Thats why I think this movie will be a bad idea, it cannot cature to both the hardcore comic readers and the common public. The actual comic readers would know that Batman would most likely win (or at least kick the daylights out of superman) while the common public wont be able to get past the idea that since superman has powers and batman does not, then it will be an easy victory for superman.
I suggest that a comprimise already exists lower down the discussion page: Cast Bruce Campbell as Superman.
This will effectively allow you to please everyone. Batman can beat the daylights out of Bruce, and in the end Bruce can dispatch Batman using a chainsaw or shotgun and make a smart-alec quip. Viola, the general public gets what it expects and all the hardcore fans will be too busy messing themselves to care about what would "really" happen.
Then Batman really wouldn't stand a chance. He'd kick Supes around the film in amusing ways for a half hour only to get his head blown off by a not-much-worse-for-wear, shotgun-weilding Superman.
Hail to the King, baby.
Re:Render Engine is nice, but modelers?
on
POV-Ray 3.5 Rendered
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If the OSS tools aren't up to your satisfaction, why not go buy a commercial package and use it?
The strength of OSS is that you can change it to meet your needs, and that over a long enough timeline this means that it tends to evolve into what the users need it to be. As such, the tools tend to become superior to their competitors in the long run. In the meantime, assuming you're not up to making the changes yourself (don't sweat it -- I couldn't code my way out of a paper bag, either), tinkering with the OSS tools and complaining is just a big waste of your time.
OSS is about freedom as in speech, but as a side effect it also allows freedom as in choice of products (which, contrary to common belief, is what really chafes Bill G's hide). Exercise that.
The buffet analogy just doesn't work, because your agreement with the restaurant is fundementally different than your agreement with the broadband provider.
Here's a food analogy that works:
Pretend that I set up an eatery. I think about an all-you-can-eat take-out buffet, but then realize that I'd lose money on certain corpulant customers. Instead, I create a system where you can take up to 5 lbs. of food. While 5 lbs. is pretty much the break-even point for what I'm charging, I know that most of my customers will never eat that much.
I let a bunch of people in, and to my shock and horror most of them load their take-out cartons with exactly 5 lbs. of food and depart. I follow one of them home, and find them spooning out portions to their neighbor.
Now, is this (a) my fault for setting up a basically faulty (from my POV) system, or (b) the customer's fault for using the system in a way I didn't forsee?
We'll see if that holds out as soon as the US thinks Osama might have some old email on one of Sealand's servers.
What I'm saying is that no government has found it worthwhile or necessary to take over/blow up Sealand yet, but if they ever have any information which really *needs* a data haven ("Free Tibet" doesn't count), you'll see the place end really fast.
that would effectively mean that the UK had declared war on another nation
In practice, national governments don't get any sort of protection unless someone pretty important recognizes them as being legit -- look at what the US did in Afghanistan, for chrissake.
That aside, you don't even need to be a government to take this place out -- a well-placed shaped charge on one of the supports would send this SOB to the bottom of the ocean, and *anyone* with sufficiant knowledge and motivation could do it.
I'll believe in a data haven when one shows up in a real country. This place is just hype.
It's sweet that HavenCo can sit out in the ocean and play make-believe, but how long do you *really* think they could last if they ever hosted something that really caught the ire of Britain? They have no political recognition, no real ability to defend themselves and no sort of general support from anyone.
Really, there are no real protections to be had here other than those provided by British law -- everything else is a mere SAS raid away from extinction. You could set this place up anywhere in the semi-free world and provide the same level of protection -- it's all just a publicity stunt.
While they're at it, maybe they can ban people from posting pictures of their cats and ugly children.
Seriously, though, I can see the reasoning here, but it seems like a law just begging to be abused -- what if I said that you can't post muckraking photos of workers at my food processing plant peeing in the Cream of Mushroom, etc? Why should I be able to publish celebrity photos in a tabloid but not a web site? Isn't this just effectively removing the internet as a valid form of journalism?
Maybe it's just time to update privacy laws somewhat in a way that doesn't treat the net as a redheaded stepchild.
which has a better chance of success - taking BE and making developing it to the point where it can compete with windows, or taking Linux and covering up all those under-the-hood traits that have held it back so far.
In my experience, you just can't hide the under-the-hood stuff and assume the users will never need it -- remember the "zero administration" debacle?
Isn't it possible that pushing Linux to the average user's desktop is like pushing a round peg into a square hole?
It seems to me that Linux is and always has been a server and power-user OS. It's become more user friendly in recent years, with the caveat that the ease of use depends heavily on the under-the-hood stuff operating correctly -- my mom will never, ever be able to tweak her kernel or reconfigure an XF86Config file.
Isn't is possible that an OSS-type BeOS is a better option? It provides an environment that is ground-up designed for desktop users. It can still give us all the Good Things that a OSS OS brings (compliance with standards, innate resistance to embrace-and-extend, etc). Why limit ourselves to only running over a specific kernel and using a specific (UN*X) basic paradigm?
As a group, we decided to adopt restrictive licenses in order to prevent our creations from being used in a manner we did not approve of and we decided that we actually cared who adopted our operating systems, our programs, and we decided that we were going to compete against organizations like Microsoft.
Now you may not have liked those decisions, but as a group, that's where Open Source went.
Whoa, slow down there, cowboy.
The licenses which make OSS possible are there to do just that -- force people and organizations to stay honest and not simply take advantage of the efforts of others. What you can *do* with that software is pretty much unfettered -- consider all of the places you can find Linux in one form or another.
Besides that, who said we (we as in the community) had decided to compete against Microsoft? Competition implies that the OSS community is tied up in a parry-and-jab with MS, which we most definately are not -- why else would we be so eager to interoperate with Windows boxen, even when it means trying to adhere to MS's broken "standards"?
OSS is about a way to develop software, and nothing else. My personal interest, and I dare say the interest of most people involved in the development or use of OSS, is only to obtain and use the best possible software solution for our needs.
Raising the awareness of the project is important, but generally good and useful software concepts attract users and developers far more effectively tan "marketing".
Now if we could just get people to stop buying station wagons and stick to either tanks or batmobiles, we'd be in business.
Seriously, though, I think right now is a key turning point in the platform wars. Simply put: thanks to widely-available and cheap networking and a proliferation of cross-platform applications (even on the desktop, at least until MS decides to pull the plug on Apple), the platform you're running on means less now than ever. That's the point Apple's trying to make in their new advertising campaign.
Given that, it might just be that there's room for an OSS desktop.
I fail to see how it is a good idea to ban the sales of copy protected CDs. The record comapnies are more than free to sell them as such, and I would hate to see the even more legislation from the government telling companies what they can and can't do, especialy when it is in a situation where no harm can come to the users of the products. The Libertarian in me cringes at this idea.
The problem is that you just can't produce a CD that cannot be copied -- in the end, it's all just little ones and zeros.
What you have to do is convince or force (laws, lawsuits, etc) the hardware and software people to make it hard to copy the bits using their hardware. This, in turn, means that we start dictating what innovations a very big industry (computer equipment) can make to protect the interests of a much smaller industry whose business model is on borrowed time (recording).
When I did sysadmin work, I kept up on security threats by reading the literature available. CERT notices, security reports from vendor sites and posted to newsgroups, read the cracker pubs to keep up on attack methods, etc.
Computer (esp. network) security isn't really something that can be learned in a class. It's more of an ongoing awareness of what the threat of the week is. If history has shown us anything, it's that any useful networked system has flaws and can be broken into. As such, it's important to always keep on the forefront of what the enemy is up to.
Irritatingly time-consuming? You bet. A pain in the ass to keep up with? Oh yeah. The only effective way to keep systems and networks secure? Unfortunately.
His little sections about "corporate culture" made me realize what it was I really miss from the.com boom:
It wasn't the free soda, it wasn't the shitload of money thrown at everything (well, ok, I miss that, too), it wasn't the company buying beer on Fridays or paying for lunch...
What I miss is the "bright" and "young" aspect. The Silicon Valley of 2002 seems to have gotten a lot older. It makes sense -- most of the young people like myself moved out when they got laid off. Now, at 25, I'm still the youngest person in my office (and in many offices I interviewed in while I was job hunting). As such, many of the companies are lacking that energy that made working during the boom seem, well, special.
You go thumping past and wake my kids up in the car when I'm on the freeway as well. I'll be stuck at a light with you behind or next to me and things start bouncing around my car.
I generally don't find a whole lot of traffic lights on the freeway. I also tend to notice that, while travelling in excess of 65 MPH, there's quite a bit of road and engine noise. Anyhow, if your kids are that tired, I recommend buying them a "bed" at "home".
You know what - I'm irritated by the excessive noise on the freeway as well. What makes you think that just because you're not driving down by someones house that a) it can't be heard where it is unwelcome and b) it doesn't irritate people
I guess you'll just have to learn not to be so sensative for the 10 seconds our cars might be in proximity.
If I were in the apartment next to yours, you'd have a right to expect me not to watch DVDs with my system jacked all the way up. In the car on a highway, however, you're in a naturally noisy and dynamic environment. Learn to deal.
If you have an extra $20 for tickets and popcorn, it you have a couple of hours to kill on a Saturday and you want to get out of the daytime heat, this movie is worth a matinee viewing.
It's dumb, it's action and silly comedy. I'm prepared to deal with that. Hell, I'm even looking forward to that. Nothing beats seeing summer popcorn movies at the theatre on a Saturday afternoon.
Keep in mind that Sony, the company that builds MP3 players, computers with CD-RW drives, CD players, DVD players, etc., is also the company that owns Columbia Records, which tries to prevent their music from working with those MP3 players, computers with CD-RW drives, CD players, and DVD players.
Three years ago when I was still in college, I would have agreed with this assessment. Since then, however, I've come to realize that truly big corporations consist of a lot of little internal organizations with no real consistancy, which will usually step on the necks of other internal organizations if they think it'll get them more funding.
I think Sony is like this -- the Columbia people have to hate stuff like this, but so long as the MP3 player people are bringing in money, Sony higher-ups will never risk their clout by stepping in and interfering.
Ah...you're one of the assholes who should be taken out and shot. "hey...look at me people...I'm so cool. who cares if it's 1am and I'm waking you up...I've got a fuckin subwoofer."
Notice I said "freeway".
I use my car audio system responsibly; grouping me in with the teens in riced out Acuras pumping crappy house music at all hours is about as fair as grouping the average American with those assholes on the 700 Club.
You *know* when you're being an asshole with your car system -- the difference with me and people like me is that we realize that we don't want to be assholes. Realizing that "Loud Music != Manhood", I'm capable of turning it down when I get to residential areas or other places where people might be rightly irritated by excessive noise.
Nobody I know wants to 'rip' their Audio CDs in their car.
No, I can see where you'd want to do this -- ripping the CDs in your car is a great way to transport your music collection, which is already on CD (unless your "collection" consists of stolen music). You can build up a set of songs in the car that will allow you to leave your CDs at home in the future.
The real problem I have is that I've yet to see a really good interface for a vast collection of MP3's. This is something you really could use a simple GUI for, but most car audio systems force you to sludge through as if it were just a regular CD (ok for 14 tracks, shitty for 1400). If Sony or someone could come up with a good way to select a song without causing me to drive off the road, I'd buy that. As it stands, sticking to regular CDs is actually easier for me.
Well, a little it of healthy paranoia never hurt anyone. Personally, I just pop off my CD face and take it with me whenever I park my car in a public place (street, parking lot, my driveway -- anyplace the access isn't controlled).
My stereo head is only about a quarter of the investment in my car audio system, but the rest would be more difficult to steal -- wires are obviously tough, the amps and sub are bolted to the frame and the speakers are just a pain to get at. If you stole the entire car, it obviously wouldn't be a problem, but your average stereo theif is looking to smash and grab.
As to the why: Imagine driving down the freeway at 80 MPH with the top down and your stereo kicking hard enough for you to *feel* the music. Does it for me.
The weird thing about Salon is that it managed to stop running all of the (funny) stuff I read on a regular basis right after I paid for premium service. All that's left now is complete crapola.
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Kmart. A lot of people never shop there, but there's actually some great super hero supplies stashed back behind the fishing stuff in sporting goods.
Don't tell anyone.
I suggest that a comprimise already exists lower down the discussion page: Cast Bruce Campbell as Superman.
This will effectively allow you to please everyone. Batman can beat the daylights out of Bruce, and in the end Bruce can dispatch Batman using a chainsaw or shotgun and make a smart-alec quip. Viola, the general public gets what it expects and all the hardcore fans will be too busy messing themselves to care about what would "really" happen.
Hail to the King, baby.
The strength of OSS is that you can change it to meet your needs, and that over a long enough timeline this means that it tends to evolve into what the users need it to be. As such, the tools tend to become superior to their competitors in the long run. In the meantime, assuming you're not up to making the changes yourself (don't sweat it -- I couldn't code my way out of a paper bag, either), tinkering with the OSS tools and complaining is just a big waste of your time.
OSS is about freedom as in speech, but as a side effect it also allows freedom as in choice of products (which, contrary to common belief, is what really chafes Bill G's hide). Exercise that.
Here's a food analogy that works:
Pretend that I set up an eatery. I think about an all-you-can-eat take-out buffet, but then realize that I'd lose money on certain corpulant customers. Instead, I create a system where you can take up to 5 lbs. of food. While 5 lbs. is pretty much the break-even point for what I'm charging, I know that most of my customers will never eat that much.
I let a bunch of people in, and to my shock and horror most of them load their take-out cartons with exactly 5 lbs. of food and depart. I follow one of them home, and find them spooning out portions to their neighbor.
Now, is this (a) my fault for setting up a basically faulty (from my POV) system, or (b) the customer's fault for using the system in a way I didn't forsee?
We'll see if that holds out as soon as the US thinks Osama might have some old email on one of Sealand's servers.
What I'm saying is that no government has found it worthwhile or necessary to take over/blow up Sealand yet, but if they ever have any information which really *needs* a data haven ("Free Tibet" doesn't count), you'll see the place end really fast.
In practice, national governments don't get any sort of protection unless someone pretty important recognizes them as being legit -- look at what the US did in Afghanistan, for chrissake.
That aside, you don't even need to be a government to take this place out -- a well-placed shaped charge on one of the supports would send this SOB to the bottom of the ocean, and *anyone* with sufficiant knowledge and motivation could do it.
I'll believe in a data haven when one shows up in a real country. This place is just hype.
Really, there are no real protections to be had here other than those provided by British law -- everything else is a mere SAS raid away from extinction. You could set this place up anywhere in the semi-free world and provide the same level of protection -- it's all just a publicity stunt.
Seriously, though, I can see the reasoning here, but it seems like a law just begging to be abused -- what if I said that you can't post muckraking photos of workers at my food processing plant peeing in the Cream of Mushroom, etc? Why should I be able to publish celebrity photos in a tabloid but not a web site? Isn't this just effectively removing the internet as a valid form of journalism?
Maybe it's just time to update privacy laws somewhat in a way that doesn't treat the net as a redheaded stepchild.
In my experience, you just can't hide the under-the-hood stuff and assume the users will never need it -- remember the "zero administration" debacle?
It seems to me that Linux is and always has been a server and power-user OS. It's become more user friendly in recent years, with the caveat that the ease of use depends heavily on the under-the-hood stuff operating correctly -- my mom will never, ever be able to tweak her kernel or reconfigure an XF86Config file.
Isn't is possible that an OSS-type BeOS is a better option? It provides an environment that is ground-up designed for desktop users. It can still give us all the Good Things that a OSS OS brings (compliance with standards, innate resistance to embrace-and-extend, etc). Why limit ourselves to only running over a specific kernel and using a specific (UN*X) basic paradigm?
Now you may not have liked those decisions, but as a group, that's where Open Source went.
Whoa, slow down there, cowboy.
The licenses which make OSS possible are there to do just that -- force people and organizations to stay honest and not simply take advantage of the efforts of others. What you can *do* with that software is pretty much unfettered -- consider all of the places you can find Linux in one form or another.
Besides that, who said we (we as in the community) had decided to compete against Microsoft? Competition implies that the OSS community is tied up in a parry-and-jab with MS, which we most definately are not -- why else would we be so eager to interoperate with Windows boxen, even when it means trying to adhere to MS's broken "standards"?
OSS is about a way to develop software, and nothing else. My personal interest, and I dare say the interest of most people involved in the development or use of OSS, is only to obtain and use the best possible software solution for our needs.
Raising the awareness of the project is important, but generally good and useful software concepts attract users and developers far more effectively tan "marketing".
Seriously, though, I think right now is a key turning point in the platform wars. Simply put: thanks to widely-available and cheap networking and a proliferation of cross-platform applications (even on the desktop, at least until MS decides to pull the plug on Apple), the platform you're running on means less now than ever. That's the point Apple's trying to make in their new advertising campaign. Given that, it might just be that there's room for an OSS desktop.
The problem is that you just can't produce a CD that cannot be copied -- in the end, it's all just little ones and zeros.
What you have to do is convince or force (laws, lawsuits, etc) the hardware and software people to make it hard to copy the bits using their hardware. This, in turn, means that we start dictating what innovations a very big industry (computer equipment) can make to protect the interests of a much smaller industry whose business model is on borrowed time (recording).
That makes me cringe, personally.
Computer (esp. network) security isn't really something that can be learned in a class. It's more of an ongoing awareness of what the threat of the week is. If history has shown us anything, it's that any useful networked system has flaws and can be broken into. As such, it's important to always keep on the forefront of what the enemy is up to.
Irritatingly time-consuming? You bet. A pain in the ass to keep up with? Oh yeah. The only effective way to keep systems and networks secure? Unfortunately.
It wasn't the free soda, it wasn't the shitload of money thrown at everything (well, ok, I miss that, too), it wasn't the company buying beer on Fridays or paying for lunch...
What I miss is the "bright" and "young" aspect. The Silicon Valley of 2002 seems to have gotten a lot older. It makes sense -- most of the young people like myself moved out when they got laid off. Now, at 25, I'm still the youngest person in my office (and in many offices I interviewed in while I was job hunting). As such, many of the companies are lacking that energy that made working during the boom seem, well, special.
I miss that.
They're called SUVs.
I generally don't find a whole lot of traffic lights on the freeway. I also tend to notice that, while travelling in excess of 65 MPH, there's quite a bit of road and engine noise. Anyhow, if your kids are that tired, I recommend buying them a "bed" at "home".
You know what - I'm irritated by the excessive noise on the freeway as well. What makes you think that just because you're not driving down by someones house that a) it can't be heard where it is unwelcome and b) it doesn't irritate people
I guess you'll just have to learn not to be so sensative for the 10 seconds our cars might be in proximity.
If I were in the apartment next to yours, you'd have a right to expect me not to watch DVDs with my system jacked all the way up. In the car on a highway, however, you're in a naturally noisy and dynamic environment. Learn to deal.
"We knew all along, sadly..."
It's dumb, it's action and silly comedy. I'm prepared to deal with that. Hell, I'm even looking forward to that. Nothing beats seeing summer popcorn movies at the theatre on a Saturday afternoon.
Three years ago when I was still in college, I would have agreed with this assessment. Since then, however, I've come to realize that truly big corporations consist of a lot of little internal organizations with no real consistancy, which will usually step on the necks of other internal organizations if they think it'll get them more funding.
I think Sony is like this -- the Columbia people have to hate stuff like this, but so long as the MP3 player people are bringing in money, Sony higher-ups will never risk their clout by stepping in and interfering.
Notice I said "freeway".
I use my car audio system responsibly; grouping me in with the teens in riced out Acuras pumping crappy house music at all hours is about as fair as grouping the average American with those assholes on the 700 Club.
You *know* when you're being an asshole with your car system -- the difference with me and people like me is that we realize that we don't want to be assholes. Realizing that "Loud Music != Manhood", I'm capable of turning it down when I get to residential areas or other places where people might be rightly irritated by excessive noise.
No, I can see where you'd want to do this -- ripping the CDs in your car is a great way to transport your music collection, which is already on CD (unless your "collection" consists of stolen music). You can build up a set of songs in the car that will allow you to leave your CDs at home in the future.
The real problem I have is that I've yet to see a really good interface for a vast collection of MP3's. This is something you really could use a simple GUI for, but most car audio systems force you to sludge through as if it were just a regular CD (ok for 14 tracks, shitty for 1400). If Sony or someone could come up with a good way to select a song without causing me to drive off the road, I'd buy that. As it stands, sticking to regular CDs is actually easier for me.
My stereo head is only about a quarter of the investment in my car audio system, but the rest would be more difficult to steal -- wires are obviously tough, the amps and sub are bolted to the frame and the speakers are just a pain to get at. If you stole the entire car, it obviously wouldn't be a problem, but your average stereo theif is looking to smash and grab.
As to the why: Imagine driving down the freeway at 80 MPH with the top down and your stereo kicking hard enough for you to *feel* the music. Does it for me.
The weird thing about Salon is that it managed to stop running all of the (funny) stuff I read on a regular basis right after I paid for premium service. All that's left now is complete crapola.