You're not the only one to think so, actually; I saw a couple others who agree. And I don't entirely disagree with where you're coming from either.
But I always felt that it didn't jibe well with what I thought of as TNG. (Another disclaimer: I saw most of the series on reruns on TV, and not particularly in order, so I saw later seasons before going back to the first.) At least when they solved the episode's problem with some transporter magic, you can at least imagine different fictional mechanisms that would have achieved that goal. What I didn't like about the traveler episodes is that what was basically happening was actually magic.
And while there's nothing inherently wrong with that ("use the force!"), and even though TNG is pretty far towards the "soft" end of the sci-fi scale, it was still an episode that, to me, felt extremely out of place. And I think that's why I hated it so.
I don't care about higher-res much; I'm more interested in the fact that the color saturation in the DVDs isn't particularly good. (It's bad enough that I noticed it pretty much unprompted when I got them.)
Oh man, I can't stand Farpoint. Not only did the thing have no plot, but they managed to extend the lack of plot into a 1.5 hour episode.
It's like the first movie!
But if you don't enjoy hearing Picard say, "Shut up, Wesley!" only to hear his own mother say it in another minute...well, turn in your Trekkie card.
Yeah... that is pretty good. Didn't actually know what episode that was in though. It's been a while since I've seen most of the series.
Hah...and they actually bring The Traveler back for two more episodes.
And I actually like "Remember Me" quite a bit -- pretty much except for the Traveler.:-)
That said, as far as the worst episode of TNG goes, "Shades of Gray", hands down. Get a bunch of the crappiest episodes in TNG, combine clips from them, and transform it into a brand new episode!
To me, "Shades of Gray" is merely bad and dumb; I found "Where No One Has Gone Before" actively offensive. At least, that's my memory of both of them from, oh, say 8 years ago when I was getting into TNG. I don't think I've re-watched either.
Don't bother with Voyager. Definitely force yourself through the first 3 seasons of DS9 so you can get to the good stuff.
That's sort of the general impression I had. I watched a few episodes of DS9 but between being pressed for time and not being overly impressed (and having been borrowing the DVDs) I didn't get very far.
As for TOS, I do want to give it a go some day. "City on the Edge of Forever", for instance, definitely makes me feel guilty for having not seen. And I can put up with a fair bit of cheesiness... it's not like TNG doesn't have that in spades.:-)
So I said it's pretty irredeemable a bit in jest... I still own it on DVD despite full knowledge of the quality of the episodes.
Datalore is an okayish episode... to be honest, I don't really like it. I think the main redeeming factor of it is that it introduces Lore for future episodes.:-)
Home Soil though, I actually consider pretty good. I didn't recognize it by name when I was looking through the titles, or I actually probably would have mentioned it in my earlier post. Encounter at Farpoint is also easily worth watching for the introduction of the series but also to set up "All Good Things" (which I, at least, actually really like a lot) for the end, even though "Farpoint" was only middle-of-the-road on its own.
There are also quite a few individual moments that I like (probably some as guilty pleasures). "The Battle" had the Picard maneuver and Data's response to it. "Arsenal of Freedom" had Geordi commanding the Enterprise for a bit (and I'm a sucker for saucer separation). "Skin of Evil" has one of my favorite quotes about death ever ("death is that state in which one exists only in the memory of others, which is why it is not an end"). I like the evacuation sequence in "11001001".
But in the end, if you ask me, Season 1 was on the whole just flat-out bad. It's the only season that doesn't contain at least an episode or two of my top, say, 20 episodes, unless you count "Farpoint" for its place in the whole series. (Unless I missed one, this guide puts the highest-rated season 1 episode, "Conspiracy", at #59.) And there are several episodes which at least I think are really, really terrible. You mention "Code of Honor", but for better or worse, I absolutely despise "Where No One Has Gone Before" -- I consider that as the worst TNG episode. (Looking around the internet I may be alone in that judgement...)
(Finally, I should add a disclaimer that while I consider myself to know TNG pretty well, I pretty much only know TNG, and the TOS movies. I've only seen a few other episodes. One day...)
Now now, it's really only season 1 that's pretty irredeemable. Season 2 had a few good episodes. "Measure of a Man" and "Q Who" are both actually really good; I also like "The Emissary" and "Peak Performance".
The three episodes are a teaser; they're remastering the whole series. Season 1 in full is supposed to be released later this year, I think.
And while the visuals aren't the draw of the show, the DVD version really doesn't look very good a lot of places. I'm not even much of a video snob most of the time, and that was something I was a bit disappointed in years ago.
Assuming that they maintain the quality of the demo footage, I'm definitely looking forward to the Blu-Rays. I may or may not get the series as a whole, but there's a very good chance I'll pick up at least a couple seasons. 3-6? 4-6? We'll see. I'll want to check out a couple discs before I buy them first though.
No, it's not because this is slashdot. It's because the profs who were involved all agreed to it, and in fact didn't involve their normal machines. They didn't just go steal laptops and go "ha ha only kidding" after.
Same here. I've only bought one Steam-only game at full price, and that was Portal 2. I won't buy a full-price, heavily-DRM'd game (anything which requires online activation) just on a whim. I can't say I have the willpower to completely resist, but it has to be a damn good game for me to do that. (Starcraft 2 is the other one I've gotten like that.)
However, I have a ton of cheap-ass games I've picked up on their holiday sales. I have enough that I can't say that I'd not care if Steam went down, but at least at an individual game level, I don't really care if I lose the $2.50 I paid for KOTOR or whatever.
Now, years after the iPad was announced and launched...
Considering the iPad was announced Jan 27, 2010, your statement is only barely true. (If that, because it is not a whole number of years since it was launched.)
It's not like Proview Technology waited a few years to file suit; less than a year went by during that time. And presumably the company was trying to negotiate during that time.
It can be. That is why cloning a library under an incompatible license typically requires an expensive "clean room" engineering process
"Requires" is a strong word. A well-documented clean room process provides a strong argument for why something isn't copied if they wound up in court, as well as a way for an organization and the people in it to be sure that they aren't inadvertently (or even, uh, vertently) copying. Thus it can make sense to do.
While I like the sentiment, and I think I've expressed it too in the past, I think it smells like the potential for a lot of unintended consequences. For instance, imagine that some folks want to add some provision to the law. It'd probably be way easier to do that on the back of a vote to renew (since congress "has to" act anyway) then it would be to go through the whole legislative process to amend.
It also seems like it'd lead to a lot more see-sawing of laws: party A is in control and passes some legislation, party B takes over and lets it lapse, party A takes over and passes it again, etc.
It was implemented mostly properly (see other posts in this thread for a couple caveats) in Vista, which was the first version that had it at all.
Previous versions have had things which function sometimes in some cases a little bit like symbolic links, but Vista was the first version which had anything that MS actually called symbolic links. It's also the first version with mklink.
The Gentoo wiki used to be very very very good, until it died a couple of years ago - and it never regained it's glory
Aw, that's too bad. I didn't know that it went away; I haven't used Linux at home for a few years. I've said a few times in "what distro should I use" conversations that if you have a few rare qualities (the time and will to tinker, some knowledge about computers even if it's not about Linux specifically, and aren't afraid to play around and try things), Gentoo is actually a decent choice to even start off with because the docs are soooo good. I'm disappointed that it sounds like this may no longer be the case.
Symlinks and hard links to files are allowed for standard users. Symlinks to directories are not.
Not under my setup, and I am not aware of anything that would have changed it from the default setup. I get a permissions error even for file symbolic links, even as a non-elevated administrator let alone a standard user (I tried both).
Oddly, Explorer won't do everything NTFS allows. For example, Explorer doesn't let you rename a folder with a leading dot.
Files too, not just folders.
In fact, there are sort of three levels: what Explorer allows (e.g. not naming a file ".gitignore"), what the Win32 API allows (e.g. not having two files whose names differ only in case), and what NTFS itself supports and is accessible through, e.g., the Interix/SFU/SUA/whatever-it's-called-now subsystem, which is fully Posix-compliant AFAIK.
That's Git's problem, not MS's problem; I'm not sure why you think it's particularly relevant.
(OK, it's mostly Git's problem. The difference between symlink-to-file and symlink-to-directory is the primary reason that they don't support it. You can find some mailing list discussion on it.)
(OK, it's not quite sane considering you have to distinguish between links to files and links to directories at creation time. I'm not sure what happens if you flip it behind its back.)
Also, I think that under the default setup you have to be admin to create links.
I think I've read some "reason" for that but I forget what it was.
I do wish Windows had a sane soft-link system like *nix does; I've yet to run into an application that automatically dereferences a.lnk when opening it. You have to futz around with opening the link manually, reading it's redirect, and then opening THAT instead. Very crude and ugly.
(OK, it's not quite sane considering you have to distinguish between links to files and links to directories at creation time. I'm not sure what happens if you flip it behind its back.)
Plausible deniability goes away when a large number of records, more than the national average, from a single doctor get loose.
Between stuff like different attitudes toward security, different income levels (if you're poor are you going to buy either a home safe or safe deposit box?), different education levels, etc., I'd expect a fairly wide variation in the "probability you'll lose this" between different populations. I'd be very wary about jumping to conclusions about stuff like that.
Unfortunately I got a bit unlucky there. I did actually take apart my keyboard like that the first time it happened, but the traces actually have visible water damage (see the brown bits). I tried that at the time, and again now, and it didn't help.
When I went to try that with the second keyboard, while I was separating the layers I kind of tore one of the layers through a trace. Oops.
I have occasionally wanted to go and see if I could figure the right place at MS to contact to see if I could buy a couple of those plastic things though... I think i'll give that another shot now.
Gee, I wonder if "preference voting" might be a specific term for something which allows votes to express more nuanced opinions than first-past-the-post plurality votes do and could lead to better outcomes, more viable third parties, and other beneficial features?
Slashdot Mirror
You're not the only one to think so, actually; I saw a couple others who agree. And I don't entirely disagree with where you're coming from either.
But I always felt that it didn't jibe well with what I thought of as TNG. (Another disclaimer: I saw most of the series on reruns on TV, and not particularly in order, so I saw later seasons before going back to the first.) At least when they solved the episode's problem with some transporter magic, you can at least imagine different fictional mechanisms that would have achieved that goal. What I didn't like about the traveler episodes is that what was basically happening was actually magic.
And while there's nothing inherently wrong with that ("use the force!"), and even though TNG is pretty far towards the "soft" end of the sci-fi scale, it was still an episode that, to me, felt extremely out of place. And I think that's why I hated it so.
I don't care about higher-res much; I'm more interested in the fact that the color saturation in the DVDs isn't particularly good. (It's bad enough that I noticed it pretty much unprompted when I got them.)
Oh man, I can't stand Farpoint. Not only did the thing have no plot, but they managed to extend the lack of plot into a 1.5 hour episode.
It's like the first movie!
But if you don't enjoy hearing Picard say, "Shut up, Wesley!" only to hear his own mother say it in another minute...well, turn in your Trekkie card.
Yeah... that is pretty good. Didn't actually know what episode that was in though. It's been a while since I've seen most of the series.
Hah...and they actually bring The Traveler back for two more episodes.
And I actually like "Remember Me" quite a bit -- pretty much except for the Traveler. :-)
That said, as far as the worst episode of TNG goes, "Shades of Gray", hands down. Get a bunch of the crappiest episodes in TNG, combine clips from them, and transform it into a brand new episode!
To me, "Shades of Gray" is merely bad and dumb; I found "Where No One Has Gone Before" actively offensive. At least, that's my memory of both of them from, oh, say 8 years ago when I was getting into TNG. I don't think I've re-watched either.
Don't bother with Voyager. Definitely force yourself through the first 3 seasons of DS9 so you can get to the good stuff.
That's sort of the general impression I had. I watched a few episodes of DS9 but between being pressed for time and not being overly impressed (and having been borrowing the DVDs) I didn't get very far.
As for TOS, I do want to give it a go some day. "City on the Edge of Forever", for instance, definitely makes me feel guilty for having not seen. And I can put up with a fair bit of cheesiness... it's not like TNG doesn't have that in spades. :-)
I have to agree that the show is kind of "meh" at this point but the first season was pretty good.
What bizarro TNG are you watching? The one I know sucked during the first season, and got excellent for 4-6. :-)
So I said it's pretty irredeemable a bit in jest... I still own it on DVD despite full knowledge of the quality of the episodes.
Datalore is an okayish episode... to be honest, I don't really like it. I think the main redeeming factor of it is that it introduces Lore for future episodes. :-)
Home Soil though, I actually consider pretty good. I didn't recognize it by name when I was looking through the titles, or I actually probably would have mentioned it in my earlier post. Encounter at Farpoint is also easily worth watching for the introduction of the series but also to set up "All Good Things" (which I, at least, actually really like a lot) for the end, even though "Farpoint" was only middle-of-the-road on its own.
There are also quite a few individual moments that I like (probably some as guilty pleasures). "The Battle" had the Picard maneuver and Data's response to it. "Arsenal of Freedom" had Geordi commanding the Enterprise for a bit (and I'm a sucker for saucer separation). "Skin of Evil" has one of my favorite quotes about death ever ("death is that state in which one exists only in the memory of others, which is why it is not an end"). I like the evacuation sequence in "11001001".
But in the end, if you ask me, Season 1 was on the whole just flat-out bad. It's the only season that doesn't contain at least an episode or two of my top, say, 20 episodes, unless you count "Farpoint" for its place in the whole series. (Unless I missed one, this guide puts the highest-rated season 1 episode, "Conspiracy", at #59.) And there are several episodes which at least I think are really, really terrible. You mention "Code of Honor", but for better or worse, I absolutely despise "Where No One Has Gone Before" -- I consider that as the worst TNG episode. (Looking around the internet I may be alone in that judgement...)
(Finally, I should add a disclaimer that while I consider myself to know TNG pretty well, I pretty much only know TNG, and the TOS movies. I've only seen a few other episodes. One day...)
Amazon at least says the Blu-Rays are 1.33:1, and my impression from reading about their attitude is that's what they'll be.
Fortunately. :-) (Said as another who much prefers letterboxed widescreen, even on 4:3.)
Now now, it's really only season 1 that's pretty irredeemable. Season 2 had a few good episodes. "Measure of a Man" and "Q Who" are both actually really good; I also like "The Emissary" and "Peak Performance".
The three episodes are a teaser; they're remastering the whole series. Season 1 in full is supposed to be released later this year, I think.
And while the visuals aren't the draw of the show, the DVD version really doesn't look very good a lot of places. I'm not even much of a video snob most of the time, and that was something I was a bit disappointed in years ago.
Assuming that they maintain the quality of the demo footage, I'm definitely looking forward to the Blu-Rays. I may or may not get the series as a whole, but there's a very good chance I'll pick up at least a couple seasons. 3-6? 4-6? We'll see. I'll want to check out a couple discs before I buy them first though.
Know how I can tell you didn't RTFA?
No, it's not because this is slashdot. It's because the profs who were involved all agreed to it, and in fact didn't involve their normal machines. They didn't just go steal laptops and go "ha ha only kidding" after.
Same here. I've only bought one Steam-only game at full price, and that was Portal 2. I won't buy a full-price, heavily-DRM'd game (anything which requires online activation) just on a whim. I can't say I have the willpower to completely resist, but it has to be a damn good game for me to do that. (Starcraft 2 is the other one I've gotten like that.)
However, I have a ton of cheap-ass games I've picked up on their holiday sales. I have enough that I can't say that I'd not care if Steam went down, but at least at an individual game level, I don't really care if I lose the $2.50 I paid for KOTOR or whatever.
Now, years after the iPad was announced and launched...
Considering the iPad was announced Jan 27, 2010, your statement is only barely true. (If that, because it is not a whole number of years since it was launched.)
It's not like Proview Technology waited a few years to file suit; less than a year went by during that time. And presumably the company was trying to negotiate during that time.
It can be. That is why cloning a library under an incompatible license typically requires an expensive "clean room" engineering process
"Requires" is a strong word. A well-documented clean room process provides a strong argument for why something isn't copied if they wound up in court, as well as a way for an organization and the people in it to be sure that they aren't inadvertently (or even, uh, vertently) copying. Thus it can make sense to do.
But there's no reason it's necessary.
While I like the sentiment, and I think I've expressed it too in the past, I think it smells like the potential for a lot of unintended consequences. For instance, imagine that some folks want to add some provision to the law. It'd probably be way easier to do that on the back of a vote to renew (since congress "has to" act anyway) then it would be to go through the whole legislative process to amend.
It also seems like it'd lead to a lot more see-sawing of laws: party A is in control and passes some legislation, party B takes over and lets it lapse, party A takes over and passes it again, etc.
Right, because no organization would give their employees user access to a machine but not root.
Maybe it's finally been implemented properly in 7
It was implemented mostly properly (see other posts in this thread for a couple caveats) in Vista, which was the first version that had it at all.
Previous versions have had things which function sometimes in some cases a little bit like symbolic links, but Vista was the first version which had anything that MS actually called symbolic links. It's also the first version with mklink.
The Gentoo wiki used to be very very very good, until it died a couple of years ago - and it never regained it's glory
Aw, that's too bad. I didn't know that it went away; I haven't used Linux at home for a few years. I've said a few times in "what distro should I use" conversations that if you have a few rare qualities (the time and will to tinker, some knowledge about computers even if it's not about Linux specifically, and aren't afraid to play around and try things), Gentoo is actually a decent choice to even start off with because the docs are soooo good. I'm disappointed that it sounds like this may no longer be the case.
Symlinks and hard links to files are allowed for standard users. Symlinks to directories are not.
Not under my setup, and I am not aware of anything that would have changed it from the default setup. I get a permissions error even for file symbolic links, even as a non-elevated administrator let alone a standard user (I tried both).
Uh, what? Symlinks are implicitly traversed when you open them, just like they are in *nix.
Oddly, Explorer won't do everything NTFS allows. For example, Explorer doesn't let you rename a folder with a leading dot.
Files too, not just folders.
In fact, there are sort of three levels: what Explorer allows (e.g. not naming a file ".gitignore"), what the Win32 API allows (e.g. not having two files whose names differ only in case), and what NTFS itself supports and is accessible through, e.g., the Interix/SFU/SUA/whatever-it's-called-now subsystem, which is fully Posix-compliant AFAIK.
That's Git's problem, not MS's problem; I'm not sure why you think it's particularly relevant.
(OK, it's mostly Git's problem. The difference between symlink-to-file and symlink-to-directory is the primary reason that they don't support it. You can find some mailing list discussion on it.)
(OK, it's not quite sane considering you have to distinguish between links to files and links to directories at creation time. I'm not sure what happens if you flip it behind its back.)
Also, I think that under the default setup you have to be admin to create links.
I think I've read some "reason" for that but I forget what it was.
I do wish Windows had a sane soft-link system like *nix does; I've yet to run into an application that automatically dereferences a .lnk when opening it. You have to futz around with opening the link manually, reading it's redirect, and then opening THAT instead. Very crude and ugly.
Man, if only.
(OK, it's not quite sane considering you have to distinguish between links to files and links to directories at creation time. I'm not sure what happens if you flip it behind its back.)
Plausible deniability goes away when a large number of records, more than the national average, from a single doctor get loose.
Between stuff like different attitudes toward security, different income levels (if you're poor are you going to buy either a home safe or safe deposit box?), different education levels, etc., I'd expect a fairly wide variation in the "probability you'll lose this" between different populations. I'd be very wary about jumping to conclusions about stuff like that.
Unfortunately I got a bit unlucky there. I did actually take apart my keyboard like that the first time it happened, but the traces actually have visible water damage (see the brown bits). I tried that at the time, and again now, and it didn't help.
When I went to try that with the second keyboard, while I was separating the layers I kind of tore one of the layers through a trace. Oops.
I have occasionally wanted to go and see if I could figure the right place at MS to contact to see if I could buy a couple of those plastic things though... I think i'll give that another shot now.
We have it. It's called "voting."
Gee, I wonder if "preference voting" might be a specific term for something which allows votes to express more nuanced opinions than first-past-the-post plurality votes do and could lead to better outcomes, more viable third parties, and other beneficial features?
Nah, it must just be a synonym for voting.