There is a very good reason to download a copy of this. To figure out if it is actually out there or not.
I have a couple of very good reasons to believe that this has more to do with Drudge making up ways to be "relevant" than it has to do with actual reality.
First of all, they are not done with the actual editing of the film. Hard to do a bootleg of a film when the film is not even done yet!
Second, there is a longstanding tradition of mislabeling on the p2p networks. Much of what is labeled as "Lord of the Rings" is either the cartoon or something totally bogus. (Not to mention any song parody is labeled as being by "Weird Al" or "Dr. Demento", even if it has nothing to do with either of them.)
I take this as being crap-filled hype until proven otherwise.
The manual was called "The New User's Guide To Editor and Runoff" published by PR1ME Computers. This is the second edition from 1980. The first edition was published in 1978.
The manual includes color cartoons, quotes from sources like Edgar Alan Poe, Douglas Adams and Gilbert and Sulivan, as well as many in-jokes and literary references.
In the section on doing mail merge letters...
"It is our pleasure to inform you, Arthur Trent that you are a FINAL CONTESTANT in the RANIBURGER BAKE-OFF!
Raniburger is prepared to fly you, at your expense, to our BIG BAKE-OFF, which will be broadcast live from the Hotel Cthulhu in downtown Arkham. Winners will be selected by our panel of distinguished judges, which includes Drs. Ann E. Lidda and Chuck Render of the Serpentine Health Spas, and Grima Viper of Saruman Bakeries. Prizes include a two-week vacation for two at Loch Ness, plus a year's supply of Raniburgers.
So, congradulations, Arthur Trent, and we hope to see you soon!
Sincerely,
The Raniburger Corporation
"I never ate a frog I did not like"
666 Ourboros Drive, Arkham, MA 02546
There are a couple other silly examples, including a sales brochure from "The Magrathean Manufacturing Corporation.".
Digital projection has a bunch of problems. Most non-digitally filmed movies get converted at the wrong gamma setting. The results are a dull washed-out picture. The resolution sucks as well.
There are better and cheaper technologies available that are being swept aside by the digital hype.
Roger Ebert commented a while back on a projector that removed almost all of the "jitter" found in projectors. He said the results were incredible. Too bad it is being ignored by the press and moviemakers.
I will have to find out more about it and post it here.
I have a Prime manual from the early 1980s that has a long running joke in it.
It is a manual for a version of "runoff", which is used for formatting documents. The examples given in the book are for a restraunt chain that servers "frog burgers". There are a whole bunch of Cthulhu references throughout.
I need to scan some of them and post them to the net. Pretty funny.
Another example is in the error return values in GLIBC. Included are EIEIO and EGREGIOUS and other bogus errors.
Unfortunatly all traces of humor are removed from manuals, not due to burn out or other causes, but because Corporate America sees them as "Not Profesional".
Funny documentation and Easter Eggs are both a causualty of the War on Fun.
The reason that people get repetitive stress injuries is because the way they are taught to type. In typing class, you are taught to hold your hands in aa certain way, to never cross your hands and to keep them bent at an unnatural angle. Holding your hands in the same position as what typing teachers drill into their students increases the chance that you will do damage.
I would like to see a study of people who type using the "touch typing method" v.s. people who use the "hunt and peck" method. I think you will find that people who vary how they type have a much lower chance of having repetative stress problems than people who follow the rote dictates of how "you are supposed to type".
Actually there were more than one American series.
Here is the series list:
* The Channel 4 pilot. (later aired on Cinemax.)
* Max Headroom - This was a video music series run on Cinemax. It had intercut bits from the Channel 4 pilot for the first three episodes. Most of them had interviews with various music celebrities. There was a heavy emphasis on golf jokes. These were about 20 minutes each..I have about 10 of these. These include music videos I have not seen elesewhere. ("Rat on a Budget" and a couple of Max Headroom songs come to mind.)
* The Max Headroom Giant Christmas Turkey - Theis was a Max Headroom special that ran on Cinemax. VERY warped. (The only Christmas special that comes to mind with a children's choir singing about how Mary could not get an episiotomy in the manger.)
* The Max talking Headroom Show - This ran on Cinemax and was an hour interview show. It usually had three interviews and one commedian. I only have 2-3 of these. (The interview with William Shatner was pretty bizzare.)
* The ABC series - Ran for 14 episodes, only 13 where shown on ABC. (I have seen claims that episode 13 was not shown on ABC. I have a tape of it off of ABC. 12 & 13 were shown at real weird off times a couple of months later. Most people missed those, which is unfortunate as they were excelent.)
One of these days I need to complete my set of episodes. I am missing a bunch of the Cinemax stuff. I have yet to find a complete list of episodes for those early shows on the net. (Or why Cinemax stopped doing original programming.)
One of my favorite shows of all time. Now if they would just release all of it on DVD.
I am curious what the plan is for keeping up with the various versions. I have Mandrake 8.2 and would like to install Ximian. I can't do it because you don't support that quite yet. I have another box that will go to Redhat 7.3 as soon as that is out of beta (and I can get the hard drive clean enough to do the install). Will that be a long wait as well?
The PICK OS was an even earlier example of a "database filesystem". I worked with it back in 1981, but it dates back earlier than that.
PICK has an SQL-like language to create reports and search and select databases. The data structures are kept in a "dictonary" file for each file. Records are variable length and seperated by upper acsii characters. (254 for fields, 253 for values (sub-fields), and 252 for sub-values.)
PICK is pretty much considered a "legacy system" by most people any more. (If they have heard of it at all.) It had some features that were far ahead of its time. Unfortuantly, Dick Pick, the creator of the OS, was unwilling to improve on it. So PICK remained in the dumb terminal world, while everyone else moved on. The vendors of PICK made improvements over the years. It was the only thing that kept it even vaguely current.
Microsoft is claiming that you will not need datastructures for their new system. DB filesystems are very dependant on embeded filestructures. It has to be there. I have no idea how they will be able to take a structure as complex as Word or MPEG-4 and make it "transparent" and portable. More likely you will be held hostage to their OS. It will be portable to "upgrades" of the OS and no more. (At least until they make that data format no longer supported...)
This sounds like yet another attempt to make things "easier", with no understanding or attention to the security ramifications.
Paralogix has a similar password scheme. You click on a number of objects to create a password.
Sounds good, but it turns out to be very bad.
It turns out that the number of objects used on the screen made for less combinations than you would have if it represented a letter of the alphabet. (About 28 combinations per "drag".)
It gets worse. Due to the way the interface works, it becomes prohibitive to make large passwords. (A keyboard is much faster.) The interface passlogix used was drop and drag. Icons are not going to be much better. (You only have so much screen area to work with.)
Passlogix did one even better though... They made the order of the password not matter. (So "AAB" and "ABA" and "BAA" were equivelent.) For small passwords, it removes a fair chunk of the combinations. For large passwords, it removes almost all of it. (95% at 5 characters and it gets worse from there.) I expect similar things from Microsoft if they actually do this.
I have suspected that Microsoft considers most of their users to be illiterate. It frightens me when I see evidence that my worst fears are confirmed.
The movie industry needs to set an example and be the first to use Copy Controlled PCs.
Then see if they can get any work done.
I find it interesting that the movie industry is the first to cry for strong copy protection, yet they depend on public domain works (like almost every big Disney movie) and "free" software (like Linux and BSD).
Personally I find Valenti a repulsive little gnome, but I don't think he understands just what would happen to his industry if he tightened down copyrights to the point that he seems to want. There would be nothing left to steal.
It is an enjoyable book. It is not one that you read for the plot, however. it is one that you read for Stephenson's screeds on opinion polsters, politics and the like. It does have some interesting things to say, as well as some very interesting and satisfying momments. The end it telegraphed way in advance, but the writing is enjoyable enough that you don't really care.
It is one I recommend.
I have not read "The Cobweb". The description did not interest me that much. Maybe I do need to go back and read it.
I recieve a LOT of mail. Much of it is from Windows users.
Those users expect me to be able to read their Word format files without complaint. (Like I am going to pay almost $400 for a word processor for 1-2 documents a week.)
They expect that I read their html formatted mail with bizzare IE-only extensions.
These are the same people who become totally baffled if I send them a ASCII document with Unix line wraps.
At some point you get tired of dealing with people who expect the world to conform to their expectations and platform while making *no* effort to adapt to anything outside of their narrow world-view.
My method of dealing with people who send Word documents is to return the favor by sending them Star Office format. It is amazing how much they complain about it. They expect me to install a very expensive package, but are totally unwilling to install something that costs them next to nothing. ($50 if they buy the boxed version.)
What I find even more interesting are the people who seem to be backing the Outlook user in this "fight". The Outlook bug that is being exploited is quite old. Not only has Microsoft refused to fix it, it appears that they have removed the work-around. (I still do not see why people continue to use Outlook. The only reason that I hear from people is because they need the calendaring support and shared folders. There are other programs that do similar things. They are just being lazy.)
Part of the "PC" movement in this country is the unwillingness (in fact that absolute abhorence) to tell someone when they are being stupid. Error-correction is no longer tolerated because someone's feelings might get hurt. Since when did the most sensitive and stupid gain control of what should or should not be done?
There are a number of problems using Gnutella.
Getting a complete and/or undamaged file is difficult. (Especially anything long.)
Just because you find a file does not meanyou can get it. Huge numbers of the files "available" on Gnutella are either on non-routable addresses or on servers that refuse connection or timeout.
Many of the files on Gnutella are misnamed or misattributed. Do a search on "Weird Al", for example. You will get all sorts of responses, few of them actually by Weird Al.
It is useless for getting files that contain multiple parts, unless tared or the like. (For example, getting a complete album is next to impossible. The unreliability of the service ensures that.)
Gnutella seems to have nothing to insure any sort of "quality of service" or file intergrity.
This is not the first time that Borland has come out with a licence with incredibly objectionable terms.
A number of years ago, the licence for their C compiler had the provision that you could not use it to create a competing product. (It would probably make compiling GCC a violation of the license agreement.) They backed off after people screamed about it.
It makes me wonder if their lawyers are paid under the table by Microsoft or some other competitor. Why else would they put in clauses that are so obvious to piss off their customers time and again?
They have been told about the problems before!
on
Pictorial Passwords
·
· Score: 2
Passlogix has been pushing this idea for at least a year. They refuse to listen to WHY it is a bad idea, even when confronted with overwhelming proof that it is not secure.
In Passlogix visual password schemes, ORDER DOES NOT MATTER.
This is a bad thing.
Most of their passwords have about 27 or so combinations per password "element". (Some are weaker than that.) This alone makes it weaker than a standard passphrase. If order does not matter, then the longer the password, the less it adds to the entropy. At five characters you lose about 95% of the number of combinations v.s. if order did matter. It goes downhill from there.
To make matters worse, the gui is such a pain to use that people will not make passwords larger than about five characters!
Their backup routine would also allow someone to grab all of the password data and crack it on their own computer later.
Passlogix was told about these problems. They claimed that each passowrd element represented more than one bit of entropy. Where this other magical entropy came from i am not certain. (Only their proctoligist knows for sure.)
Graphical passwords are a bad idea as presently implemented. They do not add entropy and they are enough of a hastle that they encourage people to use short passwords. A bad idea all around.
There were a few parts of the film that I had to bite my tounge to keep from making snide remarks.
The part where Galdalf talks about having pity for Bilbo for not killing Golum I thought "It is a pity I have run out of bullets". (Read "Bored of the Rings" if you do not get that last line.)
My big problem with Hugo Weaving was that I was half expecting to find out we were all in a big MUD. And then he started talking about "The One" and I expected Kenau Reaves to show up. ("Whoa! Elf dude!")
There were a few spots where the "THEME" was a bit overbearing. Thankfully those moments were few and far between.
As for sound and film problems. There were a few places where i could tell that the film had been processed to add "effect". (A few scenes were a bit on the sepia side.) None of the problems with the sound. Probably just Regal Theatres... (If you are in Portland, go to the Century 16. It is not Regal and has stadium seating. VERY nice.)
I highly recomend this film. Probably the best fantasy film I have ever seen. Personnaly I wish they would go for a summer release for the second and a holiday release for the third. A year is just too damn long!
Most of Microsoft's support is outsourced to companies like "Stream". You have to get past the initial levels of support to get to anyone who actually works for Microsoft.
Stream has a VERY bad reputation. Unless the customer demands it, they hire and train just about anyone. They are kept to very strict call times, which insures the customer has to call back if the solution did not work.
Most of the times I have dealt with Microsoft support, the standard "solution" is to reinstall the OS. (So much for all your system settings and preferences! If you use Kai texture explorer, you lose all your saved textures as well.)
I ask anyone who thinks that Microsoft has good support just how many times they had to call them and why.
The only thing that would suffer would be algorithms based on that class of problems. Unless someone found a way of solving the entire class of NP-Complete problems. By their nature, i seriously doubt if it is possible to solve beyond a single type of problem. It would require some sort of interrelationship between problem sets. If something on that magnitude were found, the benifits would greatly outweigh the drawbacks as we would have made a great leap forward in the understanding of mathematics.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone else find it ironic that this announcement was made in Shanghai?
"Mars needs IP" or "IP on Mars"?
There is a very good reason to download a copy of this. To figure out if it is actually out there or not.
I have a couple of very good reasons to believe that this has more to do with Drudge making up ways to be "relevant" than it has to do with actual reality.
First of all, they are not done with the actual editing of the film. Hard to do a bootleg of a film when the film is not even done yet!
Second, there is a longstanding tradition of mislabeling on the p2p networks. Much of what is labeled as "Lord of the Rings" is either the cartoon or something totally bogus. (Not to mention any song parody is labeled as being by "Weird Al" or "Dr. Demento", even if it has nothing to do with either of them.)
I take this as being crap-filled hype until proven otherwise.
The notice on IDs says "No exceptions".
I wonder if this includes John Gilmore? (Chief Cypherpunk, owner of toad.com, and suer of airlines for requiring IDs.)
The manual was called "The New User's Guide To Editor and Runoff" published by PR1ME Computers. This is the second edition from 1980. The first edition was published in 1978.
The manual includes color cartoons, quotes from sources like Edgar Alan Poe, Douglas Adams and Gilbert and Sulivan, as well as many in-jokes and literary references.
In the section on doing mail merge letters...
"It is our pleasure to inform you, Arthur Trent
that you are a FINAL CONTESTANT in the RANIBURGER BAKE-OFF!
Raniburger is prepared to fly you, at your expense,
to our BIG BAKE-OFF, which will be broadcast live from
the Hotel Cthulhu in downtown Arkham.
Winners will be selected by our panel of distinguished judges, which includes Drs. Ann E. Lidda and Chuck Render of the Serpentine Health Spas, and Grima Viper of Saruman Bakeries. Prizes include a two-week vacation for two at Loch Ness, plus a year's supply of Raniburgers.
So, congradulations, Arthur Trent, and we hope to see you soon!
Sincerely,
The Raniburger Corporation
"I never ate a frog I did not like"
666 Ourboros Drive, Arkham, MA 02546
There are a couple other silly examples, including a sales brochure from "The Magrathean Manufacturing Corporation.".
Digital projection has a bunch of problems. Most non-digitally filmed movies get converted at the wrong gamma setting. The results are a dull washed-out picture. The resolution sucks as well.
There are better and cheaper technologies available that are being swept aside by the digital hype.
Roger Ebert commented a while back on a projector that removed almost all of the "jitter" found in projectors. He said the results were incredible. Too bad it is being ignored by the press and moviemakers.
I will have to find out more about it and post it here.
I have a Prime manual from the early 1980s that has a long running joke in it.
It is a manual for a version of "runoff", which is used for formatting documents. The examples given in the book are for a restraunt chain that servers "frog burgers". There are a whole bunch of Cthulhu references throughout.
I need to scan some of them and post them to the net. Pretty funny.
Another example is in the error return values in GLIBC. Included are EIEIO and EGREGIOUS and other bogus errors.
Unfortunatly all traces of humor are removed from manuals, not due to burn out or other causes, but because Corporate America sees them as "Not Profesional".
Funny documentation and Easter Eggs are both a causualty of the War on Fun.
The reason that people get repetitive stress injuries is because the way they are taught to type. In typing class, you are taught to hold your hands in aa certain way, to never cross your hands and to keep them bent at an unnatural angle. Holding your hands in the same position as what typing teachers drill into their students increases the chance that you will do damage.
I would like to see a study of people who type using the "touch typing method" v.s. people who use the "hunt and peck" method. I think you will find that people who vary how they type have a much lower chance of having repetative stress problems than people who follow the rote dictates of how "you are supposed to type".
Actually there were more than one American series.
Here is the series list:
* The Channel 4 pilot. (later aired on Cinemax.)
* Max Headroom - This was a video music series run on Cinemax. It had intercut bits from the Channel 4 pilot for the first three episodes. Most of them had interviews with various music celebrities. There was a heavy emphasis on golf jokes. These were about 20 minutes each..I have about 10 of these. These include music videos I have not seen elesewhere. ("Rat on a Budget" and a couple of Max Headroom songs come to mind.)
* The Max Headroom Giant Christmas Turkey - Theis was a Max Headroom special that ran on Cinemax. VERY warped. (The only Christmas special that comes to mind with a children's choir singing about how Mary could not get an episiotomy in the manger.)
* The Max talking Headroom Show - This ran on Cinemax and was an hour interview show. It usually had three interviews and one commedian. I only have 2-3 of these. (The interview with William Shatner was pretty bizzare.)
* The ABC series - Ran for 14 episodes, only 13 where shown on ABC. (I have seen claims that episode 13 was not shown on ABC. I have a tape of it off of ABC. 12 & 13 were shown at real weird off times a couple of months later. Most people missed those, which is unfortunate as they were excelent.)
One of these days I need to complete my set of episodes. I am missing a bunch of the Cinemax stuff. I have yet to find a complete list of episodes for those early shows on the net. (Or why Cinemax stopped doing original programming.)
One of my favorite shows of all time. Now if they would just release all of it on DVD.
Blank Art
Just call me "Blank Art". ]:>
Actually this was mentioned weeks ago on aint-it-cool-news.com. The episode title is "Jump the Shark", a reference to jumptheshark.com.
But then again, I have been living 23 minutes into the future lately. (I watched the Star Trek episode of Futurama with full end credit this morning.)
I am curious what the plan is for keeping up with the various versions. I have Mandrake 8.2 and would like to install Ximian. I can't do it because you don't support that quite yet. I have another box that will go to Redhat 7.3 as soon as that is out of beta (and I can get the hard drive clean enough to do the install). Will that be a long wait as well?
The PICK OS was an even earlier example of a "database filesystem". I worked with it back in 1981, but it dates back earlier than that.
PICK has an SQL-like language to create reports and search and select databases. The data structures are kept in a "dictonary" file for each file. Records are variable length and seperated by upper acsii characters. (254 for fields, 253 for values (sub-fields), and 252 for sub-values.)
PICK is pretty much considered a "legacy system" by most people any more. (If they have heard of it at all.) It had some features that were far ahead of its time. Unfortuantly, Dick Pick, the creator of the OS, was unwilling to improve on it. So PICK remained in the dumb terminal world, while everyone else moved on. The vendors of PICK made improvements over the years. It was the only thing that kept it even vaguely current.
Microsoft is claiming that you will not need datastructures for their new system. DB filesystems are very dependant on embeded filestructures. It has to be there. I have no idea how they will be able to take a structure as complex as Word or MPEG-4 and make it "transparent" and portable. More likely you will be held hostage to their OS. It will be portable to "upgrades" of the OS and no more. (At least until they make that data format no longer supported...)
Didn't the people who owned the "got Milk?" trademark try similar litigation and got shot down by the courts?
I have tried finding references pro or con on this, but all the anti-milk PETA sites are making searching difficult.
I guess the lawyers for Intel have a trademark on "Evil Inside".
I guess their lawyers figure people will confused between yoga and a company with their head up their ass.
This sounds like yet another attempt to make things "easier", with no understanding or attention to the security ramifications.
Paralogix has a similar password scheme. You click on a number of objects to create a password.
Sounds good, but it turns out to be very bad.
It turns out that the number of objects used on the screen made for less combinations than you would have if it represented a letter of the alphabet. (About 28 combinations per "drag".)
It gets worse. Due to the way the interface works, it becomes prohibitive to make large passwords. (A keyboard is much faster.) The interface passlogix used was drop and drag. Icons are not going to be much better. (You only have so much screen area to work with.)
Passlogix did one even better though... They made the order of the password not matter. (So "AAB" and "ABA" and "BAA" were equivelent.) For small passwords, it removes a fair chunk of the combinations. For large passwords, it removes almost all of it. (95% at 5 characters and it gets worse from there.) I expect similar things from Microsoft if they actually do this.
I have suspected that Microsoft considers most of their users to be illiterate. It frightens me when I see evidence that my worst fears are confirmed.
The movie industry needs to set an example and be the first to use Copy Controlled PCs.
Then see if they can get any work done.
I find it interesting that the movie industry is the first to cry for strong copy protection, yet they depend on public domain works (like almost every big Disney movie) and "free" software (like Linux and BSD).
Personally I find Valenti a repulsive little gnome, but I don't think he understands just what would happen to his industry if he tightened down copyrights to the point that he seems to want. There would be nothing left to steal.
I have been rereading Interface.
It is an enjoyable book. It is not one that you read for the plot, however. it is one that you read for Stephenson's screeds on opinion polsters, politics and the like. It does have some interesting things to say, as well as some very interesting and satisfying momments. The end it telegraphed way in advance, but the writing is enjoyable enough that you don't really care.
It is one I recommend.
I have not read "The Cobweb". The description did not interest me that much. Maybe I do need to go back and read it.
I recieve a LOT of mail. Much of it is from Windows users.
Those users expect me to be able to read their Word format files without complaint. (Like I am going to pay almost $400 for a word processor for 1-2 documents a week.)
They expect that I read their html formatted mail with bizzare IE-only extensions.
These are the same people who become totally baffled if I send them a ASCII document with Unix line wraps.
At some point you get tired of dealing with people who expect the world to conform to their expectations and platform while making *no* effort to adapt to anything outside of their narrow world-view.
My method of dealing with people who send Word documents is to return the favor by sending them Star Office format. It is amazing how much they complain about it. They expect me to install a very expensive package, but are totally unwilling to install something that costs them next to nothing. ($50 if they buy the boxed version.)
What I find even more interesting are the people who seem to be backing the Outlook user in this "fight". The Outlook bug that is being exploited is quite old. Not only has Microsoft refused to fix it, it appears that they have removed the work-around. (I still do not see why people continue to use Outlook. The only reason that I hear from people is because they need the calendaring support and shared folders. There are other programs that do similar things. They are just being lazy.)
Part of the "PC" movement in this country is the unwillingness (in fact that absolute abhorence) to tell someone when they are being stupid. Error-correction is no longer tolerated because someone's feelings might get hurt. Since when did the most sensitive and stupid gain control of what should or should not be done?
Quality of files is the problem.
There are a number of problems using Gnutella.
Getting a complete and/or undamaged file is difficult. (Especially anything long.)
Just because you find a file does not meanyou can get it. Huge numbers of the files "available" on Gnutella are either on non-routable addresses or on servers that refuse connection or timeout.
Many of the files on Gnutella are misnamed or misattributed. Do a search on "Weird Al", for example. You will get all sorts of responses, few of them actually by Weird Al.
It is useless for getting files that contain multiple parts, unless tared or the like. (For example, getting a complete album is next to impossible. The unreliability of the service ensures that.)
Gnutella seems to have nothing to insure any sort of "quality of service" or file intergrity.
Pretty much a waste of time.
This is not the first time that Borland has come out with a licence with incredibly objectionable terms.
A number of years ago, the licence for their C compiler had the provision that you could not use it to create a competing product. (It would probably make compiling GCC a violation of the license agreement.) They backed off after people screamed about it.
It makes me wonder if their lawyers are paid under the table by Microsoft or some other competitor. Why else would they put in clauses that are so obvious to piss off their customers time and again?
Passlogix has been pushing this idea for at least a year. They refuse to listen to WHY it is a bad idea, even when confronted with overwhelming proof that it is not secure.
In Passlogix visual password schemes, ORDER DOES NOT MATTER.
This is a bad thing.
Most of their passwords have about 27 or so combinations per password "element". (Some are weaker than that.) This alone makes it weaker than a standard passphrase. If order does not matter, then the longer the password, the less it adds to the entropy. At five characters you lose about 95% of the number of combinations v.s. if order did matter. It goes downhill from there.
To make matters worse, the gui is such a pain to use that people will not make passwords larger than about five characters!
Their backup routine would also allow someone to grab all of the password data and crack it on their own computer later.
Passlogix was told about these problems. They claimed that each passowrd element represented more than one bit of entropy. Where this other magical entropy came from i am not certain. (Only their proctoligist knows for sure.)
Graphical passwords are a bad idea as presently implemented. They do not add entropy and they are enough of a hastle that they encourage people to use short passwords. A bad idea all around.
There were a few parts of the film that I had to bite my tounge to keep from making snide remarks.
The part where Galdalf talks about having pity for Bilbo for not killing Golum I thought "It is a pity I have run out of bullets". (Read "Bored of the Rings" if you do not get that last line.)
My big problem with Hugo Weaving was that I was half expecting to find out we were all in a big MUD. And then he started talking about "The One" and I expected Kenau Reaves to show up. ("Whoa! Elf dude!")
There were a few spots where the "THEME" was a bit overbearing. Thankfully those moments were few and far between.
As for sound and film problems. There were a few places where i could tell that the film had been processed to add "effect". (A few scenes were a bit on the sepia side.) None of the problems with the sound. Probably just Regal Theatres... (If you are in Portland, go to the Century 16. It is not Regal and has stadium seating. VERY nice.)
I highly recomend this film. Probably the best fantasy film I have ever seen. Personnaly I wish they would go for a summer release for the second and a holiday release for the third. A year is just too damn long!
Most of Microsoft's support is outsourced to companies like "Stream". You have to get past the initial levels of support to get to anyone who actually works for Microsoft.
Stream has a VERY bad reputation. Unless the customer demands it, they hire and train just about anyone. They are kept to very strict call times, which insures the customer has to call back if the solution did not work.
Most of the times I have dealt with Microsoft support, the standard "solution" is to reinstall the OS. (So much for all your system settings and preferences! If you use Kai texture explorer, you lose all your saved textures as well.)
I ask anyone who thinks that Microsoft has good support just how many times they had to call them and why.
The only thing that would suffer would be algorithms based on that class of problems. Unless someone found a way of solving the entire class of NP-Complete problems. By their nature, i seriously doubt if it is possible to solve beyond a single type of problem. It would require some sort of interrelationship between problem sets. If something on that magnitude were found, the benifits would greatly outweigh the drawbacks as we would have made a great leap forward in the understanding of mathematics.