A few months ago, I was asked by a client to develop an e-store using OSCommerce.
After looking at what the client wanted and what OSCommerce offered, I recommended going with Drupal instead. Admittedly, the e-commerce side of Drupal wasn't as robust as what OSCommerce offered, but Drupal's superior API, highly-customizable theming engine, and well-documented codebase made it the preferred choice IMO. I had to write some custom code to support the e-commerce options the client wanted, but it didn't take more than a few days.
After reading everyone else's painful experiences with OSCommerce, I'm doubly glad I avoided it.
I'm confused by this statement: "Still, iPod's continuing dominance in Japan isn't a sure thing. For starters, Sony isn't giving up the chase. Its new Walkman, which will be released in the U.S. this year, has been well-received in Japan."
What kind of fucked-up government system do you have where a party which represents 50.01% of the population is granted vastly greater powers than a party which represents 49.99% of the population? If this isn't the "tyranny of the majority", I don't know what would be.
All the more reason to vote out the Republicans in this year's Congressional elections and restore some checks and balances to the system, eh?
"One could argue that a large part of Pixar's success has been Job's willingness to stay out of day-to-day operations and concentrate on the business side."
Mr. Tulip: "From what I hear he mostly doesn't do a ---ing thing!" Mr. Pin: "Yeah. One of the hardest things to do properly." -- The Truth, Terry Pratchett
"But I have learned that they don't stick with what they were going for when they made the teasers, they adapt and fiddle and tweak in the production until they make a masterpeice"
It's not even that -- the Pixar teasers are always made first in the animation process. But since that means most of the sets and models and rendering haven't been done yet, the "first teaser" ends up being some sort of gag that's tossed together with whatever is available at the moment. For instance, the teaser for The Incredibles featured Bob in his "den" because those were the only models they had ready at the time.
Knowing this, it puts the Pixar teasers into a new perspective. The sheer difficulty of trying to put together a teaser for a movie that's still 98% non-existent yet is not something I'd like to try...
Don't knock Drupal just because the coders aren't good graphic artists. Just use the PHPTemplateEngine, and you can convert just about any HTML page design to a Drupal template.
Theming Drupal is easiest if you use the optional phpThemeEngine -- you can then take a stock HTML + CSS page, throw in PHP directives to display your content-specific data, and be off to the races.
The stock Drupal themes tend to be a bit on the bland side, but that's IMO largely because good coders don't necessarily make good designers.;-) I recently put up an e-commerce site that married Drupal with a graphic artist's design; you can see the results here.
Despite all the pounding Jobs gets for his "mercurial" behavior and "elitist attitude", the guy has a talent for spotting truly talented people and letting them flourish. Just look at Jonathan Ive and Avie Tevanian for two examples at Apple.
Jobs is not an idiot; he knows Pixar kicks ass because the people there -- Lasseter being the most prominent, but also Catmull, Andrew Stanton, Lee Unkrich, Brad Bird, and countless others -- are damn good at what they do. Jobs' job at Pixar was to negotiate the deals and make sure the creatives got what they needed to grow.
The new positions for Jobs, Lasseter, and Catmull at Disney will help enforce that. Only instead of encouraging greatness at Pixar, Lasseter will now encourage greatness at Disney -- and Jobs and Catmull will watch his back...
It's hard to judge a movie by it's trailers, but if Cars turns out to be as awful as it looks, Pixar is going to crash and burn when it's released.
That's as likely as George W. Bush admitting that he lied to the world in order to provoke a war with Iraq -- ain't gonna happen in this universe, at least.
Besides, from what I've heard, Cars has more-or-less been finished since November; it's sitting on a bunch of servers at Pixar right now, and is pretty much what we'll see in June. Folks who've seen the completed movie says it's easily another Pixar winner.
Finally, which Cars trailer are we talking about here? I've seen at least three:
1. An early teaser with the drive-in showing of a NASCAR race;
2. The current "test drive" trailer, which starts off as a car commercial (complete with "Professional driver" disclaimer); and
3. A full-blown trailer with general plot synopsis and additional scenes, including a painful accident with a cactus patch.
If you've only seen #1 or #2, that's not much to judge the movie on. I think #3 is not officially released yet, but will be unrolled closer to the movie's release date.
There's only so much of Lasseter's time to go around. I think one of the big benefits of him being restricted to Pixar was precisely that he didn't have to worry about all manner of marketing, distribution and theme park crap. If he has to pay attention to all those extra facets, something has to suffer (at least until we figure out how to switch to a 36 hour standard day...).
Assuming this deal wasn't sprung on John Lasseter in the last 24 hours, it's safe to assume he's been pondering this step for a long time and eventually believe he's up to the task. He might not be able to fully direct animated movies any more (though I think he's contractually obligated to do two more after Cars), but creative control at Disney Imagineering is nothing to sneeze at.
Look what became of the operating system. Mac OS X is about as "Mac" as OS/2. It's NeXT for the masses and any resemblance to OS 9 is purely coincidental.
Speaking as a Mac user for over a decade, I have to say that you make this sound like a bad thing.
I don't claim to be a web architecture guru, but what's wrong with Drupal? Open source, PHP 5-friendly, and does everything from vanity sites to corporate sites.
Don't get me wrong, seriously, I hold that Pratchetts lesser works tend to dwarf the output of most of his contenders, and I'll re-read Mauriuce over Order of the Phoenix any day. I just don't think it was as great as the award givers claim, and don't feel it was one of his better works.
"You could have poisoned our wells. You could have set fire to our houses. My daughter tells me you are very... advanced. You don't owe us anything. Why didn't you?"
"I asked myself that, too," said Darktan. "And I told myself: What good would it do? What would we have done afterward? Gone to another town? Gone through all this again? Would killing you have made anything better for us? Sooner or later we'd have to talk to humans. It might as well be you."
IMO, the book earns its accolades for that exchange alone.
Jobs is hands-off the creative side of Pixar, but I believe he's very hands-on the business side of things.
If Jobs does join Disney, I doubt he'll be content with anything less than running the whole show. Not that he'd do everything, but I can imagine him finding idealistic, qualified folks to run each part of the empire and giving them the power to improve Disney from the sucktastic, $$$-oriented joke it's become.
The average actor can't but a few can. See "Whose Line Is It Anyway?"
Actually, the folks on WLIIA? -- as with all other improv acts -- do a lot of rehearsals before each taping. Not that they memorize their roles to every last detail, but they do know in advance what the topics will be, and what they'll do for each one.
The whole "we're making it up spontaneously" is just an act.
"Also, whenever I see David Hasselhoff now, I just think, 'really, really, really, really bad German pop star'."
Go see the Spongebob Squarepants movie (stop laughing!). David has a sizable cameo in that, and the stuff he gets into makes up for a lot of the "bad German pop music" work, IMO.
If nothing else, you'll never see David's pecs the same way again...
Re:Disappointed by Mac Mini as entertainment cente
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Mac mini, Apple DVR?
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· Score: 1
Sure, but there's also a sizable community of folks who want to turn Honda Civics into tricked-up street machines. Yet I wouldn't expect to go to my Honda dealer, buy a Civic, and then go blow the doors off my neighbor's 'vette.
I'd like to see a Mac Mini HTPC myself, but if the do-it-yourself solutions don't cut it yet, the blame isn't with Apple.
Re:Disappointed by Mac Mini as entertainment cente
on
Mac mini, Apple DVR?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This may be a little offtopic, but I just wanted to share my disappointment in using the Mac Mini as an entertainment center
Considering the current incarnation of the MacMini isn't advertised, promoted, or intended to be a media center-style PC, why are you disappointed?
Slashdot Mirror
Must be a slow day on Slashdot when an unsubstantiated (and easily-disproven) assertion like the parent gets ranked "Interesting"...
A few months ago, I was asked by a client to develop an e-store using OSCommerce.
After looking at what the client wanted and what OSCommerce offered, I recommended going with Drupal instead. Admittedly, the e-commerce side of Drupal wasn't as robust as what OSCommerce offered, but Drupal's superior API, highly-customizable theming engine, and well-documented codebase made it the preferred choice IMO. I had to write some custom code to support the e-commerce options the client wanted, but it didn't take more than a few days.
After reading everyone else's painful experiences with OSCommerce, I'm doubly glad I avoided it.
(And for those who care, the store is here.)
I'm confused by this statement: "Still, iPod's continuing dominance in Japan isn't a sure thing. For starters, Sony isn't giving up the chase. Its new Walkman, which will be released in the U.S. this year, has been well-received in Japan."
Did someone forget to tell Sony that their six-month-old "hip, fab, stylish" Walkman Bean has already been steamrolled by the iPod?
What kind of fucked-up government system do you have where a party which represents 50.01% of the population is granted vastly greater powers than a party which represents 49.99% of the population? If this isn't the "tyranny of the majority", I don't know what would be.
All the more reason to vote out the Republicans in this year's Congressional elections and restore some checks and balances to the system, eh?
"Everybody agrees Jobs has vision. My take is that he manipulates and uses people to achieve that vision."
That's called "leadership".
"One could argue that a large part of Pixar's success has been Job's willingness to stay out of day-to-day operations and concentrate on the business side."
Mr. Tulip: "From what I hear he mostly doesn't do a ---ing thing!"
Mr. Pin: "Yeah. One of the hardest things to do properly."
-- The Truth, Terry Pratchett
"But I have learned that they don't stick with what they were going for when they made the teasers, they adapt and fiddle and tweak in the production until they make a masterpeice"
It's not even that -- the Pixar teasers are always made first in the animation process. But since that means most of the sets and models and rendering haven't been done yet, the "first teaser" ends up being some sort of gag that's tossed together with whatever is available at the moment. For instance, the teaser for The Incredibles featured Bob in his "den" because those were the only models they had ready at the time.
Knowing this, it puts the Pixar teasers into a new perspective. The sheer difficulty of trying to put together a teaser for a movie that's still 98% non-existent yet is not something I'd like to try...
Don't knock Drupal just because the coders aren't good graphic artists. Just use the PHPTemplateEngine, and you can convert just about any HTML page design to a Drupal template.
Theming Drupal is easiest if you use the optional phpThemeEngine -- you can then take a stock HTML + CSS page, throw in PHP directives to display your content-specific data, and be off to the races.
;-) I recently put up an e-commerce site that married Drupal with a graphic artist's design; you can see the results here.
The stock Drupal themes tend to be a bit on the bland side, but that's IMO largely because good coders don't necessarily make good designers.
Amen to that.
Despite all the pounding Jobs gets for his "mercurial" behavior and "elitist attitude", the guy has a talent for spotting truly talented people and letting them flourish. Just look at Jonathan Ive and Avie Tevanian for two examples at Apple.
Jobs is not an idiot; he knows Pixar kicks ass because the people there -- Lasseter being the most prominent, but also Catmull, Andrew Stanton, Lee Unkrich, Brad Bird, and countless others -- are damn good at what they do. Jobs' job at Pixar was to negotiate the deals and make sure the creatives got what they needed to grow.
The new positions for Jobs, Lasseter, and Catmull at Disney will help enforce that. Only instead of encouraging greatness at Pixar, Lasseter will now encourage greatness at Disney -- and Jobs and Catmull will watch his back...
It's hard to judge a movie by it's trailers, but if Cars turns out to be as awful as it looks, Pixar is going to crash and burn when it's released.
That's as likely as George W. Bush admitting that he lied to the world in order to provoke a war with Iraq -- ain't gonna happen in this universe, at least.
Besides, from what I've heard, Cars has more-or-less been finished since November; it's sitting on a bunch of servers at Pixar right now, and is pretty much what we'll see in June. Folks who've seen the completed movie says it's easily another Pixar winner.
Finally, which Cars trailer are we talking about here? I've seen at least three:
1. An early teaser with the drive-in showing of a NASCAR race;
2. The current "test drive" trailer, which starts off as a car commercial (complete with "Professional driver" disclaimer); and
3. A full-blown trailer with general plot synopsis and additional scenes, including a painful accident with a cactus patch.
If you've only seen #1 or #2, that's not much to judge the movie on. I think #3 is not officially released yet, but will be unrolled closer to the movie's release date.
There's only so much of Lasseter's time to go around. I think one of the big benefits of him being restricted to Pixar was precisely that he didn't have to worry about all manner of marketing, distribution and theme park crap. If he has to pay attention to all those extra facets, something has to suffer (at least until we figure out how to switch to a 36 hour standard day...).
Assuming this deal wasn't sprung on John Lasseter in the last 24 hours, it's safe to assume he's been pondering this step for a long time and eventually believe he's up to the task. He might not be able to fully direct animated movies any more (though I think he's contractually obligated to do two more after Cars), but creative control at Disney Imagineering is nothing to sneeze at.
Look what became of the operating system. Mac OS X is about as "Mac" as OS/2. It's NeXT for the masses and any resemblance to OS 9 is purely coincidental.
Speaking as a Mac user for over a decade, I have to say that you make this sound like a bad thing.
I don't claim to be a web architecture guru, but what's wrong with Drupal? Open source, PHP 5-friendly, and does everything from vanity sites to corporate sites.
You mean like Mr Toad's Wild Ride?
I never knew acid trips could be so dull.
Lifting from my Terry Pratchett quotes database:
IMO, the book earns its accolades for that exchange alone.
Jobs is hands-off the creative side of Pixar, but I believe he's very hands-on the business side of things.
If Jobs does join Disney, I doubt he'll be content with anything less than running the whole show. Not that he'd do everything, but I can imagine him finding idealistic, qualified folks to run each part of the empire and giving them the power to improve Disney from the sucktastic, $$$-oriented joke it's become.
Maybe that's an oh-so-subtle hint that looking at the inside of an iMac is not what you're supposed to be doing at work?
But what if I'm an engineer at Dell?
So Steve Ballmer is an idiot. This is news?
Breaking News!! When Steve Jobs goes to the bathroom, he makes iPoop.
He could benefit from this, then.
The average actor can't but a few can. See "Whose Line Is It Anyway?"
Actually, the folks on WLIIA? -- as with all other improv acts -- do a lot of rehearsals before each taping. Not that they memorize their roles to every last detail, but they do know in advance what the topics will be, and what they'll do for each one.
The whole "we're making it up spontaneously" is just an act.
If you really believe that music is as essential to your survival as water, utilities, and shelter... well, you're the perfect customer for Urge.
"Also, whenever I see David Hasselhoff now, I just think, 'really, really, really, really bad German pop star'."
Go see the Spongebob Squarepants movie (stop laughing!). David has a sizable cameo in that, and the stuff he gets into makes up for a lot of the "bad German pop music" work, IMO.
If nothing else, you'll never see David's pecs the same way again...
Sure, but there's also a sizable community of folks who want to turn Honda Civics into tricked-up street machines. Yet I wouldn't expect to go to my Honda dealer, buy a Civic, and then go blow the doors off my neighbor's 'vette.
I'd like to see a Mac Mini HTPC myself, but if the do-it-yourself solutions don't cut it yet, the blame isn't with Apple.
This may be a little offtopic, but I just wanted to share my disappointment in using the Mac Mini as an entertainment center
Considering the current incarnation of the MacMini isn't advertised, promoted, or intended to be a media center-style PC, why are you disappointed?