Take three of the schools. In school 1, have an IT guy totally turn off the WiFi without telling anyone. In school 2, have the same IT guy say that he's turning off the WiFi, but have it go black and broadcast just as much as usual. In school 3, blanket the parents with information that the WiFi is being shut off, then don't change a thing. Take a look at what effects this has on student / parent complaints.
The iPhone 4 was also supposed to come in White. At first, it was to come at the same time. Then "soon" after the black version. Now it is even later, as it is supposedly getting the rumored new iPhone 4 (now without terrible antenna) treatment.
At this point, who hasn't moved their production from USA, EU, and Japan? I know there are cars, some food products, and really, really big things built here. But what (brands or genres of stuff) are still built in the US or Europe or Japan?
I don't mean this facetiously, I simply don't know.
To be fair, the special edition in the theater had Han shooting first in an atrociously butchered photoshop job. It's bad now, but the first version in the theater looked like a high-school student screwing around in flash.
I do think the problem is that Han is supposed to undergo a character arc from a scoundrel willing to kill for his own benefit, to a scoundrel that is willing to die for his friends. Making Greedo shoot first flattens a big part of that character arch. In the original version, it's not even clear that Greedo is going to shoot. Han just doesn't want to go with him to face up to Jabba / his mistakes, and he's willing to kill because of that. Of course, it has also become symbolic of the problem that Lucas just doesn't know how to write a decent character arc. And that he needs to stop changing things with the original series as he does so without delicacy and with a tendency to make them worse.
And, again, lots of outrage originally stems from the embarassingly bad effect the first time 'round. Thankfully, they cleaned it up a little for the disk releases.
Does anyone else do it to the same degree as FOX news? Has another TV channel cut around a speech to make a conservative look like they're saying something that was the exact opposite of the point of the speech? Does Martin Bashir cut off the mic his guests if they say things he doesn't like? Does MSNBC give its reporters an explicit ultimatum to promote a particular point of view or risk your job?
I thought that came from deliverables. For some time you made code drops, art drops, or other drops to clients... I.E. you uploaded things to their FTP server and hoped they noticed. That probably came from drop points in drug dealing and other covert operations.
1: So... you would like to see tech journals write less sensational headlines? 2: And either Slashdot or CNET should lead this revolution of non-sensationalism and technical accuracy? 3: And this sounds plausible?
Does anyone have a recommendation for a modern FPS that captures the speed, fun, and simplicity of Doom 1 and 2? I enjoy games like Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield, but sometimes I'd like something fast, fun and disposable... the Mario Kart of shooting people, if you will.
Jurassic Park would be horribly dated by today's effects standards. It had a budget equivalent to a modern Adam Sandler comedy, and the majority of the dinosaurs were just puppets. Yet Jurassic Park is still eminently watchable.
Personally, I'd say that Jurassic Park was full of intelligent effects sequences. Sure, a T-Rex attacking a car is a special effect. But it was an incredibly well scripted, planned, and shot series. Keeping a nasty wall of chomping teeth at bay by a bunch of kids holding a sunroof above them is brilliant writing, effects or not. And as Jurassic Park 2 proved, your effects script and planning is more important than having a big effects budget if you want to make something actually watchable. They had a bigger budget, but the sequence scripting was just pot.
Or rather, you realize after the first round of dailies that the movie you greenlighted is crap because you're an overpaid cad who can't read a script. At that point it's too late to fix the story (and you'd probably just add another comedy sidekick anyway you hack), so you approve a higher effects budget and call in a favor at Lucasfilm. And movie enthusiasts get a great looking turd out the metaphorical end of the tunnel, and all switch to drinking whiskey and abusing the staff.
Are we actually in a war? I mean, do we have a clearly defined enemy, winnable objectives, etc? Sure, we are getting shot at, but the same can be said of police officers in Detroit. Is it really a wartime objective to stay in one place long enough that people stop shooting at you, then leave?
It appears that we're in some sort of publicity campaign of attrition. We have to kill everyone who wants us to leave, before we can leave. We've clearly given up on Bush's promise of the largest rebuilding effort the world has ever seen. We want a stable in-place government that won't harbor terrorists. Oh yes, and we want that in a democracy where everyone hates us.
But we are not in a war. We're in a publicity campaign. And in a publicity campaign, people who aren't with you are exactly who you're trying to reach. The only thing that turned Iraq around was specific powerful locals realizing that we seemed to shoot first less often than other groups, and the goal of getting us out was causing more harm than just sitting around for a while until we left of our own accord. We'll probably not get out of Afghanistan until we've convinced the locals that dealing with us for a few years is better than fighting for even more.
PopCap is responsible for Bejeweled, which has sold over 50 million copies, and Peggle, which eats souls (and has sold about 50 million as well). They have about 200 employees.
They're probably thinking "Oh good, another batch of press impressions for the campaign recap binder."
This was the Philippians. They likely didn't have the funding to pay for all of the guards to have work phones, but still wanted to be able to contact them quickly.
I don't know. It's hard to reconcile the images of Obama being a toothless victim that can't push policies through, and yet retaining a lot of the ridiculous executive powers bush pushed through. Gitmo was born through an executive declaration, and could end with one too. And there is no opposition that would account for the disparity between his promises of more transparency, and the reality of denying more FOIA requests than Bush did. He seems to be doing moderately OK on his campaign promises, but he still hasn't gotten around to half of them... and they're a big half.
JFK died before he could be accountable for getting us stuck in Vietnam. He was a great leader, don't get me wrong, but he's lionized by history out of proportion. Also, could you imagine what would happen if Obama had a public affair with, say, Lady Gaga? JFK got away with a *lot*.
As far as I can tell, though, Mark Hurd still wanted to run a company that makes things. Carly and Dunn wanted HP to be a "brand," and to outsource design development and marketing to everyone else. The H.P. iPod is a perfect example of the vacuousness of their reign. Hurd seemed like a normal-bad CEO. Carly and Dunn seemed like marketing droids that set legendary new standards for "bad CEO."
I totally agree that domestic money can be misspent, and can be spent in ways that drive up prices or reduce competitiveness, or in ways that lock us in to bad long-term contracts. At the end of the day, though, we might have roads that don't damage your rims every time you drive them, government systems converted from the archaic junk most of them still seem to use, and maybe some parks without broken glass in the deal. And, of course, the hope is we'll be spending enough that poverty doesn't get massively worse, the crime rates stay low, people don't slip from potential workers into completely unemployable, and we avoid the knock-on effects that bring economies down. We'll probably also get locked into a lot of bad long-term deals with shady bastards in the process. The Big Dig ran what, 10x over budget?
What mystifies me is that you recognize the current administration's "plan" for the pipe dream it is... but you still have hope. I can't decide whether that kind of faith is virtuous or not.:-/
The options are fight for what I believe to be wrong now but right later, or accept that what is right now is happening and pray that the administration isn't totally bonkers later. Honestly, if we successfully reigned in spending now, during any sort of economic recovery the people in Washington are likely to start shouting "Pork Pork Pork" anyway.
After years of campaigning for a balanced budget and limits on special-interest handouts, I'm going to sit this one out. I helped fight for years for budget reform in California, and look where those idiots are now. After the past ten years, and the failure of the Contract With America, I have no faith that the Republicans are the party to bring the fiscal house back in order. The options seem to be a party that can't balance the budget, and seems to spend most of its money at war, or a party that can't balance the budget, and seems to spend most of its money domestically. At least the latter seems to be the right direction for the moment.
At least being overseas won't effect the transfer rate of AT&T. Our soldiers will experience the same level of service that they enjoy at home in New York city.
I'm of the opinion that the government should spend when the economy is poor, and save when the economy is strong. The current administration has said that is their plan. It's a pipe dream, of course, that government handouts will be easy to reign in during good times. But that is the hope.
Also, I'm a lot more forgiving of domestic spending than the $2,500 per US citizen we poured into Iraq. The level of spending during the Bush administration was shocking. The economy was doing well (housing bubble, but whatever), paying off our country's debts was actually achievable. Instead we created a giant new government agency and threw cash at the phantom of terrorism and 2 wars (1, the Iraq war, has helped set up a further direct conflict with Iran).
the Democrats in the House, Senate, and White House have radically changed the landscape, and not for anyone's long-term benefit.
If you accept that the massive influx of government spending is the proper response to a dead economy (I do), and that it is temporary (god I hope so), what specifically are you referring to? The healthcare bill got watered down to the point where all it did was set up a competitive price exchange for healthcare... sort of the Amazon.com of getting sick. They changed student loans to be a bit more fair, and expanded Pell grants for needy students. They passed an act where if your landlord gets foreclosed upon but you have a lease, your lease survives. And if you don't have a lease, you have 3 months to find a new place. They passed a few credit-card acts counteracting some of the more egregious offences, and giving business owners some rights. They passed a toothless wall-street reform act.
What bills, specifically, are you referring to? I'm not asking facetiously. I know we tend to filter news through our own perceptions, and I wonder what I missed.
And saying this is as bad as Bush II is going too far. We're not stuck in any new intractable wars, we haven't lost all of our allies, and we haven't had any new worldwide economic collapses.
HP has been headed by complete imbeciles for years now. The legendarily bad Carly was just the first headliner.
I'm not too close to his work, but Mark Hurd was actually the first HP CEO in years that didn't seem to be a completely vacuous idiot. By not immediately firing every engineer and outsourcing design to wikipedia, Mark Hurd was the best HP CEO since the 90's. He seemed like he wanted to lead a business that actually made things. It was shocking.
While there are many people that can competently fill the shoes of the CEO at HP, if history is any indication the board will elect Mister Bean.
Slashdot Mirror
Take three of the schools. In school 1, have an IT guy totally turn off the WiFi without telling anyone. In school 2, have the same IT guy say that he's turning off the WiFi, but have it go black and broadcast just as much as usual. In school 3, blanket the parents with information that the WiFi is being shut off, then don't change a thing. Take a look at what effects this has on student / parent complaints.
The iPhone 4 was also supposed to come in White. At first, it was to come at the same time. Then "soon" after the black version. Now it is even later, as it is supposedly getting the rumored new iPhone 4 (now without terrible antenna) treatment.
At this point, who hasn't moved their production from USA, EU, and Japan? I know there are cars, some food products, and really, really big things built here. But what (brands or genres of stuff) are still built in the US or Europe or Japan?
I don't mean this facetiously, I simply don't know.
To be fair, the special edition in the theater had Han shooting first in an atrociously butchered photoshop job. It's bad now, but the first version in the theater looked like a high-school student screwing around in flash.
I do think the problem is that Han is supposed to undergo a character arc from a scoundrel willing to kill for his own benefit, to a scoundrel that is willing to die for his friends. Making Greedo shoot first flattens a big part of that character arch. In the original version, it's not even clear that Greedo is going to shoot. Han just doesn't want to go with him to face up to Jabba / his mistakes, and he's willing to kill because of that. Of course, it has also become symbolic of the problem that Lucas just doesn't know how to write a decent character arc. And that he needs to stop changing things with the original series as he does so without delicacy and with a tendency to make them worse.
And, again, lots of outrage originally stems from the embarassingly bad effect the first time 'round. Thankfully, they cleaned it up a little for the disk releases.
Call me crazy, but is Star Wars even culturally relevant anymore? It feels like Disco at this point.
Does anyone else do it to the same degree as FOX news? Has another TV channel cut around a speech to make a conservative look like they're saying something that was the exact opposite of the point of the speech? Does Martin Bashir cut off the mic his guests if they say things he doesn't like? Does MSNBC give its reporters an explicit ultimatum to promote a particular point of view or risk your job?
I thought that came from deliverables. For some time you made code drops, art drops, or other drops to clients... I.E. you uploaded things to their FTP server and hoped they noticed. That probably came from drop points in drug dealing and other covert operations.
That's just a guess, though.
1: So... you would like to see tech journals write less sensational headlines?
2: And either Slashdot or CNET should lead this revolution of non-sensationalism and technical accuracy?
3: And this sounds plausible?
On the note of Doom 1 and Doom 2:
Does anyone have a recommendation for a modern FPS that captures the speed, fun, and simplicity of Doom 1 and 2? I enjoy games like Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield, but sometimes I'd like something fast, fun and disposable... the Mario Kart of shooting people, if you will.
Walk into your living room, look at the halogen torchlamp aimed at the ceiling.
Good modern lighting is frequently indirect.
That's funny: I always wanted Doom 3 in the Doom 1 engine. It would have been a faster, tighter, more enjoyable game.
Jurassic Park would be horribly dated by today's effects standards. It had a budget equivalent to a modern Adam Sandler comedy, and the majority of the dinosaurs were just puppets. Yet Jurassic Park is still eminently watchable.
Personally, I'd say that Jurassic Park was full of intelligent effects sequences. Sure, a T-Rex attacking a car is a special effect. But it was an incredibly well scripted, planned, and shot series. Keeping a nasty wall of chomping teeth at bay by a bunch of kids holding a sunroof above them is brilliant writing, effects or not. And as Jurassic Park 2 proved, your effects script and planning is more important than having a big effects budget if you want to make something actually watchable. They had a bigger budget, but the sequence scripting was just pot.
Or rather, you realize after the first round of dailies that the movie you greenlighted is crap because you're an overpaid cad who can't read a script. At that point it's too late to fix the story (and you'd probably just add another comedy sidekick anyway you hack), so you approve a higher effects budget and call in a favor at Lucasfilm. And movie enthusiasts get a great looking turd out the metaphorical end of the tunnel, and all switch to drinking whiskey and abusing the staff.
Are we actually in a war? I mean, do we have a clearly defined enemy, winnable objectives, etc? Sure, we are getting shot at, but the same can be said of police officers in Detroit. Is it really a wartime objective to stay in one place long enough that people stop shooting at you, then leave?
It appears that we're in some sort of publicity campaign of attrition. We have to kill everyone who wants us to leave, before we can leave. We've clearly given up on Bush's promise of the largest rebuilding effort the world has ever seen. We want a stable in-place government that won't harbor terrorists. Oh yes, and we want that in a democracy where everyone hates us.
But we are not in a war. We're in a publicity campaign. And in a publicity campaign, people who aren't with you are exactly who you're trying to reach. The only thing that turned Iraq around was specific powerful locals realizing that we seemed to shoot first less often than other groups, and the goal of getting us out was causing more harm than just sitting around for a while until we left of our own accord. We'll probably not get out of Afghanistan until we've convinced the locals that dealing with us for a few years is better than fighting for even more.
PopCap is responsible for Bejeweled, which has sold over 50 million copies, and Peggle, which eats souls (and has sold about 50 million as well). They have about 200 employees.
They're probably thinking "Oh good, another batch of press impressions for the campaign recap binder."
This was the Philippians. They likely didn't have the funding to pay for all of the guards to have work phones, but still wanted to be able to contact them quickly.
It's the name of the book, and how the author refers to his findings. NPR has nothing to do with it.
I don't know. It's hard to reconcile the images of Obama being a toothless victim that can't push policies through, and yet retaining a lot of the ridiculous executive powers bush pushed through. Gitmo was born through an executive declaration, and could end with one too. And there is no opposition that would account for the disparity between his promises of more transparency, and the reality of denying more FOIA requests than Bush did. He seems to be doing moderately OK on his campaign promises, but he still hasn't gotten around to half of them... and they're a big half.
JFK died before he could be accountable for getting us stuck in Vietnam. He was a great leader, don't get me wrong, but he's lionized by history out of proportion. Also, could you imagine what would happen if Obama had a public affair with, say, Lady Gaga? JFK got away with a *lot*.
Doesn't he know he should be driving an Audi now?
I have not. If I am wrong about the man, I'm sorry. And it is distinctly possible that I am.
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100809-711931.html
As far as I can tell, though, Mark Hurd still wanted to run a company that makes things. Carly and Dunn wanted HP to be a "brand," and to outsource design development and marketing to everyone else. The H.P. iPod is a perfect example of the vacuousness of their reign. Hurd seemed like a normal-bad CEO. Carly and Dunn seemed like marketing droids that set legendary new standards for "bad CEO."
I totally agree that domestic money can be misspent, and can be spent in ways that drive up prices or reduce competitiveness, or in ways that lock us in to bad long-term contracts. At the end of the day, though, we might have roads that don't damage your rims every time you drive them, government systems converted from the archaic junk most of them still seem to use, and maybe some parks without broken glass in the deal. And, of course, the hope is we'll be spending enough that poverty doesn't get massively worse, the crime rates stay low, people don't slip from potential workers into completely unemployable, and we avoid the knock-on effects that bring economies down. We'll probably also get locked into a lot of bad long-term deals with shady bastards in the process. The Big Dig ran what, 10x over budget?
What mystifies me is that you recognize the current administration's "plan" for the pipe dream it is... but you still have hope. I can't decide whether that kind of faith is virtuous or not. :-/
The options are fight for what I believe to be wrong now but right later, or accept that what is right now is happening and pray that the administration isn't totally bonkers later. Honestly, if we successfully reigned in spending now, during any sort of economic recovery the people in Washington are likely to start shouting "Pork Pork Pork" anyway.
After years of campaigning for a balanced budget and limits on special-interest handouts, I'm going to sit this one out. I helped fight for years for budget reform in California, and look where those idiots are now. After the past ten years, and the failure of the Contract With America, I have no faith that the Republicans are the party to bring the fiscal house back in order. The options seem to be a party that can't balance the budget, and seems to spend most of its money at war, or a party that can't balance the budget, and seems to spend most of its money domestically. At least the latter seems to be the right direction for the moment.
At least being overseas won't effect the transfer rate of AT&T. Our soldiers will experience the same level of service that they enjoy at home in New York city.
I'm of the opinion that the government should spend when the economy is poor, and save when the economy is strong. The current administration has said that is their plan. It's a pipe dream, of course, that government handouts will be easy to reign in during good times. But that is the hope.
Also, I'm a lot more forgiving of domestic spending than the $2,500 per US citizen we poured into Iraq. The level of spending during the Bush administration was shocking. The economy was doing well (housing bubble, but whatever), paying off our country's debts was actually achievable. Instead we created a giant new government agency and threw cash at the phantom of terrorism and 2 wars (1, the Iraq war, has helped set up a further direct conflict with Iran).
the Democrats in the House, Senate, and White House have radically changed the landscape, and not for anyone's long-term benefit.
If you accept that the massive influx of government spending is the proper response to a dead economy (I do), and that it is temporary (god I hope so), what specifically are you referring to? The healthcare bill got watered down to the point where all it did was set up a competitive price exchange for healthcare... sort of the Amazon.com of getting sick. They changed student loans to be a bit more fair, and expanded Pell grants for needy students. They passed an act where if your landlord gets foreclosed upon but you have a lease, your lease survives. And if you don't have a lease, you have 3 months to find a new place. They passed a few credit-card acts counteracting some of the more egregious offences, and giving business owners some rights. They passed a toothless wall-street reform act.
What bills, specifically, are you referring to? I'm not asking facetiously. I know we tend to filter news through our own perceptions, and I wonder what I missed.
And saying this is as bad as Bush II is going too far. We're not stuck in any new intractable wars, we haven't lost all of our allies, and we haven't had any new worldwide economic collapses.
HP has been headed by complete imbeciles for years now. The legendarily bad Carly was just the first headliner.
I'm not too close to his work, but Mark Hurd was actually the first HP CEO in years that didn't seem to be a completely vacuous idiot. By not immediately firing every engineer and outsourcing design to wikipedia, Mark Hurd was the best HP CEO since the 90's. He seemed like he wanted to lead a business that actually made things. It was shocking.
While there are many people that can competently fill the shoes of the CEO at HP, if history is any indication the board will elect Mister Bean.