The public library in my town had a version of The Cage on VHS. It used the original B&W footage from the original pilot and interspersed it with the full-color versions used in The Menagerie. What I don't understand is, if the original pilot was shot on color film, why the whole damn thing wasn't in color -- you wouldn't dare copy the color original to a B&W film somehow and then give *that* to the editors to work on, would you?
Anyway, wandering off topic... But yes, The Cage was the unaired pilot; The Menagerie became the reel that eventually got the series off the drawing board and on to the small screen.
I appreciate that rant wholly. I actually felt a flash of anger, because, dumbass that I am, brain fried by thesis in progress, I expected this to, you know, be a site where I could go download a fucking movie. Oh emusic.com you've spoiled me so, advertising content that you make available to anyone who can play an MP3 file. Look at me carrying that expectation that my Xubuntu box and iBook will be allow me to avail myself of this new service.
But no. Windows XP only, it says. Well, screw that.
Someday I'll learn that nobody in the RIAA/MPAA extortium wants to sell me anything anyway.
For now, though, I'll just laugh heartily that the Office Space DVD version is available used, including shipping, for less than the IdiotBox version and feel a little smug for noticing that. Ha!
Well yeah, but still -- what the hell? They're actually touting "reduced storage costs" as a bonus? Storage cost is incremental with the size of the drives you buy, not the amount of stuff you store on those drives, and I can't believe anyone anywhere has their storage equipment needs determined in any significant way by the size of Office documents*. That doesn't seem like a very strong claim.
-----------
* -- Find a way to shrink pr0n storage by 75% and you may have something, though.
For some reason, my brain has escape-character backslash stored in a completely different way than file-path-whatever BS backslash. I literally didn't even think of them as the same character until I read the last line of your comment.
Now just one second. It started because of DOS conventions, not Windows. Not spekaing in defense of Windows, of course, because that would hurt my karma. But seriously, ever used DOS? E.g. command prompt:
c:\>
And path names:
c:\windows\pr0n\ascii\
Having used Linux / BSD for a gazillion years now, it feels like I'm reaching up to Maine in order to type those paths. Yay frontslash!
It's interesting to note that "open source" is now a verb. And we can be sure of that because the poster has inflected it for tense.
The part of the compound that seems most verbal to me is "open" -- yet they don't refer to it as "opened source" -- which ostensibly refers to source (code) which has undergone an event of opening. Instead, the whole kit and kaboodle has been verbalized. Or, alternatively, "source" is being inflected as a verb on its own, becoming past tense "sourced", leaving "open" as... ? An adverbial? Must be, because the opposite of "open sourced" would be "closed sourced", right? So the preceding modifier controls the manner of sourcing, either in the opening or closing direction. Hm. What a conundrum:)
Enough with all the bitching about how Real is an awful software company (they are) and how horrible their windows product is (it is) and how their Mac program looks all goofy in OS X (it does).
The fact remains that if I want to listen to a web stream, and the content provider is hellbent on using a proprietary encoding mechanism for that distribution -- which they usually are -- if I'm running any Linux distro, the only option I have, other than using the contraband w32codecs package, is to use RealPlayer.
And for as bad as people want to make their software out to be, I think the criticisms that can be directed at the GTK+ based package for Linux are really few and far between. They've released their decoder to Linux, and as a Linux user, I can take full advantage of their offerings. This is something that neither Microsoft nor Apple seem to have on their to-do list, and so, as a user of all three (Win / Mac / Linux) systems, I say "fuck it". I listen to RealPlayer streams only anymore, because it's the only system through which I can legally do it on every computer I use.
I agree, they've done some crappy stuff in their past; their Windows client is a wreck and the Mac one isn't much better; and sure, the ridiculous amount of extra software they want you to install is unacceptable. But this misses a key point which should be of primary concern to many in the Slashdot community, among others -- I can legally use it in Linux.
Grandparent refers to the smoke-and-mirrors story of the other day where Mac afficionados were ditching their proprietary locked-down DRM'd don't-touch-my-kernel-asshole OSes for Ubuntu.
In the interest of full disclosure, I run Ubuntu on my main box and have an iBook as a portable. Seriously.
Both formats are mechanically compatible with each other and with DVD. This is a huge difference from the VHS/Beta situation.
Point taken, but the author doesn't address this issue in the article. All the article says is that the DVD form factor + quality + nonlinearity were killer upgrades over videocassette. DVD++ only has one of those "upgrade" points, ergo it's a less compelling sell to Average Joe.
It sounds like for all of these regressions enabling the "ati" driver in xorg.conf will fix the major issues. Of course, the problem then is that you're running the ati driver, not the fglrx driver, which actually comes from ATI. (Confusing as hell, I know).
You should see something like this in/etc/X11/xorg.conf
Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Technologies, Inc. Radeon RV250 If [Radeon 9000 Pro]"
Driver "fglrx"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0" EndSection
If you first do (to make a backup of the xorg.conf file*)
and then use your favorite text editor (with sudo) to change where it says "fglrx" to "ati" (make sure you DO have the quotes in there), then you should be running off the ATI driver which installs by default in Ubuntu.
Until such time as ATI gets their damn fglrx drivers in line and fixes that regression, it seems like using the open source driver is the easiest alternative.
----------
* - Sorry if this is totally pedantic, but you can reverse the effects of any bad edits you make to xorg.conf by the following command:
Re:Good for desktops, bad for certain laptops.
on
Ubuntu 6.06 Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
Actually, it's bad for desktops, too. R2x0 chips on the desktop were affected in a different way when using the fglrx driver. I'm amazed at how fuX0r3d the ATI driver set became, and how quickly it went to being a mess.
FWIW, this isn't just mindless bitching on my part; I'm subscribed to the relevant bugs and have confirmed not only a bug but also a fix (to the fglrx bug in question).
These bugs are grave enough that I have no doubt the Ubuntu folks, with our help, will work on getting the regressions fixed.
I spent many years of therapy trying to get that Sesame Street (yes, it was Sesame Street) song out of my head when I used to go to sleep every night. Now, it's going to come back to me, I'm going to go apeshit from lack of sleep, and kill 20 people.
I shit you not, I had that song rattling around in my head while reading this article. I didn't have the slightest idea why. But yet I was sure it was actually in a song.
Evidently my mind-wipe was much more effective than yours. Regardless, I'm sure we'll both be on a zombie-like brain eating spree tonight on account of the disaster which asshole-grandparent hath wrough.
Don't forget bands like The Pixies, Bad Religion, Black Flag, Camper Van Beethoven, Eagles of Deathmetal, Guided by Voices, M.I.A., Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Kinks... I could go on and on.
Certainly not to overlook those bands. Especially The Kinks. I don't know where this idea that non-DRMd music is just from obscure bands nobody's heard of or would want to listen to. Methinks the RIAA is none to happy to have that sentiment perpetuated.
Another nice feature is that they offer a free song every day that you can download, to help you find new music.
Oh, I didn't know that. I just noticed that there are occasionally free sampler mixes and whatnot. Time to go check it out -- thanks for the tip!
I've never paid for a tune from iTunes -- and since discovering emusic.com, I probably never will.
Everyone else in the thread has already said it, but I just wanted to add to the chorus of people urging emusic virgins to check the service out.
In addition to picking up new music from old favorites like Sufjan Stevens, The Decemberists, and The New Pornographers, their insightful reviews and helpful, music-lover-friendly emails have led me to find a bunch of new music I love. Calexico, Tarkio, Gomez.. A bunch of random electronic tracks... Oh, and a bunch of B-3 jazz / blues, like Tony Monaco, Jimmy Smith, Joey DeFrancesco, et al.
Seriously, it's great. It's like Christmas every month when the downloads renew and I can go grab a couple more albums. I dig it:)
I no longer admin Windows boxes that aren't in a major university environment where I unofficially do support work because I enjoy it, not because it's in my job description. So I run whatever the hell AV they tell me to on the Windows boxes on campus.
However, when I did do official or unofficial admin work / computer consulting, not only did I use AVG, but my family did (and still does and digs it) and the same with many of my clients. Some even liked AVG so much they actually paid for the upgrade to the professional version -- despite using it in a SOHO setting where I think the license is vague as to whether or not you are requried to run a paid version.
As an OT type thing -- does anyone know if there's any previous standard for the use of "free for private, in-home use" when those computers are SOHO machines? In the letter of the license, I'd say it's legal, but I'm not sure it's in the spirit of the license.
We were in a similar situation as you, but probably wound up growing a bit too big for our britches, and wound up getting (financially) over our heads, thinking we could grow the business better with a physical location, advertising, etc. It was a risk, it didn't work. Eh.
Best of luck to you in your endeavors as well. I have no interest anymore in maintaining other people's computers, so I quit building altogether for people other than immediate family. For those of us who "get it", your computers are most definitely the better pieces. Hopefully you'll have better luck than we did in helping people "get it":) The best to you!
To sister comments, the above post isn't about you building your own system because you enjoy it. And honestly, kids, the value-added reseller game isn't about selling quality parts anymore, either.
This isn't a scandal on Dell's part; they've made their bed (creating the idea that a low- to mid-range computer should be as cheap as you can get them from Dell), and now they're turning tricks in it (whoring their cheap low- to mid-range computers to VARs), because it makes sense for them (they sell more computers) and it makes sense for the VARs themselves (try building a low- to mid-range computer and adding 15% margin -- you just can't sell 'em).
It's Dell's shifting perceptions that computers, which used to be considered reasonably priced up in the $1200 - $2000 range down to where an $800 computer is exhorbitant for a lot of people.
YES -- you can make a computer yourself and enjoy it. I've built my own for years now.
YES -- you can build out of higher-quality components as a DIY job.
HELL NO can you sell for a satistfactory profit, to families and SOHOs, computers which Dell moves to market for under $600- $800.
So they sell VARs (of which I used to co-own one) the same crap they sell everyone else, the VARs can tweak or customize if they want, the VARs sell the same piece of crap to the customer *and* the VARs are backed by the 1 year warranty Dell sells by default.
How in the world, with a situation like that, could you not sell Dells as a VAR?
"Word processing and typesetting are separate tasks. If you don't understand that, and do typesetting decisions while you're doing word processing, you end up in a completely wrong place."
You know, every damn time I sit down to fix a nice, rich malware infestation anymore, I think to myself "Should I just suggest we wipe the drive and move along?"...
And the answer is really simple: Windows simply refuses to make it easy to partition a drive so that data is over THERE ---> and only the OS is on this parition. Yes, I know you can do it. But you try explaining to home users who are terrified of any sort of change on their computer that their documents are on the D: drive. And no, they don't have a new hard drive. And yes, it's a Good Thing to have it that way. Grrrar.
Perhaps the simplest (to implement on their end) improvement MS could make to Vista is just to have it ask if you want user files and OS files on the same paritition or different ones.
Then the easy-to-use, always answer for "can you remove this spyware" is "Yes, and I can do it cheap if you're willing to reinstall your software CDs yourself."
And we have the New Horizons mission on its way to Pluto. Think about how cool that is! No human being today can tell you what the surface of Pluto looks like. Aren't you curious? I am! One day soon, thanks to NASA, we'll know.
Allow me to paraphrase Lewis Black on this:
The probe is expected to reach Pluto in just nine short years. NINE YEARS! I can't wait that long! I need to know what's happening on Pluto NOW!
Slashdot Mirror
The public library in my town had a version of The Cage on VHS. It used the original B&W footage from the original pilot and interspersed it with the full-color versions used in The Menagerie. What I don't understand is, if the original pilot was shot on color film, why the whole damn thing wasn't in color -- you wouldn't dare copy the color original to a B&W film somehow and then give *that* to the editors to work on, would you?
Anyway, wandering off topic... But yes, The Cage was the unaired pilot; The Menagerie became the reel that eventually got the series off the drawing board and on to the small screen.
I appreciate that rant wholly. I actually felt a flash of anger, because, dumbass that I am, brain fried by thesis in progress, I expected this to, you know, be a site where I could go download a fucking movie. Oh emusic.com you've spoiled me so, advertising content that you make available to anyone who can play an MP3 file. Look at me carrying that expectation that my Xubuntu box and iBook will be allow me to avail myself of this new service.
But no. Windows XP only, it says. Well, screw that.
Someday I'll learn that nobody in the RIAA/MPAA extortium wants to sell me anything anyway.
For now, though, I'll just laugh heartily that the Office Space DVD version is available used, including shipping, for less than the IdiotBox version and feel a little smug for noticing that. Ha!
Well yeah, but still -- what the hell? They're actually touting "reduced storage costs" as a bonus? Storage cost is incremental with the size of the drives you buy, not the amount of stuff you store on those drives, and I can't believe anyone anywhere has their storage equipment needs determined in any significant way by the size of Office documents*. That doesn't seem like a very strong claim.
-----------
* -- Find a way to shrink pr0n storage by 75% and you may have something, though.
For some reason, my brain has escape-character backslash stored in a completely different way than file-path-whatever BS backslash. I literally didn't even think of them as the same character until I read the last line of your comment.
Bizarre.
Now just one second. It started because of DOS conventions, not Windows. Not spekaing in defense of Windows, of course, because that would hurt my karma. But seriously, ever used DOS? E.g. command prompt:
c:\>
And path names:
c:\windows\pr0n\ascii\
Having used Linux / BSD for a gazillion years now, it feels like I'm reaching up to Maine in order to type those paths. Yay frontslash!
It's interesting to note that "open source" is now a verb. And we can be sure of that because the poster has inflected it for tense.
... ? An adverbial? Must be, because the opposite of "open sourced" would be "closed sourced", right? So the preceding modifier controls the manner of sourcing, either in the opening or closing direction. Hm. What a conundrum :)
The part of the compound that seems most verbal to me is "open" -- yet they don't refer to it as "opened source" -- which ostensibly refers to source (code) which has undergone an event of opening. Instead, the whole kit and kaboodle has been verbalized. Or, alternatively, "source" is being inflected as a verb on its own, becoming past tense "sourced", leaving "open" as
Enough with all the bitching about how Real is an awful software company (they are) and how horrible their windows product is (it is) and how their Mac program looks all goofy in OS X (it does).
The fact remains that if I want to listen to a web stream, and the content provider is hellbent on using a proprietary encoding mechanism for that distribution -- which they usually are -- if I'm running any Linux distro, the only option I have, other than using the contraband w32codecs package, is to use RealPlayer.
And for as bad as people want to make their software out to be, I think the criticisms that can be directed at the GTK+ based package for Linux are really few and far between. They've released their decoder to Linux, and as a Linux user, I can take full advantage of their offerings. This is something that neither Microsoft nor Apple seem to have on their to-do list, and so, as a user of all three (Win / Mac / Linux) systems, I say "fuck it". I listen to RealPlayer streams only anymore, because it's the only system through which I can legally do it on every computer I use.
I agree, they've done some crappy stuff in their past; their Windows client is a wreck and the Mac one isn't much better; and sure, the ridiculous amount of extra software they want you to install is unacceptable. But this misses a key point which should be of primary concern to many in the Slashdot community, among others -- I can legally use it in Linux.
Grandparent refers to the smoke-and-mirrors story of the other day where Mac afficionados were ditching their proprietary locked-down DRM'd don't-touch-my-kernel-asshole OSes for Ubuntu.
In the interest of full disclosure, I run Ubuntu on my main box and have an iBook as a portable. Seriously.
Point taken, but the author doesn't address this issue in the article. All the article says is that the DVD form factor + quality + nonlinearity were killer upgrades over videocassette. DVD++ only has one of those "upgrade" points, ergo it's a less compelling sell to Average Joe.
Yeah, in the drug-dealer-esque "Hey, kid, want some candy" kind of way, I guess you could say it's good marketing
Case-in-point, I guess :)
Buddy, I've got news for you: That's not Slashdot culture, that's American culture. Sadly.
It sounds like for all of these regressions enabling the "ati" driver in xorg.conf will fix the major issues. Of course, the problem then is that you're running the ati driver, not the fglrx driver, which actually comes from ATI. (Confusing as hell, I know).
You should see something like this in
Until such time as ATI gets their damn fglrx drivers in line and fixes that regression, it seems like using the open source driver is the easiest alternative.
----------
* - Sorry if this is totally pedantic, but you can reverse the effects of any bad edits you make to xorg.conf by the following command:
Actually, it's bad for desktops, too. R2x0 chips on the desktop were affected in a different way when using the fglrx driver. I'm amazed at how fuX0r3d the ATI driver set became, and how quickly it went to being a mess.
FWIW, this isn't just mindless bitching on my part; I'm subscribed to the relevant bugs and have confirmed not only a bug but also a fix (to the fglrx bug in question).
These bugs are grave enough that I have no doubt the Ubuntu folks, with our help, will work on getting the regressions fixed.
I shit you not, I had that song rattling around in my head while reading this article. I didn't have the slightest idea why. But yet I was sure it was actually in a song.
Evidently my mind-wipe was much more effective than yours. Regardless, I'm sure we'll both be on a zombie-like brain eating spree tonight on account of the disaster which asshole-grandparent hath wrough.
Certainly not to overlook those bands. Especially The Kinks. I don't know where this idea that non-DRMd music is just from obscure bands nobody's heard of or would want to listen to. Methinks the RIAA is none to happy to have that sentiment perpetuated.
Oh, I didn't know that. I just noticed that there are occasionally free sampler mixes and whatnot. Time to go check it out -- thanks for the tip!
I've never paid for a tune from iTunes -- and since discovering emusic.com, I probably never will.
:)
Everyone else in the thread has already said it, but I just wanted to add to the chorus of people urging emusic virgins to check the service out.
In addition to picking up new music from old favorites like Sufjan Stevens, The Decemberists, and The New Pornographers, their insightful reviews and helpful, music-lover-friendly emails have led me to find a bunch of new music I love. Calexico, Tarkio, Gomez.. A bunch of random electronic tracks... Oh, and a bunch of B-3 jazz / blues, like Tony Monaco, Jimmy Smith, Joey DeFrancesco, et al.
Seriously, it's great. It's like Christmas every month when the downloads renew and I can go grab a couple more albums. I dig it
I no longer admin Windows boxes that aren't in a major university environment where I unofficially do support work because I enjoy it, not because it's in my job description. So I run whatever the hell AV they tell me to on the Windows boxes on campus.
However, when I did do official or unofficial admin work / computer consulting, not only did I use AVG, but my family did (and still does and digs it) and the same with many of my clients. Some even liked AVG so much they actually paid for the upgrade to the professional version -- despite using it in a SOHO setting where I think the license is vague as to whether or not you are requried to run a paid version.
As an OT type thing -- does anyone know if there's any previous standard for the use of "free for private, in-home use" when those computers are SOHO machines? In the letter of the license, I'd say it's legal, but I'm not sure it's in the spirit of the license.
We were in a similar situation as you, but probably wound up growing a bit too big for our britches, and wound up getting (financially) over our heads, thinking we could grow the business better with a physical location, advertising, etc. It was a risk, it didn't work. Eh.
:) The best to you!
Best of luck to you in your endeavors as well. I have no interest anymore in maintaining other people's computers, so I quit building altogether for people other than immediate family. For those of us who "get it", your computers are most definitely the better pieces. Hopefully you'll have better luck than we did in helping people "get it"
To sister comments, the above post isn't about you building your own system because you enjoy it. And honestly, kids, the value-added reseller game isn't about selling quality parts anymore, either.
This isn't a scandal on Dell's part; they've made their bed (creating the idea that a low- to mid-range computer should be as cheap as you can get them from Dell), and now they're turning tricks in it (whoring their cheap low- to mid-range computers to VARs), because it makes sense for them (they sell more computers) and it makes sense for the VARs themselves (try building a low- to mid-range computer and adding 15% margin -- you just can't sell 'em).
It's Dell's shifting perceptions that computers, which used to be considered reasonably priced up in the $1200 - $2000 range down to where an $800 computer is exhorbitant for a lot of people.
YES -- you can make a computer yourself and enjoy it. I've built my own for years now.
YES -- you can build out of higher-quality components as a DIY job.
HELL NO can you sell for a satistfactory profit, to families and SOHOs, computers which Dell moves to market for under $600- $800.
So they sell VARs (of which I used to co-own one) the same crap they sell everyone else, the VARs can tweak or customize if they want, the VARs sell the same piece of crap to the customer *and* the VARs are backed by the 1 year warranty Dell sells by default.
How in the world, with a situation like that, could you not sell Dells as a VAR?
"Macs are for fags"
Oh, that explains it.
*returns to editing in iMovie*
"Word processing and typesetting are separate tasks. If you don't understand that, and do typesetting decisions while you're doing word processing, you end up in a completely wrong place."
Jeez, dude. You sound just like the LaTeX manual.
Snap! I just wanted to let you know you made me laugh. Hard.
You know, every damn time I sit down to fix a nice, rich malware infestation anymore, I think to myself "Should I just suggest we wipe the drive and move along?"...
And the answer is really simple: Windows simply refuses to make it easy to partition a drive so that data is over THERE ---> and only the OS is on this parition. Yes, I know you can do it. But you try explaining to home users who are terrified of any sort of change on their computer that their documents are on the D: drive. And no, they don't have a new hard drive. And yes, it's a Good Thing to have it that way. Grrrar.
Perhaps the simplest (to implement on their end) improvement MS could make to Vista is just to have it ask if you want user files and OS files on the same paritition or different ones.
Then the easy-to-use, always answer for "can you remove this spyware" is "Yes, and I can do it cheap if you're willing to reinstall your software CDs yourself."
Allow me to paraphrase Lewis Black on this:
The probe is expected to reach Pluto in just nine short years. NINE YEARS! I can't wait that long! I need to know what's happening on Pluto NOW!