What religion? I've never heard of a "Gentoo" religion.
Unless you mean "Linux"...
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Gentoo Linux 1.2
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· Score: 3, Informative
Popularity. When looking at visits to the Gentoo page, distrowatch.com ranks it at number 6, and linuxiso.org has it in the top 15 (and considering how quickly it got there after adding a page for it, I'm sure it's in the top ten from there - no specific rankings there beyond top 15).
As far as how current Slashdot's news is, I doubt they can stay more current than their submissions here - Gentoo doesn't mail out an announcement list that I can tell. Gentoo's popular, but I doubt as many people are breathlessly awaiting the next update to Gentoo as they might for the kernel or Red Hat (most Gentoo users would just use emerge).
He wasn't but because he wasn't good, he was stripped of the "White" monicker. Then we got "Gandalf the White". Saruman's fall from grace was also his fall from whiteness. How's that for logic, sucka!
LOTR is good fiction. I read it and I was entertained. I have a brain, so I was able to read it and not decide to model my life after every nuance of the story. Passing references to Southrons and Haradrim didn't make me think, "Oh, those darn darkies!" To be honest, I barely paid any attention to them, because they were pretty incidental as badguys go.
Stuff about "forces of light and darkness" don't get me to thinking about race because I read that phrase more literally. Y'see, there are these nouns "light" and "darkness" that have nothing to do with skin color and everything to do with how well a visually-oriented species such as our own can see. Light and darkness may be metaphors for honesty and deceit in fantasy novels like LOTR, but I don't think I've ever seen them used in a way that suggests that they're referring to "The forces of honkies and negros." People who read fantasy and get that message are trying to get their own messages from the books they read, not the messages the authors were trying to write.
Ahem, burning hydrogen creates H2O not CO2, hence all the trees in the world are not going to convert the spent oxygen back into O2.
Yeah, but we'll have no problem remembering to water our plants with so much H2O around. And while we water them, we'll be breathing, and when we exhale - CO2! The plants will thank us.
Herd-like college kids and knee-jerk political activists associate the term with a broad range of bugaboos, from cultural imperialism to sweatshops to environmental destruction. But others (like me) see it as the best hope for a world in which gaps between the tech and non-tech worlds are widening, and the have-nots are increasingly enraged at the haves.
That's cute. By using derogatory terminology to refer to activists that have protested against globalization, you dismiss their arguments without ever having to demonstrate why you think they aren't important. That frees you to trumpet your own ideas without addressing the drawbacks of globalization as it is currently being approached by the US.
The reason so many "knee-jerk activists" turned up in Seattle and elsewhere is because organizations like the WTO and trade agreements like NAFTA place an emphasis on global profit over local prosperity. It's an enforceable emphasis, too - under some of these agreements, if a corporation's profits would be hurt by new legislation (such as environmental or labor laws), a corporation can sue the government for compensation. That's had a discouraging effect on such legislation in countries that can't afford such compensation.
It's great to tout the benefits of globalization, but don't dismiss its drawbacks. At the least, if you are going to dismiss its drawbacks, tell us why instead of hiding behind name-calling. Tell us why it isn't important that globalization agreements are preventing improved labor conditions in these third-world countries, and why they're interfering with environmental legislation in first-world countries (to the point of demanding repeal of laws implemented by elected officials). Globalization as it's practiced today has become an emphasis of capitalism over democracy, and name-calling won't make that problem go away.
The question should actually be, "Why switch from.pkg?" (The.app extension is an application bundle, while.pkg is an installer archive.)
The answer is that if this standard package format were usable under Mac OS X as well, then it would increase the number of platforms a developer could distribute packages for using the same package system. Making that part easier for developers means Mac OS X users might get more software packages in an easy-to-use installer archive format rather than extracting from.tar.gz files (thus meaning the user doesn't have to be technically competent to install the program).
Not to mention Sony certainly doesn't hold a monopoly on the console market. They put out a better product and the sales figures prove it.
The sales figures only prove that Sony sold more of their product than anyone else, not that they put out a better product. If sales figures proved a product was better than the competition, there wouldn't be so much griping about Windows on this site.
The first Playstation was a capable system, but by itself didn't exactly blow away the competition. Sony marketed the hell out of it, and even then the system didn't really take off until they finally got some good games out for it - most of the initial titles were high on graphics, and low on gameplay. Sony ended up dominating because Sega never figured out how to do developer support for their Saturn, and Nintendo took too long to release the N64 (which had its own host of problems to hold it back further). Sony's better developer relations later in the platform's life, coupled with the marketing power of Sony, and helped further by the complacency of the entrenched competition, was what let the Playstation sell so many units. The product itself was not so much "better" as to account for the sales numbers.
With that said, it's possible MS may pull off a coup with the Xbox. MS has a formidable marketing machine, and most people still think that if it comes from Microsoft, it must be good. They're getting more press coverage than the Gamecube, in part because MS is doing a better job of getting review units and games in the hands of journalists. Their system is technically superior to the PS2, and that difference will probably be more pronounced this time next year, as developers learn to tweak for the box. Right now the PS2 is the clear choice because it has an actual lineup of good games available right now, and the Gamecube appears to have a better list of future titles than the Xbox, but none of that guarantees the Xbox won't be the best-selling console next Christmas.
I haven't had experience with any newer Dish PVRs, but I did use the Dishplayer 7200 for a while. I had used a Tivo before it, and use a Tivo now. I don't know how the newer Dish PVRs compare, but if they're anything like the 7200, then I'd recommend the Tivo.
The Dishplayer 7200 did have excellent picture quality, and the ability to browse the listing of recorded shows and to set up new recordings while live TV is still displayed in a smaller picture in the corner was also an advantage over the Tivo.
The Tivo (the normal unit for use with Dish, not the DirecTV version) has comparable picture quality at "best" recording quality, but can't hold as many shows at that quality as the Dishplayer. The Tivo has better options for setting up regular recordings, and its practice of filling unused space with "recommended" recordings is pretty nice. You also have more control over when (or whether) a given recording is deleted automatically on the Tivo.
I gave up on the Dishplayer and went with the Tivo again for two reasons. The first was that the Tivo downloads program information in the background, allowing you to continue using the unit, while the Dishplayer would need to lock the viewer out for 45 minutes around 3am to download program data. I found that the only thing that keeps the update from happening on the Dishplayer was either user intervention or a scheduled recording - if you were, say, recording something from the Dishplayer to a VCR, the Dishplayer had no problem interrupting the playback to update.
The other reason, the biggest reason, was that my Dishplayer 7200 was unstable. It wasn't often, but it was often enough - sometimes I'd make a selection, and the unit would reboot, an action that would cancel a recording in progress - very annoying. It would also sometimes lock up, and I'd discover hours later that it had missed any shows that were on during the lock-up period (I'd have to turn it off then back on to reset it). Finally, and worst, I twice had spontaneous resets delete _all_ recorded programs. That was heartbreaking.
With the Tivo, I've had occasional unexpected reboots that have interrupted recordings, but they haven't been as frequent as the Dishplayer, and they've never resulted in anything worse than one interrupted recording. The reduced recorded show capacity and requirement for a phone line to download updates is far outweighed by the stability of the unit and its flexible recording options.
Again, I don't know if newer Dish PVRs use the same software as the 7200 (which was capable of WebTV access as well). If they don't, there's hope for them. But I haven't had anything to complain about with my Tivo.
It's not obsolete if there are still unique games out for it, and it's still worth playing. I'm not speaking as a Dreamcast fanboy - I have that and a Playstation 2, so there's no envy there. The graphics on the PS2 are nice, but the games haven't demonstrated as huge a leap over the Dreamcast as the Dreamcast did over the PS2. You have to watch closely to see any difference between Dead or Alive 2 on both platforms, for example. And "value" is pretty accurate - it's $50 for a Dreamcast, then $20-$30 for a Crazy Taxi version that's not much different from what you'd buy for $40-$50 for the $300 Playstation 2. Shenmue and Soul Calibur are easily worth more than what they cost right now, and Jet Grind Radio is a fantastic game that can be found in bargain bins for $10-$15. Those last three are games you can't get on another platform - if you haven't played them, you'll get good value picking them up now.
I'm not putting the PS2 down - I bought it, and I like it. But so far I've been more impressed by the games Dreamcast had out by this point in its life than what the PS2 has out now. A console is only as impressive as the games you can play on it.
So the question really is, should you with your 5 devices pay $40/month, and your neighbor with his/her 1 device pay $40/month, or should you maybe pay $50/month and your neighbor pay $30?
Depends. If my neighbor's one device is used by a downloading fiend who keeps his bandwidth maxed as much as he possibly can, while my 5 devices use barely any bandwidth (a daily Tivo download, a couple peolpe checking email and browsing web pages), then it could hardly be argued that my 5 devices merit a higher monthly charge than my neighbor's one device.
If they're that worried about recouping expenses, they should charge extra when certain bandwidth "landmarks" are reached in a month. Not that I _want_ them to use that scheme, mind, since some months I can be a downloading fiend myself, but it would make more sense than charging per-device.
Thus my question about whether it is possible to have a humorous supervillian succeed in the current atmosphere.
I'd imagine it would work pretty well, so long as the supervillain kept losing. Humorous depictions of Osama bin Laden are pretty popular on the Web right now, so there doesn't seem to be an aversion to humor as relates to terrorism right now. The only affect I could see recent events having on humorous supervillains on TV would be that it would be hard to succeed with a show that had a supervillain as a protagonist.
I think I'll wait until the next episode to pass judgment. This episode seemed to be mostly rehashing stuff we've seen and heard in the comic and cartoon already. The real test will be when the episode is mostly original and isn't trying to do the usual exposition.
I'm kind of disappointed that they didn't rehash the argument about the name "Tick", though. I would have liked to see Warburton arguing, "I, er, suck blood all the time!"
Alas, if it does happen, it won't be the same as the comic. The Red Scare in the show is a mute robot, not a villain-for-hire. They didn't really present the Red Scare in any way that would allow for much in the way of a recurring character.
I guess the legal issues refer to devices used in the cartoon, and must override what was in the comic. "Spoon!" and Chairface Chippendale were both in the comic before the cartoon. Which is a weird restriction, since they had some lines in the pilot that were used in both the comic and the cartoon ("Gravity is a harsh mistress.").
...you were hit in the eye and while you stood there trying to figure out if it was an accident, you were slugged in the other eye - this second hit confirming the first was no accident? What would you do?
It sounds like you think the correct answer is "lash out blindly."
Pay closer attention to your World War 2 history. Even the Allies referred to some of their bombing runs as "terror bombing". Civilian populations _were_ targets of some of the Allied bombing runs. They operated under the mistaken belief that bombings would demoralize the civilian populations and make them less able to support the war effort, and possibly force an internal political end to the war. What actually happened, of course, is that the civilians got more incensed at the enemy and more supportive of the war effort.
This happened on both sides of World War 2, of course - Germany started with a mistaken bombing of London, and British bomber command was the most enthusiastic supporter of terror bombing. Do a Google search for "Dresden bombing" if you want an example.
I'm not saying I'm not glad the Allies won the war, of course. But I do feel the need to correct posts that suggest that Allied intentions were nothing but good, and that civilians were never purposefully targeted. Some incidents of targeting civilians probably did prevent greater casualties in the long run (Hiroshima and Nagasaki spring to mind), but the ends gained do not change the fact that civilians were indeed Allied targets.
As to the current bombings, we'll see what's actually getting hit. As I said above, bombing the civilian population of Afghanistan is more likely to feed their will to fight the US than to wear it down. Bombing the barely-existent infrastructure of Afghanistan will have short-term military benefits, but long-term detrimental effects on the civilian population, as Iraq has shown. Whatever happens, I don't think I'll be able to shake the feeling that this is exactly what the terrorists were hoping the US would do.
The existence of subtleties in a movie does not make it a good movie - it just means you might gain some enjoyment from noticing them. Yes, the plotline involved more than just a planetary invasion and messiah-wannabe. Yes, there are plot points that aren't as obvious now, without later movies to point them out to people. But that doesn't change the fact that it's easy to dislike the overall movie. Heck, I loved parts of the "Dungeons and Dragons" movie, but thought the movie as a whole sucked eggs.
For my part, while TPM had redeeming moments, the movie as a whole was a disappointment. Suspicions that Anakin's mother lied about Anakin's parentage to pique Qui-Gon's interest just don't make up for Anakin's terrible lines ("Yippee"? Who says "Yippee"?), Jar-Jar's constant distractions from the story, and absurdly juvenile plot devices like "ascension guns".
I'm not about to roast Lucas for making a movie I didn't enjoy - he's made it clear I'm not in the target age group for TPM. But I'm not about to latch onto the movie's redeeming qualities in an effort to make its critics ignore its numerous flaws, either.
So let me get this straight - they're raising an alarm because they did a "preliminary survey" of "online music enthusiasts" and then use the numbers gained from that targeted sample to claim that their copyrighted material needs more protection? Their press release only says that 50% of those surveyed "downloaded in the past month," but they don't say in the press release whether the music downloaded violated any copyright - I'd be interested in knowing whether they're including in their numbers people who download music legally available online, such as the music available on mp3.com.
All we can really draw from their survey is that 35% (70% of 50%) of online music enthusiasts burn music to CD. It doesn't sound that alarming to me, especially since we don't have a means of determining what percentage of the music-loving population are "online music enthusiasts", nor do we know what percentage of those burning music are burning copyrighted music they don't already own to CD-R.
At least we know one thing - the RIAA is good at saying nothing and making it sound like something.
Um, Mac OS X is based on BSD, not Linux. Completely different. Though they could both be considered UNIX.
Granted, you can run Linux on any shipping Mac - but it doesn't ship with any machines from Apple.
Other than that, the ability to use GNU software on Mac OS X/Darwin is very promising, and it wouldn't be overly hard to port many Unix tools between OS X, BSD, and Linux. Interaction with the GUI does make for a big difference, however (I'm not sure if GNUStep would make that easier).
Just judging from the number of comments that pop up on such articles, I'd suspect there are more Apple fans reading Slashdot than there are BSD fans, but I'd hardly complain about Slashdot stories concerning BSD. Should Slashdot only post stories that would have a majority appeal, and ignore stories with a more narrow audience? If they're going that route, then should they take it a step further and focus stories on the "lowest common denominator" to ensure the maximum number of potential readers will be interested in and understand all stories?
On a more personal note, I've never had a problem with Mac networking, though I admit I've focused more on TCP/IP. Considering changes to Mac TCP/IP settings don't require a reboot, and the relative speed I've observed when comparing Macs with Win9x and NT, I can only assume you were looking for a different type of network than TCP/IP. If you are having any particular probem with Macs on a TCP/IP network, however, feel free to email me and I'll be happy to try and help.
Don't get so wrapped up in indignation over biased treatment of Microsoft that you forget that Microsoft has done some things that merit harsh criticism. If you read the Register article referenced, you'll notice a reference to how Windows would give bogus error messages to people trying to run it on top of DR-DOS, error messages put into Windows because management didn't want people using a competing product. While the driver-blocking in Windows XP does have a legitimate reason for being implemented in many cases (changes to the TCP/IP implementation would cause problems for firewall software, for instance, so disabling them would prevent the first boot of an XP-upgraded system from crashing due to that conflict), the possibility does exist that Microsoft could pull an old trick. All they would need to do would be to put some competing software in the "banned" list not because it could cause problems, but because it's competing software. The quick rise of IE illustrated that users are more likely to use what they get with the OS than they are to go out of their way to download a competing product, so such a move would certainly encourage people to use whatever's bundled with XP rather than download an updated version of the software. Especially since I'm sure the "blocking" feature doesn't display a download URL for the user to make updating the software easier.
Yes, Microsoft does make some good software (I hate IE for Windows, for instance, but love IE 5 on the Mac). But in case you missed the recent appeals court ruling, Microsoft isn't exactly a saint. If you look beyond blind MS-bashing and blind MS-defending, you'll see a report about a feature that should be closely watched because of its potential for abuse.
"How can anyone stand the Star Wars movies? I only watched one scene from Phantom Menace where this Jar-Jar character stepped in poop, but that scene is enough for me to judge all the Star Wars movies! And all the other characters must be like Jar-Jar, because that's what I saw!"
"How can anyone read books? I read this one book once, with this Fabio guy on the cover and florid lettering on the spine, and I hated it! All books suck!"
I half-agree, but I'm mostly thinking of the expansion when I do so. The game is, to me, a lot of fun, but I don't have to deal with Battle.Net lag - I mostly play on the LAN with my fiancee. On a Mac, I never really had any stability problems or lag problems with Diablo II. Then I got the expansion. The game crashes frequently, we get lag despite being on the LAN and using machines that shouldn't have problems with a game like Diablo II (400MHz G4s), and occasionally the game launches one of the two players into a "no-man's land", presumably where the client and server get out of sync. That last one is fixable with lots of running around until the machines are forced to coordinate with each other again.
We persevere, because the new classes are a lot of fun to play with, but the game is far less stable than Blizzard's previous offerings. All I can do is hope that Blizzard releases a bug fix patch soon.
Re:You're just remembering the halcyon days of you
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You kidding? I still occasionally play "Starflight 2", and I consider "Dark Castle" to be one of the best games of all time. The writing in Infocom adventures has yet to be matched in modern games. These aren't all "two people in a garage" games, but they are games that relied more on good design than on graphics and cookie-cutter game creation. If I ever get bitter over the games of yore, it's primarily because younger gamers would never show much interest in games with such "primitive" graphics. I can't really blame them, either - when you're used to 32-bit 3D-accelerated graphics, it's hard to pick up something new that runs in 16 colors.
I do enjoy modern games, but the existence of newer games doesn't mean the older games suddenly suck - it only means the technology that drives them isn't as impressive. If all you care about is cool graphics, then don't bother with older games - I'm certainly not going to argue with you. But I'm more impressed by good design, and without glitzy graphics, good design was the only thing that made the "classics" classic.
I think there's less of that going on now than there used to be. Daikatana's long development time, massive hype engine, and miserable eventual release taught a few people a lesson. Duke Nukem Forever saw a lot of hype a few years ago, and wisely dropped out of the spotlight when development starting dragging out - we're only hearing more about it now because it's closer to release.
A certain amount of hype before a game is released can generate excitement over the title and get people talking about it, which can help sales when it gets released. You're right though, too much hype too early consumes money that should go into development, and drives expectations up to impossible-to-meet levels. It can also make gamers so sick of hearing about a game that they're less likely to buy it - Halo, for example, would have to completely bowl me over in a demo before I would spend any money on it now. I've heard too much about it for too long, and all the anticipation has drained away.
Ouch. I'm ashamed to say that English is my first language, and I made a careless grammatical error. It sounds like you knew what I meant anyway, so I won't lose any sleep over it.
I know the trick with games isn't to ship them bug-free, but to find a happy medium between shipping soon and shipping with all problems fixed. FunCom didn't find a happy medium - they released the game before it was playable by most people, from the sound of things. I know that's scared me away from trying a game that sounded good in the pre-release hype. It's also made me wary of any releases they may come out with in the future.
Can I understand if they released the game sooner because they were running out of funding? Yep. But if I buy a game I'm not going to do it out of sympathy - I'll do it because I think I'll have fun playing it. If play gets interrupted by bugs, and problems in the game aren't quickly resolved by adequate support, then it isn't likely to be enough fun to be worth my money.
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What religion? I've never heard of a "Gentoo" religion.
Unless you mean "Linux"...
Popularity. When looking at visits to the Gentoo page, distrowatch.com ranks it at number 6, and linuxiso.org has it in the top 15 (and considering how quickly it got there after adding a page for it, I'm sure it's in the top ten from there - no specific rankings there beyond top 15).
As far as how current Slashdot's news is, I doubt they can stay more current than their submissions here - Gentoo doesn't mail out an announcement list that I can tell. Gentoo's popular, but I doubt as many people are breathlessly awaiting the next update to Gentoo as they might for the kernel or Red Hat (most Gentoo users would just use emerge).
You mean Saruman The White was good?
He wasn't but because he wasn't good, he was stripped of the "White" monicker. Then we got "Gandalf the White". Saruman's fall from grace was also his fall from whiteness. How's that for logic, sucka!
LOTR is good fiction. I read it and I was entertained. I have a brain, so I was able to read it and not decide to model my life after every nuance of the story. Passing references to Southrons and Haradrim didn't make me think, "Oh, those darn darkies!" To be honest, I barely paid any attention to them, because they were pretty incidental as badguys go.
Stuff about "forces of light and darkness" don't get me to thinking about race because I read that phrase more literally. Y'see, there are these nouns "light" and "darkness" that have nothing to do with skin color and everything to do with how well a visually-oriented species such as our own can see. Light and darkness may be metaphors for honesty and deceit in fantasy novels like LOTR, but I don't think I've ever seen them used in a way that suggests that they're referring to "The forces of honkies and negros." People who read fantasy and get that message are trying to get their own messages from the books they read, not the messages the authors were trying to write.
Ahem, burning hydrogen creates H2O not CO2, hence all the trees in the world are not going to convert the spent oxygen back into O2.
Yeah, but we'll have no problem remembering to water our plants with so much H2O around. And while we water them, we'll be breathing, and when we exhale - CO2! The plants will thank us.
Herd-like college kids and knee-jerk political activists associate the term with a broad range of bugaboos, from cultural imperialism to sweatshops to environmental destruction. But others (like me) see it as the best hope for a world in which gaps between the tech and non-tech worlds are widening, and the have-nots are increasingly enraged at the haves.
That's cute. By using derogatory terminology to refer to activists that have protested against globalization, you dismiss their arguments without ever having to demonstrate why you think they aren't important. That frees you to trumpet your own ideas without addressing the drawbacks of globalization as it is currently being approached by the US.
The reason so many "knee-jerk activists" turned up in Seattle and elsewhere is because organizations like the WTO and trade agreements like NAFTA place an emphasis on global profit over local prosperity. It's an enforceable emphasis, too - under some of these agreements, if a corporation's profits would be hurt by new legislation (such as environmental or labor laws), a corporation can sue the government for compensation. That's had a discouraging effect on such legislation in countries that can't afford such compensation.
It's great to tout the benefits of globalization, but don't dismiss its drawbacks. At the least, if you are going to dismiss its drawbacks, tell us why instead of hiding behind name-calling. Tell us why it isn't important that globalization agreements are preventing improved labor conditions in these third-world countries, and why they're interfering with environmental legislation in first-world countries (to the point of demanding repeal of laws implemented by elected officials). Globalization as it's practiced today has become an emphasis of capitalism over democracy, and name-calling won't make that problem go away.
The question should actually be, "Why switch from .pkg?" (The .app extension is an application bundle, while .pkg is an installer archive.)
.tar.gz files (thus meaning the user doesn't have to be technically competent to install the program).
The answer is that if this standard package format were usable under Mac OS X as well, then it would increase the number of platforms a developer could distribute packages for using the same package system. Making that part easier for developers means Mac OS X users might get more software packages in an easy-to-use installer archive format rather than extracting from
Not to mention Sony certainly doesn't hold a monopoly on the console market. They put out a better product and the sales figures prove it.
The sales figures only prove that Sony sold more of their product than anyone else, not that they put out a better product. If sales figures proved a product was better than the competition, there wouldn't be so much griping about Windows on this site.
The first Playstation was a capable system, but by itself didn't exactly blow away the competition. Sony marketed the hell out of it, and even then the system didn't really take off until they finally got some good games out for it - most of the initial titles were high on graphics, and low on gameplay. Sony ended up dominating because Sega never figured out how to do developer support for their Saturn, and Nintendo took too long to release the N64 (which had its own host of problems to hold it back further). Sony's better developer relations later in the platform's life, coupled with the marketing power of Sony, and helped further by the complacency of the entrenched competition, was what let the Playstation sell so many units. The product itself was not so much "better" as to account for the sales numbers.
With that said, it's possible MS may pull off a coup with the Xbox. MS has a formidable marketing machine, and most people still think that if it comes from Microsoft, it must be good. They're getting more press coverage than the Gamecube, in part because MS is doing a better job of getting review units and games in the hands of journalists. Their system is technically superior to the PS2, and that difference will probably be more pronounced this time next year, as developers learn to tweak for the box. Right now the PS2 is the clear choice because it has an actual lineup of good games available right now, and the Gamecube appears to have a better list of future titles than the Xbox, but none of that guarantees the Xbox won't be the best-selling console next Christmas.
I haven't had experience with any newer Dish PVRs, but I did use the Dishplayer 7200 for a while. I had used a Tivo before it, and use a Tivo now. I don't know how the newer Dish PVRs compare, but if they're anything like the 7200, then I'd recommend the Tivo.
The Dishplayer 7200 did have excellent picture quality, and the ability to browse the listing of recorded shows and to set up new recordings while live TV is still displayed in a smaller picture in the corner was also an advantage over the Tivo.
The Tivo (the normal unit for use with Dish, not the DirecTV version) has comparable picture quality at "best" recording quality, but can't hold as many shows at that quality as the Dishplayer. The Tivo has better options for setting up regular recordings, and its practice of filling unused space with "recommended" recordings is pretty nice. You also have more control over when (or whether) a given recording is deleted automatically on the Tivo.
I gave up on the Dishplayer and went with the Tivo again for two reasons. The first was that the Tivo downloads program information in the background, allowing you to continue using the unit, while the Dishplayer would need to lock the viewer out for 45 minutes around 3am to download program data. I found that the only thing that keeps the update from happening on the Dishplayer was either user intervention or a scheduled recording - if you were, say, recording something from the Dishplayer to a VCR, the Dishplayer had no problem interrupting the playback to update.
The other reason, the biggest reason, was that my Dishplayer 7200 was unstable. It wasn't often, but it was often enough - sometimes I'd make a selection, and the unit would reboot, an action that would cancel a recording in progress - very annoying. It would also sometimes lock up, and I'd discover hours later that it had missed any shows that were on during the lock-up period (I'd have to turn it off then back on to reset it). Finally, and worst, I twice had spontaneous resets delete _all_ recorded programs. That was heartbreaking.
With the Tivo, I've had occasional unexpected reboots that have interrupted recordings, but they haven't been as frequent as the Dishplayer, and they've never resulted in anything worse than one interrupted recording. The reduced recorded show capacity and requirement for a phone line to download updates is far outweighed by the stability of the unit and its flexible recording options.
Again, I don't know if newer Dish PVRs use the same software as the 7200 (which was capable of WebTV access as well). If they don't, there's hope for them. But I haven't had anything to complain about with my Tivo.
It's not obsolete if there are still unique games out for it, and it's still worth playing. I'm not speaking as a Dreamcast fanboy - I have that and a Playstation 2, so there's no envy there. The graphics on the PS2 are nice, but the games haven't demonstrated as huge a leap over the Dreamcast as the Dreamcast did over the PS2. You have to watch closely to see any difference between Dead or Alive 2 on both platforms, for example. And "value" is pretty accurate - it's $50 for a Dreamcast, then $20-$30 for a Crazy Taxi version that's not much different from what you'd buy for $40-$50 for the $300 Playstation 2. Shenmue and Soul Calibur are easily worth more than what they cost right now, and Jet Grind Radio is a fantastic game that can be found in bargain bins for $10-$15. Those last three are games you can't get on another platform - if you haven't played them, you'll get good value picking them up now.
I'm not putting the PS2 down - I bought it, and I like it. But so far I've been more impressed by the games Dreamcast had out by this point in its life than what the PS2 has out now. A console is only as impressive as the games you can play on it.
So the question really is, should you with your 5 devices pay $40/month, and your neighbor with his/her 1 device pay $40/month, or should you maybe pay $50/month and your neighbor pay $30?
Depends. If my neighbor's one device is used by a downloading fiend who keeps his bandwidth maxed as much as he possibly can, while my 5 devices use barely any bandwidth (a daily Tivo download, a couple peolpe checking email and browsing web pages), then it could hardly be argued that my 5 devices merit a higher monthly charge than my neighbor's one device.
If they're that worried about recouping expenses, they should charge extra when certain bandwidth "landmarks" are reached in a month. Not that I _want_ them to use that scheme, mind, since some months I can be a downloading fiend myself, but it would make more sense than charging per-device.
Thus my question about whether it is possible to have a humorous supervillian succeed in the current atmosphere.
I'd imagine it would work pretty well, so long as the supervillain kept losing. Humorous depictions of Osama bin Laden are pretty popular on the Web right now, so there doesn't seem to be an aversion to humor as relates to terrorism right now. The only affect I could see recent events having on humorous supervillains on TV would be that it would be hard to succeed with a show that had a supervillain as a protagonist.
I think I'll wait until the next episode to pass judgment. This episode seemed to be mostly rehashing stuff we've seen and heard in the comic and cartoon already. The real test will be when the episode is mostly original and isn't trying to do the usual exposition.
I'm kind of disappointed that they didn't rehash the argument about the name "Tick", though. I would have liked to see Warburton arguing, "I, er, suck blood all the time!"
Alas, if it does happen, it won't be the same as the comic. The Red Scare in the show is a mute robot, not a villain-for-hire. They didn't really present the Red Scare in any way that would allow for much in the way of a recurring character.
I guess the legal issues refer to devices used in the cartoon, and must override what was in the comic. "Spoon!" and Chairface Chippendale were both in the comic before the cartoon. Which is a weird restriction, since they had some lines in the pilot that were used in both the comic and the cartoon ("Gravity is a harsh mistress.").
It sounds like you think the correct answer is "lash out blindly."
Pay closer attention to your World War 2 history. Even the Allies referred to some of their bombing runs as "terror bombing". Civilian populations _were_ targets of some of the Allied bombing runs. They operated under the mistaken belief that bombings would demoralize the civilian populations and make them less able to support the war effort, and possibly force an internal political end to the war. What actually happened, of course, is that the civilians got more incensed at the enemy and more supportive of the war effort.
This happened on both sides of World War 2, of course - Germany started with a mistaken bombing of London, and British bomber command was the most enthusiastic supporter of terror bombing. Do a Google search for "Dresden bombing" if you want an example.
I'm not saying I'm not glad the Allies won the war, of course. But I do feel the need to correct posts that suggest that Allied intentions were nothing but good, and that civilians were never purposefully targeted. Some incidents of targeting civilians probably did prevent greater casualties in the long run (Hiroshima and Nagasaki spring to mind), but the ends gained do not change the fact that civilians were indeed Allied targets.
As to the current bombings, we'll see what's actually getting hit. As I said above, bombing the civilian population of Afghanistan is more likely to feed their will to fight the US than to wear it down. Bombing the barely-existent infrastructure of Afghanistan will have short-term military benefits, but long-term detrimental effects on the civilian population, as Iraq has shown. Whatever happens, I don't think I'll be able to shake the feeling that this is exactly what the terrorists were hoping the US would do.
The existence of subtleties in a movie does not make it a good movie - it just means you might gain some enjoyment from noticing them. Yes, the plotline involved more than just a planetary invasion and messiah-wannabe. Yes, there are plot points that aren't as obvious now, without later movies to point them out to people. But that doesn't change the fact that it's easy to dislike the overall movie. Heck, I loved parts of the "Dungeons and Dragons" movie, but thought the movie as a whole sucked eggs.
For my part, while TPM had redeeming moments, the movie as a whole was a disappointment. Suspicions that Anakin's mother lied about Anakin's parentage to pique Qui-Gon's interest just don't make up for Anakin's terrible lines ("Yippee"? Who says "Yippee"?), Jar-Jar's constant distractions from the story, and absurdly juvenile plot devices like "ascension guns".
I'm not about to roast Lucas for making a movie I didn't enjoy - he's made it clear I'm not in the target age group for TPM. But I'm not about to latch onto the movie's redeeming qualities in an effort to make its critics ignore its numerous flaws, either.
So let me get this straight - they're raising an alarm because they did a "preliminary survey" of "online music enthusiasts" and then use the numbers gained from that targeted sample to claim that their copyrighted material needs more protection? Their press release only says that 50% of those surveyed "downloaded in the past month," but they don't say in the press release whether the music downloaded violated any copyright - I'd be interested in knowing whether they're including in their numbers people who download music legally available online, such as the music available on mp3.com.
All we can really draw from their survey is that 35% (70% of 50%) of online music enthusiasts burn music to CD. It doesn't sound that alarming to me, especially since we don't have a means of determining what percentage of the music-loving population are "online music enthusiasts", nor do we know what percentage of those burning music are burning copyrighted music they don't already own to CD-R.
At least we know one thing - the RIAA is good at saying nothing and making it sound like something.
Um, Mac OS X is based on BSD, not Linux. Completely different. Though they could both be considered UNIX.
Granted, you can run Linux on any shipping Mac - but it doesn't ship with any machines from Apple.
Other than that, the ability to use GNU software on Mac OS X/Darwin is very promising, and it wouldn't be overly hard to port many Unix tools between OS X, BSD, and Linux. Interaction with the GUI does make for a big difference, however (I'm not sure if GNUStep would make that easier).
Just judging from the number of comments that pop up on such articles, I'd suspect there are more Apple fans reading Slashdot than there are BSD fans, but I'd hardly complain about Slashdot stories concerning BSD. Should Slashdot only post stories that would have a majority appeal, and ignore stories with a more narrow audience? If they're going that route, then should they take it a step further and focus stories on the "lowest common denominator" to ensure the maximum number of potential readers will be interested in and understand all stories?
On a more personal note, I've never had a problem with Mac networking, though I admit I've focused more on TCP/IP. Considering changes to Mac TCP/IP settings don't require a reboot, and the relative speed I've observed when comparing Macs with Win9x and NT, I can only assume you were looking for a different type of network than TCP/IP. If you are having any particular probem with Macs on a TCP/IP network, however, feel free to email me and I'll be happy to try and help.
Don't get so wrapped up in indignation over biased treatment of Microsoft that you forget that Microsoft has done some things that merit harsh criticism. If you read the Register article referenced, you'll notice a reference to how Windows would give bogus error messages to people trying to run it on top of DR-DOS, error messages put into Windows because management didn't want people using a competing product. While the driver-blocking in Windows XP does have a legitimate reason for being implemented in many cases (changes to the TCP/IP implementation would cause problems for firewall software, for instance, so disabling them would prevent the first boot of an XP-upgraded system from crashing due to that conflict), the possibility does exist that Microsoft could pull an old trick. All they would need to do would be to put some competing software in the "banned" list not because it could cause problems, but because it's competing software. The quick rise of IE illustrated that users are more likely to use what they get with the OS than they are to go out of their way to download a competing product, so such a move would certainly encourage people to use whatever's bundled with XP rather than download an updated version of the software. Especially since I'm sure the "blocking" feature doesn't display a download URL for the user to make updating the software easier.
Yes, Microsoft does make some good software (I hate IE for Windows, for instance, but love IE 5 on the Mac). But in case you missed the recent appeals court ruling, Microsoft isn't exactly a saint. If you look beyond blind MS-bashing and blind MS-defending, you'll see a report about a feature that should be closely watched because of its potential for abuse.
Nice troll.
"How can anyone stand the Star Wars movies? I only watched one scene from Phantom Menace where this Jar-Jar character stepped in poop, but that scene is enough for me to judge all the Star Wars movies! And all the other characters must be like Jar-Jar, because that's what I saw!"
"How can anyone read books? I read this one book once, with this Fabio guy on the cover and florid lettering on the spine, and I hated it! All books suck!"
I half-agree, but I'm mostly thinking of the expansion when I do so. The game is, to me, a lot of fun, but I don't have to deal with Battle.Net lag - I mostly play on the LAN with my fiancee. On a Mac, I never really had any stability problems or lag problems with Diablo II. Then I got the expansion. The game crashes frequently, we get lag despite being on the LAN and using machines that shouldn't have problems with a game like Diablo II (400MHz G4s), and occasionally the game launches one of the two players into a "no-man's land", presumably where the client and server get out of sync. That last one is fixable with lots of running around until the machines are forced to coordinate with each other again.
We persevere, because the new classes are a lot of fun to play with, but the game is far less stable than Blizzard's previous offerings. All I can do is hope that Blizzard releases a bug fix patch soon.
You kidding? I still occasionally play "Starflight 2", and I consider "Dark Castle" to be one of the best games of all time. The writing in Infocom adventures has yet to be matched in modern games. These aren't all "two people in a garage" games, but they are games that relied more on good design than on graphics and cookie-cutter game creation. If I ever get bitter over the games of yore, it's primarily because younger gamers would never show much interest in games with such "primitive" graphics. I can't really blame them, either - when you're used to 32-bit 3D-accelerated graphics, it's hard to pick up something new that runs in 16 colors.
I do enjoy modern games, but the existence of newer games doesn't mean the older games suddenly suck - it only means the technology that drives them isn't as impressive. If all you care about is cool graphics, then don't bother with older games - I'm certainly not going to argue with you. But I'm more impressed by good design, and without glitzy graphics, good design was the only thing that made the "classics" classic.
I think there's less of that going on now than there used to be. Daikatana's long development time, massive hype engine, and miserable eventual release taught a few people a lesson. Duke Nukem Forever saw a lot of hype a few years ago, and wisely dropped out of the spotlight when development starting dragging out - we're only hearing more about it now because it's closer to release.
A certain amount of hype before a game is released can generate excitement over the title and get people talking about it, which can help sales when it gets released. You're right though, too much hype too early consumes money that should go into development, and drives expectations up to impossible-to-meet levels. It can also make gamers so sick of hearing about a game that they're less likely to buy it - Halo, for example, would have to completely bowl me over in a demo before I would spend any money on it now. I've heard too much about it for too long, and all the anticipation has drained away.
Ouch. I'm ashamed to say that English is my first language, and I made a careless grammatical error. It sounds like you knew what I meant anyway, so I won't lose any sleep over it.
I know the trick with games isn't to ship them bug-free, but to find a happy medium between shipping soon and shipping with all problems fixed. FunCom didn't find a happy medium - they released the game before it was playable by most people, from the sound of things. I know that's scared me away from trying a game that sounded good in the pre-release hype. It's also made me wary of any releases they may come out with in the future.
Can I understand if they released the game sooner because they were running out of funding? Yep. But if I buy a game I'm not going to do it out of sympathy - I'll do it because I think I'll have fun playing it. If play gets interrupted by bugs, and problems in the game aren't quickly resolved by adequate support, then it isn't likely to be enough fun to be worth my money.