I'm going to take this from my friends view. He has a deeper insight into justifying things than I.
EpI was a story about a whiny obnoxious kid. It worked very well. EpI was also about getting a young audience, hence all the silly (abnoxious) Gungans and Jar-Jar, the Gungan NERF energy weapons, and the giant fish hokey pokey.
EpII was about a whiny obnoxious teenager. If you can stretch your memory back that far, you'll remember that you too were an angst ridden bitch at Anakins age in this movie. So that acting was rather good.
EpIII is about an insecure, hubris filled, young adult. And Hayden acted accordingly. The love scenes were realistic in Real World standards, but not in the faux real Hollywood way that we come to expect from Hollywood. Awkward, silly, but genuine. Hayden played the fall to the dark side really well, having genuine emotional motives for becomeing badass, but got trapped. The story is great. (sure, Lucas sort of kludged a couple bits, but it's Lucas what do you expect?) Vader killing the children was the best part of the movie, it was tastefully done, and really made clear what a bitch Vader is (because of love).
Also if you examine the story arc, you see some very nice deeper messages, that would have made Cambell proud. The misinterpretted prophecy (which was true), the fall of the Jedi because of their own hubris, and the fall(rise) of Vader because of his. Even when the Emperor talks of peace...
I loved this movie. It tied in really well with epIV too, there is only ONE plot hole that cannot be easily explained. Obi-Wan does not recognize the droids. And it makes certain things make sense too, like the odd smirk Obi-Wan gives Luke before he lets Vader kill him.
There were other problems with continuity, but their easily explained away. Like Laea telling Obi-Wan that he served under her father during the Clone Wars, but he adopted father was a Senator, so that makes sense. The fact that the Stormtroopers have different charactoristics from Jango makes sense too, if you accept that they used different templates between III and IV.
Actually, I thought the love scenes were quite realistic, as in REAL WORLD, and not Hollywood. Somewhat awkward, kind of silly, but the feeling was there.
Re:Speed up the interface a bit!
on
Just a Phone?
·
· Score: 1
I agree. Up to no AC. I live in Arizona, AC is life.
I agree though, cars have reached this extreme of ugliness. Some of the newer ones even pain me, i want to grab their owners by the collar and scream "Where has your sense of aesthetic gone!!?", while crying tears of blood at the eyesore he's driving. The Prius comes to mind first, followed by the Element, and then the New Beatle.
The only auto feature I like is mirrors, but they should also be manually adjustable.
Re:I applaud Vodafone.
on
Just a Phone?
·
· Score: 2
Okay kid... Focus = Good.
Todays with ADHD (if they even actually have it), will out grow it with puberty. Todays adults with ADHD are members of a fictional mental illness created by drug marketing.
Todays adults wiht ADHD need a vacation, and a stiff drink.
Wow, you make it sound like the Luddite hordes are pressing at your door, trying to forcibly pry your feature packed glory of technology from your hands. Hell, they might even force you to use analogue!
Stop sounding so defensive. Different strokes for different folks, and all. Nobody cares about you and your feature packed phone, it's all just a matter of preference. As it even says in TFA.
Personally I loath cellphones. I think that their destroying our sense of public decency, and even to an extent the foundation of community (another technology that allows us to alienate ourself from the scary unknown other). My opinion. And yes, I have owned a cell, when I first got it I was in your camp, give me bells! Give me whistles! I want to show it off to the neighbors!
Then I realized it didn't do anything as well as a dedicated device. So I opted for a cheap model, with a bare minimum of bloat, it could make calls, and do another couple things that I ignored (text... bleh!). Then I realized that it didn't do anything to enrich my life, or improve my communication to my loved ones. Do I really need to be in contact with everyone, all that time? Nope. (most cell conversations I observe are idiots spouting the minutia of their lives to someone, like it really matters) Did I live happily with out one before, yes. Could I survive without one? Hell yes. At that point the little pointless gagdet went out the window. Now people talk to me when I want them too, and I can sleep easily knowing that I am not one of those people who would annoy me in public places.
Now, tangent aside, I really don't care if you want a phone with features, a plain phone, or none at all. Preference. I don't understand the defensive attitude.
When I got my PowerBook the first thing I noticed is that is dead silent. A big change from my (now dead) tower, when I run it, it sounds like a 747 taking off. It's only slightly better than my PB too, but for some reason I need 4 fans to keep it from getting too hot. I've only managed to get my PB fan to kick in twice, and both of those time required work and effort (photoshop doing a batch job, running a game in the background, updating the system, AND listening to music).
I've decided that computers should be unobtrusive, meaning silent. When I get around to fixing my PC, I think I'm going to try to rig it to be fanless.
I've got into the (safer but more aggrivating) habit of automatically clicking "No". Long years of running IE and Windows have trained me to be very negative and paranoid.
As a poweruser, I get very sick of dialogues, when I click something, I damn well know what I'm doing, and if not, I can fix it. I'm smart enough to know that when website x tries to load "pornmonkeydialer.exe", I say no, and I don't run it if it somehow ends up on my desktop. ActiveX controls are not an issue of course (use only FF and Safari, haven't run IE in over a year, AT ALL). When something asks me if I'm sure, my first reaction is to scream "Yes, or else I wouldn't have told you to do it!". This is especially a problem in Windows, where I've actually had programs ask me TWICE, after typing DELETE or somesuch as well. Some of the populating aren't morons, and we should not be made to suffer.
Problems, IMHO, are the USERS responsibility, not the operating systems. The user is the boss. I understand the problem in a corporate setting, but it comes down to the admin to safeguard the system, take away the options from the users. At home let them suffer, they support the support industry, and thus strengthen the economy.
Ahhh... Still strikes me as odd. I'm as big an advocate of open source as anyone here, but I'm also a realist, and know that all source will never be open, and that there are scads of superiour software (meaning functionality, not some idealistic definition) that are closed, and will remain closed.
I never that that the open source movement was about paranoia, I always thought it was about improvements, and fixing bugs. Not, "I want to see the source to see if it's phoning the CIA!!!" But then again I forget at times I'm in the land of tinfoil hats.
Reading just the first page of this thread, I've decided to circumvent the propirates and the idiots, same difference, I know.
First, background, I paid to see episode one, and decided, aftaer that abortion, not to see episode 2 until I heard 10 people compliment it, I didn't, so I downloaded and watched it for free. It was worth every cent.
Episode 3 had things going for it, though. The trailer made it live up to expectations. So I paid for it. Yes, a whole $6! And no, I'm not bankrupt from this, and neither will anyone here, being that all fo us can at least afford internet access.
I'm sorry kids, there is NO excuse for pirating this. Try as you may, there is only lame excuses. Please, stop lying to others, and possibly youself.
"My theators quality sucks!" go to another one!
"I don't like the enviroment of my theator because (tall people/loud people/laser pointers/...)!" Your lying, I live in a big city, with many morons, no problem here.
"I might have to pee!" Tough, go first. Or hold it.
"My girlfriend wants to be home" Your lying, this is/., you want to masterbate to Natale Portman.
"It's too expensive!" It's $6??!!! If you live in a cardboard box, then maybe, if not, STFU!
And my last thing, it was a VERY good flick. It actually impressed me, and made me respect the rest of the series, I-VI. It was worth every cent of my $6. And more. What the hell is wrong with paying for quality. When I cheated on the last one, I at least had motivation, and waited for it to be on DVD. There is no excuse for not paying.
Dreams and practicality, the eternal conflict. I'm sorry, my cell/GBA/camera/PDA/mp3 player will ALWAYS suck at each task more than a specialized device, and then when we couple this with the future video/dishwasher combo we can see how silly this is. I want my cell and mp3 player to be VERY small, I want everything else to have an actual viewable screen, meaning big.
God knows I've learned enough interfaces throughout my life, a few more won't kill me, if they make them SIMPLE. I want everything to run WELL, meaning making the proc not split between 5 million different tasks. I want things to be stable, meaning SIMPLE, again. The more you add to a device, the more complicated it becomes, the more complicated the more buggy, the more buggy, the less stable. You see this reasoning? This is something that even future advances in tech cannot help. Things should work, and be simple.
Do you really need to carry them all around with you? I am still at a loss to think of even a single portable device that most people actually NEED. Except a book, of course. But then again I am a geek luddite.
Err... And yes, these are all rolls that the PC invented... Thank you. Or at least most of them.
This is what I meant, the PC is the only general computing device that has been invented worth its weight in salt. Well, besides it's spawn, the laptop, of course.
And who the hell is going to buy an iPod if their phone already has all the capacity they need and can play MP3s?
I would. I'm a firm believer in specialized devices. My iPod is better at being an MP3 player (and protable HD) than my cell phone, which is better at being a phone than my PSP would be, which is a better gaming device than my iPod.
Name one general purpose device that actually has ever caught on, aside from the PC. Hell, I don't even like me DVD TV, that I own. What happens when the motors and such in it break, I then have a TV with the dead weight of a DVD player inside.
Look at new cells, with the stupid little camera. Even if they jacked them up to 5 mega pixels, they still would not be as handy as an actual digital camera (which still, on the consumer level isn't as handy as a decent 35mm). Why is it that people here bitch about software bloat, but think that physical bloat is a good idea?
I really don't mind carrying a phone and an iPod. It's not that much extra work. And both devices are pretty good at their jobs. Sometimes I even carry my digital camera with me, and survive perfectly fine.
Pardon me for not being organized to the point of knowing the content of all 3000 emails archived on my computer. Though I generally would agree with you, but once use spotlight, you'll realize that it also make a very nice app launcer, and saves the effort of actually hunting for files or app, since all it takes is command-space and a couple keypresses. For some odd reason I am more efficient with a keyboard than a mouse, though.
I used to use Quicksilver as an app launcher though, which has the same command-spc control, but it didn't require a direct search string (when I typed wow, it would find WOrld of Warcraft, but in Spotlight I get an aiff when I type in wow, but not WoW.).
Spotlight is nice, but I've been using Quickselver as an app launcher for awhile, so I'm used to not using finder to find things anymore. I'm really loving it though, I even decided to archive my Gmail account locally, so I can search through those messages. I've already used it to pry a telephone # from a 3 year old chat log.
Dashboard is... I haven't formed an opinion on it yet. Seems nice, though, but I don't know about it's utility though. The weather widget is nice though, as is the dictionary one, and the Address book one.
I want to find a use for automator, I just can't think of one.:( Seems nifty though.
SafariRSS is... er... Disapointing. I've been messing with feeds in Firefox for awhile, both native and via Bloglines. I'm sure Safari is wonderful, it just doesn't compare to FF, mostly because of FF's expandability. Give me a mouse gesture plugin for Saf, and it might be usuable.
For some reason I don't get the ripple on my iBook (1.2Ghz)... Which is odd. I want ripple, damnit!
Not true. Not long a go I found and booted up and old ][e emu, plugged in Oregon Trail, and wasted a good day of my life, exchanging odd IMs with my friends "My god bob! Jesus drowned!" "Plato has consumption!"
Man, I can relate. MUDs, BBSing, IRC, there went much of highschool and early college. Especially the early chunk of college since all my CS classes had nice little telnet connections, only when I switched majors (and lost the in-class telnet) did my grades improve.
I broke up with one of my first g/fs because "I was about to level" on Genocide. I spent more time learning how to code on a MUSH (and later a pirated Diku) than I ever sunk into schooling.
I guess now that I'm a mature adult, I can depend of/. to take up all my time. Where would we be without the internet, I don't know, but I am sure that we all would be more productive. (world peace or/.... hmmmmm)
On my Mac I just click the little green button, and it minimizes to an itty-bitty corner of my screen. I know that it does the same on my XP box, but it was much harder to find. I think it was in the right side of the display window.
I HATED iTunes when I first installed it (my friends Mac-hype), I really liked winamp MUCH better, even if it did have a buggy side. I was used to INTENSIVE music managment. But in reality is was very cumbersome, just an aquired taste. While iTunes is definatly not perfect, and has some nagging problems, i like it more because of the ease-of-use. I like just adding things, and then never having to think about them again. I love smart playlists, and iTMS took some time, but has grown on me.
Are you really worried about program size? On my compy iTunes takes up 30MB, which is approx.3% of my immediate primary HD. I guess.06% would be better, but I doubt I'm going to loose any sleep over it.
It takes about 3 seconds to enter the missing info from the ID3 tags. Beats sitting around correcting them all at some future time.
Though I will view any sequal to TA with a grain of salt, seeing how bad Dungeon Seige turned out. But then again this is a guy who worked on the original Fallout, and developed the greatest RTS of all time.
As for Morrowind, Bethesda is already working on the sequal, Elder Scrolls 4, Oblivion. Supposedly Bethesda is also working on Fallout 3, according to the rumor mill. There is some hope for the future of gaming.
Still, platformers are dead. Adventure is dead. FPS is dead.
Don't really want to enter into this debate, but could you please name some of these modern innovative games? Please delete any game with a number (2 for example) appended to the end. In recent history only a couple games come to mind, and only two of them were unique enough to form genres (everquest and the sims).
But then I look at my old NES library and notice Zelda, Dragon Warrior, Duck Hunt, Tetris... All within a 3 year period of time, too.
Even the shining gems of aspecific genres has gone down, I could play just about ANY FPS, and confuse it for a mod on any other. Besides atmosphere there is no real diffence.
Same for RTS. There hasn't been a REALLY good one since Total Annihilation, though I suppose we can consider Warcraft 3, even if it was rather lackluster. RPGs seem to be doing somewhat well, with Morrowind being the most recent decent one, but KoTOR and Fable are also very worthy.
I don't know if this is gonna get much better, especially since all of the decent game studios don't seem to exist anymore (with the exception of Blizzard). Interplay and thier divisions (Shiny, Black Isle) used to the place to go for new things (Sacrafice, Earthworm Jim, and of course the immortal Fallout, even Messiah was innovative, if not good). Maxis is part of EA, meaning the whole Sid Meier lines has become unsupported, buggy, over-hyped crap, with chronic sequalitus.
Re:Positivism is dead, long live postivism!
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 1
We're quibbling over a very epistemic point here. The scientist does not KNOW this, they EXPECT this. Just because you know past results, does not mean that you can know with certanty that these results will hold in the future.
The first definition of faith from dictionary.com: Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing. First definition of trust from dictionary.com Firm reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing.
These two terms are pretty must synonymous, so a semantic argument is not needed here. Though I think that faith does have religious connotations, and I use it deliberatly for this reason. Since me stating that you having faith in the scientific method is basically the same as stating that you have faith in Jesus. Sure, your version of faith has a higher critical value, but in the end there still is no certanty. Please notice the philosophical definition of inductive, which the scientific method is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_%28philosop hy%29
Also if you look at the logical structure of the scientific method, you'll realize that it is a formal fallacy (affirming the consequent, to be precise). This is proof that the scientific method CANNOT be deductive, meaning that is cannot be ever certain. Notice this form, P -> Q Q.: P This is what runs the scientific method. It is slightly more complicated, here P and Q holds the place of several conjuncts, but this is the general form.
Besides the epistemic flaw of the scientific method, I do hold that there is a point where the explanative value of the method do not work. Where there are two theories that explain the same set of date, for example, sure you can use Ockham's Razor, but this is purely ad hoc, there is no reason for nature to be the simplest.
Also there are points where it no longer becomes meaningful to ask why, such as superposition in QM.
I think that at one point neuroscience will have to shrug its shoulders. Never have I seen a convincing attempt to generalize from neural firings to conciousness. I have seen the so-called cognitive scientists try, but they only use philosophical and rhetorical techniques, with no grounding in empirical fact. I think that the brain is going to show some severe limits to our possible understanding (like QM did to physics).
I say this because you and I are more than mere meat. I'm not calling a soul card into this. But there is a deeply unique symbol process that transcends the physical firings of individual neurons. And on top of this layer, there are higher and higher levels of process that move further from any single neural pattern. Scientists today tell us that consciousness might be an illusion, which proves what a boondogle understanding the mind will be. Conciousness cannot be an illusion, Descartes proved this in mid 1600's.
Good, you can get the experience of a HUMAN with sonar, now can we put ourselves in the bat's head? Is there even a possible stretch of imagination that will allow this? Nope. It boils down to the fact that you are not a bat, nor can you ever be a bat, and thus you can never be aware of the subjective state of bat-ness.
By WIRED I mean that bats have several thousand generations of unique structure, made specifically for the ability of sonar. Not just the usual neural adaption.
Re:Positivism is dead, long live postivism!
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 1
You have FAITH in science, then? Because science cannot breed TRUTH, it can only say that x holds true of all previous cases, and SHOULD (within a given probability) hold true in all future cases. This is the nature of INDUCTIVE logic. You name one scientist that is sure of his discoveries, and I'll show you a bad scientist.
I have faith that when I turn my key, my car will start. It has everytime before. Or is this not faith? It seems that it is. Faith is a critical ASSUMPTION, much like our beleif in that which we discover through science.
When you get in an elevator you have faith in many things, that the cables will hold, that the buttons will take you where you want, etc... And the engeneer who built it had faith in several things two, the archetectual lesson he was taught in school, the validity of the studies saying that x metal is strong enough, etc...
Actually most pain killers don't work on me, I guess I must not be human then. Also viagra DOES not give you a stiffy, it increases bloodflow to that specific region, letting you experience a longer lasting and... er... harder "stiffy" than you would have been able to. And I'm sure if you read the research you would realize that there is a portion of the population who are immune to it as well.
Again your PCP thing doesn't prove a damn thing. If it does please point out what it does prove beyond the fact that yes I can make something unknown happen in your blackbox(brain), and make it happen each time, but do not necissarily understand what I'm actually making happen inside.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to take this from my friends view. He has a deeper insight into justifying things than I.
EpI was a story about a whiny obnoxious kid. It worked very well. EpI was also about getting a young audience, hence all the silly (abnoxious) Gungans and Jar-Jar, the Gungan NERF energy weapons, and the giant fish hokey pokey.
EpII was about a whiny obnoxious teenager. If you can stretch your memory back that far, you'll remember that you too were an angst ridden bitch at Anakins age in this movie. So that acting was rather good.
EpIII is about an insecure, hubris filled, young adult. And Hayden acted accordingly. The love scenes were realistic in Real World standards, but not in the faux real Hollywood way that we come to expect from Hollywood. Awkward, silly, but genuine. Hayden played the fall to the dark side really well, having genuine emotional motives for becomeing badass, but got trapped. The story is great. (sure, Lucas sort of kludged a couple bits, but it's Lucas what do you expect?) Vader killing the children was the best part of the movie, it was tastefully done, and really made clear what a bitch Vader is (because of love).
Also if you examine the story arc, you see some very nice deeper messages, that would have made Cambell proud. The misinterpretted prophecy (which was true), the fall of the Jedi because of their own hubris, and the fall(rise) of Vader because of his. Even when the Emperor talks of peace...
I loved this movie. It tied in really well with epIV too, there is only ONE plot hole that cannot be easily explained. Obi-Wan does not recognize the droids. And it makes certain things make sense too, like the odd smirk Obi-Wan gives Luke before he lets Vader kill him.
There were other problems with continuity, but their easily explained away. Like Laea telling Obi-Wan that he served under her father during the Clone Wars, but he adopted father was a Senator, so that makes sense. The fact that the Stormtroopers have different charactoristics from Jango makes sense too, if you accept that they used different templates between III and IV.
Actually, I thought the love scenes were quite realistic, as in REAL WORLD, and not Hollywood. Somewhat awkward, kind of silly, but the feeling was there.
I agree. Up to no AC. I live in Arizona, AC is life.
I agree though, cars have reached this extreme of ugliness. Some of the newer ones even pain me, i want to grab their owners by the collar and scream "Where has your sense of aesthetic gone!!?", while crying tears of blood at the eyesore he's driving. The Prius comes to mind first, followed by the Element, and then the New Beatle.
The only auto feature I like is mirrors, but they should also be manually adjustable.
Okay kid... Focus = Good.
Todays with ADHD (if they even actually have it), will out grow it with puberty. Todays adults with ADHD are members of a fictional mental illness created by drug marketing.
Todays adults wiht ADHD need a vacation, and a stiff drink.
Wow, you make it sound like the Luddite hordes are pressing at your door, trying to forcibly pry your feature packed glory of technology from your hands. Hell, they might even force you to use analogue!
Stop sounding so defensive. Different strokes for different folks, and all. Nobody cares about you and your feature packed phone, it's all just a matter of preference. As it even says in TFA.
Personally I loath cellphones. I think that their destroying our sense of public decency, and even to an extent the foundation of community (another technology that allows us to alienate ourself from the scary unknown other). My opinion. And yes, I have owned a cell, when I first got it I was in your camp, give me bells! Give me whistles! I want to show it off to the neighbors!
Then I realized it didn't do anything as well as a dedicated device. So I opted for a cheap model, with a bare minimum of bloat, it could make calls, and do another couple things that I ignored (text... bleh!). Then I realized that it didn't do anything to enrich my life, or improve my communication to my loved ones. Do I really need to be in contact with everyone, all that time? Nope. (most cell conversations I observe are idiots spouting the minutia of their lives to someone, like it really matters) Did I live happily with out one before, yes. Could I survive without one? Hell yes. At that point the little pointless gagdet went out the window. Now people talk to me when I want them too, and I can sleep easily knowing that I am not one of those people who would annoy me in public places.
Now, tangent aside, I really don't care if you want a phone with features, a plain phone, or none at all. Preference. I don't understand the defensive attitude.
When I got my PowerBook the first thing I noticed is that is dead silent. A big change from my (now dead) tower, when I run it, it sounds like a 747 taking off. It's only slightly better than my PB too, but for some reason I need 4 fans to keep it from getting too hot. I've only managed to get my PB fan to kick in twice, and both of those time required work and effort (photoshop doing a batch job, running a game in the background, updating the system, AND listening to music).
I've decided that computers should be unobtrusive, meaning silent. When I get around to fixing my PC, I think I'm going to try to rig it to be fanless.
I've got into the (safer but more aggrivating) habit of automatically clicking "No". Long years of running IE and Windows have trained me to be very negative and paranoid.
As a poweruser, I get very sick of dialogues, when I click something, I damn well know what I'm doing, and if not, I can fix it. I'm smart enough to know that when website x tries to load "pornmonkeydialer.exe", I say no, and I don't run it if it somehow ends up on my desktop. ActiveX controls are not an issue of course (use only FF and Safari, haven't run IE in over a year, AT ALL). When something asks me if I'm sure, my first reaction is to scream "Yes, or else I wouldn't have told you to do it!". This is especially a problem in Windows, where I've actually had programs ask me TWICE, after typing DELETE or somesuch as well. Some of the populating aren't morons, and we should not be made to suffer.
Problems, IMHO, are the USERS responsibility, not the operating systems. The user is the boss. I understand the problem in a corporate setting, but it comes down to the admin to safeguard the system, take away the options from the users. At home let them suffer, they support the support industry, and thus strengthen the economy.
Ahhh... Still strikes me as odd. I'm as big an advocate of open source as anyone here, but I'm also a realist, and know that all source will never be open, and that there are scads of superiour software (meaning functionality, not some idealistic definition) that are closed, and will remain closed.
I never that that the open source movement was about paranoia, I always thought it was about improvements, and fixing bugs. Not, "I want to see the source to see if it's phoning the CIA!!!" But then again I forget at times I'm in the land of tinfoil hats.
Err... How so? I'm typing this via OS X right now, and I'm pretty sure I know what my computer is doing right now.
Unless we're talking about super-secret nefarious code that escapes the unsleeping eyes of Unix.
So, please clarify.
Reading just the first page of this thread, I've decided to circumvent the propirates and the idiots, same difference, I know.
/., you want to masterbate to Natale Portman.
First, background, I paid to see episode one, and decided, aftaer that abortion, not to see episode 2 until I heard 10 people compliment it, I didn't, so I downloaded and watched it for free. It was worth every cent.
Episode 3 had things going for it, though. The trailer made it live up to expectations. So I paid for it. Yes, a whole $6! And no, I'm not bankrupt from this, and neither will anyone here, being that all fo us can at least afford internet access.
I'm sorry kids, there is NO excuse for pirating this. Try as you may, there is only lame excuses. Please, stop lying to others, and possibly youself.
"My theators quality sucks!"
go to another one!
"I don't like the enviroment of my theator because (tall people/loud people/laser pointers/...)!"
Your lying, I live in a big city, with many morons, no problem here.
"I might have to pee!"
Tough, go first. Or hold it.
"My girlfriend wants to be home"
Your lying, this is
"It's too expensive!"
It's $6??!!! If you live in a cardboard box, then maybe, if not, STFU!
And my last thing, it was a VERY good flick. It actually impressed me, and made me respect the rest of the series, I-VI. It was worth every cent of my $6. And more. What the hell is wrong with paying for quality. When I cheated on the last one, I at least had motivation, and waited for it to be on DVD. There is no excuse for not paying.
Dreams and practicality, the eternal conflict. I'm sorry, my cell/GBA/camera/PDA/mp3 player will ALWAYS suck at each task more than a specialized device, and then when we couple this with the future video/dishwasher combo we can see how silly this is. I want my cell and mp3 player to be VERY small, I want everything else to have an actual viewable screen, meaning big.
God knows I've learned enough interfaces throughout my life, a few more won't kill me, if they make them SIMPLE. I want everything to run WELL, meaning making the proc not split between 5 million different tasks. I want things to be stable, meaning SIMPLE, again. The more you add to a device, the more complicated it becomes, the more complicated the more buggy, the more buggy, the less stable. You see this reasoning? This is something that even future advances in tech cannot help. Things should work, and be simple.
Do you really need to carry them all around with you? I am still at a loss to think of even a single portable device that most people actually NEED. Except a book, of course. But then again I am a geek luddite.
Err... And yes, these are all rolls that the PC invented... Thank you. Or at least most of them.
This is what I meant, the PC is the only general computing device that has been invented worth its weight in salt. Well, besides it's spawn, the laptop, of course.
And who the hell is going to buy an iPod if their phone already has all the capacity they need and can play MP3s?
I would. I'm a firm believer in specialized devices. My iPod is better at being an MP3 player (and protable HD) than my cell phone, which is better at being a phone than my PSP would be, which is a better gaming device than my iPod.
Name one general purpose device that actually has ever caught on, aside from the PC. Hell, I don't even like me DVD TV, that I own. What happens when the motors and such in it break, I then have a TV with the dead weight of a DVD player inside.
Look at new cells, with the stupid little camera. Even if they jacked them up to 5 mega pixels, they still would not be as handy as an actual digital camera (which still, on the consumer level isn't as handy as a decent 35mm). Why is it that people here bitch about software bloat, but think that physical bloat is a good idea?
I really don't mind carrying a phone and an iPod. It's not that much extra work. And both devices are pretty good at their jobs. Sometimes I even carry my digital camera with me, and survive perfectly fine.
Damn lack of mod points...
we need a +1 Kruschev reference mod.
Pardon me for not being organized to the point of knowing the content of all 3000 emails archived on my computer. Though I generally would agree with you, but once use spotlight, you'll realize that it also make a very nice app launcer, and saves the effort of actually hunting for files or app, since all it takes is command-space and a couple keypresses. For some odd reason I am more efficient with a keyboard than a mouse, though.
I used to use Quicksilver as an app launcher though, which has the same command-spc control, but it didn't require a direct search string (when I typed wow, it would find WOrld of Warcraft, but in Spotlight I get an aiff when I type in wow, but not WoW.).
Spotlight is nice, but I've been using Quickselver as an app launcher for awhile, so I'm used to not using finder to find things anymore. I'm really loving it though, I even decided to archive my Gmail account locally, so I can search through those messages. I've already used it to pry a telephone # from a 3 year old chat log.
:( Seems nifty though.
Dashboard is... I haven't formed an opinion on it yet. Seems nice, though, but I don't know about it's utility though. The weather widget is nice though, as is the dictionary one, and the Address book one.
I want to find a use for automator, I just can't think of one.
SafariRSS is... er... Disapointing. I've been messing with feeds in Firefox for awhile, both native and via Bloglines. I'm sure Safari is wonderful, it just doesn't compare to FF, mostly because of FF's expandability. Give me a mouse gesture plugin for Saf, and it might be usuable.
For some reason I don't get the ripple on my iBook (1.2Ghz)... Which is odd. I want ripple, damnit!
Not true. Not long a go I found and booted up and old ][e emu, plugged in Oregon Trail, and wasted a good day of my life, exchanging odd IMs with my friends "My god bob! Jesus drowned!" "Plato has consumption!"
And the hunting is TRULY the precursor to Doom3.
Man, I can relate. MUDs, BBSing, IRC, there went much of highschool and early college. Especially the early chunk of college since all my CS classes had nice little telnet connections, only when I switched majors (and lost the in-class telnet) did my grades improve.
/. to take up all my time. Where would we be without the internet, I don't know, but I am sure that we all would be more productive. (world peace or /. ... hmmmmm)
I broke up with one of my first g/fs because "I was about to level" on Genocide. I spent more time learning how to code on a MUSH (and later a pirated Diku) than I ever sunk into schooling.
I guess now that I'm a mature adult, I can depend of
On my Mac I just click the little green button, and it minimizes to an itty-bitty corner of my screen. I know that it does the same on my XP box, but it was much harder to find. I think it was in the right side of the display window.
.3% of my immediate primary HD. I guess .06% would be better, but I doubt I'm going to loose any sleep over it.
I HATED iTunes when I first installed it (my friends Mac-hype), I really liked winamp MUCH better, even if it did have a buggy side. I was used to INTENSIVE music managment. But in reality is was very cumbersome, just an aquired taste. While iTunes is definatly not perfect, and has some nagging problems, i like it more because of the ease-of-use. I like just adding things, and then never having to think about them again. I love smart playlists, and iTMS took some time, but has grown on me.
Are you really worried about program size? On my compy iTunes takes up 30MB, which is approx
It takes about 3 seconds to enter the missing info from the ID3 tags. Beats sitting around correcting them all at some future time.
http://pc.ign.com/articles/490/490864p1.html
Though I will view any sequal to TA with a grain of salt, seeing how bad Dungeon Seige turned out. But then again this is a guy who worked on the original Fallout, and developed the greatest RTS of all time.
As for Morrowind, Bethesda is already working on the sequal, Elder Scrolls 4, Oblivion. Supposedly Bethesda is also working on Fallout 3, according to the rumor mill. There is some hope for the future of gaming.
Still, platformers are dead. Adventure is dead. FPS is dead.
TA was actually billed as the first 3D RTS. Mostly due to hightmapping and such. But the units were full 3D.
Don't really want to enter into this debate, but could you please name some of these modern innovative games? Please delete any game with a number (2 for example) appended to the end. In recent history only a couple games come to mind, and only two of them were unique enough to form genres (everquest and the sims).
But then I look at my old NES library and notice Zelda, Dragon Warrior, Duck Hunt, Tetris... All within a 3 year period of time, too.
Even the shining gems of aspecific genres has gone down, I could play just about ANY FPS, and confuse it for a mod on any other. Besides atmosphere there is no real diffence.
Same for RTS. There hasn't been a REALLY good one since Total Annihilation, though I suppose we can consider Warcraft 3, even if it was rather lackluster. RPGs seem to be doing somewhat well, with Morrowind being the most recent decent one, but KoTOR and Fable are also very worthy.
I don't know if this is gonna get much better, especially since all of the decent game studios don't seem to exist anymore (with the exception of Blizzard). Interplay and thier divisions (Shiny, Black Isle) used to the place to go for new things (Sacrafice, Earthworm Jim, and of course the immortal Fallout, even Messiah was innovative, if not good). Maxis is part of EA, meaning the whole Sid Meier lines has become unsupported, buggy, over-hyped crap, with chronic sequalitus.
We're quibbling over a very epistemic point here. The scientist does not KNOW this, they EXPECT this. Just because you know past results, does not mean that you can know with certanty that these results will hold in the future.
p hy%29
.: P
The first definition of faith from dictionary.com:
Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.
First definition of trust from dictionary.com
Firm reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing.
These two terms are pretty must synonymous, so a semantic argument is not needed here. Though I think that faith does have religious connotations, and I use it deliberatly for this reason. Since me stating that you having faith in the scientific method is basically the same as stating that you have faith in Jesus. Sure, your version of faith has a higher critical value, but in the end there still is no certanty. Please notice the philosophical definition of inductive, which the scientific method is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_%28philoso
Also if you look at the logical structure of the scientific method, you'll realize that it is a formal fallacy (affirming the consequent, to be precise). This is proof that the scientific method CANNOT be deductive, meaning that is cannot be ever certain. Notice this form,
P -> Q
Q
This is what runs the scientific method. It is slightly more complicated, here P and Q holds the place of several conjuncts, but this is the general form.
Besides the epistemic flaw of the scientific method, I do hold that there is a point where the explanative value of the method do not work. Where there are two theories that explain the same set of date, for example, sure you can use Ockham's Razor, but this is purely ad hoc, there is no reason for nature to be the simplest.
Also there are points where it no longer becomes meaningful to ask why, such as superposition in QM.
I think that at one point neuroscience will have to shrug its shoulders. Never have I seen a convincing attempt to generalize from neural firings to conciousness. I have seen the so-called cognitive scientists try, but they only use philosophical and rhetorical techniques, with no grounding in empirical fact. I think that the brain is going to show some severe limits to our possible understanding (like QM did to physics).
I say this because you and I are more than mere meat. I'm not calling a soul card into this. But there is a deeply unique symbol process that transcends the physical firings of individual neurons. And on top of this layer, there are higher and higher levels of process that move further from any single neural pattern. Scientists today tell us that consciousness might be an illusion, which proves what a boondogle understanding the mind will be. Conciousness cannot be an illusion, Descartes proved this in mid 1600's.
Good, you can get the experience of a HUMAN with sonar, now can we put ourselves in the bat's head? Is there even a possible stretch of imagination that will allow this? Nope. It boils down to the fact that you are not a bat, nor can you ever be a bat, and thus you can never be aware of the subjective state of bat-ness.
By WIRED I mean that bats have several thousand generations of unique structure, made specifically for the ability of sonar. Not just the usual neural adaption.
You have FAITH in science, then? Because science cannot breed TRUTH, it can only say that x holds true of all previous cases, and SHOULD (within a given probability) hold true in all future cases. This is the nature of INDUCTIVE logic. You name one scientist that is sure of his discoveries, and I'll show you a bad scientist.
I have faith that when I turn my key, my car will start. It has everytime before. Or is this not faith? It seems that it is. Faith is a critical ASSUMPTION, much like our beleif in that which we discover through science.
When you get in an elevator you have faith in many things, that the cables will hold, that the buttons will take you where you want, etc... And the engeneer who built it had faith in several things two, the archetectual lesson he was taught in school, the validity of the studies saying that x metal is strong enough, etc...
Actually most pain killers don't work on me, I guess I must not be human then. Also viagra DOES not give you a stiffy, it increases bloodflow to that specific region, letting you experience a longer lasting and... er... harder "stiffy" than you would have been able to. And I'm sure if you read the research you would realize that there is a portion of the population who are immune to it as well.
Again your PCP thing doesn't prove a damn thing. If it does please point out what it does prove beyond the fact that yes I can make something unknown happen in your blackbox(brain), and make it happen each time, but do not necissarily understand what I'm actually making happen inside.