That seems to be a trend in certain part-of-a-series movies lately... Many filmmakers seemingly fail to understand that the middle movie needs to stand on it's own -- maybe this comes from treating the whole as a single big money-making enterprise rather than as making *movies*.
A good counterexample is Empire Strikes Back. Sure, it set up Jedi, but it definately had an ending (which, IMO, stands as one of the all-time great endings in movie history). It's too bad more films don't follow that paradigm.
Re:America's Army
on
Gentoo Games
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Of course, you say "die" and you really mean "have to sit out several minutes before I respawn". AA is about as close to the reality of combat as paintball (at least in paintball it stings a little when you get shot).
It differs because it's actually intended as a recruiting tool for the military.
IMO, there's nothing wrong with serving in the military or, as the military, recruiting. OTOH, it's despicable to lie and mischaracterize the realities of the military to the people you're trying to get to join. This has been done for years ("Yes! You'll be getting a primo job in Germany with top-of-the-line tech training and your own quarters!") and this is just another aspect of that.
I really don't want my taxes supporting the people who want to trick people into joining the armed forces, but my tax dollars did pay for America's Army.
Re:What's the Point??
on
TiVo For Radio?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
And the point of time-shifting radio is????
I almost never catch Car Talk on NPR on the weekends because it's on before I'm out driving around (I'm in CA, and I sleep in on weekends).
Now, OTOH, on the weekdays I find myself listening to crappy morning shows during my commute if I'm not up for news. I would really like the option of pulling up a show from the weekend (or a Science Friday or whatever) and listening to it rather than putting on Sarah & No-Name and listening to what happened on TV the night before just to have *something* to listen to.
Hell, I spend roughly as much time commuting as I do in front of the TV during the week. If you can see why TiVO has a market, surely you can see one here, too?
Only useful if I can share...
on
TiVo For Radio?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I always listen to NPR on my way in to and from work because music just puts me into a sleepy funk when I'm commuting (slow traffic and all).
I can't tell you how many times I've heard something and thought "gee, my girlfriend would be interested in that". However, neither of us listen to the radio except in our cars, so unless we're carpooling (which we can only do about 1/3 of the time), the other'd still pretty much be screwed even with a TiVO-like recorder.
Now, if I could park next to her can and wirelessly transfer the show, that'd be completely different. Maybe I could flag reports for her and have them automatically transfer when the cars are nearby... Of course, you'd have to do some pretty impressive interface work with this in order to keep everyone on the road...
Also, it'd have to work when the car was off without draining my battery (why is Science Friday on at such an odd time?)
mastery of nanotechnology could lead to the kind of military supremacy that mastery of steam power and repeating firearms gave the West in the 19th Century.
It seems to me that the availability of nanotech would actually completely outmode the current definition of military mastery.
Nuclear weapons accomplished (or are accomplishing) this to a very limited extent, but they're really hard to build and require exotic and hard-to-find elements and impressive amounts of infrastructure.
Nanotech, OTOH, seems like just an advance in manufacturing techniques. Given a properly advanced state of the art, it seems like it would be fairly impossible to limit access it the tech once things got rolling.
So, what we'll have is yet another dramatic inflation of the 9-11 effect, where once again the idea of how many people can be killed by a single determined person rises dramatically. It's been a historical trend over the last few hundred years, but I foresee an increase by a level of magnitude in our near future...
However, I believe they may be putting the cart ahead of the donkey, considering the need of resources for the bots. That is, unless you don't mind nanobots eating your kids and reconstituting them into Nanobot Green.;)
This is true -- you still need something to start from, but really you could conveivably skip so many steps in production that it would seem like a literal something-from-nothing.
Look at anything on your desk and consider how many steps were taken to manufacture it. I have a box of raisins, for instance -- that's grape growers, trees to make the box, inks to print on the box, plastic for the bag to hold all the little boxes, distributions systems, etc.
Given that, imagine the economic chaos that would ensue if nanotech got off the ground in and sort of raw-material-to-finished-product way; you'd see a worldwide depression of unprecidented severity which would take generations and wars and famines to put behind us...
If the summary is indicative of the report (and I'm hoping it's not), let me say: Bullshit.
Let's examine one of the "myth" bullets:
Myth: Linux Means Longer Hardware Life
"It is true that a three- or four-year-old PC that is not powerful enough to run Windows XP Latest News about Windows XP and Office XP may be able to run Linux and StarOffice," Silver says. "However, enterprises need to budget for some additional costs to maintain older PCs."
Notice how the inflamatory, attention-grabbing headline does not actually describe the analysis below it. Rather than suggesting that the average useful lifetime of a PC running Linux is longer than that of a PC running Windows, they point out instead that older PCs might break down.
They're charging $95 for this brilliant type of insight? The ridiculous idea that PC hardware's average working lifespan is three years aside, they're not making any point about Linux at all.
*sigh* I got to keep my resident pointy hair away from this one, lest he see the P300 workstation on my desk (still completely usable, BTW) and assume I'm damaging company revenues...
Rather than 90% of the mass in the universe being AWOL, isn't it possible that we don't have an accurate understanding of how gravity functions on an extremely large scale?
Could this, in turn, be related to how the expansion of the universe appears to be actually speeding up rather than, as we'd expect, slowing down?
I'd welcome any thoughts on this one... Anyhow, it's late and this is way out of my area of expertise, so forgive my spitballing.
For those of you who didn't RTFA: This is essentially a little hard drive which rides around in your backpack (note: I don't carry a backpack all the time; do you?) and can connect, wirelessly, to any machine you access which recognizes wireless devices. Basically, as far as I can tell, this has the same net effect as having a home directory on an NFS server someplace and using it to save your settings as you move from machine to machine.
Again: Bo-ring.
When I saw "personal server, no IO", I was hoping this would be a manifestation of the keystone portion of my idea for a personal wireless network Your devices would all notice one another, and the width of functionality of any given device would be dependant on what you were carrying. If you we out taking pictures with your digicam and were carrying a server, the images would be transfered to the (presumably very expansive) drive in the server. If you had your cell phone, the images would be sent off to your home computer, as well.
Repeat en masse. PDAs display and do I/O, headphones play music and the real work is taken care of automagically behind the scenes in some secure fashion. You'd effectively allow the elimination of multi-use devices which don't do any job very well by allowing your devices to play their strong points, and you could customize your loadout just in what you grab in the morning when you're loading your pockets.
Anyhow, this ain't it, and that's disappointing -- somebody must have hit my verbosity flag today...
And when you run free software, don't tell yourself that it's your right to take someone else's work and use it "just because." You have the right to use it because THEY gave you that right.
While that's true on it's face, I would counter that making the fruits of your labor available to others in the community is not an entirely selfless act.
Really, quality OSS projects are not the work of a single person. They're the result of wide-ranging teams who, thanks to the GPL, are able to apply many eyes, ideas and approaches. That's the whole strength of OSS.
Now, I do believe it's important to give credit to those who work hard, but I also believe it's futile to toss credits in the face of someone who doesn't give a toss (and not giving a toss is a right the GPL gives you, as well).
Hans talks about how 99% of people, as it stands, don't see the names of the folks responsible for the software they turned out.
I'd counter that 99% of the people certainly could care less, that 99% of people leave movies before the credits are even halfway through and habitually tune them out to begin with.
IMO, the people who are going to care are already seeing the names, either in the source or at the project websites or in CVS. To everyone else, any sort of more obtrusive crediting is just going to be obnoxious, and they're still not going to know any more names then they did before.
The whole point, if anyone still remembers the original goal of the majority of OSS projects, is to write some kick-ass code that's going to be done the Right Way, rather than the short-cutty kludgy way that most programmers are forced to code at work. To me, this includes making the software as elegant and streamlined as possible, and the various methods of ego gratification I can think of (extra splash screens, etc) seem incompatible with this.
I did something like this in college via the Student ACM at my school. Here's a link:
http://acm.cs.uwec.edu/
We obtained a small room and set up some Linux systems and gave people room to play with. We initially called it the UPL (Undergrad Project Lab), a name stolen from a similar student-run lab at UW Madison. I'd advise you not to likewise take the name lest Gus threaten to break your knees with a titanium crowbar as he did me.
This was back in day, so gigabyte harddrives were high times for us. These days, hardware is so cheap that I imagine you could get some good stuff happening with just a corner of a classroom and an ethernet connection.
I will definately encourage you on this one -- for me, the UPL was great experience in terms of hardware, writing user policy (especially) and other admin-type stuff, and it acted as the base from which I built the skill set that I earn a living from now. So good luck!
Either way, it's probably easier just to sniff the keyboard or bug the encrypted phone.
Easier, sure, but also a helluva lot more detectible. You gotta figure that anytime you have a local device, you're running a pretty high risk of getting caught given that you (a) have to place it, (b) have to have something physically there that might be found, and (c) it has to transmit data out somehow. Tapping a line at the phone company has none of these drawbacks.
Those bad guys really need to learn how to use some real encryption.
I tend to believe that the government is able to either break or circumvent levels of encryption at a much higher level than commonly thought. I mean, it's entirely possible that old devices were being used for communication, but it seems to be if you're going to be cautious enough to encrypt comms at least one or two would have done it properly.
I wonder: If encryption on the line prevents a court-ordered wiretap from obtaining useful information, is that enough cause to, say, break in and bug the room? The wording of the statement seems to suggest that...
It appears to me that the author has described a method for the circumvention of Apple's copyright enforcement mechanism.
Never mind that anyone with a good understanding of computers could have come up with the same thing, this is still a violation of the DMCA, isn't it? IANAL, but maybe/. ought to pull it to save the author from legal action.
God, I hate living in a country where free speech is outlawed.
What's this? GWB saying one thing and then doing the complete opposite?
I can't believe that. I'm sure that at least one of our proud 24-hour news stations would be all over that. Someone check the No-Spin Zone!
Face it, folks: This is an administration which plays the press perfectly and gets away with an astounding amount of this bullshit. We're just lucky it's not in the US this time -- he could be appointing more Enron lackies to head the army or obviously business-biased people to set policy. And he gets away with it 'cause the 24 hour "news" channels don't have the will or the stones to make, afraid that they'll lose interviews or access or credibility among people who made the WWE and NASCAR such powerhouses.
(sigh) Sorry, I guess my cynicism got out for a run again. I'm off to watch a few more hours of Fox News and MSNBC. Maybe I can hear another eloquent defense of that poor Senator from PA who's under attack by crazy lefties just because he hates homosexuals.
You know, it's refreshing that rather than being saddled laws which are based on wisdom and forward-thinking ideals, the Iraqis will be able to skip straight to having laws based on short-sighted greed.
You know, I worry about sitting in front of a CRT for extended periods or standing by the microwave when it's cooking something or living near high voltage lines.
Call me an alarmist, but I want to see the 50-year health studies before I go to something this, er, extreme. I mean, it could be completely harmless, but it just *seems* like something so potentially fraught with problems that my instinct is to avoid it.
But the biggest difference is that Linus isn't going to send you to N. Finland and have Alan Cox shoot you if you whine on/. about your latest/greatest kernel patch...
Leader of the OSS movement? Linus? Are we thinking of the same guy here? Short, glasses, funny accent?
I can think of a few guys I'd pick as leader of the OSS movement, but Linus isn't on the list. He's the manager of one of the all-time successful projects in OSS and a lot of people (rightly, IMO) respect what he things, but that's pretty much it.
DRM's not really about Linux, anyhow...
on
Linus on DRM
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Really, all of the DRM stuff out there is aimed squarely at the 95% of people sitting on the net running Windows.
If you disable sharing of certain digital information for a vast majority of users, you've effectively plugged up the problem. Obviously, you'll never stop *everybody*, so that's not a realistic goal in the first place. So it doesn't really matter what Linus thinks/does, at least not in this point in time (the GUIs that come with the popular Linux distributions ain't ready to take a serious run at the desktop yet).
I try my best to not pay any attention to reviews.
So how the heck to you decide which games to buy? Maybe it's just me, but my friends are even more broke than I am and therefore not good for games not yet in the bargain bin...
Personally, I gauge all reviews (games, gear, etc) on how detailed and well thought-out they seem. For example, if a review carefully goes over a game's premise, gameplay, controls, storyline and etc. it's going to get a lot more credibility from my mind than a short blurb about how great it is.
Beyond that, all you can do is identify which reviewers you tend to agree with and which you don't -- I can usually tell if I'll want to see a movie by how badly Mr. Cranky hates it, while Ebert is useless as a barometer because he hates things I like and vice versa.
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A good counterexample is Empire Strikes Back. Sure, it set up Jedi, but it definately had an ending (which, IMO, stands as one of the all-time great endings in movie history). It's too bad more films don't follow that paradigm.
Of course, you say "die" and you really mean "have to sit out several minutes before I respawn". AA is about as close to the reality of combat as paintball (at least in paintball it stings a little when you get shot).
IMO, there's nothing wrong with serving in the military or, as the military, recruiting. OTOH, it's despicable to lie and mischaracterize the realities of the military to the people you're trying to get to join. This has been done for years ("Yes! You'll be getting a primo job in Germany with top-of-the-line tech training and your own quarters!") and this is just another aspect of that.
I really don't want my taxes supporting the people who want to trick people into joining the armed forces, but my tax dollars did pay for America's Army.
I almost never catch Car Talk on NPR on the weekends because it's on before I'm out driving around (I'm in CA, and I sleep in on weekends).
Now, OTOH, on the weekdays I find myself listening to crappy morning shows during my commute if I'm not up for news. I would really like the option of pulling up a show from the weekend (or a Science Friday or whatever) and listening to it rather than putting on Sarah & No-Name and listening to what happened on TV the night before just to have *something* to listen to.
Hell, I spend roughly as much time commuting as I do in front of the TV during the week. If you can see why TiVO has a market, surely you can see one here, too?
I can't tell you how many times I've heard something and thought "gee, my girlfriend would be interested in that". However, neither of us listen to the radio except in our cars, so unless we're carpooling (which we can only do about 1/3 of the time), the other'd still pretty much be screwed even with a TiVO-like recorder.
Now, if I could park next to her can and wirelessly transfer the show, that'd be completely different. Maybe I could flag reports for her and have them automatically transfer when the cars are nearby... Of course, you'd have to do some pretty impressive interface work with this in order to keep everyone on the road...
Also, it'd have to work when the car was off without draining my battery (why is Science Friday on at such an odd time?)
It seems to me that the availability of nanotech would actually completely outmode the current definition of military mastery.
Nuclear weapons accomplished (or are accomplishing) this to a very limited extent, but they're really hard to build and require exotic and hard-to-find elements and impressive amounts of infrastructure.
Nanotech, OTOH, seems like just an advance in manufacturing techniques. Given a properly advanced state of the art, it seems like it would be fairly impossible to limit access it the tech once things got rolling.
So, what we'll have is yet another dramatic inflation of the 9-11 effect, where once again the idea of how many people can be killed by a single determined person rises dramatically. It's been a historical trend over the last few hundred years, but I foresee an increase by a level of magnitude in our near future...
This is true -- you still need something to start from, but really you could conveivably skip so many steps in production that it would seem like a literal something-from-nothing.
Look at anything on your desk and consider how many steps were taken to manufacture it. I have a box of raisins, for instance -- that's grape growers, trees to make the box, inks to print on the box, plastic for the bag to hold all the little boxes, distributions systems, etc.
Given that, imagine the economic chaos that would ensue if nanotech got off the ground in and sort of raw-material-to-finished-product way; you'd see a worldwide depression of unprecidented severity which would take generations and wars and famines to put behind us...
Let's examine one of the "myth" bullets:
Myth: Linux Means Longer Hardware Life
"It is true that a three- or four-year-old PC that is not powerful enough to run Windows XP Latest News about Windows XP and Office XP may be able to run Linux and StarOffice," Silver says. "However, enterprises need to budget for some additional costs to maintain older PCs."
Notice how the inflamatory, attention-grabbing headline does not actually describe the analysis below it. Rather than suggesting that the average useful lifetime of a PC running Linux is longer than that of a PC running Windows, they point out instead that older PCs might break down.
They're charging $95 for this brilliant type of insight? The ridiculous idea that PC hardware's average working lifespan is three years aside, they're not making any point about Linux at all.
*sigh* I got to keep my resident pointy hair away from this one, lest he see the P300 workstation on my desk (still completely usable, BTW) and assume I'm damaging company revenues...
I'd welcome any thoughts on this one... Anyhow, it's late and this is way out of my area of expertise, so forgive my spitballing.
For those of you who didn't RTFA: This is essentially a little hard drive which rides around in your backpack (note: I don't carry a backpack all the time; do you?) and can connect, wirelessly, to any machine you access which recognizes wireless devices. Basically, as far as I can tell, this has the same net effect as having a home directory on an NFS server someplace and using it to save your settings as you move from machine to machine.
Again: Bo-ring.
When I saw "personal server, no IO", I was hoping this would be a manifestation of the keystone portion of my idea for a personal wireless network Your devices would all notice one another, and the width of functionality of any given device would be dependant on what you were carrying. If you we out taking pictures with your digicam and were carrying a server, the images would be transfered to the (presumably very expansive) drive in the server. If you had your cell phone, the images would be sent off to your home computer, as well.
Repeat en masse. PDAs display and do I/O, headphones play music and the real work is taken care of automagically behind the scenes in some secure fashion. You'd effectively allow the elimination of multi-use devices which don't do any job very well by allowing your devices to play their strong points, and you could customize your loadout just in what you grab in the morning when you're loading your pockets.
Anyhow, this ain't it, and that's disappointing -- somebody must have hit my verbosity flag today...
While that's true on it's face, I would counter that making the fruits of your labor available to others in the community is not an entirely selfless act.
Really, quality OSS projects are not the work of a single person. They're the result of wide-ranging teams who, thanks to the GPL, are able to apply many eyes, ideas and approaches. That's the whole strength of OSS.
Now, I do believe it's important to give credit to those who work hard, but I also believe it's futile to toss credits in the face of someone who doesn't give a toss (and not giving a toss is a right the GPL gives you, as well).
IMO, the people who are going to care are already seeing the names, either in the source or at the project websites or in CVS. To everyone else, any sort of more obtrusive crediting is just going to be obnoxious, and they're still not going to know any more names then they did before.
The whole point, if anyone still remembers the original goal of the majority of OSS projects, is to write some kick-ass code that's going to be done the Right Way, rather than the short-cutty kludgy way that most programmers are forced to code at work. To me, this includes making the software as elegant and streamlined as possible, and the various methods of ego gratification I can think of (extra splash screens, etc) seem incompatible with this.
http://acm.cs.uwec.edu/
We obtained a small room and set up some Linux systems and gave people room to play with. We initially called it the UPL (Undergrad Project Lab), a name stolen from a similar student-run lab at UW Madison. I'd advise you not to likewise take the name lest Gus threaten to break your knees with a titanium crowbar as he did me.
This was back in day, so gigabyte harddrives were high times for us. These days, hardware is so cheap that I imagine you could get some good stuff happening with just a corner of a classroom and an ethernet connection.
I will definately encourage you on this one -- for me, the UPL was great experience in terms of hardware, writing user policy (especially) and other admin-type stuff, and it acted as the base from which I built the skill set that I earn a living from now. So good luck!
Easier, sure, but also a helluva lot more detectible. You gotta figure that anytime you have a local device, you're running a pretty high risk of getting caught given that you (a) have to place it, (b) have to have something physically there that might be found, and (c) it has to transmit data out somehow. Tapping a line at the phone company has none of these drawbacks.
I tend to believe that the government is able to either break or circumvent levels of encryption at a much higher level than commonly thought. I mean, it's entirely possible that old devices were being used for communication, but it seems to be if you're going to be cautious enough to encrypt comms at least one or two would have done it properly.
I wonder: If encryption on the line prevents a court-ordered wiretap from obtaining useful information, is that enough cause to, say, break in and bug the room? The wording of the statement seems to suggest that...
Never mind that anyone with a good understanding of computers could have come up with the same thing, this is still a violation of the DMCA, isn't it? IANAL, but maybe /. ought to pull it to save the author from legal action.
God, I hate living in a country where free speech is outlawed.
I can't believe that. I'm sure that at least one of our proud 24-hour news stations would be all over that. Someone check the No-Spin Zone!
Face it, folks: This is an administration which plays the press perfectly and gets away with an astounding amount of this bullshit. We're just lucky it's not in the US this time -- he could be appointing more Enron lackies to head the army or obviously business-biased people to set policy. And he gets away with it 'cause the 24 hour "news" channels don't have the will or the stones to make, afraid that they'll lose interviews or access or credibility among people who made the WWE and NASCAR such powerhouses.
(sigh) Sorry, I guess my cynicism got out for a run again. I'm off to watch a few more hours of Fox News and MSNBC. Maybe I can hear another eloquent defense of that poor Senator from PA who's under attack by crazy lefties just because he hates homosexuals.
You know, it's refreshing that rather than being saddled laws which are based on wisdom and forward-thinking ideals, the Iraqis will be able to skip straight to having laws based on short-sighted greed.
Call me an alarmist, but I want to see the 50-year health studies before I go to something this, er, extreme. I mean, it could be completely harmless, but it just *seems* like something so potentially fraught with problems that my instinct is to avoid it.
Exactly. Firearms are 100% ESR's domain.
I can think of a few guys I'd pick as leader of the OSS movement, but Linus isn't on the list. He's the manager of one of the all-time successful projects in OSS and a lot of people (rightly, IMO) respect what he things, but that's pretty much it.
If you disable sharing of certain digital information for a vast majority of users, you've effectively plugged up the problem. Obviously, you'll never stop *everybody*, so that's not a realistic goal in the first place. So it doesn't really matter what Linus thinks/does, at least not in this point in time (the GUIs that come with the popular Linux distributions ain't ready to take a serious run at the desktop yet).
Is there anyone else out there who uses their cell phone to place and recieve phone calls, or am I all alone now?
So how the heck to you decide which games to buy? Maybe it's just me, but my friends are even more broke than I am and therefore not good for games not yet in the bargain bin...
Personally, I gauge all reviews (games, gear, etc) on how detailed and well thought-out they seem. For example, if a review carefully goes over a game's premise, gameplay, controls, storyline and etc. it's going to get a lot more credibility from my mind than a short blurb about how great it is.
Beyond that, all you can do is identify which reviewers you tend to agree with and which you don't -- I can usually tell if I'll want to see a movie by how badly Mr. Cranky hates it, while Ebert is useless as a barometer because he hates things I like and vice versa.
I'll bite: Carrie-Anne Moss without a tight leather catsuit, perhaps?
(smiles, sighs)