Easy there, chief. Did I say it was wrong or offensive? No. But it's there. And it's exactly as wrong and offensive as old people farting: You can't really fault them because it's just the way their bodies work and they can't control it. But that doesn't mean you can totally ignore it.
Yeah, Top Gear's open disdain for electric vehicles makes it hard to watch sometimes... along with their ever-present homophobia, misogyny, and racism.
As in all things, if usability and design are your concerns: get a Mac. The lights-under-or-next- to-the-relevant-key design has been standard issue since the first iMacs. Ditto for PowerBooks back to the G3s.
...on what settings you'll be wanting to 'propigate'.
A lot can be done by simply dropping files and folders into C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\ (i.e: Documents, Desktop items, IE Favorites, Start Menu items, etc).
As for anything else, the way to go is thus: create a dummy user that is not an administrator, set everything the way you want it for the system and all programs. Restart; log in as administrator and copy NTUSER.DAT and NTUSER.INI from C:\Documents and Settings\[dummy]\ (where dummy is the name you gave to the account )to C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\; backing up the existing files first, of course, in case you've done something that would cause the system to go tits up.
Now, delete the dummy user and its file and from now on, all users added to the system will get the settings you so lovingly crafted.
You won't have to worry about permissions, because by default everything should be world readable; if it ain't, then add Everyone to the permissions for the Default User directory and don't forget to recurse down from there.
Is he a seasoned expert on politics, law, and cinema?
I think most everyone can agree that Katz is none of these things. His political and legal diatribes are one note symphonies of self-aggrandizement and faux-righteous indignation, espousing the values and attitudes of a culture which he has been trying desperately for the past few years to not only be a part of, but also to be the poet laureate for. In these respects he acts the part of the colonials coming to the new world, assigning roles, rules, and boundries that were previously non-existent, nor ontologically inferable, but constitute the only way in which he can fathom the world functioning. So he imposes this artificial order on things, which the natives (slashdotters) see right through, but which the Old World (Wired, Salon, etc), who deal with the new in the same terms as him, views as extremely novel and insightful.
The same can be said for his movie reviews. His lack of understanding of and expertise in the field shows through in the form they all take: plot summaries decorated with occasional tips-of-the-hat to quality or cultural implications. Many people have said of this particular review that they learned nothing that they couldn't have inferred from the trailer, a sentiment with which I empathize. But beyond the shoddy craftsmanship and poorly-suited-to-this-forum topic, there is the fact that he gets close, at points, to actually saying something, as opposed to regurgitating parts of the press kit. He says that "the movie makes some real points about contemporary American teen life." Reading the review over, the only nearly salient point on this topic is "that white suburban kids want everybody else's culture." Thank you Jon, but this suggestion is neither specific to this movie, new, nor, from what I can tell, especially well explored in this bit of cinematic dross.
Please: do not speak for a community that you don't belong to, that doesn't want you, and that you quite obviously don't understand. And when reviewing movies, try to offer your readers something beyond what they could get from the two sentence blurbs that appear in monolithic film guides. Or, if this is all the content you intend to offer, cut to the chase and author one sentence reviews that have the same effect of your current opining rambles: either "I liked it" or "I didn't like it."
ok, i'll bite. what kind of enemy is envisioned here? what documents are you citing with these claims?
the assumption that backed proliferation was that of mutually assured destruction: rubble bouncing and whatnot. if this plan for a limited missile defense is meant to protect against so few weapons, the enemy it would seem to assume is either one with extremely limited means (in which case involvement in a shooting war with the US would all but guarantee their own demise) or a failure of will (same as above).
are these supposed enemies (the rogue states much ballyhooed) extant? are we to guard against every possible attack, no matter how ludicrous, unlikely, or illogical? i know we're not supposed to underestimate anyone who overestimates themselves, but there's a difference between overestimation and taking first-strike initiative against the US; if once you take that first shot, all you have left is your dick in your hand.
again, what documentation are you citing? i'd be interested to read it, if only to see how it could possibly contextualize or reify the need for such a limited and specific defense against what would seem to be an attack about as likely to appear as Brigadoon.
Regardless of the fact that the difficulty of destroying a sufficiently large meteor would be on par with killing all the cockroaches in Chicago with a spatula, missile defense in any incarnation is as practical as trying to stop traffic on the internet by targetting routers. Sure, you could hit a lot of them, in both cases, but the way the systems are structured, something will get through. Modern weapons have such high yields that one bomb, a one-percent margin of error, could result in 20 to 30 million deaths, depending on the weapon's objective. Two little things called redundancy and mutually-assured destruction. You don't have to take my word for it. You can go to the guy who [might have] built the thing.
"Go back to bed America, your government is in control" -- George Bush pre
For a long time, I've tried to see things from Katz's perspective: fish out of water, trying to spark debate on lazy sunday mornings about something that geeks might be interested in, even if it's not specifically geeky. I've tried to be patient, but I'm feeling punchy, so here goes: Katz, I know you want to fit in here, or that you were brought in by some contractual deal handed down by Andover, but give it up. Geeks here don't need any help sparking debate or finding random, non-geeky crap to flame about. If you want to continue to opine in your trite, faux-Ebert style, take that crap over to geocities. Either that, or start posting these things on Saturday night instead of the following morning, so you can get the belligerent geeks at their drunkest and most pugnacious, not in the middle of their hangovers.
IF this movie was an exploration of geekdom, which it's not, and IF it were telling the story of the making of Nosferatu, which it's not, then maybe you're thoughts might have some parallel course with the intentions of the movie.
The big secret here, and the reason the movie is most definitely NOT the story of the making of Nosferatu, is that FW Murnau was a perfectionist, and a German perfectionist at that. Nosferatu ended up the way it did because the man whipped and pulled and scraped and cried every detail of the movie until it was just the way he wanted it. He was a master of his craft who knew exactly what he wanted, and wasn't afraid to ask for it.
If there were a geek in the story, it should be he; instead, this meticulous genius is reduced to what basically amounts to a pornographer: he's not there to create anything, not terror, or vampires, or art, he exists in the film merely to record these things. Murnau was not a pimp, he was an artist; and if this movie purports to be about art, then it should give the visionary behind this seminal work more credit than that of a snuff film producer.
As has been noted in many articles posted in the recent past: game development is always somewhat lacking when a platform is first released. There is a learning curve for developers on every system, new processors to be dealt with and new tricks to learn. Super Mario 3 was written for the same machine as the first two games, lest we forget. One of the main issues with the PS2 is the major paradigm shift that comes from having two so distinct processors (the Emotion Engine and the graphics processor). Once developers begin figuring out how best to use the immense resources of this machine, we will see much improved performance, graphics and ass-kicking factor in the games released for it. Till then, be patient. No one says you have to buy one, but don't slander something which has yet to be truly tested and exploited.
i've been tooling around with OSX at work for the last few days, and i've noticed something distressing which i have heard no news or indignation about: gcc is missing, gone, completely not there. as far as i can tell, there is no way to compile on this thing. why has there been no press about this? has no one noticed this besides me? comments? thoughts? death threats?
did anyone else notice that this is the first time Transmeta has been spelled on/. with a lower-case 't'? we're getting downright vulgar in our talking about them, they must be mainstream
when you think about it, your average mp3 is about 1/50 the quality of cd music. that is the purpose of compression and the reason the format has become so prominent on the internet: it is an acceptably lossy format.
so all the RIAA's and Metallica's claims that mp3's threaten record sales and infringe on copyrights are even more ludicrous than they were before.
mp3's are like higher quality analog cassette tapes, but they are not a replacement for cds.
the only replacement for a cd is another cd. which begs the question: why arent the RIAA and Metallica suing the makers of CD-R and CD-RW drives? those (if any) are the real threats to replace commercially bought cds; you could get a scenario of one person buying a cd and making 15, 50, 100 copies for their friends. that is a real threat, because cd-to-cd is a lossless copy process. so where's the outrage on the part of the RIAA about this? nowhere. because sony, one of the members of the RIAA, is also one of the leading manufacturers of CD-R/RW drives. so what do they do instead? pick on the little guy.
they're not teaching Microsoft how to write an OS, but MS is complaining that the DOJ wants windows to only be an OS. i personally find this hilarious: microsoft bitching and moaning because someone wants their software to do its job and NOTHING ELSE.
can you speak to the fact that the music industry is experiencing an unprecedented boom in sales over the past two years? do you think this is despite electronic means of music distribution, or could napster and its friends be aiding here?
there is a program geared at highschool students which already does this, except instead of a computer game, it's an actual car. they rig a dodge Neon with a laptop that controls how the driver's input is handled. the program on the laptop can be set to any theoretical blood alcohol level, and the higher that number is, the harder it is to control the car: sluggish wheel and break response, hyperactive accelerator response and so on.
in my estimation this is not a bad game design, but an ingenious informative tool for teenagers who think they are indestructible and can handle their liquor.
though i must admit i am drawn to the concept of drunken Poll Position.
when EG was written, the technology in the book was novel and unheard of, it came across as extremely futuristic and fantastical.
having read the first five chapters of the new book, i am extremely disappointed. he seems to be shaping the fantasy world (of 200 years in the future) around the modern world: using email, having addresses with *@foo.gov, etc. i dont know about you, but i'll be extremely disappointed if our electronic communication is symantically identical in ten years, let alone 200.
for god's sake, the books' earth history is screwed up enough as it is (the Warsaw Pact being a serious power?), why does he feel the need to make the stupid little techie details conform to reality? if he kept all the terms and ideas he laid down 20 years ago, i could respect that, i could understand that. but as is, the thing reads like an extremely uncreative look at a future history which might as well have happened in southern california five years ago.
imagine if you will: all the people out there using Outlook and IE grabbing this file, running it, and having their boxes pop. somewhere around 75% of AOL would go down, and lord knows how many people on cable modems and other ISPs. can you IMAGINE what that would do to the speed on your average connection? 90% of the bandwidth hogging lusers out there all gone...i think of this not as a nightmare than a goal. btw: an 87 digit encryption key for nuclear systems? why 87? is that 64 in base 6? they'd be more secure using PGP. i wonder how long would that take a distributed.net project to crack.
...in a secret vault somewhere in LA from which he controls all media. Think about it, this story and all the turns it has taken is merely one example of the tendancy in the past few years of everything in our media culture becoming more and more surreal. Sometimes I get the feeling that people are just taking things to the extremes in order to test how far the viewing public will follow them. I think "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?" and the COPS episode of the X-Files have proved that there really is no limit to the public's capacity to suspend disbelief and accept all manner of ideas that are only tenuously linked to anything we once might have believed was "reality."
a few things here: claiming that your well water is purer than Evian isn't exactly a strong argument. bottled water has fewer restrictions and standards placed on it than municipal water supplies. it often contains much higher levels of lead, bacteria, and other undesirables than would ever be allowed through even the poorest run processing plant.
also, wells are notorius for being the source of various infections and bacterial outbreaks when contaminated ground water containing particles from industrial run-off and animal feces seeps into them.
i dont know about you, but i wouldnt get so high and mighty about the fact that you rely on such a flawed, antiquated system.
they tried this earlier in this century, with ketchup, mustard and a lot of other food products, the only things that stuck around were whipped cream and cheese.
i found one directory on all the mirrors labelled "Redhat-6.0" but it was empty. methinks one has pulled the proverbial wool over cmdrtaco's all-seeing eyes.
Slashdot Mirror
Easy there, chief. Did I say it was wrong or offensive? No. But it's there. And it's exactly as wrong and offensive as old people farting: You can't really fault them because it's just the way their bodies work and they can't control it. But that doesn't mean you can totally ignore it.
Yeah, Top Gear's open disdain for electric vehicles makes it hard to watch sometimes... along with their ever-present homophobia, misogyny, and racism.
As in all things, if usability and design are your concerns: get a Mac. The lights-under-or-next- to-the-relevant-key design has been standard issue since the first iMacs. Ditto for PowerBooks back to the G3s.
...on what settings you'll be wanting to 'propigate'.
A lot can be done by simply dropping files and folders into C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\ (i.e: Documents, Desktop items, IE Favorites, Start Menu items, etc).
As for anything else, the way to go is thus: create a dummy user that is not an administrator, set everything the way you want it for the system and all programs. Restart; log in as administrator and copy NTUSER.DAT and NTUSER.INI from C:\Documents and Settings\[dummy]\ (where dummy is the name you gave to the account )to C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\; backing up the existing files first, of course, in case you've done something that would cause the system to go tits up.
Now, delete the dummy user and its file and from now on, all users added to the system will get the settings you so lovingly crafted.
You won't have to worry about permissions, because by default everything should be world readable; if it ain't, then add Everyone to the permissions for the Default User directory and don't forget to recurse down from there.
Is he a seasoned expert on politics, law, and cinema?
I think most everyone can agree that Katz is none of these things. His political and legal diatribes are one note symphonies of self-aggrandizement and faux-righteous indignation, espousing the values and attitudes of a culture which he has been trying desperately for the past few years to not only be a part of, but also to be the poet laureate for. In these respects he acts the part of the colonials coming to the new world, assigning roles, rules, and boundries that were previously non-existent, nor ontologically inferable, but constitute the only way in which he can fathom the world functioning. So he imposes this artificial order on things, which the natives (slashdotters) see right through, but which the Old World (Wired, Salon, etc), who deal with the new in the same terms as him, views as extremely novel and insightful.
The same can be said for his movie reviews. His lack of understanding of and expertise in the field shows through in the form they all take: plot summaries decorated with occasional tips-of-the-hat to quality or cultural implications. Many people have said of this particular review that they learned nothing that they couldn't have inferred from the trailer, a sentiment with which I empathize. But beyond the shoddy craftsmanship and poorly-suited-to-this-forum topic, there is the fact that he gets close, at points, to actually saying something, as opposed to regurgitating parts of the press kit. He says that "the movie makes some real points about contemporary American teen life." Reading the review over, the only nearly salient point on this topic is "that white suburban kids want everybody else's culture." Thank you Jon, but this suggestion is neither specific to this movie, new, nor, from what I can tell, especially well explored in this bit of cinematic dross.
Please: do not speak for a community that you don't belong to, that doesn't want you, and that you quite obviously don't understand. And when reviewing movies, try to offer your readers something beyond what they could get from the two sentence blurbs that appear in monolithic film guides. Or, if this is all the content you intend to offer, cut to the chase and author one sentence reviews that have the same effect of your current opining rambles: either "I liked it" or "I didn't like it."
ok, i'll bite. what kind of enemy is envisioned here? what documents are you citing with these claims?
the assumption that backed proliferation was that of mutually assured destruction: rubble bouncing and whatnot. if this plan for a limited missile defense is meant to protect against so few weapons, the enemy it would seem to assume is either one with extremely limited means (in which case involvement in a shooting war with the US would all but guarantee their own demise) or a failure of will (same as above).
are these supposed enemies (the rogue states much ballyhooed) extant? are we to guard against every possible attack, no matter how ludicrous, unlikely, or illogical? i know we're not supposed to underestimate anyone who overestimates themselves, but there's a difference between overestimation and taking first-strike initiative against the US; if once you take that first shot, all you have left is your dick in your hand.
again, what documentation are you citing? i'd be interested to read it, if only to see how it could possibly contextualize or reify the need for such a limited and specific defense against what would seem to be an attack about as likely to appear as Brigadoon.
Regardless of the fact that the difficulty of destroying a sufficiently large meteor would be on par with killing all the cockroaches in Chicago with a spatula, missile defense in any incarnation is as practical as trying to stop traffic on the internet by targetting routers. Sure, you could hit a lot of them, in both cases, but the way the systems are structured, something will get through. Modern weapons have such high yields that one bomb, a one-percent margin of error, could result in 20 to 30 million deaths, depending on the weapon's objective. Two little things called redundancy and mutually-assured destruction. You don't have to take my word for it. You can go to the guy who [might have] built the thing. "Go back to bed America, your government is in control" -- George Bush pre
For a long time, I've tried to see things from Katz's perspective: fish out of water, trying to spark debate on lazy sunday mornings about something that geeks might be interested in, even if it's not specifically geeky. I've tried to be patient, but I'm feeling punchy, so here goes: Katz, I know you want to fit in here, or that you were brought in by some contractual deal handed down by Andover, but give it up. Geeks here don't need any help sparking debate or finding random, non-geeky crap to flame about. If you want to continue to opine in your trite, faux-Ebert style, take that crap over to geocities. Either that, or start posting these things on Saturday night instead of the following morning, so you can get the belligerent geeks at their drunkest and most pugnacious, not in the middle of their hangovers.
IF this movie was an exploration of geekdom, which it's not, and IF it were telling the story of the making of Nosferatu, which it's not, then maybe you're thoughts might have some parallel course with the intentions of the movie.
The big secret here, and the reason the movie is most definitely NOT the story of the making of Nosferatu, is that FW Murnau was a perfectionist, and a German perfectionist at that. Nosferatu ended up the way it did because the man whipped and pulled and scraped and cried every detail of the movie until it was just the way he wanted it. He was a master of his craft who knew exactly what he wanted, and wasn't afraid to ask for it.
If there were a geek in the story, it should be he; instead, this meticulous genius is reduced to what basically amounts to a pornographer: he's not there to create anything, not terror, or vampires, or art, he exists in the film merely to record these things. Murnau was not a pimp, he was an artist; and if this movie purports to be about art, then it should give the visionary behind this seminal work more credit than that of a snuff film producer.
As has been noted in many articles posted in the recent past: game development is always somewhat lacking when a platform is first released. There is a learning curve for developers on every system, new processors to be dealt with and new tricks to learn. Super Mario 3 was written for the same machine as the first two games, lest we forget. One of the main issues with the PS2 is the major paradigm shift that comes from having two so distinct processors (the Emotion Engine and the graphics processor). Once developers begin figuring out how best to use the immense resources of this machine, we will see much improved performance, graphics and ass-kicking factor in the games released for it. Till then, be patient. No one says you have to buy one, but don't slander something which has yet to be truly tested and exploited.
i've been tooling around with OSX at work for the last few days, and i've noticed something distressing which i have heard no news or indignation about: gcc is missing, gone, completely not there. as far as i can tell, there is no way to compile on this thing. why has there been no press about this? has no one noticed this besides me? comments? thoughts? death threats?
did anyone else notice that this is the first time Transmeta has been spelled on /. with a lower-case 't'? we're getting downright vulgar in our talking about them, they must be mainstream
what are you doing with the old hardware? i know i'd be interested in taking it off your hands as a tax deductible donation.
when you think about it, your average mp3 is about 1/50 the quality of cd music. that is the purpose of compression and the reason the format has become so prominent on the internet: it is an acceptably lossy format.
so all the RIAA's and Metallica's claims that mp3's threaten record sales and infringe on copyrights are even more ludicrous than they were before.
mp3's are like higher quality analog cassette tapes, but they are not a replacement for cds.
the only replacement for a cd is another cd. which begs the question: why arent the RIAA and Metallica suing the makers of CD-R and CD-RW drives? those (if any) are the real threats to replace commercially bought cds; you could get a scenario of one person buying a cd and making 15, 50, 100 copies for their friends. that is a real threat, because cd-to-cd is a lossless copy process. so where's the outrage on the part of the RIAA about this? nowhere. because sony, one of the members of the RIAA, is also one of the leading manufacturers of CD-R/RW drives. so what do they do instead? pick on the little guy.
they're not teaching Microsoft how to write an OS, but MS is complaining that the DOJ wants windows to only be an OS. i personally find this hilarious: microsoft bitching and moaning because someone wants their software to do its job and NOTHING ELSE.
can you speak to the fact that the music industry is experiencing an unprecedented boom in sales over the past two years? do you think this is despite electronic means of music distribution, or could napster and its friends be aiding here?
there is a program geared at highschool students which already does this, except instead of a computer game, it's an actual car. they rig a dodge Neon with a laptop that controls how the driver's input is handled. the program on the laptop can be set to any theoretical blood alcohol level, and the higher that number is, the harder it is to control the car: sluggish wheel and break response, hyperactive accelerator response and so on.
in my estimation this is not a bad game design, but an ingenious informative tool for teenagers who think they are indestructible and can handle their liquor.
though i must admit i am drawn to the concept of drunken Poll Position.
when EG was written, the technology in the book was novel and unheard of, it came across as extremely futuristic and fantastical.
having read the first five chapters of the new book, i am extremely disappointed. he seems to be shaping the fantasy world (of 200 years in the future) around the modern world: using email, having addresses with *@foo.gov, etc. i dont know about you, but i'll be extremely disappointed if our electronic communication is symantically identical in ten years, let alone 200.
for god's sake, the books' earth history is screwed up enough as it is (the Warsaw Pact being a serious power?), why does he feel the need to make the stupid little techie details conform to reality? if he kept all the terms and ideas he laid down 20 years ago, i could respect that, i could understand that. but as is, the thing reads like an extremely uncreative look at a future history which might as well have happened in southern california five years ago.
imagine if you will: all the people out there using Outlook and IE grabbing this file, running it, and having their boxes pop. somewhere around 75% of AOL would go down, and lord knows how many people on cable modems and other ISPs. can you IMAGINE what that would do to the speed on your average connection? 90% of the bandwidth hogging lusers out there all gone...i think of this not as a nightmare than a goal. btw: an 87 digit encryption key for nuclear systems? why 87? is that 64 in base 6? they'd be more secure using PGP. i wonder how long would that take a distributed.net project to crack.
...in a secret vault somewhere in LA from which he controls all media. Think about it, this story and all the turns it has taken is merely one example of the tendancy in the past few years of everything in our media culture becoming more and more surreal. Sometimes I get the feeling that people are just taking things to the extremes in order to test how far the viewing public will follow them. I think "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?" and the COPS episode of the X-Files have proved that there really is no limit to the public's capacity to suspend disbelief and accept all manner of ideas that are only tenuously linked to anything we once might have believed was "reality."
a few things here:
claiming that your well water is purer than Evian isn't exactly a strong argument. bottled water has fewer restrictions and standards placed on it than municipal water supplies. it often contains much higher levels of lead, bacteria, and other undesirables than would ever be allowed through even the poorest run processing plant.
also, wells are notorius for being the source of various infections and bacterial outbreaks when contaminated ground water containing particles from industrial run-off and animal feces seeps into them.
i dont know about you, but i wouldnt get so high and mighty about the fact that you rely on such a flawed, antiquated system.
they tried this earlier in this century, with ketchup, mustard and a lot of other food products, the only things that stuck around were whipped cream and cheese.
i found one directory on all the mirrors labelled "Redhat-6.0" but it was empty.
methinks one has pulled the proverbial wool over cmdrtaco's all-seeing eyes.