but who is paying, and will be paying, for the commercial software? If I'm hearing you correctly, you're in a public (or private, it doesn't really matter in the long run) school system. I know that I don't want tax dollars spent on entertainment when most school systems lack proper education. People won't like that. If it's a private school, you might be asking for some trouble - what happens when a board member (who possibly paid to be there) finds out? You lose your job.
Sorry if this has been mentioned, I didn't see it anywhere.
As someone involved in many different activities, do you have cohesive social groups? That is, do the people from, say, your motorcycle-riding friends develop/use linux as well? (Or does your wife know about your dirty little secret?:P) I'm interested in knowing what your social ties are, being as it seems you are a fairly active individual.
If such a thing were to ever run itself into existence, it would turn MS into a "Defense Contractor". What I find even more interesting is the contrast between MS and other defense contractors. While the current stock of old school defense contractors essentially work together, MS won't work with anyone - they're like the bully on the playground, squashing any competition that comes their way. MS is so big they don't -have- to work with anyone.
Another interesting thing: the defense industry intentionally keeps prices high, because none of them are really big enough to provided for the demands of the gov't of themselves, and thus they work together. MS doesn't have to.
Granted, this isn't a prefect comparission, but it I believe it helps put things in perspective over MS's monopoly - like anyone doubts it's a monopoly and needs reassurance anyway.
Lack of -training-? No, I think it's jsut that there's a lack of skilled drivers. That involves training, but is not the sole factor. We have drivers that are fearful, drivers that do things they shouldn't while driving (eating, talking on the phone, etc.), poor dextrousity, poor eyesight, and such. Training is just a small factor. Probably also a factor, is the ease that exists in getting a license. It shouldn't be as cheap as it is (cheap to renew, yes, after a basic review of continued competence), and the testing procedure shouldn't be as momentary - they should have to drive on, say, an obsticle course in an unfamiliar vehicle (one big cause for accidents), etc...
"Benjamin" is the name of a Biblical character that was part of a large family of 12. He was the only one that stood up for his youngest brother, preventing his other brothers from stoning him to death due to jealousy.
I'm not sure what relation this has to the RIAA and such, but I'm sure you can derive parallels.:)
I really -shouldn't- have to mention that it's quite plauseable for the persion you flamed to have simply missed tapping the "o" key a second time, transforming "to" into "too". I won't even begin to mention how extensive your hypocricy is - just read through this little post of yours that I am replying to, and find even more mistakes for yourself.
Re: This Guy Is Directing "Terminator 3"...
on
Review: U-571
·
· Score: 2
*cough* It's a Terminator film, dumbass! Have you even seen the first two? Let's see. The first one stars... Arnold "I'll be back" Swartzenager, and the second one stars... yes, Arnold. Since when could Arnold act? He was a body builder. A female model would be -perfect-.
... universe, or possibly not known, is that the story telling perspective is not from the point of view of the humans such as Luke, Leah, Anakin, or the aliens, Yoda, Chewie, etc. They're told from the perspective of the droids, plain and simple. That has always been Lucas's intention. I heard/read/saw an interview or something along those lines (I forget, I'm sorry) where he mentioned this explicitly. The droids are what make the real framework of the story - their antics make the movies interesting and fresh. I challenge everyone to go back through the Trilogy (and Ep2, really) and mentally remove the schenes where R2 and 3PO are present. The films are drastically lacking any sort of entertainment value. They're almost boring. The droids perform -so many- useful tasks in the films. Paticular emphasis on A New Hope and Clones, I feel. Notice how the plot didn't really start picking up until the droids started having a more active role. (Coincidence, but still, ironic coincidence. Also, I'm not sure of this, but I think that Lucas almost named the movie Droids initially, but picked Star Wars instead. Watch "The Making of Star Wars" - the majority of talk was about droids, and getting them to work properly, etc.)
Just think of the film possibilities in the future!
When we consider Final Fantasy: The Movie, and contrast it to what should be viable within just 5 years from now, it boggles the mind.
I, for one, would love to see a digital-quality old western film - but with both the Duke and Eastwood, not just one. Oh, and while we're at it, why not have Arnold Swartsenager (spelled wrong, I'm sure) be a henchman. And hell, throw "Han Solo" (Harrison Ford) in there as a local traveling trader, but in some western chaps.:) We could have Brad Pitt as the main bad guy (we all know he's crazy), and Sean Connery as the local sheriff... oh, and then pick any half dozen supermodels/really effing hot chicks for the town whores/barmaids.
After seeing Ep2 early this morning in the theatre (and being incredibly impressed for the most part - expectations far exceeded. Lucas may live another season!), I'm looking forward to Ep3 as I did Ep1 before I heard anything about it and saw the sucky trailers, etc.:)
As has already been said, The Matrix: Reloaded looks like it might just be another actionish movie w/o the philosophy that helped make The Matrix cool. In my mind, sure, the philosophy and weird scifi made The Matrix cool, but let's face it. It'd have been a pretty weak ending without the revolutionary action at the end. THAT is what made The Matrix totally haul ass. Now that everyone has seen The Matrix almost 100 times each, and there have been dozens of 'immitation' movies, employing the same stop action photography, the effect is somewhat passe, and not all that nifty. I suspect Reloaded will be nothing more than an additional chapter with more action and little real plot development. Like Star Wars Ep1 - 3, we already know basically what's going to happen. We don't need basic plot - we need indepth plot (which, I feel, Ep2 provided fairly well, overall), otherwise it'll be dull and not all that interesting.
I got enough purely action films from the 80's and early 90's, like Terminator. Give me a good solid plot, please, and make it stimulating.
But I s'pose that's asking too much. Episode 1, for instance, got cheers throughout. Episode 2 (being substantially longer - I clocked somewhere around 2 hours 15 minutes) didn't really get much enthusiasm in the theatre I went to at all. I don't understand people.
Someone needs to find you and promptly shove you firmly underneath a moving bus. Do you realize waht a security risk your "Win95" machine is? To say nothing of how horrid and unstable it is.
Nobody, in a perfect world, should be using Win9x any longer. Most dfinately, nobody on slashdot, even in this unperfect world, should be using them. While I'm not saying people should use Win2k or XP, necessarily (or even linux), Win9x is straight out.
American politicians know damned well what the law says, what the Declaration and Constitution say, and how things should be run - they've been to law school, the most of them. The fact of the matter is, they don't care. They're there for the power, prestige, and ability to impact their ideals. Representation be damned, most congressmen don't reflect their populace's opinion, simply because their populace doesn't give a damn.
This might be funny, but think about it... it's scary, too. There's an incredible amount of tyrany involved in a system that allows a large corporation to (essentially) criminalize a small (and government run) educational body for not paying for their overpriced product.
This kind of behavior reminds me of the 'protection' fees paid to mafia members, and the like. The payers get no substantial benefit, in many cases, but the mafia gains financially. And the numbers seem to point to the mafia's dividends being nowhere near as high as MS's.
Or compare it to the extortion done by any large 'agency' throughout time - the Catholic church, most Old World governments, etc.
The US is odd that way. We seem to have multiple forms of government that compete with each other, within each other, and together. MS, the monarchy government with no real benefits, simply taxes us. The US gov't seems to work for us, but only to the extent that the MS gov't allows them to.
DUDE! NES bosses were so much harder than the bosses in some newer games. I mean, let's compare DOOM to say, C&C Renegade. No competition. Renegade gets it's shit plastered all over the wall.
Precisely. Especially with all the movies that are "Matrix inspired" that do a pretty good job with good special effects. The whole 'bullet-time' bit is incredibly passe. Sure, it's cool, but it's not, "Whoa, shit... that was so cool I loaded my pants" cool, as it was the first time around. (Endless analogies can be applied here.)
I'd wager to say that half of what's cool about The Matrix is that it was introducing the 'world' that the Matrix is. And even that won't be new.
Hey, if the two brothers can make a prequel and a sequel that don't suck, I'd say the two of them are cinematic geniuses. Otherwise, they got a) incredibly lucky, or b) in the right place at the right time. Not denying that The Matrix is good, but I feel true genius would be able to make a decent sequel/prequel, even if the original is as good as The Matrix is/was.
Of course, they'll keep their 'original' brand names, to feign competition and keep the prices as high as possible. (Not that much profit margin is even possible anymore in retail, really)
This is quite a surprise to me. Considering the company's respective markets, and the amount of products that they produce, I would have suspected that Compaq would have bought out HP, not the way it turned out. Seems to me as if Compaq produces a lot more products in general, does more research, has more of a market presence, etc..
...we're still lacking some essential tools for a vast group of corporate desktop environments. Of course, the server arena is far ahead, but OSS desktops are lacking, when we're talking about a 'complete solution'.
Here are some of the things that we have that work, and work well. So far, we have:
kdevelop - development environment
KDE3 - desktop environment
Evolution - mail, PIM, colaboration (albeit, you need the Connector to use Exchange Server)
Mozilla/Konqueror - pick one. Browser, o'course. And there are others that are 'satisfactory' for most tasks as well.
Xine/mplayer/xmms - media
PDF viewer - many are available that work well.
samba client component - combined w/ all the various file managers for X, it's equally as functional as the Windows clients.
These items are getting there, but still need a lot of/some help:
GIMP - 'replace' photoshop. Still needs a lot of work on making it easier to use for 'non-script writing' users. Several generations behind Photoshop in that respect, but quite/just as powerful for a technically advanced artist.
OpenOffice - I'd say it's arrived for most things, if it were able to deal with Word documents and had revision history support. There are just too many documents out there that are in Word format that will still need to be read and written to. Those features need to be supported.
gnumeric - as far as I know, it should be able to do anything someone needs to do, but I've never really used Excel or gnumeric, besides for some very basic work. It did what I needed it to.
There might be some commericial solutions to these things (WineX, for instance), but the idea is to not have to rely on MS's horrid licensing extortion, etc.
Here are the main applications that I feel are the main things that are keeping linux back on the desktop in companies:
AutoCAD - there really aren't any OSS CAD solutions, let alone one that's comparable to AutoCAD. IMO, the best thing AutoDesk could do would be to release a version of their software for linux. The (possible) added development that would be necessary to port it would be beneficial to the overall stability of their product as well. I really don't see there being an OSS solution for AutoCAD in the near future, unless it's an abstration layer. CAD is such a complex, involved item and would require a high degree of backward compatability.
Complete independence from any Microsoft product - Unless this happens, MS will still have a strong foothold on manipulating the industry, and will make things general hell for everyone else involved as long as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
*wtf face* They did that in that Home Alone film back in... what, 1990?
but who is paying, and will be paying, for the commercial software? If I'm hearing you correctly, you're in a public (or private, it doesn't really matter in the long run) school system. I know that I don't want tax dollars spent on entertainment when most school systems lack proper education. People won't like that. If it's a private school, you might be asking for some trouble - what happens when a board member (who possibly paid to be there) finds out? You lose your job.
Sorry if this has been mentioned, I didn't see it anywhere.
If I'm not mistaken, isn't that quote actually belonging to Abe Lincoln?
... your life is now an open book. Welcome to the life of the slashdot celebrity.
As someone involved in many different activities, do you have cohesive social groups? That is, do the people from, say, your motorcycle-riding friends develop/use linux as well? (Or does your wife know about your dirty little secret? :P) I'm interested in knowing what your social ties are, being as it seems you are a fairly active individual.
If such a thing were to ever run itself into existence, it would turn MS into a "Defense Contractor". What I find even more interesting is the contrast between MS and other defense contractors. While the current stock of old school defense contractors essentially work together, MS won't work with anyone - they're like the bully on the playground, squashing any competition that comes their way. MS is so big they don't -have- to work with anyone.
Another interesting thing: the defense industry intentionally keeps prices high, because none of them are really big enough to provided for the demands of the gov't of themselves, and thus they work together. MS doesn't have to.
Granted, this isn't a prefect comparission, but it I believe it helps put things in perspective over MS's monopoly - like anyone doubts it's a monopoly and needs reassurance anyway.
Lack of -training-? No, I think it's jsut that there's a lack of skilled drivers. That involves training, but is not the sole factor. We have drivers that are fearful, drivers that do things they shouldn't while driving (eating, talking on the phone, etc.), poor dextrousity, poor eyesight, and such. Training is just a small factor. Probably also a factor, is the ease that exists in getting a license. It shouldn't be as cheap as it is (cheap to renew, yes, after a basic review of continued competence), and the testing procedure shouldn't be as momentary - they should have to drive on, say, an obsticle course in an unfamiliar vehicle (one big cause for accidents), etc...
"Benjamin" is the name of a Biblical character that was part of a large family of 12. He was the only one that stood up for his youngest brother, preventing his other brothers from stoning him to death due to jealousy.
:)
:)
I'm not sure what relation this has to the RIAA and such, but I'm sure you can derive parallels.
Oh, and it's my first name. Good choice!
I really -shouldn't- have to mention that it's quite plauseable for the persion you flamed to have simply missed tapping the "o" key a second time, transforming "to" into "too". I won't even begin to mention how extensive your hypocricy is - just read through this little post of yours that I am replying to, and find even more mistakes for yourself.
*cough* It's a Terminator film, dumbass! Have you even seen the first two? Let's see. The first one stars... Arnold "I'll be back" Swartzenager, and the second one stars... yes, Arnold. Since when could Arnold act? He was a body builder. A female model would be -perfect-.
... universe, or possibly not known, is that the story telling perspective is not from the point of view of the humans such as Luke, Leah, Anakin, or the aliens, Yoda, Chewie, etc. They're told from the perspective of the droids, plain and simple. That has always been Lucas's intention. I heard/read/saw an interview or something along those lines (I forget, I'm sorry) where he mentioned this explicitly. The droids are what make the real framework of the story - their antics make the movies interesting and fresh. I challenge everyone to go back through the Trilogy (and Ep2, really) and mentally remove the schenes where R2 and 3PO are present. The films are drastically lacking any sort of entertainment value. They're almost boring. The droids perform -so many- useful tasks in the films. Paticular emphasis on A New Hope and Clones, I feel. Notice how the plot didn't really start picking up until the droids started having a more active role. (Coincidence, but still, ironic coincidence. Also, I'm not sure of this, but I think that Lucas almost named the movie Droids initially, but picked Star Wars instead. Watch "The Making of Star Wars" - the majority of talk was about droids, and getting them to work properly, etc.)
Just think of the film possibilities in the future!
:) We could have Brad Pitt as the main bad guy (we all know he's crazy), and Sean Connery as the local sheriff... oh, and then pick any half dozen supermodels/really effing hot chicks for the town whores/barmaids.
:)
When we consider Final Fantasy: The Movie, and contrast it to what should be viable within just 5 years from now, it boggles the mind.
I, for one, would love to see a digital-quality old western film - but with both the Duke and Eastwood, not just one. Oh, and while we're at it, why not have Arnold Swartsenager (spelled wrong, I'm sure) be a henchman. And hell, throw "Han Solo" (Harrison Ford) in there as a local traveling trader, but in some western chaps.
That'd be a really fun movie to watch.
I'd ask them that, I really would. However, most of them have been dead for quite some years now. :)
No no no... It'll be "The Matrix: Vector Space"
After seeing Ep2 early this morning in the theatre (and being incredibly impressed for the most part - expectations far exceeded. Lucas may live another season!), I'm looking forward to Ep3 as I did Ep1 before I heard anything about it and saw the sucky trailers, etc. :)
As has already been said, The Matrix: Reloaded looks like it might just be another actionish movie w/o the philosophy that helped make The Matrix cool. In my mind, sure, the philosophy and weird scifi made The Matrix cool, but let's face it. It'd have been a pretty weak ending without the revolutionary action at the end. THAT is what made The Matrix totally haul ass. Now that everyone has seen The Matrix almost 100 times each, and there have been dozens of 'immitation' movies, employing the same stop action photography, the effect is somewhat passe, and not all that nifty. I suspect Reloaded will be nothing more than an additional chapter with more action and little real plot development. Like Star Wars Ep1 - 3, we already know basically what's going to happen. We don't need basic plot - we need indepth plot (which, I feel, Ep2 provided fairly well, overall), otherwise it'll be dull and not all that interesting.
I got enough purely action films from the 80's and early 90's, like Terminator. Give me a good solid plot, please, and make it stimulating.
But I s'pose that's asking too much. Episode 1, for instance, got cheers throughout. Episode 2 (being substantially longer - I clocked somewhere around 2 hours 15 minutes) didn't really get much enthusiasm in the theatre I went to at all. I don't understand people.
Win95? Win95? OH MY GOD.
Someone needs to find you and promptly shove you firmly underneath a moving bus. Do you realize waht a security risk your "Win95" machine is? To say nothing of how horrid and unstable it is.
Nobody, in a perfect world, should be using Win9x any longer. Most dfinately, nobody on slashdot, even in this unperfect world, should be using them. While I'm not saying people should use Win2k or XP, necessarily (or even linux), Win9x is straight out.
I can't believe some people!
American politicians know damned well what the law says, what the Declaration and Constitution say, and how things should be run - they've been to law school, the most of them. The fact of the matter is, they don't care. They're there for the power, prestige, and ability to impact their ideals. Representation be damned, most congressmen don't reflect their populace's opinion, simply because their populace doesn't give a damn.
This might be funny, but think about it... it's scary, too. There's an incredible amount of tyrany involved in a system that allows a large corporation to (essentially) criminalize a small (and government run) educational body for not paying for their overpriced product.
This kind of behavior reminds me of the 'protection' fees paid to mafia members, and the like. The payers get no substantial benefit, in many cases, but the mafia gains financially. And the numbers seem to point to the mafia's dividends being nowhere near as high as MS's.
Or compare it to the extortion done by any large 'agency' throughout time - the Catholic church, most Old World governments, etc.
The US is odd that way. We seem to have multiple forms of government that compete with each other, within each other, and together. MS, the monarchy government with no real benefits, simply taxes us. The US gov't seems to work for us, but only to the extent that the MS gov't allows them to.
DUDE! NES bosses were so much harder than the bosses in some newer games. I mean, let's compare DOOM to say, C&C Renegade. No competition. Renegade gets it's shit plastered all over the wall.
orpheus2000 died May 6th, 2002, at approximately 07:02 AM. He was pronounced officially dead 40 minutes later, due to heart failure.
Surviving relatives are siblings orpheus1999 and orpheus1998, and parents Morpheus and Amorpheus.
The funeral will be at noon, May 10th, at the Slashdot Memorium Builing.
Precisely. Especially with all the movies that are "Matrix inspired" that do a pretty good job with good special effects. The whole 'bullet-time' bit is incredibly passe. Sure, it's cool, but it's not, "Whoa, shit... that was so cool I loaded my pants" cool, as it was the first time around. (Endless analogies can be applied here.)
I'd wager to say that half of what's cool about The Matrix is that it was introducing the 'world' that the Matrix is. And even that won't be new.
Hey, if the two brothers can make a prequel and a sequel that don't suck, I'd say the two of them are cinematic geniuses. Otherwise, they got a) incredibly lucky, or b) in the right place at the right time. Not denying that The Matrix is good, but I feel true genius would be able to make a decent sequel/prequel, even if the original is as good as The Matrix is/was.
Of course, they'll keep their 'original' brand names, to feign competition and keep the prices as high as possible. (Not that much profit margin is even possible anymore in retail, really)
This is quite a surprise to me. Considering the company's respective markets, and the amount of products that they produce, I would have suspected that Compaq would have bought out HP, not the way it turned out. Seems to me as if Compaq produces a lot more products in general, does more research, has more of a market presence, etc..
It's true. The lot of you have been severely troll-baited. :)
Here are some of the things that we have that work, and work well. So far, we have:
kdevelop - development environment
KDE3 - desktop environment
Evolution - mail, PIM, colaboration (albeit, you need the Connector to use Exchange Server)
Mozilla/Konqueror - pick one. Browser, o'course. And there are others that are 'satisfactory' for most tasks as well.
Xine/mplayer/xmms - media
PDF viewer - many are available that work well.
samba client component - combined w/ all the various file managers for X, it's equally as functional as the Windows clients.
These items are getting there, but still need a lot of/some help:
GIMP - 'replace' photoshop. Still needs a lot of work on making it easier to use for 'non-script writing' users. Several generations behind Photoshop in that respect, but quite/just as powerful for a technically advanced artist.
OpenOffice - I'd say it's arrived for most things, if it were able to deal with Word documents and had revision history support. There are just too many documents out there that are in Word format that will still need to be read and written to. Those features need to be supported.
gnumeric - as far as I know, it should be able to do anything someone needs to do, but I've never really used Excel or gnumeric, besides for some very basic work. It did what I needed it to.
There might be some commericial solutions to these things (WineX, for instance), but the idea is to not have to rely on MS's horrid licensing extortion, etc.
Here are the main applications that I feel are the main things that are keeping linux back on the desktop in companies:
AutoCAD - there really aren't any OSS CAD solutions, let alone one that's comparable to AutoCAD. IMO, the best thing AutoDesk could do would be to release a version of their software for linux. The (possible) added development that would be necessary to port it would be beneficial to the overall stability of their product as well. I really don't see there being an OSS solution for AutoCAD in the near future, unless it's an abstration layer. CAD is such a complex, involved item and would require a high degree of backward compatability.
Complete independence from any Microsoft product - Unless this happens, MS will still have a strong foothold on manipulating the industry, and will make things general hell for everyone else involved as long as possible.