What does Cairo have to do with Avalon? Avalon isn't the hardware acceleration in Longhorn. It's for building applications.
Yes, well, not everything has perfect one to one relationships in terms of available libraries and exactly what specific functions they provide. Avalon is also the new rendering model for Windows, and Cairo, as well as being hardware acceleration, is a new rendering model to run on X. Both of these are following along the lines of DisplayPostscript and Quartz which have a rendering model that is similar to PDF. In the case of Cairo the rendering model most accurately realtes to SVG, but that's similar to PDF in the end. Avalon - well, I'm not sure. I gather they're running with something SVG-like as well.
OK. Then try owning a TV in the UK and making the claim you watch only ITN or Sky TV.
Sure, and try owning and distributing a copy of deCSS in the US and making the claim that it is only to gain full access to legally purchased DVDs and not for copying them.
The fact is the MPAA has you by the testicles, and they are far from the only organization with that power.
The point here is that the BBC is independent of the government. Sure, they've managed to get quite a sweet deal, but they're under no obligation to the British government over that.
Try watching BBC in the UK without paying your license. If you push it far enough, men with guns will show up and escort you to gaol. Sounds like givernment to me.
Oh come on. Try living in an apartment without paying your landlord rent. If push it far enough men with guns will show up and escort you to gaol. Does that mean that your landlord is the government? The "men with guns" are enforcing the law on behalf of the BBC or your landlord. Yes they work for the government. That doesn't mean the BBC or your landlord work for the government.
If you want to dispute the fairness of the law (in either case) that's fine. That is an issue you can take up with the government. That doesn't affect the independence of the parties involved.
Opera is an increasingly marginalized player in the browser market.
I think you might be surprised. Opera has a decent popular following in the desktop market. Sure, it's not growing, but it's not shrinking either. More importantly though, Opera has a very strong position in the mobile/embedded market where their "small and efficient" approach pays dividends.
Don't forget, either, that Opera has been a continuing source of innovation in the browser market: tabbed browsing and mouse gestures showed up first in Opera. They've recently also added native SVG support out of the box. No, these aren't startling innovations, but they do help to keep the browser market active and moving forward.
And just for reference, no I'm not an Opera fanboi. I use Galeon myself, but I used to use Opera when I was on Windows (back before Firefox existed), and have at least kept track of what they're doing.
That actually reminds me vaguely of the death of a band I quite liked called "Machines of Loving Grace". They had released 3 albums and were starting to really hit their stride, so the upcoming 4th album was much anticipated, and was some 4 years in coming. Lo and behold, just as they were doing the final mix down prior to release the small record company they were signed to got bought. By Disney. Disney refused to release the album. As the album was produced while they were under contract to the small record company Disney had rights to bar the band from trying to shop the album to a different distributor. Disney, naturally, exercised those rights. The band, in frustration decided to release the album free on the internet - at least people would actually hear it then. But Disney, in buying the small record company, had become part copyright holders to the work. They threatened to sue every band member into financial oblivion should any tracks ever appear on the 'net. In disgust at 4 years of what the band considered their best work being permanently locked away to never be heard they split up. One or two of them are still involved in the music business, but only as producers for other people. It's a sad and pointless loss.
The Blair Witch Project was famously promoted by creating bogus info sites, detailing the "legend" of the Blair Witch.
In an interesting stroke of genius a Japanese film director went about the process the other way around. He wanted to make a film about teenagers, and had a very rough idea for a story involving a group of teenagers and their pop idol whose music they all listen to and obsess over. So he set up a fan site for a purely fictional artist, including discussion boards which were suitably seeded. The resulting discussions were then used to shape the final film, and a lot of the dialog from the discussion boards actually appears in the film (the teenagers in the film, of course, meet and interact on internet fan sites).
The resulting film, if you ever get the chance, is well worth seeing. It's called "All About Lily Chou Chou", and is a very perceptive study of youth not only in Japan, but the world over. Note, also, that a track from the Kill Bill Vol. 1 soundtrack is credited to the entirely fictional artist "Lily Chou Chou" who was created solely for the film (the track is from the soundtrack to "All About Lily Chou Chou").
So you love Apt or yum. Great. Apt does not mean.deb. Apt can still do its normal great things using rpm formatted packages, so clearly the greatness comes from the tool, not the package specification.
The fuure of package maangers, like Smart, make this even clearer. Smart is like apt (but has better dep resolution algorithms) except it supports pluggable backends - that means currently Smart supports.deb,.rpm, and even slackware.tgz. It can manage those from apt repositories, yum repositories, urpmi repositories, re-carpet channels, whatever. You can even do a mix and match between formats and repository types if you want (though that, of course, can get messy).
The point is that package management and dependency solving are largely independent of package formats (as long as the format contains some dependency information). We can have a global package manager that works everywhere and doesn't care which package format it happens to be working with.
So basically even though the RPM based distros were already using APT for RPM for years, Fedora decides to ditch it in favor of an inferior package manager Yum, and then they continue to update and improve Yum until it actually has some advantage (though tons of disadvantages still) over APT for RPM.
Come now, everyone knows Smart is the future of package management. Yum is clearly just filling in time until Smart becomes the standard (even on Debian).
This article appeared in the Apple section early today, then vanished. It has now reappeared in the developers section with most of the old comments (and moderation) still attached.
Why does this matter? Because the first incarnation of the article linked to the previous Linux on POWER contest which closed in 2004 and was simply announcing winners. Presumably the Slashdot editors noticed (who would have thought), pulled it, corrected it, and reposted it. Unfortunately all the comments bitching about it that got (reasonably enough at the time) modded up are also still attached.
I do a fair bit of work in live theatre and I have often considered making a movie of the shows we do. However I am held back by the exact opposite problem - I have access to some very good actors, lighting designers, makeup people and costume makers but only a very limit access to the things that modern film needs, decent editing software for a beginner, special effects skills and raw talent when it comes to holding a camera.
It's a hard problem because you rarely find a group of people who naturally have a nice complete balance of skills. In the end you just have to play to your strengths, and try and minimise your deficits. If you're serious about making films of the shows then investing some cash in a Mac and Final Cut Pro wouldn't go astray. As for the rest - I'm not a film director, I just know some. There are books on the subject though (and your library will probably have them), and they can give you some good basic rules for contructing shots and editing things together. No, you can't become an expert in that, but that just means you want to construct the whole film to be as minimalist as possible with shots and editing. If you keep that aspect simple and let the actors shine, the end result will probably be surprisngly good.
the Acting. it seems bland, with little real emotion. You know it's bad when you can clearly tell they are acting when you've never seen the actors before.
What really pulled the acting down was this: the actors simply weren't comfortable in their environment. They didn't sell the fact that they were there in the film world - they looked too much like someone who knows they're sitting on set. Having so many of the sets apparently CG only makes it harder. Acting on an empty(ish) set can be very hard indeed.
the writing.
I think that's a harsh judgement. There's really practically no dialogue of note in the trailer - just a smattering of lines. Anything can sound bad if not delivered with full conviction. I don't think there was enough to decide either way on the writing.
The Lighting. Especially with the lightsabers. I know it makes sense, but having the lightsaber pointed directly at the screen just looks... awkward. The lighting otherwise looks monotone, obvious, and non-suggestive.
Professional lighting is very hard. Lighting when a lot of your sets are CG is even harder. I thought they did okay under the circumstances, but realitically they were perhaps a little ambitious with what they were trying to achieve.
I would suggest sound was actually a point that also suffered. A lot of the dialogue sounded unclear or had echoes to it. Again, it's all the little cues, like sound and subtle lighting effects, that help to add that feel of unreality. Sound recording and editing can be hard and expensive however.
All around I think these people did a great job. I would possibly fault them for being too ambitious: trying to do more than their acting, lighting and sound were capable of, and hence losing a little suspension of disbelief.
Another problem is sound editting. They didn't pad the room or use the right equipment or filters or something... you can hear all kinds of sounds and noise when the actors talk, making it sound like it was recorded in a bedroom.
Very true. Again, that's one of those things that's hard, and potentially expensive to do right. Then again, there's the issue of knowing your constraints. That, IMHO, is why Troops was so good. They knew sound and lighting and make-up were really the hard parts, so they managed to write something that required a minimum of it: Everything was shot outside in bright sun so lighting issues are minimised. 90% of the dialog is from the troopers and can hence be recorded separately in sound booth afterwards. Everyone is in costume (which was a point they were apparently very good at, and used to the hilt) except Beru and Owen, who are supposed to look a little haggard and distressed anyway - make-up becomes a non-issue.
The truly great amateur films are the ones that understand what they can do well, and what they don't have available, and manage to create something that fits neatly inside those constraints. Being so constrained is a little more limiting, but if you're really creative in writing and direction you can often do wonders. There are some great Science Fiction films (Pi and Sticky Fingers of Time for instance) that were made on shoestring budgets. Knowing and playing to your limitations is what makes for a great low budget film.
Star Wars had a stellar cast, all proven professionals...well, mostly.
It certainly has some very good actors apperaing in even the prequels: Ewen McGregor, Liam Neeson, and Natalie Portman among others. What it also had was some very very poor actors in some critical roles: Jake Lloyd, and Hayden Christiansen. Then there were those weird choices for minor roles: Ahmed Best? I think we could have done better for a character with as much screen time as Jar Jar in Ep I (though the director is surely to blame for some of that). Temuera Morrison? You're not in Guatemala now Dr. Ropata. Has Martin Henderson somehow scored himself a role for Ep III?
I agree though, despite some good actors, there's only so much you can do with a script and director who are apparently working against you. Most of the blame really has to fall squarely at Lucas' feet here.
Actually what was lacking was professional quality lighting, wardrobe, make-up and cinematography. That's understandable, these thngs are hard, and potentially very expensive. Most average (that's average, not ugly!) people can look good if you supply them with professional make up and tailored costuming, have professional lighting (that makes a surprsing difference actually - its one of the main differences in "look" between a alot of amateur films and professional productions) and shoot them in a way that makes the most of their features.
You would probably be surprised to find, should you ever meet them in real life, that most celebrities are hardly more attractive than a lot of the people you'll meet every day. Sure they've got the knack of a winning smile, or a particularly "sexy pout" or whatever, but on the whole the difference isn't that great. What they do have is professional makeup, lighting and cinematography.
This is like the FBI's report last week that it had no evidence of al Qaeda sleeper cells operating in the United States currently. Only a fool would believe that this means we have defeated terrorism on our own soil.
Well, you could do some reading as to what al Qaeda actually is, preferably from people who seriously researched them for years, instead of just swallowing the government line of "a global terror network". You can start here. What you'll probably find, the more you read, is that the odds that al Qaeda has any sort of network, any sleeper cells, in the US is very low indeed. Given that, the fact that the FBI failed to find any is hardly suprising at all.
Heck, even trivial programs have real problems with this. And why is that? Because we have problems thinking in parallell all the time.
Exactly. So what we need is a way of thinking about the problem that makes it easy to think about and do analysis. I'm sure there are probably some Computer Science researchers contemplating these problems. Hopefully there are really good people, like Tony Hoare working on it. What's that? He did work on this already? He came up with something that solves most of these problems already? Can't have been that long ago could it? Only 20 years ago you say?
Check out CSP. If you want a way to think about multithreaded applications that makes managing threads and avoiding deadlocks easy it's already available - it just hasn't got the publicity amongst developers that it deserves. If your project is in Java there are already things like JCSP which let you do CSP style threading in Java right now.
Apparently you've never had GNOME bleed the colors out of your desktop because you have a crappy Sun video card. And yes, it does hammer the CPU a bit more.
I have had to deal with the fact that for some reason a lot of Sun workstations can't cope with more than 8bit color. Perhaps Sun should consider spending an extra 50c on a video card that can manage.
Besides, when I'm in Solaris it means I'm programming. When I'm programming I could not possibly care less about window dressing.
I care about window dressing when it means a difference in functionality, particularly in window handling. Having gnome-terminal or (preferably) konsole that can provide tabs is nice. Having a window manager that support window shading is nice. Having a window manager that supported window groups (to help manage, for instance, a variety of emacs frames) would be better (and yes, GNOME doesn't. Grrr). Having a pager that shows me my desktop layouts is nice. Having an easy way to bind menu items to key shortcuts on all my apps is nice. Having good utility software (like character maps, a decent email and calendar etc.) is always useful too. If you're that devoted to just focussign on programming with no distractions, boot to the console and use Emacs from there.
The last time I was using Solaris seriously I spent a while in CDE, got annoyed with its general lack ability to do anything useful for me, and switched to fluxbox. I get the same great lack of functionality in a lighter package. Heck, I even get to tab together my terminals and have window shading.
The time before that when I was using Solaris seriously I went straight to FVWM2 which, at the time, was the most featureful kickass window manager around. And it was still lighter than CDE.
CDE is light on functionality, light on looks (unless you really like Motif for some reason), and a bitch to configure. Yes it can be configured, but anything beyond the most basic stuff is not exactly intuitive or obvious. I had an easier time hacking whatever I wanted into my.fvwm2rc.
As I said CDE works fine, but it is old, ugly and lacking in features. There are still people out there tied to to it, but really, the world (and Sun!) needs to be moving on. CDE hasn't gone anywhere in 10 years, and it shows.
Because their customers are used to having it, and don't want to upgrade anything they don't have to. They'll often have heavily customised CDE environments, or be an ISV that integrates apps into the CDE, etc.
Believe me, I know - I've worked in exactly such an environment. That doesn't mean they need to keep providing CDE as the default desktop on every new version of the OS.
Back with Solaris 8 there was an extra optional CD that contained all the GNU tools and GNOME. It was easy enough to throw that CD in and install the GNU tools and GNOME if you desired it. The default install, of course, never installed any such thing. All I'm saying is that it is about time CDE got relegated to the extra optional CD. All those people who are still tied to it can install it, but all the people coming to Solaris 10 don't even have to know it exists.
I imagine that once they have good management tools for GNOME they'll push it a bit harder, but even so they can't offer the same sort of stability (in terms of compatible changes only, etc) for GNOME.
They can if they want to. It's not like they don't have access to the source or something.
I reckon the people who still like (and use) CDE do so because they are happy with how it is at the moment. Those who want something else have already moved away to XFCE, Gnome, KDE, etc. So since the only users of CDE are happy with it... why change what works?
Because you are introducing all your new users to the "joys" of CDE. It hardly represents a good solution, not a migration path (handing new users something you want to migrate away from as the default is not exactly good). Sun can provide CDE updates and support for all those legacy people who still use it. That doesn't mean they need to make it the default desktop available immediately from the log in screen for every new version of their OS.
Relatively speaking that's piss all though. It's hardly as if that's going to make orders of magnitude difference in the number of users supportable. You may as well force all your users to use sh instead of bash or ksh 'cause that'll save memory too. Who really needs interactive command line editing and history anyway? Feature crack I say!
Any bloat that GNOME has is in shared libraries. Stick that on a server and serve it up to 10 or 100 workstations and you're really not putting much extra load on the server because all those shared libraries only need to get loaded once and then shared. When it comes down to it I very seriously doubt that the number of users you can support on the same hardware with CDE is all that many higher than GNOME, let along many orders of magnitude. Yes, you get gains from serving everyone CDE instead of GNOME, but you'll get gains over that by serving them blackbox instead of CDE. Given the increased functionalty offered, I think GNOME comfortably covers its costs.
Oh dear, CDE, what has become of you? Apparently nothing has changed since the mid 90's. Can anyone honestly tell me that they've looked through the CDE and JDS (GNOME) screenshots and would choose CDE? I've used CDE. It works well enough, but it really is lacking in functionality compared to GNOME.
Is it really that hard to transition people off CDE? Are there actually that many people that are that heavily wedded to CDE? Provide some legacy support, sure, but shouldn't GNOME (aka JDS) be the default by now? Why are they still mentioning CDE as anything other than a minor product they've attached on some extra CDs as support for legacy users?
A weak US dollar makes exports inexpensive and imports expensive. This is generally good news for the US tourism and manufacturing industries, both of which have been in a flux since fall of 2001.
That is indeed true. The question is, if the US Dollar declines, how far and how fast will it decline? Some rather well informed individuals, like the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and the former head of research at the IMF predict a possible 20%-40% decline in value over a short time period - a currency crisis. Should that happen swiftly you can expect inflation to be utterly rampant, and no matter how you cut it, that's going to be very bad for the US economy.
but cutting SS won't do them any good...they'll still have the same amount of money in the kitty (ignoring the surplus SS funds going to buy bonds, ofcourse).
Very true, except that it is getting harder to find people willing to buy bonds to cover the defificts being run. The social security fund provides a nice captive market to buy bonds on mass at the sort of rate of return that the US government can reasonably afford to offer. If that starts running low its going to be rather hard to cover the defificts. Bond yield rates might have to go up to manage to find buyers. That's going to make the debt a lot harder to service. Buyers are also increasingly going to question exactly how the US is going to manage to cover that rate of return.
Slashdot Mirror
What does Cairo have to do with Avalon? Avalon isn't the hardware acceleration in Longhorn. It's for building applications.
Yes, well, not everything has perfect one to one relationships in terms of available libraries and exactly what specific functions they provide. Avalon is also the new rendering model for Windows, and Cairo, as well as being hardware acceleration, is a new rendering model to run on X. Both of these are following along the lines of DisplayPostscript and Quartz which have a rendering model that is similar to PDF. In the case of Cairo the rendering model most accurately realtes to SVG, but that's similar to PDF in the end. Avalon - well, I'm not sure. I gather they're running with something SVG-like as well.
Jedidiah.
OK. Then try owning a TV in the UK and making the claim you watch only ITN or Sky TV.
Sure, and try owning and distributing a copy of deCSS in the US and making the claim that it is only to gain full access to legally purchased DVDs and not for copying them.
The fact is the MPAA has you by the testicles, and they are far from the only organization with that power.
The point here is that the BBC is independent of the government. Sure, they've managed to get quite a sweet deal, but they're under no obligation to the British government over that.
Jedidiah.
Try watching BBC in the UK without paying your license. If you push it far enough, men with guns will show up and escort you to gaol. Sounds like givernment to me.
Oh come on. Try living in an apartment without paying your landlord rent. If push it far enough men with guns will show up and escort you to gaol. Does that mean that your landlord is the government? The "men with guns" are enforcing the law on behalf of the BBC or your landlord. Yes they work for the government. That doesn't mean the BBC or your landlord work for the government.
If you want to dispute the fairness of the law (in either case) that's fine. That is an issue you can take up with the government. That doesn't affect the independence of the parties involved.
Jedidiah.
Opera is an increasingly marginalized player in the browser market.
I think you might be surprised. Opera has a decent popular following in the desktop market. Sure, it's not growing, but it's not shrinking either. More importantly though, Opera has a very strong position in the mobile/embedded market where their "small and efficient" approach pays dividends.
Don't forget, either, that Opera has been a continuing source of innovation in the browser market: tabbed browsing and mouse gestures showed up first in Opera. They've recently also added native SVG support out of the box. No, these aren't startling innovations, but they do help to keep the browser market active and moving forward.
And just for reference, no I'm not an Opera fanboi. I use Galeon myself, but I used to use Opera when I was on Windows (back before Firefox existed), and have at least kept track of what they're doing.
Jedidiah.
That actually reminds me vaguely of the death of a band I quite liked called "Machines of Loving Grace". They had released 3 albums and were starting to really hit their stride, so the upcoming 4th album was much anticipated, and was some 4 years in coming. Lo and behold, just as they were doing the final mix down prior to release the small record company they were signed to got bought. By Disney. Disney refused to release the album. As the album was produced while they were under contract to the small record company Disney had rights to bar the band from trying to shop the album to a different distributor. Disney, naturally, exercised those rights. The band, in frustration decided to release the album free on the internet - at least people would actually hear it then. But Disney, in buying the small record company, had become part copyright holders to the work. They threatened to sue every band member into financial oblivion should any tracks ever appear on the 'net. In disgust at 4 years of what the band considered their best work being permanently locked away to never be heard they split up. One or two of them are still involved in the music business, but only as producers for other people. It's a sad and pointless loss.
Jedidiah.
The Blair Witch Project was famously promoted by creating bogus info sites, detailing the "legend" of the Blair Witch.
In an interesting stroke of genius a Japanese film director went about the process the other way around. He wanted to make a film about teenagers, and had a very rough idea for a story involving a group of teenagers and their pop idol whose music they all listen to and obsess over. So he set up a fan site for a purely fictional artist, including discussion boards which were suitably seeded. The resulting discussions were then used to shape the final film, and a lot of the dialog from the discussion boards actually appears in the film (the teenagers in the film, of course, meet and interact on internet fan sites).
The resulting film, if you ever get the chance, is well worth seeing. It's called "All About Lily Chou Chou", and is a very perceptive study of youth not only in Japan, but the world over. Note, also, that a track from the Kill Bill Vol. 1 soundtrack is credited to the entirely fictional artist "Lily Chou Chou" who was created solely for the film (the track is from the soundtrack to "All About Lily Chou Chou").
Jedidiah.
So you love Apt or yum. Great. Apt does not mean .deb. Apt can still do its normal great things using rpm formatted packages, so clearly the greatness comes from the tool, not the package specification.
.deb, .rpm, and even slackware .tgz. It can manage those from apt repositories, yum repositories, urpmi repositories, re-carpet channels, whatever. You can even do a mix and match between formats and repository types if you want (though that, of course, can get messy).
The fuure of package maangers, like Smart, make this even clearer. Smart is like apt (but has better dep resolution algorithms) except it supports pluggable backends - that means currently Smart supports
The point is that package management and dependency solving are largely independent of package formats (as long as the format contains some dependency information). We can have a global package manager that works everywhere and doesn't care which package format it happens to be working with.
Jedidiah.
So basically even though the RPM based distros were already using APT for RPM for years, Fedora decides to ditch it in favor of an inferior package manager Yum, and then they continue to update and improve Yum until it actually has some advantage (though tons of disadvantages still) over APT for RPM.
Come now, everyone knows Smart is the future of package management. Yum is clearly just filling in time until Smart becomes the standard (even on Debian).
Jedidiah.
This article appeared in the Apple section early today, then vanished. It has now reappeared in the developers section with most of the old comments (and moderation) still attached.
Why does this matter? Because the first incarnation of the article linked to the previous Linux on POWER contest which closed in 2004 and was simply announcing winners. Presumably the Slashdot editors noticed (who would have thought), pulled it, corrected it, and reposted it. Unfortunately all the comments bitching about it that got (reasonably enough at the time) modded up are also still attached.
Ah well, this is Slashdot after all.
Jedidiah.
I do a fair bit of work in live theatre and I have often considered making a movie of the shows we do. However I am held back by the exact opposite problem - I have access to some very good actors, lighting designers, makeup people and costume makers but only a very limit access to the things that modern film needs, decent editing software for a beginner, special effects skills and raw talent when it comes to holding a camera.
It's a hard problem because you rarely find a group of people who naturally have a nice complete balance of skills. In the end you just have to play to your strengths, and try and minimise your deficits. If you're serious about making films of the shows then investing some cash in a Mac and Final Cut Pro wouldn't go astray. As for the rest - I'm not a film director, I just know some. There are books on the subject though (and your library will probably have them), and they can give you some good basic rules for contructing shots and editing things together. No, you can't become an expert in that, but that just means you want to construct the whole film to be as minimalist as possible with shots and editing. If you keep that aspect simple and let the actors shine, the end result will probably be surprisngly good.
Jedidiah.
the Acting. it seems bland, with little real emotion. You know it's bad when you can clearly tell they are acting when you've never seen the actors before.
What really pulled the acting down was this: the actors simply weren't comfortable in their environment. They didn't sell the fact that they were there in the film world - they looked too much like someone who knows they're sitting on set. Having so many of the sets apparently CG only makes it harder. Acting on an empty(ish) set can be very hard indeed.
the writing.
I think that's a harsh judgement. There's really practically no dialogue of note in the trailer - just a smattering of lines. Anything can sound bad if not delivered with full conviction. I don't think there was enough to decide either way on the writing.
The Lighting. Especially with the lightsabers. I know it makes sense, but having the lightsaber pointed directly at the screen just looks... awkward. The lighting otherwise looks monotone, obvious, and non-suggestive.
Professional lighting is very hard. Lighting when a lot of your sets are CG is even harder. I thought they did okay under the circumstances, but realitically they were perhaps a little ambitious with what they were trying to achieve.
I would suggest sound was actually a point that also suffered. A lot of the dialogue sounded unclear or had echoes to it. Again, it's all the little cues, like sound and subtle lighting effects, that help to add that feel of unreality. Sound recording and editing can be hard and expensive however.
All around I think these people did a great job. I would possibly fault them for being too ambitious: trying to do more than their acting, lighting and sound were capable of, and hence losing a little suspension of disbelief.
Jedidiah.
Another problem is sound editting. They didn't pad the room or use the right equipment or filters or something... you can hear all kinds of sounds and noise when the actors talk, making it sound like it was recorded in a bedroom.
Very true. Again, that's one of those things that's hard, and potentially expensive to do right. Then again, there's the issue of knowing your constraints. That, IMHO, is why Troops was so good. They knew sound and lighting and make-up were really the hard parts, so they managed to write something that required a minimum of it: Everything was shot outside in bright sun so lighting issues are minimised. 90% of the dialog is from the troopers and can hence be recorded separately in sound booth afterwards. Everyone is in costume (which was a point they were apparently very good at, and used to the hilt) except Beru and Owen, who are supposed to look a little haggard and distressed anyway - make-up becomes a non-issue.
The truly great amateur films are the ones that understand what they can do well, and what they don't have available, and manage to create something that fits neatly inside those constraints. Being so constrained is a little more limiting, but if you're really creative in writing and direction you can often do wonders. There are some great Science Fiction films (Pi and Sticky Fingers of Time for instance) that were made on shoestring budgets. Knowing and playing to your limitations is what makes for a great low budget film.
Jedidiah.
Star Wars had a stellar cast, all proven professionals...well, mostly.
It certainly has some very good actors apperaing in even the prequels: Ewen McGregor, Liam Neeson, and Natalie Portman among others. What it also had was some very very poor actors in some critical roles: Jake Lloyd, and Hayden Christiansen. Then there were those weird choices for minor roles: Ahmed Best? I think we could have done better for a character with as much screen time as Jar Jar in Ep I (though the director is surely to blame for some of that). Temuera Morrison? You're not in Guatemala now Dr. Ropata. Has Martin Henderson somehow scored himself a role for Ep III?
I agree though, despite some good actors, there's only so much you can do with a script and director who are apparently working against you. Most of the blame really has to fall squarely at Lucas' feet here.
Jedidiah.
Actually what was lacking was professional quality lighting, wardrobe, make-up and cinematography. That's understandable, these thngs are hard, and potentially very expensive. Most average (that's average, not ugly!) people can look good if you supply them with professional make up and tailored costuming, have professional lighting (that makes a surprsing difference actually - its one of the main differences in "look" between a alot of amateur films and professional productions) and shoot them in a way that makes the most of their features.
You would probably be surprised to find, should you ever meet them in real life, that most celebrities are hardly more attractive than a lot of the people you'll meet every day. Sure they've got the knack of a winning smile, or a particularly "sexy pout" or whatever, but on the whole the difference isn't that great. What they do have is professional makeup, lighting and cinematography.
Jedidiah.
This is like the FBI's report last week that it had no evidence of al Qaeda sleeper cells operating in the United States currently. Only a fool would believe that this means we have defeated terrorism on our own soil.
Well, you could do some reading as to what al Qaeda actually is, preferably from people who seriously researched them for years, instead of just swallowing the government line of "a global terror network". You can start here. What you'll probably find, the more you read, is that the odds that al Qaeda has any sort of network, any sleeper cells, in the US is very low indeed. Given that, the fact that the FBI failed to find any is hardly suprising at all.
Jedidiah.
Heck, even trivial programs have real problems with this. And why is that? Because we have problems thinking in parallell all the time.
Exactly. So what we need is a way of thinking about the problem that makes it easy to think about and do analysis. I'm sure there are probably some Computer Science researchers contemplating these problems. Hopefully there are really good people, like Tony Hoare working on it. What's that? He did work on this already? He came up with something that solves most of these problems already? Can't have been that long ago could it? Only 20 years ago you say?
Check out CSP. If you want a way to think about multithreaded applications that makes managing threads and avoiding deadlocks easy it's already available - it just hasn't got the publicity amongst developers that it deserves. If your project is in Java there are already things like JCSP which let you do CSP style threading in Java right now.
Jedidiah.
Apparently you've never had GNOME bleed the colors out of your desktop because you have a crappy Sun video card. And yes, it does hammer the CPU a bit more.
I have had to deal with the fact that for some reason a lot of Sun workstations can't cope with more than 8bit color. Perhaps Sun should consider spending an extra 50c on a video card that can manage.
Besides, when I'm in Solaris it means I'm programming. When I'm programming I could not possibly care less about window dressing.
I care about window dressing when it means a difference in functionality, particularly in window handling. Having gnome-terminal or (preferably) konsole that can provide tabs is nice. Having a window manager that support window shading is nice. Having a window manager that supported window groups (to help manage, for instance, a variety of emacs frames) would be better (and yes, GNOME doesn't. Grrr). Having a pager that shows me my desktop layouts is nice. Having an easy way to bind menu items to key shortcuts on all my apps is nice. Having good utility software (like character maps, a decent email and calendar etc.) is always useful too. If you're that devoted to just focussign on programming with no distractions, boot to the console and use Emacs from there.
Jedidiah.
The last time I was using Solaris seriously I spent a while in CDE, got annoyed with its general lack ability to do anything useful for me, and switched to fluxbox. I get the same great lack of functionality in a lighter package. Heck, I even get to tab together my terminals and have window shading.
.fvwm2rc.
The time before that when I was using Solaris seriously I went straight to FVWM2 which, at the time, was the most featureful kickass window manager around. And it was still lighter than CDE.
CDE is light on functionality, light on looks (unless you really like Motif for some reason), and a bitch to configure. Yes it can be configured, but anything beyond the most basic stuff is not exactly intuitive or obvious. I had an easier time hacking whatever I wanted into my
As I said CDE works fine, but it is old, ugly and lacking in features. There are still people out there tied to to it, but really, the world (and Sun!) needs to be moving on. CDE hasn't gone anywhere in 10 years, and it shows.
Jedidiah.
Because their customers are used to having it, and don't want to upgrade anything they don't have to. They'll often have heavily customised CDE environments, or be an ISV that integrates apps into the CDE, etc.
Believe me, I know - I've worked in exactly such an environment. That doesn't mean they need to keep providing CDE as the default desktop on every new version of the OS.
Back with Solaris 8 there was an extra optional CD that contained all the GNU tools and GNOME. It was easy enough to throw that CD in and install the GNU tools and GNOME if you desired it. The default install, of course, never installed any such thing. All I'm saying is that it is about time CDE got relegated to the extra optional CD. All those people who are still tied to it can install it, but all the people coming to Solaris 10 don't even have to know it exists.
I imagine that once they have good management tools for GNOME they'll push it a bit harder, but even so they can't offer the same sort of stability (in terms of compatible changes only, etc) for GNOME.
They can if they want to. It's not like they don't have access to the source or something.
Jedidiah.
I reckon the people who still like (and use) CDE do so because they are happy with how it is at the moment. Those who want something else have already moved away to XFCE, Gnome, KDE, etc. So since the only users of CDE are happy with it... why change what works?
Because you are introducing all your new users to the "joys" of CDE. It hardly represents a good solution, not a migration path (handing new users something you want to migrate away from as the default is not exactly good). Sun can provide CDE updates and support for all those legacy people who still use it. That doesn't mean they need to make it the default desktop available immediately from the log in screen for every new version of their OS.
Jedidiah.
Relatively speaking that's piss all though. It's hardly as if that's going to make orders of magnitude difference in the number of users supportable. You may as well force all your users to use sh instead of bash or ksh 'cause that'll save memory too. Who really needs interactive command line editing and history anyway? Feature crack I say!
Jedidiah.
Any bloat that GNOME has is in shared libraries. Stick that on a server and serve it up to 10 or 100 workstations and you're really not putting much extra load on the server because all those shared libraries only need to get loaded once and then shared. When it comes down to it I very seriously doubt that the number of users you can support on the same hardware with CDE is all that many higher than GNOME, let along many orders of magnitude. Yes, you get gains from serving everyone CDE instead of GNOME, but you'll get gains over that by serving them blackbox instead of CDE. Given the increased functionalty offered, I think GNOME comfortably covers its costs.
Jedidiah.
Oh dear, CDE, what has become of you? Apparently nothing has changed since the mid 90's. Can anyone honestly tell me that they've looked through the CDE and JDS (GNOME) screenshots and would choose CDE? I've used CDE. It works well enough, but it really is lacking in functionality compared to GNOME.
Is it really that hard to transition people off CDE? Are there actually that many people that are that heavily wedded to CDE? Provide some legacy support, sure, but shouldn't GNOME (aka JDS) be the default by now? Why are they still mentioning CDE as anything other than a minor product they've attached on some extra CDs as support for legacy users?
Jedidiah.
A weak US dollar makes exports inexpensive and imports expensive. This is generally good news for the US tourism and manufacturing industries, both of which have been in a flux since fall of 2001.
That is indeed true. The question is, if the US Dollar declines, how far and how fast will it decline? Some rather well informed individuals, like the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and the former head of research at the IMF predict a possible 20%-40% decline in value over a short time period - a currency crisis. Should that happen swiftly you can expect inflation to be utterly rampant, and no matter how you cut it, that's going to be very bad for the US economy.
Jedidiah
but cutting SS won't do them any good...they'll still have the same amount of money in the kitty (ignoring the surplus SS funds going to buy bonds, ofcourse).
Very true, except that it is getting harder to find people willing to buy bonds to cover the defificts being run. The social security fund provides a nice captive market to buy bonds on mass at the sort of rate of return that the US government can reasonably afford to offer. If that starts running low its going to be rather hard to cover the defificts. Bond yield rates might have to go up to manage to find buyers. That's going to make the debt a lot harder to service. Buyers are also increasingly going to question exactly how the US is going to manage to cover that rate of return.
It's really not that pretty a situation.
Jedidiah.