AOL/TW may be a huge media conglomerate, and their internet service may suck for geeks, but they are responsible at least in part for Mozilla, ICQ, Winamp (which is being ported to Linux), and send free coasters as a courtesy in the mail.
They are a media conglomerate, but they are about as non-evil as they get. They are also Microsoft's second biggest problem, and anything that annoys them is fine by me. An enemy of an enemy...
Back on topic, money seems to be the only thing spammers care about. $7 million is bound to be an eye opener.
The U.S., of which I am a citizen, is the only country in the world which has decided to make itself the world's police force. Defending other countries is bound to happen in-between oil rescues and terrorist witch-hunts.
France, BTW, is one of the most self-sufficient countries in the world. The coordinate system used to display graphics on your monitor was invented by the French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes--also the creator of analytical geometry, the precursor math which made Calculus possible.
Why don't you try to not portray Americans as ethnocentric, poorly educated bigots, because that reputation is passed along to more people than yourself. I am sure that was not your intention, but intention and interpretation are often completely different.
Gentoo is my preferred distribution as well. Were I running Redhat, I would not have easily been able to recompile such core parts of the system. Gentoo is wonderful, no?
"Linux is 2-5 times slower (usually closer to 3) on the same machine"
Bullshit. Slower running what? All of those crossplatform apps you tested.
He was probably saying "StarOffice is slower than Microsoft office." This is a fact. I personally prefer OpenOffice/StarOffice because of it's lack of "I know more than the user" policy, but there is no denying that Microsoft Office is hands down faster at starting and at certain time consuming tasks, like complex scripts and searching large text files. It seems you agree with this statement. (Honestly I don't think a few seconds loading time makes much difference, but that's me)
"I've tried KDE and Gnome, several versions, and multiple distros. Slow. Very slow"
No more than XP on that same machine. You want all the eye candy there is a price to pay. Of course you can run XFCE and other lean apps, but why bother with real facts?
Linux newbie from Windows: "This window manager (Blackbox, XFCE, IceWM, etc) sucks! I want something perty like Windows (and with a decent interface and consistant applications)."
Linux guru: "Use GNOME2 or KDE3! They are what you want! They even have more options and power than Windows!"
Linux newbie: "This is great but man is it slow! I was hoping for something faster than Windows. I want something at least as fast!"
Linux guru: "Use Blackbox or XFCE (etc)! They are what you want! They are even faster than Windows 95, nevermind XP!"
Ad infinitum.
"Linux was more stable than Windows 98. It's less so compared to XP in my experience."
Again Bullshit. What is less stable? Oh right why give facts when you can just make things up. I can't speak for Windows XP, which I hate with a passion, but Windows 2000's applications and GUI are definitely more stable than GNOME2 or KDE3. No question. As far as overall system stability, Linux almost never crashes. Almost. Windows 2000 crashes for me about every other month, usually due to Creative's infamous soundcard drivers.
I would know. I have been working for weeks setting up and tweaking a Linux server to serve Xwindows applications to remote terminals. GNOME2 crashes frequently, but usually only when logging off or running Nautilus. I'd say about twice a weak on light use. KDE3 itself has never crashed for me, but Konqueror and its help system have done so three times each so far, and Konquer has simply frozen once in addition to that. Of course, it is only fair to mention that Internet Explorer seems to me far less stable (but a better actual browser) than Konqueror, but then I use Mozilla on all platforms but OpenVMS, so that doesn't much matter to me. Fluxbox is stable but simple, and a recent update made it suddenly decide to: 1) Place items in the slit in a large grey box on the lower-right corner of the screen rather than at the top as configured, but ONLY when running remotely over the X protocol 2) Not work at all (GSOD) over TightVNC.
Those complaints about Xbox itself don't really count though, because running a separate user session remotely isn['t even an option with Windows (less the expensive and flaky as hell Terminal Server setup)
That said, Linux desktops crash at least ten times more often for me than Windows 2000 does (which is integrated with its GUI, so when it crashed the whole thing goes down). That is to say, both rarely crash, but Linux GUIS noticeably more. I have tried custom compiling everything with conservative flags with no effect.
You critique the original posters lack of evidence when you yourself offer nothing but that critique. It would probably be best to offer counterevidence rather thanjust be argumentative.
Again WTF is wrong with the mods these days? This was pure trolling. I was wondering the same thing, but for different posts.
The first line of the link: I understand that there are some poor benighted fools who believe that the best thing about Babylon 5 is the plot. I am sorry to have to be harsh, but they are wrong. Not a very good start. It seems the reviewer has trouble separating "fact" from "opinion."
There are also people who believe that the moon is made of green cheese, or that whales are fish. We should not seek to condemn them, but should set out to offer the basic education that should removed these troublesome beliefs, or failing that pup them full of drugs and lock them away from sharp objects for their own protection.
Remove these troublesome beliefs? You quoted something that had the sentence:...Remove these troublesome beliefs and took it seriously? What does that statement remind you of?
So what's the problem?
The problem is that there is a single mind driving the entire show.
The author does make some good points (later on), but again he is attacking an opinion, which is completely pointless. He thinks that this is a weakness of the show. You'll find most people which like the series find this one of its biggest strengths--that the plot is contiguous, and the single vision makes the series capable of telling a larger story. Star Trek, et. al is not capable of doing this, or at least it certainly hasn't done so thus far. (Not that I have a problem with Star Trek).
What if I were to write a review of your favorite book, complaining that it was written by only one author? The problem with that book is that there is a single mind driving every chapter.
What about Star Wars? It's driven by a single mind, and anybody which says Lucas is capable of excellent script writing should see episodes 1 and 2!
That said, the complaint is wrong. Even in the writing, there were others that helped with the scripts and some that wrote entire episodes outside of JMS's influence. Many of these sucked, but that only further serves to make my point (or perhaps is an indication that those writers weren't very good). Then, I can only assume that the actors, SFX people, etc. had some sort of influence over JMS' writing as well. In the fifth season, which as has been pointed out, was not particularly good, the actress who played "Ivonova" certainly had a rather large effect on the script.:)
But that's not how it goes on Babylon 5, because everything's being done by one man. One man who lacks either the time, the ability or the vision to see any single episode of Babylon 5 as anything more than a tiny segment of a five year story. Every episode is just a segment of a larger story. That's the point!
What makes things worse is that JMS is not much cop when it comes to scripting. It's not simply that he's not much good when it comes to writing stories, what damns him is that he's really not got much handle on dialogue This is where I completely disagree. One of the main reasons I like the series is because of it's excellent dialog. There were indeed hiccups and moments which were written poorly, but this is the case in all series' I have seen, and would only ruin the series for one who is very cynical. I had a philosophy professor which stated that some of the comments in Babylon 5 (some, not all obviously) were worthy of quoting in his classes, alongside Descartes, Hume, Kant, etc. I particularly liked the dialog of the characters "Lorien" and "Delenn." I would quote some, which I actually took the time to write down (the only television series with sufficiently good dialog for me to bother), but taken out of context it would lose something, and then I'm sure there would be all to many people more than happy to pick it apart.
Many of the judgements of Babylon 5 seem to come from the first season, or perhaps the fifth. The first season was not really all that good--I admit. It seemed like everyone was new and was getting used to their job; that they hadn't developed a style or finesse as of yet. The second, third, and fourth seasons are what I am talking about, though the first season isn't what I would call "bad" (and has important story elements used later, like the first few chapters in a book).
Every person that I know which has actually seen most of the series (in order), which is a surprisingly large and diverse group of people, considers it the best series to ever appear on television.
I agree. You are free to disagree, but I hope you realize, unlike the author you linked, that the words "right" and "wrong" do not apply to opinions.
The plot points you mention in Babylon 5, which as Remus Shepherd points out, are common base themes, are a tiny fraction of a rather large plot. Even smaller a fraction than those similar events in the book, "Lord of the Rings." You do have a point though. I never really analyzed the series to see where some of its ideas came from, but it does appear that some came from LoTR.
Now, please point out another 5+ year series where all ideas had never before appeared in a previous work.
Agreed! I was looking forward to the series but found it horribly lacking. Poor acting, no particular story, and it completely faled to make me care about the characters. Plus, the original premise was not a particularly good idea, IMO. A powerful hybrid technology ship that can fire a "special" weapon (and then be offline for half an hour to recover) out to save the earth from a virus. After exactly five years. It seemed like they were trying to force a new series without really doing much preplanning. I am glad they cancelled it early, because if it continued it would have left bad impressions of its parent series.
The Babylon 5 first season DVDs are now available for sale.
Babylon 5 had a problem in that many viewers expected another Star Trek, where each episode is more or less self-contained. This is a very efficient medium for "light" sci fi, but is terrible for telling a real story. Babylon 5 had a real story. Several, really, as at any one time there were generally a good 3-5 subplots going on. Some long, long term (over the course of several real years) and some as short as a single episode, and everything in-between. What I thought made the series so great wasn't that--it was the stories themselves. The plot is one of the most skillfully crafted I have ever seen in any medium; book, television, movie, video game. Problem is, you must see the episodes in order and not miss many, if any. The plot is very tightly woven in with each episode, and many references are made that are not designed to make sense to viewers who haven't seen the episode in question.
That said, I know a professor who purchased a Super VHS VCR for the sole purpose of recording Babylon 5 in the highest possible quality he could afford. This was not a well paid professor, and he spent over $1,000 on the device, not including tapes.
My aunt, far more watchful of accurate physics than even most Slashdotters (considering she is, or was, literally a rocket scientist) watches an unhealthy amount of television and considers Babylon 5 to be the best series ever written,
I resisted watching the series for over a year, probably because several friends tried to get me to see it with so much effort. (why I resist that I do not know, I did the same thing with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Once I got into it, which wasn't extremely fast considering that the first season isn't very strong, I spent all of my spare money on tapes to record it.
When J. Michael Straczinski was asked to visit MIT, he found that the general consensus ther (among the film students, or whatever MIT's equivalent is) is that there were three seminal American science fiction series on television: The original Star Trek series, The Twilight Zone, and Babylon 5.
The single most important factor, at least to me, in any television series/novel/video game is the story. Let me reiterate that Babylon 5's story is truly a work of art. Far and above any mere television series or movie, it approaches, in my view, the greatest stories every told in all literature, though I admit I am a bit biased towards the science fiction genre. The second most important factor, to me, is the character development. The characters in Babylon are better developed than some characters I know in real life. (of course, with some people that isn't much of a challenge, but the characters are extremely well developed--honest)
I may sound like some sort of TV freak or science fiction gung-ho psycho, but this is not the case. I like various Star Trek series but have certainly never purchased one of the movies or been to any sort of sci fi convention, and I watch perhaps 10 hours of television per month. I have actually watched even less after B5 ended because everything on television seemed so bland in comparison, though I am sure there are many fairly good productions now (the 5% out of the rest of the crap that seems so popular).
Anyway, if any slashdotters get a chance, give it a try. Do NOT, however, start in the middle, or you will have NFI what is going on, and will probably hate it. Watching B5 like Star Trek is like reading ten random pages of a book each day. Books simply do not work like that. Babylon 5 does not either.
IE's implementation may be flawed (imagine that), but it should not be difficult to read the first few bytes of a file to determine its type. It is easy to tell the difference between text files and, say, RAR files. Most media types have a header which can be used to determine the type within the first 20 bytes. For example, GIF images start with "GIF8xx" (xx is the version). PNG files begin with "xPNG" (where 'x' is 89h)..RAR files begin with "Rar!". It would not be difficult to examine the next few bytes for verification, and would not be difficult to keep a little database of known filetypes. No, it should not be necessary, but neither should dialogs asking "are you sure you want to format this disk drive." People aren't perfect, webmasters are bound to make mistakes, the best that can be done is to make your program intelligent enough to realize when they are being made. Displaying a RAR archive as text is not the proper response to RAR download, no matter what the webserver says.
Regardless, usually the IE method works out. Try downloading the Linux version of DivX from Divx.com, for example. They apparently have something misconfigured. Good luck.:)
I was being sarcastic. My point was that several very large websites such as Yahoo and Slashdot use MySQL with great success. Apparently the moderaters didn't get it either.
I use Mozilla in Windows 2000 and Gentoo Linux. I haven't had any major problems with the Linux release (though the announced DHTML bug is in both), but the Windows release has been buggy as hell. This in contrast to 1.1 which was only somewhat buggy.
- It forgets the previous pages visited every so often,
- Every 10th or so time I visit a page, it announces "The entry point @113WINAPAITSP@@% was not found in [some DLL file]",
- It randomely decides to ignore the mouse wheel, the keyboard, or the mouse altogether, but recovers if I switch to another window and use that device,
- It places some banner ads in the middle of a page. For example, on the StorageReview.com, the bottom banner is often smack dab in the middle of the last message in any given forum thread,
- It reports all downloaded images, be they 200 bytes or 5MB, as "1K" in the download manager,
- It decides that some files are text files, whether they are or not, and insists on displaying them in the browser rather than downloading them. RAR archives and PNG images do not look good in a web browser window. This bug has been present in many versions and is ignored Bugzilla, with claims that it is the website telling Mozilla what MIME type the file is. Well, whatever, IE seems to be able to figure the files out just fine.
Bitch, bitch, moan, moan. The Mozilla team is still doing an excellent job making the world's most powerful browser suite. I do, however, hope they run releases through a bit more QA before the next release.
It's an ADVENTURE website. The article is listing cancelled ADVENTURE games.
This ADVENTURE site's article on cancelled ADVENTURE games also lists ROLE PLAYING games, and the Babylon 5 games was to have ADVENTURE elements as well.
And I quote: AMD BOSS HECTOR RUIZ says AMD is "dead serious" about ousting Intel to become the number one player in the "computational processor market". "We're not just trying to be a good number two," he said. Ruiz claimed its "competitor" had done "everything possible" to keep it from competing in new segments of the market but, despite Intel's best efforts, AMD was on course to make significant progress in a number of areas.
Surely AMD didn't change its entire business direction and core corporate strategy in a matter of days. It seems to me that there is a misunderstanding, and seeing as how the Forbes article quoted not one single comment from AMD brass stating that they "will no longer compete with Intel", I think it's Forbes, and the story submitter. I seem to recall rumors back when AMD was kicking ass that Intel planned to leave the PC CPU business to pursue more "long term profitable measures." Well, what sure doesn't seem to be the case.
Hold on for just a second. A can of coke costs about a nickle to make, can, ship and refrigerate and I just payed 0.75$ for it out of a vending machine.
Coke costs pennies to manufacture (that is, to make the actual sugar water), but the rest costs significantly more. If you think about all the infrastructure required to get those little, physical products into that vending machine, the profit margins are probably not very impressive. Also, Coke has serious competition from Pepsi (and minor competition from everyone else), so if their profit margins get to high, the business thing to do would likely be to lower their price to increase sales and market share relative to Pepsi. Then Pepsi would do the same thing if they could, or cheapen their manufacturing and do it otherwise. Of course, car (and I suppose cola, too) analogies are always full of holes, so I'm not criticizing your line of thinking.
On 32 bit machines, 4 bytes is needed to represent the ascii value of '.'
No, on x86 you can store just 8 bits of it into a register segment like AL. You can even do this on the 64-bit Opteron.
Only on Slashdot would this kind of argument go on...:)
Re:This is This is the exact opposite of my findin
on
New Linux 2.5 Benchmarks
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The P4 has notoriously slow context switching performance.
The Pentium IV has notoriously slow performance in some areas, but a processor being slow in context switching doesn't make sense. Depending on the context(English context, not computer context), context switching is either the system switching from kernel mode (running kernel code) to user mode (user applications) or vice-versa, OR it is simply moving from one execution path to another (as was scheduled by the, um, scheduler)
The processor has nothing to do with it. Context switching in BOTH instances is handled entirely by the operating system. While Windows NT 3.1 may have "slow context switching" and Linux with the O(1) scheduler may have "fast context switching", the Pentium IV cannot "have fast or slow context switching" because it doesn't have anything to do with the Pentium IV.
One might theorize that the original poster's comment was refering to the Pentium IV being particularly slow at the actual instructions used in context switching. Regarding the discussion of the kernel scheduler, the meaning of "context switching" that we are using probably refers to switching between tasks (AKA multitasking), so the important instructions would simply be jump instructions like "jmp", which AFAIK are not particularly slow on the Pentium IV like, say, bit shifting (which is glacially slow on the Pentium IV).
However I don't think it's right to say false truth like "linux 2.6 will be 3 times faster!!!!!" That would be why I said: "With some tasks more than tripling in performance,..."
I doubt any semi-knowledgeable person is going to take that statement to mean that kernel 2.6 makes a Linux system three times faster, but depending on what they use that system for, it may do just that. The performance figures are very respectable alone, but when you consider that they kernel hasn't even been frozen yet and that tuning hasn't begun, as I sais, the future looks very promising.
Microsoft knows that if they can dominate in one specific area which a user needs, they can ultimately dominate the user. For me, that specific area is games. While I use Linux quite often, I find myself not bothering to boot to it after playing a game in Windows. Linux is simply not an OS for gamers, and I am a gamer. That aside, there also exist a great many annoyances with the various Linux GUIs, the most significant of which (for me) is the lack of comparable integration among pieces of software, even in KDE (the king of integration in Unix). Further, often applications will "work just fine" and "look just fine", but only after significant configuration. Mozilla's fonts, for example, look absolutely terrible until I tweak the hell out of it (which I needn't do with Mozilla in Windows).
Further, Linux still lacks Photoshop, which the GIMP is simply not a replacement for.
That said, Linux allows me to get much of my work done faster than I can do it in Windows because of its modular design (pipe output from this to that, filtered through foo and sorted by bar), but the fact that I can do all of my work in Windows and game is probably the biggest item holding me from pure Linux.
And no, WineX is not a worthwhile option. I don't play brainless games that it supports well like Diablo 2 and Quake, and I finished Deus Ex and others it supports well a long time ago.
I had stopped using my Kenwood portable CD player for a few weeks, and a rather large spider made its home just inside of the CD viewing window. I remember thinking, "What a terrible place to hunt for insects," but apparently I was wrong.
The spider was quite surprised when I pressed the play button...
Slashdot Mirror
AOL/TW may be a huge media conglomerate, and their internet service may suck for geeks, but they are responsible at least in part for Mozilla, ICQ, Winamp (which is being ported to Linux), and send free coasters as a courtesy in the mail.
They are a media conglomerate, but they are about as non-evil as they get.
They are also Microsoft's second biggest problem, and anything that annoys them is fine by me.
An enemy of an enemy...
Back on topic, money seems to be the only thing spammers care about. $7 million is bound to be an eye opener.
"We have just been informed by Rad Game Tools that they have Linux versions of both Bink and Miles.
You mean... They didn't ask?!
And much of the 300 million tons of shells produced by laying hens each year is worked into the soil.
They could have left out the details...
Not unlike they did for us in our early history.
The U.S., of which I am a citizen, is the only country in the world which has decided to make itself the world's police force.
Defending other countries is bound to happen in-between oil rescues and terrorist witch-hunts.
France, BTW, is one of the most self-sufficient countries in the world. The coordinate system used to display graphics on your monitor was invented by the French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes--also the creator of analytical geometry, the precursor math which made Calculus possible.
Why don't you try to not portray Americans as ethnocentric, poorly educated bigots, because that reputation is passed along to more people than yourself. I am sure that was not your intention, but intention and interpretation are often completely different.
Gentoo is my preferred distribution as well. Were I running Redhat, I would not have easily been able to recompile such core parts of the system.
Gentoo is wonderful, no?
"Linux is 2-5 times slower (usually closer to 3) on the same machine"
Bullshit. Slower running what? All of those crossplatform apps you tested.
He was probably saying "StarOffice is slower than Microsoft office."
This is a fact. I personally prefer OpenOffice/StarOffice because of it's lack of "I know more than the user" policy, but there is no denying that Microsoft Office is hands down faster at starting and at certain time consuming tasks, like complex scripts and searching large text files. It seems you agree with this statement.
(Honestly I don't think a few seconds loading time makes much difference, but that's me)
"I've tried KDE and Gnome, several versions, and multiple distros. Slow. Very slow"
No more than XP on that same machine. You want all the eye candy there is a price to pay. Of course you can run XFCE and other lean apps, but why bother with real facts?
Linux newbie from Windows:
"This window manager (Blackbox, XFCE, IceWM, etc) sucks! I want something perty like Windows (and with a decent interface and consistant applications)."
Linux guru: "Use GNOME2 or KDE3! They are what you want! They even have more options and power than Windows!"
Linux newbie: "This is great but man is it slow! I was hoping for something faster than Windows. I want something at least as fast!"
Linux guru: "Use Blackbox or XFCE (etc)! They are what you want! They are even faster than Windows 95, nevermind XP!"
Ad infinitum.
"Linux was more stable than Windows 98. It's less so compared to XP in my experience."
Again Bullshit. What is less stable? Oh right why give facts when you can just make things up.
I can't speak for Windows XP, which I hate with a passion, but Windows 2000's applications and GUI are definitely more stable than GNOME2 or KDE3. No question. As far as overall system stability, Linux almost never crashes. Almost. Windows 2000 crashes for me about every other month, usually due to Creative's infamous soundcard drivers.
I would know. I have been working for weeks setting up and tweaking a Linux server to serve Xwindows applications to remote terminals. GNOME2 crashes frequently, but usually only when logging off or running Nautilus. I'd say about twice a weak on light use. KDE3 itself has never crashed for me, but Konqueror and its help system have done so three times each so far, and Konquer has simply frozen once in addition to that. Of course, it is only fair to mention that Internet Explorer seems to me far less stable (but a better actual browser) than Konqueror, but then I use Mozilla on all platforms but OpenVMS, so that doesn't much matter to me.
Fluxbox is stable but simple, and a recent update made it suddenly decide to:
1) Place items in the slit in a large grey box on the lower-right corner of the screen rather than at the top as configured, but ONLY when running remotely over the X protocol
2) Not work at all (GSOD) over TightVNC.
Those complaints about Xbox itself don't really count though, because running a separate user session remotely isn['t even an option with Windows (less the expensive and flaky as hell Terminal Server setup)
That said, Linux desktops crash at least ten times more often for me than Windows 2000 does (which is integrated with its GUI, so when it crashed the whole thing goes down). That is to say, both rarely crash, but Linux GUIS noticeably more. I have tried custom compiling everything with conservative flags with no effect.
You critique the original posters lack of evidence when you yourself offer nothing but that critique. It would probably be best to offer counterevidence rather thanjust be argumentative.
Again WTF is wrong with the mods these days? This was pure trolling.
I was wondering the same thing, but for different posts.
The first line of the link: I understand that there are some poor benighted fools who believe that the best thing about Babylon 5 is the plot. I am sorry to have to be harsh, but they are wrong.
...Remove these troublesome beliefs and took it seriously? What does that statement remind you of?
:)
Not a very good start. It seems the reviewer has trouble separating "fact" from "opinion."
There are also people who believe that the moon is made of green cheese, or that whales are fish. We should not seek to condemn them, but should set out to offer the basic education that should removed these troublesome beliefs, or failing that pup them full of drugs and lock them away from sharp objects for their own protection.
Remove these troublesome beliefs? You quoted something that had the sentence:
So what's the problem?
The problem is that there is a single mind driving the entire show.
The author does make some good points (later on), but again he is attacking an opinion, which is completely pointless. He thinks that this is a weakness of the show. You'll find most people which like the series find this one of its biggest strengths--that the plot is contiguous, and the single vision makes the series capable of telling a larger story. Star Trek, et. al is not capable of doing this, or at least it certainly hasn't done so thus far. (Not that I have a problem with Star Trek).
What if I were to write a review of your favorite book, complaining that it was written by only one author? The problem with that book is that there is a single mind driving every chapter.
What about Star Wars? It's driven by a single mind, and anybody which says Lucas is capable of excellent script writing should see episodes 1 and 2!
That said, the complaint is wrong. Even in the writing, there were others that helped with the scripts and some that wrote entire episodes outside of JMS's influence. Many of these sucked, but that only further serves to make my point (or perhaps is an indication that those writers weren't very good). Then, I can only assume that the actors, SFX people, etc. had some sort of influence over JMS' writing as well. In the fifth season, which as has been pointed out, was not particularly good, the actress who played "Ivonova" certainly had a rather large effect on the script.
But that's not how it goes on Babylon 5, because everything's being done by one man. One man who lacks either the time, the ability or the vision to see any single episode of Babylon 5 as anything more than a tiny segment of a five year story.
Every episode is just a segment of a larger story. That's the point!
What makes things worse is that JMS is not much cop when it comes to scripting. It's not simply that he's not much good when it comes to writing stories, what damns him is that he's really not got much handle on dialogue
This is where I completely disagree. One of the main reasons I like the series is because of it's excellent dialog. There were indeed hiccups and moments which were written poorly, but this is the case in all series' I have seen, and would only ruin the series for one who is very cynical.
I had a philosophy professor which stated that some of the comments in Babylon 5 (some, not all obviously) were worthy of quoting in his classes, alongside Descartes, Hume, Kant, etc. I particularly liked the dialog of the characters "Lorien" and "Delenn."
I would quote some, which I actually took the time to write down (the only television series with sufficiently good dialog for me to bother), but taken out of context it would lose something, and then I'm sure there would be all to many people more than happy to pick it apart.
Many of the judgements of Babylon 5 seem to come from the first season, or perhaps the fifth. The first season was not really all that good--I admit. It seemed like everyone was new and was getting used to their job; that they hadn't developed a style or finesse as of yet. The second, third, and fourth seasons are what I am talking about, though the first season isn't what I would call "bad" (and has important story elements used later, like the first few chapters in a book).
Every person that I know which has actually seen most of the series (in order), which is a surprisingly large and diverse group of people, considers it the best series to ever appear on television.
I agree. You are free to disagree, but I hope you realize, unlike the author you linked, that the words "right" and "wrong" do not apply to opinions.
The plot points you mention in Babylon 5, which as Remus Shepherd points out, are common base themes, are a tiny fraction of a rather large plot. Even smaller a fraction than those similar events in the book, "Lord of the Rings."
You do have a point though. I never really analyzed the series to see where some of its ideas came from, but it does appear that some came from LoTR.
Now, please point out another 5+ year series where all ideas had never before appeared in a previous work.
Agreed! I was looking forward to the series but found it horribly lacking. Poor acting, no particular story, and it completely faled to make me care about the characters. Plus, the original premise was not a particularly good idea, IMO.
A powerful hybrid technology ship that can fire a "special" weapon (and then be offline for half an hour to recover) out to save the earth from a virus. After exactly five years.
It seemed like they were trying to force a new series without really doing much preplanning. I am glad they cancelled it early, because if it continued it would have left bad impressions of its parent series.
The Babylon 5 first season DVDs are now available for sale.
Babylon 5 had a problem in that many viewers expected another Star Trek, where each episode is more or less self-contained. This is a very efficient medium for "light" sci fi, but is terrible for telling a real story. Babylon 5 had a real story. Several, really, as at any one time there were generally a good 3-5 subplots going on. Some long, long term (over the course of several real years) and some as short as a single episode, and everything in-between.
What I thought made the series so great wasn't that--it was the stories themselves. The plot is one of the most skillfully crafted I have ever seen in any medium; book, television, movie, video game. Problem is, you must see the episodes in order and not miss many, if any. The plot is very tightly woven in with each episode, and many references are made that are not designed to make sense to viewers who haven't seen the episode in question.
That said, I know a professor who purchased a Super VHS VCR for the sole purpose of recording Babylon 5 in the highest possible quality he could afford. This was not a well paid professor, and he spent over $1,000 on the device, not including tapes.
My aunt, far more watchful of accurate physics than even most Slashdotters (considering she is, or was, literally a rocket scientist) watches an unhealthy amount of television and considers Babylon 5 to be the best series ever written,
I resisted watching the series for over a year, probably because several friends tried to get me to see it with so much effort. (why I resist that I do not know, I did the same thing with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Once I got into it, which wasn't extremely fast considering that the first season isn't very strong, I spent all of my spare money on tapes to record it.
When J. Michael Straczinski was asked to visit MIT, he found that the general consensus ther (among the film students, or whatever MIT's equivalent is) is that there were three seminal American science fiction series on television: The original Star Trek series, The Twilight Zone, and Babylon 5.
The single most important factor, at least to me, in any television series/novel/video game is the story. Let me reiterate that Babylon 5's story is truly a work of art. Far and above any mere television series or movie, it approaches, in my view, the greatest stories every told in all literature, though I admit I am a bit biased towards the science fiction genre. The second most important factor, to me, is the character development. The characters in Babylon are better developed than some characters I know in real life. (of course, with some people that isn't much of a challenge, but the characters are extremely well developed--honest)
I may sound like some sort of TV freak or science fiction gung-ho psycho, but this is not the case. I like various Star Trek series but have certainly never purchased one of the movies or been to any sort of sci fi convention, and I watch perhaps 10 hours of television per month. I have actually watched even less after B5 ended because everything on television seemed so bland in comparison, though I am sure there are many fairly good productions now (the 5% out of the rest of the crap that seems so popular).
Anyway, if any slashdotters get a chance, give it a try. Do NOT, however, start in the middle, or you will have NFI what is going on, and will probably hate it. Watching B5 like Star Trek is like reading ten random pages of a book each day. Books simply do not work like that. Babylon 5 does not either.
IE's implementation may be flawed (imagine that), but it should not be difficult to read the first few bytes of a file to determine its type. It is easy to tell the difference between text files and, say, RAR files. Most media types have a header which can be used to determine the type within the first 20 bytes. For example, GIF images start with "GIF8xx" (xx is the version). PNG files begin with "xPNG" (where 'x' is 89h). .RAR files begin with "Rar!". It would not be difficult to examine the next few bytes for verification, and would not be difficult to keep a little database of known filetypes.
No, it should not be necessary, but neither should dialogs asking "are you sure you want to format this disk drive." People aren't perfect, webmasters are bound to make mistakes, the best that can be done is to make your program intelligent enough to realize when they are being made.
Displaying a RAR archive as text is not the proper response to RAR download, no matter what the webserver says.
Regardless, usually the IE method works out. Try downloading the Linux version of DivX from Divx.com, for example. They apparently have something misconfigured. Good luck. :)
I was being sarcastic. My point was that several very large websites such as Yahoo and Slashdot use MySQL with great success. Apparently the moderaters didn't get it either.
but you might want to check the following link for just why MySQL sucks for non-toy apps
You're absolutely right.
Only complete idiots would ever use MySQL for anything serious.
Idiots like The U.S. Census Bureau, Slashdot, Yahoo, and Novell.
I use Mozilla in Windows 2000 and Gentoo Linux. I haven't had any major problems with the Linux release (though the announced DHTML bug is in both), but the Windows release has been buggy as hell. This in contrast to 1.1 which was only somewhat buggy.
- It forgets the previous pages visited every so often,
- Every 10th or so time I visit a page, it announces "The entry point @113WINAPAITSP@@% was not found in [some DLL file]",
- It randomely decides to ignore the mouse wheel, the keyboard, or the mouse altogether, but recovers if I switch to another window and use that device,
- It places some banner ads in the middle of a page. For example, on the StorageReview.com, the bottom banner is often smack dab in the middle of the last message in any given forum thread,
- It reports all downloaded images, be they 200 bytes or 5MB, as "1K" in the download manager,
- It decides that some files are text files, whether they are or not, and insists on displaying them in the browser rather than downloading them. RAR archives and PNG images do not look good in a web browser window. This bug has been present in many versions and is ignored Bugzilla, with claims that it is the website telling Mozilla what MIME type the file is. Well, whatever, IE seems to be able to figure the files out just fine.
Bitch, bitch, moan, moan. The Mozilla team is still doing an excellent job making the world's most powerful browser suite. I do, however, hope they run releases through a bit more QA before the next release.
It's an ADVENTURE website. The article is listing cancelled ADVENTURE games.
This ADVENTURE site's article on cancelled ADVENTURE games also lists ROLE PLAYING games, and the Babylon 5 games was to have ADVENTURE elements as well.
If the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences can call Diablo 2 a role-playing game (let alone the role-playing game of the year), I can call Babylon 5 an adventure game.
I am shocked that he left out "Babylon 5" blah blah.
Seriously though, I was looking forward to that game, and I rarely look forward to any video game.
Didn't AMD just mention that it planned to surpass Intel as the world's number 1 chip maker?
And I quote:
AMD BOSS HECTOR RUIZ says AMD is "dead serious" about ousting Intel to become the number one player in the "computational processor market".
"We're not just trying to be a good number two," he said.
Ruiz claimed its "competitor" had done "everything possible" to keep it from competing in new segments of the market but, despite Intel's best efforts, AMD was on course to make significant progress in a number of areas.
Surely AMD didn't change its entire business direction and core corporate strategy in a matter of days. It seems to me that there is a misunderstanding, and seeing as how the Forbes article quoted not one single comment from AMD brass stating that they "will no longer compete with Intel", I think it's Forbes, and the story submitter.
I seem to recall rumors back when AMD was kicking ass that Intel planned to leave the PC CPU business to pursue more "long term profitable measures." Well, what sure doesn't seem to be the case.
Hold on for just a second. A can of coke costs about a nickle to make, can, ship and refrigerate and I just payed 0.75$ for it out of a vending machine.
Coke costs pennies to manufacture (that is, to make the actual sugar water), but the rest costs significantly more. If you think about all the infrastructure required to get those little, physical products into that vending machine, the profit margins are probably not very impressive. Also, Coke has serious competition from Pepsi (and minor competition from everyone else), so if their profit margins get to high, the business thing to do would likely be to lower their price to increase sales and market share relative to Pepsi. Then Pepsi would do the same thing if they could, or cheapen their manufacturing and do it otherwise.
Of course, car (and I suppose cola, too) analogies are always full of holes, so I'm not criticizing your line of thinking.
On 32 bit machines, 4 bytes is needed to represent the ascii value of '.'
:)
No, on x86 you can store just 8 bits of it into a register segment like AL. You can even do this on the 64-bit Opteron.
Only on Slashdot would this kind of argument go on...
The P4 has notoriously slow context switching performance.
The Pentium IV has notoriously slow performance in some areas, but a processor being slow in context switching doesn't make sense. Depending on the context(English context, not computer context), context switching is either the system switching from kernel mode (running kernel code) to user mode (user applications) or vice-versa, OR it is simply moving from one execution path to another (as was scheduled by the, um, scheduler)
The processor has nothing to do with it. Context switching in BOTH instances is handled entirely by the operating system. While Windows NT 3.1 may have "slow context switching" and Linux with the O(1) scheduler may have "fast context switching", the Pentium IV cannot "have fast or slow context switching" because it doesn't have anything to do with the Pentium IV.
One might theorize that the original poster's comment was refering to the Pentium IV being particularly slow at the actual instructions used in context switching. Regarding the discussion of the kernel scheduler, the meaning of "context switching" that we are using probably refers to switching between tasks (AKA multitasking), so the important instructions would simply be jump instructions like "jmp", which AFAIK are not particularly slow on the Pentium IV like, say, bit shifting (which is glacially slow on the Pentium IV).
However I don't think it's right to say false truth like "linux 2.6 will be 3 times faster!!!!!"
That would be why I said: "With some tasks more than tripling in performance,..."
I doubt any semi-knowledgeable person is going to take that statement to mean that kernel 2.6 makes a Linux system three times faster, but depending on what they use that system for, it may do just that. The performance figures are very respectable alone, but when you consider that they kernel hasn't even been frozen yet and that tuning hasn't begun, as I sais, the future looks very promising.
This article has become the most active story ever on Slashdot. Click the "hof" link on the left.
Microsoft knows that if they can dominate in one specific area which a user needs, they can ultimately dominate the user. For me, that specific area is games. While I use Linux quite often, I find myself not bothering to boot to it after playing a game in Windows. Linux is simply not an OS for gamers, and I am a gamer.
That aside, there also exist a great many annoyances with the various Linux GUIs, the most significant of which (for me) is the lack of comparable integration among pieces of software, even in KDE (the king of integration in Unix). Further, often applications will "work just fine" and "look just fine", but only after significant configuration. Mozilla's fonts, for example, look absolutely terrible until I tweak the hell out of it (which I needn't do with Mozilla in Windows).
Further, Linux still lacks Photoshop, which the GIMP is simply not a replacement for.
That said, Linux allows me to get much of my work done faster than I can do it in Windows because of its modular design (pipe output from this to that, filtered through foo and sorted by bar), but the fact that I can do all of my work in Windows and game is probably the biggest item holding me from pure Linux.
And no, WineX is not a worthwhile option. I don't play brainless games that it supports well like Diablo 2 and Quake, and I finished Deus Ex and others it supports well a long time ago.
Not exactly the same thing.
I had stopped using my Kenwood portable CD player for a few weeks, and a rather large spider made its home just inside of the CD viewing window.
I remember thinking, "What a terrible place to hunt for insects," but apparently I was wrong.
The spider was quite surprised when I pressed the play button...