Actually, I just figured that the 'cloth' was really some sort of fibreglass plug--soft when fresh, hardens to an air-tight sea. And the hatch and controls are explained by the fact that the ship is a metal shell within which a Cylon is mounted and grown. So all she had to do was remove the previous occupant and there's a nice ship to fly. And since it's a metal ship with an organic pilot, it's believable that the pilot would be dead but the ship flyable.
Yeah, it takes a little work to suspend disbelief--but not that much.
Dude, he was hit by a car. A Magic Foam Safety Hat will do very little to alleviate that. Helmets for road cycling make about as much sense as wearing a breastplate whilst driving a car. Sure, they reduce the risk of a certain type of injury, but that type of injury is rare (the vast majority of cycling injuries are to the arms & shoulders); they also increase the risk of neck injuries, including fatalities. Moreover, the wearing of helmets discourages cycling, and the single greatest cycling safety factor is riders on the road--every region with high ridership has fewer accidents, fewer injuries & fewer fatalities.
A recent study has shown that drivers drive significantly closer to helmeted cyclists, an average of 3 1/2 inches away.
Research has shown that helmet wearing is correlated with fatality rates.
Well, it's illegal for you to play MP3s without paying the Frauenhofer Institute. When you buy Windows, part of your license fee goes to them. When you download Linux for free, there's no payment to Frauenhofer. So instead you need to download the mp3 libraries and programs independently, so that you can illegally play your music. Or you could just use Ogg Vorbis, which is free and higher quality.
You've never upgraded Windows? What do you think Windows patches do--they fix bugs and close holes, just like Linux patches.
nVidia's drivers are proprietary. If they were free this wouldn't be a problem. Given that they're a hardware company, it makes little sense for their drivers to be closed anyway.
What sort of setup are you running on? I've not had to manually tweak X11 parameters for almost a decade now.
Well, everyone's different. My filebrowser is the combination of cd & ls, but different strokes for different folks.
As the article put it, shooting at insurgents to "Hit Me Baby One More Time" is a bit surreal.
Hasn't anyone who's played a video game in the last decade or so done the equivalent? Really, is it any different than the old military bands back when they were actually used to march men into battle?
Considering that most of Iraq & Afghanistan aren't 'comabt situations' and yet are prone to a great deal of bombs and such, I can imagine that a soldier would welcome such cases. As Erich Maria Remarque noted, a soldier's life is one of long periods of boredom interspersed with brief moments of sheer terror; no doubt a soldier would like his music player to survive those moments of terror.
Dude, if you like Apple's current look then you don't have bad taste--you lack taste. There's nothing to taste: it's sterile and cold. There's no life to it. It's boring, with nothing to entrance the eye or attract the gaze. It's a morass of straight lines and circles, all done up in white and transparent plastic. It's as lively as a corpse in a casket, save that the corpse once lived: Apple's recent hardware never will.
As an example, the Bauhaus school, which has rectilinear, minimialist lines, could not be confused with the Art Deco period, which has sweeping, organic lines modeled on natural plants.
Because they hate beauty. I'm actually quite serious, here. Apple's current house style is notable for: lines-and-circles construction; lack of colour; a starkness. It's Stalinist architecture bent towards computer design. There's no warmth, no complexity, no organic life to any of the designs. It's the sort of thing which looks its best on a featureless pedestal in the middle of a featureless room, and which looks its worst in the middle of real life. Give me cruves, swirls, colours, patterns, textures, warmth, liveliness, design. Give me anything but what Apple's trying to sell me.
As an example, the Bauhaus school, which has rectilinear, minimialist lines, could not be confused with the Art Deco period, which has sweeping, organic lines modeled on natural plants.
I think you mean art nouveau, not art deco. Deco was all too much lines IMHO.
You're right, but I like being able to upgrade. I've had the same computer for six years. Well, it's the same case, anyway. In the past six years, I've upgraded: drives (from 20GB through various combinations to the current 2x250GB + 500GB); motherboard (including an upgrade from no USB to USB 1 to USB 2); CPU; power supply; mouse; CD-ROM (to CD-RW); keyboard (to a wonderful Happy Hacking model). I've even added new fans. In fact, as far as I know the only original hardware are the floppy drive and case.
And it's cost me very little money over the years--less than I spend on beer, and far less than I spend on food. A new Mac, OTOH, would cost me more than I spend on either, and that's just not right.
And you'll be doing the rest of us a favor, too; you leave Macs to Mac users, and we'll leave beige to you.
An amusing comment from someone whose hardware comes in...white. And white. Oh, and clear white. Beige at least has the advantage of an attempt at colour. White is ugly.
So's beige, of course. But that doesn't excuse Apple's insistence on white. Bleah.
I have to wonder--is Ives really all that great? Looking at the slideshow, there's exactly one which looks good: the original iMac. And I will give the iMac all that it deserves: it was an incredibly attractive design, even an insanely great one. Curvy and colourful, it caught the eye. Why Apple replaced the beautiful iMac with the ugly half-basketball and the even worse monitor-with-an-unbalanced-white-zone-beneath is beyond me.
Looking at the rest: the fact machine is sad; the Newton is clunky; the cinema display is okay (just okay); the Cube was boring; the iPod is Raphaelite in its straight lines and its ugliness; the TiBook is merely not unattractive; the demi-basketball iMac is an insult to the eyes and a burden to the soul; the Mac Mini is as cold and unappealing as Kubrick's monolith, without the visual interest of apes beating one another to death at its base; the '05 iMac is visually unbalanced with its foul white Rectangle o' Doom; the Nano is yet another spartan combination of line and circle; the remote is not pictured, so I was spared its sight; the MacBooks are just...laptops; and the woofer is still one more boring line-and-circle montage.
Dear God in Heaven, send Jonathan Ives to Versailles or somewhere in Italy. Show him that Baroque & Rococo are rich and wonderful. Teach him how to use colour again. Hell, if he's ready for it, re-introduce curves.
Ives is a better designer than I am, that's for certain. But, as good as he is, his work for Apple is sadly bereft of taste. He's the van der Rohe or La Corbusier of computing.
Squeak is supposed to be great for kids--but I can't figure it out. How does one create an app? How does one draw on the screen? At least the last time I took a look at it, there were no documented answers. If someone with a degree in CS can't figure out how to use your environment productively, can a kid?
I'll admit that perhaps I'm just not thinking simply enough--maybe using Squeak for programming is simplicity in itself. Perhaps Morphic doesn't need any figuring out, and my problem is that I'm trying to figure it out nonetheless. Perhaps I just need a good tutorial. But--at least a year or two ago--the tutorials don't exist.
I've been very happy with my move over to PostgreSQL from MySQL. The book Beginning Databases with PostgreSQL is a pretty good introduction to its dialect of SQL and even covers some stuff which isn't really covered well in the official docs (or wasn't when I was looking, anyway).
PostgreSQL doesn't have as many built-in types as MySQL, but its types are IMHO more consistent, and extending the database with your own types really isn't a pain.
I've been happy with its speed, and am given to understand that an intelligent DBA can make it extremely fast.
Take a look--I think that you'll be pleasantly surprised. And you'll never have to worry about duplicated primary keys again!
I suppose I should have expected that. My father deals with reporters as part of his job, and I don't believe that one has ever properly quoted him. They always hear something other than what one says. That probably applies to most of us.
I'm glad to see from your comments below that this was blown rather out of context. It's true that for what MySQL is good at that it can be a good choice. I'd say that it's not good for much than an speedy SQL interface to flat files, though.
PHP makes "wrong things" easy, and "right things" hard.
Evidence: "addslashes", "register_globals" and "magic quotes".
More evidence: PHP Nuke, phpBB, PDO vs PEAR DB.
Taking his advice on software is like taking a coprophagist's advice on fine dining.
Couldn't be more correct. I've done a little PHP hacking when I'd no other choice--it's to be avoided when possible. For what it was meant for initially, it's not too shabby, but as a general solution it's...lacking.
It's not really surprising that the author of PHP would think that the things PostgreSQL buys you aren't worth it. You know, little things like integrity, reliability and stability. Who needs those? Not anyone writing in PHP, certainly.
Come to think of it, while either of them would have been great for LOTR, given the sort of humor that runs throughout the Hobbit, I actually wonder if Whedon wouldn't be good for the project.
I don't think he could do it. He'd turn several of the dwarves into short-girls-that-kick-ass. And he'd kill Bilbo, but it'd be alright because Gollum would join the dwarves and save the day, shortly before the Necromancer offers Thorin the use of Dol Guldur.
I think that it's pretty rare for smokers to blow smoke in non-smoker's faces, although I will grant that there was a time when smokers were much less polite than they currently are (and before that, the period which I think was best: when a smoker asked those around him if they minded his smoke). Now it seems that the balance has shifted to the other side: it's the non-smokers who are offensive, who demand that no smoking be allowed anywhere, even in those businesses which prefer to allow it.
You do not intercept domestic phone calls without warrants.
So far as I know, Bush has never done so. He's authorised interceptions of international calls with a domestic origin or destination, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Amusingly, the Old English word for 'to ask' was 'aksian'--the -ian is an infinitive ending (cognate to German -en), and the stem is aks-; 'ask' is an old metathesis. Droll, no?
Why would BSD the various BSDs switch to using the mostly inferior GNU tools??? The BSD userland is more standard and time-tested.
Easy: first of all, the GNU tools are not inferior; they are, if anything, far superor. The BSD tools are old-fashioned and painful to use--like having to carry boulders up seven flights of stairs rather than using a simple pulley arrangement.
I will grant that the GNU tools could use a bit more stability--but every month they improve; the BSD tools simply stagnate.
On the other hand, Bush has destroyed a huge budget surplus and left trillions in debt to my kids.
Actually, that's false. USA Today revealed that Clinton's 'surplus' was really a $484 billion deficit. The print version included a chart (which I cannot find) showing that Bush's deficits are actually better than Clinton's.
Ummm...Reagan defeated the Soviet Union, which is the single greatest achievement of the 20th century (yes, bigger even than World War II). That was worth every single penny and more.
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I could swear one could some data displays in the shots of the Cylon interior. Perhaps I remember in error?
Yeah, it takes a little work to suspend disbelief--but not that much.
I'm pretty certain that sf.net email addresses/project associations are public.
A recent study has shown that drivers drive significantly closer to helmeted cyclists, an average of 3 1/2 inches away.
Research has shown that helmet wearing is correlated with fatality rates.
Bicycle helmets are a Bad Idea.
Hasn't anyone who's played a video game in the last decade or so done the equivalent? Really, is it any different than the old military bands back when they were actually used to march men into battle?
Considering that most of Iraq & Afghanistan aren't 'comabt situations' and yet are prone to a great deal of bombs and such, I can imagine that a soldier would welcome such cases. As Erich Maria Remarque noted, a soldier's life is one of long periods of boredom interspersed with brief moments of sheer terror; no doubt a soldier would like his music player to survive those moments of terror.
Dude, if you like Apple's current look then you don't have bad taste--you lack taste. There's nothing to taste: it's sterile and cold. There's no life to it. It's boring, with nothing to entrance the eye or attract the gaze. It's a morass of straight lines and circles, all done up in white and transparent plastic. It's as lively as a corpse in a casket, save that the corpse once lived: Apple's recent hardware never will.
Because they hate beauty. I'm actually quite serious, here. Apple's current house style is notable for: lines-and-circles construction; lack of colour; a starkness. It's Stalinist architecture bent towards computer design. There's no warmth, no complexity, no organic life to any of the designs. It's the sort of thing which looks its best on a featureless pedestal in the middle of a featureless room, and which looks its worst in the middle of real life. Give me cruves, swirls, colours, patterns, textures, warmth, liveliness, design. Give me anything but what Apple's trying to sell me.
I think you mean art nouveau, not art deco. Deco was all too much lines IMHO.
And it's cost me very little money over the years--less than I spend on beer, and far less than I spend on food. A new Mac, OTOH, would cost me more than I spend on either, and that's just not right.
An amusing comment from someone whose hardware comes in...white. And white. Oh, and clear white. Beige at least has the advantage of an attempt at colour. White is ugly.
So's beige, of course. But that doesn't excuse Apple's insistence on white. Bleah.
Looking at the rest: the fact machine is sad; the Newton is clunky; the cinema display is okay (just okay); the Cube was boring; the iPod is Raphaelite in its straight lines and its ugliness; the TiBook is merely not unattractive; the demi-basketball iMac is an insult to the eyes and a burden to the soul; the Mac Mini is as cold and unappealing as Kubrick's monolith, without the visual interest of apes beating one another to death at its base; the '05 iMac is visually unbalanced with its foul white Rectangle o' Doom; the Nano is yet another spartan combination of line and circle; the remote is not pictured, so I was spared its sight; the MacBooks are just...laptops; and the woofer is still one more boring line-and-circle montage.
Dear God in Heaven, send Jonathan Ives to Versailles or somewhere in Italy. Show him that Baroque & Rococo are rich and wonderful. Teach him how to use colour again. Hell, if he's ready for it, re-introduce curves.
Ives is a better designer than I am, that's for certain. But, as good as he is, his work for Apple is sadly bereft of taste. He's the van der Rohe or La Corbusier of computing.
I'll admit that perhaps I'm just not thinking simply enough--maybe using Squeak for programming is simplicity in itself. Perhaps Morphic doesn't need any figuring out, and my problem is that I'm trying to figure it out nonetheless. Perhaps I just need a good tutorial. But--at least a year or two ago--the tutorials don't exist.
PostgreSQL doesn't have as many built-in types as MySQL, but its types are IMHO more consistent, and extending the database with your own types really isn't a pain.
I've been happy with its speed, and am given to understand that an intelligent DBA can make it extremely fast.
Take a look--I think that you'll be pleasantly surprised. And you'll never have to worry about duplicated primary keys again!
I'm glad to see from your comments below that this was blown rather out of context. It's true that for what MySQL is good at that it can be a good choice. I'd say that it's not good for much than an speedy SQL interface to flat files, though.
Couldn't be more correct. I've done a little PHP hacking when I'd no other choice--it's to be avoided when possible. For what it was meant for initially, it's not too shabby, but as a general solution it's...lacking.
It's not really surprising that the author of PHP would think that the things PostgreSQL buys you aren't worth it. You know, little things like integrity, reliability and stability. Who needs those? Not anyone writing in PHP, certainly.
I don't think he could do it. He'd turn several of the dwarves into short-girls-that-kick-ass. And he'd kill Bilbo, but it'd be alright because Gollum would join the dwarves and save the day, shortly before the Necromancer offers Thorin the use of Dol Guldur.
I think that it's pretty rare for smokers to blow smoke in non-smoker's faces, although I will grant that there was a time when smokers were much less polite than they currently are (and before that, the period which I think was best: when a smoker asked those around him if they minded his smoke). Now it seems that the balance has shifted to the other side: it's the non-smokers who are offensive, who demand that no smoking be allowed anywhere, even in those businesses which prefer to allow it.
So far as I know, Bush has never done so. He's authorised interceptions of international calls with a domestic origin or destination, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Amusingly, the Old English word for 'to ask' was 'aksian'--the -ian is an infinitive ending (cognate to German -en), and the stem is aks-; 'ask' is an old metathesis. Droll, no?
Easy: first of all, the GNU tools are not inferior; they are, if anything, far superor. The BSD tools are old-fashioned and painful to use--like having to carry boulders up seven flights of stairs rather than using a simple pulley arrangement.
I will grant that the GNU tools could use a bit more stability--but every month they improve; the BSD tools simply stagnate.
Actually, that's false. USA Today revealed that Clinton's 'surplus' was really a $484 billion deficit. The print version included a chart (which I cannot find) showing that Bush's deficits are actually better than Clinton's.
Ummm...Reagan defeated the Soviet Union, which is the single greatest achievement of the 20th century (yes, bigger even than World War II). That was worth every single penny and more.
Name a single 'basic Constitutional right' Bush has restricted. Oh yeah--you can't, because he hasn't.