Agreed. The article mentions that e-commerce sites, due to whiz-bang view cart/checkout features, are often the least likely to work. These tend to be very receptive to your complaints, if you email them and say, "Hi, I'd like to buy your product, but I can't - you don't support my browser!"
I did this for an online recordstore once, and the webmaster wrote back to apologize, and request that I use IE in the meantime. I wrote him back to explain that MS doesn't make IE for my platform, and he replied to that rather shocked, "What platform is that?!" I gave him a quick Linux spiel.
What do you know - a few months later their site is redesigned, works fine with Konqueror, and no "You must be using IE" warnings to be found!
MUDs and other text adventure games have been playable, unmodified, by any blind person with some text-to-speach software and a braile keyboard. In fact, there was a blind player on AnotherMUD a few years ago. The "blindness" spell was quite common in that game. Whenever someone managed to successfully cast the spell on your character, you would see:
"You are blind."
Every time this happened to the blind fellow, he would shout: "'You are blind.' Well, duh!":)
Big news in the audio industry
on
Apple Buys Emagic
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This is big news, for two reasons:
1. Logic Audio is quickly becoming one of the most used pro audio sequencers. I'm not sure where it stands next to Cubase and Protools (the other two big names), but it has gained a lot of market share lately.
2. We've been waiting for the OS X version of Logic for over a year now. This damn well better mean that it come out really soon, otherwise Apple owns a company that only creates MacOS 9 software!
Speaking as someone who works in the credit card processing industry, this isn't too shocking. One merchant accepting payments on behalf of another is known as "factoring" and is generally a no-no, both legally and in terms of Visa/MC regulations. PayPal is a special case; how they negotiated their current deal, I'm not sure. Really good lawyers, I guess.
Here's the reason why: merchant account providers are taking on risk on behalf ot the merchant. Because credit cards provide complete safety for the consumer (via chargebacks), if a merchant runs a bunch of charges one day, cashes out the bank account, and skips town, it's the card acquirer (or possibly the issuer) that are left with the responsibility to pay off the fraudulent charges to the consumer. By using a "proxy" merchant, ie factoring, they distance themselves from the consumer and make it that much easier to get away with fraud at this level.
That's excellent, both for Red Hat's continued success, and the greater acceptance of Open Source / Free Software. As geeks we like to think that the best technology will prevail, but in truth it's all about your marketing and salesmanship. I'd like to think that TrustCommerce is experience so much success due to the cool technologies that we have developed, but I know that it's really our sales staff that brings in the green. (In fact, we have a ratio around 90% of sales to other staff as well...)
Good for Red Hat. I hope that they can pull through this recession intact; and I think they will, because they seem to understand the basic premises of business.
Here at the office, we are finding that a lot of GNOME apps are far more usable for day to day tasks. Most of our employees are moving to Evolution - they absolutely love the calendar, task lists, and contacts. (I only use the email portion, myself.) Also, Galeon is a faster and stabler browser than Konqueror. But as a desktop, GNOME just won't cut it for production use. (Two of my coworkers switched to Ximian GNOME for a few weeks, and declared it practically unusable.) So we're definitely going to stick with KDE as the environment now, but for apps...Gnumeric, Evolution, and Galeon are all better than their KDE equivilents.
Some better interoperation (cut-n-paste, default browser & mail clients, themes) would really make our lives a whole lot easier. In the meantime we will hobble by.
I suppose that both desktops are shooting to someday have enough apps that it is not necessary to mix-and-match quite so much. But in the meantime...
The game makes a connection to one (or more) other games via UDP. UDP is ideal because it doesn't guarentee that the packets will arrive in order, or even that they will arrive at all - but it does guarentee that any packet that arrives will be intact and unaltered.
The games need to time sync to each other, by sending "here's what time it is" messages to each other and then recording how long the trip took - much like ping.
Update packets are sent whenever an object changes. You can do this one of two ways. One is to explictly setting a "changed" flag on the object, and then at the end of the update loop check to see if that flag is set, and if so transmit an update packet. The second is to have a "compare" and a "copy" function for all game objects; you can create a copy of the object at the beginning of the pulse, and then compare it to the current one at the end of the pulse. If they are different, transmit the update packet.
Update packets must not rely on each other. They must contain all pertinent information about the object. Typically that will include its current position, its current velocity (vector of motion), animation state, hitpoints, and so forth.
The timestamp on received update packets should be compared to the most recently received packet for the object that it applies to. If it is older, discard it. (Remember, UDP can deliver out of order.)
The game uses data about the objects' motion and state to continue to animate the object moving even inbetween packets -sometimes called "dead reckoning." When an update packet is received that shows the object in a slightly different position, the object should interopolate (sometimes known as "lerping" in the industry) to its new position so that it does not appear to pop.
The only remaining issue is what we call "who is right?" If one game claims that a ship blew up because it was hit by shot, and another game claims that the ship dodged at the last minute, who is right? If the game is client-server, the answer is easy: the server is always right. In fact, clients shouldn't even display "big" events like a ship blowing up until it has confirmation from the server that that is what really happened. (Sometimes it's a good idea to use "hint" animations - if the client expects that a ship has been hit and is going to explode, but hasn't received confirmation from the server yet, you might want to show a shower of sparks. Then, if the confirmation is received a moment later, the explosition doesn't seem to be delayed quite so much.)
In peer-to-peer, things get much tougher. In some cases one of the peers simply declares itself a server, in which case you have the situation above. In true peer-to-peer, it's simply up to the game designers. The most obvious choice is to make each machine responisble for its own position as well as the position of the objects its has created. So the player controlling a given ship has the last say on where that ship was at any given moment.
In some cases, you may find that certain game elements (especially if it is an action game) don't work very well when you have to deal with 100ms or more of delay on network traffic. In that case you may want to remove or change those elements. You should pick a number where represents your "maximum" allowable delay, based on whether your target audience is modem users or not.
Er, as the author of the article, I'm going to have to disagree with your assertation here. Search for the word "install" in Part II and you'll see that I only mention two install complaints: WordPerfect, which we chose not to use anyway; and StarOffice, which installs just fine, it just uses an annoying Windows-style "wizard" instead of a clean rpm install.
Most die-hard Zim fans probably know this, but if you're a fan of a show but not familiar with Jhonen Vasque's other work, you owe it to yourself to get ahold of a copy of Squee and Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. The first is the more accessable and Zim-like; the second is Jhonen's quintisential work, but it is much darker and more philosophical. All his work is available from Slave Labor Graphics. (Avoid Fillerbunny and especially the Bad Art Collection; these are for die-hard fans only.)
I have to admit, I find the attitudes of the people described in this article hard to swallow. I can't imagine life without broadband; I consider it as vital as electricity. $40-$50 is expensive?! No way! If consumer broadband went away, I'd probably give some thought to getting a ~$500/mo T1.
When Northpoint went out of business I was stuck with a modem for about three weeks. It was absolute and total hell; I have no idea how anyone uses the Internet with just a modem.
While I agree that the stuff that's been going on (phone company monopolies, little guys going out of business left and right) are not good for consumers, some broadband is certainly better than no broadband. The situation is not nearly as grim as this article seems to imply.
Rune, Kohan, and SimCity 3000 are a tie. They are all excellent examples of their respective genres, and the Loki ports are fast, stable, and are in no way inferior to the originals.
Alpha Centauri I enjoyed, but in many ways it is just "more of the same" from Sid Meier. More of the same stuff that we love, of course:)
MindRover looks really cool. I've had it sitting on my shelf for a while now, but my preliminary attempts at it found that it was hard to just jump right into the game. Sometime when I have a rainy day to kill reading the manual I plan to dive in...
No - and for good reason. (PayPal does the same trick with their "verified seller" stuff, though obviously it's not quite as rigorous.) Basically, accepting credit cards is a huge liability. Why? Because you can run large amounts on a bunch of credit cards, cash out the account, and then skip the country. People have defrauded cardholders (and ultimately, the acquiring bank, which is who ends up eating it) for millions this way. Banks (and anyone who is going to front the risk of your business running credit cards) need some assurance that you aren't going to defraud them.
It's also good for the purchaser, because if a business is legitimate enough to get a merchant account, you can probably trust them, at least somewhat. There's always the chance of fraud, but a business that accepts credit cards has essentially been pre-screened by the bank for you.
Yes, security is an important issue I didn't even touch on, but which should be a top priority for anyone doing commerce over the open Internet.
Personally, I don't trust large companies like Visa/MC to handle 100% of the security for a task like this. But then, as a former sysadmin and currently an engineer for a payment processor, I'm probably about as paranoid as they come...
PayPal is great for person-to-person transactions, as well as small organizations requesting donations. But for a business of any size, it just doesn't cut it. You need real payment processing, and here's why:
Ease of use. Forcing people to sign up for a paypal account before they purchase from you is a sure way to loose sales.
Professionalism. When someone wants to sell me something via a PayPal payment, I get cold feet. It's not professional, and it makes me wonder about the trustworthiness of the business, especially if it's an item that costs more than $20 or so.
PayPal is vastly more expensive. Last time I checked, they skim something like 5% off your credit card transactions. A good e-commerce merchant account from a real bank should only charge you on the order of 2.5%.
Integration. I suppose this goes with the first point, but as a web designer it's an important one for me...I want to build payment handling into my PHP-generated web page, not send the user to an external site.
The only downside to "real" processing is the barrier of entry. You've got to fill out a bit more paperwork, talk to at least one real human (the banker), and there are some startup fees associated with it. But once you are up and running it quickly will become more economical than paypal, because of the difference in transactions rate (5% vs. 2.5% as mentioned above), not to mention you won't loose sales to people that don't want to sign up with PayPal.
And just as you thought I was posting to get karma...no, you guessed it, it's Shameless Plug(tm) time!
The only Open Source payment processor in the business: TrustCommerce
Mention Slashdot when you sign up for a test account and you'll get a free...um, well nothing, but at least we'll know you're cool.:)
Re:Question
on
KDE 2.2.2
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
If you think that, then you haven't really used KDE. As a person who didn't even start using X until a few years ago (console mode gave me everything I wanted), I know exactly where you are coming from.
Let me tell you a few of the features in KDE that make me vastly more productive, and which I feel crippled without.
Alt-F2 to run programs.
Alt-F2, then type in a URL (eg, slashdot.org) to launch Konquerer, instead of the slow process of clicking on the icon, then clicking in the URL bar, then typing the URL and pressing enter.
Alt-F2, then type "gg:linux" to do a Google search, "dict:pedantic" to look something up in the dictionary, or "fm:tclink" to look up an entry on Freshmeat.
Klipper, for cut-n-paste history. I mean really, how does anyone live without this?
KPrint/KUPS, which makes printer setup a SNAP - something UNIX has needed for a very long time. I just _love_ the ability to print from any application directly to a PDF.
The ability to drag URLs to my desktop, for "quick access" bookmarks.
A dock panel that I can configure by dragging icons around instead of editing configuration files or using some sort of external GUI config tool.
Easy to configure keyboard shortcuts for everything. X Windows (much like the Macintosh) has always been over-reliant on the mouse. KDE can be driven 100% from the keyboard, like Windows - but even better, because you can make hotkeys for actions like Windows minimize. (I use Alt-F1.)
File browser - not something I really use, but many people love it. I like to use it for browsing pictures on my digital camera because of the image preview.
KMix, which makes it really easy to adjust sound volume at any time.
Konsole, which has the ability to open multiple terminals inside one window. Switch between them with Alt-LeftArrow and Alt-RightArrow.
The KDE control panel. Just look at it, it's great. What other control panel lets you configure your kernel compilation parameters?
Apps, apps, apps! KOffice is very cool all around (though KPresenter is the only thing that is yet equivilent in features to other office suites). Konquerer for web browsing, KYahoo for chatting, Kreate for burning CDs, KMail for reading mail, Node for reading news, KScheduler for tracking appointments and sending automated reminders, Personal Time Tracker for keeping track of those consulting hours, the list goes on...apps are what the desktop is all about, and KDE has them in spades.
I spent many years using WMs such as CDE, Afterstep (1.0 is the only good version, IMO), WindowMaker, BlackBox, and so forth. I have also used GNOME quite a bit, as well as MacOS, various flavors of Windows, and so on. None of them made me want to give up my console (though in some cases I had to because I was doing web design or something). But with KDE, I don't miss the console at all.
First of all, he keeps blabbing about "thousands of directories under/usr." I don't know about you guys, but on every Red Hat system I've ever used, "ls/usr" produces about 10 directories.
If he's referring to/usr/bin - well, that's just plain silliness. Of course there are binaries (and symlinks to binaries) in there. Does he expect us to have a $PATH that is 25k long?
There are a lot of things that I would change about the filesystem layout, and about Linux/UNIX in general. This is not one of them.
We do this at my company. The web apps are all written in PHP; most of the small "helper" apps are either Perl scripts or bash shell scripts, depending on the size; and the large, complex programs are written in Java. Finally, key server components that require extremely high throughput are coded in pure C in order that they run as fast as possible.
This works well for the reasons stated in the story. However, my main complaint is that getting your development workstation set up such that you can use and debug all of these languages effectively takes a little doing. Things have gotten easier: a few years ago installing JDK's was kind of a pain, but today they come in RPM form which makes it easy. Ditto for PHP.
The other big problem is the context switch required, not only the languages themselves (which I don't find it hard to move between, especially with a good syntax-highlighting editor like vim) but rather the different tools. The Perl debugger is very similar to, but not completely the same as, gdb. So I find myself hitting the wrong keys when I'm switching back and forth between debugging Perl and C. PHP, on the other hand, uses good ol' fashioned "printf" debugging, so no problem there.:)
Mandatory ratings are not a good thing. But that's only because an industry should choose to self-regulate. Ratings are appreciated by more than just parents trying to filter their childrens' entertainment; there are people that prefer to play less violent games, or perhaps would be disturbed by sexual content, or occult symbology (if they were a religious nut or something).
Surely giving the consumer more information can never be a bad thing.
UPN's got a great new strategy. Since they couldn't come up with a decent show besides Star Trek (anyone remember "Homeboys in Space" or "The Watcher" starring Sir Mix-A-Lot?), they just bought a bunch of other popular shows - Buffy, Roswell, Senfield reruns, and Iron Chef.
Watch out for those rising stars! Although it wasn't a "pure" arts flick, Crouching Tiger: Hidden Dragon featured Ziyi Zhang, who at 20 years old already has moves that put Chan & Li to shame. The battle between Michelle Yeoh and Ziyi Zhang at the end of CT:HD was probably the best martial arts sequence I've ever seen, and yeah, I've seen pretty much every HK flick of any signifigance.
Let's not worry about hanging onto the past, but instead look towards the future. There will never be another Bruce Lee, but you know what? That's okay. Watch his movies if you want to see him, watch new stars if you want to see new movies.
Slashdot Mirror
Christopher Lawrence
Sandra Collins
Nicholas Bennsion
Adam Wiggins (shameless plug)
Agreed. The article mentions that e-commerce sites, due to whiz-bang view cart/checkout features, are often the least likely to work. These tend to be very receptive to your complaints, if you email them and say, "Hi, I'd like to buy your product, but I can't - you don't support my browser!"
I did this for an online recordstore once, and the webmaster wrote back to apologize, and request that I use IE in the meantime. I wrote him back to explain that MS doesn't make IE for my platform, and he replied to that rather shocked, "What platform is that?!" I gave him a quick Linux spiel.
What do you know - a few months later their site is redesigned, works fine with Konqueror, and no "You must be using IE" warnings to be found!
MUDs and other text adventure games have been playable, unmodified, by any blind person with some text-to-speach software and a braile keyboard. In fact, there was a blind player on AnotherMUD a few years ago. The "blindness" spell was quite common in that game. Whenever someone managed to successfully cast the spell on your character, you would see:
:)
"You are blind."
Every time this happened to the blind fellow, he would shout: "'You are blind.' Well, duh!"
This is big news, for two reasons:
1. Logic Audio is quickly becoming one of the most used pro audio sequencers. I'm not sure where it stands next to Cubase and Protools (the other two big names), but it has gained a lot of market share lately.
2. We've been waiting for the OS X version of Logic for over a year now. This damn well better mean that it come out really soon, otherwise Apple owns a company that only creates MacOS 9 software!
http://people.trustcommerce.com/~adam/office.ht
http://trustcommerce.com/security.html
Speaking as someone who works in the credit card processing industry, this isn't too shocking. One merchant accepting payments on behalf of another is known as "factoring" and is generally a no-no, both legally and in terms of Visa/MC regulations. PayPal is a special case; how they negotiated their current deal, I'm not sure. Really good lawyers, I guess.
Here's the reason why: merchant account providers are taking on risk on behalf ot the merchant. Because credit cards provide complete safety for the consumer (via chargebacks), if a merchant runs a bunch of charges one day, cashes out the bank account, and skips town, it's the card acquirer (or possibly the issuer) that are left with the responsibility to pay off the fraudulent charges to the consumer. By using a "proxy" merchant, ie factoring, they distance themselves from the consumer and make it that much easier to get away with fraud at this level.
That's excellent, both for Red Hat's continued success, and the greater acceptance of Open Source / Free Software. As geeks we like to think that the best technology will prevail, but in truth it's all about your marketing and salesmanship. I'd like to think that TrustCommerce is experience so much success due to the cool technologies that we have developed, but I know that it's really our sales staff that brings in the green. (In fact, we have a ratio around 90% of sales to other staff as well...)
Good for Red Hat. I hope that they can pull through this recession intact; and I think they will, because they seem to understand the basic premises of business.
Here at the office, we are finding that a lot of GNOME apps are far more usable for day to day tasks. Most of our employees are moving to Evolution - they absolutely love the calendar, task lists, and contacts. (I only use the email portion, myself.) Also, Galeon is a faster and stabler browser than Konqueror. But as a desktop, GNOME just won't cut it for production use. (Two of my coworkers switched to Ximian GNOME for a few weeks, and declared it practically unusable.) So we're definitely going to stick with KDE as the environment now, but for apps...Gnumeric, Evolution, and Galeon are all better than their KDE equivilents.
Some better interoperation (cut-n-paste, default browser & mail clients, themes) would really make our lives a whole lot easier. In the meantime we will hobble by.
I suppose that both desktops are shooting to someday have enough apps that it is not necessary to mix-and-match quite so much. But in the meantime...
The only remaining issue is what we call "who is right?" If one game claims that a ship blew up because it was hit by shot, and another game claims that the ship dodged at the last minute, who is right? If the game is client-server, the answer is easy: the server is always right. In fact, clients shouldn't even display "big" events like a ship blowing up until it has confirmation from the server that that is what really happened. (Sometimes it's a good idea to use "hint" animations - if the client expects that a ship has been hit and is going to explode, but hasn't received confirmation from the server yet, you might want to show a shower of sparks. Then, if the confirmation is received a moment later, the explosition doesn't seem to be delayed quite so much.)
In peer-to-peer, things get much tougher. In some cases one of the peers simply declares itself a server, in which case you have the situation above. In true peer-to-peer, it's simply up to the game designers. The most obvious choice is to make each machine responisble for its own position as well as the position of the objects its has created. So the player controlling a given ship has the last say on where that ship was at any given moment.
In some cases, you may find that certain game elements (especially if it is an action game) don't work very well when you have to deal with 100ms or more of delay on network traffic. In that case you may want to remove or change those elements. You should pick a number where represents your "maximum" allowable delay, based on whether your target audience is modem users or not.
Here's the link:
http://people.trustcommerce.com/~adam/office.html
Er, as the author of the article, I'm going to have to disagree with your assertation here. Search for the word "install" in Part II and you'll see that I only mention two install complaints: WordPerfect, which we chose not to use anyway; and StarOffice, which installs just fine, it just uses an annoying Windows-style "wizard" instead of a clean rpm install.
Most die-hard Zim fans probably know this, but if you're a fan of a show but not familiar with Jhonen Vasque's other work, you owe it to yourself to get ahold of a copy of Squee and Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. The first is the more accessable and Zim-like; the second is Jhonen's quintisential work, but it is much darker and more philosophical. All his work is available from Slave Labor Graphics. (Avoid Fillerbunny and especially the Bad Art Collection; these are for die-hard fans only.)
More info:
Link
Link
Link
Link
I have to admit, I find the attitudes of the people described in this article hard to swallow. I can't imagine life without broadband; I consider it as vital as electricity. $40-$50 is expensive?! No way! If consumer broadband went away, I'd probably give some thought to getting a ~$500/mo T1.
When Northpoint went out of business I was stuck with a modem for about three weeks. It was absolute and total hell; I have no idea how anyone uses the Internet with just a modem.
While I agree that the stuff that's been going on (phone company monopolies, little guys going out of business left and right) are not good for consumers, some broadband is certainly better than no broadband. The situation is not nearly as grim as this article seems to imply.
I think what you are looking for is a payment processor which supports recurring billing as well as open source client APIs?
</plug>
Rune, Kohan, and SimCity 3000 are a tie. They are all excellent examples of their respective genres, and the Loki ports are fast, stable, and are in no way inferior to the originals.
:)
Alpha Centauri I enjoyed, but in many ways it is just "more of the same" from Sid Meier. More of the same stuff that we love, of course
MindRover looks really cool. I've had it sitting on my shelf for a while now, but my preliminary attempts at it found that it was hard to just jump right into the game. Sometime when I have a rainy day to kill reading the manual I plan to dive in...
No - and for good reason. (PayPal does the same trick with their "verified seller" stuff, though obviously it's not quite as rigorous.) Basically, accepting credit cards is a huge liability. Why? Because you can run large amounts on a bunch of credit cards, cash out the account, and then skip the country. People have defrauded cardholders (and ultimately, the acquiring bank, which is who ends up eating it) for millions this way. Banks (and anyone who is going to front the risk of your business running credit cards) need some assurance that you aren't going to defraud them.
It's also good for the purchaser, because if a business is legitimate enough to get a merchant account, you can probably trust them, at least somewhat. There's always the chance of fraud, but a business that accepts credit cards has essentially been pre-screened by the bank for you.
Yes, security is an important issue I didn't even touch on, but which should be a top priority for anyone doing commerce over the open Internet.
Personally, I don't trust large companies like Visa/MC to handle 100% of the security for a task like this. But then, as a former sysadmin and currently an engineer for a payment processor, I'm probably about as paranoid as they come...
The only downside to "real" processing is the barrier of entry. You've got to fill out a bit more paperwork, talk to at least one real human (the banker), and there are some startup fees associated with it. But once you are up and running it quickly will become more economical than paypal, because of the difference in transactions rate (5% vs. 2.5% as mentioned above), not to mention you won't loose sales to people that don't want to sign up with PayPal.
And just as you thought I was posting to get karma...no, you guessed it, it's Shameless Plug(tm) time!
The only Open Source payment processor in the business: TrustCommerce
Mention Slashdot when you sign up for a test account and you'll get a free...um, well nothing, but at least we'll know you're cool.
Let me tell you a few of the features in KDE that make me vastly more productive, and which I feel crippled without.
I spent many years using WMs such as CDE, Afterstep (1.0 is the only good version, IMO), WindowMaker, BlackBox, and so forth. I have also used GNOME quite a bit, as well as MacOS, various flavors of Windows, and so on. None of them made me want to give up my console (though in some cases I had to because I was doing web design or something). But with KDE, I don't miss the console at all.
First of all, he keeps blabbing about "thousands of directories under /usr." I don't know about you guys, but on every Red Hat system I've ever used, "ls /usr" produces about 10 directories.
/usr/bin - well, that's just plain silliness. Of course there are binaries (and symlinks to binaries) in there. Does he expect us to have a $PATH that is 25k long?
If he's referring to
There are a lot of things that I would change about the filesystem layout, and about Linux/UNIX in general. This is not one of them.
We do this at my company. The web apps are all written in PHP; most of the small "helper" apps are either Perl scripts or bash shell scripts, depending on the size; and the large, complex programs are written in Java. Finally, key server components that require extremely high throughput are coded in pure C in order that they run as fast as possible.
:)
This works well for the reasons stated in the story. However, my main complaint is that getting your development workstation set up such that you can use and debug all of these languages effectively takes a little doing. Things have gotten easier: a few years ago installing JDK's was kind of a pain, but today they come in RPM form which makes it easy. Ditto for PHP.
The other big problem is the context switch required, not only the languages themselves (which I don't find it hard to move between, especially with a good syntax-highlighting editor like vim) but rather the different tools. The Perl debugger is very similar to, but not completely the same as, gdb. So I find myself hitting the wrong keys when I'm switching back and forth between debugging Perl and C. PHP, on the other hand, uses good ol' fashioned "printf" debugging, so no problem there.
Mandatory ratings are not a good thing. But that's only because an industry should choose to self-regulate. Ratings are appreciated by more than just parents trying to filter their childrens' entertainment; there are people that prefer to play less violent games, or perhaps would be disturbed by sexual content, or occult symbology (if they were a religious nut or something).
Surely giving the consumer more information can never be a bad thing.
UPN's got a great new strategy. Since they couldn't come up with a decent show besides Star Trek (anyone remember "Homeboys in Space" or "The Watcher" starring Sir Mix-A-Lot?), they just bought a bunch of other popular shows - Buffy, Roswell, Senfield reruns, and Iron Chef.
Watch out for those rising stars! Although it wasn't a "pure" arts flick, Crouching Tiger: Hidden Dragon featured Ziyi Zhang, who at 20 years old already has moves that put Chan & Li to shame. The battle between Michelle Yeoh and Ziyi Zhang at the end of CT:HD was probably the best martial arts sequence I've ever seen, and yeah, I've seen pretty much every HK flick of any signifigance.
Let's not worry about hanging onto the past, but instead look towards the future. There will never be another Bruce Lee, but you know what? That's okay. Watch his movies if you want to see him, watch new stars if you want to see new movies.