For you, maybe, the prequel movies are on par with the originals. But for millions of others, they simply aren't. Why do I say this? It all became clear to me when my parents watched the Episode I DVD.
To make things clear, my parents were somewhat older in 1977 as I was in 1999 (by about a decade). They saw Star Wars back then, thought it was a great movie for its time. They most certainly were not children. They did not go to see it because of their children (I never saw Star Wars in the theatre until 1997). They went because of the hype back then, because friends told them about it. And they LOVED IT.
Since then, they've seen the rest of the original trilogy in the theatre, owned LD, VHS, and now DVD versions of it. And still think the original trilogy were good movies. They're now in their 60s.
When I showed them Episode I, they hated it. They found it dull, boring, and pandering to children in a way that IV-VI never did. In fact, seeing as they now have grandchildren, you'd think they would more enjoy things like Jar-Jar, for the kids' sakes.
I've since talked to a LOT of people who were adults back in the 70s/80s, and they pretty much echo my parents' opinions.
The general negative opinion towards the prequels has nothing to do with us all having seen them back when we were kids. The prequels are, to most people I know, simply worse movies. Sure, the originals were aimed at teenagers - and thus not bad movies even for adults. But the prequels are aimed at 5-8 year olds, as far as I can tell. And that's a big difference.
you no longer have to blow on the cartridges to get them to work
Gah, this old myth.
Again, blowing on the cartridges generally does nothing. You're not getting a bad connection due to an infinitessimally thin layer of dust, unless you've been letting these carts sit around for a decade or more.
The reason NES carts don't work nicely is the poor connector in the console itself, and the fact that using 2 different types of metals in a connection leads to massive corrosion. The way to fix this is to scrub the hell out of the cart connections using a Q-tip soaked in rubbing alcohol.
Why did blowing seem to work back in the day? The corrosion isn't uniform, and odds are the removal and re-insertion of the cartridge not only removed a tiny bit of the corrosion, but also moved it over a tiny amount, thereby establishing a strong connection. Remember having to remove-and-blow 5 or 10 times before it would work? Could THAT much dust have accumulated?
Trust me, I've spent the past 5 years re-conditioning old NES decks and cartridges. Haven't blown on a single one, but short of a dead deck the rubbing alcohol trick has led to every single cart I own working (several hundred and counting).
Here in Manitoba, Canada, we've had this for many many months now. The local (formerly government) telco monopoly rolled out their digital television over phone line service with great fanfare.
I must say I'm less than impressed. It's basically the identical channels/packages as cable and satellite, for the same cost - however, the quality is VERY poor. Posts in this thread talk about bandwidth issues over POTS, and that has to be it.
Know when you're watching digital satellite and the screen suddenly pixelates like mad, like a really nasty MPEG artifact? Especially noticable during storms? TV over the phone lines looks like this pretty much all the time. Now just imagine an action sequence, with lots of frame changes. It's downright unwatchable.
Step 1: read the article Step 2: failing this daunting undertaking, read the article summary:
We will split the mainstream edition of Knoppix into two versions: a 'maximum' DVD edition with a complete Debian installation, and a 'light' edition on CD that contains the most popular desktop and server software only, for older computers or smaller systems that don't have a bootable DVD drive yet
Step 3: Try to find mods who also read the article summaries before modding people up.
a 1GHz VIA C3 processor, 128 MB RAM, 30GB hard drive, and a plain vanilla CD-ROM. Seems overpriced for what you get, but cheap nonetheless.
I can't speak for the US market, but up here in Canada the cheapest new laptop runs you about $1,000, which is about $800 USD. Granted, this is with a 2+ ghz cpu, 256 MB RAM, 20-30GB drive and a dvd-rom.
However, to pay anything less than this requires checking out the used laptop market. Here we see such gems as a P3-700, 64-96MB RAM, 8-10GB drive selling for $5-600 all the time. Say about $4-500 USD.
I don't know about you folks, but this looks like a pretty nice deal for those folks who aren't planning on running Doom3 on their laptops. The ram's a bit scanty for any modern OS, but otherwise this is a perfectly good machine to do 99% of what people do with a laptop.
The problem here is that there's this self-reinforcing cult of personality around Linux on this site. And you're participating in it.
Not in the slightest.
This isn't a right vs wrong debate to me at all. Allow me to relate:
I recently took a graduate-level Operating Systems course. It naturally focussed on Linux and the BSDs (if you're beginning to get upset at this, read further). At the end of the course, when asked for feedback, one student asked why we couldn't have discussed Windows.
See, about 90% of the course notes was discussing kernel code. Kind of hard to do with Windows. The fact of the matter is, if you want to know exactly what your OS is doing, and if you want to make changes to it to any great degree, you NEED to work with source code. Geeks are those who like to know how things work. Learning every last detail about how something works makes you more informed.
Windows is a black box. My statement said nothing about it being better or worse. But it simply is an OS that is best suited for USERS, who don't want/need/expect full control and understanding of the underlying frameworks they're dealing with.
Linux is the best choice for those of us that like to hack, because it allows us to do what we want with it, no holds barred. We're the geeks of the world, the hackers, the ones who like to twiddle every last bit we can to make something do exactly what we want it to do. We're also the (historically) largest part of Slashdot. It's not for everyone, I agree. Hell, it's not for most people!
This isn't zealotry. I wouldn't call it zealotry because my car-fanatic friend told me kit cars aren't for me, and I should just buy a Honda or whatever. And it's not zealotry when I say that Linux isn't for my girlfriend.
Bullshit (and I don't mean opinions but facts) are rated +5 informative just because it is pro-Linux and/or anti-MS, while facts correcting this are modded down.
You wanna know something not terribly interesting?
Every Slashdot story that even touches the Windows/Linux debate contains many pro-Linux comments modded up, and many pro-Windows comments modded up. More on the pro-Linux side, of course, because most people here are a) geeks, b) more informed, and c) somewhat zealous. This is nothing new, nothing surprising, cetainly nothing that hasn't been the norm since I started reading Slashdot in the late 90s.
But lately, there is/are always a comment(s) such as yours, which implies that *all* pro-Linux comments are modded up, and *all* pro-MS comments are modded down (which is factually incorrect in and of itself).
The interesting part is that almost without exception, a comment such as yours is modded to +5, and stays that way. I imagine it's because your comment is well-written and actually thoughtful. About the only pro-Windows comments I see being modded down consistently are the "Windows is just as secure/stable/better/pretty/doesthedishes as Linux, you're just a bunch of zealots!!!". (I always picture these posters pronouncing it as zeee-lots for some reason:)
Sound and printed text has a much higher threshold before it's considered "adult material" or "objectionable content". Cartoon and video, being more visual, seem to have a much lower threshold.
Go browse the books in your local grocery store sometime. I first learned the term "throbbing manhood" while waiting in an express line.
Canada has had several referendums on the separation of Quebec.
Not quite true. *Quebec* has had several referendums on the separation of Quebec.
However, your point is still accurate. I really cannot see my government banning a video game because someone puts a Quebec national team in it. Everyone who wants to act as an apologist for China, and claim that Canada and the US do similar things, you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
We may not be perfect (hell, no one is), but up in the Great White North we don't often bring in tanks to quell pro-democracy movements. Or any other protest, for that matter. Fact of the matter is, I can say every single bad thing about my government that I want, and I don't risk imprisonment. My government does not try to censor the internet. Hell, we don't even have government-mandated child porn filters (one of the few truly illegal things in this country).
Long as I don't start lobbing bombs at people, I can pretty much do whatever the hell I please, say what I want, be who I want.
Imperfect freedom != dictatorship. I really wish people would understand that things are not so binary in this world.
Driven through Canada in late summer/early fall, about 26 hours. It's a beautiful drive for much of it, especially the stretch around Lake Superior. The park there is one of the best outside of the coasts and the Rockies.
(spoken from experience, and I highly recommend this road trip to anyone who enjoys many hours a day behind the wheel)
One of my primary arguments was that the development of fine motor skills and handwriting was stumped when children are allowed to type and use the mouse rather than write, paint, etc.
Keyboarding and mousing develop fine motor skills. Unless you only are concerned with people's abilities to write cursive script and/or paint. Personally, I'd say a lack of keyboarding and mousing ability is a much greater hinderance in today's soceity.
With one, I type in my topic and immediately receive a specific article. With the other, I have to learn how to look the topic up, and in that process am inevitably exposed to other topics which may catch my attention and allow me to learn a bit more.
Let me introduce the concept of hypertext. I usually end up on some pretty deep-linked tangents when researching something, myself. With an encyclopedia, you're only likely to hit something that's related due to alphabetic coincidence. With hypertext, you're far more likely to want to learn about something similar, and it's remarkable just how far you can go with this concept. I once spend 2 hours reading about the French revolution and Napoleon after looking for info on an obscure CPU I couldn't find opcodes for. Granted, you prefaced this with "before the WWW", but frankly I'd like to know just what information source you had access to in 1993 that allowed you to research virtually any topic with a simple query. I suppose the very early non-linked electronic encyclopedias...
My suggestion at that time, and one I would probably stand by today, is that computer technology in the classroom should be delayed until the Junior High (7th or 8th grade) level.
They said the very same thing about books, a long time ago.
Not to be too critical of your post, because you do touch on some interesting areas not already covered, but it strikes me that when stories like this come out, we just drag out the old arguments against books/comics/music/television/etc.
And.. to those who say "change the channel", I have tried that as well. The sad fact is that there are hardly any alternatives because almost EVERY show is doing it.
I have a much better alternative for you: turn the damn thing off.
I've for the most part stopped watching television simply because there are much more enjoyable things to do. If you find what's on television so objectionable that you actually become offended by it, why on earth are you still watching it?
I didn't go lobby the FCC (CRTC up here in Canada, same diff) because I find a million "reality" shows to be more boring than a trip to the dentist's chair. If people really want to watch garbage, more power to em. Who am I, or you, to tell them what they can and cannot watch?
Besides, if you're so hell-bent on watching television, most everything from the first 40 years of broadcasting is showing up on DVD these days. I'm sure there's something in there you'd find less offensive than what's on TV these days. If not, why did you start watching in the first place?
Well, things like oral and anal sex are far more permissable up here than in the US. AFAIK, the poor yanks still have sodomy laws on the books in some states.
Things like this unfortunately tend to work in FAVOUR of the fundies - "See? Canadians are immoral perverts, they don't even make immoral sexual activities illegal!". Considering how many people in the US consider homosexuality to be sexual deviance, or even a crime, they must really LOVE us, what with 8 or 9 provinces now recognizing homosexual marriages.
Hell, in the US, things like that get run through the tyranny of the majority. Hooray for intolerance!
Slashdot Mirror
For you, maybe, the prequel movies are on par with the originals. But for millions of others, they simply aren't. Why do I say this? It all became clear to me when my parents watched the Episode I DVD.
To make things clear, my parents were somewhat older in 1977 as I was in 1999 (by about a decade). They saw Star Wars back then, thought it was a great movie for its time. They most certainly were not children. They did not go to see it because of their children (I never saw Star Wars in the theatre until 1997). They went because of the hype back then, because friends told them about it. And they LOVED IT.
Since then, they've seen the rest of the original trilogy in the theatre, owned LD, VHS, and now DVD versions of it. And still think the original trilogy were good movies. They're now in their 60s.
When I showed them Episode I, they hated it. They found it dull, boring, and pandering to children in a way that IV-VI never did. In fact, seeing as they now have grandchildren, you'd think they would more enjoy things like Jar-Jar, for the kids' sakes.
I've since talked to a LOT of people who were adults back in the 70s/80s, and they pretty much echo my parents' opinions.
The general negative opinion towards the prequels has nothing to do with us all having seen them back when we were kids. The prequels are, to most people I know, simply worse movies. Sure, the originals were aimed at teenagers - and thus not bad movies even for adults. But the prequels are aimed at 5-8 year olds, as far as I can tell. And that's a big difference.
I'm curious how many people, like myself, went and checked out each and every link the parent had in it :)
Baby Geniuses *TWO*????
One wasn't bad enough???
Oh well, at least you missed the Problem Child series.
...this video.
(disclaimer: I've never been able to find a non-evil version of it)
Sorry, Richard.
you no longer have to blow on the cartridges to get them to work
Gah, this old myth.
Again, blowing on the cartridges generally does nothing. You're not getting a bad connection due to an infinitessimally thin layer of dust, unless you've been letting these carts sit around for a decade or more.
The reason NES carts don't work nicely is the poor connector in the console itself, and the fact that using 2 different types of metals in a connection leads to massive corrosion. The way to fix this is to scrub the hell out of the cart connections using a Q-tip soaked in rubbing alcohol.
Why did blowing seem to work back in the day? The corrosion isn't uniform, and odds are the removal and re-insertion of the cartridge not only removed a tiny bit of the corrosion, but also moved it over a tiny amount, thereby establishing a strong connection. Remember having to remove-and-blow 5 or 10 times before it would work? Could THAT much dust have accumulated?
Trust me, I've spent the past 5 years re-conditioning old NES decks and cartridges. Haven't blown on a single one, but short of a dead deck the rubbing alcohol trick has led to every single cart I own working (several hundred and counting).
Actually, many of them go even further, and say things like "Own the greatest romantic comedy of all time!" etc.
Yeah, there's a helluva deal if I've ever heard one.
Here in Manitoba, Canada, we've had this for many many months now. The local (formerly government) telco monopoly rolled out their digital television over phone line service with great fanfare.
I must say I'm less than impressed. It's basically the identical channels/packages as cable and satellite, for the same cost - however, the quality is VERY poor. Posts in this thread talk about bandwidth issues over POTS, and that has to be it.
Know when you're watching digital satellite and the screen suddenly pixelates like mad, like a really nasty MPEG artifact? Especially noticable during storms? TV over the phone lines looks like this pretty much all the time. Now just imagine an action sequence, with lots of frame changes. It's downright unwatchable.
Step 1: read the article
Step 2: failing this daunting undertaking, read the article summary:
We will split the mainstream edition of Knoppix into two versions: a 'maximum' DVD edition with a complete Debian installation, and a 'light' edition on CD that contains the most popular desktop and server software only, for older computers or smaller systems that don't have a bootable DVD drive yet
Step 3: Try to find mods who also read the article summaries before modding people up.
Would you like us to portray the IE6 worst case scenario?
Sure. The other day this site tried to install some Active-X compo*&!&&^%#^@!((NO CARRIER
a 1GHz VIA C3 processor, 128 MB RAM, 30GB hard drive, and a plain vanilla CD-ROM. Seems overpriced for what you get, but cheap nonetheless.
I can't speak for the US market, but up here in Canada the cheapest new laptop runs you about $1,000, which is about $800 USD. Granted, this is with a 2+ ghz cpu, 256 MB RAM, 20-30GB drive and a dvd-rom.
However, to pay anything less than this requires checking out the used laptop market. Here we see such gems as a P3-700, 64-96MB RAM, 8-10GB drive selling for $5-600 all the time. Say about $4-500 USD.
I don't know about you folks, but this looks like a pretty nice deal for those folks who aren't planning on running Doom3 on their laptops. The ram's a bit scanty for any modern OS, but otherwise this is a perfectly good machine to do 99% of what people do with a laptop.
The problem here is that there's this self-reinforcing cult of personality around Linux on this site. And you're participating in it.
Not in the slightest.
This isn't a right vs wrong debate to me at all. Allow me to relate:
I recently took a graduate-level Operating Systems course. It naturally focussed on Linux and the BSDs (if you're beginning to get upset at this, read further). At the end of the course, when asked for feedback, one student asked why we couldn't have discussed Windows.
See, about 90% of the course notes was discussing kernel code. Kind of hard to do with Windows. The fact of the matter is, if you want to know exactly what your OS is doing, and if you want to make changes to it to any great degree, you NEED to work with source code. Geeks are those who like to know how things work. Learning every last detail about how something works makes you more informed.
Windows is a black box. My statement said nothing about it being better or worse. But it simply is an OS that is best suited for USERS, who don't want/need/expect full control and understanding of the underlying frameworks they're dealing with.
Linux is the best choice for those of us that like to hack, because it allows us to do what we want with it, no holds barred. We're the geeks of the world, the hackers, the ones who like to twiddle every last bit we can to make something do exactly what we want it to do. We're also the (historically) largest part of Slashdot. It's not for everyone, I agree. Hell, it's not for most people!
This isn't zealotry. I wouldn't call it zealotry because my car-fanatic friend told me kit cars aren't for me, and I should just buy a Honda or whatever. And it's not zealotry when I say that Linux isn't for my girlfriend.
Bullshit (and I don't mean opinions but facts) are rated +5 informative just because it is pro-Linux and/or anti-MS, while facts correcting this are modded down.
:)
You wanna know something not terribly interesting?
Every Slashdot story that even touches the Windows/Linux debate contains many pro-Linux comments modded up, and many pro-Windows comments modded up. More on the pro-Linux side, of course, because most people here are a) geeks, b) more informed, and c) somewhat zealous. This is nothing new, nothing surprising, cetainly nothing that hasn't been the norm since I started reading Slashdot in the late 90s.
But lately, there is/are always a comment(s) such as yours, which implies that *all* pro-Linux comments are modded up, and *all* pro-MS comments are modded down (which is factually incorrect in and of itself).
The interesting part is that almost without exception, a comment such as yours is modded to +5, and stays that way. I imagine it's because your comment is well-written and actually thoughtful. About the only pro-Windows comments I see being modded down consistently are the "Windows is just as secure/stable/better/pretty/doesthedishes as Linux, you're just a bunch of zealots!!!". (I always picture these posters pronouncing it as zeee-lots for some reason
I'm scanty on the details, but aren't the developers of "City of Heroes" being sued for this very same thing?
:(
Apparently, the ability to create a character similar to Marvel's Hulk infringes on their copyrights somehow.
Man, bankruptcy turns even nice guys into litigous assholes
Does that mean we all sit around here talking about slashing?
Take a look at the porn industry at large.
Sound and printed text has a much higher threshold before it's considered "adult material" or "objectionable content". Cartoon and video, being more visual, seem to have a much lower threshold.
Go browse the books in your local grocery store sometime. I first learned the term "throbbing manhood" while waiting in an express line.
This news is 2 days old at best.
:)
1999 called. It wants its complaint back.
Ah, the irony of using an old comment to complain about less than timely news updates
(I'm sure someone has a link to it).
:)
Yes, in fact the link provided in the parent has a link to the trailer
That, and "the Spoke".
Canada has had several referendums on the separation of Quebec.
Not quite true. *Quebec* has had several referendums on the separation of Quebec.
However, your point is still accurate. I really cannot see my government banning a video game because someone puts a Quebec national team in it. Everyone who wants to act as an apologist for China, and claim that Canada and the US do similar things, you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
We may not be perfect (hell, no one is), but up in the Great White North we don't often bring in tanks to quell pro-democracy movements. Or any other protest, for that matter. Fact of the matter is, I can say every single bad thing about my government that I want, and I don't risk imprisonment. My government does not try to censor the internet. Hell, we don't even have government-mandated child porn filters (one of the few truly illegal things in this country).
Long as I don't start lobbing bombs at people, I can pretty much do whatever the hell I please, say what I want, be who I want.
Imperfect freedom != dictatorship. I really wish people would understand that things are not so binary in this world.
He's a "software engineer", and he's from Utah.
:)
Insert conspiracy theory here, and add a dash of my disdain for traditional soft eng practices.
No, really. Is there anyone out there who thinks that stick figures help developers?
How far is Winnipeg from Montreal?
Driven through Canada in late summer/early fall, about 26 hours. It's a beautiful drive for much of it, especially the stretch around Lake Superior. The park there is one of the best outside of the coasts and the Rockies.
(spoken from experience, and I highly recommend this road trip to anyone who enjoys many hours a day behind the wheel)
One of my primary arguments was that the development of fine motor skills and handwriting was stumped when children are allowed to type and use the mouse rather than write, paint, etc.
Keyboarding and mousing develop fine motor skills. Unless you only are concerned with people's abilities to write cursive script and/or paint. Personally, I'd say a lack of keyboarding and mousing ability is a much greater hinderance in today's soceity.
With one, I type in my topic and immediately receive a specific article. With the other, I have to learn how to look the topic up, and in that process am inevitably exposed to other topics which may catch my attention and allow me to learn a bit more.
Let me introduce the concept of hypertext. I usually end up on some pretty deep-linked tangents when researching something, myself. With an encyclopedia, you're only likely to hit something that's related due to alphabetic coincidence. With hypertext, you're far more likely to want to learn about something similar, and it's remarkable just how far you can go with this concept. I once spend 2 hours reading about the French revolution and Napoleon after looking for info on an obscure CPU I couldn't find opcodes for. Granted, you prefaced this with "before the WWW", but frankly I'd like to know just what information source you had access to in 1993 that allowed you to research virtually any topic with a simple query. I suppose the very early non-linked electronic encyclopedias...
My suggestion at that time, and one I would probably stand by today, is that computer technology in the classroom should be delayed until the Junior High (7th or 8th grade) level.
They said the very same thing about books, a long time ago.
Not to be too critical of your post, because you do touch on some interesting areas not already covered, but it strikes me that when stories like this come out, we just drag out the old arguments against books/comics/music/television/etc.
Change really isn't that scary, people, honest!
No more far-fetched than "if it's true for the general population, it must be true for your daughter, right?"
And.. to those who say "change the channel", I have tried that as well. The sad fact is that there are hardly any alternatives because almost EVERY show is doing it.
I have a much better alternative for you: turn the damn thing off.
I've for the most part stopped watching television simply because there are much more enjoyable things to do. If you find what's on television so objectionable that you actually become offended by it, why on earth are you still watching it?
I didn't go lobby the FCC (CRTC up here in Canada, same diff) because I find a million "reality" shows to be more boring than a trip to the dentist's chair. If people really want to watch garbage, more power to em. Who am I, or you, to tell them what they can and cannot watch?
Besides, if you're so hell-bent on watching television, most everything from the first 40 years of broadcasting is showing up on DVD these days. I'm sure there's something in there you'd find less offensive than what's on TV these days. If not, why did you start watching in the first place?
Well, things like oral and anal sex are far more permissable up here than in the US. AFAIK, the poor yanks still have sodomy laws on the books in some states.
Things like this unfortunately tend to work in FAVOUR of the fundies - "See? Canadians are immoral perverts, they don't even make immoral sexual activities illegal!". Considering how many people in the US consider homosexuality to be sexual deviance, or even a crime, they must really LOVE us, what with 8 or 9 provinces now recognizing homosexual marriages.
Hell, in the US, things like that get run through the tyranny of the majority. Hooray for intolerance!