I found Night Watch (and most Vimes books written since) a bit too preachy, too full of clichés, and a bit low on jokes and metaphors (still very well written, unlike his latest ones, but a bit too black-and-white for my taste). IMO Pratchett's peak was Small Gods (which is very much Literature, with a capital L, probably in goldish).
And yet I can find multiple Bourguignon Maurice violins for sale for less than $3000?
I don't know, can you? Or is that question mark at the end meant to be a full stop?
And, if you can find multiple Maurice Bourguignon violins for less than $3000, doesn't that reinforce my point that it's highly unlikely that "eBay destroyed a $20k violin"...? Also, where did I say anything about "a low quality instrument", or indeed anything about the quality of any instrument?
I'd say that, at the very least, you are missing the fact that the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature are different things. You are also missing a user name.
I wonder if you've even read any of the authors you mention in that post. Or maybe you tried reading one, found it too complex, and went back to Harry Potter and Dan Brown...?
Being a neurologist doesn't mean you'll have a lot of creative ideas. Being a linguist doesn't make you a stylish writer.
I read LotR three times (first time when I was 9 or 10) and I loved the epic story and the consistent universe, but the language is rather bland. Tolkien was certainly very meticulous, but anyone who praises him for writing style probably hasn't read anything else. Terry Pratchett or Will Self (to name only two) can often get more out of a sentence than Tolkien managed to get out of a whole chapter.
The films are boring. And nonsensical, because they mangled several sub-plots (they should either have kept them or removed them completely; as it is, several scenes in the films make no sense at all to people who haven't read the books). Also not very well directed or acted, as often happens when the special effects become more important than the storytelling.
I think part of the problem people have with LotR is that they didn't read The Hobbit, which is really the first chapter of the story.
Regarding TFA, Tolkien is indeed not Nobel prize material; he didn't really change the literary or social landscape of his day (which is what the Nobel committee usually looks for), although he somewhat "crystallised" fantasy writing and was able to transmit a sense of scale that few authors manage.
An item, especially art or an antique, is worth exactly whatever somebody else will pay for it.
Congratulations on stating the obvious.
But you do understand that eBay lets you set a starting price, right...? So, if this violin had been valued at $20k (as the GGP suggests), do you really think the seller wouldn't have started the auction at a significantly higher value than $2k? So, either the "they destroyed a $20k violin" claim is nonsense (and they destroyed, at most, a ~$3k violin, which is quite low by violin standards) or the fact that "a $20k violin" was being sold for $2500 is, in itself, rather suspicious.
Firefox (and Chrome, and IE, and Safari) copied pretty much everything from Opera. Tabbed browsing, searching from the address bar, mouse gestures, pop-up blocking, etc., etc., all that was in Opera first (sometimes several years before the others).
Don't even compare those two. One is just a toy with no real-world utility, that people get bored with after two days and only bring out to impress their friends who still don't have one. The other is an Etch-a-Sketch.
SunSpider is a "core JS benchmark". It does not focus on interaction with the renderer (which is what JS is used for in >95% of web pages), it basically tests JS performance as a computing platform. While this is likely to become more relevant in the future, it's still not a good measure of how a browser's JS performance impacts user experience.
Opera 9 was quite slow at running SunSpider and yet reacted faster than any browser of its time to user interaction in most pages, simply because it was faster "where it mattered" (interaction with the DOM and renderer).
If I was a cynical person, I'd say that SunSpider (a benchmark created by WebKit) was designed specifically to make WebKit look better than Opera and Firefox...:-P
Absolutely, he's a very competent producer. But that doesn't invalidate that the summary gives him credit for perfecting technology that a) already existed and b) he was not actually involved with in any way.
still Cameron will be where he is now - on the freaking movie Olympus for his organisational and fundraising skills
Absolutely. He's an excellent producer. He's just a so-so director and a terrible, terrible writer. In fact, by now even he has figured out the last part, and doesn't really try to write anything anymore.
I'm sure "Aliens" made a lot more money than "Alien". And yet the latter is a suspense classic with a solid script and a consistent atmosphere, while the former is a mad race between bullet holes and plot holes. Entertaining at times, but hardly on the same level in terms of storytelling (you know, that part of the film that makes you feel things, not just go "Whoa! Geat explosions, dude!").
I'm always amused (though not amazed anymore) by that fact that, whenever someone says "X is a pretty low quality product", someone (usually an american - maybe it's a cultural thing) immediately replies "no, it's great quality because it made a lot of dollars".
I guess heaven must be eating a Big Mac while you use Microsoft Windows to watch Oprah Winfrey.
No, he made a handful of very high-grossing films (sold a lot of tickets but also cost a lot of money to make). If you define "profitability" as the ratio of income to expenditure, he's not even close. But all that is irrelevant, because my comments were about quality (and the ability to not make a whole script hinge on some obvious plot hole).
If your definition of quality is "how much money it makes", then I guess you think Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates are the pinnacle of human evolution.
the photorealistic CGI technology James Cameron perfected [...]
James Cameron is a mediocre film director and a terrible writer, but I'm willing to bet he's even worse at coding, 3D modelling or animation.
James Cameron did not "perfect" anything. He paid some people to put something together so he could make more money from it. Most of the technology used to streamline the CGI production in Avatar was in fact developed for other films (ex., "Benjamin Button").
And, in any case, the "new" part about Avatar is the (nearly automatic) "performance capture", not the "photorealistic" rendering, which has been around for ages (how realistic you want it depends on how much time or render nodes you can afford to throw at it).
Slashdot Mirror
I found Night Watch (and most Vimes books written since) a bit too preachy, too full of clichés, and a bit low on jokes and metaphors (still very well written, unlike his latest ones, but a bit too black-and-white for my taste). IMO Pratchett's peak was Small Gods (which is very much Literature, with a capital L, probably in goldish).
And yet I can find multiple Bourguignon Maurice violins for sale for less than $3000?
I don't know, can you? Or is that question mark at the end meant to be a full stop?
And, if you can find multiple Maurice Bourguignon violins for less than $3000, doesn't that reinforce my point that it's highly unlikely that "eBay destroyed a $20k violin"...? Also, where did I say anything about "a low quality instrument", or indeed anything about the quality of any instrument?
I'd say that, at the very least, you are missing the fact that the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature are different things. You are also missing a user name.
I wonder if you've even read any of the authors you mention in that post. Or maybe you tried reading one, found it too complex, and went back to Harry Potter and Dan Brown...?
Being a neurologist doesn't mean you'll have a lot of creative ideas. Being a linguist doesn't make you a stylish writer.
I read LotR three times (first time when I was 9 or 10) and I loved the epic story and the consistent universe, but the language is rather bland. Tolkien was certainly very meticulous, but anyone who praises him for writing style probably hasn't read anything else. Terry Pratchett or Will Self (to name only two) can often get more out of a sentence than Tolkien managed to get out of a whole chapter.
The films are boring. And nonsensical, because they mangled several sub-plots (they should either have kept them or removed them completely; as it is, several scenes in the films make no sense at all to people who haven't read the books). Also not very well directed or acted, as often happens when the special effects become more important than the storytelling.
I think part of the problem people have with LotR is that they didn't read The Hobbit, which is really the first chapter of the story.
Regarding TFA, Tolkien is indeed not Nobel prize material; he didn't really change the literary or social landscape of his day (which is what the Nobel committee usually looks for), although he somewhat "crystallised" fantasy writing and was able to transmit a sense of scale that few authors manage.
An item, especially art or an antique, is worth exactly whatever somebody else will pay for it.
Congratulations on stating the obvious.
But you do understand that eBay lets you set a starting price, right...? So, if this violin had been valued at $20k (as the GGP suggests), do you really think the seller wouldn't have started the auction at a significantly higher value than $2k? So, either the "they destroyed a $20k violin" claim is nonsense (and they destroyed, at most, a ~$3k violin, which is quite low by violin standards) or the fact that "a $20k violin" was being sold for $2500 is, in itself, rather suspicious.
Paypal is not regulated like banks are, in the US.
Funniest thing I've read in ages!
There are some very nice violins falsely labeled as Strads, for example.
Then please, oh wise Anonymous Coward, tell us which ones those are so we may label them properly.
Then why would the seller be flogging it on eBay for 1/10th of that? Unless, of course, it was a fake...
"Please become a legal adult. You have 20 second to comply."
"You now have 15 seconds to comply."
"You are in direct violation of Dessert Code 1.13, Section 9. You have 5 seconds to comply."
"I am now authorized to use physical force."
(machine-gun fire)
Firefox (and Chrome, and IE, and Safari) copied pretty much everything from Opera. Tabbed browsing, searching from the address bar, mouse gestures, pop-up blocking, etc., etc., all that was in Opera first (sometimes several years before the others).
According to Prof Kubiatowicz...
It's fitting that he has a polish name, but surely all this (and more) was discovered ages ago by Professor A. Donda...
Don't even compare those two. One is just a toy with no real-world utility, that people get bored with after two days and only bring out to impress their friends who still don't have one. The other is an Etch-a-Sketch.
The real question is: is your in-law aware of their resemblance to the the gardener, the mailman and the poolboy?
Actually I'm pretty sure #4 (according to the TSA manuals) is "a brown-skinned male", but they decided it wasn't PC to mention that.
Look at the picture. It's a fingerbox. The student was clearly trying to troll the TSA.
Meanwhile, they completely missed the real bomb he was carrying inside his bible.
Mankind is divided into three kinds of people: Those who can count, and those who can't.
SunSpider is a "core JS benchmark". It does not focus on interaction with the renderer (which is what JS is used for in >95% of web pages), it basically tests JS performance as a computing platform. While this is likely to become more relevant in the future, it's still not a good measure of how a browser's JS performance impacts user experience.
Opera 9 was quite slow at running SunSpider and yet reacted faster than any browser of its time to user interaction in most pages, simply because it was faster "where it mattered" (interaction with the DOM and renderer).
If I was a cynical person, I'd say that SunSpider (a benchmark created by WebKit) was designed specifically to make WebKit look better than Opera and Firefox... :-P
Absolutely, he's a very competent producer. But that doesn't invalidate that the summary gives him credit for perfecting technology that a) already existed and b) he was not actually involved with in any way.
still Cameron will be where he is now - on the freaking movie Olympus for his organisational and fundraising skills
Absolutely. He's an excellent producer. He's just a so-so director and a terrible, terrible writer. In fact, by now even he has figured out the last part, and doesn't really try to write anything anymore.
I'm sure "Aliens" made a lot more money than "Alien". And yet the latter is a suspense classic with a solid script and a consistent atmosphere, while the former is a mad race between bullet holes and plot holes. Entertaining at times, but hardly on the same level in terms of storytelling (you know, that part of the film that makes you feel things, not just go "Whoa! Geat explosions, dude!").
I'm always amused (though not amazed anymore) by that fact that, whenever someone says "X is a pretty low quality product", someone (usually an american - maybe it's a cultural thing) immediately replies "no, it's great quality because it made a lot of dollars".
I guess heaven must be eating a Big Mac while you use Microsoft Windows to watch Oprah Winfrey.
he made most of the most profitable films.
No, he made a handful of very high-grossing films (sold a lot of tickets but also cost a lot of money to make). If you define "profitability" as the ratio of income to expenditure, he's not even close. But all that is irrelevant, because my comments were about quality (and the ability to not make a whole script hinge on some obvious plot hole).
If your definition of quality is "how much money it makes", then I guess you think Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates are the pinnacle of human evolution.
Terminator was a mystery to me for a long time, because it actually has a pretty good script, with no huge plot holes.
And then Cameron was sued for plagiarism and my universe made sense again.
the photorealistic CGI technology James Cameron perfected [...]
James Cameron is a mediocre film director and a terrible writer, but I'm willing to bet he's even worse at coding, 3D modelling or animation.
James Cameron did not "perfect" anything. He paid some people to put something together so he could make more money from it. Most of the technology used to streamline the CGI production in Avatar was in fact developed for other films (ex., "Benjamin Button").
And, in any case, the "new" part about Avatar is the (nearly automatic) "performance capture", not the "photorealistic" rendering, which has been around for ages (how realistic you want it depends on how much time or render nodes you can afford to throw at it).