Screw Invader Zim, I say we start a grassroots campaign to bring back Turbo Teen! Also, Jace and the Wheeled Warriors, which have been sadly neglected in the 80s action show resurgence that has brought back He-Man, TMNT, Voltron and The Transformers.
The long, forgotten Tranzor Z lives on as the volume name of my video scratch disc.
The problem with the Clerks cartoon is that it really isn't all that good. It's not bad...but for every "Bear is driving, how can that be?" there's five minutes of boring, self referential filler. Oh wait, I just described every Kevin Smith film since the grayscale Clerks...
We're headed for what we've always had...a scant few long running shows that get money and the benefit of the doubt, along with a bunch of filler that's on a short leash. Family Guy did well, but it didn't do as well as expected (come on, it was up against friggin FRIENDS, the indestructable behemouth of thursday night. even *I* would tape FG during the first run). So it was dumped as if it were Oliver Beene. Of course, since then, it's done massive syndicated business and had tons of DVD sales, and suddenly it looked a lot more valuable.
Reality TV series are pressed to be more outrageous and as such are becoming more expensive. Yes, you don't pay the actors...but if you think talented editors, tropical locales and hundreds of cameras come cheaper than a ten person cast and a few unchanging sets, you're deluding yourself. And it's not as if you don't need writers on a reality show...you think all that drama sequences and frames itself? You think those voiceovers are ad-libbed? People write out the plots and subplots of reality TV, same as regular shows...they just have to make mountains out of molehills instead of out of imagination.
I think reality TV peaked last year. It won't disappear, but I think what we're seeing is the tail end of reality show development and we can expect something new to excite programming directors for the next five years.
Which can hurt them, too. Spike TV's "This Just In" tries the same thing with very little success. Even jokes that SHOULD be funny aren't funny when they do them.
It takes a special show to become more than the sum of its collaboraters. Adult Swim has it a lot of the time. Family Guy had it. South Park had it, lost it, and last season regained it. And Futurama has it in droves...in fact, as The Simpsons slowly became an exercise in self worship, Futurama started slicing at the bleeding edge of parody, with some of the most hilarious dialog on TV.
You know, some of us *DO* watch Malcolm in the Middle. It's a really well written show. The plots are clever and original and the acting is great.
Oliver Beene hasn't been on in months (yet another Fox shitpile). They've been playing Bernie Mac reruns instead...and that show's starting to grow on me.
When I fixed my deck last weekend, I half assed it. I only put lattice on the side facing the street, figuring that I didn't care what my neighbors would think.
I sure don't want to get my software from somebody with the same mentality!
Re:Use an external display at higher resolution...
on
Cocoa in a Nutshell
·
· Score: 1
Great advice. I should castrate the portability of my machine by buying a $200+ monitor rather than invest in a $40 book.
I love slashdot. Where else can you get convoluted non-solutions to non-problems?
Wilson was a volleyball, not a coconut, wasn't he?
Re:The API is pretty well documented
on
Cocoa in a Nutshell
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Well, when you're dealing with a 1024x768 display on a 600 MHz iBook, it's nice to have an external reference. JavaDocs are pretty good too, but my "Java in a Nutshell" series (including JFC in a nutshell and java enterprise in a nutshell) books are indispensible, despite each weighing more than the computer itself!
All of those statements are true. And a cluster is not a mainframe, and the products sold by Oracle, Microsoft and Sun *DO* go far beyond their Open Source competitors in terms of functionality.
The problem for these guys is that, in terms of real world enterprise usage, not everybody needs the features they offer. My business doesn't need the easy management and clustering features in IIS, heck the website hasn't been updated in months and this time kast year nobody even knew which machine it ran on. We don't need the task scheduling, file striping, data transformation, replication or XML features of Orcale. In fact, we only need a tiny sliver of the possible functionality of these great products...but we're unable to pay a sliver of the price. With OSS ramping up its feature set daily, for a lot of companies with our needs it makes more sense to train a guy on Linux than to drop five digits on Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server.
As for supercomputing...well, a cluster is NOT a mainframe. They're two similar, but different things, with the main difference being the databus. If your task is to perform a lot of calculations on a trivial dataset, clustering is the way to go. If your task is to perform a few calculations on a massive dataset, you want a mainframe. The mainframe is simply more efficient at processing massive inputs and providing massive outputs because it was designed to efficiently pass data between processors -- give the same dataset to a cluster and most of your time is wasted negociating the network.
Of course, these days networking is so fast that a cluster will probably do for most of the things people used to do on mainframes...but a cluster is still best for tasks which are easy to split apart and process in pieces.
I bought an iSkin EXO2. It's a plastic shell that wraps tightly around your ipod. Provides a better belt clip, screen protection and impact protection while making your ipod look less like an ipod, without increasing the size too much.
Way cheaper than a custom paint job...and less troublesome if you drop it!
A focus group is a rather expensive thing. It's also time consuming. So you can't have one for every design decision you want to make, unless you're an extreme programmer.
On the other hand, looking around, seeing that the best selling devices have blue LEDs, and noticing that the cost difference is negligible, is very cheap and takes no time at all.
Personally, I love blue LEDs, though they are sometimes a bit strong. I have a blue backlit receiver with a dimmer, and I find that, in the dark, the regular display is a bit too bright, but the dimmed version is about perfect.
If you want to dim your own lights, just wire a nice resistor in series with the LED...
Well, think about it this way: it's illegal to traffic drugs into the country. It's illegal to smuggle money out of the country. US law doesn't give a wet snap about posessing drugs in another country, but they don't need to -- you've committed two worse crimes already.
So, in the case you mentioned, the foriegn server would be okay. But posessing and uploading offending materials would be illegal, as would downloading and retaining them.
So the foreign server is really no help at all from a legal standpoint. From a logical standpoint, it makes sense when combined with secure and anonymized transmissions. They don't know what you put up there. They can't check to see what's there. They can't find out who got stuff from there.
If this sort of thing appeals to you, visit freenetproject.org. Me, I've got my hands full with legal pursuits, I don't have the time nor the passion to devote to breaking a service I like.
We are 36 years away from the oil pinch. That's more than a generation. We are just now starting to see oil prices go up. People have yet to realize that they aren't ever going to go back down into the $.80/gal region. Another year of $2 gas prices combined with decreasing wages, and we'll start to see more demand. The SUV thing isn't going to dry up based on oil costs, because currently the apparent safety and comfort override the concern of oil costs. As costs continue to rise, and manufacturers start releasing more efficient SUVs (like Ford's hybrid Escape), people will buy those.
I'm not saying this is the best way to go about things. I'm saying that, barring some kind of oligarchy, this is the way things ARE going to happen. Free market democracy doesn't guarantee a bed of roses...it guarantees the possibility of some roses and the right to sleep on them given the means.
The real world moves slowly and hyperbolically. If there's a direct line to avoid a problem, we'll arc around it and get into a little bit of trouble. This is just the way humanity works -- we're a reactive people and we're always trying to one up the system. Getting into a little trouble ecologically is something we HAVE to do, or there will never be any support for reforms.
Wait...so you're saying by NOT BREAKING THE LAW, nor SUPPORTING OTHERS who break it, I am supporting tyrannical legislation? There's no possibility that I just think it's hypocritical to ignore the laws just because you don't like it?
Maybe you're right. Prisons, after all, are full of free-thinking anarchists who just wanted to evade barriers to truly free markets. Barriers like taxes, personal property, and insecure front doors.
Above all else, change happens. The reason India and China are becoming the dominant economic powers is because we don't have proper barriers to truly free markets. You can't hemmorage cash to the third world and not expect to become anemic. People who think like me are going to prevent the change that happens from burying the country. We are going to do so by making it more difficult for the greedy to violate the rights of others and call it "free market." We are going to do so, because unchecked greed has lead to all of the great economic failures in human history. But, you know, keep ignoring the past if it makes you feel better.
Incidentally, I think it's hilarious that you're complaining about tyrannical legislation, then claiming that we'll be overtaken by India and China. If socialist governments are so damned glorious and efficient, why are you against them?
(The OSS thing was a reference to some of your other hopelessly ivory tower posts. I like to read up on assholes before I respond to them. I think a personal response is far more satisfying than an offhanded flame.)
Slashdot's providing that link is illegal in the US.
And saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com is a Canadian website. Canada has an extradition treaty with the US.
So unless Saint Aardvark is ready to move his Ayn Rand postcards to Sealand, he could be in some small amount of shit. He won't be...but that wasn't my point.
Who says it's illegal? I'm pretty sure that congress said that, back in October of 1998. Singing:
"(1) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
`(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof;
`(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof"
No, it hasn't yet been proven in court that PlayFair violates this, nor would it have to for linking to PlayFair to be illegal. I think it's obvious PlayFair is both A and B. The link is offering to the public the ability to download Playfair, which is both A and B. If it walks like a crime and talks like a crime, it's probably not okay to abet it. And that's my point.
So? Nearly every program my company writes does all of those as well. And our customers love us for it.
A program that alters the underlying operating system is not a problem unless it messes something up and then won't fix it. We test our stuff, and if it breaks your machine, we fix it.
Of course, we have a market of several thousand clients, and not several millions...
Sure it can. Animals eat vegetables, vegetables repurpose sunlight, this is yet another form of solar power.
In the end, even oil is a renewable fuel source based on solar power -- so long as you don't use more of it than is recycled. And currenly, we're way overusing it.
Of course, it seems like it's probably much easier to just use photovoltaics and a good battery, but hey, what do I know about the efficiency of chemical energy, I'm not a Wachowski brother.
Slashdot Mirror
Screw Invader Zim, I say we start a grassroots campaign to bring back Turbo Teen! Also, Jace and the Wheeled Warriors, which have been sadly neglected in the 80s action show resurgence that has brought back He-Man, TMNT, Voltron and The Transformers.
The long, forgotten Tranzor Z lives on as the volume name of my video scratch disc.
The problem with the Clerks cartoon is that it really isn't all that good. It's not bad...but for every "Bear is driving, how can that be?" there's five minutes of boring, self referential filler. Oh wait, I just described every Kevin Smith film since the grayscale Clerks...
I'm afraid your both wrong.
We're headed for what we've always had...a scant few long running shows that get money and the benefit of the doubt, along with a bunch of filler that's on a short leash. Family Guy did well, but it didn't do as well as expected (come on, it was up against friggin FRIENDS, the indestructable behemouth of thursday night. even *I* would tape FG during the first run). So it was dumped as if it were Oliver Beene. Of course, since then, it's done massive syndicated business and had tons of DVD sales, and suddenly it looked a lot more valuable.
Reality TV series are pressed to be more outrageous and as such are becoming more expensive. Yes, you don't pay the actors...but if you think talented editors, tropical locales and hundreds of cameras come cheaper than a ten person cast and a few unchanging sets, you're deluding yourself. And it's not as if you don't need writers on a reality show...you think all that drama sequences and frames itself? You think those voiceovers are ad-libbed? People write out the plots and subplots of reality TV, same as regular shows...they just have to make mountains out of molehills instead of out of imagination.
I think reality TV peaked last year. It won't disappear, but I think what we're seeing is the tail end of reality show development and we can expect something new to excite programming directors for the next five years.
Which can hurt them, too. Spike TV's "This Just In" tries the same thing with very little success. Even jokes that SHOULD be funny aren't funny when they do them.
It takes a special show to become more than the sum of its collaboraters. Adult Swim has it a lot of the time. Family Guy had it. South Park had it, lost it, and last season regained it. And Futurama has it in droves...in fact, as The Simpsons slowly became an exercise in self worship, Futurama started slicing at the bleeding edge of parody, with some of the most hilarious dialog on TV.
You know, some of us *DO* watch Malcolm in the Middle. It's a really well written show. The plots are clever and original and the acting is great.
Oliver Beene hasn't been on in months (yet another Fox shitpile). They've been playing Bernie Mac reruns instead...and that show's starting to grow on me.
When I fixed my deck last weekend, I half assed it. I only put lattice on the side facing the street, figuring that I didn't care what my neighbors would think.
I sure don't want to get my software from somebody with the same mentality!
Great advice. I should castrate the portability of my machine by buying a $200+ monitor rather than invest in a $40 book.
I love slashdot. Where else can you get convoluted non-solutions to non-problems?
I mean, besides in government.
It would hit too close to home, considering how many cuckoos use Maciontoshes.
Wilson was a volleyball, not a coconut, wasn't he?
Well, when you're dealing with a 1024x768 display on a 600 MHz iBook, it's nice to have an external reference. JavaDocs are pretty good too, but my "Java in a Nutshell" series (including JFC in a nutshell and java enterprise in a nutshell) books are indispensible, despite each weighing more than the computer itself!
Wrong? Maybe. But Interesting AND Insightful.
Actually, a more accurate statement might be "A hundred tractor trailers are not a freight train."
But of course, if you're just moving a couch, those tractor trailers would be pretty good.
All of those statements are true. And a cluster is not a mainframe, and the products sold by Oracle, Microsoft and Sun *DO* go far beyond their Open Source competitors in terms of functionality.
The problem for these guys is that, in terms of real world enterprise usage, not everybody needs the features they offer. My business doesn't need the easy management and clustering features in IIS, heck the website hasn't been updated in months and this time kast year nobody even knew which machine it ran on. We don't need the task scheduling, file striping, data transformation, replication or XML features of Orcale. In fact, we only need a tiny sliver of the possible functionality of these great products...but we're unable to pay a sliver of the price. With OSS ramping up its feature set daily, for a lot of companies with our needs it makes more sense to train a guy on Linux than to drop five digits on Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server.
As for supercomputing...well, a cluster is NOT a mainframe. They're two similar, but different things, with the main difference being the databus. If your task is to perform a lot of calculations on a trivial dataset, clustering is the way to go. If your task is to perform a few calculations on a massive dataset, you want a mainframe. The mainframe is simply more efficient at processing massive inputs and providing massive outputs because it was designed to efficiently pass data between processors -- give the same dataset to a cluster and most of your time is wasted negociating the network.
Of course, these days networking is so fast that a cluster will probably do for most of the things people used to do on mainframes...but a cluster is still best for tasks which are easy to split apart and process in pieces.
I hear Quantum Freenet has the best supply of Quantum Bush Jokes, Quantum Kiddy Porn and of course, Quantum Key Not Found Exceptions.
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principal or something.
Heh. He's not sure if it's the Uncertainty Principal.
This is quantum cryptography. You do not need a large axe. You do not even need a large scalpel. Shit, at that scale, a helium atom is overkill.
I bought an iSkin EXO2. It's a plastic shell that wraps tightly around your ipod. Provides a better belt clip, screen protection and impact protection while making your ipod look less like an ipod, without increasing the size too much.
Way cheaper than a custom paint job...and less troublesome if you drop it!
A focus group is a rather expensive thing. It's also time consuming. So you can't have one for every design decision you want to make, unless you're an extreme programmer.
On the other hand, looking around, seeing that the best selling devices have blue LEDs, and noticing that the cost difference is negligible, is very cheap and takes no time at all.
Personally, I love blue LEDs, though they are sometimes a bit strong. I have a blue backlit receiver with a dimmer, and I find that, in the dark, the regular display is a bit too bright, but the dimmed version is about perfect.
If you want to dim your own lights, just wire a nice resistor in series with the LED...
Well, think about it this way: it's illegal to traffic drugs into the country. It's illegal to smuggle money out of the country. US law doesn't give a wet snap about posessing drugs in another country, but they don't need to -- you've committed two worse crimes already.
So, in the case you mentioned, the foriegn server would be okay. But posessing and uploading offending materials would be illegal, as would downloading and retaining them.
So the foreign server is really no help at all from a legal standpoint. From a logical standpoint, it makes sense when combined with secure and anonymized transmissions. They don't know what you put up there. They can't check to see what's there. They can't find out who got stuff from there.
If this sort of thing appeals to you, visit freenetproject.org. Me, I've got my hands full with legal pursuits, I don't have the time nor the passion to devote to breaking a service I like.
I couldn't disagree with you more.
We are 36 years away from the oil pinch. That's more than a generation. We are just now starting to see oil prices go up. People have yet to realize that they aren't ever going to go back down into the $.80/gal region. Another year of $2 gas prices combined with decreasing wages, and we'll start to see more demand. The SUV thing isn't going to dry up based on oil costs, because currently the apparent safety and comfort override the concern of oil costs. As costs continue to rise, and manufacturers start releasing more efficient SUVs (like Ford's hybrid Escape), people will buy those.
I'm not saying this is the best way to go about things. I'm saying that, barring some kind of oligarchy, this is the way things ARE going to happen. Free market democracy doesn't guarantee a bed of roses...it guarantees the possibility of some roses and the right to sleep on them given the means.
The real world moves slowly and hyperbolically. If there's a direct line to avoid a problem, we'll arc around it and get into a little bit of trouble. This is just the way humanity works -- we're a reactive people and we're always trying to one up the system. Getting into a little trouble ecologically is something we HAVE to do, or there will never be any support for reforms.
Wait...so you're saying by NOT BREAKING THE LAW, nor SUPPORTING OTHERS who break it, I am supporting tyrannical legislation? There's no possibility that I just think it's hypocritical to ignore the laws just because you don't like it?
Maybe you're right. Prisons, after all, are full of free-thinking anarchists who just wanted to evade barriers to truly free markets. Barriers like taxes, personal property, and insecure front doors.
Above all else, change happens. The reason India and China are becoming the dominant economic powers is because we don't have proper barriers to truly free markets. You can't hemmorage cash to the third world and not expect to become anemic. People who think like me are going to prevent the change that happens from burying the country. We are going to do so by making it more difficult for the greedy to violate the rights of others and call it "free market." We are going to do so, because unchecked greed has lead to all of the great economic failures in human history. But, you know, keep ignoring the past if it makes you feel better.
Incidentally, I think it's hilarious that you're complaining about tyrannical legislation, then claiming that we'll be overtaken by India and China. If socialist governments are so damned glorious and efficient, why are you against them?
(The OSS thing was a reference to some of your other hopelessly ivory tower posts. I like to read up on assholes before I respond to them. I think a personal response is far more satisfying than an offhanded flame.)
Well, visiting that link is illegal in the US.
Slashdot's providing that link is illegal in the US.
And saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com is a Canadian website. Canada has an extradition treaty with the US.
So unless Saint Aardvark is ready to move his Ayn Rand postcards to Sealand, he could be in some small amount of shit. He won't be...but that wasn't my point.
Who says it's illegal? I'm pretty sure that congress said that, back in October of 1998. Singing:
"(1) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
`(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof;
`(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof"
No, it hasn't yet been proven in court that PlayFair violates this, nor would it have to for linking to PlayFair to be illegal. I think it's obvious PlayFair is both A and B. The link is offering to the public the ability to download Playfair, which is both A and B. If it walks like a crime and talks like a crime, it's probably not okay to abet it. And that's my point.
So? Nearly every program my company writes does all of those as well. And our customers love us for it.
A program that alters the underlying operating system is not a problem unless it messes something up and then won't fix it. We test our stuff, and if it breaks your machine, we fix it.
Of course, we have a market of several thousand clients, and not several millions...
Sure it can. Animals eat vegetables, vegetables repurpose sunlight, this is yet another form of solar power.
In the end, even oil is a renewable fuel source based on solar power -- so long as you don't use more of it than is recycled. And currenly, we're way overusing it.
Of course, it seems like it's probably much easier to just use photovoltaics and a good battery, but hey, what do I know about the efficiency of chemical energy, I'm not a Wachowski brother.