Commercial spaceflight will hopefully beget commercial orbital platforms, will hopefully beget commercial R & D on orbital platforms, and maybe then we'll start seeing some serious uses of microgravity science and engineering.
If anything, it's worth getting off of this rock just to get away from guys like Van Allen who seem to think we should just stay put until we run out of resources and the sun burns out.:P
... a top of the line PC IS going to cost you 3k, and it's still going to lag in the FSB. Even if a few other components are faster.
My workstation gives me:
Optical in and out, headphone jacks (front and back), three USB 2.0 jacks, two Firewire 400 jacks, one firewire 800 jack, gigabit ethernet, bluetooth capability, wireless capability, three PCI-X slots, and AGP. One standard 40-pin IDE bus and two SATA connections.
On. The. Motherboard.
Oh, and it's dual 64-bit.
How much does a dual 64-bit amd box with all that bling on the motherboard go for these days?
Hell, I could hit the three grand point on a PC box just by getting one with a decent workstation video card in it.;-) Oh, and if I'm building a PC to last, it's gonna be SCSI. Wasn't an option on my G5, though I've no complaints about SATA. SCSI drives the cost up considerably (as well as the MTBF!:D)
Admittedly, you can spank a G4 quite handily for ~1200$ these days, and maybe get most of the motherboard stuff.
You'll also get more internal expandability- drives, optical, etceteras. And you'll also be needing it.:P
Modern Application Development did take a stab at this, back during the MacOS 8-8.1 days. OpenDoc was very short-lived, and was basically exactly what you describe: the UNIX model of a score of little single-purpose thingers that could be strung together however the user wanted.
Add spellchecking to your webbrowser, html support to your text editor, vector tools to a page layout program, or jam together a whole bunch of modules and have something like pagemaker or dreamweaver with just the features you want. Upgrade components, not the whole application....
Of course, Adobe and Macromedia dropped a giant load in their pants and did what they always do whenever Apple does anything interesting- threaten to drop support for the platform.
I'm buying either laserdiscs or clean, good quality VHS THX remasters and transferring them to DVD using the hardware I have access to myself.
I don't want the EX Plus Alpha II Special Champion Edition Star Wars. I want Han Shooting first. I want the goddamned seedy bar band, NOT the broadway mupped production number.
The article completely fails to mention rather or not the Original Trilogy DVDs include the original theatrical releases, or if it's the Special (special like the "short bus") Editions only.
Or the guy who signed off on rolling the thing out without extremely thorough testing beforehand. The IT / Software end of companies is a lot like animals in this respect- cut the head off and you prevent the body from doing anything grossly stupid.
Start with the CTO and work your way down. If it's a software problem, why wasn't it discovered sooner? Who was in charge of QA? Who was in charge of making sure QA did their jobs? Who said YES WE CAN DO IT!, lying out their ass?
The fun thing about capitalism is greed and/or the desire for profit leads to systems like this being built by the lowest bidder.:P You get what you pay for!:|
Orkut's a circle jerk. Slashdot's a circle jerk. It just so happens that here, Windows is sneezed at and joked about, whereas on Orkut, the "I'm BETTER THAN J00!!!" has turned out to be language-based, as opposed to more personal preferences. Since it's hard to argue just how much the other guy sucks when you can't speak his language, some people are getting peeved.
And babelfish goes unmentioned.
I gave orkut a shot. Frankly, looking at the Pittsburgh dating scene through search filters scared the crap outta me.
Macintoshes are Macintoshes and Performas are stripped down, lobotomized, unexpandable Macs. Or Powermacs with their balls cut off, depending.
Apple has the Macintosh and Centris / Performa lines throughout the 68k era. Macintoshes with the Power PC chip were called Power Macintoshes. They still came in at least four flavors- slim desktop, desktop, all in one, minitower.
Powermacs were always expandable. Performas were always limited- but most of 'em had slots of some kind. It's only with the advent of the iMac that Apple has ditched the Performa name and pretty much any possibility of internal expandability. Performa meant "crap" in a lot of circles, whereas Power Macintosh (basically, "Mac" these days) didn't.
I'm with a lot of the other posters to this thread- I'd LOVE a headless "performa" grade machine from Apple.:|
Which is why I failed Algebra and despite having college-level skills in english and reading, wound up having to take "reduced" math classes in order to graduate from high school.
Problem was that I was finding solutions to problems, getting the correct answers, showing my work... and FAILING because it wasn't the TEACHER'S METHOD, which was convoluted, made my brain scream, and sent me to the nurses office three or four times a week with tension headaches.
Public Education math is very much My Way Or The Highway. It's easily the most creativity-stifling experience I've had in my life.
I'd heard something about that at some point last year or so, but had figured it would just be an Extra Super Special Directors Cut version or similar, and honestly hadn't paid it much attention.
Good to know the project still exists!
(which reminds me, I need to find a Critereon cut of Brazil, too.)
I read all day. Usually it's IRC, system prompts, the command line, news feeds, etceteras. In gradeskool and high school, I read all the sci-fi I could get my hands on- magazines, novels, short stories, etceteras. I Consumed. Had to do something with my time in the summers! I always had a book. Gave me something to read on the bus, before bed, etceteras.
When I was younger, my mom read the entire local library's selection of romance novels. All of her mom's, all of her aunt's, all of her friends. She never read anything else, and she mowed through at least three or four of them a week. It's escapism, pure and simple. I escape with Quake.
I still read before bed. I write in my journal on the bus these days, though I read when I'm travelling (no license- greyhound or shotgun)- managed to devour half of Gibson's All Tomorrow's Party's on my last trip to Philly. Comic books in the pooper.
Currently, I'm rereading Appleseed (Shirow, you know, that Ghost in the Shell guy), and as an adult, I'm finally capable of realizing how much ass it kicks.
It goes in spurts- I'll have months where I'm too busy writing and drawing and IRCing to read. I'll have months where I inhale a stream of novels (I read ALL of the Sandman and several Gaiman novels in the span of about three weeks...), and I'll have my periods where comics are where my head is (last jag being Transmetropolitan).
Problem is, I'm picky and I'm poor and IRC is free and cheaper than the coffee house. I dearly love my dead tree picturebooks and novels, but I find it increasingly difficult to figure out what's good at a glance- much easier to do with comics than novels.:P So I've been sticking with authors I've known from the past, and rereading comics and books I read back in high school. Big trunk of comics and books I barely remember buying! Cheap! Convenient! O.o
It's a hard, sick truth, but both Adobe and Macromedia are optimizing for Wintel. They happen to chunk out Mac versions because Designers Use Macs and they're guranteed to move product with an OS X version.
Photoshop 7 for MacOS is the most sluggish piece of SHIT I have ever had the displeasure of using. CS isn't much better.
I think Adobe's still pissed about Apple's move into production software, and they're taking it out on the users.
Great. Balance of Terror is, in my opinion, one of the best episodes of TOS, and ranks up there amongst the best in the series- namely for the reaction of Spock to the sight of a Romulan, and especially for the reaction of the entire crew to Spcok after the sighting. That episode dealt strongly with racism, and was damned entertaining.
So now Berman's gonna take a shit all over one of the few uncorrupted Trek elements, and do it with a no-name crew?
Why exactly does this guy still have his job, again?
They are if you want to run photoshop, illustrator, Macromedia products.... if you need Office for whatever reason. If you do video.
For the Creative Professional, your options are the Mac, which gets out of your way, and Windows, which goes out of your way to get in your way, but is so stupidly cheap and ubiquitous that the vast majority of young / struggling artists go with it.
Adobe dropped Photoshop for IRIX a long time back, and there's no comprable solution for Professional Image Editing.
(save the Gimp arguments, I've heard them.:-| The Gimp is getting useable but the Gimp is still Not Photoshop.)
Willow was totally my favorite fantasy film in my early teens, though the climax effects were bleh even for the time.
If Lucas REALLY wants to CASH IN, he'll take advantage of three years of LoTR theatre-hordes inertia and release a cleaned up, THX remastered version of Willow in December. Rework the end! Dear gods!
Hey, y'all went and saw the Big Epic Fantasy Thing over winter break for the last three years, what's another one, eh? eh?
The important thing is that THX-1138 is being released on DVD.
The LoTR movies prove that slavering fanboi will buy two versions of a movie in the same year- at three movies, thousands of people wind up having six boxes sitting around. Yeah. And we're ragging on George here.
The Aliens DVD is worth every penny. Just wish Alien3 had commentary.:|
I'd kill for a Theatrical cut of Blade Runner on DVD. Alas, all you can get is The Directors Cut. It's annoying.
Yes, The Directors Cut is a Better Film. However, in my experience, it's a Better Film to me in the sense that I already have the context and background that the noir narrative in the Theatrical cut conveys.
Personally, the pace is what makes the production so damned creepy. If you sped it up to the hyperkinetic ADD dragonball explosionfest that is Modern Cinema, it would suck. And suck horribly.:|
Some of us like our sci-fi in the Drama sub category.:D
I own both versions- the Theatrical on VHS and the Theatrical / Special Edition on DVD. Personally, I don't think it needs a remaster. It's Perfect just the way it is.
Dark Star : You either absolutely love it, or you've so thoroughly repressed the memory that you'll swear you've never seen it.
YOU ARE NOT TO EXPLODE IN THE BOMB BAY! THIS IS AN ORDER!
Yes, one box. Not horribly expensive. Four keyboards and four mice. Again, not horribly expensive (unless you go Apple, where a nice mechanical keyswitch board will cost you 100$).
Monitors. You can get pantsed a couple of ways here.
Small CRTs are cheapish, but heavyish. Big CRTs are expensivish and heavy. LCDs are massively NOT cheap and expensive. Yes, you're saving on the silicon, but you still have to consider cost and shipping for monitors.
Depending on what you'd get, the box suddenly ends up being the cheaper part of the system.:-O
This seems to be a desired feature.
on
Hacking Quartz
·
· Score: 1
Me, I'm just pissed that not everything (games, some screensavers, etc) supports multihead. I run three displays on my workstation- you'd be surprised just how many apps don't support the real estate.:-|
As an artist who hangs with geeks, I seem to have become the point man and go-to guy for several linux/solaris friends who've bought powerbooks over the past couple of years.
Inevitably, after they get over virt-shock and set the terminal back to some acceptable defaults, they want to know if they can change the focus model and if so, how. That sort of thing has always been completely counter to my workflow- don't need Illustrator or Irssi popping up when I'm rolling between a texture file and the target document.... it would drive me mad. I've disabled it on a couple of Windows machines I had to deal with awhile back (machines with some sort of extension that enabled this feature installed).
I was dead-set on hating focus-follows-mouse until I used IRIX.
Good to know that there's at least some option for the mac.:)
This is slashdot, where User Friendly is the shit. And about as funny, imo.
Go ahead, flamebate me- point is that a sense of humor is a highly relative thing- one man's OMFGWTFROTFLMAO!!!1 is another man's "man, I just wasted $minutes of my life on this shit."
Cases in point : Saturday Night Live and User Friendly.
Slashdot Mirror
We got TANG, dangit.
:P
Commercial spaceflight will hopefully beget commercial orbital platforms, will hopefully beget commercial R & D on orbital platforms, and maybe then we'll start seeing some serious uses of microgravity science and engineering.
If anything, it's worth getting off of this rock just to get away from guys like Van Allen who seem to think we should just stay put until we run out of resources and the sun burns out.
Verily.
Kind of poetic to see the complete definition of dookie on slashdot.
... a top of the line PC IS going to cost you 3k, and it's still going to lag in the FSB. Even if a few other components are faster.
;-) Oh, and if I'm building a PC to last, it's gonna be SCSI. Wasn't an option on my G5, though I've no complaints about SATA. SCSI drives the cost up considerably (as well as the MTBF! :D)
:P
My workstation gives me:
Optical in and out, headphone jacks (front and back), three USB 2.0 jacks, two Firewire 400 jacks, one firewire 800 jack, gigabit ethernet, bluetooth capability, wireless capability, three PCI-X slots, and AGP. One standard 40-pin IDE bus and two SATA connections.
On. The. Motherboard.
Oh, and it's dual 64-bit.
How much does a dual 64-bit amd box with all that bling on the motherboard go for these days?
Hell, I could hit the three grand point on a PC box just by getting one with a decent workstation video card in it.
Admittedly, you can spank a G4 quite handily for ~1200$ these days, and maybe get most of the motherboard stuff.
You'll also get more internal expandability- drives, optical, etceteras. And you'll also be needing it.
Modern Application Development did take a stab at this, back during the MacOS 8-8.1 days. OpenDoc was very short-lived, and was basically exactly what you describe: the UNIX model of a score of little single-purpose thingers that could be strung together however the user wanted.
:-|
Add spellchecking to your webbrowser, html support to your text editor, vector tools to a page layout program, or jam together a whole bunch of modules and have something like pagemaker or dreamweaver with just the features you want. Upgrade components, not the whole application....
Of course, Adobe and Macromedia dropped a giant load in their pants and did what they always do whenever Apple does anything interesting- threaten to drop support for the platform.
So, OpenDoc was gone in OS 8.5. It got Steved.
Well, that tears that.
I'm buying either laserdiscs or clean, good quality VHS THX remasters and transferring them to DVD using the hardware I have access to myself.
I don't want the EX Plus Alpha II Special Champion Edition Star Wars. I want Han Shooting first. I want the goddamned seedy bar band, NOT the broadway mupped production number.
And it looks like I'll have to make it myself.
So be it!
The article completely fails to mention rather or not the Original Trilogy DVDs include the original theatrical releases, or if it's the Special (special like the "short bus") Editions only.
If it's SE only, no sale. I'm not interested.
I WANT THE THEATRICAL CUTS DANGIT.
Annoying IT behaviour is five years on an improperly configured domain.
Really. Turning on samba in OS X should not be eating the network. Say something, really.
Worse, imo, is that one of my coworkers has YET to discover the MAGIC of HEADPHONES and she listens to nothing but staticy SHIT all day. >:|
Or the guy who signed off on rolling the thing out without extremely thorough testing beforehand. The IT / Software end of companies is a lot like animals in this respect- cut the head off and you prevent the body from doing anything grossly stupid.
:P You get what you pay for! :|
Start with the CTO and work your way down. If it's a software problem, why wasn't it discovered sooner? Who was in charge of QA? Who was in charge of making sure QA did their jobs? Who said YES WE CAN DO IT!, lying out their ass?
The fun thing about capitalism is greed and/or the desire for profit leads to systems like this being built by the lowest bidder.
Orkut's a circle jerk. Slashdot's a circle jerk. It just so happens that here, Windows is sneezed at and joked about, whereas on Orkut, the "I'm BETTER THAN J00!!!" has turned out to be language-based, as opposed to more personal preferences. Since it's hard to argue just how much the other guy sucks when you can't speak his language, some people are getting peeved.
And babelfish goes unmentioned.
I gave orkut a shot. Frankly, looking at the Pittsburgh dating scene through search filters scared the crap outta me.
A 6400, actually.
:)
Less than a meg of VRAM. No ethernet. TWO PCI slots.
Suck city! >_
On the upside, it had a really neat form factor and a built-in subwoofer. Heavy as hell but the sound quality was really nice.
Macintoshes are Macintoshes and Performas are stripped down, lobotomized, unexpandable Macs. Or Powermacs with their balls cut off, depending.
:|
Apple has the Macintosh and Centris / Performa lines throughout the 68k era. Macintoshes with the Power PC chip were called Power Macintoshes. They still came in at least four flavors- slim desktop, desktop, all in one, minitower.
Powermacs were always expandable. Performas were always limited- but most of 'em had slots of some kind. It's only with the advent of the iMac that Apple has ditched the Performa name and pretty much any possibility of internal expandability. Performa meant "crap" in a lot of circles, whereas Power Macintosh (basically, "Mac" these days) didn't.
I'm with a lot of the other posters to this thread- I'd LOVE a headless "performa" grade machine from Apple.
Which is why I failed Algebra and despite having college-level skills in english and reading, wound up having to take "reduced" math classes in order to graduate from high school.
Problem was that I was finding solutions to problems, getting the correct answers, showing my work... and FAILING because it wasn't the TEACHER'S METHOD, which was convoluted, made my brain scream, and sent me to the nurses office three or four times a week with tension headaches.
Public Education math is very much My Way Or The Highway. It's easily the most creativity-stifling experience I've had in my life.
I'd heard something about that at some point last year or so, but had figured it would just be an Extra Super Special Directors Cut version or similar, and honestly hadn't paid it much attention.
Good to know the project still exists!
(which reminds me, I need to find a Critereon cut of Brazil, too.)
I read all day. Usually it's IRC, system prompts, the command line, news feeds, etceteras. In gradeskool and high school, I read all the sci-fi I could get my hands on- magazines, novels, short stories, etceteras. I Consumed. Had to do something with my time in the summers! I always had a book. Gave me something to read on the bus, before bed, etceteras.
:P So I've been sticking with authors I've known from the past, and rereading comics and books I read back in high school. Big trunk of comics and books I barely remember buying! Cheap! Convenient! O.o
When I was younger, my mom read the entire local library's selection of romance novels. All of her mom's, all of her aunt's, all of her friends. She never read anything else, and she mowed through at least three or four of them a week. It's escapism, pure and simple. I escape with Quake.
I still read before bed. I write in my journal on the bus these days, though I read when I'm travelling (no license- greyhound or shotgun)- managed to devour half of Gibson's All Tomorrow's Party's on my last trip to Philly. Comic books in the pooper.
Currently, I'm rereading Appleseed (Shirow, you know, that Ghost in the Shell guy), and as an adult, I'm finally capable of realizing how much ass it kicks.
It goes in spurts- I'll have months where I'm too busy writing and drawing and IRCing to read. I'll have months where I inhale a stream of novels (I read ALL of the Sandman and several Gaiman novels in the span of about three weeks...), and I'll have my periods where comics are where my head is (last jag being Transmetropolitan).
Problem is, I'm picky and I'm poor and IRC is free and cheaper than the coffee house. I dearly love my dead tree picturebooks and novels, but I find it increasingly difficult to figure out what's good at a glance- much easier to do with comics than novels.
Print isn't dead. It's a preference.
So does Photoshop. :-|
It's a hard, sick truth, but both Adobe and Macromedia are optimizing for Wintel. They happen to chunk out Mac versions because Designers Use Macs and they're guranteed to move product with an OS X version.
Photoshop 7 for MacOS is the most sluggish piece of SHIT I have ever had the displeasure of using. CS isn't much better.
I think Adobe's still pissed about Apple's move into production software, and they're taking it out on the users.
Great. Balance of Terror is, in my opinion, one of the best episodes of TOS, and ranks up there amongst the best in the series- namely for the reaction of Spock to the sight of a Romulan, and especially for the reaction of the entire crew to Spcok after the sighting. That episode dealt strongly with racism, and was damned entertaining.
So now Berman's gonna take a shit all over one of the few uncorrupted Trek elements, and do it with a no-name crew?
Why exactly does this guy still have his job, again?
They are if you want to run photoshop, illustrator, Macromedia products.... if you need Office for whatever reason. If you do video.
:-| The Gimp is getting useable but the Gimp is still Not Photoshop.)
For the Creative Professional, your options are the Mac, which gets out of your way, and Windows, which goes out of your way to get in your way, but is so stupidly cheap and ubiquitous that the vast majority of young / struggling artists go with it.
Adobe dropped Photoshop for IRIX a long time back, and there's no comprable solution for Professional Image Editing.
(save the Gimp arguments, I've heard them.
Willow was totally my favorite fantasy film in my early teens, though the climax effects were bleh even for the time.
:-|
If Lucas REALLY wants to CASH IN, he'll take advantage of three years of LoTR theatre-hordes inertia and release a cleaned up, THX remastered version of Willow in December. Rework the end! Dear gods!
Hey, y'all went and saw the Big Epic Fantasy Thing over winter break for the last three years, what's another one, eh? eh?
I'd go.
The important thing is that THX-1138 is being released on DVD.
The LoTR movies prove that slavering fanboi will buy two versions of a movie in the same year- at three movies, thousands of people wind up having six boxes sitting around. Yeah. And we're ragging on George here.
The Aliens DVD is worth every penny. Just wish Alien3 had commentary. :|
I'd kill for a Theatrical cut of Blade Runner on DVD. Alas, all you can get is The Directors Cut. It's annoying.
Yes, The Directors Cut is a Better Film. However, in my experience, it's a Better Film to me in the sense that I already have the context and background that the noir narrative in the Theatrical cut conveys.
Yeah. THX has a slow pace. So does life. :P
:|
:D
Personally, the pace is what makes the production so damned creepy. If you sped it up to the hyperkinetic ADD dragonball explosionfest that is Modern Cinema, it would suck. And suck horribly.
Some of us like our sci-fi in the Drama sub category.
I own both versions- the Theatrical on VHS and the Theatrical / Special Edition on DVD. Personally, I don't think it needs a remaster. It's Perfect just the way it is.
Dark Star : You either absolutely love it, or you've so thoroughly repressed the memory that you'll swear you've never seen it.
YOU ARE NOT TO EXPLODE IN THE BOMB BAY! THIS IS AN ORDER!
Yes, one box. Not horribly expensive. Four keyboards and four mice. Again, not horribly expensive (unless you go Apple, where a nice mechanical keyswitch board will cost you 100$).
:-O
Monitors. You can get pantsed a couple of ways here.
Small CRTs are cheapish, but heavyish. Big CRTs are expensivish and heavy. LCDs are massively NOT cheap and expensive. Yes, you're saving on the silicon, but you still have to consider cost and shipping for monitors.
Depending on what you'd get, the box suddenly ends up being the cheaper part of the system.
Me, I'm just pissed that not everything (games, some screensavers, etc) supports multihead. I run three displays on my workstation- you'd be surprised just how many apps don't support the real estate. :-|
:)
As an artist who hangs with geeks, I seem to have become the point man and go-to guy for several linux/solaris friends who've bought powerbooks over the past couple of years.
Inevitably, after they get over virt-shock and set the terminal back to some acceptable defaults, they want to know if they can change the focus model and if so, how. That sort of thing has always been completely counter to my workflow- don't need Illustrator or Irssi popping up when I'm rolling between a texture file and the target document.... it would drive me mad. I've disabled it on a couple of Windows machines I had to deal with awhile back (machines with some sort of extension that enabled this feature installed).
I was dead-set on hating focus-follows-mouse until I used IRIX.
Good to know that there's at least some option for the mac.
This is slashdot, where User Friendly is the shit. And about as funny, imo.
Go ahead, flamebate me- point is that a sense of humor is a highly relative thing- one man's OMFGWTFROTFLMAO!!!1 is another man's "man, I just wasted $minutes of my life on this shit."
Cases in point : Saturday Night Live and User Friendly.