Which he said he'd do after he finishes the prequels. Complete with tons of special features etc. that he doesn't have time to oversee now (because yes, love him or hate him, he is a control freak).
Besides, I don't think the fans have quite exhausted their complaining about "having" to buy multiple versions of the VHS version yet. He probably wants to wait a couple years before he kicks off the Great DVD Whine.
I'm sorry to hear you've run into such rude tech support. Around here, we're polite enough up until the customer starts copping a serious attitude.
That said, we get dozens of calls a day accusing us (not asking politely, as characterized by your post) of having downtime when, in fact, the problem is on the client's side. I have outright been called a liar when I say our ISP is not "down." When there actually is an outage (which is rare, but happens), it's much worse.
Then, we are "always" down, and have had "dozens" of outages in the past week, and etc. etc. (usually this is a customer running Win 95 with an antiquated HSP modem who lives in the sticks and has a 400-foot phone cord going from his computer to the phone jack in the barn, but... nevermind. We're "always down.")
So yes, when you have hundreds of callers a day telling you you are ruining their business and costing them thousands of dollars and raping their grandchildren, patience sometimes runs a little thin. Because so many customers open with "are you guys down AGAIN?" rather than describing their problem, sometimes techs can get a little terse.
Nonetheless, if any of the techs here spoke to a customer the way you're characterizing it, he would pretty much be fired on the spot.
I haven't bought any CDs in a long time -- just too expensive and I won't support the copy-protection nonsense. But I do need my new music fix, so I subscribed to emusic. $10 a month for all the DRM-free mp3s I can download. It's been well worth it, and it's allowed me to get new music without running to the record store to pay extortionist prices for crippled products.
There's a nice article on emusic and its advantages here.
No, they're not paying me, but I heard about emusic from a similar Slashdot discussion, so I figured I'd return the favor.
The RIAA has to know their business model is dead. I suspect within the next couple years they will follow in Metallica's footsteps, stop turning out CDs altogether, and move into the "all lawsuit" phase of revenue generation.
How about I break into your house and smash up some of your stuff, then say it's your fault because your locks aren't durable enough?
When you're deliberately setting out to damage a system, it doesn't matter how secure that system is to begin with. A crime doesn't stop being a crime because the door was unlocked or the safety was off or the code was badly written.
CGI has been the death of special effects wizardry. If you can imagine it, you can put it on the screen by throwing enough computers at it. In earlier times you had to think about how to do the special effects. And audiences could still be surprised and amazed when a particularly clever effect or dramatic stunt worked.
Not so. Watch the documentary on the making of Jurassic Park sometime. The animators hired to do the dinosaurs -- who were all from Phil Tippett's band of stop-motion and go-motion veterans. The animators could not work with a keyboard and mouse and make their animations work, so they built computerized versions of their stop-motion dinosaur puppets, and used essentially the same techniques that they had been using for decades -- indeed very similar to Ray Harryhausen's techniques on King Kong and Sinbad and the like.
One of the animators even commented, somewhat indignantly, that audiences think that animators now just hit "D for Dinosaur" on a keyboard, and that it magically appears on the screen, when in fact animators bust more ass than ever trying to bring increasingly more lifelike animations to the screen.
Dennis Muren (of ILM fame) and his contemporaries, in several DVD commentaries that I've heard, and on the documentaries, comment on the massive amounts of work it takes to make CGI special effects convincing.
If anything, it's more difficult and time consuming to do CGI well than it was to use more primitive FX technology. Certainly, you can rip off the kinematics libraries from Jurassic Park to make the baby lizards from Godzilla, but audiences are going to know the y're seeing second-rate work. Just like you can tell the difference between quality and crapulent blue-screen.
The wizardry is still there, but audiences are far more demanding than they were. We forget that back in the 80s, Return of the Jedi had huge matte lines and transparencies and jerky stop-motion, and sneer at effects now that are far more realistic, because a few details don't look quite right. Paradoxically, the closer things look to real, the more "fake" people accuse it of looking.
Glad to oblige. I've put three screenshots from my Omniweb session into this directory.
The first screenshot (and I think, the worst) is CNN.com. You can see for yourself what happens up by the address bar. It's a mess. The second screenshot is one of Omniweb's own pages... if you look in the middle under the address bar, you can see where the fonts are squashed together and illegible. That isn't a page, that's Omniweb's own window. The third page is that same corruption repeating on Omniweb's own page.
So that's my problem with Omniweb. And I do admit my version of OS X is slightly modified; however, I've used Safari, Camino, Mozilla, Firebird, IE, and Omniweb in an attempt to find the perfect browser for me, and of these only Omniweb has these problems, or anything near it.
The browser window didn't render correctly -- squashed-looking fonts, cut-off address bar, and the first few pages I browsed too were a similar mess. Massively buggy rendering.
Closed it, uninstalled it. I'll try again next version. I wouldn't even use this app for free, much less $30.
Incidentally, I went through this same procedure with OmniWeb a few months ago.
Because an OS feature makes up for it doesn't mean it's not a vital feature in a browser. I use tabbed browsing extensively on both my Windows and OS X machines, and I won't use a browser that doesn't have it if I don't have a choice. If Omniweb provided tabs as a feature, I might give it another look (tried it already -- didn't like it), but I don't have Panther or Expose -- so I need my tabs.
I guess it depends on whether you find applications of personal logic the highest goal humankind can strive for.
Personally, I have seen and read of too many things for which modern science cannot account to dismiss the possibility of a guiding intelligence out of hand. When science can explain all the unanswered questions, then I'll start believing there is no god. And when human beings can stop using science to create new means of destroying himself, his fellow humans, and the planet, then I'll start believing we no longer need one.
I think the world has developed enough now, that we no longer need religion as a deterrent. It serves more as a tool for discrimination/fanaticism, rather than what it was intended for.
I think you're partially right, but I find that a very narrow viewpoint. Organized religion can be used as deterrent to certain behavior, but that's not necessarily the sum total of its function. Many people get a lot of personal and spiritual fulfillment out of their religion. It lends meaning to their lives. Because the original intent might have been to codify behavior has little bearing on the end product -- after all, Kellogg's Corn Flakes were originally invented as a deterrent to masturbation, but that isn't why most people eat them today.
It's inspiring that you have this much faith in humanity, but personally I'm comforted by the fact that some people consider themselves beholden to a divine power that will hold them accountable for their actions. It's hard for me to have a lot of optimism about human beings governing themselves morally "just because."
Atrocities are perpetrated for secular causes as much as religious ones. It's easy to dismiss religion on the basis of its lowest manifestations, while ignoring all its highest. Do away with Christianity and you might do away with some of the pain in the world, but you also lose the Sistine Chapel, the Divine Comedy, and Monty Python's Life of Brian.
Yes, religion can be, and often is, misused, but its potential misuse isn't interchangeable with its inherent value. Because you can stab someone in the eye with a ball-point pen doesn't mean we've evolved past the need for the written word.
Guns are the top of the food chain and very rare, while baseball bats, machetes, shanks, garrottes, and even a plastic bag are the more common (and messy) options. As in Tenchu and its descendents, every weapon can be used for an automatic kill if you approach the target undetected. In a neat twist, though, the ensuing death is presented from the Director's perspective, forcing the player into his unpleasantly voyeuristic role.
Hype or not, this sounds pretty cool. I've been pretty impressed with what Rockstar did with the GTA series. Some companies go for "shock" value and have nothing more going for them; Rockstar, with GTA at least, has done a fine job of both shock value and quality gaming. I'll be looking forward to this title.
The title is available at the Science Fiction Book Club, as well. If you like Philip K. Dick, pick up William Tenn's Immodest Proposals and Dimensions of Sheckley while you're there.
I knew this already -- in fact, most online gamers are 6'2" 250# and seasoned kenpo masters who will not hesitate to track people down at their houses and kick their asses.
Well -- that's what they say when they lose, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Which he said he'd do after he finishes the prequels. Complete with tons of special features etc. that he doesn't have time to oversee now (because yes, love him or hate him, he is a control freak).
Besides, I don't think the fans have quite exhausted their complaining about "having" to buy multiple versions of the VHS version yet. He probably wants to wait a couple years before he kicks off the Great DVD Whine.
Imagine if William Gibson wrote a James Bond adventure in which a sexual tigress seduces Bond into a Caribbean political crisis
I'm pretty sure this story already has its own category over at fanfiction.net. Except that Pokemon is involved somehow, too.
I'm sorry to hear you've run into such rude tech support. Around here, we're polite enough up until the customer starts copping a serious attitude.
That said, we get dozens of calls a day accusing us (not asking politely, as characterized by your post) of having downtime when, in fact, the problem is on the client's side. I have outright been called a liar when I say our ISP is not "down." When there actually is an outage (which is rare, but happens), it's much worse.
Then, we are "always" down, and have had "dozens" of outages in the past week, and etc. etc. (usually this is a customer running Win 95 with an antiquated HSP modem who lives in the sticks and has a 400-foot phone cord going from his computer to the phone jack in the barn, but... nevermind. We're "always down.")
So yes, when you have hundreds of callers a day telling you you are ruining their business and costing them thousands of dollars and raping their grandchildren, patience sometimes runs a little thin. Because so many customers open with "are you guys down AGAIN?" rather than describing their problem, sometimes techs can get a little terse.
Nonetheless, if any of the techs here spoke to a customer the way you're characterizing it, he would pretty much be fired on the spot.
And I'm sure every minute of those 72 hours was characterized by irate phone calls to tech support.
"Are you guys down again? You're down more than you're up! I'm going to find another service... etc..."
"Ma'am our facilities have been entirely leveled by a tornado, we'll be back up in 72 hours."
"72 HOURS?! I have photos of my grandchildren I have to mail! Worst ISP ever! Let me speak to your supervisor!"
"Ma'am our supervisor was also leveled by the tornado."
*click*
Not that I work tech support for an ISP and am bitter...
I haven't bought any CDs in a long time -- just too expensive and I won't support the copy-protection nonsense. But I do need my new music fix, so I subscribed to emusic. $10 a month for all the DRM-free mp3s I can download. It's been well worth it, and it's allowed me to get new music without running to the record store to pay extortionist prices for crippled products.
There's a nice article on emusic and its advantages here.
No, they're not paying me, but I heard about emusic from a similar Slashdot discussion, so I figured I'd return the favor.
The RIAA has to know their business model is dead. I suspect within the next couple years they will follow in Metallica's footsteps, stop turning out CDs altogether, and move into the "all lawsuit" phase of revenue generation.
Just trying to do my bit for community service, on the off chance he didn't know.
As for replying seriously to spammers -- that's not morbidly curious, that's masochistic. "We've got a live one, boys!"
Yeah, and I heard one of the boom mike operators on the Lord of the Rings movie yells at his kids, so I won't watch it.
Seriously, I fail to see what bearing it has. Either the game is good or it isn't. Personality doesn't really factor into it.
YHBT.
Cassette? What's that?
You should apologize! You don't roll six-sided dice to make saving throws! Jeez!
How about I break into your house and smash up some of your stuff, then say it's your fault because your locks aren't durable enough?
When you're deliberately setting out to damage a system, it doesn't matter how secure that system is to begin with. A crime doesn't stop being a crime because the door was unlocked or the safety was off or the code was badly written.
Yeah and, they were all predated by Digital Derby. Bunch of Johnny-come-latelies.
Has the Slashdot hive mind forgotten?
Jack Valenti blah blah MPAA blah blah evil blah blah DRM blah blah Orwellian world of terror blah blah...
OK, that's out of the way, you can go about your business.
CGI has been the death of special effects wizardry. If you can imagine it, you can put it on the screen by throwing enough computers at it. In earlier times you had to think about how to do the special effects. And audiences could still be surprised and amazed when a particularly clever effect or dramatic stunt worked.
Not so. Watch the documentary on the making of Jurassic Park sometime. The animators hired to do the dinosaurs -- who were all from Phil Tippett's band of stop-motion and go-motion veterans. The animators could not work with a keyboard and mouse and make their animations work, so they built computerized versions of their stop-motion dinosaur puppets, and used essentially the same techniques that they had been using for decades -- indeed very similar to Ray Harryhausen's techniques on King Kong and Sinbad and the like.
One of the animators even commented, somewhat indignantly, that audiences think that animators now just hit "D for Dinosaur" on a keyboard, and that it magically appears on the screen, when in fact animators bust more ass than ever trying to bring increasingly more lifelike animations to the screen.
Dennis Muren (of ILM fame) and his contemporaries, in several DVD commentaries that I've heard, and on the documentaries, comment on the massive amounts of work it takes to make CGI special effects convincing.
If anything, it's more difficult and time consuming to do CGI well than it was to use more primitive FX technology. Certainly, you can rip off the kinematics libraries from Jurassic Park to make the baby lizards from Godzilla, but audiences are going to know the y're seeing second-rate work. Just like you can tell the difference between quality and crapulent blue-screen.
The wizardry is still there, but audiences are far more demanding than they were. We forget that back in the 80s, Return of the Jedi had huge matte lines and transparencies and jerky stop-motion, and sneer at effects now that are far more realistic, because a few details don't look quite right. Paradoxically, the closer things look to real, the more "fake" people accuse it of looking.
JMO.
None of my other applications have any problem with Metalifizer, just OmniWeb. I'll stick with Safari.
Glad to oblige. I've put three screenshots from my Omniweb session into this directory.
The first screenshot (and I think, the worst) is CNN.com. You can see for yourself what happens up by the address bar. It's a mess. The second screenshot is one of Omniweb's own pages... if you look in the middle under the address bar, you can see where the fonts are squashed together and illegible. That isn't a page, that's Omniweb's own window. The third page is that same corruption repeating on Omniweb's own page.
So that's my problem with Omniweb. And I do admit my version of OS X is slightly modified; however, I've used Safari, Camino, Mozilla, Firebird, IE, and Omniweb in an attempt to find the perfect browser for me, and of these only Omniweb has these problems, or anything near it.
I hope that's helpful.
I downloaded it, installed it, ran it.
The browser window didn't render correctly -- squashed-looking fonts, cut-off address bar, and the first few pages I browsed too were a similar mess. Massively buggy rendering.
Closed it, uninstalled it. I'll try again next version. I wouldn't even use this app for free, much less $30.
Incidentally, I went through this same procedure with OmniWeb a few months ago.
And if you don't have Panther, what then?
Because an OS feature makes up for it doesn't mean it's not a vital feature in a browser. I use tabbed browsing extensively on both my Windows and OS X machines, and I won't use a browser that doesn't have it if I don't have a choice. If Omniweb provided tabs as a feature, I might give it another look (tried it already -- didn't like it), but I don't have Panther or Expose -- so I need my tabs.
Pope Catholic, Bear S**ts in Woods...
I guess it depends on whether you find applications of personal logic the highest goal humankind can strive for.
Personally, I have seen and read of too many things for which modern science cannot account to dismiss the possibility of a guiding intelligence out of hand. When science can explain all the unanswered questions, then I'll start believing there is no god. And when human beings can stop using science to create new means of destroying himself, his fellow humans, and the planet, then I'll start believing we no longer need one.
I think the world has developed enough now, that we no longer need religion as a deterrent. It serves more as a tool for discrimination/fanaticism, rather than what it was intended for.
I think you're partially right, but I find that a very narrow viewpoint. Organized religion can be used as deterrent to certain behavior, but that's not necessarily the sum total of its function. Many people get a lot of personal and spiritual fulfillment out of their religion. It lends meaning to their lives. Because the original intent might have been to codify behavior has little bearing on the end product -- after all, Kellogg's Corn Flakes were originally invented as a deterrent to masturbation, but that isn't why most people eat them today.
It's inspiring that you have this much faith in humanity, but personally I'm comforted by the fact that some people consider themselves beholden to a divine power that will hold them accountable for their actions. It's hard for me to have a lot of optimism about human beings governing themselves morally "just because."
Atrocities are perpetrated for secular causes as much as religious ones. It's easy to dismiss religion on the basis of its lowest manifestations, while ignoring all its highest. Do away with Christianity and you might do away with some of the pain in the world, but you also lose the Sistine Chapel, the Divine Comedy, and Monty Python's Life of Brian.
Yes, religion can be, and often is, misused, but its potential misuse isn't interchangeable with its inherent value. Because you can stab someone in the eye with a ball-point pen doesn't mean we've evolved past the need for the written word.
Guns are the top of the food chain and very rare, while baseball bats, machetes, shanks, garrottes, and even a plastic bag are the more common (and messy) options. As in Tenchu and its descendents, every weapon can be used for an automatic kill if you approach the target undetected. In a neat twist, though, the ensuing death is presented from the Director's perspective, forcing the player into his unpleasantly voyeuristic role.
Hype or not, this sounds pretty cool. I've been pretty impressed with what Rockstar did with the GTA series. Some companies go for "shock" value and have nothing more going for them; Rockstar, with GTA at least, has done a fine job of both shock value and quality gaming. I'll be looking forward to this title.
Actually, it's also available in Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick. That's where I first read it.
The title is available at the Science Fiction Book Club, as well. If you like Philip K. Dick, pick up William Tenn's Immodest Proposals and Dimensions of Sheckley while you're there.
I knew this already -- in fact, most online gamers are 6'2" 250# and seasoned kenpo masters who will not hesitate to track people down at their houses and kick their asses.
Well -- that's what they say when they lose, anyway.