Why take two evil companies (MS/Intel) into my computer when I can take only one?
I prefer my evil to come from a company with a long history of evil. IBM got the history. Would you trust some tiny little upstart or a company that is now in its 3rd century of spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Denial? MS is still learning Slight-anxiety, Bit-of-doubt and Feeble-counter-argument.
Also the penguin logo is so much cooler. You can make him cute and cuddly or a fearsome killer penguin.
MS got some four colored thingy and a butterfly. Tsk. Might as well use a fruit and really show what kinda customers you expect to attract.
Anyone else find it humorous that MS logo is a bug?
You can make all the jokes you want about OS/2 but for a failed OS it sure hung around for a bloody long time. And it hung around in the kinda places that matter like banks. The kinda places that want an OS that just works, not endless upgrade cycles and constant patching.
Sure OS/2 has now lost. Simplest reason? It became isolated, just try to find a programmer for OS/2.
But their hardware continues to be very very good. Maybe not the best maybe not the fastest but simply good. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM is still true. Sure people do get fired for going over budget and buying IBM is a sure way of doing that but there are still enough places that can afford IBM's prices.
They also supply one thing nobody else does. A world wide total solution provider. If you have something to do with computers were ever you are IBM can help you.
There are some obvious disadvanteges. No remote, PC makes a lot of noise or you need long cables from the PC to the TV wich compounds the lack of a remote, tv-out needed wich is not standard, getting the sound out as well. These can however all be worked around.
There are however some major advantages especially if you got a powerfull pc and you watch movies with subs.
VobSub allows you to polygnize the fonts. This turns the ugly standard DVD subs into beautifull high quality fonts. It costs a lot of cpu power but the results are a lot better.
Add a couple of other filters and you can dramatically improve your picture especially if you got a decent tv.
Wether this worth all the effort is up to you. A stand alone player is a lot lot simpler to work with.
I mean if he gets this upset about the Singles wich has two people after long long courtship declaring their love for each other and then well, going about their christian duty of reproduction then I hate to think what he will make of any of the h-games. The Biko series should make him explode on the spot.
For those that don't know Biko is a 3D game where you stalk a girl and you either rape her or follow her through the end for the nice ending (return something she lost and screw her).
There are also a fair number of h-games with minors and almost incest angles.
As for comparisons between the US/EU and japan. Well some claim they have less (violent) crime in japan but that doesn't explain the yakuza who operate far more openly then the mafia would ever dare to outside of italy. It neither explains why they got women only train carriages to stop them from being groped. Dutch trains can be very crowded too but I never heard of women complaining about being groped.
As for the issue he raises I am not certain. I can play singles and just see it as a game not as a model of real life. Most h-games from japan are actually terribly sweet and innocent, biko you don't have to rape the hardest challenge is actually the good ending. And virgin roster disgusted me.
But I am not sure if these games should be easily available. Make them available only to adults.
It easy to make fun of this guy as he is clearly a troll but that doesn't make sex in games a non-issue. Being from holland my views are bound to be more liberal then some and I really can't see anyone going out raping after playing the Singles, but after playing Biko or Virgin Roster I am not so sure. Nobody sane would be influenced by a game but nobody sane would molest kids either or take upskirt photograps. (why? It is hardly a flattering angle)
I think the biggest danger the more liberals of us face is us driving the more conservative into a corner. There just might be more conservatives out there then we think.
Wow that would kill the industry instantly. ID would own the FPS. Maxis the simwhatever. And if I was up to it I could go on but I am not.
Anyway you missed a word. Its really a BAD sims ripoff. Everything that makes the sims fun is missing from singles. Everything that makes the sims frustating to play is enlarged a thousand times in singles.
The fun part, designing and decorating a house is immensly reduced, with only a few pieces available and the lot sizes small.
The frustation of your sims taking insane amounts of time is added, simply walking down the stairs to work takes bloody ages, your sims spend all the time on the toilet and they barely interact on their own. And unlike the sims interacting with each other is all their is.
Avoid, if you want sex games download one of the 3D sex games from japan. At least they get right down to the action. (Singles need an insane amount of time of telling jokes and kissing before they jump in the sack. No one night stands here)
You car is powered by its engine wich is fueled by ehm the fuel.
A ford is powered by a V8 wich is fueled with petrol.
My Linux desktop is powered by a dual P3 wich is (and here is where the trouble starts) powered by electricity.
"powered" can mean both stages. So yes everyone does need a dictionary but some of us also need to learn common sense. That unfortuanly is not available in a book. I do got a clue-bat right here maybe that will help?
There is a game by Sony called Star Wars galaxies. It is one of a handfull of games out there that really benefits from a dual (or more if your filthy rich) processor.
It ain't really so hard. It is just that on the PC the fast majority of PC's are single CPU so no-one really bothers. I recently was asked to look at upgrading an office of about 50 pc's from P3's to up. They were running windows XP pro (boss is a MS junkie of the worst kind but he also pays well). I open one of the boxes and find it is really a dual but with only 1 cpu. Turned out that almost all their machines were like that. All Dells btw. With the P3 it was really simple but it just never caught on despite the fact that a dual P3 is faster then a single P4, gives better response times (less of the hang time when windows does something complex like reading a directory) and LESS PRONE TO LOCKUPS (when a process uses 100% of the cpu a single machine becomes impossible to control, on a dual it just uses the other cpu).
I managed to find some old P3's and together with some of their scapped machines upgraded 2/3s of the office to duals and the rest to P4's
The duals are the hottest machines and liked the best. No lockups, fast response. The machines are well liked and it cost a tiny fraction of the upgrade to a P4.
Sadly this is the exception. The fast majority just buy an insanely fast single CPU never realising that the biggest bottleneck is not the CPU horse power but the cpu waiting for other stuff.
How does this all relate to cell?
Well if cell comes out then all of a sudden this whole multiple processor and perhaps distrubuted stuff will have a huge installed base.
The problem is not that doing it is hard. The problem is that before there was no installed base to make use of it.
You want to now how easy distributed computing is? Read up on mosix.
Get all the IIS runners to FIX THEIR GODDAMN BUGGY PIECES OF CRAP THAT KEEP SENDING THEIR FILTY WORMS TO MY LINUX/APACHE SERVER.
When the day comes that I do NOT see entries in my apache log files off IIS worms I will perhaps be willing to look again at IIS. Until that day it will be proven to me that even if MS every manages to put out a decent bit of software it will still be damaged because MS users can't even run a simple patch.
Mean I know, hardly your fault that others do not patch.
Oh and I did work with IIS at a major ISP were we ran basically every OS out there in large numbers. IIS demanded the most attention. This was some years ago so perhaps the nightly reboots of the NT4 machines is a thing of the past but scars like that don't heal easily.
(not sure if you are a MS apologist but it sure sound like it)
As long as you choose hardware with proven drivers and don't run anti-virus software (firewall it and run minimal services and no IE) Windows should be very stable.
Yet whenever Linux fails to run some obscure soundcard or mozilla does not display every webpage exactly the same as IE, then all of opensource has just proven a failure.
The old "If a page fails in IE then it is the pages fault. If a page fails in Mozilla it is Mozillas fault." is still true I guess.
So you can only run windows with certain hardware, with certain driver versions, no Internet explorer and no anti-virus. Riiiiiiiight.
Well it is true enough I guess. I only use my windows machine for games and it is fairly stable. Nothing like my linux machine wich measure reboots in hardware installs and power failures but still, it doesn't crash as much as previous windows.
Your last point however is oddly lacking in historical knowledge. The entire computing community had a history with Unix. Then they switched to windows. Now they are switching back.
but when you are MS the company famous for memory hogging, bloated, unreliable, insecure pieces of software then when you make the announcement you are going to do clusters you can expect anyone who knows their stuff to fall out of their chair laughing.
It is kinda like lada announcing their entry into Formula 1. Sure it can be done but excuse me while I collapse in hysterical laughter first.
People who object to the BSOD jokes mention that XP and 2k3 crash far less (they still do) but forget to mention the insane memory requirements. Oh and don't look at the memory in use reports from task managers. look at what 3rd party programs can use before swapping starts.
You are the first one I read to point out the x-box. Well there is some logic to this. But basically x-box is dos. One task, 1 processor. Not exactly super complex stuff.
With the new x-box if it is everything they hyped it up to be they are closer. It has been said many times before that modern consoles clustered could make an excellent poor mans super-computer.
Just remains the question if MS can cluster their own stuff. In theory there is no reason why not. But in theory there is also no reason why IE couldn't be the best browser out there, windows the most secure and stable, and clippy not so fucking irritating. MS somehow continues to prove they just can't do it.
As for who would buy it? Linux and others are often blaimed for not being userfriendly but me thinks that those who run supercomputers hardly care about a gui and are smart enough to hire good operators.
Opera re-invent themselve? Why? They are doing fine. The PC is a sideline to them. Basically they are supplying a browser for every platform out there. Something no other browser is capable off.
Their money comes from bulk licenses sold to phone makers and similar. Not from consumer licenses.
Sure it would be nice if opera was a real contender on the PC market but how do you compete with a free product when quality is something only tiny percentage of customers understand? Even mozilla and its offspring is having a hardtime and they are free.
Also if you run multipl OS'es, having one single browser between them is awfully handy. I can't tell you how much more I swear at IE now that it is refusing to listen to my mouse movements whenever I am on a non-opera machine.
On the mobile phone Opera is a very real player. In fact that is where opera makes it money. Not from PC browsers (wich most people pirate anyway) but from licenses sold to phone makers.
Just try one of the non-ms "modern" phones. Shouldn't be too hard. Most are non-ms. All the nokia ones I seen had an opera browser.
This is something MS doesn't like. It has tried everything it could outside murder to get a foothold in the mobile phone market without success. PDA's are slightly more succesfull but its old reputation of rebooting is really hurting it from the customer perspective. PDA's and certainly PC's we are used to being bugged but we expect or mobile phones to be like our land line phones. Just working.
From the phone makers perspective MS reputation of screwing everyone makes them very determined not to rely on MS software.
So in yes opera is a real threat. If ever that vision where the Mobile phone will be the main computer everyone uses and not the PC then people might also suddenly see that an OS doesn't have to be rebooted and that browser do exist that just bloody work.
So opera is a real threat. So why did MS settle? Even Bill Gates must be learning from all the legal problems MS is having. Sure 12 million is nothing to MS but it ain't 12 million. It is 12 million to opera, 600 million to the EU, close to a billion to various american states, lots of other legal cases being settled all the tune of millions, the case against lindows wich is not going all that well. Each individual case will not be enough but put them all together and MS is losing some real money while gaining nothing.
And each and every case only shows MS as the evil company. Not good.
There is just a tiny little problem and that is all the others have patents too.
You fell prey to one of life's classic blunders. The most famous is, 'Don't get involved in a land war in Asia. Slightly less well known is Don't get involved in patent pissing contest with IBM when money is on the line'.
Look up if you have time a recent setback for MS were they were told to remove the clause from their contracts that stops their OEM's from enforcing their patents against MS.
Anyway the answer is there. The movie doesn't stop where the story stops. The sound of thunder is presumably the sound of the gun firing. But that doesn't have to be the case. It could be the sound of a security guards gun blowing travis (the safari leader) away as travis tries to kill the tourist.
And from there until the end of the the movie. Will it be bad? Without a doubt. The entire attraction of Sound of thunder is its shortness. No endless battle, no leaping plotholes, no silly motivations. Provided you don't stumble on how stepping on a butterfly can effect just language and an election the story is remarkably simple and effective.
Making it as the opening of a full movie might just totally ruin it.
But perhaps/. is not meant for people that can't handle 2 3 word sentences without a lie down.
Don't worry, Fox and CNN are just there for your kind. 1 second of news. 20 minutes of non-news. 9.59 minutes of commercials. All easy and no thinking required. The nurse will be along shortly to give you your shot and tuck you in.
Well here is a lesson in reading. Look to the top left under the name of the site. "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
So it doesn't have to be for "News for Nerds." It can just be "Stuff that matters.".
You can imagine an AND between them and accept only news stories that meet both conditions but this site doesn't do that. Instead it uses the more common english meaning of AND what for programmers would be an OR.
So slashdot has stories that are "News for Nerds." OR "Stuff that matters."
This is hardly the first political story on/. and I say it is the better for it. And if you don't like the political views of/. feel free to make your own site. If you actually bother to read the comments you will learn that their are a fair number of pro-bush posters as well.
No nature documentary would pass in front of a courtroom. I remember a sketch on the interview of a suspect with was being filmed for evidence. Very nice tape of the suspect slowly giving a full confession. Tiny detail? The clock in the background jumping backwards and forwards, bruises appearing and disappaearing and the shadows dancing all over the place.
Nature documentaries reshuffle time a lot too and add scenes together that were filmed in totally different locations. Want to show a lion hunting? One shot of the lion creeping. Totally different shot of an antilope grazing. Other shot of the same lion creeping but flipped to give the impression he is walking towards the prey on the left. Completly different antilope being spooked by a member of the filmteam and running away. The same lion but running after a zebra that is of screen in totally different hunt. End lion eating on a prey that during one brief glimps turns out to be male antilope while all the previous were off a female antilope.
So yes nature docu's are "false". That is not even touching on the totally staged scenes (insect docu's are famous for this were everything is filmed inside a studio) with sharks. How many shark docu's have you seen where all the footage consisted of shark being fed from a boat?
But any docu is biased and staged. Truly objective journalism doesn't exist. The trick is making sure the journalist/documaker is upfront about wich side he is on. The truly nasty scum pretend to be left while making a rightwing point or the other way around.
That to sadly is fair. Imagine the police is called to a murder and finds a suspect but has trouble connecting up the evidence. It happens. Would you want every murder case to be dismissed if the police doesn't have a conviction in a month?
The legal system ain't perfect and yes it sucks that trials drag on and on. You know what? They solved this in some countries. There you can judged and executed in a matter of hours.
Both IBM and SCO need to have fair time to make their case. Every idiot deserves their chance in court even if we think one of them is evil.
So that hardly gets you locked up. What the law maybe in america I don't care. That is the problem of americans. I don't want them to interfere wich dutch politics and I kindly return the favor.
Peru forbids the export of price winning thingies (to lazy to check the name) and you could conclude that the export of non-pricewinning thingies is therefore accetable.
So cutting out the microship turns a banned export into a legal export.
Whereas in your example cutting it out would turn a legal export into an illegal one. If you had illegal fish you would have to insert a chip. This is probably a lot more work. Also fish don't have fur with wich to cover the wound.
There are a whole bunch of enterprises and captains and the Star Trek franchise timeline has more holes then Star Wars.
The new "enterprise" series does its very best to tear what remains of the timeline to shreds however. Faintly I can recall one book dealing with the launch of the TOS Enterprise under what might have been kirks dad or grandfather. Where the hell the current Enterprise series fits I have no idea and frankly I don't care much. I watch a couple of episodes and then just stopped. TOS was great, TNG became enjoyable after wesley was slaughtered (well I can dreame can't I) DS9 had 1 good episode (tribbles), voyager was Star Trek put through the same process as Britney Spears and Enterprise said it all in the opening episode. Notice that all the "historical" footage is of american space craft.
It is intresting to see the real world politics behind Star Trek. TOS was at the height of the Cold War and racial troubles and Gene Roddenberry was showing a series with a russian and a black WOMAN. Showing that he thought in the future we would all work together. Of course there were "the evil empires" of bot klingons and romulans but they mostly talked.
TNG was the touchie feelie America is best but lets talk others into being like us instead of blowing them up. Picard was never wrong and everyone wanted to be a human. Note the "aliens" on the ship were a barbaric klingon struggling to get rid of his "inferior" races aggression and a robot trying to be human despite running circles around the human race. The crew was also far whiter then before and they all seemed to come from america-europe. No chinese or russians or africans or australians or south americans.
DS9 went to warmode. It had plenty of enemies and Star Fleet was busily attacking them all or at least setting them up against each other. Making pacts and breaking them. Basically it was the america that created afghanistand and iraq wich it later attacks. If anything this show was even whiter then TNG.
Voyager continued the downward spiral and had Janeway make a pact with the worst enemy ever, the borg, to destroy the one enemy of the borg that had actually a chance of defeating the borg, just so that they could get home a bit faster. Janeway was right because she was janeway. It is kinda like how america is now saying that beheading an american is a great evil but torturing prisoners is perfectly acceptable. Janeway/America is right because it is Janeway/America.
All those actors who we the customer remember fondly as 1 single role have a simple choice. Get a new job or accept that while as an actor they would love to explore new roles their is also the earning an income part and if people want to see them time and time again the money is hard to refuse. Especially when all the other roles pay very little if at all.
Also Mel Gibson is far less associated with any specific role then Spock or Kirk. Picard has the same problem. Most people at least accept that Patrick Stewart is a good actor (not exactly something most people want to admit about Star Trek actors) and even he suffers from the fact that you expect him to go "Engage" when he is playing scrooge.
As for the TOS or for that matter any Star Trek cast being bad actors (including Shatner) just ask yourselve this. If they were truly that bad then why did we watch it? Why do we still watch it 30 yrs after? We know truly bad acting from totally flopped series and movies that are so badly acted you only watch them as a bet. Star Trek is not remotely like that.
I think the whole bad acting idea is something started as "joke" by those who don't like or get shows like star trek and become part of the legend. There are plenty of actors who only really play one role and yet never get slandered with being unable to act.
Slashdot Mirror
I prefer my evil to come from a company with a long history of evil. IBM got the history. Would you trust some tiny little upstart or a company that is now in its 3rd century of spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Denial? MS is still learning Slight-anxiety, Bit-of-doubt and Feeble-counter-argument.
Also the penguin logo is so much cooler. You can make him cute and cuddly or a fearsome killer penguin.
MS got some four colored thingy and a butterfly. Tsk. Might as well use a fruit and really show what kinda customers you expect to attract.
Anyone else find it humorous that MS logo is a bug?
Sure OS/2 has now lost. Simplest reason? It became isolated, just try to find a programmer for OS/2.
But their hardware continues to be very very good. Maybe not the best maybe not the fastest but simply good. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM is still true. Sure people do get fired for going over budget and buying IBM is a sure way of doing that but there are still enough places that can afford IBM's prices.
They also supply one thing nobody else does. A world wide total solution provider. If you have something to do with computers were ever you are IBM can help you.
And here this IBM ad ends.
There are however some major advantages especially if you got a powerfull pc and you watch movies with subs.
VobSub allows you to polygnize the fonts. This turns the ugly standard DVD subs into beautifull high quality fonts. It costs a lot of cpu power but the results are a lot better.
Add a couple of other filters and you can dramatically improve your picture especially if you got a decent tv.
Wether this worth all the effort is up to you. A stand alone player is a lot lot simpler to work with.
For those that don't know Biko is a 3D game where you stalk a girl and you either rape her or follow her through the end for the nice ending (return something she lost and screw her).
There are also a fair number of h-games with minors and almost incest angles.
As for comparisons between the US/EU and japan. Well some claim they have less (violent) crime in japan but that doesn't explain the yakuza who operate far more openly then the mafia would ever dare to outside of italy. It neither explains why they got women only train carriages to stop them from being groped. Dutch trains can be very crowded too but I never heard of women complaining about being groped.
As for the issue he raises I am not certain. I can play singles and just see it as a game not as a model of real life. Most h-games from japan are actually terribly sweet and innocent, biko you don't have to rape the hardest challenge is actually the good ending. And virgin roster disgusted me.
But I am not sure if these games should be easily available. Make them available only to adults.
It easy to make fun of this guy as he is clearly a troll but that doesn't make sex in games a non-issue. Being from holland my views are bound to be more liberal then some and I really can't see anyone going out raping after playing the Singles, but after playing Biko or Virgin Roster I am not so sure. Nobody sane would be influenced by a game but nobody sane would molest kids either or take upskirt photograps. (why? It is hardly a flattering angle)
I think the biggest danger the more liberals of us face is us driving the more conservative into a corner. There just might be more conservatives out there then we think.
It is not hardcore porn but about the lvl of playboy "porn" movies.
Anyway you missed a word. Its really a BAD sims ripoff. Everything that makes the sims fun is missing from singles. Everything that makes the sims frustating to play is enlarged a thousand times in singles.
The fun part, designing and decorating a house is immensly reduced, with only a few pieces available and the lot sizes small.
The frustation of your sims taking insane amounts of time is added, simply walking down the stairs to work takes bloody ages, your sims spend all the time on the toilet and they barely interact on their own. And unlike the sims interacting with each other is all their is.
Avoid, if you want sex games download one of the 3D sex games from japan. At least they get right down to the action. (Singles need an insane amount of time of telling jokes and kissing before they jump in the sack. No one night stands here)
A ford is powered by a V8 wich is fueled with petrol.
My Linux desktop is powered by a dual P3 wich is (and here is where the trouble starts) powered by electricity.
"powered" can mean both stages. So yes everyone does need a dictionary but some of us also need to learn common sense. That unfortuanly is not available in a book. I do got a clue-bat right here maybe that will help?
It ain't really so hard. It is just that on the PC the fast majority of PC's are single CPU so no-one really bothers. I recently was asked to look at upgrading an office of about 50 pc's from P3's to up. They were running windows XP pro (boss is a MS junkie of the worst kind but he also pays well). I open one of the boxes and find it is really a dual but with only 1 cpu. Turned out that almost all their machines were like that. All Dells btw. With the P3 it was really simple but it just never caught on despite the fact that a dual P3 is faster then a single P4, gives better response times (less of the hang time when windows does something complex like reading a directory) and LESS PRONE TO LOCKUPS (when a process uses 100% of the cpu a single machine becomes impossible to control, on a dual it just uses the other cpu).
I managed to find some old P3's and together with some of their scapped machines upgraded 2/3s of the office to duals and the rest to P4's
The duals are the hottest machines and liked the best. No lockups, fast response. The machines are well liked and it cost a tiny fraction of the upgrade to a P4.
Sadly this is the exception. The fast majority just buy an insanely fast single CPU never realising that the biggest bottleneck is not the CPU horse power but the cpu waiting for other stuff.
How does this all relate to cell?
Well if cell comes out then all of a sudden this whole multiple processor and perhaps distrubuted stuff will have a huge installed base.
The problem is not that doing it is hard. The problem is that before there was no installed base to make use of it.
You want to now how easy distributed computing is? Read up on mosix.
When the day comes that I do NOT see entries in my apache log files off IIS worms I will perhaps be willing to look again at IIS. Until that day it will be proven to me that even if MS every manages to put out a decent bit of software it will still be damaged because MS users can't even run a simple patch.
Mean I know, hardly your fault that others do not patch.
Oh and I did work with IIS at a major ISP were we ran basically every OS out there in large numbers. IIS demanded the most attention. This was some years ago so perhaps the nightly reboots of the NT4 machines is a thing of the past but scars like that don't heal easily.
(not sure if you are a MS apologist but it sure sound like it) As long as you choose hardware with proven drivers and don't run anti-virus software (firewall it and run minimal services and no IE) Windows should be very stable.
Yet whenever Linux fails to run some obscure soundcard or mozilla does not display every webpage exactly the same as IE, then all of opensource has just proven a failure.
The old "If a page fails in IE then it is the pages fault. If a page fails in Mozilla it is Mozillas fault." is still true I guess.
So you can only run windows with certain hardware, with certain driver versions, no Internet explorer and no anti-virus. Riiiiiiiight.
Well it is true enough I guess. I only use my windows machine for games and it is fairly stable. Nothing like my linux machine wich measure reboots in hardware installs and power failures but still, it doesn't crash as much as previous windows.
Your last point however is oddly lacking in historical knowledge. The entire computing community had a history with Unix. Then they switched to windows. Now they are switching back.
It is kinda like lada announcing their entry into Formula 1. Sure it can be done but excuse me while I collapse in hysterical laughter first.
People who object to the BSOD jokes mention that XP and 2k3 crash far less (they still do) but forget to mention the insane memory requirements. Oh and don't look at the memory in use reports from task managers. look at what 3rd party programs can use before swapping starts.
You are the first one I read to point out the x-box. Well there is some logic to this. But basically x-box is dos. One task, 1 processor. Not exactly super complex stuff.
With the new x-box if it is everything they hyped it up to be they are closer. It has been said many times before that modern consoles clustered could make an excellent poor mans super-computer.
Just remains the question if MS can cluster their own stuff. In theory there is no reason why not. But in theory there is also no reason why IE couldn't be the best browser out there, windows the most secure and stable, and clippy not so fucking irritating. MS somehow continues to prove they just can't do it.
As for who would buy it? Linux and others are often blaimed for not being userfriendly but me thinks that those who run supercomputers hardly care about a gui and are smart enough to hire good operators.
Nothing else to say.
Their money comes from bulk licenses sold to phone makers and similar. Not from consumer licenses.
Sure it would be nice if opera was a real contender on the PC market but how do you compete with a free product when quality is something only tiny percentage of customers understand? Even mozilla and its offspring is having a hardtime and they are free.
Also if you run multipl OS'es, having one single browser between them is awfully handy. I can't tell you how much more I swear at IE now that it is refusing to listen to my mouse movements whenever I am on a non-opera machine.
Just try one of the non-ms "modern" phones. Shouldn't be too hard. Most are non-ms. All the nokia ones I seen had an opera browser.
This is something MS doesn't like. It has tried everything it could outside murder to get a foothold in the mobile phone market without success. PDA's are slightly more succesfull but its old reputation of rebooting is really hurting it from the customer perspective. PDA's and certainly PC's we are used to being bugged but we expect or mobile phones to be like our land line phones. Just working.
From the phone makers perspective MS reputation of screwing everyone makes them very determined not to rely on MS software.
So in yes opera is a real threat. If ever that vision where the Mobile phone will be the main computer everyone uses and not the PC then people might also suddenly see that an OS doesn't have to be rebooted and that browser do exist that just bloody work.
So opera is a real threat. So why did MS settle? Even Bill Gates must be learning from all the legal problems MS is having. Sure 12 million is nothing to MS but it ain't 12 million. It is 12 million to opera, 600 million to the EU, close to a billion to various american states, lots of other legal cases being settled all the tune of millions, the case against lindows wich is not going all that well. Each individual case will not be enough but put them all together and MS is losing some real money while gaining nothing.
And each and every case only shows MS as the evil company. Not good.
You fell prey to one of life's classic blunders. The most famous is, 'Don't get involved in a land war in Asia. Slightly less well known is Don't get involved in patent pissing contest with IBM when money is on the line'.
Look up if you have time a recent setback for MS were they were told to remove the clause from their contracts that stops their OEM's from enforcing their patents against MS.
And from there until the end of the the movie. Will it be bad? Without a doubt. The entire attraction of Sound of thunder is its shortness. No endless battle, no leaping plotholes, no silly motivations. Provided you don't stumble on how stepping on a butterfly can effect just language and an election the story is remarkably simple and effective.
Making it as the opening of a full movie might just totally ruin it.
Don't worry, Fox and CNN are just there for your kind. 1 second of news. 20 minutes of non-news. 9.59 minutes of commercials. All easy and no thinking required. The nurse will be along shortly to give you your shot and tuck you in.
Sleep well Mr. President.
So it doesn't have to be for "News for Nerds." It can just be "Stuff that matters.".
You can imagine an AND between them and accept only news stories that meet both conditions but this site doesn't do that. Instead it uses the more common english meaning of AND what for programmers would be an OR.
So slashdot has stories that are "News for Nerds." OR "Stuff that matters."
This is hardly the first political story on /. and I say it is the better for it. And if you don't like the political views of /. feel free to make your own site. If you actually bother to read the comments you will learn that their are a fair number of pro-bush posters as well.
Nature documentaries reshuffle time a lot too and add scenes together that were filmed in totally different locations. Want to show a lion hunting? One shot of the lion creeping. Totally different shot of an antilope grazing. Other shot of the same lion creeping but flipped to give the impression he is walking towards the prey on the left. Completly different antilope being spooked by a member of the filmteam and running away. The same lion but running after a zebra that is of screen in totally different hunt. End lion eating on a prey that during one brief glimps turns out to be male antilope while all the previous were off a female antilope.
So yes nature docu's are "false". That is not even touching on the totally staged scenes (insect docu's are famous for this were everything is filmed inside a studio) with sharks. How many shark docu's have you seen where all the footage consisted of shark being fed from a boat?
But any docu is biased and staged. Truly objective journalism doesn't exist. The trick is making sure the journalist/documaker is upfront about wich side he is on. The truly nasty scum pretend to be left while making a rightwing point or the other way around.
He seems more the old nerd/geek as shown in jock movies. Not the nerd/geek as they are in real life but rather as tv would like to show them.
The legal system ain't perfect and yes it sucks that trials drag on and on. You know what? They solved this in some countries. There you can judged and executed in a matter of hours.
Both IBM and SCO need to have fair time to make their case. Every idiot deserves their chance in court even if we think one of them is evil.
So that hardly gets you locked up. What the law maybe in america I don't care. That is the problem of americans. I don't want them to interfere wich dutch politics and I kindly return the favor.
So cutting out the microship turns a banned export into a legal export.
Whereas in your example cutting it out would turn a legal export into an illegal one. If you had illegal fish you would have to insert a chip. This is probably a lot more work. Also fish don't have fur with wich to cover the wound.
The new "enterprise" series does its very best to tear what remains of the timeline to shreds however. Faintly I can recall one book dealing with the launch of the TOS Enterprise under what might have been kirks dad or grandfather. Where the hell the current Enterprise series fits I have no idea and frankly I don't care much. I watch a couple of episodes and then just stopped. TOS was great, TNG became enjoyable after wesley was slaughtered (well I can dreame can't I) DS9 had 1 good episode (tribbles), voyager was Star Trek put through the same process as Britney Spears and Enterprise said it all in the opening episode. Notice that all the "historical" footage is of american space craft.
It is intresting to see the real world politics behind Star Trek. TOS was at the height of the Cold War and racial troubles and Gene Roddenberry was showing a series with a russian and a black WOMAN. Showing that he thought in the future we would all work together. Of course there were "the evil empires" of bot klingons and romulans but they mostly talked.
TNG was the touchie feelie America is best but lets talk others into being like us instead of blowing them up. Picard was never wrong and everyone wanted to be a human. Note the "aliens" on the ship were a barbaric klingon struggling to get rid of his "inferior" races aggression and a robot trying to be human despite running circles around the human race. The crew was also far whiter then before and they all seemed to come from america-europe. No chinese or russians or africans or australians or south americans.
DS9 went to warmode. It had plenty of enemies and Star Fleet was busily attacking them all or at least setting them up against each other. Making pacts and breaking them. Basically it was the america that created afghanistand and iraq wich it later attacks. If anything this show was even whiter then TNG.
Voyager continued the downward spiral and had Janeway make a pact with the worst enemy ever, the borg, to destroy the one enemy of the borg that had actually a chance of defeating the borg, just so that they could get home a bit faster. Janeway was right because she was janeway. It is kinda like how america is now saying that beheading an american is a great evil but torturing prisoners is perfectly acceptable. Janeway/America is right because it is Janeway/America.
Enterprise is just plain bad.
Also Mel Gibson is far less associated with any specific role then Spock or Kirk. Picard has the same problem. Most people at least accept that Patrick Stewart is a good actor (not exactly something most people want to admit about Star Trek actors) and even he suffers from the fact that you expect him to go "Engage" when he is playing scrooge.
As for the TOS or for that matter any Star Trek cast being bad actors (including Shatner) just ask yourselve this. If they were truly that bad then why did we watch it? Why do we still watch it 30 yrs after? We know truly bad acting from totally flopped series and movies that are so badly acted you only watch them as a bet. Star Trek is not remotely like that.
I think the whole bad acting idea is something started as "joke" by those who don't like or get shows like star trek and become part of the legend. There are plenty of actors who only really play one role and yet never get slandered with being unable to act.