There have been female Time Lords, but the Doctor is a guy. The last thing we need is a gender-bending regeneration to lose all the former fans due to fanservice.
Gender bending? Maybe they could get Dr. Frank N. Furter, err... Tim Curry to play the next Doctor.
Re:A GUI would be nice
on
Firefox Hacks
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· Score: 1
Why does hacking always have to be so difficult? I wonna be a fashionable hacker too.
Heeyy... don't cry. Here, have the latest issue of "Wired" to wipe your nose on.
Re:go back to windoze luser lol p2ned
on
Firefox Hacks
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· Score: 0, Troll
you are not a real linux revolutionary until you understand how secure it is to type your username/password 50 times a day rather than having them stored locally!
"Locally" means in your head and nowhere else; when you store your password on your PC, you're storing it on The Man's computer.
You'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes, crypto-fascist.
When I was at university, the non-essential stuff on the local hard drive was wiped clean every time someone logged out.
Seems the solution isn't to say "You *might* lose your data on this machine"; it is to have a sign saying "All your data on the C: drive *will* be erased when you log off of this machine- please store on drive H:". Or whatever.
(It might be desirable to have a warning allowing the user to transfer their locally-stored data to their online drive space when they log out. Maybe not..)
Anyway, doing it that way cuts out the excuse to take the risk (as many people would do) and keeps the consequences closer to the action.
Not that I'm blaming you for not doing this, nor saying your school weren't behaving like assholes...
Accurate or not, I can't let this minor gem get kicked to -1 with the rest of the post.
Sucked lolly?! Has *anything* remotely computer related ever been described thus? That's either brilliantly insightful or your mind has been fried by a 10lbs of LSD a day habit.
(OTOH if you're actually an out gay man, that doesn't really work. Nor does it work if you're a woman, though that's unlikely with a name like Todd. Well, not unless you're a really scary butch lesbian, in which case I didn't mean to offend you, Sir. Err, I meant Ma'am...)
This is an escalating battle. The more you think you deserve to avoid ads, the more ads-per-second there will be for you to avoid.
See, the fact that you are avoiding them means that they might have an affect on you, therefore they are working.
No, they're only "working" if they make you more likely to buy the product (or whatever the aim is). If MSN came and spray-painted an advertisement on my dog without permission, it would almost certainly have an effect on me.
It wouldn't make me more likely to sign up with MSN.
Granted, a lot of people underestimate the power of annoying/moronic adverts; ad-makers don't care if you like the ad or not, so long as you're more likely to buy their product as a result.
However, conversely (for the reasons above), getting someone's attention doesn't always mean you'll buy the product. Piss them off too much and that subconcious "name recall and nothing else" that gets you to buy the product turns into concious "I hate [name recall] because _____".
No business was ever "sucessful" based on destroying someone's livelyhood. As Guido says, "It's not nice to F___ with another man's livelyhood."
The aim isn't to destroy someone's livelihood. That's a side-effect. They should do their job in a less irritating manner.
And it's weird; I don't know how seriously you meant that last quote, but the type of person I visualise it coming from (Guido?!) is the same type of person who would say something like "The world doesn't owe anyone a living" two sentences later, and fail to see the contradiction.
Hey, it's human nature to wrap self-interest up like that. We all do it to some extent.
But, as I said, the ad-man's livelihood is a side-effect; and many businesses have been successful by avoiding just that. Dell, for example, cut out the middleman. They are successful.
BTW, am I the only one who looks at Shatner as the Richard M. Stallman of sci-fi? I appreciate his past contributions to the movement, and still enjoy his past work, but wishes he would just go away now.
Are you telling me that ST wouldn't have been better if Shatner hadn't been in it?
Perhaps some people would have preferred his "no crap" captain to Pike (in the pilot), but from what I remember, I would have preferred Pike.
Actually, I also preferred the pilot because they had two attractive women in prominent roles (one of them being Majel Barrett- fairly hard to reconcile with her later portrayal of the motherly-and irritating- Lxwxyayxxxwhatever Troi).
Why would you waste jms on Star Trek? Trek is hobbled by years upon years of crufty retcon and ideas that sounded good at the time, but pile up to make an insane backlog of crap.
So; essentially you're saying that Star Trek is to sci-fi what the Intel x86 series is to CPU architecture? Sounds fair.
Ideas that sounded good at the time, but pile up to make an insane backlog of crap? Yep.
Especially the stuff Intel added (IIRC) around the 286 stage because they had loads of die space to play with, but weren't used much and subsequently deprecated; but they still had to be supported in every subsequent x86 processor.
I've long thought that the designers at Intel and AMD must have a nightmare job trying to improve the performance of their chips while *still* having to support decisions made 20 years ago that restrict their ability to improve (eg) pipelining.
(Although I don't understand why they can't say "Okay; we'll support the obselete stuff in the new chips, but we won't bother ensuring its performance is up to modern standards if doing so would create a problem with the rest of the chip." Of course, there's probably some obscure legacy code in Windows XP that still uses the old instructions and would run *horribly* on chips designed along those lines.... veering offtopic, sorry.)
I guess ST's popularity and public resistance to new sci-fi is like the popularity of the x86 because *that* works with what's gone before. For "available software" read "geek obsession and interest investment".
Of course, there are far fewer practical reasons for geeks to be resistant to new sci-fi, as opposed to computer buyers wanting to be able to run their existing software on a new machine.
My understanding was that, excepting certain infamous models (120 GXP "Death Star") made by IBM/Hitachi, all consumer-level hard drives have the same, small, failure rate.
That having been said, there are some brands I wouldn't touch with a bargepole. I wasn't surprised to learn that Fujitsu had left the HDD business after their
notorious denialofproblems with certain HDDs. Obviously batches of faulty HDDs will happen now and again, but to weasel out of responsibility like that doesn't exactly promote confidence in *anything* they make, does it?
Would you want to buy anything from them after that? I wouldn't.
That's good in theory, but in practice, it requires people to stick to the guidelines you gave. I have memories of opening disks full of programs with massive icons that didn't help much.
And, to be fair to windows, it lets you hide system files (though I don't).
Some interesting features of Amiga icons:
- Arbitrary size. Windows was a BIG step backwards from Amiga icon functionality. That step was never undone. Now all leading OSes have single-image, fixed-size icons.
Yeah, the multiple images were nice. HOWEVER... we have enough problems under Windows with stupid non-standard GUI flashy crap, without allowing those same aesthetically-challenged cretins to design icons that take up three-quarters of the screen.
I'm sure those assholes would make hideous fully-animated icons that ran whenever they were visible and consumed 75% of your processor time... if it were possible, that is.
I suspect that maybe you're not in their target demographic?
Demographic? Ugh. I'm going to get a rotweiller and train it to attack anyone who says 'demographic'. Horrid marketingspeak...:)
I'm in my late twenties, so I suspect I'd still fit an 18-34 or 18-40 demog... profile, which is probably Top Gear's target audience. Problem is that these things are always crude, and I don't consider myself particularly average from that point of view. Not better or worse, just not a typical 18-34 'lad' that buys every shiny piece of crap that's advertised in FHM (though recently FHM seems to have got really adolescent, so maybe they're going for the 13-18 market).
But that's not really the point; I *liked* the funny stuff on Top Gear; I thought it lost something after Clarkson left (read my original message). But 1 hour of Clarkson, like-minded zoo, and audience is too much of a good(?) thing.
Remember that 'Clarkson' chat show that had nothing specific to do with cars? Take the cars out of the equation and Clarkson is an occasionally amusing, but more often boorish and tedious guy from the pub doing some contrived 'non-PCness' for half an hour or so.
And the problem with the new Top Gear is that it's not really *about* cars, it's about laddishness (should've done it in the mid-nineties when Loaded was at its peak).
I don't want to over-praise the old Top Gear. Even when Clarkson was on it could be bitty and often tedious, but there were good bits; and the funny stuff was funny because they didn't overdo it.
Oh apart from Worlds Wildest Police Videos with John Burnel that shit is da bomb
That the one with the suntanned, Tipp-Ex-white toothed guy that struts around and talks in a silly 'tough-guy' voice?
He strikes me as the kind of guy who, as a kid, would've hung around with the bullies and acted 'hard', then ran off screaming like a girl when his protectors disappeared. Now he's doing the same thing as an adult....
BTW, that show is freaky, like the kind of thing they'd show in a right-wing totalitarian state to placate the masses.:-/
What, the old Top Gear where they'd do highly informative, terribly boring month-long road-tests of sub-one-litre hatchbacks suitable for decomposing pensioners and the like?
Wasn't that *before* the Clarkson era? I remember they had some guy called William Woollard presenting it then, though I didn't watch it at that time. Anyhow, that would be a long time ago now.
Yeah, I'll admit that I thought the old Top Gear stagnated a bit when Clarkson left. Clarkson was an important part of the mix, and it lost something when that happened. I'm not surprised that they axed it (at least temporarily).
Ironically though, the 'new' Top Gear is crap *because* it's 1 hour (not 30 mins) of "Jeremy Clarkson and chums present a 'zoo' format' TV programme- and frankly, 30 minutes of Clarkson, let alone 1 hour is too much. The problem is that he works well as part of a mix, but now it's like Paul McCartney left The Beatles and is doing self-indulgent solo stuff (his co-presenters are the other members of Wings who do what they're told). It sucks....
For all its flaws (basically it's identical to the old Top Gear when they axed it), Fifth Gear is at least watchable and doesn't overegg the pudding.
When I went to study Chinese in Taiwan, I was in a small class with four other students, all Japanese [..] I was certainly suprised when most of the students would regularly show up ten minutes late to class. [..] So, all of those rumors about Japanese kids all being super studious...they aren't neccesarily true.
Yeah, but that was when they were OUTSIDE JAPAN. I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, I'm saying it's a somewhat different situation.
Particularly since Japanese culture (according to common perception anyway) is very group/peer-oriented. Take someone out of that and they *might* behave very differently (I emphasise that this is just speculation).
In addition, I heard that while Japanese High Schools may have massive pressure, the aim is to get *into* a good university; once you're there, the work isn't particularly hard.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at Denise Crosby(Tasha Yar) of ST:TNG. She quit because she didn't want to be type casted and she hasn't done much
That might have been because she wasn't really that good an actress anyway (haven't seen other stuff, so I can't say).
Didn't she keep coming back as parallel-Yar, bad Yar-offspring, yadda yadda?.... won't avoid typecasting like that, will she?
There have been female Time Lords, but the Doctor is a guy. The last thing we need is a gender-bending regeneration to lose all the former fans due to fanservice.
Gender bending? Maybe they could get Dr. Frank N. Furter, err... Tim Curry to play the next Doctor.
Why does hacking always have to be so difficult? I wonna be a fashionable hacker too.
Heeyy... don't cry. Here, have the latest issue of "Wired" to wipe your nose on.
you are not a real linux revolutionary until you understand how secure it is to type your username/password 50 times a day rather than having them stored locally!
"Locally" means in your head and nowhere else; when you store your password on your PC, you're storing it on The Man's computer.
You'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes, crypto-fascist.
When I was at university, the non-essential stuff on the local hard drive was wiped clean every time someone logged out.
Seems the solution isn't to say "You *might* lose your data on this machine"; it is to have a sign saying "All your data on the C: drive *will* be erased when you log off of this machine- please store on drive H:". Or whatever.
(It might be desirable to have a warning allowing the user to transfer their locally-stored data to their online drive space when they log out. Maybe not..)
Anyway, doing it that way cuts out the excuse to take the risk (as many people would do) and keeps the consequences closer to the action.
Not that I'm blaming you for not doing this, nor saying your school weren't behaving like assholes...
"One of the most overlooked advantages to computers is... If they do foul up, there's no law against whacking them around a little."
-- Joe Martin
The [WMP] player looks like a sucked lolly.
Accurate or not, I can't let this minor gem get kicked to -1 with the rest of the post.
Sucked lolly?! Has *anything* remotely computer related ever been described thus? That's either brilliantly insightful or your mind has been fried by a 10lbs of LSD a day habit.
Hah thats nothing. My friend gets xbox games before they are even developed.
Pah! That's nothing. I play all my games on an XBox 4 that won't even exist for another 15 years.
And it were uphill both ways and we had to work 27 hours a day and pay for the privilege. Tell that to kids nowadays and they won't believe you...
Yes I do like movies about gladiators.
What an irony that this sig appeared in an article about TiVo...
Does your TiVo think you're a closet homosexual yet?
(OTOH if you're actually an out gay man, that doesn't really work. Nor does it work if you're a woman, though that's unlikely with a name like Todd. Well, not unless you're a really scary butch lesbian, in which case I didn't mean to offend you, Sir. Err, I meant Ma'am...)
This is an escalating battle. The more you think you deserve to avoid ads, the more ads-per-second there will be for you to avoid.
See, the fact that you are avoiding them means that they might have an affect on you, therefore they are working.
No, they're only "working" if they make you more likely to buy the product (or whatever the aim is). If MSN came and spray-painted an advertisement on my dog without permission, it would almost certainly have an effect on me.
It wouldn't make me more likely to sign up with MSN.
Granted, a lot of people underestimate the power of annoying/moronic adverts; ad-makers don't care if you like the ad or not, so long as you're more likely to buy their product as a result.
However, conversely (for the reasons above), getting someone's attention doesn't always mean you'll buy the product. Piss them off too much and that subconcious "name recall and nothing else" that gets you to buy the product turns into concious "I hate [name recall] because _____".
No business was ever "sucessful" based on destroying someone's livelyhood. As Guido says, "It's not nice to F___ with another man's livelyhood."
The aim isn't to destroy someone's livelihood. That's a side-effect. They should do their job in a less irritating manner.
And it's weird; I don't know how seriously you meant that last quote, but the type of person I visualise it coming from (Guido?!) is the same type of person who would say something like "The world doesn't owe anyone a living" two sentences later, and fail to see the contradiction.
Hey, it's human nature to wrap self-interest up like that. We all do it to some extent.
But, as I said, the ad-man's livelihood is a side-effect; and many businesses have been successful by avoiding just that. Dell, for example, cut out the middleman. They are successful.
You forgot that she also played Nurse Chapel in TOS.
That wasn't such a significant role, though. No sign of the cute redhead either.
BTW, am I the only one who looks at Shatner as the Richard M. Stallman of sci-fi? I appreciate his past contributions to the movement, and still enjoy his past work, but wishes he would just go away now.
Are you telling me that ST wouldn't have been better if Shatner hadn't been in it?
Perhaps some people would have preferred his "no crap" captain to Pike (in the pilot), but from what I remember, I would have preferred Pike.
Actually, I also preferred the pilot because they had two attractive women in prominent roles (one of them being Majel Barrett- fairly hard to reconcile with her later portrayal of the motherly-and irritating- Lxwxyayxxxwhatever Troi).
Why would you waste jms on Star Trek? Trek is hobbled by years upon years of crufty retcon and ideas that sounded good at the time, but pile up to make an insane backlog of crap.
So; essentially you're saying that Star Trek is to sci-fi what the Intel x86 series is to CPU architecture? Sounds fair.
Ideas that sounded good at the time, but pile up to make an insane backlog of crap? Yep.
Especially the stuff Intel added (IIRC) around the 286 stage because they had loads of die space to play with, but weren't used much and subsequently deprecated; but they still had to be supported in every subsequent x86 processor.
I've long thought that the designers at Intel and AMD must have a nightmare job trying to improve the performance of their chips while *still* having to support decisions made 20 years ago that restrict their ability to improve (eg) pipelining.
(Although I don't understand why they can't say "Okay; we'll support the obselete stuff in the new chips, but we won't bother ensuring its performance is up to modern standards if doing so would create a problem with the rest of the chip." Of course, there's probably some obscure legacy code in Windows XP that still uses the old instructions and would run *horribly* on chips designed along those lines.... veering offtopic, sorry.)
I guess ST's popularity and public resistance to new sci-fi is like the popularity of the x86 because *that* works with what's gone before. For "available software" read "geek obsession and interest investment".
Of course, there are far fewer practical reasons for geeks to be resistant to new sci-fi, as opposed to computer buyers wanting to be able to run their existing software on a new machine.
The AmigaOS stored icons in the .info file associated with the application executable. Replace the info file, replace the icon.
.info files lying about the place. I didn't like that, personally.
Downside; lots of
My understanding was that, excepting certain infamous models (120 GXP "Death Star") made by IBM/Hitachi, all consumer-level hard drives have the same, small, failure rate.
That having been said, there are some brands I wouldn't touch with a bargepole. I wasn't surprised to learn that Fujitsu had left the HDD business after their notorious denial of problems with certain HDDs. Obviously batches of faulty HDDs will happen now and again, but to weasel out of responsibility like that doesn't exactly promote confidence in *anything* they make, does it?
Would you want to buy anything from them after that? I wouldn't.
That's good in theory, but in practice, it requires people to stick to the guidelines you gave. I have memories of opening disks full of programs with massive icons that didn't help much.
And, to be fair to windows, it lets you hide system files (though I don't).
Some interesting features of Amiga icons: - Arbitrary size. Windows was a BIG step backwards from Amiga icon functionality. That step was never undone. Now all leading OSes have single-image, fixed-size icons.
Yeah, the multiple images were nice. HOWEVER... we have enough problems under Windows with stupid non-standard GUI flashy crap, without allowing those same aesthetically-challenged cretins to design icons that take up three-quarters of the screen.
I'm sure those assholes would make hideous fully-animated icons that ran whenever they were visible and consumed 75% of your processor time... if it were possible, that is.
I used to have some beauties on my Amiga, and they could be any size I liked, up to the whole screen if that was your wish.
Was this a *good* thing? IIRC, Amiga programs came with lots of oddly-shaped icons that frequently *were* a large portion of the screen-size.
I'm sure it's nice for the designer's ego, but massive icons aren't that great from a usability point-of-view.
I think that being solely about geek stuff like computers is dangerous though, because then you get pidgeonholed.
Pigeonholing? Is this some sordid sexual practice some people pay money for in back streets?
I suspect that maybe you're not in their target demographic?
:)
Demographic? Ugh. I'm going to get a rotweiller and train it to attack anyone who says 'demographic'. Horrid marketingspeak...
I'm in my late twenties, so I suspect I'd still fit an 18-34 or 18-40 demog... profile, which is probably Top Gear's target audience. Problem is that these things are always crude, and I don't consider myself particularly average from that point of view. Not better or worse, just not a typical 18-34 'lad' that buys every shiny piece of crap that's advertised in FHM (though recently FHM seems to have got really adolescent, so maybe they're going for the 13-18 market).
But that's not really the point; I *liked* the funny stuff on Top Gear; I thought it lost something after Clarkson left (read my original message). But 1 hour of Clarkson, like-minded zoo, and audience is too much of a good(?) thing.
Remember that 'Clarkson' chat show that had nothing specific to do with cars? Take the cars out of the equation and Clarkson is an occasionally amusing, but more often boorish and tedious guy from the pub doing some contrived 'non-PCness' for half an hour or so.
And the problem with the new Top Gear is that it's not really *about* cars, it's about laddishness (should've done it in the mid-nineties when Loaded was at its peak).
I don't want to over-praise the old Top Gear. Even when Clarkson was on it could be bitty and often tedious, but there were good bits; and the funny stuff was funny because they didn't overdo it.
Oh apart from Worlds Wildest Police Videos with John Burnel that shit is da bomb
:-/
That the one with the suntanned, Tipp-Ex-white toothed guy that struts around and talks in a silly 'tough-guy' voice?
He strikes me as the kind of guy who, as a kid, would've hung around with the bullies and acted 'hard', then ran off screaming like a girl when his protectors disappeared. Now he's doing the same thing as an adult....
BTW, that show is freaky, like the kind of thing they'd show in a right-wing totalitarian state to placate the masses.
What, the old Top Gear where they'd do highly informative, terribly boring month-long road-tests of sub-one-litre hatchbacks suitable for decomposing pensioners and the like?
Wasn't that *before* the Clarkson era? I remember they had some guy called William Woollard presenting it then, though I didn't watch it at that time. Anyhow, that would be a long time ago now.
Yeah, I'll admit that I thought the old Top Gear stagnated a bit when Clarkson left. Clarkson was an important part of the mix, and it lost something when that happened. I'm not surprised that they axed it (at least temporarily).
Ironically though, the 'new' Top Gear is crap *because* it's 1 hour (not 30 mins) of "Jeremy Clarkson and chums present a 'zoo' format' TV programme- and frankly, 30 minutes of Clarkson, let alone 1 hour is too much. The problem is that he works well as part of a mix, but now it's like Paul McCartney left The Beatles and is doing self-indulgent solo stuff (his co-presenters are the other members of Wings who do what they're told). It sucks....
For all its flaws (basically it's identical to the old Top Gear when they axed it), Fifth Gear is at least watchable and doesn't overegg the pudding.
When I went to study Chinese in Taiwan, I was in a small class with four other students, all Japanese [..] I was certainly suprised when most of the students would regularly show up ten minutes late to class. [..] So, all of those rumors about Japanese kids all being super studious...they aren't neccesarily true.
Yeah, but that was when they were OUTSIDE JAPAN. I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, I'm saying it's a somewhat different situation.
Particularly since Japanese culture (according to common perception anyway) is very group/peer-oriented. Take someone out of that and they *might* behave very differently (I emphasise that this is just speculation).
In addition, I heard that while Japanese High Schools may have massive pressure, the aim is to get *into* a good university; once you're there, the work isn't particularly hard.
are you talking about america?
No, the difference with America is that they have trillions of *dollars* of national debt; not yen (-_^)V
Silly boy.