Alien Resurrection is only bad if you take it for what it isn't.
I took it for another movie in the Alien universe. Is it not?
If you take it for what it is, you'd realize it's a brilliant Joss Wheddon movie that happens to take place in the Alien universe.
Brilliant? Really? That's your idea of brilliance?
I'm sure if you read all of the comic books and cross overs you'd realize some of those are crap (Batman vs Aliens for instance).
Yup. There's an awful lot of crap out there in the Alien universe. Resurrection is a shining example.
It's a fun movie
In kind of a "SyFy Original" kind of way...
There's definitely some neat moments. Kind of fun seeing Ripley bleed acid and kick everyone's ass. Always fun to see aliens on the rampage. I enjoyed some of the characters.
But then you trip over some ginormous hole in the plot. Or somebody goes and does something so abysmally stupid you wonder how they managed to tie their shoes that morning. And you find yourself wondering if there isn't something better you could be doing with your time. But then something cool happens again and you forget that you were being insulted a moment ago.
just enjoy the stories in the Alien universe that you do like.
I do enjoy the stories in the Alien universe that I like. Resurrection just isn't one of them.
The problem is that much of the horror in Alien that made it work is overdone now.
A lot of what made the first Alien work was the pacing.
You spent the first hour or so with nothing going on. There's tension... It's obvious they aren't where they should be. The ship is claustrophobic. There's some disagreements between the crew. The ship is damaged during the landing and makes horrible noise. The planet itself looks like it is made out of knives, and it's noisy as hell.
But nothing happens for the longest time.
Most movies just jump in with both feet these days.
It had a lot of gore for a movie of it's time
Eh... Thinking back to other movies of the time, I don't think Alien's gore was too out of line.
complete with a woman running around in her panties.
Which was certainly nothing new at the time.
Movie goers are immune to the gore, immune to that half naked woman (even fully naked women at this point) and the horror of what's not seen, is now just seen as a cheap budget. You can't even be scared by something you've seen before
Sure you can.
You need to get the audience involved. You need to make them care about the characters. You need to build tension. And if you do all that... You don't even need to startle them. You don't need anything to jump out and go "boo!" They'll be frightened for the characters just sitting there in a perfectly safe setting.
hich is why Cameron spent so much time in the first sequel not even showing you the Alien until he was ready to throw all of it at you.
I'm of the opinion that Aliens is more of an action movie than a horror movie. There's precious little tension, very few scares, lots of gunfire and one-liners.
Having said that, however, it did work quite well. And again I'd attribute a large amount of it to the pacing of the movie.
Again, you've got basically nothing happening for quite some time. Sure, there's the nightmare Ripley has... But that's about it. There's lots of blips on the motion tracker, false-alarms, melted floor grates, and whatever else... But nothing actually happens for the longest time.
You won't get another Alien. You won't get another Aliens.
I've already got one. It's very nice.
Give it up folks.
Give what up? My enjoyment of the series? My anticipation of a new movie?
We're stuck with what we've gotten of the AvP movies, Predators and Resurrection.
So they can't make any more movies ever again? This is it? They've run out?
It doesn't get new.
What doesn't get new? There's plenty of originality out there...
Just enjoy the story.
I thoroughly enjoyed both Alien and Aliens. Enjoyed the novelization of Alien3 more than the actual movie. Or is there some other story you want me to enjoy?
I like Sigourney Weaver, really, but I think her (hopeful) absence from a prequel (aside from, perhaps, a cameo) would allow it to work. Aliens 3 and 4 both ended up stilted as a result of their attempt to build those movies around Ripley.
I generally agree.
Sigourney/Ripley was fine for 1 & 2. I didn't think 3 was a very strong movie. The novelization was much better, and was based on an earlier version of the screenplay. I wish they'd gone with the earlier version. I don't think Sigourney/Ripley was the problem in 3. In 4... Well, that movie had lots of problems. And I think a lot of them stemmed from trying to force Ripley back into the story.
Getting Ridley Scott for this one is a good move, too. It will be interesting to see if the prequel is focused more on the stark, gritty, claustrophobic terror present in the original, although a lot of that came from the lower budget and not having CG effects.
I really enjoyed Aliens, but it wasn't much of a horror movie. More of an action movie. Which is fine... But I'd love to see a return to the genuine horror of the first movie.
I'm not going to object to CG or even 3D just on general principles. It's possible they could be used tastefully to actually add something to the movie. But they'd have to exercise some serious restraint.
Prequels of played out franchises mostly blow chunks. Mostly.
Indeed, they do. And after the horror that was Alien: Resurrection and the absolute mediocrity of the two AvP movies, I was not expecting much out of this prequel.
But they've got Ridley Scott directing, and now H.R. Giger is on-board as well... A couple steps in the right direction.
More proof that SyFy is well on its way to become just another SpikeTV/MTV/G4 clone. Remember when the Sci-Fi Channel showed showed Science Fiction B-Movies and TV shows (I sure miss Mystery Science Theater 3000)?
That is why I originally started watching the SciFi channel. They had all the good old sci-fi stuff I loved. Random monster movies, classics, great old TV shows... I actually went out of my way to get a package that included the SciFi channel.
Then they started phasing that stuff out... Adding more recent, mainstream stuff... But that was OK because it was generally decent stuff...
And then they started turning out one SciFi original movie after another. And some of them were fun... But most of them just sucked...
And then they started carrying wrestling, and changed the name to SyFy... And I really just stopped caring.
Oh yeah, the only thing that ever matters is when a self-selected sample of writers puts words on paper. Nothing else matters.
I don't know that anyone besides yourself actually made that claim...
What is the percentage of humans who have lived? And what percentage of those humans got book deals
If we're talking about human history here, not many published authors actually had to get book deals. Those are a fairly recent occurrence.
and successfully negotiated the minefield to get not only published, but indexed by a 15-year-old company?
Google is indexing everything they can get their hands on. It isn't like you have to pay an entrance fee or anything.
Surely this is the sum of all human knowledge! How could it be otherwise? Oh, no, my anti-intellectualism is showing! How dare I question my betters?
The fact of the matter is that the important stuff is usually what gets written down.
Genealogies, religious texts, laws, business records, etc.
And even if it's fiction, it's generally a good indicator of what people care to read about. Lots of sex and scandal and whatnot.
Regardless of your opinion on the value of what gets written down... It isn't like we have a whole lot else to go by. We can't very well go back 1,000 years and just ask somebody what they think. We have to work with the records we have - be it written text, or the remains of a city, or statues, or whatever.
Reason. Linux users refuse to pay for their software so it's not worth targeting it as a platform.
Actually, my personal experience has been different.
In general, the *nix guys I've met have an appreciation for well-crafted software and don't have a problem paying for it.
The Windows guys, on the other hand have absolutely no problem pirating anything and everything.
Obviously your mileage may vary... But I suspect there was more to this than simply "those tree-hugging open-source hippies won't pay!" Probably some bit of licensed technology that couldn't be released in an open source format.
To a certain degree, I guess this probably makes sense.
A few years back you'd be working with physical paper. You needed room for filing cabinets. You needed a big enough desk to get work done. You needed paper, pencils, pens, a typewriter, whatever.
These days you've got a computer. You just need room for a monitor and keyboard, and you can cram the box itself under the desk somewhere.
But I think the bigger picture is that employers are genuinely squeezing as much out of their employees as they can.
We're expected to be productive every single minute that we're in the office. Any kind of downtime is frowned-upon. Vacation time is hard to come by. And now some companies are hiring PIs to make sure employees calling in sick are actually sick. Folks get work-related email virtually 24/7 on their smartphones. Folks plug into a VPN and work from home routinely. Folks are expected to work long hours.
And now they're cramming more people into smaller physical spaces.
Anything they can do to get more productivity out of fewer people for less money.
I was literally just looking at buying a Kindle for myself for Xmas...and then read this...
I really really don't like the idea of Amazon being able to reach in to my library and burn my books.
So what's the open alternative?
Obviously you'll get plenty of comments telling you to simply buy paper books.
Personally, I bought a nook specifically because it was less-closed than a Kindle.
The wi-fi will allow me to connect to the Internet even if B&N shuts down their 3G service. It's got a battery that is trivially easy to replace, so I can keep using it after the current one dies. It's got and SD card slot, so I can add storage and move things around without involving B&N or any of their software. It reads PDF and ePUB natively, so I don't have to do any weird conversion tricks to get non-B&N content to show up. It runs Android, and I believe it has already been jailbroken, so I could probably install a non-B&N OS if I wanted to.
I figured that if Amazon stops supporting the Kindle for any reason I'm pretty much screwed. But if B&N stops supporting the nook for any reason I can probably keep using it just fine.
Stallman is not referring to backups, he is referring to the situation in which the data only ever exists on Google's servers. Non-technical users may not be aware of the difference until it is too late
It's been my experience that non-technical users don't have any idea where their data lives.
They think that their documents are actually stored inside Microsoft Word... And use the open command in Word to access all their documents... And are simply amazed when you show them the contents of My Documents.
They don't worry about how they treat the "modem", because everything is stored in the screen.
They never, ever download anything off of their camera... And then delete pictures when it gets full... And then wonder why they can't find those pictures from that vacation last year...
I fail to see how throwing everything into the cloud and hoping for the best is any worse.
Lots of people want to be able to check their email just by logging in to a web page. They want to be able to show photos to friends and family all over the world. They want to be able to work on a report from anywhere they happen to be.
Sure, a lot of this can be enabled by running your own blog or photo gallery site... Or by carrying everything on a flash drive... But, for a lot of people, it's just easier to stick it in a web app somewhere.
Neither do I want the inevitable yearly charge for constant upgrades to the latest Cloud software. I bought MS Office *once* for ~$80 and have been using it for thirteen years.
And if it does everything you need, that's great.
But if you need some new feature that's only found in Office 2010, you're going to be stuck paying for an upgrade. And whether it's a yearly "cloud upgrade" fee or the cost of a new box of software every 13 years - you're still paying for the upgrade.
(Likewise I bought Final Fantasy 10 for $20 and have been playing it for ten years. In contrast Final Fantasy 11 requires a ~$5 per month constant fee.) No thanks. I want to OWN my software not rent it.
But FF11 is an MMOG, and FF10 is not. So they are not comparable products.
FF10 is fine if you want to run around playing underwater soccer and fighting monsters by yourself... But if you want to team up with your buddy on the other side of the planet, you're going to need FF11.
Similarly, cloud software frequently has features that standalone software does not.
Today, PCs are way overpowered for what 99% of the population needs. New features are not driving much in the way of additional sales.
Perhaps, "needs" but not what they want. Take for instance what most people like to play their music with: iTunes. On a PC it is a memory hog, is laggy and needs a lot of power to run correctly. Sure, most people don't "need" iTunes, Foobar2000 does a great job organizing music on Windows, VLC is great at playing music/videos, etc. but most people are familiar with and want to use iTunes.
Do they actually want to use iTunes? Or do they use it because it plays nice with their iPod, lets them buy music, and isn't horrifyingly complex? Would they maybe be happier if they could just use an iPod independently? If they could buy their music right on the iPod and never have to touch a computer for their music?
It's been my experience that most people don't really want to use a computer at all... What they want to do is play music, or write a letter, or check their email, or whatever. They've got some task they want to accomplish. Some goal in mind. And right now those tasks typically involve a computer.
But if you had a simple hardware appliance, like the iPod, that enabled them to do their task without ever touching a general-purpose computer? Most of them would be thrilled.
"One of the things that initially made the Internet so awesome was that everyone was basically a peer."
So, you want to be able to route packets just like all the other peers do? Isn't that what peers on the internet are?
No. I'm not talking about peering agreements between bandwidth providers. I wouldn't even have anywhere to route packets to.
The "peer-to-peer" nature of the internet changed when PC's starting getting onto it as clients. Yes, I think the port restictions and filtering are wrong, but citing the "internet should be only peers" is ignoring some basic changes that have happened to the internet...
Back in the day you just had computers on the Internet. There wasn't a whole lot of distinction between clients and servers. Yes, some people had beefier hardware than others. And lots of software was built with a client/server model. But there wasn't anything inherently different between my connection at home and the connection to some website out there.
That's what made a PPP connection so awesome, instead of a shell account. Your computer was genuinely on the Internet. You could run your own webserver, or IRC node, or whatever. You weren't just a client on somebody else's machine.
What changed the nature of the Internet was NAT and consumerism.
Folks got the idea that people should just be consuming content on the Internet. You got some big companies running some big servers, and everybody else just reads what they put up. The average individual doesn't actually produce any content. The whole web 2.0/blog/self-publishing thing is just a tepid version of the true peer-to-peer nature the Internet originally had.
And then ISPs got stingy with their IP addresses and everyone had to NAT everything, which made it far more difficult to host your own content even if you did have a static IP address.
When Altavista and other search engines (many names I cannot remember) were pushing crap on our search screens. You had a hell of a time finding anything between the paid ads (that were not marked as such) and the sites that gamed the search engine.
Google came along with the smallest footprint and the best algorithm.
When I switched to Google it wasn't really because it was sparse or clean or white or because there were less adds or anything like that. It was because it worked. I typed in a search, I got results I could use. I was a big fan of real boolean searches, and Google still doesn't handle them quite right, and that was a bit of an adjustment for me. But I was still getting better results out of Google than anywhere else.
Fast forward 15 years and Google is more about the cute google art, gawdy gadgets and tracking your every move.
That's because searching isn't cool anymore.
Google, Yahoo, Bing... Whatever. They all return fairly useful results. If you're looking for information it almost doesn't matter which engine you use these days.
So how do you differentiate yourself from the competition when you can't just say "we actually find you useful information"? You put a cute logo on the page... Or a dramatic background... And you change it periodically, so folks come back just to see what's new. And you toss up information based on their location, or their browsing habits, so you seem more topical and relevant than the competition does. You let people customize their search page, and stick photos of their kids on the page, and whatever else.
And over the past couple years, I find more gamed sites making it into my search results.
Meh. This is true of all the big search engines. Google's just the biggest target out there. Folks have been trying to game the search sites since the very beginning.
It has been slow, but Google is turning into the companies they replaced.
No they aren't.
Webcrawler, AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo, Google, Bing... They all make money off of advertising. You go there to find information, and they serve up an ad along the way. That's how they work. That's how they've always worked. It's nothing new.
"Cyber-picketers" sit behind a wall of more or less anonymity
Which is necessary because any attempt at cyber-picketing, peaceful or not, is deemed a crime.
often using hundreds or thousands of OTHER PEOPLE'S COMPUTERS to distance their person from the activity
Which is bad. But in the case of this LOIC client, the computers doing the DDOSing are not zombies. They're people who've decided to throw their computer into the picket line.
It really seems to me that this kind of voluntary DDOS is a fairly accurate digital version of the picket line. I mean, how exactly would you picket Amazon anyway? Line up a bunch of people outside their warehouses or something? It isn't like they've got a physical storefront to picket in front of.
Instead of using the consumer accounts, why don't you get a business service account. The cable companies are more than happy to hand you one for about 2-3 times what you're paying now- ditto AT&T and Verizon (For $160/mo you too can have a business contract and roughly half a T3's bandwidth if you're in a FiOS area...). No bandwidth increases- but they're much less likely to dink with your pipe's contents like they will with a consumer account.
I tried to get a business account from Charter a couple years ago. They didn't want to support that kind of connection at my address.
Who is your provider? On the residential level I've used 5 or 6 different providers and have never had issues opening ports up for rdp, ftp, ssh, etc. SMTP yes (which I generally agree with), but not the others. Is this a new fad or is it just one or two badly run ISPs?
I'm currently with Comcast, who according to slashdot is the most evil of ISPs, and have something like 15/3mbps with rdp, ssh, and ftps running 24/7.
We're with Charter.
It may very well be negligence/incompetence on their part... I wouldn't be surprised.
I had to stop using Charter's DNS servers because they were broken so often, the connection itself drops far more often than I'd like, and even when it is up we only get a fraction of the speed we're paying for.
Hell, it took them over 3 months just to get Internet service at our house.
It is not DDoS or cyber-war it is cyber-picketing.
It used to be that when you had a disagreement with a company people picked it and disrupted its business that way. Well, welcome to the 21 century you can now picket the business from the comfort of your own home.
Interesting. Though I loathe the "cyber" prefix... That doesn't seem like a completely inaccurate description. Hadn't thought of it that way.
Don't you have any provider in the US that doesn't block ports? I only grudingly accept that my ISP in Sweden blocks port 25, but I can understand their reasoning. If they would block 3389, 80, or any other port I would immediately switch providers, that's simply unacceptable.
Here in the US we've got a real problem with local monopolies.
If I lived just about a mile up the street I would have my pick of 3 different broadband providers, two of which are offering fiber to the house. But where I live the only option is Charter.
Well, that isn't strictly true... If I wanted to spend a couple hundred dollars in hardware, cut down a tree or two, and mount another dish to my roof I could get satellite Internet... But that isn't really an improvement. They also filter/block ports.
I tried to get a "business" connection out to my house a couple years back... But Charter didn't want to support that kind of connection at my address.
Everything you want to do I do at home on my "not real" internet connection.
You just have to take your Meds for your ADD and use ports that are not blocked, and use a dyndns service.
I do VPN back to home, I run a SFTP, I run a webserver on Port 81 and Port 82.
I'm really not sure what ADD and medication have to do with anything...
Like I indicated in my post: And any time I run RDP on a different port it'll wind up blocked again after two or three connections.
It isn't just that 3389 is blocked... If I run RDP on 3390 or 3391 or 3392 those ports will be blocked after one or two incoming connections. I've run a web server on alternative ports as well - 8080, and 8088 for example (so that I could remotely manage my router) and they got blocked after a couple connections.
I suppose, if I really wanted to, I could automate the whole thing... Throw together a script of some sort to randomly select a new port for every connection attempt or something... But that seems like an awful lot of work for very little reward.
I've started using LogMeIn for remote access to my home computer, which gets around these blocks on incoming connections by opening an outgoing connection to their central server.
To me "Internet access" is an I.P. connection on the Internet, not a filtered and plugged natted off I.P. What good is "broad band" if you're not "really" on the Internet? This article didn't address that.
This really annoys me.
Back when we got our first broadband connection (a blazing-fast 768k DSL connection) it was a genuine connection to the Internet. I wasn't doing anything amazing with it... But I would periodically use RDP or VNC or whatever to connect into my home machine for something. I had occasion to fire up an FTP server at home once or twice as well. I even tinkered around with a web server at home briefly. All those ports were readily available for my use. I had to play some games with NAT since I had a couple computers sharing that one public address... And it wasn't a static address, so I had to constantly look up my IP or use a free dynamic DNS service... But I could at least use those ports.
These days I cannot use those ports. I know for a fact that 3389 and 80 are blocked. And any time I run RDP on a different port it'll wind up blocked again after two or three connections.
One of the things that initially made the Internet so awesome was that everyone was basically a peer. Anybody could host information... Share resources... Communicate... It was all kinds of decentralized and whatnot.
These days there's a very clearly defined producer/consumer relationship. It isn't just a matter of bandwidth or anything... I simply cannot host a website on my home connection. I am barred from doing that.
Why the continuing bother with Caps Lock, SysRq, Scroll Lock, and Break? Does anyone use them? at least, any number of people above statistical noise? How about the Windows and Menu keys? anybody use that on a regular basis? would a statistically meaningful number miss them? And while we're at it, usage of the Function keys (12 of them!) seems vanishingly small. Nineteen nigh-unto-unused keys, times how many keyboards out there with them?
I use the windows key all the time. WINKEY+R to get a run prompt... WINKEY+L to lock my computer before I walk away... WINKEY+E to bring up an explorer window... WINKEY+BREAK to bring up computer properties... WINKEY+M to minimize everything... Very handy.
I have to use CAPS LOCK for our EMR software. Everything needs to be in capitals.
Break is handy for the above-mentioned WINKEY+BREAK, but that's about the only time I touch it.
SYSRQ and Scroll Lock are frequently used by KVMs. I always forget which of our KVMs uses which key... But I'm constantly mashing those two to switch between machines.
F1 is pretty reliably mapped to "help" of some kind, so I use that key fairly often. The remaining function keys get used fairly often in the video games I play. Maybe to select a weapon... Or save/load... Or whatever.
Our EMR software is case-sensitive. Everyone's been trained to do it all in caps so that there's no trouble looking up information just because somebody capitalized something weird.
Folks fire up the EMR software, hit caps lock, and go on their way.
Which makes it very annoying when they tab out to send a quick email and you get the whole thing in caps...
Slashdot Mirror
Alien Resurrection is only bad if you take it for what it isn't.
I took it for another movie in the Alien universe. Is it not?
If you take it for what it is, you'd realize it's a brilliant Joss Wheddon movie that happens to take place in the Alien universe.
Brilliant? Really? That's your idea of brilliance?
I'm sure if you read all of the comic books and cross overs you'd realize some of those are crap (Batman vs Aliens for instance).
Yup. There's an awful lot of crap out there in the Alien universe. Resurrection is a shining example.
It's a fun movie
In kind of a "SyFy Original" kind of way...
There's definitely some neat moments. Kind of fun seeing Ripley bleed acid and kick everyone's ass. Always fun to see aliens on the rampage. I enjoyed some of the characters.
But then you trip over some ginormous hole in the plot. Or somebody goes and does something so abysmally stupid you wonder how they managed to tie their shoes that morning. And you find yourself wondering if there isn't something better you could be doing with your time. But then something cool happens again and you forget that you were being insulted a moment ago.
just enjoy the stories in the Alien universe that you do like.
I do enjoy the stories in the Alien universe that I like. Resurrection just isn't one of them.
I'm going to have to disagree with you on this...
The problem is that much of the horror in Alien that made it work is overdone now.
A lot of what made the first Alien work was the pacing.
You spent the first hour or so with nothing going on. There's tension... It's obvious they aren't where they should be. The ship is claustrophobic. There's some disagreements between the crew. The ship is damaged during the landing and makes horrible noise. The planet itself looks like it is made out of knives, and it's noisy as hell.
But nothing happens for the longest time.
Most movies just jump in with both feet these days.
It had a lot of gore for a movie of it's time
Eh... Thinking back to other movies of the time, I don't think Alien's gore was too out of line.
complete with a woman running around in her panties.
Which was certainly nothing new at the time.
Movie goers are immune to the gore, immune to that half naked woman (even fully naked women at this point) and the horror of what's not seen, is now just seen as a cheap budget. You can't even be scared by something you've seen before
Sure you can.
You need to get the audience involved. You need to make them care about the characters. You need to build tension. And if you do all that... You don't even need to startle them. You don't need anything to jump out and go "boo!" They'll be frightened for the characters just sitting there in a perfectly safe setting.
hich is why Cameron spent so much time in the first sequel not even showing you the Alien until he was ready to throw all of it at you.
I'm of the opinion that Aliens is more of an action movie than a horror movie. There's precious little tension, very few scares, lots of gunfire and one-liners.
Having said that, however, it did work quite well. And again I'd attribute a large amount of it to the pacing of the movie.
Again, you've got basically nothing happening for quite some time. Sure, there's the nightmare Ripley has... But that's about it. There's lots of blips on the motion tracker, false-alarms, melted floor grates, and whatever else... But nothing actually happens for the longest time.
You won't get another Alien. You won't get another Aliens.
I've already got one. It's very nice.
Give it up folks.
Give what up? My enjoyment of the series? My anticipation of a new movie?
We're stuck with what we've gotten of the AvP movies, Predators and Resurrection.
So they can't make any more movies ever again? This is it? They've run out?
It doesn't get new.
What doesn't get new? There's plenty of originality out there...
Just enjoy the story.
I thoroughly enjoyed both Alien and Aliens. Enjoyed the novelization of Alien3 more than the actual movie. Or is there some other story you want me to enjoy?
I like Sigourney Weaver, really, but I think her (hopeful) absence from a prequel (aside from, perhaps, a cameo) would allow it to work. Aliens 3 and 4 both ended up stilted as a result of their attempt to build those movies around Ripley.
I generally agree.
Sigourney/Ripley was fine for 1 & 2. I didn't think 3 was a very strong movie. The novelization was much better, and was based on an earlier version of the screenplay. I wish they'd gone with the earlier version. I don't think Sigourney/Ripley was the problem in 3. In 4... Well, that movie had lots of problems. And I think a lot of them stemmed from trying to force Ripley back into the story.
Getting Ridley Scott for this one is a good move, too. It will be interesting to see if the prequel is focused more on the stark, gritty, claustrophobic terror present in the original, although a lot of that came from the lower budget and not having CG effects.
I really enjoyed Aliens, but it wasn't much of a horror movie. More of an action movie. Which is fine... But I'd love to see a return to the genuine horror of the first movie.
I'm not going to object to CG or even 3D just on general principles. It's possible they could be used tastefully to actually add something to the movie. But they'd have to exercise some serious restraint.
Prequels of played out franchises mostly blow chunks. Mostly.
Indeed, they do. And after the horror that was Alien: Resurrection and the absolute mediocrity of the two AvP movies, I was not expecting much out of this prequel.
But they've got Ridley Scott directing, and now H.R. Giger is on-board as well... A couple steps in the right direction.
It may not turn out to be absolutely horrible.
Maybe.
More proof that SyFy is well on its way to become just another SpikeTV/MTV/G4 clone. Remember when the Sci-Fi Channel showed showed Science Fiction B-Movies and TV shows (I sure miss Mystery Science Theater 3000)?
That is why I originally started watching the SciFi channel. They had all the good old sci-fi stuff I loved. Random monster movies, classics, great old TV shows... I actually went out of my way to get a package that included the SciFi channel.
Then they started phasing that stuff out... Adding more recent, mainstream stuff... But that was OK because it was generally decent stuff...
And then they started turning out one SciFi original movie after another. And some of them were fun... But most of them just sucked...
And then they started carrying wrestling, and changed the name to SyFy... And I really just stopped caring.
Oh yeah, the only thing that ever matters is when a self-selected sample of writers puts words on paper. Nothing else matters.
I don't know that anyone besides yourself actually made that claim...
What is the percentage of humans who have lived? And what percentage of those humans got book deals
If we're talking about human history here, not many published authors actually had to get book deals. Those are a fairly recent occurrence.
and successfully negotiated the minefield to get not only published, but indexed by a 15-year-old company?
Google is indexing everything they can get their hands on. It isn't like you have to pay an entrance fee or anything.
Surely this is the sum of all human knowledge! How could it be otherwise? Oh, no, my anti-intellectualism is showing! How dare I question my betters?
The fact of the matter is that the important stuff is usually what gets written down.
Genealogies, religious texts, laws, business records, etc.
And even if it's fiction, it's generally a good indicator of what people care to read about. Lots of sex and scandal and whatnot.
Regardless of your opinion on the value of what gets written down... It isn't like we have a whole lot else to go by. We can't very well go back 1,000 years and just ask somebody what they think. We have to work with the records we have - be it written text, or the remains of a city, or statues, or whatever.
Reason. Linux users refuse to pay for their software so it's not worth targeting it as a platform.
Actually, my personal experience has been different.
In general, the *nix guys I've met have an appreciation for well-crafted software and don't have a problem paying for it.
The Windows guys, on the other hand have absolutely no problem pirating anything and everything.
Obviously your mileage may vary... But I suspect there was more to this than simply "those tree-hugging open-source hippies won't pay!" Probably some bit of licensed technology that couldn't be released in an open source format.
To a certain degree, I guess this probably makes sense.
A few years back you'd be working with physical paper. You needed room for filing cabinets. You needed a big enough desk to get work done. You needed paper, pencils, pens, a typewriter, whatever.
These days you've got a computer. You just need room for a monitor and keyboard, and you can cram the box itself under the desk somewhere.
But I think the bigger picture is that employers are genuinely squeezing as much out of their employees as they can.
We're expected to be productive every single minute that we're in the office. Any kind of downtime is frowned-upon. Vacation time is hard to come by. And now some companies are hiring PIs to make sure employees calling in sick are actually sick. Folks get work-related email virtually 24/7 on their smartphones. Folks plug into a VPN and work from home routinely. Folks are expected to work long hours.
And now they're cramming more people into smaller physical spaces.
Anything they can do to get more productivity out of fewer people for less money.
I was literally just looking at buying a Kindle for myself for Xmas...and then read this...
I really really don't like the idea of Amazon being able to reach in to my library and burn my books.
So what's the open alternative?
Obviously you'll get plenty of comments telling you to simply buy paper books.
Personally, I bought a nook specifically because it was less-closed than a Kindle.
The wi-fi will allow me to connect to the Internet even if B&N shuts down their 3G service. It's got a battery that is trivially easy to replace, so I can keep using it after the current one dies. It's got and SD card slot, so I can add storage and move things around without involving B&N or any of their software. It reads PDF and ePUB natively, so I don't have to do any weird conversion tricks to get non-B&N content to show up. It runs Android, and I believe it has already been jailbroken, so I could probably install a non-B&N OS if I wanted to.
I figured that if Amazon stops supporting the Kindle for any reason I'm pretty much screwed. But if B&N stops supporting the nook for any reason I can probably keep using it just fine.
Stallman is not referring to backups, he is referring to the situation in which the data only ever exists on Google's servers. Non-technical users may not be aware of the difference until it is too late
It's been my experience that non-technical users don't have any idea where their data lives.
They think that their documents are actually stored inside Microsoft Word... And use the open command in Word to access all their documents... And are simply amazed when you show them the contents of My Documents.
They don't worry about how they treat the "modem", because everything is stored in the screen.
They never, ever download anything off of their camera... And then delete pictures when it gets full... And then wonder why they can't find those pictures from that vacation last year...
I fail to see how throwing everything into the cloud and hoping for the best is any worse.
I don't want my information in the cloud.
Lots of people do.
Lots of people want to be able to check their email just by logging in to a web page. They want to be able to show photos to friends and family all over the world. They want to be able to work on a report from anywhere they happen to be.
Sure, a lot of this can be enabled by running your own blog or photo gallery site... Or by carrying everything on a flash drive... But, for a lot of people, it's just easier to stick it in a web app somewhere.
Neither do I want the inevitable yearly charge for constant upgrades to the latest Cloud software. I bought MS Office *once* for ~$80 and have been using it for thirteen years.
And if it does everything you need, that's great.
But if you need some new feature that's only found in Office 2010, you're going to be stuck paying for an upgrade. And whether it's a yearly "cloud upgrade" fee or the cost of a new box of software every 13 years - you're still paying for the upgrade.
(Likewise I bought Final Fantasy 10 for $20 and have been playing it for ten years. In contrast Final Fantasy 11 requires a ~$5 per month constant fee.) No thanks. I want to OWN my software not rent it.
But FF11 is an MMOG, and FF10 is not. So they are not comparable products.
FF10 is fine if you want to run around playing underwater soccer and fighting monsters by yourself... But if you want to team up with your buddy on the other side of the planet, you're going to need FF11.
Similarly, cloud software frequently has features that standalone software does not.
Today, PCs are way overpowered for what 99% of the population needs. New features are not driving much in the way of additional sales.
Perhaps, "needs" but not what they want. Take for instance what most people like to play their music with: iTunes. On a PC it is a memory hog, is laggy and needs a lot of power to run correctly. Sure, most people don't "need" iTunes, Foobar2000 does a great job organizing music on Windows, VLC is great at playing music/videos, etc. but most people are familiar with and want to use iTunes.
Do they actually want to use iTunes? Or do they use it because it plays nice with their iPod, lets them buy music, and isn't horrifyingly complex? Would they maybe be happier if they could just use an iPod independently? If they could buy their music right on the iPod and never have to touch a computer for their music?
It's been my experience that most people don't really want to use a computer at all... What they want to do is play music, or write a letter, or check their email, or whatever. They've got some task they want to accomplish. Some goal in mind. And right now those tasks typically involve a computer.
But if you had a simple hardware appliance, like the iPod, that enabled them to do their task without ever touching a general-purpose computer? Most of them would be thrilled.
"One of the things that initially made the Internet so awesome was that everyone was basically a peer."
So, you want to be able to route packets just like all the other peers do? Isn't that what peers on the internet are?
No. I'm not talking about peering agreements between bandwidth providers. I wouldn't even have anywhere to route packets to.
The "peer-to-peer" nature of the internet changed when PC's starting getting onto it as clients. Yes, I think the port restictions and filtering are wrong, but citing the "internet should be only peers" is ignoring some basic changes that have happened to the internet...
Back in the day you just had computers on the Internet. There wasn't a whole lot of distinction between clients and servers. Yes, some people had beefier hardware than others. And lots of software was built with a client/server model. But there wasn't anything inherently different between my connection at home and the connection to some website out there.
That's what made a PPP connection so awesome, instead of a shell account. Your computer was genuinely on the Internet. You could run your own webserver, or IRC node, or whatever. You weren't just a client on somebody else's machine.
What changed the nature of the Internet was NAT and consumerism.
Folks got the idea that people should just be consuming content on the Internet. You got some big companies running some big servers, and everybody else just reads what they put up. The average individual doesn't actually produce any content. The whole web 2.0/blog/self-publishing thing is just a tepid version of the true peer-to-peer nature the Internet originally had.
And then ISPs got stingy with their IP addresses and everyone had to NAT everything, which made it far more difficult to host your own content even if you did have a static IP address.
When Altavista and other search engines (many names I cannot remember) were pushing crap on our search screens. You had a hell of a time finding anything between the paid ads (that were not marked as such) and the sites that gamed the search engine.
Google came along with the smallest footprint and the best algorithm.
When I switched to Google it wasn't really because it was sparse or clean or white or because there were less adds or anything like that. It was because it worked. I typed in a search, I got results I could use. I was a big fan of real boolean searches, and Google still doesn't handle them quite right, and that was a bit of an adjustment for me. But I was still getting better results out of Google than anywhere else.
Fast forward 15 years and Google is more about the cute google art, gawdy gadgets and tracking your every move.
That's because searching isn't cool anymore.
Google, Yahoo, Bing... Whatever. They all return fairly useful results. If you're looking for information it almost doesn't matter which engine you use these days.
So how do you differentiate yourself from the competition when you can't just say "we actually find you useful information"? You put a cute logo on the page... Or a dramatic background... And you change it periodically, so folks come back just to see what's new. And you toss up information based on their location, or their browsing habits, so you seem more topical and relevant than the competition does. You let people customize their search page, and stick photos of their kids on the page, and whatever else.
And over the past couple years, I find more gamed sites making it into my search results.
Meh. This is true of all the big search engines. Google's just the biggest target out there. Folks have been trying to game the search sites since the very beginning.
It has been slow, but Google is turning into the companies they replaced.
No they aren't.
Webcrawler, AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo, Google, Bing... They all make money off of advertising. You go there to find information, and they serve up an ad along the way. That's how they work. That's how they've always worked. It's nothing new.
How else would you propose they make money?
"Cyber-picketers" sit behind a wall of more or less anonymity
Which is necessary because any attempt at cyber-picketing, peaceful or not, is deemed a crime.
often using hundreds or thousands of OTHER PEOPLE'S COMPUTERS to distance their person from the activity
Which is bad. But in the case of this LOIC client, the computers doing the DDOSing are not zombies. They're people who've decided to throw their computer into the picket line.
It really seems to me that this kind of voluntary DDOS is a fairly accurate digital version of the picket line. I mean, how exactly would you picket Amazon anyway? Line up a bunch of people outside their warehouses or something? It isn't like they've got a physical storefront to picket in front of.
Instead of using the consumer accounts, why don't you get a business service account. The cable companies are more than happy to hand you one for about 2-3 times what you're paying now- ditto AT&T and Verizon (For $160/mo you too can have a business contract and roughly half a T3's bandwidth if you're in a FiOS area...). No bandwidth increases- but they're much less likely to dink with your pipe's contents like they will with a consumer account.
I tried to get a business account from Charter a couple years ago. They didn't want to support that kind of connection at my address.
Who is your provider? On the residential level I've used 5 or 6 different providers and have never had issues opening ports up for rdp, ftp, ssh, etc. SMTP yes (which I generally agree with), but not the others. Is this a new fad or is it just one or two badly run ISPs?
I'm currently with Comcast, who according to slashdot is the most evil of ISPs, and have something like 15/3mbps with rdp, ssh, and ftps running 24/7.
We're with Charter.
It may very well be negligence/incompetence on their part... I wouldn't be surprised.
I had to stop using Charter's DNS servers because they were broken so often, the connection itself drops far more often than I'd like, and even when it is up we only get a fraction of the speed we're paying for.
Hell, it took them over 3 months just to get Internet service at our house.
It is not DDoS or cyber-war it is cyber-picketing.
It used to be that when you had a disagreement with a company people picked it and disrupted its business that way. Well, welcome to the 21 century you can now picket the business from the comfort of your own home.
Interesting. Though I loathe the "cyber" prefix... That doesn't seem like a completely inaccurate description. Hadn't thought of it that way.
Don't you have any provider in the US that doesn't block ports? I only grudingly accept that my ISP in Sweden blocks port 25, but I can understand their reasoning. If they would block 3389, 80, or any other port I would immediately switch providers, that's simply unacceptable.
Here in the US we've got a real problem with local monopolies.
If I lived just about a mile up the street I would have my pick of 3 different broadband providers, two of which are offering fiber to the house. But where I live the only option is Charter.
Well, that isn't strictly true... If I wanted to spend a couple hundred dollars in hardware, cut down a tree or two, and mount another dish to my roof I could get satellite Internet... But that isn't really an improvement. They also filter/block ports.
I tried to get a "business" connection out to my house a couple years back... But Charter didn't want to support that kind of connection at my address.
Everything you want to do I do at home on my "not real" internet connection.
You just have to take your Meds for your ADD and use ports that are not blocked, and use a dyndns service.
I do VPN back to home, I run a SFTP, I run a webserver on Port 81 and Port 82.
I'm really not sure what ADD and medication have to do with anything...
Like I indicated in my post: And any time I run RDP on a different port it'll wind up blocked again after two or three connections.
It isn't just that 3389 is blocked... If I run RDP on 3390 or 3391 or 3392 those ports will be blocked after one or two incoming connections. I've run a web server on alternative ports as well - 8080, and 8088 for example (so that I could remotely manage my router) and they got blocked after a couple connections.
I suppose, if I really wanted to, I could automate the whole thing... Throw together a script of some sort to randomly select a new port for every connection attempt or something... But that seems like an awful lot of work for very little reward.
I've started using LogMeIn for remote access to my home computer, which gets around these blocks on incoming connections by opening an outgoing connection to their central server.
To me "Internet access" is an I.P. connection on the Internet, not a filtered and plugged natted off I.P. What good is "broad band" if you're not "really" on the Internet? This article didn't address that.
This really annoys me.
Back when we got our first broadband connection (a blazing-fast 768k DSL connection) it was a genuine connection to the Internet. I wasn't doing anything amazing with it... But I would periodically use RDP or VNC or whatever to connect into my home machine for something. I had occasion to fire up an FTP server at home once or twice as well. I even tinkered around with a web server at home briefly. All those ports were readily available for my use. I had to play some games with NAT since I had a couple computers sharing that one public address... And it wasn't a static address, so I had to constantly look up my IP or use a free dynamic DNS service... But I could at least use those ports.
These days I cannot use those ports. I know for a fact that 3389 and 80 are blocked. And any time I run RDP on a different port it'll wind up blocked again after two or three connections.
One of the things that initially made the Internet so awesome was that everyone was basically a peer. Anybody could host information... Share resources... Communicate... It was all kinds of decentralized and whatnot.
These days there's a very clearly defined producer/consumer relationship. It isn't just a matter of bandwidth or anything... I simply cannot host a website on my home connection. I am barred from doing that.
Why the continuing bother with Caps Lock, SysRq, Scroll Lock, and Break? Does anyone use them? at least, any number of people above statistical noise?
How about the Windows and Menu keys? anybody use that on a regular basis? would a statistically meaningful number miss them?
And while we're at it, usage of the Function keys (12 of them!) seems vanishingly small.
Nineteen nigh-unto-unused keys, times how many keyboards out there with them?
I use the windows key all the time. WINKEY+R to get a run prompt... WINKEY+L to lock my computer before I walk away... WINKEY+E to bring up an explorer window... WINKEY+BREAK to bring up computer properties... WINKEY+M to minimize everything... Very handy.
I have to use CAPS LOCK for our EMR software. Everything needs to be in capitals.
Break is handy for the above-mentioned WINKEY+BREAK, but that's about the only time I touch it.
SYSRQ and Scroll Lock are frequently used by KVMs. I always forget which of our KVMs uses which key... But I'm constantly mashing those two to switch between machines.
F1 is pretty reliably mapped to "help" of some kind, so I use that key fairly often. The remaining function keys get used fairly often in the video games I play. Maybe to select a weapon... Or save/load... Or whatever.
I'm not sure I have ever pressed the Caps Lock key on purpose... Anyone?
I use it to toggle running in a lot of games.
At work, I have to type in ALL CAPS for our EMR software.
But for general usage... Nah. I don't need that many capital letters at one time.
Stupid people probably don't even know shift works for caps. I've seen people pressing caps just to get a single capital letter in their password.
I was absolutely amazed the first time I saw this...
I'm now absolutely dismayed at how common it is...
Yup. We absolutely need a caps lock key here.
Our EMR software is case-sensitive. Everyone's been trained to do it all in caps so that there's no trouble looking up information just because somebody capitalized something weird.
Folks fire up the EMR software, hit caps lock, and go on their way.
Which makes it very annoying when they tab out to send a quick email and you get the whole thing in caps...