You're nailing the very thing that keeps Linux away from the 'masses' right there.
While you say 'dig through to the control panel'. I think 'Follow the logical progression from my desktop to my settings area and from there click on the services applet, and this gives me a handy list of all services and some easy to understand buttons and settings with names like "Start" & "Stop"'
Where you say: '/etc/init.d/ = scripts for controling services are in here. Tell them to stop, start, reload, etc.'
I read... ok... so that's a directory with a bunch of init things sitting in it... ok... that's good... how do I start or stop each of these? Hmmm, well, for some I'd run./myprog -startup but for others I might run./myprog -s -d -v say, or what about any number of other options and methods for starting or stopping my app... and what about those that don't have any init scripts, that instead require you to run the startup or shutdown via switches on the actual binaries in the/bin directory of your favourite app?
And on top of that you're still relying on people to know all these commands... to just KNOW them!
In windows it's all pretty logical...
Ok... I want to shutdown one of my services... ok... I'll go to my Start menu, cause that's where everything is... (I agree, the 'Start' menu is a dumb concept)... ok... now I see an Icon for 'Control Panels', that sounds like an area I could do things like what I'm looking for... ok I'm in the Control Panel... and look, an Icon that says 'Services'... oh look, the program I want to stop... oh look A BUTTON THAT SAYS STOP!
Now I have to use both Windows and *nix based systems every day at work (Solaris if you're interested), and I would call myself a damn long way away from a unix guru or admin... I can just find my way around the system, use 'man' an awful lot to try and workout how to run things, and use the immeasurably un-userfriendly 'vi' to do my editing. (Oh yes, it's powerful, and kinda ok to use once you get used to it... hell I find myself ending up with ':wq' at the end of documents in other systems. But by god is it horrible to learn)...
But man! Stop using it for a month or two and do you think I can remember the flags for Tar'ing up some files for instance? Nope... it's back to the ol' man file for me...
Stop trying to say that Unix and its varients is 'easy' to use... 'more logical' etc. It's not...
Sure, if you use it every day and the commands become burned into your mind then yes, command line interfaces can be a lot quicker to do things in... but on the other hand they become a bastard once you forget that little command to do the thing you require, or you forget where the program lives, or the flag which lets the program do what you want it to. (And god help you if there's no man page for the app... oh the horror!)
I find it more disturbing that they are flagging people based on "specific ethnic backgrounds"... yah gotta love that. Just because I'm from X country, immediately I'm suspect and start having my food habits examined, my photo scrutinised at every airport and I'm certainly going to be looked upon as a bit suspect if I buy anything from Radio Shack that ticks...
Not that I suspect I would attract any of those attacks on my personal privacy as I'm a honest to goodness anglo saxon, white skinned, wholesome Australian boy... and I could never be conceived of doing anything wrong.
Bah.
Of course, I have eated kangaroo, emu and camel... so I wonder what that would do to any 'eating habit matrix' built about me.
The ones in Aus aren't nearly as wizz bang, at least not the one I saw a number of months ago. It twas purely a boring old box that you put your spiffy original disc in one tray, a blank disc in the other, and hey presto... wait... wait... wait a few minutes and you have your copy.
Unfortunately slower, and lacking both the cover creater and dancing robot thingy... how dull for us.
Having my own burner, and before that having many friends who have them, I've never had a need for such a gizmo, as the cost was prohibative ($5 a copy I think, blank disc not included)...
No, that's aside from the point... answer me this using whatever religion or philosophy you like:
* If you use such a teleportation device on a human, but do NOT destroy the originating human, you have in effect created a 'clone' of the original.
Now, if there is such a thing as a soul, what would this clone be like? It can't possibly be the same as the original person, or you'd have also cloned the soul... so it'd have to be zombie like, or noticably different somehow... if so, then you may have just proven the existence of a soul... if the clone is EXACTLY the same as the oringal host, in all ways physical, yet acts entirely differently, then you've probably just shown the world the existance of something along the lines of a soul, or an etherial portion to the human makeup.
However
If the clone is just the same as the original, how do you explain that, using any means you like other than we are defined entirely by our physical being? You can't just say... 'well religion isn't logical'... but however illogical a religion may be, is it going to accept that humans can copy themselves, soul and all?
I'm just asking... I'm very curious to know... I'm open to all views on it, I just can't see how you could still have the concept of a soul work in this case.
The poster is correct really... at least in the way I see it, as do many others: * If there is no such thing as a soul, then who we are is merely the makeup of all our component parts, the electrical charges, spins of atoms etc. in our body at any given time. If you can duplicate us down to that level, then you would be able to create an EXACT replica of us. Including all memories (As they are stored as cell configurations, electrical charges etc. in our brain), personality etc.
HOWEVER
* If we have a soul, something other than what is physical, something which transcends the merely atomic level, something which continues on after the death of the physical body... then if you make a perfect physical copy of the body, transport it to somewhere else, and destroy the original... where does the soul go? If we are more than just the bits and bobs that we are made up of, if who we 'ARE' is defined by the soul, then whatever comes out of the transporter at the other end would not be us... The soul would have been seperated from the body....
OR
* If you think that the soul could just follow the copy of the body to whereever it went... then what about if you use a transporter without destroying the oringal... what if you create a perfect 'clone'... then the soul would be in the original, and the copy would be 'soul-less'...
That's how transportation can be a good test of the soul... that's why it would be so fascinating... that's also why it's scary as hell... just what the hell are you going to get out of the end of one of these things?
Nostalgia good... still, cost bad... and a Beowulf cluster of them? Man, how many would you have to cluster for it to actually be able to perform anything useful still... and at a K each... yoinks!
Now, a cluster of ZX Spectrums... THAT's computing POWER! 16K RAM per machine... Joy of joys.
What would you do with it?
on
IMSAI Series Two
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· Score: 1, Insightful
OK... Maybe I'm just not nerdy enough... but... what would you actually do with one of these? There's surely not all that much you can do with an old 8080 these days... especially not anything that would warrent spending almost $1K on it anyways.
I fully appreciate the cool factor... being the machine used in Wargames doesn't get much better... (On a flight between the US and Australia recently they were playing the movie in flight... fine movie, damn fine movie) but I just can't see why anyone would actually pay for anything but the original as used in the movie...
It's a bit extreme to get someone to wipe their harddrive due to one of these programs, but other than that, I mostly agree.
Basically I subscribe to: 1) Pick a program to use (Last I used was Bearshare), install it. 2) Run Ad-Aware (www.lavasoft.com), a top little program that'll weed out any 'spyware' that is attempted to be installed as a result of the application. 3) Try running the program, if it won't run due to you removing something via AdAware, then you don't want the thing, uninstall it.
You should be ok using this method as Ad Aware has proved itself to be pretty thorough...
Absolutely have the one directory (With subdirectories is ok) for sharing... I always have a directory for music, with many subdirectories under that by album artist etc... I just share the music directory and subs, and that's it...
Have good protection software running (like Zone Alarm if you're a PC user) and a fine virus checker...
Take these precautions and don't download things that look suspicious in the first place and you're going to have a pretty trouble free existance.
Not that I'm defending KaZaa, I used to use it, and its wizard was ridiculous, it'd share any folder that had something it deemed to be a 'media file'... and that's a fairly broad term, and also you'd be surprised how many folders have an mp3, wav or avi file tucked away in them.
More heat in my PC Box... that's a top idea. In fact, along with a couple of valves, let's throw in a few radiator elements, then you could have a PC case that you can cook mashmallows on.... mmmm, sweet, sticky goodness.
Oh, now that is ridiculous... From coding all sorts of things in Javascript I've come to hate Netscape 4.x... there are so many bugs in it, it has constant issues with all sorts of things. And then if you try and use dynamic content in it... BAH, good luck... and no, it's not 'Netscape more accurately reflects the standards than IE'. No it doesn't it has bugs, they are painful, and caused me so much damn grief to get things to work across browsers, if I only had to make it work in IE I would have been laughing... and then there are the differences between Netscape 4.x and Netscape 6.x urgh...
If you want to reach the VAST majority of users in the least amount of time, and with the best ability for fault checking (Due to only having to check one browser across multiple platforms rather than multiple browsers across multiple platforms), then just code for IE, it'll save so much time.
Oh god how I wish films would be left the way they were... I really do.
As George is doing his best to ensure the only versions of the original trilogy that you can buy are his newly 'enhanced' or 'revamped' ones, there are less and less ways of getting one's hands on a damn nice copy of the three films untouched.
Why do I care?
Because films are like little historical documents in a sense... while they are fantasy, SciFi in particular, they also show us what filmaking was capable of at the time they were made... by adding computer effects, new scenes etc. you are taking away from this. Rather than us having a collection of films that have absolutely breathtaking special effects, set design, costumes etc. for their time (Which still hold up amazingly well), we are left with an augmented patchwork of bits of the original films with effects 'repaired' and 'enhanced'... no longer can we marvel at how well they did things back then, instead we are left with only a feeling of 'my, wasn't that crap CGI they added there'... 'oh how I enjoyed it so much better before'.
Having had that little tirade, I'm all for restoration of films... clean up the prints, remaster the sound so we can hear it again... hell, even have a director's cut... BUT LET US STILL SEE THE ORIGINAL... go ape making a new version of the film... but please continue to give us access to the original...
Even if just so that film students still have something to study....
Oh well... Being so late in the day for this post, this won't be read, but I feel better for having vented.:)
It would indeed, but in doing so, would you make the results take as long as this engine is, or could you in fact make it only fractionally slower than the time it takes Google to return the data?
I would expect if it were done in something other than Shockwave it may be a mite faster... although in doing so it would loose a lot of it's 'funky factor'...:)
It'll hardly take the place of google as my preferred search engine, just too damn slow. But I love a good diagram... and the way it displays the results is very cool... I like it:)
I was just in the throws of collecting prices for my new pc I'm just about to buy (I've been largely without for oh so long)... and when my eyes thwacked onto those screenshots I thought "Now THAT is why I'm buying a gaming beast"... and then I read about it being a single player focus and I thought "Praise be to the deity of gameplaying delights!"...
I am now salivating on myself for this game... oh yes, yes I am. (Which is kinda embarassing, being at work and all)
I'm not arguing that I shouldn't pay for what I download, that's surely what the $69.99 a month fee is for? Optus's previous method of handling broadband seemed fair to me. It wasn't unlimited, it was a floating average based on two weeks of your usage and compared to the 'normal' user. If you used more than 7 times the normal user you were warned, if you usued 10 times, you were kicked off.
I also don't really have a problem with the 3 Gig limit, provided there aren't the costs per megabyte thereafter. Throttling back the access is a much fairer way of letting the user know they've used a lot of bandwidth that month. It's certainly a lot nicer than being presented with a huge bill for all those errant megabytes.
And I've worked for an internet company or two as well, and just because people are signing up, doesn't mean what you're offering is a good plan. People will sign up for anything, and also, there are people who have widely different needs and wants from their internet access. Some just want the convenience of having 'always on' access, but don't actually download much other than e-mail and checking the odd movie time. For these people the pay per megabyte plans will actually end up being cheaper for them. For those people, I think that's great, give them a low line rental fee, and incremental costs per downloads thereafter.
BUT, there is also a large number of people more like myself, who have broadband access not just for the convenience factor, but also for the range of other media and activities that become available when you have that kind of bandwidth. Watching streaming independant movies at iFilm or Atom, downloading legal and quite often fantasic music from MP3.com, listening to the thousands of independant internet radio stations.
By charging per megabyte, you're almost forcing me to stick with what I know will be good... don't try things, don't give other areas a go, because you have to watch what you're downloading... ooh careful, do you really need to stream that music... watch out there, are you sure it's worth the money for that download?
It's just not what I want from a broadband provider.
Having said all of that, I never really used up much bandwidth on Optus when I had it last. You got a warning at 7 times average use, but after the first two weeks where I kinda went nutty 'cause it was all new, I never got the meter above 3 or 4. So I was hardly a bandwidth hog, I just enjoyed not having to closely monitor my usage all the time.
As I said before, I plan on supporting Optus... once I get out of this short term unit rental where they don't connect Optus to...:P
A per megabyte fee is NOT the way to go, not in the slightest.
I use cable internet for the freedom of having it on all the time, and being able to just surf around a bit while I'm bored. I don't want to be thinking about every little page I visit and weighing up whether it's worth visiting. Or worse yet, to spend a long time downloading a large movie or game demo, only to find out it's absolute crap... and I've then effectively paid for it. That would annoy me no end.
No, I think Optus's decision is about the best we could hope for, I'm absolutely against the 'cap at XGig, and then xxcents per Meg after', it's just unworkable, and forces you to be constantly eyeing your usage meter... at least with Optus's plan you know straight away when you've used your allotment, and you aren't charged anything for it, you just cruise along at a slow speed until the next cycle.
Considering their large losses over the past few years, I would rather they switch to this and remain a competitor to Telstra ($69.99 for 3Gig vs $85 or so), than to close up and give the monopoly back to them.
Just wanted to throw in a couple of cents worth: a) Got the tickets the afternoon before we went to see it, no real probs doing so, and ended up with great seats. b) The cinema complex was bloody full, and the movie was playing in, I suspect, around 5 cinemas? c) I went into the movie not expecting much at all... the Phantom Menace was crud... I keep trying to like it, but can only enjoy pieces of it. So my hopes for EPII were quite low indeed.
d) I REALLY enjoyed it... it started off slow, and my thoughts started waiving over to the 'oh crud, it's crap again'... but then it really started to grab me, and by the end I felt it was a movie I would love to watch again and again, and it would probably improve on subsequent viewings.
e) One of the biggest things for me was that on thinking back over it, and whether I'd enjoy repeated viewings, in comparison to EPI, which I struggle through now, is that there's the absense of children. Oh sure there's a little section with little training Jedi's, but it's over quickly, and not much is asked of them. The real difference is that one doesn't have to endure an annoying little kid being poorly directed for a film's entirety. The more mature Anakin is far more palitable to watch.
So, in conclusion... I was very plesently suprised by this film. (However I do have to agree with Ebert's review, which I read after I watched it, and his comments on the lack of clarity of the picture. There were many, many times during the film where the image, or parts of it, were ill-defined and grainy in a 'soft' way... I'm sure the DVD will indeed look great, but the digital to film transfer process needs work... or it was intentionally made poor to push cinemas to digital.)
...it's just that hardly any discs use it, cause it's a pain in the butt.
It's been in the specs since day one. Have a look at your DVD setup menu, have a look at the part that says 'Aspect Ratio'... now think what difference 'Letterbox' & 'Pan & Scan' make... try them... you'll see nothing change with probably ANY of your discs... you won't suddenly find all of your widescreen movies loose their edges... On the other hand, if you have letterbox chosen, then you don't find those few Pan & Scan documentaries or crap transfer movies suddenly appear in wonderful widescreen do you?
So why are the options there then?
Because the DVD specs CAN have ONE copy of a widescreen movie on the disc, and an information track with the Pan & Scan info on it. I have only one disc that does this, Elizabeth in Region 4. Set the DVD player to Pan & Scan, you get full frame... set the player to letterbox, and you get wonderful widescreen.
It's just that the majority people don't know about the options to set screen size (The amount of times I've seen store display tvs showing a widescreen formatted movie on a 4:3 aspect ratio is ridiculous)... and well... it's just not a feature most people want.
I didn't have any trouble understanding the Gia theme... I just found it simplistic and dissapointing for the entire movie to sort of hinge on that as the great 'revelation' near the end of the piece, which was completely dissapointing.
It wasn't just that either that made the movie swing a lot closer to the 'bad' movie pile than the 'good' one. It was the plethora of incrediably bad lines, absolute cheese which was meant to be taken seriously... truly sad.
It's purely ease of use... I started using Gnutella clients, lots of them, but found them all to be painful to use, and all to have the feature I most like about KaZaa, and the old Morpheus, and that's the automatic resumption of partial downloads when I reconnect to the net... I don't want to be tied to the net just because I'm 70% through a 500Meg download... I kinda might want to take my laptop to work.
And then there was the reliability aspect... As the fastrack system had the fantastic concept of downloading from multiple sources, instantly it bacame far more reliable, and you pretty much always got what you started downloading, unlike Gnutella where if the person you were downloading from switched off their connection, then bye bye download.
Now, I haven't used anything other than Morpheus for quite a while now, so it might have all changed in the interim, and dammit, I hope it has, and someone can point me to a better client, cause at the moment I'm downloading KaZaa with all of its shite spyway... I don't want to, but I just can't stand Gnutella... I like ease of use in my applications, as does my girlfriend, and she loves to use Morpheus/Kazaa et al....
So perhaps someone can point me towards a better client.... please?
When the men in labcoats are packing up the internet into boxes and putting it all away in warehouses with poor lighting, and choosing a few, pertinent pieces of it to put on display in the shiny museum, this epic post will be one of the items on display.
So, when I take my grandkiddies to see the exhibition "The 'Net'", I want to be able to point at the 2000 pages of text from this one post and say "See that... I posted that, I was part of it too. Now go and get me some prune juice little Timmy."
Rob & Kathleen, congratulations. Create many happy little nerdlettes and make the world a better, smarter place.
What's this about removing A platter with data on it? Data is striped across multiple platters so that the heads moving along can read data simultaneously off multiple platters as they move across the disk... taking one platter out would give you only every other bit of your file... which I'd imagine wouldn't do you much good.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hams are moving to really high frequencies "
OK... that's just freaky... there are pigs on our airwaves?
What type of shows are they offering?
You're nailing the very thing that keeps Linux away from the 'masses' right there.
./myprog -startup but for others I might run ./myprog -s -d -v say, or what about any number of other options and methods for starting or stopping my app... and what about those that don't have any init scripts, that instead require you to run the startup or shutdown via switches on the actual binaries in the /bin directory of your favourite app?
While you say 'dig through to the control panel'. I think 'Follow the logical progression from my desktop to my settings area and from there click on the services applet, and this gives me a handy list of all services and some easy to understand buttons and settings with names like "Start" & "Stop"'
Where you say:
'/etc/init.d/ = scripts for controling services are in here. Tell them to stop, start, reload, etc.'
I read... ok... so that's a directory with a bunch of init things sitting in it... ok... that's good... how do I start or stop each of these?
Hmmm, well, for some I'd run
And on top of that you're still relying on people to know all these commands... to just KNOW them!
In windows it's all pretty logical...
Ok... I want to shutdown one of my services... ok... I'll go to my Start menu, cause that's where everything is... (I agree, the 'Start' menu is a dumb concept)... ok... now I see an Icon for 'Control Panels', that sounds like an area I could do things like what I'm looking for... ok I'm in the Control Panel... and look, an Icon that says 'Services'... oh look, the program I want to stop... oh look A BUTTON THAT SAYS STOP!
Now I have to use both Windows and *nix based systems every day at work (Solaris if you're interested), and I would call myself a damn long way away from a unix guru or admin... I can just find my way around the system, use 'man' an awful lot to try and workout how to run things, and use the immeasurably un-userfriendly 'vi' to do my editing. (Oh yes, it's powerful, and kinda ok to use once you get used to it... hell I find myself ending up with ':wq' at the end of documents in other systems. But by god is it horrible to learn)...
But man! Stop using it for a month or two and do you think I can remember the flags for Tar'ing up some files for instance? Nope... it's back to the ol' man file for me...
Stop trying to say that Unix and its varients is 'easy' to use... 'more logical' etc. It's not...
Sure, if you use it every day and the commands become burned into your mind then yes, command line interfaces can be a lot quicker to do things in... but on the other hand they become a bastard once you forget that little command to do the thing you require, or you forget where the program lives, or the flag which lets the program do what you want it to. (And god help you if there's no man page for the app... oh the horror!)
I find it more disturbing that they are flagging people based on "specific ethnic backgrounds"... yah gotta love that. Just because I'm from X country, immediately I'm suspect and start having my food habits examined, my photo scrutinised at every airport and I'm certainly going to be looked upon as a bit suspect if I buy anything from Radio Shack that ticks...
Not that I suspect I would attract any of those attacks on my personal privacy as I'm a honest to goodness anglo saxon, white skinned, wholesome Australian boy... and I could never be conceived of doing anything wrong.
Bah.
Of course, I have eated kangaroo, emu and camel... so I wonder what that would do to any 'eating habit matrix' built about me.
The ones in Aus aren't nearly as wizz bang, at least not the one I saw a number of months ago. It twas purely a boring old box that you put your spiffy original disc in one tray, a blank disc in the other, and hey presto... wait... wait... wait a few minutes and you have your copy.
Unfortunately slower, and lacking both the cover creater and dancing robot thingy... how dull for us.
Having my own burner, and before that having many friends who have them, I've never had a need for such a gizmo, as the cost was prohibative ($5 a copy I think, blank disc not included)...
Yes, and here is the Slashdot Article about it from last week... yeash.
No, that's aside from the point... answer me this using whatever religion or philosophy you like:
* If you use such a teleportation device on a human, but do NOT destroy the originating human, you have in effect created a 'clone' of the original.
Now, if there is such a thing as a soul, what would this clone be like? It can't possibly be the same as the original person, or you'd have also cloned the soul... so it'd have to be zombie like, or noticably different somehow... if so, then you may have just proven the existence of a soul... if the clone is EXACTLY the same as the oringal host, in all ways physical, yet acts entirely differently, then you've probably just shown the world the existance of something along the lines of a soul, or an etherial portion to the human makeup.
However
If the clone is just the same as the original, how do you explain that, using any means you like other than we are defined entirely by our physical being? You can't just say... 'well religion isn't logical'... but however illogical a religion may be, is it going to accept that humans can copy themselves, soul and all?
I'm just asking... I'm very curious to know... I'm open to all views on it, I just can't see how you could still have the concept of a soul work in this case.
The poster is correct really... at least in the way I see it, as do many others:
* If there is no such thing as a soul, then who we are is merely the makeup of all our component parts, the electrical charges, spins of atoms etc. in our body at any given time. If you can duplicate us down to that level, then you would be able to create an EXACT replica of us. Including all memories (As they are stored as cell configurations, electrical charges etc. in our brain), personality etc.
HOWEVER
* If we have a soul, something other than what is physical, something which transcends the merely atomic level, something which continues on after the death of the physical body... then if you make a perfect physical copy of the body, transport it to somewhere else, and destroy the original... where does the soul go? If we are more than just the bits and bobs that we are made up of, if who we 'ARE' is defined by the soul, then whatever comes out of the transporter at the other end would not be us... The soul would have been seperated from the body....
OR
* If you think that the soul could just follow the copy of the body to whereever it went... then what about if you use a transporter without destroying the oringal... what if you create a perfect 'clone'... then the soul would be in the original, and the copy would be 'soul-less'...
That's how transportation can be a good test of the soul... that's why it would be so fascinating... that's also why it's scary as hell... just what the hell are you going to get out of the end of one of these things?
Simon
Nostalgia good... still, cost bad... and a Beowulf cluster of them? Man, how many would you have to cluster for it to actually be able to perform anything useful still... and at a K each... yoinks!
Now, a cluster of ZX Spectrums... THAT's computing POWER! 16K RAM per machine... Joy of joys.
OK... Maybe I'm just not nerdy enough... but... what would you actually do with one of these? There's surely not all that much you can do with an old 8080 these days... especially not anything that would warrent spending almost $1K on it anyways.
I fully appreciate the cool factor... being the machine used in Wargames doesn't get much better... (On a flight between the US and Australia recently they were playing the movie in flight... fine movie, damn fine movie) but I just can't see why anyone would actually pay for anything but the original as used in the movie...
"...I'm writing this from the shitter..."
Ok... urgh... smelly keyboard, smelly...
And people got annoyed at me for reading a magazine in the crapper cause they thought it made it dirty... but a whole laptop.
No-one else will be touching your laptop boyo...
Or is that the point?
It's a bit extreme to get someone to wipe their harddrive due to one of these programs, but other than that, I mostly agree.
Basically I subscribe to:
1) Pick a program to use (Last I used was Bearshare), install it.
2) Run Ad-Aware (www.lavasoft.com), a top little program that'll weed out any 'spyware' that is attempted to be installed as a result of the application.
3) Try running the program, if it won't run due to you removing something via AdAware, then you don't want the thing, uninstall it.
You should be ok using this method as Ad Aware has proved itself to be pretty thorough...
Absolutely have the one directory (With subdirectories is ok) for sharing... I always have a directory for music, with many subdirectories under that by album artist etc... I just share the music directory and subs, and that's it...
Have good protection software running (like Zone Alarm if you're a PC user) and a fine virus checker...
Take these precautions and don't download things that look suspicious in the first place and you're going to have a pretty trouble free existance.
Not that I'm defending KaZaa, I used to use it, and its wizard was ridiculous, it'd share any folder that had something it deemed to be a 'media file'... and that's a fairly broad term, and also you'd be surprised how many folders have an mp3, wav or avi file tucked away in them.
More heat in my PC Box... that's a top idea. In fact, along with a couple of valves, let's throw in a few radiator elements, then you could have a PC case that you can cook mashmallows on.... mmmm, sweet, sticky goodness.
Oh, now that is ridiculous... From coding all sorts of things in Javascript I've come to hate Netscape 4.x... there are so many bugs in it, it has constant issues with all sorts of things. And then if you try and use dynamic content in it... BAH, good luck... and no, it's not 'Netscape more accurately reflects the standards than IE'. No it doesn't it has bugs, they are painful, and caused me so much damn grief to get things to work across browsers, if I only had to make it work in IE I would have been laughing... and then there are the differences between Netscape 4.x and Netscape 6.x urgh...
If you want to reach the VAST majority of users in the least amount of time, and with the best ability for fault checking (Due to only having to check one browser across multiple platforms rather than multiple browsers across multiple platforms), then just code for IE, it'll save so much time.
As George is doing his best to ensure the only versions of the original trilogy that you can buy are his newly 'enhanced' or 'revamped' ones, there are less and less ways of getting one's hands on a damn nice copy of the three films untouched.
Why do I care?
Because films are like little historical documents in a sense... while they are fantasy, SciFi in particular, they also show us what filmaking was capable of at the time they were made... by adding computer effects, new scenes etc. you are taking away from this. Rather than us having a collection of films that have absolutely breathtaking special effects, set design, costumes etc. for their time (Which still hold up amazingly well), we are left with an augmented patchwork of bits of the original films with effects 'repaired' and 'enhanced'... no longer can we marvel at how well they did things back then, instead we are left with only a feeling of 'my, wasn't that crap CGI they added there'... 'oh how I enjoyed it so much better before'.
Having had that little tirade, I'm all for restoration of films... clean up the prints, remaster the sound so we can hear it again... hell, even have a director's cut... BUT LET US STILL SEE THE ORIGINAL... go ape making a new version of the film... but please continue to give us access to the original...
Even if just so that film students still have something to study....
Oh well... Being so late in the day for this post, this won't be read, but I feel better for having vented. :)
It would indeed, but in doing so, would you make the results take as long as this engine is, or could you in fact make it only fractionally slower than the time it takes Google to return the data?
:)
I would expect if it were done in something other than Shockwave it may be a mite faster... although in doing so it would loose a lot of it's 'funky factor'...
It'll hardly take the place of google as my preferred search engine, just too damn slow. But I love a good diagram... and the way it displays the results is very cool... I like it :)
I was just in the throws of collecting prices for my new pc I'm just about to buy (I've been largely without for oh so long)... and when my eyes thwacked onto those screenshots I thought "Now THAT is why I'm buying a gaming beast"... and then I read about it being a single player focus and I thought "Praise be to the deity of gameplaying delights!"...
I am now salivating on myself for this game... oh yes, yes I am. (Which is kinda embarassing, being at work and all)
I'm not arguing that I shouldn't pay for what I download, that's surely what the $69.99 a month fee is for? Optus's previous method of handling broadband seemed fair to me. It wasn't unlimited, it was a floating average based on two weeks of your usage and compared to the 'normal' user. If you used more than 7 times the normal user you were warned, if you usued 10 times, you were kicked off.
:P
I also don't really have a problem with the 3 Gig limit, provided there aren't the costs per megabyte thereafter. Throttling back the access is a much fairer way of letting the user know they've used a lot of bandwidth that month. It's certainly a lot nicer than being presented with a huge bill for all those errant megabytes.
And I've worked for an internet company or two as well, and just because people are signing up, doesn't mean what you're offering is a good plan. People will sign up for anything, and also, there are people who have widely different needs and wants from their internet access. Some just want the convenience of having 'always on' access, but don't actually download much other than e-mail and checking the odd movie time. For these people the pay per megabyte plans will actually end up being cheaper for them. For those people, I think that's great, give them a low line rental fee, and incremental costs per downloads thereafter.
BUT, there is also a large number of people more like myself, who have broadband access not just for the convenience factor, but also for the range of other media and activities that become available when you have that kind of bandwidth. Watching streaming independant movies at iFilm or Atom, downloading legal and quite often fantasic music from MP3.com, listening to the thousands of independant internet radio stations.
By charging per megabyte, you're almost forcing me to stick with what I know will be good... don't try things, don't give other areas a go, because you have to watch what you're downloading... ooh careful, do you really need to stream that music... watch out there, are you sure it's worth the money for that download?
It's just not what I want from a broadband provider.
Having said all of that, I never really used up much bandwidth on Optus when I had it last. You got a warning at 7 times average use, but after the first two weeks where I kinda went nutty 'cause it was all new, I never got the meter above 3 or 4. So I was hardly a bandwidth hog, I just enjoyed not having to closely monitor my usage all the time.
As I said before, I plan on supporting Optus... once I get out of this short term unit rental where they don't connect Optus to...
A per megabyte fee is NOT the way to go, not in the slightest.
I use cable internet for the freedom of having it on all the time, and being able to just surf around a bit while I'm bored. I don't want to be thinking about every little page I visit and weighing up whether it's worth visiting. Or worse yet, to spend a long time downloading a large movie or game demo, only to find out it's absolute crap... and I've then effectively paid for it. That would annoy me no end.
No, I think Optus's decision is about the best we could hope for, I'm absolutely against the 'cap at XGig, and then xxcents per Meg after', it's just unworkable, and forces you to be constantly eyeing your usage meter... at least with Optus's plan you know straight away when you've used your allotment, and you aren't charged anything for it, you just cruise along at a slow speed until the next cycle.
Considering their large losses over the past few years, I would rather they switch to this and remain a competitor to Telstra ($69.99 for 3Gig vs $85 or so), than to close up and give the monopoly back to them.
I for one will be supporting Optus.
Just wanted to throw in a couple of cents worth:
a) Got the tickets the afternoon before we went to see it, no real probs doing so, and ended up with great seats.
b) The cinema complex was bloody full, and the movie was playing in, I suspect, around 5 cinemas?
c) I went into the movie not expecting much at all... the Phantom Menace was crud... I keep trying to like it, but can only enjoy pieces of it. So my hopes for EPII were quite low indeed.
d) I REALLY enjoyed it... it started off slow, and my thoughts started waiving over to the 'oh crud, it's crap again'... but then it really started to grab me, and by the end I felt it was a movie I would love to watch again and again, and it would probably improve on subsequent viewings.
e) One of the biggest things for me was that on thinking back over it, and whether I'd enjoy repeated viewings, in comparison to EPI, which I struggle through now, is that there's the absense of children. Oh sure there's a little section with little training Jedi's, but it's over quickly, and not much is asked of them. The real difference is that one doesn't have to endure an annoying little kid being poorly directed for a film's entirety. The more mature Anakin is far more palitable to watch.
So, in conclusion... I was very plesently suprised by this film. (However I do have to agree with Ebert's review, which I read after I watched it, and his comments on the lack of clarity of the picture. There were many, many times during the film where the image, or parts of it, were ill-defined and grainy in a 'soft' way... I'm sure the DVD will indeed look great, but the digital to film transfer process needs work... or it was intentionally made poor to push cinemas to digital.)
...it's just that hardly any discs use it, cause it's a pain in the butt.
It's been in the specs since day one. Have a look at your DVD setup menu, have a look at the part that says 'Aspect Ratio'... now think what difference 'Letterbox' & 'Pan & Scan' make... try them... you'll see nothing change with probably ANY of your discs... you won't suddenly find all of your widescreen movies loose their edges... On the other hand, if you have letterbox chosen, then you don't find those few Pan & Scan documentaries or crap transfer movies suddenly appear in wonderful widescreen do you?
So why are the options there then?
Because the DVD specs CAN have ONE copy of a widescreen movie on the disc, and an information track with the Pan & Scan info on it. I have only one disc that does this, Elizabeth in Region 4. Set the DVD player to Pan & Scan, you get full frame... set the player to letterbox, and you get wonderful widescreen.
It's just that the majority people don't know about the options to set screen size (The amount of times I've seen store display tvs showing a widescreen formatted movie on a 4:3 aspect ratio is ridiculous)... and well... it's just not a feature most people want.
I didn't have any trouble understanding the Gia theme... I just found it simplistic and dissapointing for the entire movie to sort of hinge on that as the great 'revelation' near the end of the piece, which was completely dissapointing.
It wasn't just that either that made the movie swing a lot closer to the 'bad' movie pile than the 'good' one. It was the plethora of incrediably bad lines, absolute cheese which was meant to be taken seriously... truly sad.
It's purely ease of use... I started using Gnutella clients, lots of them, but found them all to be painful to use, and all to have the feature I most like about KaZaa, and the old Morpheus, and that's the automatic resumption of partial downloads when I reconnect to the net... I don't want to be tied to the net just because I'm 70% through a 500Meg download... I kinda might want to take my laptop to work.
And then there was the reliability aspect... As the fastrack system had the fantastic concept of downloading from multiple sources, instantly it bacame far more reliable, and you pretty much always got what you started downloading, unlike Gnutella where if the person you were downloading from switched off their connection, then bye bye download.
Now, I haven't used anything other than Morpheus for quite a while now, so it might have all changed in the interim, and dammit, I hope it has, and someone can point me to a better client, cause at the moment I'm downloading KaZaa with all of its shite spyway... I don't want to, but I just can't stand Gnutella... I like ease of use in my applications, as does my girlfriend, and she loves to use Morpheus/Kazaa et al....
So perhaps someone can point me towards a better client.... please?
When the men in labcoats are packing up the internet into boxes and putting it all away in warehouses with poor lighting, and choosing a few, pertinent pieces of it to put on display in the shiny museum, this epic post will be one of the items on display.
So, when I take my grandkiddies to see the exhibition "The 'Net'", I want to be able to point at the 2000 pages of text from this one post and say "See that... I posted that, I was part of it too. Now go and get me some prune juice little Timmy."
Rob & Kathleen, congratulations. Create many happy little nerdlettes and make the world a better, smarter place.
Simon
What's this about removing A platter with data on it? Data is striped across multiple platters so that the heads moving along can read data simultaneously off multiple platters as they move across the disk... taking one platter out would give you only every other bit of your file... which I'd imagine wouldn't do you much good.