Please mod parent up. I believe the poster hit on the head exactly what the big announcement really will be. Apple will have an integrated music-download service in itunes with all major labels, a deep catalog, and Apple's ease-of-use. The industry couldn't come up with a napster replacement that the masses would swallow. Something integrated into iTunes and iPods that is not being provided by RIAA. Now that's something that will get people's attention.
Those Whacky Americans and their weapons of mass destruction!:)
Interestingly enough, there was an article on LAB maneuvers in a recent Smithsonian: Air & Space. The navy had another prop-driven plane they could use for very long-range deliver of nukeler warheads. Near the end of life for that mission, the Navy had a chance to test the maneuver with a real version of the bomb they would be dropping (instead of a practice-dummy), complete with everything except the warhead. Test results howed that with that plane, an over-the-shoulder LAB would toss the weapon about a thousand feet, in which time the plane would attain another thousand feet of separation, which was within the fireball.
I spend all day on Linux at work as a sys-admin for an environment with about 5,000 linux boxes. I still look forward to going home to my Mac OS X machines. As impressive an accomplishment as Gnome and KDE are, they just don't meet my standards.
The Soviet Occupation was the lid keeping Yugoslavia from reaching the boiling point. Once the uber-bad-guy was gone, the ethnic groups turned on each other as the "Pan Serbian Movement" (championed by Tito? I believe) crumbled.
Going farther back, though Germans were not "ethnic cleansed" after WWII, millions of German's were displaced from their homes and lands in surrounding countries. The surrounding countries essentially "purged" the lands of Germans.
I'm fairly certain the same dyamics at work in Yugoslavia will resurface in Iraq. The various factions that co-existed somewhat side-by-side under Saddam mostly are now clamoring for power. The Kurds, Sunni's, and Shites (sp?) are as concerned about the other guy getting a leg-up as they are about themselves. Meanwhile, Iraqi exhiles are coming into town thinking its "their time now." Those who stayed have resentment towards those who left, etc....
Oh - as for who was being bad first between Bosnians and Serbs... That conflict goes back hundreds of years. It defies common sense to even try to figure out who started what. What happened in Yugoslavia was just another pebble in the ocean of history, and another page in the unfortunate tale of racially/ethnically motivated aggression.
Please turn down the volume knob on your rhetoric.
Kosovo was a NATO action in which the US participated, initiated in response to active ethnic cleansing by the serbs. It is not an apples to apples comparison.
Iraq was not actively engaged in ethnic cleansing when we initiated action against them, and our "coalition" does not have the sanction of a governing world political organization (unless you consider the US a governing world political organization).
Clinton did not bring shame to the presidency. He brought shame to himself, and to those who supported him (in our country). In other countries, people wondered what the big deal was. The idea of mistresses is more commonly accepted elsewhere. And she wasn't even a mistriss.
The presidency is the presidency. It has no shame.
Clinton missile attacks were also in response to ethnic cleansing (at least military action by Iraq against Kurds.) They amounted to little more than a "shot across the bow." In fact, my research on them makes me think that the target selection was so "weak" that I'm sure Saddam was laughing at the cowardice of the US.
Let me guess.... you're "still right." That's okay. "You're right dude! You are so right! Damn... you are right again!"
Feel better now?
p.s. Most Gulf War II dissenters probably don't actively oppose the Kosovo actions or the Iraq missile strikes because they don't remember the relevant details enough to feel comfortable discussing them... so they waffle.
I have to agree that the order with which these episodes was aired was an atrocious decision by Fox. By the time the very good character-oriented episodes aired, the initial "surge" of viewship checking out the new show was over. Many people had decided they didn't like it.
I'm really annoyed that I didn't get to know more about Shepard's real story. I thought he might be some sort of Marshall type...
As good and interesting as CSI is, I think people need to remember that CSI has some great characters and good actors. The shows that have really endured, it has always been the characters who sustain it.
I have to say I completely disagree with that. Firefly had it's funny moments, but overall the show was much darker for me. In Firefly, I got the sense the crew was struggling to survive. In Farscape, I'm convinced there isn't an econmy.
But to return to the original point, at no time did I sense Firefly was going for the camp, or tongue-in-cheek-winking laughs that Farscape went for.
I'm a fan of the show and I've been watching the "save farscape" effort through a friend and coworker for whom the show had a lot of meaning. She has participated in some "guerilla marketing" activities to help save the show, and kept me informed of general trends.
I have a few musings that came to mind as I read the responses to this article.
First - on cancelling shows in general. No matter what, some people will gripe. While this expression of dissatisfaction should not be taken lightly, it should also not be taken too seriously unless it passes a certain threshold. My reasoning for this is based on dynamics I encounter at my job, where I manage the open source tools used by a world-wide corporation. Whenever we change the default version of emacs or xemacs for people, someone bitches. Without fail - they bitch. I've learned the people who bitch are the people who have heavily customized.emacs files, and those people are actually a significant minority, not the majority. Most people never notice, didn't read the announcement we sent out, and don't care. So it is with cancelling TV shows. The ones who bitch are the ones who really were the target audience with respect to the writing. Everyone else either doesn't care or won't notice. The one's who complain just had their.emacs file broken.
Second - Farscape as a show has some real value going for it. For me it was the show I picked up after Babylon 5. It is my sci-fi fix. Farscape is serial in that it has a major story arc. It's sometimes episodic - isolated episodes stand on their own. Very Bab 5-ish.
Third - The show is funny (usually). The show plays with innuendo and sarcasm. Often I'm guffawing with laughter at the antics of the characters.
Fourth - It has drama. Good drama, though since blowing up the Scorpi's ship it hasn't been quite as good.
Fifth - The show takes left-turns. Real left-turns. Some of the episodes from time to time are surreal and left-of-center in terms of how they were produced or directed or both. Scratch-and-Sniff and "John Quixote" are two that stand out in my head.
It has some down-sides two. One - The John/Aaron thing is geting old.
Two - Sometimes the characters are acting out of character to facilitate the plot. John especially is overwritten as a stubborn punk-ass human who needs to be taken down a notch or two.
Three - The arc has lost its momentum as of late . Four - I dunno... There's probably a four but I'm too tired now...
Makes me wonder if in the future, an elite class of game developer emerges who is completely focused on the intrinsic qualities of game design rather than the commercial aspects, with the side effect their "works of art" are huge hits when they release one every five to ten years. When I say "elite" I refer to their ability to invest large portions of their lives into this activity with no worries of economic realities due to being indpendently wealthy of self-sufficient in some way. I could imagine them being complete primadonna's about developers working for corporate outfits...
Hmm. Sounds like something I'd read in a Gibson novel.:)
This reminds me of the CDDB when it first came out. Everyone was loading in their collections and helping build the database. Then suddenly the database was sold and became commercial. Lots of people suddenly saw time and effort they devoted to a community become leveraged for someone else's profit. Sure, there weren't any promises that WOULDN"T happen, but it a lot people were surprised and pissed none-the-less.
Hell, didn't IMDB go a similar route? It was a labor of love, until it was sold, right?
I won't populate a free database of anything until I know it will stay free, or not-for-profit! I'm sure someone on slashdot will tell me why that's a stupid position. They may even be right. But that's how I certainly feel about it today.
Say what you want about the price or quality of arcade games. I still find the gaming experience of many stand-up arcades with heavy-duty joysticks and game controllers to be very enjoyable experience.
Case in point (Classic): Sinistar, which had a special joystick that allowed for 3-degrees of precision on a 360-degree range of headings. No emulator has given me the proper UI-experience that the cabinet did.
Cas in point (Classic): Robotron 2064 (right year?:)
Casin in point (Modern): GOLDEN TEE! Yeah baby! You don't have to be a golf-nut to love this game, and the ui is maddenly elegant. No stupid "swing meters" that require perfect button timing. Rather, the game uses a track ball and what happens depends on how hard (or softly) you hit it. Golden Tee is available in most any tavern in your area most likely. At least it is in the Pacific Northwest.
These are all games I've enjoyed in the arcades, and either don't enjoy at home, or doubt I could. There are other examples I'm sure.
There's something to be said for cabinets. I've never wondered what's inside them in terms of electronics, though I thought the NEO-GEO stuff was cool in terms of it's plug-and-play like architecture. Aren't there older consoles that had their hardware in cabinets?
"At least Nethack can stack more than one item on a space. Also it doesn't have that slot machine/pachinko machine appeal that is Angband's main feature."
Could you speak more to that second point please? As a longtime fan of Angband (never finished it though) I'm interested in what causes you to make that remark. (I'm not offended. Just curious).:)
Are the ones who implement their programs in postscript. There's something about using your printer to do computational problems and render the answers that I have to admit is pretty damn cool. Good for balancing checkbooks. Bad for interactive cad apps though.:)
Unless the salesman informs you of the technology by telling you that having DRM interfaces built into you new HDTV set is a good thing because everything will use it in the future (which happened to me the last time I was browsing TVs).
"Oh... if everyone's going to use, good thing I'll have it then! I'll be set for the DIGITAL (rights management) AGE! Yeah Baby!"
I stopped reading just over half-way through and jumped to the end. I couldn't take it any more. The topic is deserving of dialog, but not pontification on this level.
The author of the article, in my mind, mentions the true tragedy of high school - that young adults spend a significant portion of their youth in a purgatory not so far removed from prison, depending on your school. Their potential - jocks, nerds, or otherwise - so often unrealized. Minds wasted. This only gets a paragraph or two in his article (that I read).
I was a nerd. I was smart, well read, etc... but my education was still not so great. I found that out my first year in college....
My experience is not what others had. I could relate to a lot of what the author wrote via direct observation and experience. At the same time, it's all crap. Why? Why? Why? Oh... the humanity! SAVE THE NERDS! And NUKE gay WHALES for JESUS! (That last line is an actual bumper sticker I saw.)
In short, I'm not unsympathetic. "Nerd Persecution" is a bad thing. At the same time, I'd argue the problem of nerd persecution is really a symptom of something that is much more deserving of our attention, even by the author's own arguments.
Oh... the thing about high school teachers being wardens for a population they don't want to interact with? Pure crap. There are some places where that is true, and some places where it is not. It is probably becoming an accurate assessment more often than not, but that is because of the plummet in the quality of individuals who become school teachers now. Still, there are some very good ones out there still. It used to be an honor to be a teacher as a profession. Now it's a joke. Yet another aspect of society out of whack.
I didn't really notice DVD's making an impact on the acceptance of Anime until 2000's, and long before then Sun Coast Video already had racks of Anime tapes for sale. DVDs made "collecting/purchasing" possible for people like me because of the language issue you mentioned, but it seemed to me that the conversion of VHS libraries to DVD got off to a slow start, and there's still work to be done.
"People like me" = people who started out watching Anime that were fan-subs, or sometimes not subtitled at all, and almost always the result of trading/swapping tapes.
Yeah, I can watch DVD's with subtitles, but it's not the same, because when you watch the credits, you don't get to read humorous comments from someone who is finishing the subbing at 5:30 in the morning, whacked out on sleep deprivation and caffeine. Those "end of the episode" comments were quite often hilarious, and those of us in the Purdue Animation Club watching them while taking a break from school were falling out of our chairs.:-)
I always thought with the advent with a medium like DVD, I'd start collecting. But due to the fact I can't make good backups and excercise my fair-use rights legally, I've balked. I've also balked at buying Anime DVDs because I'm feeling nickled and dimed to death by the "two or three episodes/dvd" philosophy. I loved the boxset of Record of Lodoss wars, which had 13 episodes on two DVDs. I just don't want very many DVDs laying around.
The best thing I ever did was change my office at work to a "Standing Office." My desk height is 42 inches. I can stand and work, or sit in an elevated-chair and work. I find that I stand in the morning, and sit in the afternoon usually. I've also found that also sorts of back issues have greatly diminished because of this.
As for the upper-extremity RSI problems, I found this book to be very educational (Check out the readers comments). The main message is: "It took many years for you to do this damage to your body - there are no overnight cures, and the problem is not the symptoms."
The title of the book referenced by the link is: "It's not Carpal Tunnel Syndrome! RSI Theory & Therapy for Computer Professionals."
I was disappointed with the interview questions. Obviously, a lot of people were projecting "their shit" onto him through the questions. I think some people here have forgotten that the media environment is bigger than the people in it. Kudos to Bill for his short answers. That's about all those questions deserved.
I see the first link is "Ain't it cool news". And you hit it on the head. Larry Knowles and his cronies sit around their keyboards and have a circle jerk while they tell the world about the movie they have seen before you.
I didn't bother clicking through to that review. I didn't feel like seeing a text-asm.
I have a VooDoo 5500 in my Mac, and it's been running fine. Was the 5500 dual? I thought it was but from your post I'm thinking it must not be. In any case, even the VooDoo 5500 was a great card, and works very well for me in my Mac. I've never had a complaint about performance, but I rather suspect it's because my computer can't drive it fast enough.
Unlike the rail gun in quake, for example, in Netrek if you fire perfect vector torpedoes aimed precisely where your target is going, a decent human player will dodge them nearly every time. Instead, you have to use your (human) skill and judgement to decide where your (human) target will dodge once you fire, and fire where he's going to go, not where he was going.
This is what I LOVED about Marathon on the Macintosh platform. Marathon was created by Bungie, who was a relatively unknown until Halo finally came out. Given the good reviews it's getting, the fact Marathon was written by Bungie should say something to more people than it did in the past.
Anyway, Marathon's weapons were awesome. The only point-to-point weapon that had the fire-hit behavior was one of the weakest - the pistol. But, that made one of the weaker weapons attractive in certain situations. The machine-gun was inaccurate at longer ranges, and the grenade launcher had travel-time on the grenades. The pulse-pistol also had travel-time on its shots. My favorite weapon in Marathon though was the rocket-launcher. Not a weanie micro-missile launcher. No. Marahon rocket launchers were over-the-shoulder, say-goodbye-to-half-the-screen, one-hit-one-kill rockets. And, when you launched them they made a wonderful "whoosh" for all to hear, including your target. And, they were very dodgeable. But the deadly effectiveness of the the rocket-launcher was a siren-song that lured many people (myself included) to use them often. And rocket-duels became dances of dodging, misdirection, etc... One tatic was to fire one out in front of the target, and then put the second one actually closer to the target, anticipating the turn away from the rocket, etc...
Okay, so you get the idea I loved Marathon and rocket duals. I did. The thing was tht the gameplay in Marathon was better than any of the quakes, and rivaled only by Unreal Tournament II. I have not played RTW, or half-life, so I can't speak to those. But for all the advantages the newer games had over Marathon in terms of technology (rendering engines, etc...), I'd rather boot up Marathon for a LAN party any day.
I also wanted to thank the writer of this post for his insightfull comments.
I can't read them right now as the page was slashdotted. There is a difference between what one can do with pattern matching (regular expressions) versus Context Free Grammers. If you knew the difference between the two, you'd know why it is so easy to write lexers with perl via regular expressions, versus parsing.
That being said, there are parser modules out there that let you define grammers for languages in a pretty straight forward way. and then they do all of the parsing for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Please mod parent up. I believe the poster hit on the head exactly what the big announcement really will be. Apple will have an integrated music-download service in itunes with all major labels, a deep catalog, and Apple's ease-of-use. The industry couldn't come up with a napster replacement that the masses would swallow. Something integrated into iTunes and iPods that is not being provided by RIAA. Now that's something that will get people's attention.
Those Whacky Americans and their weapons of mass destruction! :)
Interestingly enough, there was an article on LAB maneuvers in a recent Smithsonian: Air & Space. The navy had another prop-driven plane they could use for very long-range deliver of nukeler warheads. Near the end of life for that mission, the Navy had a chance to test the maneuver with a real version of the bomb they would be dropping (instead of a practice-dummy), complete with everything except the warhead. Test results howed that with that plane, an over-the-shoulder LAB would toss the weapon about a thousand feet, in which time the plane would attain another thousand feet of separation, which was within the fireball.
I spend all day on Linux at work as a sys-admin for an environment with about 5,000 linux boxes. I still look forward to going home to my Mac OS X machines. As impressive an accomplishment as Gnome and KDE are, they just don't meet my standards.
The Soviet Occupation was the lid keeping Yugoslavia from reaching the boiling point. Once the uber-bad-guy was gone, the ethnic groups turned on each other as the "Pan Serbian Movement" (championed by Tito? I believe) crumbled.
Going farther back, though Germans were not "ethnic cleansed" after WWII, millions of German's were displaced from their homes and lands in surrounding countries. The surrounding countries essentially "purged" the lands of Germans.
I'm fairly certain the same dyamics at work in Yugoslavia will resurface in Iraq. The various factions that co-existed somewhat side-by-side under Saddam mostly are now clamoring for power. The Kurds, Sunni's, and Shites (sp?) are as concerned about the other guy getting a leg-up as they are about themselves. Meanwhile, Iraqi exhiles are coming into town thinking its "their time now." Those who stayed have resentment towards those who left, etc....
Oh - as for who was being bad first between Bosnians and Serbs... That conflict goes back hundreds of years. It defies common sense to even try to figure out who started what. What happened in Yugoslavia was just another pebble in the ocean of history, and another page in the unfortunate tale of racially/ethnically motivated aggression.
Please turn down the volume knob on your rhetoric.
Kosovo was a NATO action in which the US participated, initiated in response to active ethnic cleansing by the serbs. It is not an apples to apples comparison.
Iraq was not actively engaged in ethnic cleansing when we initiated action against them, and our "coalition" does not have the sanction of a governing world political organization (unless you consider the US a governing world political organization).
Clinton did not bring shame to the presidency. He brought shame to himself, and to those who supported him (in our country). In other countries, people wondered what the big deal was. The idea of mistresses is more commonly accepted elsewhere. And she wasn't even a mistriss.
The presidency is the presidency. It has no shame.
Clinton missile attacks were also in response to ethnic cleansing (at least military action by Iraq against Kurds.) They amounted to little more than a "shot across the bow." In fact, my research on them makes me think that the target selection was so "weak" that I'm sure Saddam was laughing at the cowardice of the US.
Let me guess.... you're "still right." That's okay. "You're right dude! You are so right! Damn... you are right again!"
Feel better now?
p.s. Most Gulf War II dissenters probably don't actively oppose the Kosovo actions or the Iraq missile strikes because they don't remember the relevant details enough to feel comfortable discussing them... so they waffle.
I have to agree that the order with which these episodes was aired was an atrocious decision by Fox. By the time the very good character-oriented episodes aired, the initial "surge" of viewship checking out the new show was over. Many people had decided they didn't like it.
I'm really annoyed that I didn't get to know more about Shepard's real story. I thought he might be some sort of Marshall type...
As good and interesting as CSI is, I think people need to remember that CSI has some great characters and good actors. The shows that have really endured, it has always been the characters who sustain it.
Oh boy. I can see it now on usenet news groups.
Star Destroyer vs. Enterprise vs. Firefly. That one will never die I bet.
I have to say I completely disagree with that. Firefly had it's funny moments, but overall the show was much darker for me. In Firefly, I got the sense the crew was struggling to survive. In Farscape, I'm convinced there isn't an econmy.
But to return to the original point, at no time did I sense Firefly was going for the camp, or tongue-in-cheek-winking laughs that Farscape went for.
What about Darwin? It's based on BSD unix as well.
I'm a fan of the show and I've been watching the "save farscape" effort through a friend and coworker for whom the show had a lot of meaning. She has participated in some "guerilla marketing" activities to help save the show, and kept me informed of general trends.
.emacs files, and those people are actually a significant minority, not the majority. Most people never notice, didn't read the announcement we sent out, and don't care. So it is with cancelling TV shows. The ones who bitch are the ones who really were the target audience with respect to the writing. Everyone else either doesn't care or won't notice. The one's who complain just had their .emacs file broken.
I have a few musings that came to mind as I read the responses to this article.
First - on cancelling shows in general. No matter what, some people will gripe. While this expression of dissatisfaction should not be taken lightly, it should also not be taken too seriously unless it passes a certain threshold. My reasoning for this is based on dynamics I encounter at my job, where I manage the open source tools used by a world-wide corporation. Whenever we change the default version of emacs or xemacs for people, someone bitches. Without fail - they bitch. I've learned the people who bitch are the people who have heavily customized
Second - Farscape as a show has some real value going for it. For me it was the show I picked up after Babylon 5. It is my sci-fi fix. Farscape is serial in that it has a major story arc. It's sometimes episodic - isolated episodes stand on their own. Very Bab 5-ish.
Third - The show is funny (usually). The show plays with innuendo and sarcasm. Often I'm guffawing with laughter at the antics of the characters.
Fourth - It has drama. Good drama, though since blowing up the Scorpi's ship it hasn't been quite as good.
Fifth - The show takes left-turns. Real left-turns. Some of the episodes from time to time are surreal and left-of-center in terms of how they were produced or directed or both. Scratch-and-Sniff and "John Quixote" are two that stand out in my head.
It has some down-sides two.
One - The John/Aaron thing is geting old.
Two - Sometimes the characters are acting out of character to facilitate the plot. John especially is overwritten as a stubborn punk-ass human who needs to be taken down a notch or two.
Three - The arc has lost its momentum as of late
.
Four - I dunno... There's probably a four but I'm too tired now...
Cheerio.
Makes me wonder if in the future, an elite class of game developer emerges who is completely focused on the intrinsic qualities of game design rather than the commercial aspects, with the side effect their "works of art" are huge hits when they release one every five to ten years. When I say "elite" I refer to their ability to invest large portions of their lives into this activity with no worries of economic realities due to being indpendently wealthy of self-sufficient in some way. I could imagine them being complete primadonna's about developers working for corporate outfits...
:)
Hmm. Sounds like something I'd read in a Gibson novel.
-Rob
This reminds me of the CDDB when it first came out. Everyone was loading in their collections and helping build the database. Then suddenly the database was sold and became commercial. Lots of people suddenly saw time and effort they devoted to a community become leveraged for someone else's profit. Sure, there weren't any promises that WOULDN"T happen, but it a lot people were surprised and pissed none-the-less.
Hell, didn't IMDB go a similar route? It was a labor of love, until it was sold, right?
I won't populate a free database of anything until I know it will stay free, or not-for-profit! I'm sure someone on slashdot will tell me why that's a stupid position. They may even be right. But that's how I certainly feel about it today.
Say what you want about the price or quality of arcade games. I still find the gaming experience of many stand-up arcades with heavy-duty joysticks and game controllers to be very enjoyable experience.
Case in point (Classic): Sinistar, which had a special joystick that allowed for 3-degrees of precision on a 360-degree range of headings. No emulator has given me the proper UI-experience that the cabinet did.
Cas in point (Classic): Robotron 2064 (right year?
Casin in point (Modern): GOLDEN TEE! Yeah baby! You don't have to be a golf-nut to love this game, and the ui is maddenly elegant. No stupid "swing meters" that require perfect button timing. Rather, the game uses a track ball and what happens depends on how hard (or softly) you hit it. Golden Tee is available in most any tavern in your area most likely. At least it is in the Pacific Northwest.
These are all games I've enjoyed in the arcades, and either don't enjoy at home, or doubt I could. There are other examples I'm sure.
There's something to be said for cabinets. I've never wondered what's inside them in terms of electronics, though I thought the NEO-GEO stuff was cool in terms of it's plug-and-play like architecture. Aren't there older consoles that had their hardware in cabinets?
"At least Nethack can stack more than one item on a space. Also it doesn't have that slot machine/pachinko machine appeal that is Angband's main feature."
:)
Could you speak more to that second point please? As a longtime fan of Angband (never finished it though) I'm interested in what causes you to make that remark. (I'm not offended. Just curious).
Are the ones who implement their programs in postscript. There's something about using your printer to do computational problems and render the answers that I have to admit is pretty damn cool. Good for balancing checkbooks. Bad for interactive cad apps though. :)
Unless the salesman informs you of the technology by telling you that having DRM interfaces built into you new HDTV set is a good thing because everything will use it in the future (which happened to me the last time I was browsing TVs).
"Oh... if everyone's going to use, good thing I'll have it then! I'll be set for the DIGITAL (rights management) AGE! Yeah Baby!"
I stopped reading just over half-way through and jumped to the end. I couldn't take it any more. The topic is deserving of dialog, but not pontification on this level.
The author of the article, in my mind, mentions the true tragedy of high school - that young adults spend a significant portion of their youth in a purgatory not so far removed from prison, depending on your school. Their potential - jocks, nerds, or otherwise - so often unrealized. Minds wasted. This only gets a paragraph or two in his article (that I read).
I was a nerd. I was smart, well read, etc... but my education was still not so great. I found that out my first year in college....
My experience is not what others had. I could relate to a lot of what the author wrote via direct observation and experience. At the same time, it's all crap. Why? Why? Why? Oh... the humanity! SAVE THE NERDS! And NUKE gay WHALES for JESUS! (That last line is an actual bumper sticker I saw.)
In short, I'm not unsympathetic. "Nerd Persecution" is a bad thing. At the same time, I'd argue the problem of nerd persecution is really a symptom of something that is much more deserving of our attention, even by the author's own arguments.
Oh... the thing about high school teachers being wardens for a population they don't want to interact with? Pure crap. There are some places where that is true, and some places where it is not. It is probably becoming an accurate assessment more often than not, but that is because of the plummet in the quality of individuals who become school teachers now. Still, there are some very good ones out there still. It used to be an honor to be a teacher as a profession. Now it's a joke. Yet another aspect of society out of whack.
In summary, I think this article was really weak.
I'm not sure I agree with this...
:-)
I didn't really notice DVD's making an impact on the acceptance of Anime until 2000's, and long before then Sun Coast Video already had racks of Anime tapes for sale. DVDs made "collecting/purchasing" possible for people like me because of the language issue you mentioned, but it seemed to me that the conversion of VHS libraries to DVD got off to a slow start, and there's still work to be done.
"People like me" = people who started out watching Anime that were fan-subs, or sometimes not subtitled at all, and almost always the result of trading/swapping tapes.
Yeah, I can watch DVD's with subtitles, but it's not the same, because when you watch the credits, you don't get to read humorous comments from someone who is finishing the subbing at 5:30 in the morning, whacked out on sleep deprivation and caffeine. Those "end of the episode" comments were quite often hilarious, and those of us in the Purdue Animation Club watching them while taking a break from school were falling out of our chairs.
I always thought with the advent with a medium like DVD, I'd start collecting. But due to the fact I can't make good backups and excercise my fair-use rights legally, I've balked. I've also balked at buying Anime DVDs because I'm feeling nickled and dimed to death by the "two or three episodes/dvd" philosophy. I loved the boxset of Record of Lodoss wars, which had 13 episodes on two DVDs. I just don't want very many DVDs laying around.
The best thing I ever did was change my office at work to a "Standing Office." My desk height is 42 inches. I can stand and work, or sit in an elevated-chair and work. I find that I stand in the morning, and sit in the afternoon usually. I've also found that also sorts of back issues have greatly diminished because of this.
As for the upper-extremity RSI problems, I found this book to be very educational (Check out the readers comments). The main message is: "It took many years for you to do this damage to your body - there are no overnight cures, and the problem is not the symptoms."
The title of the book referenced by the link is: "It's not Carpal Tunnel Syndrome! RSI Theory & Therapy for Computer Professionals."
I was disappointed with the interview questions. Obviously, a lot of people were projecting "their shit" onto him through the questions. I think some people here have forgotten that the media environment is bigger than the people in it. Kudos to Bill for his short answers. That's about all those questions deserved.
I see the first link is "Ain't it cool news". And you hit it on the head. Larry Knowles and his cronies sit around their keyboards and have a circle jerk while they tell the world about the movie they have seen before you.
I didn't bother clicking through to that review. I didn't feel like seeing a text-asm.
I have a VooDoo 5500 in my Mac, and it's been running fine. Was the 5500 dual? I thought it was but from your post I'm thinking it must not be. In any case, even the VooDoo 5500 was a great card, and works very well for me in my Mac. I've never had a complaint about performance, but I rather suspect it's because my computer can't drive it fast enough.
Does that mean we'll see Knowles publishing orgasmic reviews about how great this game that he saw on the sly, due to the help of a secret agent?
This is what I LOVED about Marathon on the Macintosh platform. Marathon was created by Bungie, who was a relatively unknown until Halo finally came out. Given the good reviews it's getting, the fact Marathon was written by Bungie should say something to more people than it did in the past.
Anyway, Marathon's weapons were awesome. The only point-to-point weapon that had the fire-hit behavior was one of the weakest - the pistol. But, that made one of the weaker weapons attractive in certain situations. The machine-gun was inaccurate at longer ranges, and the grenade launcher had travel-time on the grenades. The pulse-pistol also had travel-time on its shots. My favorite weapon in Marathon though was the rocket-launcher. Not a weanie micro-missile launcher. No. Marahon rocket launchers were over-the-shoulder, say-goodbye-to-half-the-screen, one-hit-one-kill rockets. And, when you launched them they made a wonderful "whoosh" for all to hear, including your target. And, they were very dodgeable. But the deadly effectiveness of the the rocket-launcher was a siren-song that lured many people (myself included) to use them often. And rocket-duels became dances of dodging, misdirection, etc... One tatic was to fire one out in front of the target, and then put the second one actually closer to the target, anticipating the turn away from the rocket, etc...
Okay, so you get the idea I loved Marathon and rocket duals. I did. The thing was tht the gameplay in Marathon was better than any of the quakes, and rivaled only by Unreal Tournament II. I have not played RTW, or half-life, so I can't speak to those. But for all the advantages the newer games had over Marathon in terms of technology (rendering engines, etc...), I'd rather boot up Marathon for a LAN party any day.
I also wanted to thank the writer of this post for his insightfull comments.
I can't read them right now as the page was slashdotted. There is a difference between what one can do with pattern matching (regular expressions) versus Context Free Grammers. If you knew the difference between the two, you'd know why it is so easy to write lexers with perl via regular expressions, versus parsing.
That being said, there are parser modules out there that let you define grammers for languages in a pretty straight forward way. and then they do all of the parsing for you.