This series aged badly. Watched a few episodes last year and found them deeply unfunny.
It's a britcom so of course it'll be a bit campy, a bit odd, and not for everyone.
What really impressed me was how the Grant and Naylor team wrote the novels as well as the shows. The audiobooks based on the novels were also voice-acted by the original cast.
Humor is a difficult thing and prose and teleplays are two completely different environments to work in. There's so much to written humor that can simply never be translated to the screen, the classic example from the Hitchhiker's Guide -- "The huge golden space ship hung in the air in almost exactly the way a brick doesn't." How do you convey that visually? You can't, not well. And likewise there's more than just sight gags that simply cannot be done in prose. The easiest example to bring up is the Heath Ledger Joker. So much of that performance wasn't just what he said but how he said it, the mannerisms and expressions. It was both comedic and horrifying.
What I find impressive is when you have a writer or writers who can take a story and tell it in such diverse media and do it well. Adams was involved in all the HHGTTG variants and, as I said, Grant and Naylor did both the show and the books.
Anyway, looking forward to these new episodes! Between this and the final movie wrapping up Dead Like Me, looks like we're in for some good telly this year!
Because that was the best tasting dog ever and I want seconds.
Watch out, this guy can probably kick your ass at Starcraft, too.
Re:Because you don't need more cycles in biz
on
Less Is Moore
·
· Score: 1
And once you get there, you don't want faster machines. More power would essentially go to waste. We have achived this moment about 4-5 years ago. Actually, we're already one computer generation past "fast enough" for most office applications.
Agreed. There would have to be a new paradigm shift (ok, I fucking hate that word, maybe usage need change?) to make an upgrade worthwhile.
For my personal needs, DOS was good for a long time. Then Win95 came out and true multitasking (ok, kinda working multitasking that still crashed a lot) made an upgrade compelling. I couldn't really use any of the browsers on my old dos box and Win95 opened a whole new world. That computer got too slow for the games eventually and that drove the next upgrade. Online videos helped drive the next upgrade.
As far as business computers go, there's not anything else compelling to urge the next upgrade. Microsoft Office hasn't really advanced much since Office 2000, just gotten slower. The user interface isn't any more intuitive, there are no high-resource but awesome results features like true voice recognition, nothing to make an office manager's eyes go wide and say "We must upgrade for this."
So far we're seeing cooler ideas in the form of new software but nothing that really justifies an upgrade, especially for office users. About the only upgrade I think is justifiable is multiple monitors for people who are having to keep a bunch of plates spinning at the same time.
Cell occupant 1: "Hey pale skinny white guy, what you in here for?" Cell occupant 2: "I bet he got caught jacking a 7-11" Cell occupant 1: "That's what I'm in here for" Cell occupant 3: "No shit, that's what I did last week, but I got caught today mugging someone" Cell occupant 1: "So what is it boy?" You: "I downloaded a Backstreet Boys album without paying for it.."
I find that any level of intensive focus on something will eventually bleed over into times when you are not working on it so you still think of it. I know when I studied intensely for tests I would see the formulae every time I closed my eyes to go to sleep for a week after. I drove past a fire station at night and saw the red warning light reflecting against the beige garage doors, strobing on and off, red and then shadowed. "Good light sourcing model," I said to a friend. He agreed and it took us both a minute to realize we'd been playing way too many video games.
When you talk about conditioning for reflexive behavior, that's what you do when you train for any kind of fighting system. You sense a situation and react to it without conscious thought. The army spent big bucks figuring out how to work this kind of conditioning into basic training so that recruits would instinctively shoot at people in battle rather than stopping to second-guess and get shot themselves.
This sort of conditioning is just a part of human nature and video games are just another way of conditioning people, more advanced than long sessions of chanting and ritual but serving the same purpose.
This game is an enhanced Cube 2 engine with original artwork and new gameplay (including a kid-mode, which optionally turns off the blood -- a nice option for a change).
Agent smith: What good is 2 terabytes of porn if you are unable to access it? Keanu: (glances worriedly at his zipper) agent smith: (palm to face, shakes head) The hard drive, you imbecile, the hard drive.
Republicans, and even libertarians believe that nobody should be able to make money by fraud.
Look at the legacy of the Bush administration. The reality does not reflect your arguments. Roll back regulation, roll back enforcement, protect the guilty, victory at any cost. If the president does it, it is legal. To the victor goes the spoils. Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing. Who is John Galt? I am, motherfucker.
On the other hand, if one espouses and believes a philosophy that says that "Whatever I can do to make myself more money at the expense of the group is both moral and reasonable", well, you wind up with the current GOP ideology of selfishness and greed and you can see where that has gotten us.
Thank you, you hit it right on the head. The part of Ayn's ideas that makes sense at first blush is "Hey, don't take from me what I created, let me choose to do what I want with it." That goes right back to the American Revolution with "Taxation without representation is tyranny." Yes, taxes are the price we pay for a civil society but a civil society would also let us say what should be done with it.
The part that Ayn completely misses is capturing the true costs and debts represented by a society. Her heroes are idealized men who never quite existed in the real world, only in the adventure pulps. Her heroes are like Doc Sampson, Johnny Quest's dad, Rusty Venture's dad, etc. You could sit them down on a desert island with nothing but coconuts and surly natives and five years later he'd have a modern society and space travel. This just doesn't happen in the real world.
In the real world, the Edison's and Gates' and other robber-barons are building their empires upon the groundwork laid by society. Public money paid for the national defense so they aren't growing up as slave labor for a foreign power. Public education provided for them, likely not for their own schooling but the schooling of their employees. Imagine if they were to set up shop in Haiti and had to start educating their workforce in the ABC's before they could ever get to producing things of value!
A healthy economy is like an ecosystem. The plants grow, get eaten by something that gets eaten by something eventually eaten by the apex predator. The apex predator dies, decays, and the biomass enters the ecology once more.
The problem with the Randites is they simply don't want to play fair. They'll gussy up their arguments with all sorts of sophistry but the fact of the matter is they're greedy and don't want to pay their fair share.
So Michael Dell OWES it to us. His hard work, his identifying a need and filling it, somehow makes him indebted to society as a whole because that is what is morally right? So guilt the producers of wealth by claiming that the non producers are the only reason why they were able to produce in the first place.
Wow, you're quoting Ayn Rand without a sly and ironic wink? You've fallen for it? Just remember, Alan Greenspan was a disciple and bedmate of hers.
"John Schiefer, the Los Angeles security consultant who in last 2007 admitted wielding a 250,000-node botnet to steal bank passwords, sometimes from work, says he's spent the past 15 months working as a professional in the security scene while awaiting sentencing.
Even worse, I hear the submitter has been working the past 15 months as a professor of English language while awaiting sentencing for negligent grammarcide.
What if someone who grokked our culture and understood our tech wrote something?
We'd be so bored we'd finally forgive Swordfish for the blowjob hacking scene? Part of the reason why we consume escapist entertainment is because real life is boring. Do we want to imagine the pretty heroine all made up in perfect makeup and lounging about her luxury flat in lace teddies or do we want the reality where she's wearing her comfy fluffy bathrobe that hides everything, bunny slippers, has a towel around her wet hair and has her face covered with some cosmetic mask cream?
Ok, having said that, I still cringe at bad tech scenes. "The Cylons can hack any computer that's networked, even if there's not a wireless access point anywhere on the battlestar! Just the act of running a cable from one primitive computer to another will give them a way in!" Or "Hey, this is Unix! I know this!" Or when someone is using the internet and they're instructed to bang away at random on the keyboard when they'd really be mousing around in an undramatic fashion while reading what's on the screen.
The people who complain about "welfare mothers and mass transit" will continue to complain about whatever their leaders tell them that the "problem" is. They are not capable of realization.
A high-ranking puke was on cspan this morning going on about how fiscally irresponsible the Obama administration was going to be, completely overlooking the catastrofuck the last eight years has been. He then brought up a couple of small line items that sounded really stupid that would stimulate outrage. Maybe they are stupid, I don't know -- McCain's lambasting the DNA study on black bears was misdirected because the results of the study allowed the loosening of some regulations that made everyone happy so it really wasn't all that dumb. But even if it was $2 million spent on the stupidest shit imaginable, we're spending $4 billion a week on Iraq. This is an absolutely crystal clear illustration of the phrase "penny wise, pound foolish."
www.rifftrax.com is the home of Mike, Kevin (Tom Servo), and the false Crow. I'd neglected to try them out for years because I didn't have the original movies on DVD, wasn't about to pay for them, and synchronizing the tracks seemed like too much bother. But there's good news! Not only are they available on the torrent sites pre-syched and convenient for use, there's also a tip jar on their site so you can help keep the doors open.
I think that the ultimate MST3K reunion would involve everyone, including Joel, coming back and setting up the bluescreen so they can get the theater seats on the bottom of the screen once more.
This is a national linux distribution. The net result is that Microsoft loses more customers, that's significant, but it's not like Russia is coming up with something from scratch. If they run with Open Office on this distro, that will also be significant. The whole idea of trying to divorce themselves from dependence upon western software is also interesting.
I've always found them to be witten in obfuscatese. If I google for help and get a microsoft article and any other site matching the topic, the other site will prove far more useful.
Something that irked me for years and years is how they don't bother to write a decent manual for their products anymore. You go and buy Office. You get a CD-ROM, yay. What about a manual? Well now, you must buy that separately from a different publisher. What the hell? Why can't Microsoft include the documentation with the original software? It seems like they're only half-completing the action.
Something else I'd also like to see is the next step in documentation, making it more tightly integrated with the application. Often you look up something in documentation and are still struggling to find where the tool is beneath the menu trees. Often the exact method for performing the steps is less than obvious. What would be interesting is if they could include a proper "show me how this works" script to walk you through the actions. I've seen some try to do this but it just isn't quite right.
The other thing that's annoying is how the help window pops up in a separate window that requires a lot of real estate to open up properly. It's not quite as onerous with a dual-monitor system since I can have the help open on the side window but anyone with a single-window system is stuck trying to juggle them with alt-tabs.
On Windows, the fundamental interface paradigm hasn't changed much since 95. I'm not quite sure what the perfect solution would look like but the current way of doing things does seem to be rather inadequate. If Microsoft could figure out a way to do the whole help thing smarter, make the software act as a tutor for using it, allow even non-techie folks to figure out new features, then they could really justify selling the next version of Office.
And I'm not just talking about the glowing accretion disk around the hole. If we do generate black holes that swallow the Earth, at least worrying about that will take our minds off the economy!
We do interviews via IM and if the interviewee cannot convince two out of three of the interviewers they are not a bot, they don't make it to the second round.
The courts had ordered the Pentagon to release additional prison torture pics and vids, stuff Congress had viewed in private and turned a lot of stomachs. Currently the Pentagon is illegally sitting on these pics. Can we get all the ugly in the open so we can start to earn our respect back?
Slashdot Mirror
How can you be sure it's really you? you can't see your own reflection.
I'm a vampire so it's not really much of a concern.
This series aged badly. Watched a few episodes last year and found them deeply unfunny.
It's a britcom so of course it'll be a bit campy, a bit odd, and not for everyone.
What really impressed me was how the Grant and Naylor team wrote the novels as well as the shows. The audiobooks based on the novels were also voice-acted by the original cast.
Humor is a difficult thing and prose and teleplays are two completely different environments to work in. There's so much to written humor that can simply never be translated to the screen, the classic example from the Hitchhiker's Guide -- "The huge golden space ship hung in the air in almost exactly the way a brick doesn't." How do you convey that visually? You can't, not well. And likewise there's more than just sight gags that simply cannot be done in prose. The easiest example to bring up is the Heath Ledger Joker. So much of that performance wasn't just what he said but how he said it, the mannerisms and expressions. It was both comedic and horrifying.
What I find impressive is when you have a writer or writers who can take a story and tell it in such diverse media and do it well. Adams was involved in all the HHGTTG variants and, as I said, Grant and Naylor did both the show and the books.
Anyway, looking forward to these new episodes! Between this and the final movie wrapping up Dead Like Me, looks like we're in for some good telly this year!
Because that was the best tasting dog ever and I want seconds.
Watch out, this guy can probably kick your ass at Starcraft, too.
And once you get there, you don't want faster machines. More power would essentially go to waste. We have achived this moment about 4-5 years ago. Actually, we're already one computer generation past "fast enough" for most office applications.
Agreed. There would have to be a new paradigm shift (ok, I fucking hate that word, maybe usage need change?) to make an upgrade worthwhile.
For my personal needs, DOS was good for a long time. Then Win95 came out and true multitasking (ok, kinda working multitasking that still crashed a lot) made an upgrade compelling. I couldn't really use any of the browsers on my old dos box and Win95 opened a whole new world. That computer got too slow for the games eventually and that drove the next upgrade. Online videos helped drive the next upgrade.
As far as business computers go, there's not anything else compelling to urge the next upgrade. Microsoft Office hasn't really advanced much since Office 2000, just gotten slower. The user interface isn't any more intuitive, there are no high-resource but awesome results features like true voice recognition, nothing to make an office manager's eyes go wide and say "We must upgrade for this."
So far we're seeing cooler ideas in the form of new software but nothing that really justifies an upgrade, especially for office users. About the only upgrade I think is justifiable is multiple monitors for people who are having to keep a bunch of plates spinning at the same time.
Cell occupant 1: "Hey pale skinny white guy, what you in here for?"
Cell occupant 2: "I bet he got caught jacking a 7-11"
Cell occupant 1: "That's what I'm in here for"
Cell occupant 3: "No shit, that's what I did last week, but I got caught today mugging someone"
Cell occupant 1: "So what is it boy?"
You: "I downloaded a Backstreet Boys album without paying for it.."
*all the other cell occupants slowly back away*
And one guy inches closer.
I find that any level of intensive focus on something will eventually bleed over into times when you are not working on it so you still think of it. I know when I studied intensely for tests I would see the formulae every time I closed my eyes to go to sleep for a week after. I drove past a fire station at night and saw the red warning light reflecting against the beige garage doors, strobing on and off, red and then shadowed. "Good light sourcing model," I said to a friend. He agreed and it took us both a minute to realize we'd been playing way too many video games.
When you talk about conditioning for reflexive behavior, that's what you do when you train for any kind of fighting system. You sense a situation and react to it without conscious thought. The army spent big bucks figuring out how to work this kind of conditioning into basic training so that recruits would instinctively shoot at people in battle rather than stopping to second-guess and get shot themselves.
This sort of conditioning is just a part of human nature and video games are just another way of conditioning people, more advanced than long sessions of chanting and ritual but serving the same purpose.
Alan Greenspan was a disciple and bedmate of hers.
Thank you for ruining my appetite./quote>
As if the Fountainhead didn't do that already?
This game is an enhanced Cube 2 engine with original artwork and new gameplay (including a kid-mode, which optionally turns off the blood -- a nice option for a change).
Slackers. Our media's had that feature for years.
Agent smith: What good is 2 terabytes of porn if you are unable to access it?
Keanu: (glances worriedly at his zipper)
agent smith: (palm to face, shakes head) The hard drive, you imbecile, the hard drive.
Republicans, and even libertarians believe that nobody should be able to make money by fraud.
Look at the legacy of the Bush administration. The reality does not reflect your arguments. Roll back regulation, roll back enforcement, protect the guilty, victory at any cost. If the president does it, it is legal. To the victor goes the spoils. Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing. Who is John Galt? I am, motherfucker.
On the other hand, if one espouses and believes a philosophy that says that "Whatever I can do to make myself more money at the expense of the group is both moral and reasonable", well, you wind up with the current GOP ideology of selfishness and greed and you can see where that has gotten us.
Thank you, you hit it right on the head. The part of Ayn's ideas that makes sense at first blush is "Hey, don't take from me what I created, let me choose to do what I want with it." That goes right back to the American Revolution with "Taxation without representation is tyranny." Yes, taxes are the price we pay for a civil society but a civil society would also let us say what should be done with it.
The part that Ayn completely misses is capturing the true costs and debts represented by a society. Her heroes are idealized men who never quite existed in the real world, only in the adventure pulps. Her heroes are like Doc Sampson, Johnny Quest's dad, Rusty Venture's dad, etc. You could sit them down on a desert island with nothing but coconuts and surly natives and five years later he'd have a modern society and space travel. This just doesn't happen in the real world.
In the real world, the Edison's and Gates' and other robber-barons are building their empires upon the groundwork laid by society. Public money paid for the national defense so they aren't growing up as slave labor for a foreign power. Public education provided for them, likely not for their own schooling but the schooling of their employees. Imagine if they were to set up shop in Haiti and had to start educating their workforce in the ABC's before they could ever get to producing things of value!
A healthy economy is like an ecosystem. The plants grow, get eaten by something that gets eaten by something eventually eaten by the apex predator. The apex predator dies, decays, and the biomass enters the ecology once more.
The problem with the Randites is they simply don't want to play fair. They'll gussy up their arguments with all sorts of sophistry but the fact of the matter is they're greedy and don't want to pay their fair share.
So Michael Dell OWES it to us. His hard work, his identifying a need and filling it, somehow makes him indebted to society as a whole because that is what is morally right? So guilt the producers of wealth by claiming that the non producers are the only reason why they were able to produce in the first place.
Wow, you're quoting Ayn Rand without a sly and ironic wink? You've fallen for it? Just remember, Alan Greenspan was a disciple and bedmate of hers.
Is IE8 still the resource pig we've been hearing about since the early betas? I'll pass.
Probably a rare occurrence, but this means bystanders won't be able to photograph crimes in progress without alerting criminals.
On the bright side, the cops will have to stop beating the guy cuffed on the ground to confiscate your camera and start beating you.
Outside of the money and women, part of what we do as IT is helping and protecting people in the wild west that is networks.
Back up a sec, money and women? Fuck, I knew I was doing something wrong!
"John Schiefer, the Los Angeles security consultant who in last 2007 admitted wielding a 250,000-node botnet to steal bank passwords, sometimes from work, says he's spent the past 15 months working as a professional in the security scene while awaiting sentencing.
Even worse, I hear the submitter has been working the past 15 months as a professor of English language while awaiting sentencing for negligent grammarcide.
Here in my car -- I make analogies
It is handy because -- you can relate to them
In cars...
And here I thought my sig was a reach. :)
What if someone who grokked our culture and understood our tech wrote something?
We'd be so bored we'd finally forgive Swordfish for the blowjob hacking scene? Part of the reason why we consume escapist entertainment is because real life is boring. Do we want to imagine the pretty heroine all made up in perfect makeup and lounging about her luxury flat in lace teddies or do we want the reality where she's wearing her comfy fluffy bathrobe that hides everything, bunny slippers, has a towel around her wet hair and has her face covered with some cosmetic mask cream?
Ok, having said that, I still cringe at bad tech scenes. "The Cylons can hack any computer that's networked, even if there's not a wireless access point anywhere on the battlestar! Just the act of running a cable from one primitive computer to another will give them a way in!" Or "Hey, this is Unix! I know this!" Or when someone is using the internet and they're instructed to bang away at random on the keyboard when they'd really be mousing around in an undramatic fashion while reading what's on the screen.
The people who complain about "welfare mothers and mass transit" will continue to complain about whatever their leaders tell them that the "problem" is. They are not capable of realization.
A high-ranking puke was on cspan this morning going on about how fiscally irresponsible the Obama administration was going to be, completely overlooking the catastrofuck the last eight years has been. He then brought up a couple of small line items that sounded really stupid that would stimulate outrage. Maybe they are stupid, I don't know -- McCain's lambasting the DNA study on black bears was misdirected because the results of the study allowed the loosening of some regulations that made everyone happy so it really wasn't all that dumb. But even if it was $2 million spent on the stupidest shit imaginable, we're spending $4 billion a week on Iraq. This is an absolutely crystal clear illustration of the phrase "penny wise, pound foolish."
www.rifftrax.com is the home of Mike, Kevin (Tom Servo), and the false Crow. I'd neglected to try them out for years because I didn't have the original movies on DVD, wasn't about to pay for them, and synchronizing the tracks seemed like too much bother. But there's good news! Not only are they available on the torrent sites pre-syched and convenient for use, there's also a tip jar on their site so you can help keep the doors open.
I think that the ultimate MST3K reunion would involve everyone, including Joel, coming back and setting up the bluescreen so they can get the theater seats on the bottom of the screen once more.
This is a national linux distribution. The net result is that Microsoft loses more customers, that's significant, but it's not like Russia is coming up with something from scratch. If they run with Open Office on this distro, that will also be significant. The whole idea of trying to divorce themselves from dependence upon western software is also interesting.
I've always found them to be witten in obfuscatese. If I google for help and get a microsoft article and any other site matching the topic, the other site will prove far more useful.
Something that irked me for years and years is how they don't bother to write a decent manual for their products anymore. You go and buy Office. You get a CD-ROM, yay. What about a manual? Well now, you must buy that separately from a different publisher. What the hell? Why can't Microsoft include the documentation with the original software? It seems like they're only half-completing the action.
Something else I'd also like to see is the next step in documentation, making it more tightly integrated with the application. Often you look up something in documentation and are still struggling to find where the tool is beneath the menu trees. Often the exact method for performing the steps is less than obvious. What would be interesting is if they could include a proper "show me how this works" script to walk you through the actions. I've seen some try to do this but it just isn't quite right.
The other thing that's annoying is how the help window pops up in a separate window that requires a lot of real estate to open up properly. It's not quite as onerous with a dual-monitor system since I can have the help open on the side window but anyone with a single-window system is stuck trying to juggle them with alt-tabs.
On Windows, the fundamental interface paradigm hasn't changed much since 95. I'm not quite sure what the perfect solution would look like but the current way of doing things does seem to be rather inadequate. If Microsoft could figure out a way to do the whole help thing smarter, make the software act as a tutor for using it, allow even non-techie folks to figure out new features, then they could really justify selling the next version of Office.
And I'm not just talking about the glowing accretion disk around the hole. If we do generate black holes that swallow the Earth, at least worrying about that will take our minds off the economy!
We do interviews via IM and if the interviewee cannot convince two out of three of the interviewers they are not a bot, they don't make it to the second round.
The courts had ordered the Pentagon to release additional prison torture pics and vids, stuff Congress had viewed in private and turned a lot of stomachs. Currently the Pentagon is illegally sitting on these pics. Can we get all the ugly in the open so we can start to earn our respect back?