You aren't kidding about the noise. When I max out the G5- either by exporting a large QuickTime movie or visiting a web page with too damn much advertising - the fans are loud. Then again, I have a Performa 6400 under the desk (running Debian, of course) and it's still much louder than the G5 ever is.
Does anyone know if you can safely install Debian on a G5 yet? The G5's require the operating system to run the fans to keep it from melting itself, and I hadn't heard of any distro other than Yellow Dog claiming to provide that (also, no information about this that I could find on debian.org).
This is a very good analogy, because EA is buying the respect it cannot earn, and preventing quality products from coming to market. Just like Microsoft.
I switched from EA Sports games to Sega Sports games a few years ago because EA was obviously coasting and Sega was making more realistic games. Take hockey for example - in EA's NHL series, the game play is "Big-hit everyone. Even if a penalty is called, the power play is meaningless". You lose the passing game, playing the points is impossible, and it ends up turning into frickin' "Power Stone" (a silly four-player brawler). In Sega's NHL 2K5, moving the puck and setting up quality shots (getting one-timers, getting it right in front of the net, or getting breakaways) is the only way to score. And yet, the checking game is still far more interesting than EA's, as you use the right analog stick to sweep your stick, hip check, or deck the guy (another, more easily accessible button is used for typical stick checks).
Don't even get me into the style-over-substance spew that "EA Big" has become. I've never seen a game series self-destruct as badly as "Sled Storm" did between its PS1 and PS2 versions.
Well, with kids now, I'm too busy to game much anyways, so I'll just hold on to NHL 2K5 and NFL 2K5 as the last good sports video games that will ever be made.
iPod group, not necessarily iPod product. It's possible that this group will evolve into a multi-faceted consumer electronics effort, but there's no point in Apple publicly acknowledging as much now. So for now, they call it the "iPod" group, after its one product.
Or, maybe someone actually wants to watch videos on a twinkie little 2" screen.
In the anime series The Vision of Escaflowne it is very strongly implied that the leader of the enemy forces, Emperor Dornkirk, is really Sir Isaac Newton, transported to the planet Gaea from his deathbed. In the series, Dornkirk/Newton is driven by a compulsion to understand and ultimately control fate, thinking it to be a natural force like gravity.
The series even claims that Newton was driven by this obsession with fate later in his life, but I've never seen anything to back this up, so I could never tell if this extraordinarily fanciful plot device was in any way based in fact, or if it was entirely created by the show's writers.
I bought AAPL at 21, it's at 30 today. Get this dumb-ass away from my portfolio.
Seriously, every couple of months we get another MBA-bot posting his (never her) Grand Unified Plan for "saving" Apple, usually based on dumb ideas that have already failed (competing against Dell on price - look how well that went for eMachines and Gateway), are failing (tablet PC's do everything users want... really shittily), or are obviously going to fail (taunt virus/worm writers and script kiddies with boasts of Mac's invulerability).
Enough of the madness. Seven years ago, Wired ran a piece called 100 Ways to Save Apple, most of which were stupid (#76, "Make damn sure Rhapsody runs on an Intel chip"), fucking stupid (#81, "Merge with Sega"), or so fucking stupid it blocks out the sun (#61, "Ink a promotion/development deal with Shaquille O'Neal"). The item that looks best in retrospect is #101: "Don't worry. You'll survive. It's Netscape we should really worry about."
Slashdot and other sites with a collective IQ greater than that of a turnip should pass on these articles in the future. They're utterly garbage, have been for 20 years, and probably will be in another 20.
The anime franchise Gundam has been running much longer without interruption than Trek, and unsurprisingly, they ran into the same problem: an over-complicated timeline which advanced the clock but did little more than retread the same territory.
Give them credit for the way they got out of this mess: they shut down the original timeline and brought in outside creators, giving them the keys to the Gundam franchise for a year, letting them do new shows in alternate universes, using whatever elements of Gundam they liked and dispensing with the rest. The resulting was a nice revival of the franchise: Yasuhiro Imagawa based "G Gundam" in a crazy international robot-fighting competition, while Masashi Ikeda took the "pretty boy team" approach of his "Ronin Warriors" ("Yoroiden Samurai Troopers") to create the five troubled pretty-boy pilots of the atypically girl-friendly "Gundam Wing". And when they flop, like "Gundam X", you only burn off a year of the franchise (et tu, Enterprise?)
You can see the same approach in the recent "Gundam Seed". Details are different - psychic "newtypes" from the original series have given way to genetically modified "coordinators" - but there's a pleasant mix of the familiar and the new.
Bringing in JMS would be a commendably daring move. But for my money, give him one season in an alternate universe and then bring in someone else. Imagine what Spike Jonze... or Spike Lee, for that matter... could do with the Trek franchise.
--realinvalidname
Re:What I don't understand...
on
TechTV.com RIP
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Why did they keep mostly G4? Am I the only one who believes that TechTV was several orders of magnitude in higher quality than G4? I mean, to me it wasn't even a contest! G4 looked like it was being run out of some 70's revivalist's basement!
It may have been several orders of magnitude "better", but the Comcast-backed G4 seems to have had several orders of magnitude "more money". Surely many noticed TechTV's bi-monthly appearances on FC. And since it was G4 that acquired TechTV, they win, which is why you see all production moving to Los Angeles (yeah, that hotbed of technology), TechTV shows and personalities (and surely staffers, if any were kept) getting demoted, etc. (life-lesson I've learned twice: when your company is bought out, always leave immediately)
Are they too vain to understand that their shows suck? Doesn't matter, as long as they have money and are willing to cut more checks.
Prediction: the awkward "G4TechTV" name is only a short-term ploy to try to lure the few TechTV viewers. In a year, it'll just be "G4" again, with few if any of the TechTV shows (e.g., they might keep "Anime Unleashed" only so long as they have broadcast rights to the various shows... I'd be very surprised if they renewed them, unless they did the really stupid thing and got the rights to anime based on video games, most of which are awful).
Understanding the fact that any remotely intelligent video game player would rather play games than watch bad shows about games is left to the reader.
In suburban Atlanta, we typically have a rain hard enough to knock out satellite about 3-5 times a year. Outage is typically 10 minutes or less.
Previously, we lived in an apartment 10 miles south (ergo, roughly the same weather). These same rains were perfectly capable of knocking out the cable for days.
In short, the cable companies are lying - satellite handles adverse weather conditions better than cable, in my experience. Of course, how much would you expect from a government-enforced monopoly like your local cable system?
The fact that the Beatles called their record company "Apple Corps" is the stuff of $2000 questions on "Jeopardy!". Only very very stupid people, or lawyers, could claim confusion. Granted, the issue at hand is breach of contract, but still, why be such dicks?
And at the end of the day, who's done you more good:
Apple: iMac, iPod, PowerBook, QuickTime, FireWire, iTunes Music Store, free dev tools in the box
Used Linux as my desktop for a year (the alternative was Win2K, so the choice was easy).
Still, it pissed me off that GNOME gave me 10 ways to change my window manager theme and not one to set the clock, short of opening an xterm and doing "sudo date -s". Which of these features actually matters and ought to be reasonably findable?
Is the API ref arranged the old way, where subpackages got their own chapter, or the new way, ala the 1.4 version of "Java in a Nutshell", where java.util, java.util.zip, java.util.logging, etc. all live in the same chapter, without the little black tabs on the side to help you find stuff?
Obviously, the value of looking up stuff in that section is somewhat diminished when the reader is made responsible for second-guessing the placement of the content (when does "Vector" come before "JarFile" despite being in the same chapter? When the latter is in a subpackage)
This is a narrower claim that some of you are assuming - Ellison is talking about companies like his that sell software (or at least try to).
That doesn't mean you can't make money writing software, just that you can't do so in the form of a company that sells really really expensive data CD's.
What about the software that companies in other industries are writing for themselves, either with employees or contractors? I mean, it's not like Ford can go down to CompUSA and buy "Microsoft CarPlant" to run their assembly line. There are also service companies whose service requires software to operate - they may write vast amounts of code, but their product is a service, not the software that provides it.
Apple has written some of the best desktop software of the last few years (the iApps), but they're not a software company either. They try to use the Mac-exclusive software to get you to buy their hardware.
There's lots going on. Don't tear up that degree just yet.
Post-TNG's not working out and requiring mid-run kludges is not a new phenomenon. Consider what we've been promised before:
Tossing in the Defiant will fix Deep Space Nine because now they can get off the station (well, they could with the runabouts too, but those weren't cool enough)
Tossing in Worf will fix Deep Space Nine because now we'll have Klingons, and Klingons R Kool
Tossing in a big multi-year bunch of B5-envy will fix Deep Space Nine because we didn't know what this show was supposed to be about in the first place, and the Bajoran/Cardassian thing is getting boring.
Tossing in Seven of Nine and killing off Kes will fix Voyager because Borg R Bitchin' and you can never have too much of them
Jumping 10 years closer to home will fix Voyager because everything we've set up with the Kayzon and the plague and stuff just isn't working
Sigh. I believe anime term for this kind of viewer abuse by a long-running series is "Tenchi Restart Money-Grab". It's obnoxious, and nobody should be falling for it anymore.
...why stop at exporting the programming jobs? Why not export the management positions too? Surely there are clueless Porsche-driving a-holes in China, India, and Eastern Europe too, or at least there could be.
Seriously, while I'm sure there's value to a well-run offshore development program for certain kinds of projects, there is an element of faddishness here too. Half-assed companies that can't communicate or manage a project inside a single office have little hope of managing developers 10,000 miles and 12 time-zones away.
At this point, part of the charm of Lupin is the familiarity of the cast and the hi-jinks. The TV movies they crank out every year are designed to give each of the cast members an opportunity to do the things they do best, or to do a little twist on viewers' expectations (the "it's a cop, no wait it's Lupin, no wait it's Zenigata, no that was Lupin" gag from Castle of Cagliostro gets reversed again in the opening to Harimao's Treasure). Is "The $1 Cash War" better than "To Hell with Nostradamus"? Doesn't matter. They're both aimed dead-center at the comfort zone.
Of course, a one-shot movie wouldn't have that effect -- it'd be like trying to do a "Friends" movie (or, for that matter, like doing a big-budget Zatoichi revival). And can we trust Hollywood to capture what makes these characters appealing in the first place? I'm betting not.
For future reference, let's note how this game has been played again:
Holier-than-thous see something they dislike, demand it be censored
"Moderates" appeal for private-sector solution - "voluntary" labelling
Years pass
Holier-than-thous say the labelling isn't working
Congress-weasels pass law to criminalize possessing / selling content with certain ratings
Practical effect: private voluntary ratings now have force of law behind them: de facto censorship, especially as retailers get cold feet about selling higher-rated content.
Just something to remember the next time someone plays the voluntary / private / market-solution canard. Maybe one of these days we'll learn it's bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing America produces anymore is lawsuits, so that probably is a good career choice.
You aren't kidding about the noise. When I max out the G5- either by exporting a large QuickTime movie or visiting a web page with too damn much advertising - the fans are loud. Then again, I have a Performa 6400 under the desk (running Debian, of course) and it's still much louder than the G5 ever is.
-realinvalidname
Does anyone know if you can safely install Debian on a G5 yet? The G5's require the operating system to run the fans to keep it from melting itself, and I hadn't heard of any distro other than Yellow Dog claiming to provide that (also, no information about this that I could find on debian.org).
--realinvalidname
Someone at MacHack/ADHOC 2004 yelled out that AppleScript is "the world's only read-only computer language"
Then someone replied that perl is the only write-only language.
This is a very good analogy, because EA is buying the respect it cannot earn, and preventing quality products from coming to market. Just like Microsoft.
I switched from EA Sports games to Sega Sports games a few years ago because EA was obviously coasting and Sega was making more realistic games. Take hockey for example - in EA's NHL series, the game play is "Big-hit everyone. Even if a penalty is called, the power play is meaningless". You lose the passing game, playing the points is impossible, and it ends up turning into frickin' "Power Stone" (a silly four-player brawler). In Sega's NHL 2K5, moving the puck and setting up quality shots (getting one-timers, getting it right in front of the net, or getting breakaways) is the only way to score. And yet, the checking game is still far more interesting than EA's, as you use the right analog stick to sweep your stick, hip check, or deck the guy (another, more easily accessible button is used for typical stick checks).
Don't even get me into the style-over-substance spew that "EA Big" has become. I've never seen a game series self-destruct as badly as "Sled Storm" did between its PS1 and PS2 versions.
Well, with kids now, I'm too busy to game much anyways, so I'll just hold on to NHL 2K5 and NFL 2K5 as the last good sports video games that will ever be made.
--realinvalidnameiPod group, not necessarily iPod product. It's possible that this group will evolve into a multi-faceted consumer electronics effort, but there's no point in Apple publicly acknowledging as much now. So for now, they call it the "iPod" group, after its one product.
Or, maybe someone actually wants to watch videos on a twinkie little 2" screen.
--realinvalidname
In the anime series The Vision of Escaflowne it is very strongly implied that the leader of the enemy forces, Emperor Dornkirk, is really Sir Isaac Newton, transported to the planet Gaea from his deathbed. In the series, Dornkirk/Newton is driven by a compulsion to understand and ultimately control fate, thinking it to be a natural force like gravity.
The series even claims that Newton was driven by this obsession with fate later in his life, but I've never seen anything to back this up, so I could never tell if this extraordinarily fanciful plot device was in any way based in fact, or if it was entirely created by the show's writers.
Also... reality check, a "media edition" of Java? From Sun? They walked away from their media framework years ago.
I bought AAPL at 21, it's at 30 today. Get this dumb-ass away from my portfolio.
Seriously, every couple of months we get another MBA-bot posting his (never her) Grand Unified Plan for "saving" Apple, usually based on dumb ideas that have already failed (competing against Dell on price - look how well that went for eMachines and Gateway), are failing (tablet PC's do everything users want... really shittily), or are obviously going to fail (taunt virus/worm writers and script kiddies with boasts of Mac's invulerability).
Enough of the madness. Seven years ago, Wired ran a piece called 100 Ways to Save Apple, most of which were stupid (#76, "Make damn sure Rhapsody runs on an Intel chip"), fucking stupid (#81, "Merge with Sega"), or so fucking stupid it blocks out the sun (#61, "Ink a promotion/development deal with Shaquille O'Neal"). The item that looks best in retrospect is #101: "Don't worry. You'll survive. It's Netscape we should really worry about."
Slashdot and other sites with a collective IQ greater than that of a turnip should pass on these articles in the future. They're utterly garbage, have been for 20 years, and probably will be in another 20.
--realinvalidname
The anime franchise Gundam has been running much longer without interruption than Trek, and unsurprisingly, they ran into the same problem: an over-complicated timeline which advanced the clock but did little more than retread the same territory.
Give them credit for the way they got out of this mess: they shut down the original timeline and brought in outside creators, giving them the keys to the Gundam franchise for a year, letting them do new shows in alternate universes, using whatever elements of Gundam they liked and dispensing with the rest. The resulting was a nice revival of the franchise: Yasuhiro Imagawa based "G Gundam" in a crazy international robot-fighting competition, while Masashi Ikeda took the "pretty boy team" approach of his "Ronin Warriors" ("Yoroiden Samurai Troopers") to create the five troubled pretty-boy pilots of the atypically girl-friendly "Gundam Wing". And when they flop, like "Gundam X", you only burn off a year of the franchise (et tu, Enterprise?)
You can see the same approach in the recent "Gundam Seed". Details are different - psychic "newtypes" from the original series have given way to genetically modified "coordinators" - but there's a pleasant mix of the familiar and the new.
Bringing in JMS would be a commendably daring move. But for my money, give him one season in an alternate universe and then bring in someone else. Imagine what Spike Jonze... or Spike Lee, for that matter... could do with the Trek franchise.
--realinvalidnameWhy did they keep mostly G4? Am I the only one who believes that TechTV was several orders of magnitude in higher quality than G4? I mean, to me it wasn't even a contest! G4 looked like it was being run out of some 70's revivalist's basement!
It may have been several orders of magnitude "better", but the Comcast-backed G4 seems to have had several orders of magnitude "more money". Surely many noticed TechTV's bi-monthly appearances on FC. And since it was G4 that acquired TechTV, they win, which is why you see all production moving to Los Angeles (yeah, that hotbed of technology), TechTV shows and personalities (and surely staffers, if any were kept) getting demoted, etc. (life-lesson I've learned twice: when your company is bought out, always leave immediately)
Are they too vain to understand that their shows suck? Doesn't matter, as long as they have money and are willing to cut more checks.
Prediction: the awkward "G4TechTV" name is only a short-term ploy to try to lure the few TechTV viewers. In a year, it'll just be "G4" again, with few if any of the TechTV shows (e.g., they might keep "Anime Unleashed" only so long as they have broadcast rights to the various shows... I'd be very surprised if they renewed them, unless they did the really stupid thing and got the rights to anime based on video games, most of which are awful).
Understanding the fact that any remotely intelligent video game player would rather play games than watch bad shows about games is left to the reader.
--realinvalidname
Well, call me crazy, but how can surfing on lava not save a movie?
Apparently, you haven't seen Treasure Planet .
Aw crap, we've become Laputa.
In suburban Atlanta, we typically have a rain hard enough to knock out satellite about 3-5 times a year. Outage is typically 10 minutes or less.
Previously, we lived in an apartment 10 miles south (ergo, roughly the same weather). These same rains were perfectly capable of knocking out the cable for days.
In short, the cable companies are lying - satellite handles adverse weather conditions better than cable, in my experience. Of course, how much would you expect from a government-enforced monopoly like your local cable system?
Also, nothing is as cool as DirecTiVo.
-realinvalidname-realinvalidname
The fact that the Beatles called their record company "Apple Corps" is the stuff of $2000 questions on "Jeopardy!". Only very very stupid people, or lawyers, could claim confusion. Granted, the issue at hand is breach of contract, but still, why be such dicks?
And at the end of the day, who's done you more good:
-realinvalidname
Used Linux as my desktop for a year (the alternative was Win2K, so the choice was easy).
Still, it pissed me off that GNOME gave me 10 ways to change my window manager theme and not one to set the clock, short of opening an xterm and doing "sudo date -s". Which of these features actually matters and ought to be reasonably findable?
I respect Linux, but I choose Mac OS X.
-realinvalidname
...I've always called it "The Rainbow Stress Pizza".
-realinvalidname
Obviously, the value of looking up stuff in that section is somewhat diminished when the reader is made responsible for second-guessing the placement of the content (when does "Vector" come before "JarFile" despite being in the same chapter? When the latter is in a subpackage)
-realinvalidname
That doesn't mean you can't make money writing software, just that you can't do so in the form of a company that sells really really expensive data CD's.
What about the software that companies in other industries are writing for themselves, either with employees or contractors? I mean, it's not like Ford can go down to CompUSA and buy "Microsoft CarPlant" to run their assembly line. There are also service companies whose service requires software to operate - they may write vast amounts of code, but their product is a service, not the software that provides it.
Apple has written some of the best desktop software of the last few years (the iApps), but they're not a software company either. They try to use the Mac-exclusive software to get you to buy their hardware.
There's lots going on. Don't tear up that degree just yet.
-realinvalidname
- Tossing in the Defiant will fix Deep Space Nine because now they can get off the station (well, they could with the runabouts too, but those weren't cool enough)
- Tossing in Worf will fix Deep Space Nine because now we'll have Klingons, and Klingons R Kool
- Tossing in a big multi-year bunch of B5-envy will fix Deep Space Nine because we didn't know what this show was supposed to be about in the first place, and the Bajoran/Cardassian thing is getting boring.
- Tossing in Seven of Nine and killing off Kes will fix Voyager because Borg R Bitchin' and you can never have too much of them
- Jumping 10 years closer to home will fix Voyager because everything we've set up with the Kayzon and the plague and stuff just isn't working
Sigh. I believe anime term for this kind of viewer abuse by a long-running series is "Tenchi Restart Money-Grab". It's obnoxious, and nobody should be falling for it anymore.Seriously, while I'm sure there's value to a well-run offshore development program for certain kinds of projects, there is an element of faddishness here too. Half-assed companies that can't communicate or manage a project inside a single office have little hope of managing developers 10,000 miles and 12 time-zones away.
-realinvalidname
Of course, a one-shot movie wouldn't have that effect -- it'd be like trying to do a "Friends" movie (or, for that matter, like doing a big-budget Zatoichi revival). And can we trust Hollywood to capture what makes these characters appealing in the first place? I'm betting not.
- Holier-than-thous see something they dislike, demand it be censored
- "Moderates" appeal for private-sector solution - "voluntary" labelling
- Years pass
- Holier-than-thous say the labelling isn't working
- Congress-weasels pass law to criminalize possessing / selling content with certain ratings
- Practical effect: private voluntary ratings now have force of law behind them: de facto censorship, especially as retailers get cold feet about selling higher-rated content.
Just something to remember the next time someone plays the voluntary / private / market-solution canard. Maybe one of these days we'll learn it's bullshit.--realinvalidname