Speech recognition does *not* "work great" for cell phones. Every new phone and/or new firmware upgrade, I try again to teach my phone to understand me, and each time I get embarrassed the first time I try to use it in public. The experience is similar to William H. Macy's in Wild Hogs.
"Call mother-in-law"
"Did you say, 'Hot Mothers in Slaw'?"
"Call mother in law!"
"Did you say 'my brother's my pa'?"
"Call. Mother. In. Law."
"Did you say, 'Call Hooters'?"
"What?"
"Did you say, 'What'?"
I do not know why this is so, but speech recognition does not work reliably enough to be other than a toy in any application I've ever seen. It exists for the amusement of those watching the poor sucker trying to use it. Sometimes I imagine a bunch of programmers in Taiwan laughing their asses off.
I'm a FIOS customer also, first with a business account and later with a consumer account.
Business FIOS accounts do not block port 80 and give you a large (more than I needed) number of static IP addresses. The only issues I had were (a) the install guy had no idea how to set up the router for static IP addresses. He finally gave up and I did the config after a lot of research and experimentation, (b) Verizon has no idea how to handle service calls for a business account from a residence. In several places in the process you're automatically routed based on your home phone number. Since I had a residence phone, I'd get only so far, and then the next person I'd talk to was a consumer FIOS rep who couldn't help me. Finally after a lot of complaining, a service manager gave me her personal phone number to call when I had issues.
I finally canceled the business account when we dumped DirecTV (a whole 'nother story) and we got the package deal from Verizon for phone, TV and Internet. My main issue was whether they blocked port 80. I was assured they did not.
We made the switch and... they block port 80. I know you had a different experience, but I'm telling you port 80 to my house is definitely blocked. I switched my websites to dyndns and got everything running, but it was a hassle and I was down for a few days.
These days, the service itself seems to be reliable, but I've been through three routers in less than a year. They work for awhile and then just give up. Hard reset doesn't help. I think the local depot in our area must have gotten a bad batch.
I'm wondering, though -- if you're paying $200 a month, whether you have a business account. That would explain port 80 being unblocked.
All things considered, I still wouldn't switch to Comcast. Just saying, every company has issues, even though not everyone experiences them.
And when Joe Sixpacks all over the country move in mass to another ISP, Comcast will ask for, and receive, bailout money from the government to stay in business.
I wrote to a local news host about this but don't know if they ever followed up on it.
I'd like to preface this by saying I am a former Comcast customer, and switched to Verizon only because they offered (at the time) better performance at a lower price. I think it's good to have multiple companies competing for broadband access and don't wish either company ill.
That said, last week a Comcast salesperson came to our door. I have a bum leg so wife answered the door, but I could hear the conversation.
He tried to sell her on switching to Comcast from our current Verizon FIOS account. My wife said no thank you, we will be staying with our current service.
He wanted to talk about the advantages of switching to Comcast, and she repeated again we weren't interested.
He tried to hand the flyer to her probably five times during the conversation, and she refused to take it. During this time the salesperson got more and more upset. His voice got louder and louder and he became argumentative "Why won't you look at this? What is your problem?"
Wife finally had enough and closed the door. At that point, the salesperson screamed at her "You aren't going to have any choice pretty soon! You might as well switch now!".
Ok, again, I think competition is good, but... what the hell was that?
A few seconds with a calculator shows that 136/206 is less than two thirds. For the relentlessly pedantic, it works out to.66019... which is clearly less than.66666666...
> If a test is run the indicates you have a genetic disposition toward diabetes, wouldn't you want to know?
That's completely different.
Behavior is influenced by environment, but in unpredictable ways. Two kids will live in the same home and grow up to be completely different. Kids brought up in affluent homes will do crimes. Kids brought up in tin shacks will grow up to be President.
I have an alcoholic aunt who's three kids are all teetotalers. This is not bucking the trend -- they were very much influenced by their mother -- just not in the way this type of analysis would predict.
My grandparents lived through the depression, lived very frugally, worked hard, and made a good life for themselves. Both daughters were alcoholics spendthrifts who couldn't hold down a job or a relationship. Of the five grandchildren, four are leading productive lives, and one is bankrupt, on welfare and married to an alcoholic. All the grandkids were influenced by their environment, and most decided they didn't want to live like that.
I suspect that the best such analysis will be able to do is predict small percentage variation in very large numbers, which is basically useless to predict individual behavior.
Psychology class was a long time ago, but I seem to remember that a kid is just as likely to decide to be the opposite of their parents as they are to be identical. Thus, a violent father can breed a pacifist son or a violent son -- it's kind of up to the son. The former doesn't make the news, and the latter does, which tends to skew our perception.
I seem to remember that people used to measure the size and shape of heads, location of eyes and ears and so forth to predict whether you're going to be a criminal. Glad to see we've moved so much beyond that now.
One day I found that my bank account had been cleaned out. There were a massive number of $50 charges from one vendor -- essentially they kept charging $50 until they got a decline. The charges had occurred after 11:00 PM and before 5:00 AM local time, which made me think that time zones were involved.
I called the bank immediately and reported it, had the card frozen but by that time there was only about $20 left.
I did some research from the transaction information -- the company had an address in California that appeared to be fake, an 800 number that was disconnected, and the domain was owned by a different company in Korea.
I printed all this out, took it to the credit union. They had me fill out some forms, and gave me access to some money (I was pretty much broke) while they worked on it.
Within 3 days all my money was returned to me. It's possible that the credit union fronted me the cash while they worked with the authorities -- they never said. But as far as I was concerned, the event was over in less than a week.
Maybe it makes a difference which bank you use. Or maybe it's the difference between a bank and a credit union. I dunno.
...where the only music will come from mandatory RIAA approved devices spaced every 20 feet or so, with no channel selector, volume control or on/off switch. Apple, Microsoft and Google will fight mercilessly to become the sole supplier of the devices.
Music will be interrupted every few seconds by a blast of digital noise to close the "analog hole".
Squads of media police will raid underground speakeasies featuring live music. Humming or singing will be considered an unauthorized live performance punishable by heavy fines and imprisonment. A "must listen, must pay" business model will shore up falling profits by insuring that everyone participates in an equitable manner. People crossing the border will be required to pay a "music tax" to cover the profits lost by listening to non-sanctioned media.
Personal devices will still exist but will only play the same content available on the officially sanctioned feed. There will be a brief underground economy in MP3 players, but that will pretty much end when the national guard crushes the last stronghold of black market pre-DRM iPods.
With profits assured, media companies will tout their products as "the best in history" but in actual practice will abandon any remaining commitment to quality and diversity. Selena Gomez and the Jonas Brothers will be named national heroes by the President.
The great majority of the public will just accept this.
2. The iPad has a 1GHz low power processor! If that is not "laptop performance" of at least a couple years ago, I don't know what is?
Well, perhaps, but more importantly, it has a 1 Ghz processor now, in this day and age, and offers an acceptable user experience. Microsoft has nothing current that will give users anything close to an acceptable experience on the same grade of hardware. This is playing brilliantly to Apple's strengths and Microsoft's weakness. To have decent performance, Windows based tablets will have to be much faster hardware, with the corresponding heat, size and battery life issues.
On the other hand, when the inevitable Windows 7 tablets deluge the market, they will almost certainly have a replaceable battery.
The iPhone is a greater web device perhaps, but a lesser phone. I've been using a better phone (as in phone) with features that the iPhone still does not have since before the iPhone was released.
The iPhone is shiny and fun and has cute graphics and lots of Oooooo factor. It's still a rather pedestrian phone. It's great for impressing people at Starbucks, but if one does a significant amount of business on one's phone, there are better solutions and have been for some time.
Popularity does not equate to either quality or functionality. If you really want to take the opposing view on that statement, we'll need to discuss the latest Selena Gomez album.
I'm sure this is going to get me modded down "-5 iPhone hater". I'm not really, I just wouldn't care to own one. (That's enough to be labeled "hater" or "moron" with some people.)
Caveat: I'm not a MacHead. I think the iPhone is a shiny toy that barely deserves to be called a phone. The iPad as it stands now is a rather lackluster first effort that would have failed immediately without Apple's mindshare behind it.
That said, the problem with Jupiter was not the concept. The buying public didn't just decide that there was no use for a tablet back then, but suddenly there is now.
The problem with Jupiter was that it ran WinCE.
The issue was pretty much the same then as it was when Microsoft very nearly missed out on the netbook explosion. Namely, Microsoft didn't have an (current at the time) OS with a sufficiently low resource footprint to run on the device. So they dust off WinCE, again, and consumers find, again, that WinCE has the same interoperability issues as any random free Linux distribution, except, you know, not free. Besides being ugly and less advanced than just about anything. And so the device, through no fault of it's own, fails in the marketplace.
And Microsoft learns again that the core reason we run Windows is that everyone else is running Windows, and some other OS, that looks like Windows but isn't really, is not going to fly.
They got the netbook market back partly through strategic decisions -- extending the life of XP -- but netbooks still had to become faster and more power-hungry -- bending the original paradigm a bit out of shape -- to allow Microsoft to compete in that arena.
Hardware and battery technology has improved, and Microsoft with Windows 7 seems to actually have gotten the message that you can't just pile on the bloat with each new release and expect Moore's Law to save you. I suspect there will be some new tablets limping along with Windows 7 Home on the market in a very short time. But I wouldn't be surprised at all if Microsoft blew the dust off WinCE and gave it one more go on the tablet form factor. Hope springs eternal, especially if you believe your own marketing copy.
However, on these devices, the real competition is from lighter weight operating systems with a sufficient collection of integrated applications, and these days that means Android or iPhone OS. As has been said many times in the past, the only product Microsoft has to compete in this area is (still) WinCE/PocketPC/WindowsMobile, and the user experience on that software platform is dismal. Windows 7 provides a sufficient experience, but is probably too resource hungry to run on a tablet of reasonable size and cost with reasonable battery life.
On the other hand, I thought for sure Microsoft was going to lose the netbook market, and here we are today with most netbooks running Windows. It'll be interesting to see what rabbit they pull out of their... um, hats... this time.
At first glance this appears to be a reasonable strategy. But consider that their credit cards represent a few thousand at most whereas having their password compromised by a determined attacker could result in the loss of millions. Or worse, if it's a government facility.
And before you mention RSA tokens or the like, remember that the token is probably on their keychain in the front pocket of the same pants that contain the yellow sticky with their password in the back pocket. Hung up in the changing room at the bath house, if a congressman. It's not a complete solution for an attacker, but it makes breaking in a lot easier.
As a long time sysadmin, my experience has been, the more onerous the password aging algorithm, the more likely that passwords will be on yellow stickies under the keyboard.
For instance, if your password expires monthly and you're required to pick a password with upper case, lower case, numbers and symbols, I guarantee that the majority of your users will write it down and stick it to something easily accessible.
If you get really draconian about keeping passwords on stickies on the monitor or under the keyboard, they'll keep it in their pocketbook or stuck to the back of their cell phone, which is difficult to track and actually a worse security hole (because the building at least has physical security).
My opinion is that password aging and password complexity rules are a managerial line item, not really a security strategy. A true security strategy is a combination of good logging, regular analysis, and tools like password breakers.
> Total Recall was not a "PKD movie", Total Recall doesn't pretend to be the same story as the PKD novel; Blade Runner does.
If you say so. I don't remember seeing that declaration in the credits of either film. Unless you mean that since TR was a Verhoeven film, it is by definition not the same story as the source material. I might agree with that.
Ok, you've proven your PKD geek cred, but let's not be disingenuous. The number of androids was an editing issue, not a script error. Ok, they should have gone back and redubbed the dialog, but it's just not that important an error. Neither is the machine going right when Deckard says go left. These don't make it a bad movie. What made the theatrical release a bad movie was that terrible ending. Thankfully fixed in the director's cut.
The book is long and dense with subject matter. There's only so much you can cram into 117 minutes.
From a script standpoint, Impostor was really well done. Almost word-for-word. I just think it was 45 minutes of story artificially stretched to feature length, and it dragged in spots.
Minority report, ok. I don't like Tom Cruise, and I thought there were too many gratuitous scenes, but ok. But are you serious about Total Recall? That represents pretty much everything I don't want to see in a PKD movie. Although, I have to admit, the first 20 minutes followed the short story very closely. It was the entire rest of the film that stank.
I'd forgotten about Next. I would grudgingly say it's worth watching. Scanner, bleh. Screamers, bleh.
The problem is, most of the adaptations, so far, sucketh mightely. I'm not talking about major changes to the story line -- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (blade runner (the director's cut)) took major liberties with the plot but was still a pretty good flick that remained true to the spirit of the story. Impostor was pretty accurate, although somewhat lackluster. But for the most part, they've just been Welfare for the Stars -- the opportunity to pay a Reeves or Affleck a bazillion dollars to wander around expressionless, mouthing banalities.
I'd much rather see a little film with unknowns from a director that actually "gets" PKD than yet another lame "blockbuster" with a star-studded cast.
Slashdot Mirror
With MW5 in legal hell, this might be the next best reason to go out and buy another joystick.
Speech recognition does *not* "work great" for cell phones. Every new phone and/or new firmware upgrade, I try again to teach my phone to understand me, and each time I get embarrassed the first time I try to use it in public. The experience is similar to William H. Macy's in Wild Hogs.
"Call mother-in-law"
"Did you say, 'Hot Mothers in Slaw'?"
"Call mother in law!"
"Did you say 'my brother's my pa'?"
"Call. Mother. In. Law."
"Did you say, 'Call Hooters'?"
"What?"
"Did you say, 'What'?"
I do not know why this is so, but speech recognition does not work reliably enough to be other than a toy in any application I've ever seen. It exists for the amusement of those watching the poor sucker trying to use it. Sometimes I imagine a bunch of programmers in Taiwan laughing their asses off.
And the first product will be... ...the slap?
I'm a FIOS customer also, first with a business account and later with a consumer account.
Business FIOS accounts do not block port 80 and give you a large (more than I needed) number of static IP addresses. The only issues I had were (a) the install guy had no idea how to set up the router for static IP addresses. He finally gave up and I did the config after a lot of research and experimentation, (b) Verizon has no idea how to handle service calls for a business account from a residence. In several places in the process you're automatically routed based on your home phone number. Since I had a residence phone, I'd get only so far, and then the next person I'd talk to was a consumer FIOS rep who couldn't help me. Finally after a lot of complaining, a service manager gave me her personal phone number to call when I had issues.
I finally canceled the business account when we dumped DirecTV (a whole 'nother story) and we got the package deal from Verizon for phone, TV and Internet. My main issue was whether they blocked port 80. I was assured they did not.
We made the switch and... they block port 80. I know you had a different experience, but I'm telling you port 80 to my house is definitely blocked. I switched my websites to dyndns and got everything running, but it was a hassle and I was down for a few days.
These days, the service itself seems to be reliable, but I've been through three routers in less than a year. They work for awhile and then just give up. Hard reset doesn't help. I think the local depot in our area must have gotten a bad batch.
I'm wondering, though -- if you're paying $200 a month, whether you have a business account. That would explain port 80 being unblocked.
All things considered, I still wouldn't switch to Comcast. Just saying, every company has issues, even though not everyone experiences them.
And when Joe Sixpacks all over the country move in mass to another ISP, Comcast will ask for, and receive, bailout money from the government to stay in business.
I wrote to a local news host about this but don't know if they ever followed up on it.
I'd like to preface this by saying I am a former Comcast customer, and switched to Verizon only because they offered (at the time) better performance at a lower price. I think it's good to have multiple companies competing for broadband access and don't wish either company ill.
That said, last week a Comcast salesperson came to our door. I have a bum leg so wife answered the door, but I could hear the conversation.
He tried to sell her on switching to Comcast from our current Verizon FIOS account. My wife said no thank you, we will be staying with our current service.
He wanted to talk about the advantages of switching to Comcast, and she repeated again we weren't interested.
He tried to hand the flyer to her probably five times during the conversation, and she refused to take it. During this time the salesperson got more and more upset. His voice got louder and louder and he became argumentative "Why won't you look at this? What is your problem?"
Wife finally had enough and closed the door. At that point, the salesperson screamed at her "You aren't going to have any choice pretty soon! You might as well switch now!".
Ok, again, I think competition is good, but... what the hell was that?
I am so so soooooooo liking that.
A few seconds with a calculator shows that 136/206 is less than two thirds. For the relentlessly pedantic, it works out to .66019... which is clearly less than .66666666...
> If a test is run the indicates you have a genetic disposition toward diabetes, wouldn't you want to know?
That's completely different.
Behavior is influenced by environment, but in unpredictable ways. Two kids will live in the same home and grow up to be completely different. Kids brought up in affluent homes will do crimes. Kids brought up in tin shacks will grow up to be President.
I have an alcoholic aunt who's three kids are all teetotalers. This is not bucking the trend -- they were very much influenced by their mother -- just not in the way this type of analysis would predict.
My grandparents lived through the depression, lived very frugally, worked hard, and made a good life for themselves. Both daughters were alcoholics spendthrifts who couldn't hold down a job or a relationship. Of the five grandchildren, four are leading productive lives, and one is bankrupt, on welfare and married to an alcoholic. All the grandkids were influenced by their environment, and most decided they didn't want to live like that.
I suspect that the best such analysis will be able to do is predict small percentage variation in very large numbers, which is basically useless to predict individual behavior.
Psychology class was a long time ago, but I seem to remember that a kid is just as likely to decide to be the opposite of their parents as they are to be identical. Thus, a violent father can breed a pacifist son or a violent son -- it's kind of up to the son. The former doesn't make the news, and the latter does, which tends to skew our perception.
I seem to remember that people used to measure the size and shape of heads, location of eyes and ears and so forth to predict whether you're going to be a criminal. Glad to see we've moved so much beyond that now.
One day I found that my bank account had been cleaned out. There were a massive number of $50 charges from one vendor -- essentially they kept charging $50 until they got a decline. The charges had occurred after 11:00 PM and before 5:00 AM local time, which made me think that time zones were involved.
I called the bank immediately and reported it, had the card frozen but by that time there was only about $20 left.
I did some research from the transaction information -- the company had an address in California that appeared to be fake, an 800 number that was disconnected, and the domain was owned by a different company in Korea.
I printed all this out, took it to the credit union. They had me fill out some forms, and gave me access to some money (I was pretty much broke) while they worked on it.
Within 3 days all my money was returned to me. It's possible that the credit union fronted me the cash while they worked with the authorities -- they never said. But as far as I was concerned, the event was over in less than a week.
Maybe it makes a difference which bank you use. Or maybe it's the difference between a bank and a credit union. I dunno.
I never did figure out how they got my numbers.
Music will be interrupted every few seconds by a blast of digital noise to close the "analog hole".
Squads of media police will raid underground speakeasies featuring live music. Humming or singing will be considered an unauthorized live performance punishable by heavy fines and imprisonment. A "must listen, must pay" business model will shore up falling profits by insuring that everyone participates in an equitable manner. People crossing the border will be required to pay a "music tax" to cover the profits lost by listening to non-sanctioned media.
Personal devices will still exist but will only play the same content available on the officially sanctioned feed. There will be a brief underground economy in MP3 players, but that will pretty much end when the national guard crushes the last stronghold of black market pre-DRM iPods.
With profits assured, media companies will tout their products as "the best in history" but in actual practice will abandon any remaining commitment to quality and diversity. Selena Gomez and the Jonas Brothers will be named national heroes by the President.
The great majority of the public will just accept this.
2. The iPad has a 1GHz low power processor! If that is not "laptop performance" of at least a couple years ago, I don't know what is?
Well, perhaps, but more importantly, it has a 1 Ghz processor now, in this day and age, and offers an acceptable user experience. Microsoft has nothing current that will give users anything close to an acceptable experience on the same grade of hardware. This is playing brilliantly to Apple's strengths and Microsoft's weakness. To have decent performance, Windows based tablets will have to be much faster hardware, with the corresponding heat, size and battery life issues.
On the other hand, when the inevitable Windows 7 tablets deluge the market, they will almost certainly have a replaceable battery.
Paying taxes gave me Tourette's Syndrome. While I'm writing the check I curse uncontrollably. I wonder if I should sue.
This is pointless and off topic, but fine.
The iPhone is a greater web device perhaps, but a lesser phone. I've been using a better phone (as in phone) with features that the iPhone still does not have since before the iPhone was released.
The iPhone is shiny and fun and has cute graphics and lots of Oooooo factor. It's still a rather pedestrian phone. It's great for impressing people at Starbucks, but if one does a significant amount of business on one's phone, there are better solutions and have been for some time.
Popularity does not equate to either quality or functionality. If you really want to take the opposing view on that statement, we'll need to discuss the latest Selena Gomez album.
I'm sure this is going to get me modded down "-5 iPhone hater". I'm not really, I just wouldn't care to own one. (That's enough to be labeled "hater" or "moron" with some people.)
Caveat: I'm not a MacHead. I think the iPhone is a shiny toy that barely deserves to be called a phone. The iPad as it stands now is a rather lackluster first effort that would have failed immediately without Apple's mindshare behind it.
That said, the problem with Jupiter was not the concept. The buying public didn't just decide that there was no use for a tablet back then, but suddenly there is now.
The problem with Jupiter was that it ran WinCE.
The issue was pretty much the same then as it was when Microsoft very nearly missed out on the netbook explosion. Namely, Microsoft didn't have an (current at the time) OS with a sufficiently low resource footprint to run on the device. So they dust off WinCE, again, and consumers find, again, that WinCE has the same interoperability issues as any random free Linux distribution, except, you know, not free. Besides being ugly and less advanced than just about anything. And so the device, through no fault of it's own, fails in the marketplace.
And Microsoft learns again that the core reason we run Windows is that everyone else is running Windows, and some other OS, that looks like Windows but isn't really, is not going to fly.
They got the netbook market back partly through strategic decisions -- extending the life of XP -- but netbooks still had to become faster and more power-hungry -- bending the original paradigm a bit out of shape -- to allow Microsoft to compete in that arena.
Hardware and battery technology has improved, and Microsoft with Windows 7 seems to actually have gotten the message that you can't just pile on the bloat with each new release and expect Moore's Law to save you. I suspect there will be some new tablets limping along with Windows 7 Home on the market in a very short time. But I wouldn't be surprised at all if Microsoft blew the dust off WinCE and gave it one more go on the tablet form factor. Hope springs eternal, especially if you believe your own marketing copy.
However, on these devices, the real competition is from lighter weight operating systems with a sufficient collection of integrated applications, and these days that means Android or iPhone OS. As has been said many times in the past, the only product Microsoft has to compete in this area is (still) WinCE/PocketPC/WindowsMobile, and the user experience on that software platform is dismal. Windows 7 provides a sufficient experience, but is probably too resource hungry to run on a tablet of reasonable size and cost with reasonable battery life.
On the other hand, I thought for sure Microsoft was going to lose the netbook market, and here we are today with most netbooks running Windows. It'll be interesting to see what rabbit they pull out of their... um, hats... this time.
At first glance this appears to be a reasonable strategy. But consider that their credit cards represent a few thousand at most whereas having their password compromised by a determined attacker could result in the loss of millions. Or worse, if it's a government facility.
And before you mention RSA tokens or the like, remember that the token is probably on their keychain in the front pocket of the same pants that contain the yellow sticky with their password in the back pocket. Hung up in the changing room at the bath house, if a congressman. It's not a complete solution for an attacker, but it makes breaking in a lot easier.
As a long time sysadmin, my experience has been, the more onerous the password aging algorithm, the more likely that passwords will be on yellow stickies under the keyboard.
For instance, if your password expires monthly and you're required to pick a password with upper case, lower case, numbers and symbols, I guarantee that the majority of your users will write it down and stick it to something easily accessible.
If you get really draconian about keeping passwords on stickies on the monitor or under the keyboard, they'll keep it in their pocketbook or stuck to the back of their cell phone, which is difficult to track and actually a worse security hole (because the building at least has physical security).
My opinion is that password aging and password complexity rules are a managerial line item, not really a security strategy. A true security strategy is a combination of good logging, regular analysis, and tools like password breakers.
> Total Recall was not a "PKD movie", Total Recall doesn't pretend to be the same story as the PKD novel; Blade Runner does.
If you say so. I don't remember seeing that declaration in the credits of either film. Unless you mean that since TR was a Verhoeven film, it is by definition not the same story as the source material. I might agree with that.
Oh, well, that's ok then.
Ok, you've proven your PKD geek cred, but let's not be disingenuous. The number of androids was an editing issue, not a script error. Ok, they should have gone back and redubbed the dialog, but it's just not that important an error. Neither is the machine going right when Deckard says go left. These don't make it a bad movie. What made the theatrical release a bad movie was that terrible ending. Thankfully fixed in the director's cut.
The book is long and dense with subject matter. There's only so much you can cram into 117 minutes.
From a script standpoint, Impostor was really well done. Almost word-for-word. I just think it was 45 minutes of story artificially stretched to feature length, and it dragged in spots.
Minority report, ok. I don't like Tom Cruise, and I thought there were too many gratuitous scenes, but ok. But are you serious about Total Recall? That represents pretty much everything I don't want to see in a PKD movie. Although, I have to admit, the first 20 minutes followed the short story very closely. It was the entire rest of the film that stank.
I'd forgotten about Next. I would grudgingly say it's worth watching. Scanner, bleh. Screamers, bleh.
The problem is, most of the adaptations, so far, sucketh mightely. I'm not talking about major changes to the story line -- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (blade runner (the director's cut)) took major liberties with the plot but was still a pretty good flick that remained true to the spirit of the story. Impostor was pretty accurate, although somewhat lackluster. But for the most part, they've just been Welfare for the Stars -- the opportunity to pay a Reeves or Affleck a bazillion dollars to wander around expressionless, mouthing banalities.
I'd much rather see a little film with unknowns from a director that actually "gets" PKD than yet another lame "blockbuster" with a star-studded cast.