Rule of thumb: "The Book is Better"
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A Sound of Thunder
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This has been my rule of thumb for movies adapted from books (most movies, BTW). I will admit that there are a very few exceptions (usually where the book was adapted from the movie - Star Wars), but the vast majority of the time the book is better. Even when they do a really good job on the movie, like with LotR or The Princess Bride, there's still no comparison with the book. Don't get me wrong, I love those movies & can't think of many practical ways they could have been improved (three movies each for FotR, TTT, and RotK...), but IMO the books are still much better. I know a lot of you will start yelling "Apples and Oranges" at me, but I guess that's kind of my point. With very few exceptions I like oranges better than apples. I honestly think that books are a better form of entainment media than movies. Not that movies aren't great, but books are better.
I also want to say that I don't think there shouldn't be movie adaptations of books - like I said above I love the LotR movies. But as I am something of a bookworm (never would've guessed, huh?), it really bugs me when Hollywood takes a book and totally screws it over. And all too often that's what they do. Just a couple recent examples: I, Robot. That movie just really ticked me off. It would have been all right (well, the movie still would have sucked, but I wouldn't have cared so much) if they had just come up with their own title for the movie, and not had any connection to Asimov or his stories. He just had to be spinning in his grave over that movie. For those that don't know, I, Robot was a collection of short stories and essays by Asimov; and one of the things he makes very clear was that the whole reason he started writing Robot stories was because he hated the cliched plot "Man builds robot. Robot goes crazy and kills everyone." What's the plot in the movie?
One last example of a book Hollywood screwed over recently: Cheaper by the Dozen. Remake of a movie adapted from a stageplay adapted from book. The first movie and the stageplay were done well. The 2003 movie never should have been made. Cheaper by the Dozen is a comedy revolving around two points: a large family (12 kids), and the Father working as an efficiency expert consultant for large corporations. He is not, I repeat NOT, a football coach. Hollywood just blew away half of the premise.
Like I said, I don't think Hollywood should stop making book adaptations, but they should stay true to the book. If you don't like the book's plot, then don't make a movie claiming to be an adaptation of it, when less than half the movie is related to the book, or worse goes completly against the book.
That's actually almost a reason to move away from MS Office. As other's have mentioned, when it comes to backwards compatibility, OO.org is more compatible with MS Office than MS Office is.
Ads pay for stuff (especially web content), so that I don't have to. But when the advertisments get in the way of me enjoying the web content, it annoys me, which leads to me *NOT* respond to the ad. On the other hand, I personally make a conscious effort to support inobtrusive advertising. My hope is that enough people would have similar practices that advertising methods that interfer with the media they're placed in would be unprofitable. Google AdWords/AdSense, inobtrusive banner ads, etc. are the type of advertising I support. They are adjacent to, not in the content, and so they don't get in the way. The 'IntelliTxt' that the article talks about would be nice, except that the method it uses to deliver the ads (mouse-over underlined words) can be used for other better things, like definitions for jargon - and I'm betting they don't make it easy to tell the difference between an ad or a definition. It's better to just keep the advertisments seperate from the content.
Anyone read The Speed of Dark? It's a good book (although it has a depressing ending, IMO). Oh, and just to stay on topic... one of the central plots in the book is an experimental treatment to cure Autism, and to make people workaholics.
The/. summary is just a summary. It makes more sense if you RTFA.
. . . attendees at a party held Wednesday night in San Francisco to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Beowulf and to unveil the newly redesigned Beowulf project website.
One great thing about these tools is that they are 100% platform independant. You can use the to secure/fix *nix, MS Windows, Apple, or anything else. They'll even work on other things besides computers, like copy machines, toasters, and tangled jumpropes. Really, these have got to be two of the greatest tools of all time.
Pastor Rao, I have had a request made to me by me brother-in-law. He is the owner of a very large chain of seafood suppliers. His company is called 419 Eater Seafood Supplies. You can see his site at www.419eater.co.uk. My brother was extremely impressed by the excellent work that you did with the sign and he wondered if you would be willing to make a similar sign for him to use for his company? He would like to use it as a flag outside his company headquarters.
Let's just tell him we know it's a 419 scam, think he'll get the clue?
I guess I should have read the grandparent poster more... I was looking at the "use other people's code" part. I was aware the BSD License permits this.
This type of thing can get really confusing. Say my next door neighbor works in an autoshop, and is under contract not to compete with his employer... so if I ask him to help me fix something on my car, is he commiting a crime? Am I? What if he does just as a favor for me (no money changes hands), would that be more/less/the same of a crime? What if the work he did for me was not work that the autoshop he works for normally does? If he stopped on the freeway and helped an old lady change a tire, is he now a criminal? Is the old lady?
Now of course "intellectual property" and the service of changing a tire are very different things, but when you look at computer code as the result of work done by a programmer, and a changed tire as the result of work done by an automechanic, what makes one persons work "intellectual property", and the other persons not?
That's different. These indemnification packages protect from legal action against you for using or purchasing Linux, they do not protect you from legal action against you for breaking a contract with your employer. That's your own stupid fault for signing without reading. And IANAL, but I really don't think an employer who had an employee contracted not to produce work for anyone other than the employer would be able to sue anyone besides the employee who broke contract. This is one of the most ridiculus things about the SCO vs. AutoZone etc. cases: even assuming SCO has the rights to any source code used in Linux, why is AutoZone liable for that? Back in the early days of automobiles, the guy who invented (and patented) the windshield wiper tried to sell it to auto makers, and the auto maker turned him down, but then started selling cars with windshield wipers. The inventor sued them, and won rightfully. I don't think he would have won if he had tried to sue someone who had bought or used a car that had windshield wipers. It just doesn't make sense.
Little doubt exists; a legal cloud hangs over Linux from infringement claims of the SCO Group, Inc. In spite of that cloud, Linux server sales grew 56.9 percent in the first quarter of the year. Linux sales in 2004 follows six consecutive quarters of double-digit growth for the free operating system during unprecedented legal attacks from SCO over the same period.
Just that first statement, "Little doubt exists; a legal cloud hangs over Linux" annoys me. I can't really argue against it (yes, SCO did start a big stink), but I for one don't think of it as much of a 'cloud over Linux'. It really doesn't take much research to see that SCO's claim's are unlikely to hold up in court. And I think sales growth indicates I'm not alone in not being afraid of SCO's litigation, so where's the cloud? This almost seems like a scare tactic, not to make you stay away from Linux, but to buy a indemnification package to protect yourself. I don't buy it.
I tried it a while ago... at the time I decided it showed promise, but was still rather rough. Hopefully there's been improvement, and I will try it again, but I gotta play the original, just for the nostagia.
Is the first thing that comes to anyone else's mind when they see MIRV Scorched Earth? Man that was a fun game... now I'm going to have to dig it out & get it running again.
Back in my first High School CS class, my end of the year project was an unbeatable tic-tac-toe game. It had nifty features: Save & load (for those long tic-tac-toe games you can't fit into one session). And I could created save files by hand, so I could load games where the whole board was Xs (or Os), or some such impossible combination. Also this allowed me to be the only person that could beat it (create a save file by hand that was at a point that I could force a win). That was a fun project.
The word robot comes from the Czech robota meaning "labor." The word was first used in Karel Capek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) (written in 1920; first performed 1921; performed in New York 1922; English edition published 1923).
1. While Karel is frequently acknowledged as the originator of the word, he wrote a short letter in reference to the Oxford English Dictionary etymology in which he named his brother, painter and writer Josef Capek as its true inventor. 2. . ..
So, at least literally, a robot is anything that labors. Check the clicky to see more of it's literary history, or read some of Isaac Asimovs numerous essays on robots.
He's got to be spinning in his grave over the new I, Robot movie. Based on the trailer, it is just so very wrong. It looks really cool, but it (my guess based on the trailer) screws up so many fundamental things in Asimov's robot stories that it really bugs me. Hopefully I'm wrong and the actual movie will be stay more or less true to the books, but I really don't have that much faith in Hollywood...
This is why Isaac Asimov believed that the best robots would be humaniform - a humaniform robot would be able to use any tool designed for human use (think the vacuum, lawnmower, dishwasher, etc that you already have), and would not be limited to one specific area of specialization. Of course, in Asimov's robot stories he had his 'positronic brain' that gave his robots near-human AI, which is the big requirement for a multi-purpose robot (although there are of course several other difficulties with humaniform robots, for example balance - most bipedal robots are rather unsteady). Creating a robot intelligent enough to ideally be able to learn how to use multiple tools, or at the very least pre-programmed to use multiple tools is a huge hurdle, and at least for now in the commercial arena it really only feasible to create speciallized robots, and since they're being speciallized anyway, there's no reason to overcome the numerous other difficulties related to humaniform robotics. So I think there are really two possibilities for the future: either as xagon7 suggests house working robots will really not catch on until they become multi-purpose, in which case Asimov may have been correct and humaniform robots become common; or else speciallized robots will catch on, at least enough that multiple robots specialized for different chores will be developed, and once you have 1 robot to vacuum, another to mow, another to do dishes, etc. to the point where all your chores are being completed, in which case there would be no need for a single multi-purpose robot.
As I RTFA & previous comments here, I was rather suprised at how argumentive people were getting over this. Some people are saying swap is an absolute necessity & a swapless system was a broken system, while other's said swap was an obsolete solution to a problem that no longer exists (expensive RAM). This seems odd to me, because as far as I can tell, the decision of whether & how much swap to use is based mostly on two things: specific situations (and thus there is no general answer to 'Is Swap Necessary?'), and opinion. And either way, with the Linux kernel today (and for quite a while now), I can choose for myself whether or not, and how much, swap I want to use. So if I am in a situation that I think requires swap, I can use it, and in a situation that I think would be hurt by having swap, I don't have to use it. So I don't see why there's so much hoolabaloo about this: nobody is forcing anyone to do it one way or the other. And if someone else thinks it should be done different from how I would do it, that's their decision, not mine.
Last year at the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival, their was a CD available on the last day with recordings (some with video) of stories recorded live at the festival, including IIRC some from that day. It was a really cool CD that I need to get back from my sister....
Speaking of doing it for publicities sake, I wonder if it was a requiremoent for the donation for the Foundation to change name...
Re:If you want actual Dos for perfect compatabilit
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Is DOS Gaming Dead?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If you are going this route, you may as well actually use MS-DOS 6.22, rather than Win98. Although you will most likely have better luck getting old DOS games running under Win9x than under WinXP, depending on the game and your hardware you may still have problems. On of the major problems I remember having with DOS games under Win98 was with sound: the SoundBlaster drivers that came with my SB Live! could work either with win32 (Win9x+), or DOS, but not both at the same time. So in order to get sound working in DOS games I had really mess with the config.sys & win.ini files... and after I finally got my sound working, my mouse driver died. So if you go the dual-booting route, I would say dual-boot to the actual platform you want.
Project Gutenberg already has a section devoted to audio ebooks, but I have to say I'm all for this Telltale Weekly. All of the PG Audio Books I've listened too have been text-to-speech computer generated audio, and have been rather difficult to understand. As long as Telltale Weekly actually has human readers recording, they will be better than what PG currently has. I do hope that Telltale Weekly submits their audio ebooks to be included in PG.
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This has been my rule of thumb for movies adapted from books (most movies, BTW). I will admit that there are a very few exceptions (usually where the book was adapted from the movie - Star Wars), but the vast majority of the time the book is better. Even when they do a really good job on the movie, like with LotR or The Princess Bride, there's still no comparison with the book. Don't get me wrong, I love those movies & can't think of many practical ways they could have been improved (three movies each for FotR, TTT, and RotK...), but IMO the books are still much better. I know a lot of you will start yelling "Apples and Oranges" at me, but I guess that's kind of my point. With very few exceptions I like oranges better than apples. I honestly think that books are a better form of entainment media than movies. Not that movies aren't great, but books are better.
I also want to say that I don't think there shouldn't be movie adaptations of books - like I said above I love the LotR movies. But as I am something of a bookworm (never would've guessed, huh?), it really bugs me when Hollywood takes a book and totally screws it over. And all too often that's what they do. Just a couple recent examples: I, Robot. That movie just really ticked me off. It would have been all right (well, the movie still would have sucked, but I wouldn't have cared so much) if they had just come up with their own title for the movie, and not had any connection to Asimov or his stories. He just had to be spinning in his grave over that movie. For those that don't know, I, Robot was a collection of short stories and essays by Asimov; and one of the things he makes very clear was that the whole reason he started writing Robot stories was because he hated the cliched plot "Man builds robot. Robot goes crazy and kills everyone." What's the plot in the movie?
One last example of a book Hollywood screwed over recently: Cheaper by the Dozen. Remake of a movie adapted from a stageplay adapted from book. The first movie and the stageplay were done well. The 2003 movie never should have been made. Cheaper by the Dozen is a comedy revolving around two points: a large family (12 kids), and the Father working as an efficiency expert consultant for large corporations. He is not, I repeat NOT , a football coach. Hollywood just blew away half of the premise.
Like I said, I don't think Hollywood should stop making book adaptations, but they should stay true to the book. If you don't like the book's plot, then don't make a movie claiming to be an adaptation of it, when less than half the movie is related to the book, or worse goes completly against the book.
All right, rant mode off...
That's actually almost a reason to move away from MS Office. As other's have mentioned, when it comes to backwards compatibility, OO.org is more compatible with MS Office than MS Office is.
Ads pay for stuff (especially web content), so that I don't have to. But when the advertisments get in the way of me enjoying the web content, it annoys me, which leads to me *NOT* respond to the ad. On the other hand, I personally make a conscious effort to support inobtrusive advertising. My hope is that enough people would have similar practices that advertising methods that interfer with the media they're placed in would be unprofitable. Google AdWords/AdSense, inobtrusive banner ads, etc. are the type of advertising I support. They are adjacent to, not in the content, and so they don't get in the way. The 'IntelliTxt' that the article talks about would be nice, except that the method it uses to deliver the ads (mouse-over underlined words) can be used for other better things, like definitions for jargon - and I'm betting they don't make it easy to tell the difference between an ad or a definition. It's better to just keep the advertisments seperate from the content.
Anyone read The Speed of Dark ? It's a good book (although it has a depressing ending, IMO). Oh, and just to stay on topic... one of the central plots in the book is an experimental treatment to cure Autism, and to make people workaholics.
One great thing about these tools is that they are 100% platform independant. You can use the to secure/fix *nix, MS Windows, Apple, or anything else. They'll even work on other things besides computers, like copy machines, toasters, and tangled jumpropes. Really, these have got to be two of the greatest tools of all time.
I guess I should have read the grandparent poster more... I was looking at the "use other people's code" part. I was aware the BSD License permits this.
This type of thing can get really confusing. Say my next door neighbor works in an autoshop, and is under contract not to compete with his employer... so if I ask him to help me fix something on my car, is he commiting a crime? Am I? What if he does just as a favor for me (no money changes hands), would that be more/less/the same of a crime? What if the work he did for me was not work that the autoshop he works for normally does? If he stopped on the freeway and helped an old lady change a tire, is he now a criminal? Is the old lady?
Now of course "intellectual property" and the service of changing a tire are very different things, but when you look at computer code as the result of work done by a programmer, and a changed tire as the result of work done by an automechanic, what makes one persons work "intellectual property", and the other persons not?
That's different. These indemnification packages protect from legal action against you for using or purchasing Linux, they do not protect you from legal action against you for breaking a contract with your employer. That's your own stupid fault for signing without reading. And IANAL, but I really don't think an employer who had an employee contracted not to produce work for anyone other than the employer would be able to sue anyone besides the employee who broke contract. This is one of the most ridiculus things about the SCO vs. AutoZone etc. cases: even assuming SCO has the rights to any source code used in Linux, why is AutoZone liable for that? Back in the early days of automobiles, the guy who invented (and patented) the windshield wiper tried to sell it to auto makers, and the auto maker turned him down, but then started selling cars with windshield wipers. The inventor sued them, and won rightfully. I don't think he would have won if he had tried to sue someone who had bought or used a car that had windshield wipers. It just doesn't make sense.
Depending on how lenient your work is (I love my job), you might want to try this. It's a web-based remake of SE in Java.
I tried it a while ago... at the time I decided it showed promise, but was still rather rough. Hopefully there's been improvement, and I will try it again, but I gotta play the original, just for the nostagia.
Is the first thing that comes to anyone else's mind when they see MIRV Scorched Earth? Man that was a fun game... now I'm going to have to dig it out & get it running again.
Back in my first High School CS class, my end of the year project was an unbeatable tic-tac-toe game. It had nifty features: Save & load (for those long tic-tac-toe games you can't fit into one session). And I could created save files by hand, so I could load games where the whole board was Xs (or Os), or some such impossible combination. Also this allowed me to be the only person that could beat it (create a save file by hand that was at a point that I could force a win). That was a fun project.
So, at least literally, a robot is anything that labors. Check the clicky to see more of it's literary history, or read some of Isaac Asimovs numerous essays on robots.
He's got to be spinning in his grave over the new I, Robot movie. Based on the trailer, it is just so very wrong. It looks really cool, but it (my guess based on the trailer) screws up so many fundamental things in Asimov's robot stories that it really bugs me. Hopefully I'm wrong and the actual movie will be stay more or less true to the books, but I really don't have that much faith in Hollywood...
This is why Isaac Asimov believed that the best robots would be humaniform - a humaniform robot would be able to use any tool designed for human use (think the vacuum, lawnmower, dishwasher, etc that you already have), and would not be limited to one specific area of specialization. Of course, in Asimov's robot stories he had his 'positronic brain' that gave his robots near-human AI, which is the big requirement for a multi-purpose robot (although there are of course several other difficulties with humaniform robots, for example balance - most bipedal robots are rather unsteady). Creating a robot intelligent enough to ideally be able to learn how to use multiple tools, or at the very least pre-programmed to use multiple tools is a huge hurdle, and at least for now in the commercial arena it really only feasible to create speciallized robots, and since they're being speciallized anyway, there's no reason to overcome the numerous other difficulties related to humaniform robotics. So I think there are really two possibilities for the future: either as xagon7 suggests house working robots will really not catch on until they become multi-purpose, in which case Asimov may have been correct and humaniform robots become common; or else speciallized robots will catch on, at least enough that multiple robots specialized for different chores will be developed, and once you have 1 robot to vacuum, another to mow, another to do dishes, etc. to the point where all your chores are being completed, in which case there would be no need for a single multi-purpose robot.
As I RTFA & previous comments here, I was rather suprised at how argumentive people were getting over this. Some people are saying swap is an absolute necessity & a swapless system was a broken system, while other's said swap was an obsolete solution to a problem that no longer exists (expensive RAM). This seems odd to me, because as far as I can tell, the decision of whether & how much swap to use is based mostly on two things: specific situations (and thus there is no general answer to 'Is Swap Necessary?'), and opinion. And either way, with the Linux kernel today (and for quite a while now), I can choose for myself whether or not, and how much, swap I want to use. So if I am in a situation that I think requires swap, I can use it, and in a situation that I think would be hurt by having swap, I don't have to use it. So I don't see why there's so much hoolabaloo about this: nobody is forcing anyone to do it one way or the other. And if someone else thinks it should be done different from how I would do it, that's their decision, not mine.
Last year at the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival, their was a CD available on the last day with recordings (some with video) of stories recorded live at the festival, including IIRC some from that day. It was a really cool CD that I need to get back from my sister....
Speaking of doing it for publicities sake, I wonder if it was a requiremoent for the donation for the Foundation to change name...
If you are going this route, you may as well actually use MS-DOS 6.22, rather than Win98. Although you will most likely have better luck getting old DOS games running under Win9x than under WinXP, depending on the game and your hardware you may still have problems. On of the major problems I remember having with DOS games under Win98 was with sound: the SoundBlaster drivers that came with my SB Live! could work either with win32 (Win9x+), or DOS, but not both at the same time. So in order to get sound working in DOS games I had really mess with the config.sys & win.ini files... and after I finally got my sound working, my mouse driver died. So if you go the dual-booting route, I would say dual-boot to the actual platform you want.
Project Gutenberg already has a section devoted to audio ebooks, but I have to say I'm all for this Telltale Weekly. All of the PG Audio Books I've listened too have been text-to-speech computer generated audio, and have been rather difficult to understand. As long as Telltale Weekly actually has human readers recording, they will be better than what PG currently has. I do hope that Telltale Weekly submits their audio ebooks to be included in PG.
Yes, it is illegal. The penalty is that the currency becomes void. So you can't pay for anything with any of your shrunken (or stretched) coins.