Well not exactly asleep, but I certainly didn't spend that decade watching Fox.
We were talking about a single show, Fox's history of cancelling good shows before they had a chance to develop doesn't seem to run counter to my point.
Incidentally, it is my understanding that Fox goes through half a dozen cancelled shows a season (or thereabout) - is it really true that a disproportionate number of those are SciFi shows?
Get rid of the silly name, get rid of the silly premise, get rid of the much mocked manner of speakage, keep the important concepts.
Wait, are you talking about Buffy or Firefly? In case of Firefly, the premise and the stylized nature of how it looked an how people talked (haven't heard of this being mocked per se) were the best parts of the show! Playing to the lowest common denominator by removing the more unusual aspects is not the way to make a good show. I'd rather have 13 episodes of a great show, than 5 seasons of the same thing as usual, over again.
Somehow I doubt that FOX would put political dogma ahead of profits - being a large corporation, they just don't have the integrity for that.
Seems like they are just as capable of running a show into the ground through ineptitude; it didn't help that it was a particularly expensive show - they probably could get a whole season of some reality show clone for the price of one or two Firefly episodes.
Anyway, Hanlon's Razor seems to be appropriate here.
Maybe whatever school actors go to should include martial arts lessons in its curriculum ? They might become handy even outside the movies, once the actor becomes famous and starts attracting mentally unbalanced fans.
From what I heard, most do. Or at least they have classes in convincing simulation of various martial arts - real martial arts look like crap on screen.
Batman is not Terminator or Robocop, he's closer to a ninja.
I don't believe anyone has ever uttered a sentence that made them sound more like a 13 year old geek, overly invested in his comic books:)
I'm not ripping anybody off... I'm just trying to record telvision shows when I'm not home... I'm not harming anybody, I'm not not paying someone when I should, and so it should. not. be. illegal.
Oh? And what if when you get back home you watch that recorded show and skip the commercials? Or what about if you watch it TWICE and then DON'T watch it (or the commercials) when the station reruns the show? That's clearly not how the content providers would like you to watch those shows - how is that not stealing?
I just happened to read this a few days ago. Basically it's well envisioned and intentioned, but at the end just not worth the time. The characters are flat, the story sounds interesting at first, but gets trite very quickly, and then just doesn't go anywhere.
I don't think the constant Dan Brown comparisons are fair though - it's bad, but not that bad.
Find it on Amazon and go straight to the "customers also bought" section - almost everything in there is better. I read Arthur Phillips' The Egyptologist (vaguely similar genre, from the Prague guy) right after it, and I'd say it's a much better read.
Yeah, I was all confused: "Apple making a spreadsheet? But why would Apple make obsolete office supplies? I think they should make an application with the functionality of a spreadsheet instead - that would be MUCH better!"
Yes, the MPEG-4 standard defines a container format, based on the Quicktime format
Do you know where I can get more info about it? Specifically how it compares feature-wise to Matroska et al, and if there are any open tools for creating content with it?
I didn't mention the ones it can't (or any specific features, really). Like I said, I'm not an expert on this, I just remember going through all the container options a while ago and not finding anything that didn't have significant downsides.
I thought Ogg was general purpose, and could contain anything, but I might be wrong about that.
The last thing I remember reading about this was that it theoretically could, but the ogg people had no interest in supporting anything beyond the codecs in the ogg familty.
So as far as I know there is not practical way to use Ogg as a general purpose container. I don't know if things have changed since then, though.
I'm not sure how much it is a "version" of divx, rather than an open source implementation of MPEG4.
The answer to your question - very long (as in "never"). Xvid and DivX (as well as the other MPEG4s) are not "fully compatible", in theory they should play each other's datastreams, but each has features that the other doesn't understand.
AVI is pretty much obsolete, or at least can't copy with some of the features of modern codes (something about frame sizes and multiple video/audio streams - I don't know much about it)
Ogg doesn't have a general purpose container, only works for their stuff
Matroska seems like a Good Thing but I haven't seen much adoption for it (not sure if it's just the usual momentum or something else)
Then there were other enhancements, but we all truthfully know that XP was a big jump for the average user of Windows.
Big jump? The IO speedup might be true, I don't know about that one, but the only other enhancement XP offered was the retarded "six year old with crayons" color scheme.
XP offered no new functionality, was less stable than 2K and reintroduced the whole "you moved the mouse - you must reboot" concept.
They put all that work into coming up with an "uber" keyboard and yet still go with that wrist-crippling square key layout. You'd think that keyboard designers have never seen a human pair of hands in their life.
My opinion only goes so far, at some point we have to judge these things objectively. I am no more "enlightened" than the next person when it comes to judging movies; when I see that the movie has acting, writing and especially dialog that would look more in place in a highschool play, I don't think it's my rarified taste that's at fault.
Now, if you think that it was an enjoyable movie that's worth the price of admission - great, the last thing I want to do is tell you which movies to enjoy. I am only talking about the production values, not the content.
That was kinda my point, after the last two I pretty much had little hope for this being better (though the reviews gave some hope), but I still went to see, because it's not like there's a better Star Wars playing somewhere. So it seems it's enough the sell us the idea of Star Wars, and not really expend much effort making the movie.
I just saw III (mostly because I am a weak, consumerist whore) and not to put too fine a point for it, but it's complete shit. I don't understand how anyone can, in good conscience, associate their name with it. I mean, come on, during several of the more "dramatic" scenes half the audience broke out laughing. This isn't some sort of failure to grasp what vision he was going for, and it's not like I'm some fanboy who didn't get to see events unfold like I wanted them to - they've created a hugely expensive movie of embarassingly poor quality, on every level.
Of course I realize the movie will make an insane amount of money, so my question is - did we just finally admit that quality (or even effort) do not enter into the equation at all? Did the studios just hear: "We know the standards of quality were low before, but now there are none at all - we'll go, in droves, to see whatever shit you release. Please release more shit."?
Oh, but despite all of this, the whole thing could've been made worth-while if they gave just one more line to Mace: "Does the Jedi Council LOOK like a bitch? Then why'd you try to fuck them like a bitch?". Would've made the movie right there (it's PG13, they're allowed a 'fuck' or two, you know, in between the decapitations).
Celera could not have finished their project without directly using data from the government one (there are plenty of articles out there explaining the differences and complements in their methodologies far better than I could).
More important are the sequencing techniques that were developed in that first decade. They are a far more important contribution to the field than the completion of the one genome (which is really just a lot of very tedious work).
If you get as many people to believe you as John Titor did, then yes, you will get your own Wikipedia entry.
How many people is that? 10? 100? 1,000,000? Who decides where the cutoff is? Why is my belief less valid than his if only one other person believes it?
Neither one of us has any kind of evidence, so his eloquence vs mine is what should decide the validity of the claims?
Again though, it's not the existence of the article I have a problem with - I very much see the use in being able to look up 'John Titor' and find out what this obscure hoax is about - it's the content and bias that make it stand out as being below wikimedia's usual standards.
Actually, Mr. Smart Guy, If the editors of wikipedia DIDN'T parrot everything they read on the internet wikipedia would be an editorial instead of an encyclopedia.
We already have something that contains everything on the internet: the internet.
As for the guy with the underpants gnomes in his attic, if there were more then just your account of these creatures, and a group of people did infact believe you, yes you should be put in the wikipedia.
That's just it (I am that guy, btw), there isn't more than just an online account under a pseudonim to that story. As for people believing, well, that has never been much of a supporting argument; there's plenty of people who believe all sorts of stupid crap, it is certainly their right and some of them are probably right, the mere fact of believing is just not much of an argument one way or another.
Don't get me wrong though, I absolutely agree that this deserves a place in the encyclopedia. My problem with the article is that it grossly overstates the validity of these claims and is hugely biased. In fact wikipedia itself provides guidelines on why the type of language it uses is bad practice.
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Ah, ok - never seen Buffy myself, so I was confused.
We were talking about a single show, Fox's history of cancelling good shows before they had a chance to develop doesn't seem to run counter to my point.
Incidentally, it is my understanding that Fox goes through half a dozen cancelled shows a season (or thereabout) - is it really true that a disproportionate number of those are SciFi shows?
Wait, are you talking about Buffy or Firefly? In case of Firefly, the premise and the stylized nature of how it looked an how people talked (haven't heard of this being mocked per se) were the best parts of the show! Playing to the lowest common denominator by removing the more unusual aspects is not the way to make a good show. I'd rather have 13 episodes of a great show, than 5 seasons of the same thing as usual, over again.
Seems like they are just as capable of running a show into the ground through ineptitude; it didn't help that it was a particularly expensive show - they probably could get a whole season of some reality show clone for the price of one or two Firefly episodes.
Anyway, Hanlon's Razor seems to be appropriate here.
From what I heard, most do. Or at least they have classes in convincing simulation of various martial arts - real martial arts look like crap on screen.
Batman is not Terminator or Robocop, he's closer to a ninja.
I don't believe anyone has ever uttered a sentence that made them sound more like a 13 year old geek, overly invested in his comic books :)
Oh? And what if when you get back home you watch that recorded show and skip the commercials? Or what about if you watch it TWICE and then DON'T watch it (or the commercials) when the station reruns the show? That's clearly not how the content providers would like you to watch those shows - how is that not stealing?
You meant to say "which we licensed for limited use" - I'm sure the MPAA will forgive you this one slipup.
I don't think the constant Dan Brown comparisons are fair though - it's bad, but not that bad.
Find it on Amazon and go straight to the "customers also bought" section - almost everything in there is better. I read Arthur Phillips' The Egyptologist (vaguely similar genre, from the Prague guy) right after it, and I'd say it's a much better read.
Yeah, I was all confused: "Apple making a spreadsheet? But why would Apple make obsolete office supplies? I think they should make an application with the functionality of a spreadsheet instead - that would be MUCH better!"
Looks really nice, thanks. Wonder why I've never come across it before.
Do you know where I can get more info about it? Specifically how it compares feature-wise to Matroska et al, and if there are any open tools for creating content with it?
I didn't mention the ones it can't (or any specific features, really). Like I said, I'm not an expert on this, I just remember going through all the container options a while ago and not finding anything that didn't have significant downsides.
The last thing I remember reading about this was that it theoretically could, but the ogg people had no interest in supporting anything beyond the codecs in the ogg familty.
So as far as I know there is not practical way to use Ogg as a general purpose container. I don't know if things have changed since then, though.
The answer to your question - very long (as in "never"). Xvid and DivX (as well as the other MPEG4s) are not "fully compatible", in theory they should play each other's datastreams, but each has features that the other doesn't understand.
AVI is pretty much obsolete, or at least can't copy with some of the features of modern codes (something about frame sizes and multiple video/audio streams - I don't know much about it)
Ogg doesn't have a general purpose container, only works for their stuff
Matroska seems like a Good Thing but I haven't seen much adoption for it (not sure if it's just the usual momentum or something else)
Quicktime is proprietary
ISO MPEG - is this even a container?
Real and ASF - well, no comment.
I personally find that the best order to watch them is:
I, II, III.
Big jump? The IO speedup might be true, I don't know about that one, but the only other enhancement XP offered was the retarded "six year old with crayons" color scheme.
XP offered no new functionality, was less stable than 2K and reintroduced the whole "you moved the mouse - you must reboot" concept.
XP is the very definition of useless "upgrade".
About 9 pounds a week, on their staple diet of cheetos and Moutain Dew?
Online games and pornography are "fringe" industries? Yeah, right.
They put all that work into coming up with an "uber" keyboard and yet still go with that wrist-crippling square key layout. You'd think that keyboard designers have never seen a human pair of hands in their life.
My opinion only goes so far, at some point we have to judge these things objectively. I am no more "enlightened" than the next person when it comes to judging movies; when I see that the movie has acting, writing and especially dialog that would look more in place in a highschool play, I don't think it's my rarified taste that's at fault.
Now, if you think that it was an enjoyable movie that's worth the price of admission - great, the last thing I want to do is tell you which movies to enjoy. I am only talking about the production values, not the content.
That was kinda my point, after the last two I pretty much had little hope for this being better (though the reviews gave some hope), but I still went to see, because it's not like there's a better Star Wars playing somewhere. So it seems it's enough the sell us the idea of Star Wars, and not really expend much effort making the movie.
Of course I realize the movie will make an insane amount of money, so my question is - did we just finally admit that quality (or even effort) do not enter into the equation at all? Did the studios just hear: "We know the standards of quality were low before, but now there are none at all - we'll go, in droves, to see whatever shit you release. Please release more shit."?
Oh, but despite all of this, the whole thing could've been made worth-while if they gave just one more line to Mace: "Does the Jedi Council LOOK like a bitch? Then why'd you try to fuck them like a bitch?". Would've made the movie right there (it's PG13, they're allowed a 'fuck' or two, you know, in between the decapitations).
More important are the sequencing techniques that were developed in that first decade. They are a far more important contribution to the field than the completion of the one genome (which is really just a lot of very tedious work).
How many people is that? 10? 100? 1,000,000? Who decides where the cutoff is? Why is my belief less valid than his if only one other person believes it?
Neither one of us has any kind of evidence, so his eloquence vs mine is what should decide the validity of the claims?
Again though, it's not the existence of the article I have a problem with - I very much see the use in being able to look up 'John Titor' and find out what this obscure hoax is about - it's the content and bias that make it stand out as being below wikimedia's usual standards.
We already have something that contains everything on the internet: the internet.
As for the guy with the underpants gnomes in his attic, if there were more then just your account of these creatures, and a group of people did infact believe you, yes you should be put in the wikipedia.
That's just it (I am that guy, btw), there isn't more than just an online account under a pseudonim to that story. As for people believing, well, that has never been much of a supporting argument; there's plenty of people who believe all sorts of stupid crap, it is certainly their right and some of them are probably right, the mere fact of believing is just not much of an argument one way or another.
Don't get me wrong though, I absolutely agree that this deserves a place in the encyclopedia. My problem with the article is that it grossly overstates the validity of these claims and is hugely biased. In fact wikipedia itself provides guidelines on why the type of language it uses is bad practice.