watching someone else play Doom. The sets, while very cool-looking, seemed contrived to provide an environment for "pointless scary stuff happening" than showing a real functioning space ship. And while the cast was good (Sam Neill did good "creepy", you end up with a feeling of futility because you soon realize that they only thing you're going to get for the rest of the movie is "[ointless scary stuff happening".
Still, it was better than Spawn.
I upgraded to the latest player and listened to about a half hour of part 1.1 successfully. Very nice, but I'd prefer a version that is maybe about 6 time faster or so. It's very peaceful and pretty, but the tension starts to build after waiting for the next change after a couple of minutes. :-)
#5. ?????
#6 Profit!!!
Just kidding. Seriously, you have a great idea, metacosm.
This license is a joke. First off, how can you include such a vague term as "violations of human rights" in a legal agreement in the first place without including pages and pages that define it... you can find someone somewhere that will argue anything is a violation of human rights (capitalism for one, and it's not hard to find people who will argue that).
Like the parent poster's, this is just more handwaving by people in an attempt to look like they care, but without any real action to back it up, it just looks like hypocrisy. It's kind of like all the useless legislation that gets passed not to fix a problem, but so that to the less-informed, the politicians LOOK like they are doing something.
Just more babble in a world that has too much babble and not enough deeds. Something as simple as helping out at the local food bank can make a difference. This is something I do that's easy and fun and you actually get to see the people you are helping (something that almost never happens in my career).
"Think globally, act locally." is a good philosophy in my mind, because that's the only way most of us can make a difference. This is much better than some stupid, if well-meant, misplaced manifesto in a software license.
I'd like to hear about more "hypercites". People who do lots of good, but don't go around making a big deal about it.
Yeah, I just wish I could get that POS Real software to work... all I get is silence. Why do people continue to use this perpertually broken software by a company that sucks away your privacy like a vampire?!
Actually the liner notes from that album don't mention the 16/33 RPM, but it did talk about the fact that the music was just barely audible and Eno couldn't get up to fix it. "Discrete Music", which is a great album, is meant to be listened to at a very low volume (i.e., "ambient").
Using tape loops and various analog "sampling" technologies he created 3 alternate versions of the Canon on side 2 played, for lack of better word, "sideways", each progressively more dissonant. Side 1 is the same idea, but uses, I believe different music.
Both versions work... one is meant sarcastically, and the other is meant literally. Someone anal enough to point that out should realize that. ;-)
Don't ask me. Talk to Justice Blackmun.
Of course we all know that there is a right to privacy implied in the Constitution. In the biggest legal non sequitur of the 20th century, that right to privacy means you have the right to have an abortion, but of course, it does not give you a right to privacy.
Even worse, have you ever seen he video?!
It's a ripe slice of hippie-generation kitsch (kind of "Up With People" meets "Laugh-In") with fresh-faced teenagers with primary-colored T-shirts and oversized buttons with quips like "Hobbits unite!" and "Appoint Leonard Nimoy to the U.N.", wearing oversized rubber pointed ears and mincing and hopping about in a most undignified manner, and Nimoy looking dapper, if dated, with a black blazer, white turtleneck and the Spock haircut (but no ears), looking very relaxed and happy.
"Empire" was much more grown up, but large parts of "Jedi" were as cartoony as episode 1.
The problem with Episode 1, was that while it really did have a pretty grown-up plot, the grown-up plot was given short shrift so Lucas could show us 21 minutes of Jake Lloyd going "Yippee!", 47 minutes of droids being blown up and chopped in half, 67 minutes of teeth-grindingly annoying Jar-Jar antics and 153 minutes of min-numbing pod racing. The plot, while very interesting, seemed like an afterthought, and was shoe-horned into a couple of short scenes, even though there was much more story to tell.
Episode II was good for pure action, but the lame attempts at characterization dashed any chance of being able to take the characters seriously.
Anakin: "My mother was killed so I became a mass-murderer!"
Amidala: "There, there. That's OK. We all go on a killing spree once in a while. Let's get married and have twins."
Anakin: "For no reason, I don't have a father."
Amidala: "Parthenogenesis is so-o-o-o cute. Can Jar-Jar be our best man?"
Anakin: "I'm just angry all the time."
Amidala: "Hush, dear. We're late for your aqualung fitting."
My understanding is that Windows does this to help maintain file system integrity... turning off a Windows box without shutting down is much less risky than with Linux, as I understand it. The trade-off is performance, and when I have lots of stuff going on, sometimes the whole system will freeze for several seconds or more while the disk thrashes. If I get really stupid and launch something memory-intensive when the machine is already low on RAM the system can go dead for several minutes. It's pretty easy to avoid that, usually.
But since NT/2000/XP has all disk I/O in critical regions, your system still grinds to a standstill.
The day Microsoft OS's are not ridiculously I/O-bound, this will make a much bigger difference... for Microsoft users.
Of course, I guess there's a point to helping your filesystem remain intact when Granny or the baby flips the Big Red Switch without shutting down...
The moral: Use lots and lots and lots of RAM with Microsoft