the six shooter that is never reloaded - even after firing about a hundred rounds.
They did that for DECADES!
Now they all use semi-automatics (you hardly ever see a revolver any more in the movies - unless it's some moron criminal as if to indicate that he can't afford a "real" gun!) that don't usually fire too many rounds because they do show reloads (from an apparently unlimited number of magazines carried on the person's body!) and also it takes too much time to show emptying a twenty-round tactical magazine.
You even occasionally see people with the right tactical stance in the movies these days. You don't see one-handed grips much any more, although they do occasionally show up. Most of the actors these days get firearms training from real experts. Angelina Jolie has had so much firearms training from experts on at least four movies that she could probably outgun an FBI agent at this point - I watched the extra material on her training for Tomb Raider, and that babe is dangerous! For "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", she even had live fire movement training! Angie said that helped her trust Brad Pitt because you've gotta trust the guy next to you when it's live rounds.
If the resulting scene isn't accurate, it's probably because the director modified it for some movie technical reason.
You still see some dumb nigger using the horizontal grip - because dumb niggers really do believe in using it.
I liked his line where he taunted the government guys by saying, "I was smarter than you when I worked there, and I'm still smarter than you", or something like that.
Hackers was listed in the film clips. They had the scene near the end where the gang is attacking the Ellison computer, and the screen is showing a "Cookie Monster."
Well, that's part of Michael Crichton's whole thing - everybody in his books is an idiot except the hero, who knows everything and has a particular axe to grind about science or whatever the book is about. I would have punched Jeff Goldblum's lights out early in the film...his character was a major conceited asshole. (Never mind that I regard most people as idiots, too.)
His plots are so pathetically obviously set up to allow his point of view to prevail that it's hard for me to view or read them.
Especially since he writes the screenplays first and the books second. So he dumbs down the book to match the screenplay - which was dumb to begin with.
And his point of view is so ridiculously anti-science - while supposedly using science to back up his point of view - that it's irritating as hell.
Reminds me of "Steelyard Blue" where the gang is trying to steal parts off an airplane in a hangar, and a guard comes in and spots them, runs to the alarm box to set off the alarm.
Nothing happens.
You hear, "Ahem!"
Everybody looks at the nutcase Peter Boyle who says, "The fuse..." - holding it up.
Ah, "UFO"! Wanda Ventham! Remember her? Hottest blonde in the UK! That show had more hot broads walking around in weird outfits than any other I've seen. The Brits know how to do that stuff!
Ed Davis as the guy in charge. His only other role that I know of was a bit part in a James Bond movie - as "Klaus Hergesheimer" in "Diamonds Are Forever", the lame techie who is doing the radiation badge monitoring in Blofeld's facility building the laser device.
I'm probably the only human being on Earth who spotted him as the guy from "UFO." That's really pathetic.
I just wonder how they get that 2GB of data onto the floppy - must have some really good compression utility...
Speaking of which, In X-men 2, why did Mystique print all that crap out of Stryker's computer instead of putting it on a flash drive? Because it wouldn't be as suspenseful with Lady Deathstryke coming around the corner if she was using the flash drive...
Or maybe Stryker had all the USB ports locked down...He obviously was a security nut, since he had voice recognition on his password utility...
You probably could if you relied on the AI system in the alien ship to figure out that you're a dumb primate that can't code worth a shit and it helpfully fixed everything so that it worked properly.
In other words, aliens use the Microsoft concept of computer security - dumb everything down until an ape could break in.
Actually she had to click on it while doing CTRL-SHIFT...
If that makes it better for you...
So she called up a Web page from a floppy - I've put Web pages on floppies. Maybe it was a 2.44MB floppy?
The important thing is that they filmed the last part of the movie in San Francisco - at Moscone Center. The scene where she's in the evil corporation looking out the window at the responding fire department is in a building I recognized from the view from the window.
Since we're reminiscing, how about the Altair? I visited the third computer store in the nation - the Real Oregon Computer Store - the day before it opened, in Eugene, Oregon, in 1976 or 1977 (can't remember the exact year.)
I played with a Processor Tech machine that actually had an ASCII terminal connected - the Altairs were all connected to Teletypes. I played one of the first asteroid shoot down games, wasted two hours, and swore never to play another computer game (and held to it for some years.)
Somebody wrote a routine to simulate the noises of sex on a Teletype by banging the print head. The code had to be entered in the Altair through the front panel by flipping switches. Some of these guys could enter code almost as fast as by typing.
I later owned a Radio Shack Model I - cassette tape data storage! 48K of RAM! CP/M!
The "chick" was Ally Sheedy, possibly the least "hot" actress in Hollywood - but yeah, she was cute then.
The fun part of War Games was realizing later that all the computer displays were being done by a couple ancient (today) 8-bit microcomputers from a company that doesn't exist today. And also realizing that none of the displays in the actual Cheyenne Mountain look anything like that level of cool - and are limited to displaying fifty targets at a time. It cost the US government several billions to upgrade Cheyenne to something more usable in the last fifteen or twenty years - your average desktop today has a lot more power than most of the machines they were defending the country with then.
"The herd of turtles that is the American people look to have wised up"
No, they haven't. Three years after the suckers allowed Bush to attack a country for no reason, we're about to attack Iran for no reason.
And THIS one won't be some little insurgency of 20,000-40,000 people, but a Vietnam-style war with hundreds of thousands of insurgents and it will be about two to four times as big as Vietnam in terms of US troops that have to be deployed, number of civilians killed, and WAY more expensive than even Iraq (say, two or three trillion dollars over the next ten years.)
The US's greatest military disaster in history is about to happen.
And at least half the US public - and virtually all of the media - is behind it.
The rest of you can stuff your Shang-Chi comics up your ass.
Talking about Hatsumi like the posts I've seen here is like talking about Linus Torvalds (or any top programmer - take your pick) as if he just learned Basic and had written his first "Hello World" program.
Not that Hatsumi himself would care - a bunch of dumb American geeks aren't going to do his reputation any harm.
It'll work - I've been sharing a half dozen or more multi-gig FAT32 partitions with various Linux versions and various Windows versions (currently Mandriva 2006 and Windows XP Pro) for the last four years.
There are even a couple of utilities (some open source, some commercial) that will let you go the other way and let Windows read and (perhaps) write to an Ext2/3 Linux file system, although I don't make much use of them myself. A few times when I was under RH 7.3, I used Explore2fs from Windows to look at the Linux side of my system.
I got four out of eight wrong, but then I don't use any of the P2P programs listed, so I'm not up on the current ones as to which has spyware embedded. Of course, I KNEW Kazaa did, so that one was easy. I've never used BearShare or eMule and never heard of the other one.
Since I run Firefox with no ActiveX, and on the Windows side I run at least four antispyware programs, I'd say my performance on the quix isn't terribly relevant.
Also, the fact that the SITE has downloads with spyware doesn't necessarily mean that any specific SOFTWARE I download has it. I tend to get my freeware from sites that check for that sort of thing anyway. And I never download crap software like screensavers, smilies, and the like. If I get a smilie, it's an animated GIF. I only download utilities that seem to have been written by someone with a clue.
I'd say this is hype from the security software guys again. I'm sure a better quix could be developed - but it wouldn't matter since most people aren't concerned about computer security anyway - as the horrible results demonstrate.
Teach people to dump IE and ActiveX and design the browsers to turn off scripting and applets by default and provide prompts and sandboxes, and spyware will go the way of the dodo.
I agree - ebooks are fairly easy to find on Usenet and the Web. Any ebook will have its DRM cracked sooner or later and be fully available in both places.
The textbook publishers are going the way of the music CD makers - they are charging too high a price for something to people who aren't willing to pay that price regardless of the value they see in the product.
I've had textbooks in the last four years at City College of San Francisco that cost over $100! I don't care what the limited market is for a textbook, that price is simply nuts. It's a BOOK, for Christ's sakes!
Nanotech will obsolete all this stuff a couple decades later.
Nanotech will subsume biotech because biotech is just a specific way of organizing molecoles. Nanotech is all about organizing molecules of any kind.
In other words, biotech will become obsolete because having a biological basis for sentience - not necessarily omitting biological principles of organization entirely, however - will be replaced by other mechanical bases.
Even before that, nanotech will be used to revamp human biology. I don't see any point in "redesigning" the human body in the manner suggested when the body as it exists is perfectly adequate once its flaws and limitations are mitigated by nanotech enhancements.
Think "Bionic Man" before you think genetic re-engineering - then combine the two which is more likely to be done than complete genetic re-engineering. Long before complete genetic re-engineering is both feasible and desireable for humans, better technologies such as nanotech will be available.
That's true, but at one time I recall Larry Ellison touting the notion that Oracle's DB could end up being an actual operating system to compete with Windows. That was related IIRC to the concept of Windows having that database-like file system that Microsoft has never gotten working.
It never happened, but I suspect something like that is in the back of his mind when he contemplates running his own Linux distro.
In other words, tightly integrating the Oracle database and development tools into the Linux OS would pretty much make it easier for database servers to be set up. Now you have to install the OS, then tweak the OS to run Oracle and then install the DB. If Oracle did that already in their own distro, you just download the whole thing, blow it onto a server, and you're good to go.
Of course, they could still sell the DB for other OS's and distros, but it would be pretty clear which one most people would buy. So they'd probably not lose many customers who want to run the DB on another OS, and they'd probably make up for that by having a combined OS/DB package.
I'm not crazy about the idea of Larry buying one of the top two or three major distros, since essentially I don't think he would support them as "general purpose" distros anymore. They would be more for bundling the DB and that's it.
On the other hand, I wouldn't mind Oracle doing its own distro - first because IF (and that's a big if) they executed well, it might be a great distro - or alternatively, if they merely used it to bundle the DB, it wouldn't have a particularly big impact on the other Linux distros anyway - but it WOULD make Linux a hair more acceptable in some corporations.
Slashdot Mirror
The ultimate classic:
the six shooter that is never reloaded - even after firing about a hundred rounds.
They did that for DECADES!
Now they all use semi-automatics (you hardly ever see a revolver any more in the movies - unless it's some moron criminal as if to indicate that he can't afford a "real" gun!) that don't usually fire too many rounds because they do show reloads (from an apparently unlimited number of magazines carried on the person's body!) and also it takes too much time to show emptying a twenty-round tactical magazine.
You even occasionally see people with the right tactical stance in the movies these days. You don't see one-handed grips much any more, although they do occasionally show up. Most of the actors these days get firearms training from real experts. Angelina Jolie has had so much firearms training from experts on at least four movies that she could probably outgun an FBI agent at this point - I watched the extra material on her training for Tomb Raider, and that babe is dangerous! For "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", she even had live fire movement training! Angie said that helped her trust Brad Pitt because you've gotta trust the guy next to you when it's live rounds.
If the resulting scene isn't accurate, it's probably because the director modified it for some movie technical reason.
You still see some dumb nigger using the horizontal grip - because dumb niggers really do believe in using it.
I liked his line where he taunted the government guys by saying, "I was smarter than you when I worked there, and I'm still smarter than you", or something like that.
My kind of guy.
Hackers was listed in the film clips. They had the scene near the end where the gang is attacking the Ellison computer, and the screen is showing a "Cookie Monster."
Well, that's part of Michael Crichton's whole thing - everybody in his books is an idiot except the hero, who knows everything and has a particular axe to grind about science or whatever the book is about. I would have punched Jeff Goldblum's lights out early in the film...his character was a major conceited asshole. (Never mind that I regard most people as idiots, too.)
His plots are so pathetically obviously set up to allow his point of view to prevail that it's hard for me to view or read them.
Especially since he writes the screenplays first and the books second. So he dumbs down the book to match the screenplay - which was dumb to begin with.
And his point of view is so ridiculously anti-science - while supposedly using science to back up his point of view - that it's irritating as hell.
They're doing it in London around the financial district to pick up terrorists using facial recognition technology.
Not going to work, of course, but, hey, it's someone's budget.
Well, he probably was a Windows MCSE, what do you expect from them?
Reminds me of "Steelyard Blue" where the gang is trying to steal parts off an airplane in a hangar, and a guard comes in and spots them, runs to the alarm box to set off the alarm.
Nothing happens.
You hear, "Ahem!"
Everybody looks at the nutcase Peter Boyle who says, "The fuse..." - holding it up.
He was a nut but he was smart.
I knew there was something wrong with that dialog.
The FBI has a network now?
Last I heard they were still on dialup...Had to fax their data around the branch offices...
AFTER pissing away $150 million on an upgrade that had to be canceled...
Ah, "UFO"! Wanda Ventham! Remember her? Hottest blonde in the UK! That show had more hot broads walking around in weird outfits than any other I've seen. The Brits know how to do that stuff!
Ed Davis as the guy in charge. His only other role that I know of was a bit part in a James Bond movie - as "Klaus Hergesheimer" in "Diamonds Are Forever", the lame techie who is doing the radiation badge monitoring in Blofeld's facility building the laser device.
I'm probably the only human being on Earth who spotted him as the guy from "UFO." That's really pathetic.
Well. diskette drives are SLOW...
I just wonder how they get that 2GB of data onto the floppy - must have some really good compression utility...
Speaking of which, In X-men 2, why did Mystique print all that crap out of Stryker's computer instead of putting it on a flash drive? Because it wouldn't be as suspenseful with Lady Deathstryke coming around the corner if she was using the flash drive...
Or maybe Stryker had all the USB ports locked down...He obviously was a security nut, since he had voice recognition on his password utility...
You probably could if you relied on the AI system in the alien ship to figure out that you're a dumb primate that can't code worth a shit and it helpfully fixed everything so that it worked properly.
In other words, aliens use the Microsoft concept of computer security - dumb everything down until an ape could break in.
Actually she had to click on it while doing CTRL-SHIFT...
If that makes it better for you...
So she called up a Web page from a floppy - I've put Web pages on floppies. Maybe it was a 2.44MB floppy?
The important thing is that they filmed the last part of the movie in San Francisco - at Moscone Center. The scene where she's in the evil corporation looking out the window at the responding fire department is in a building I recognized from the view from the window.
Note to self: Call Dick to find out where the suitcase actually is. -GWB
Since we're reminiscing, how about the Altair? I visited the third computer store in the nation - the Real Oregon Computer Store - the day before it opened, in Eugene, Oregon, in 1976 or 1977 (can't remember the exact year.)
I played with a Processor Tech machine that actually had an ASCII terminal connected - the Altairs were all connected to Teletypes. I played one of the first asteroid shoot down games, wasted two hours, and swore never to play another computer game (and held to it for some years.)
Somebody wrote a routine to simulate the noises of sex on a Teletype by banging the print head. The code had to be entered in the Altair through the front panel by flipping switches. Some of these guys could enter code almost as fast as by typing.
I later owned a Radio Shack Model I - cassette tape data storage! 48K of RAM! CP/M!
The "chick" was Ally Sheedy, possibly the least "hot" actress in Hollywood - but yeah, she was cute then.
The fun part of War Games was realizing later that all the computer displays were being done by a couple ancient (today) 8-bit microcomputers from a company that doesn't exist today. And also realizing that none of the displays in the actual Cheyenne Mountain look anything like that level of cool - and are limited to displaying fifty targets at a time. It cost the US government several billions to upgrade Cheyenne to something more usable in the last fifteen or twenty years - your average desktop today has a lot more power than most of the machines they were defending the country with then.
"The herd of turtles that is the American people look to have wised up"
No, they haven't. Three years after the suckers allowed Bush to attack a country for no reason, we're about to attack Iran for no reason.
And THIS one won't be some little insurgency of 20,000-40,000 people, but a Vietnam-style war with hundreds of thousands of insurgents and it will be about two to four times as big as Vietnam in terms of US troops that have to be deployed, number of civilians killed, and
WAY more expensive than even Iraq (say, two or three trillion dollars over the next ten years.)
The US's greatest military disaster in history is about to happen.
And at least half the US public - and virtually all of the media - is behind it.
No, they haven't learned a goddamn thing.
Hatsumi is the real deal - the only real deal.
The rest of you can stuff your Shang-Chi comics up your ass.
Talking about Hatsumi like the posts I've seen here is like talking about Linus Torvalds (or any top programmer - take your pick) as if he just learned Basic and had written his first "Hello World" program.
Not that Hatsumi himself would care - a bunch of dumb American geeks aren't going to do his reputation any harm.
It'll work - I've been sharing a half dozen or more multi-gig FAT32 partitions with various Linux versions and various Windows versions (currently Mandriva 2006 and Windows XP Pro) for the last four years.
There are even a couple of utilities (some open source, some commercial) that will let you go the other way and let Windows read and (perhaps) write to an Ext2/3 Linux file system, although I don't make much use of them myself. A few times when I was under RH 7.3, I used Explore2fs from Windows to look at the Linux side of my system.
I got four out of eight wrong, but then I don't use any of the P2P programs listed, so I'm not up on the current ones as to which has spyware embedded. Of course, I KNEW Kazaa did, so that one was easy. I've never used BearShare or eMule and never heard of the other one.
Since I run Firefox with no ActiveX, and on the Windows side I run at least four antispyware programs, I'd say my performance on the quix isn't terribly relevant.
Also, the fact that the SITE has downloads with spyware doesn't necessarily mean that any specific SOFTWARE I download has it. I tend to get my freeware from sites that check for that sort of thing anyway. And I never download crap software like screensavers, smilies, and the like. If I get a smilie, it's an animated GIF. I only download utilities that seem to have been written by someone with a clue.
I'd say this is hype from the security software guys again. I'm sure a better quix could be developed - but it wouldn't matter since most people aren't concerned about computer security anyway - as the horrible results demonstrate.
Teach people to dump IE and ActiveX and design the browsers to turn off scripting and applets by default and provide prompts and sandboxes, and spyware will go the way of the dodo.
I agree - ebooks are fairly easy to find on Usenet and the Web. Any ebook will have its DRM cracked sooner or later and be fully available in both places.
The textbook publishers are going the way of the music CD makers - they are charging too high a price for something to people who aren't willing to pay that price regardless of the value they see in the product.
I've had textbooks in the last four years at City College of San Francisco that cost over $100! I don't care what the limited market is for a textbook, that price is simply nuts. It's a BOOK, for Christ's sakes!
Nanotech will obsolete all this stuff a couple decades later.
Nanotech will subsume biotech because biotech is just a specific way of organizing molecoles. Nanotech is all about organizing molecules of any kind.
In other words, biotech will become obsolete because having a biological basis for sentience - not necessarily omitting biological principles of organization entirely, however - will be replaced by other mechanical bases.
Even before that, nanotech will be used to revamp human biology. I don't see any point in "redesigning" the human body in the manner suggested when the body as it exists is perfectly adequate once its flaws and limitations are mitigated by nanotech enhancements.
Think "Bionic Man" before you think genetic re-engineering - then combine the two which is more likely to be done than complete genetic re-engineering. Long before complete genetic re-engineering is both feasible and desireable for humans, better technologies such as nanotech will be available.
Nice speculation, though.
That's true, but at one time I recall Larry Ellison touting the notion that Oracle's DB could end up being an actual operating system to compete with Windows. That was related IIRC to the concept of Windows having that database-like file system that Microsoft has never gotten working.
It never happened, but I suspect something like that is in the back of his mind when he contemplates running his own Linux distro.
In other words, tightly integrating the Oracle database and development tools into the Linux OS would pretty much make it easier for database servers to be set up. Now you have to install the OS, then tweak the OS to run Oracle and then install the DB. If Oracle did that already in their own distro, you just download the whole thing, blow it onto a server, and you're good to go.
Of course, they could still sell the DB for other OS's and distros, but it would be pretty clear which one most people would buy. So they'd probably not lose many customers who want to run the DB on another OS, and they'd probably make up for that by having a combined OS/DB package.
I'm not crazy about the idea of Larry buying one of the top two or three major distros, since essentially I don't think he would support them as "general purpose" distros anymore. They would be more for bundling the DB and that's it.
On the other hand, I wouldn't mind Oracle doing its own distro - first because IF (and that's a big if) they executed well, it might be a great distro - or alternatively, if they merely used it to bundle the DB, it wouldn't have a particularly big impact on the other Linux distros anyway - but it WOULD make Linux a hair more acceptable in some corporations.
No, no, no.
It's "Larry Linux"!
Larry wants to take the name away from Linus! After all, everybody likes Linus and nobody likes Larry!
I'm not gonna admit to wanting one, no, sirree!
/. - who needs one?
Besides, this is
Can you say "Prune Juice"?
I knew you could...