if you're bored and you don't read at -1, you HAVE to read the comment this is in reference to. It's pretty funny, if you've ever found a troll funny (I personally do sometimes).
my lame ass attempt at a public service announcement;-) And of course this is only good until the moderators wipe this away too . . . at least some funny points to the original, k?:-)
The PSX2 is set for a Christmas 2000 release in the US, Spring in Japan. I could wait "a couple months", but what good is a game if I can't read what it says? And even so, a PSX2 is not going to make Drakan or any of the other pc games I play run any quicker, until the software is available for it.
But I agree. The PSX2 is going to kick severely large ammounts of ass. And I'd rather shell out for a Geforce now anyway
Just out of curiosity, does ANYONE enforce the.org domain for "non-profit organizations"? I'm a fan of the band Foetus, and they have a.org page, but last I checked there are very few non-profit musicians. I love User Friendly, but does Illiad draw just for the overall benefit for his readers? There's alot of talk about Slashdot being changed to a.com by people here, but I wonder does it really matter? It seems to me that domain names work on the "once you've grabbed them it doesn't matter what you do" philosophy. Should this change? How about we discuss it here.
Shesh. Pathetic. If anything he ought to be flattered; he'd been out of the public eye for a while, and despite the fact that it IS a pokemon we're talking about, it's not like he's being slandered. If anything, he ought to sue every entry level psychology course that DOES make fun of him when they introduce parapsychology.
Besides, there's a little thing known as Fair Use. Ask Negativland . . . they've been fighting this battle longer than anyone I personally know. Don't get me wrong, I've nothing against suing the Big Evil Corporation(tm), but I DO have something against frivolous lawsuits.
I belive that I am the only choice for best dressed; I won't repeat my reasons, but I will add that I will personally bake the aforementioned cookies myself. They shall be unlike any cookie you have tasted before, and oh you shall like the cookie.
oh, that and the fact that none of you really know me, and it would be silly and fun:-)
Carol Cleveland was the girl who was part of the Monty Python troupe. According to the bio from the Flying Circus card set (hey, if I wasn't a geek, I wouldn't be here!!!)
Carol was born in London but moved to America at age five. She was schooled in Texas and California before returning to England in 1960 to study at R.A.D.A. Her early tv credits include The Saint, The Avengers, Man in a Suitcase, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and the comidies Doctors at Large, Father Dear Father and The Two Ronnies. Aside from her appearances in the Monty Python's Flying Circus series for BBC, she has been featured in all the Python films, stage shows and record albums, becoming known as The Python Girl More recently she has been seen in Are You Being Served? and Only Fools and Horses. She has done much stage work, covering a wide variety of comedy drama and pantomimes. She has also written and performed her own one-woman show entitled Carol Cleveland Reveals All, an autobiographical and humorous look at the glamour business.
I don't disagree with you at all. The war did wonders for our economy, and I wouldn't be surprised if the strategists were just ITCHING for Pearl Harbour to happen so we could leap on both fronts like a starved dog. I agree that the many people who agreed with what Hitler preached were just as guilty as he.
But my point, and the reason I used him as an example, is that we need a central figure to hate. It's so much easier to focus on Bill Gates rather than Microsoft itself, or even certain parts of Microsoft (I think notepad is a pretty okay editor;-). If we didn't leap on the Y2K issue when it was realized, then one person would have been singled out for the masses. The geek martyr, and it would have been his/her fault.
Just like Hitler. In our history books, it's his fault. Too much Sluggy lately; I hear the voice of Kiki ringing in my head ("stay good, Adolph, stay good!!!")
I was trying to think of what I'd qualify for. Most people don't know who the hell I am, and usually people aren't too kind to my postings (after all I don't like South Park;-), so I figured that I have to qualify for best dressed. Why? Let me count the ways:
my large collection of silk paisly shirts. Paisly is ALWAYS cool:-)
black buttondown with black tie and somehow look neither goth nor Johnny Cash.
proud owner of the Ugliest Jacket Known To Man(tm) . . . I'd show it to you, but you likely won't want to see it;-)
1999 was the end of a long reign for one pork pie hat, and the beginning of a new one. Corderoy this time. How can you go wrong?!?!?!
t-shirts ranging from O'Reily, to Sluggy Freelance, to Swans. Something for everyone
because you know you should love me *bats eyelashes*
so vote for me. I'll give you a cookie. One per vote if I win:-)
Since the media seems to be hopping on the "stupid geeks, working us up over nothing" bandwagon, despite the fact that they were the ones spilling hype themselves, it only seems natural what will follow next. The next major forseen disaster will go unacknowledged. We'll jump and cry and scramble to get things in working order, but the media will dismiss it as "crying wolf" again, and only the employers with the most vision and foresight will think to fund any emergency efforts.
That's the problem with things being fixed and going well; there doesn't appear to be a problem at all. If Hitler was killed before he rose to power, no one would realize the crisis averted, because millions of people might not have died. Ours is a culture that thrives on villians, not heros. Horror movies get hundreds of sequels, but hero-central films are lucky to get a few. So rather than praising the computer community for taking care of a potentially dangerous issue, we're going to be seen as freaks who overreact.
Can you confirm this? More importantly, can you ship me a bottle or two? Oh, and if they EVER realease the windows gum; I'm all over that.
Think about it. The ability to grind windows between your teeth and chew angrily for hours and hours. Suffering is much more important than death, and quite frankly, chewing on windows cds doesn't taste as good as you might at first suspect.
That was one of the best Slashdot interviews I've seen since...I don't know when. It's good to see someone (or a group) speak thoroughly and clearly. And I'm sure that comes from years of dealing with aggressive press who don't want to listen.
But the more I think about it, I really don't mind that these guys are the ones the press run to rather than say CotDC. I don't find myself disagreeing with them, and they're far more eloquent than I could be in the situation.
No one argues that hackers are mis-portrayed in the media. I think L0pht has the right idea: pro-active re-information. Don't wait until someone misuses the word "hacker" or what not to correct them. Tell them what it means. It's a find line between informative and over zealous (as a pagan who is neither wiccan nor satanic I have that problem all the time; but my beliefs allow explaining, not converting. I don't care if you disagree, so long as you made effort to understand). The next 10-20 years are going to be pretty frightening if we don't stay on top of information, and if the hackers are evil, then who is going to listen to them?
okay, now maybe I'm just being paranoid here, but let's look at the situation:
the russians are involved in armed conflict.
Boris makes a statement at a conference merely weeks ago that President Clinton has "forgotten Russia is a nuclear power"
Boris in his "farewell" speech APPOLOGIZES.
Boris hasn't been a bad leader. Not a great leader, but he's done some pretty good things in his term. Now, I suppose it's just the nice guy ethic to appologize for "dreams not coming true" and "mistakes" in his career. But this is from a man that has held fast to every decision he's made. Hell, that's part of why I've respected him.
Something's up. I mean, no way to tell until it happens, and I'm not about to go running for the bomb shelter, but this is quite definitely not a good sign. Time to read up on the man with the briefcase I suppose.
of COURSE. And you forgot Microsoft (the big one!), Sun and Compaq float on and off the boycott list every now and then, and we all have our personal lists;-)
seriously though, it's like shopping locally. You buy from the stores that give you good service. You don't from stores that piss you off. I feel strongly about supporting people I believe in. I personally won't buy any more DVDs until some sort of working linux player is available, and if the industry would have worked on it in the first place, this mess wouldn't have happened. It's a shame that the community had to be hurt by the lawsuit, but DeCSS was crippled not killed. If anything it forces anyone interested to work at it more on the individual level.
for the record, I have no intention of pirating. But I do miss when DVDs were $15-20 instead of closer to $30.
. . . but wasn't this what everyone else was saying the other day? I mean, it's good that it's coming from someone respectable in the Open Source world (oh, hush Stallman;-), and predictably it seems written to use a trivial(?) example to serve as evangelitical text to the non-believers. But at any rate, is this the place for it? I know I weigh Slashdot discussion (-inanities of course) almost as much as words from a "spokesman" for the community. I agree with what he says, but I'd have thought us discussing it would be all the swaying we need. I don't need top-level affirmation that what I believe is right.
I personally think (and hope ESR does too) that this is the sort of thing you post to a non-community news source. Let's face it, a good percentage of Slashdot readers are Open Source people. No need to preach to the converted. It's a great parable for the benefits of Open Source, but we know all that already.
Oh, and is this affecting Q3 too? I thought it was just relevant in Q1 (the game with the open source). I don't know; I'm a Drakan player;-)
Toolbox. I do alot of HTML (it's what I do for a living), and rather than deal with the subtle annoyances of an editor(I've yet to find one that lets me tailor all the automated tags) I keep a few "toolbox" text files with commonly used scripts and tags (particularly complicated tables and generic headers). Less time is spent typing when you're cutting and pasting, and you can spend more time working out the gritty bits. The only drawback is it's easy to not want to write ANY new code . . . just rehash old stuff. Then again, I've spent all morning refining a JavaScript search I wrote, and it's almost pretty as well as functional;-)
and this way you can keep your "text editor" pride;-)
Yeah, i'd love to too, but I haven't seen any SMP Athlons yet. Which isn't to say there won't be (and if anyone has any reviews/prices on a motherboard for such, post them!!!!). But that said, it would be interesting running a dual processer G4 against a K7-800 . . . or one of the Kryotech 1Ghz Athlons! I'm sure the G4 would win, but by how much?
Only in the world of lawyers can an article have a title like "Gold Diggers" be a positive image. I'll assume the follow up will be an article entitled "Ambulance Chasers" about an "innovative" group of lawyers who prowl for internet related injuries (after all, if people spend time somewhere, then someone can sue . ..)
Oh, I liked this bit too:
The "Au" in Aurigin and Aureka stands for the periodic symbol for gold. (And, yes, the company name and product name are puns for origin and eureka. Who said lawyers don't have senses of humor?)
No one ever said that. They just said lawyers don't have a GOOD sense of humor;-)
On, a serious note, I'm not sure what this article means. Obviously it's intended for the law community, but the urging to patent business METHODS?!?! A business method is useless unless you can get a large number of people to adopt/accept it, and who's going to if they have to pay royalties? Is there a patent for a location where you can exchange goods for money, and leave via a door? Sigh. Well, I'm not saying anything we don't all already know. Perhaps I ought to follow up on my patent for exchanging computer knowledge and skills for currency.
Rumor was a copy of SuSE Linux was going to be packed in with the game, but there are kernel requirements listed on the site. Did they opt not to include a distro? I thought that would have been a GREAT way to get more users . . .
It seems that the links have been to fatbrain.com lately anyway, so it's not so much of an issue. Of course, they're running NT with Active Server Pages, so there goes Geek Idealisim;-)
How effective will this be, really? I mean, yeah, a boycott is a fantastic way of protest, and I think this is a very worthy cause to protest. But really, when RMS speaks, who listens? Us. The geeks. The social idealists. The people who are 90% likely to be shopping from smaller independant retailers than someone like Amazon anyway. I know I try to feed as much of my purchases through the little guys as I can, and even when I DO go through a corporate monolith, I've only bought one or two things at Amazon.
So the message we're sending to Amazon is that people who didn't give them money will continue to not give them money? Again, it's all we can do, and a very commendable action, but will it really be more than a drop in the bucket? If anything, the publicity can't be great for them, but it'd be interesting to poll Amazon customers to see how many a) know who RMS is and b) cares what he has to say.
Hmmmm. Since I have the Shuttlecocks slashbox running, this story was in essence referenced twice on the Slashdot front page; that's got to count for something!
Seriously though, this one was cute, but far from the best. Hell, they've even done better Microsoft jokes. I'd include the links, but work, firewall, lalala . . . you know the deal. If you get bored, dig through the archives, a full 70-80% of the stuff is fantastic, and the weekly ratings are halarious.
The creator of Ren and Stimpy, John Icanneverrememberhowtospellhislastnamebutitstartsw ithaK has been running his Spumco website for a couple years now. Though not quite for the same reasons. He did it to push the envelope and have the freedom to create what he wanted to (after MTV networks turned Ren and Stimpy into a joke of itself. Compare the first seasons to the latter ones).
However, Parker and Stone are NOT exactly motivated by creativity here. It's a total money grab situation. They say "we've had offers before", and if one thing they've ALWAYS known how to merchandise thier product. They knew they could get a hefty sum rather than going out on thier own like Spumco. 10% of Shockwave is a nice pile of dimes. They're not making cartoons; they're making commercials. They sell Macromedia's software (which I do generally like; Fireworks is an excellent tool), and they sell thier own tv series. It's not like they're giving that up (John K. doesn't do tv very often anymore . . . occasionally, but from what I understand he doesn't WANT another regular series).
And if that fails, they still have movies (which I'll admit was funnier than the tv show, but still bored me after the first fifteen minutes).
A few trivial comments
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 3
First: I'm sure there's something quite zen about reading the same paragraphs several times in a row;-)
Second: I've found Tetris a great gateway to programming satori. I play a game or two, and my mind is buzzing, and elevated beyond the actions of the game, or the computer. I then fire up an editor, and get to work, no longer distracted by the physical actions of interfacing with the computer. Perhaps in the future I'll have trained myself to enter that state without the game, but for now, it really helps me focus. Who says video games aren't productive!
Third (and final, I swear): I don't have a problem with the "penalty zone". Perhaps it comes from growing up with pc keyboards instead of unix keyboards. I use the numeric keypad without missing a beat too. Or at least I don't THINK I miss a beat (as that I'm not too aware of typing). I agree the big caps lock and small ctrl keys are just damn stupid (but I do like the placement of ctrl . . . maybe switch tab down, and caps lock up where esc is?), but the great thing about humans is our ability to adapt and train ourselves. If you think of typing as just finger motions instead of hand motions, yeah, it's going to be awkward and slower.
Carrying the music metaphor, it's like playing a guitar solo in one hand position as opposed to moving up and down the neck. It's easy to learn to play in one position, and you can be brilliant doing nothing but that. But once you learn to move hand positions without checking yourself, you'll be a much more versitile player.
Slashdot Mirror
if you're bored and you don't read at -1, you HAVE to read the comment this is in reference to. It's pretty funny, if you've ever found a troll funny (I personally do sometimes).
;-) And of course this is only good until the moderators wipe this away too . . . at least some funny points to the original, k? :-)
my lame ass attempt at a public service announcement
The PSX2 is set for a Christmas 2000 release in the US, Spring in Japan. I could wait "a couple months", but what good is a game if I can't read what it says? And even so, a PSX2 is not going to make Drakan or any of the other pc games I play run any quicker, until the software is available for it.
But I agree. The PSX2 is going to kick severely large ammounts of ass. And I'd rather shell out for a Geforce now anyway
Just out of curiosity, does ANYONE enforce the .org domain for "non-profit organizations"? I'm a fan of the band Foetus, and they have a .org page, but last I checked there are very few non-profit musicians. I love User Friendly, but does Illiad draw just for the overall benefit for his readers? There's alot of talk about Slashdot being changed to a .com by people here, but I wonder does it really matter? It seems to me that domain names work on the "once you've grabbed them it doesn't matter what you do" philosophy. Should this change? How about we discuss it here.
Besides, there's a little thing known as Fair Use. Ask Negativland . . . they've been fighting this battle longer than anyone I personally know. Don't get me wrong, I've nothing against suing the Big Evil Corporation(tm), but I DO have something against frivolous lawsuits.
oh yeah, vote for me for best dressed
I belive that I am the only choice for best dressed; I won't repeat my reasons, but I will add that I will personally bake the aforementioned cookies myself. They shall be unlike any cookie you have tasted before, and oh you shall like the cookie.
:-)
oh, that and the fact that none of you really know me, and it would be silly and fun
Carol was born in London but moved to America at age five. She was schooled in Texas and California before returning to England in 1960 to study at R.A.D.A. Her early tv credits include The Saint, The Avengers, Man in a Suitcase, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and the comidies Doctors at Large, Father Dear Father and The Two Ronnies.
Aside from her appearances in the Monty Python's Flying Circus series for BBC, she has been featured in all the Python films, stage shows and record albums, becoming known as The Python Girl
More recently she has been seen in Are You Being Served? and Only Fools and Horses. She has done much stage work, covering a wide variety of comedy drama and pantomimes. She has also written and performed her own one-woman show entitled Carol Cleveland Reveals All, an autobiographical and humorous look at the glamour business.
and now you know the rest of the story ;-)
I don't disagree with you at all. The war did wonders for our economy, and I wouldn't be surprised if the strategists were just ITCHING for Pearl Harbour to happen so we could leap on both fronts like a starved dog. I agree that the many people who agreed with what Hitler preached were just as guilty as he.
;-). If we didn't leap on the Y2K issue when it was realized, then one person would have been singled out for the masses. The geek martyr, and it would have been his/her fault.
But my point, and the reason I used him as an example, is that we need a central figure to hate. It's so much easier to focus on Bill Gates rather than Microsoft itself, or even certain parts of Microsoft (I think notepad is a pretty okay editor
Just like Hitler. In our history books, it's his fault. Too much Sluggy lately; I hear the voice of Kiki ringing in my head ("stay good, Adolph, stay good!!!")
so vote for me. I'll give you a cookie. One per vote if I win
Since the media seems to be hopping on the "stupid geeks, working us up over nothing" bandwagon, despite the fact that they were the ones spilling hype themselves, it only seems natural what will follow next. The next major forseen disaster will go unacknowledged. We'll jump and cry and scramble to get things in working order, but the media will dismiss it as "crying wolf" again, and only the employers with the most vision and foresight will think to fund any emergency efforts.
;-)
That's the problem with things being fixed and going well; there doesn't appear to be a problem at all. If Hitler was killed before he rose to power, no one would realize the crisis averted, because millions of people might not have died. Ours is a culture that thrives on villians, not heros. Horror movies get hundreds of sequels, but hero-central films are lucky to get a few. So rather than praising the computer community for taking care of a potentially dangerous issue, we're going to be seen as freaks who overreact.
Almost makes you wish the power HAD gone out
Can you confirm this? More importantly, can you ship me a bottle or two? Oh, and if they EVER realease the windows gum; I'm all over that.
Think about it. The ability to grind windows between your teeth and chew angrily for hours and hours. Suffering is much more important than death, and quite frankly, chewing on windows cds doesn't taste as good as you might at first suspect.
That was one of the best Slashdot interviews I've seen since...I don't know when. It's good to see someone (or a group) speak thoroughly and clearly. And I'm sure that comes from years of dealing with aggressive press who don't want to listen.
But the more I think about it, I really don't mind that these guys are the ones the press run to rather than say CotDC. I don't find myself disagreeing with them, and they're far more eloquent than I could be in the situation.
No one argues that hackers are mis-portrayed in the media. I think L0pht has the right idea: pro-active re-information. Don't wait until someone misuses the word "hacker" or what not to correct them. Tell them what it means. It's a find line between informative and over zealous (as a pagan who is neither wiccan nor satanic I have that problem all the time; but my beliefs allow explaining, not converting. I don't care if you disagree, so long as you made effort to understand). The next 10-20 years are going to be pretty frightening if we don't stay on top of information, and if the hackers are evil, then who is going to listen to them?
Here's to you guys!
- the russians are involved in armed conflict.
- Boris makes a statement at a conference merely weeks ago that President Clinton has "forgotten Russia is a nuclear power"
- Boris in his "farewell" speech APPOLOGIZES.
Boris hasn't been a bad leader. Not a great leader, but he's done some pretty good things in his term. Now, I suppose it's just the nice guy ethic to appologize for "dreams not coming true" and "mistakes" in his career. But this is from a man that has held fast to every decision he's made. Hell, that's part of why I've respected him.Something's up. I mean, no way to tell until it happens, and I'm not about to go running for the bomb shelter, but this is quite definitely not a good sign. Time to read up on the man with the briefcase I suppose.
of COURSE. And you forgot Microsoft (the big one!), Sun and Compaq float on and off the boycott list every now and then, and we all have our personal lists ;-)
seriously though, it's like shopping locally. You buy from the stores that give you good service. You don't from stores that piss you off. I feel strongly about supporting people I believe in. I personally won't buy any more DVDs until some sort of working linux player is available, and if the industry would have worked on it in the first place, this mess wouldn't have happened. It's a shame that the community had to be hurt by the lawsuit, but DeCSS was crippled not killed. If anything it forces anyone interested to work at it more on the individual level.
for the record, I have no intention of pirating. But I do miss when DVDs were $15-20 instead of closer to $30.
. . . but wasn't this what everyone else was saying the other day? I mean, it's good that it's coming from someone respectable in the Open Source world (oh, hush Stallman ;-), and predictably it seems written to use a trivial(?) example to serve as evangelitical text to the non-believers. But at any rate, is this the place for it? I know I weigh Slashdot discussion (-inanities of course) almost as much as words from a "spokesman" for the community. I agree with what he says, but I'd have thought us discussing it would be all the swaying we need. I don't need top-level affirmation that what I believe is right.
;-)
I personally think (and hope ESR does too) that this is the sort of thing you post to a non-community news source. Let's face it, a good percentage of Slashdot readers are Open Source people. No need to preach to the converted. It's a great parable for the benefits of Open Source, but we know all that already.
Oh, and is this affecting Q3 too? I thought it was just relevant in Q1 (the game with the open source). I don't know; I'm a Drakan player
To bed? You mean you don't sleep in front of your computer?!?!!
;-)
sorry, as you can tell, sleep is something I HAVEN'T gotten in a while
Didn't say a straight G4 would. But odds are a dual-G4 would beat a single Athlon
Toolbox. I do alot of HTML (it's what I do for a living), and rather than deal with the subtle annoyances of an editor(I've yet to find one that lets me tailor all the automated tags) I keep a few "toolbox" text files with commonly used scripts and tags (particularly complicated tables and generic headers). Less time is spent typing when you're cutting and pasting, and you can spend more time working out the gritty bits. The only drawback is it's easy to not want to write ANY new code . . . just rehash old stuff. Then again, I've spent all morning refining a JavaScript search I wrote, and it's almost pretty as well as functional ;-)
;-)
and this way you can keep your "text editor" pride
Yeah, i'd love to too, but I haven't seen any SMP Athlons yet. Which isn't to say there won't be (and if anyone has any reviews/prices on a motherboard for such, post them!!!!). But that said, it would be interesting running a dual processer G4 against a K7-800 . . . or one of the Kryotech 1Ghz Athlons! I'm sure the G4 would win, but by how much?
God, it's such a good time to be a geek!
Oh, I liked this bit too:
The "Au" in Aurigin and Aureka stands for the periodic symbol for gold. (And, yes, the company name and product name are puns for origin and eureka. Who said lawyers don't have senses of humor?)
No one ever said that. They just said lawyers don't have a GOOD sense of humor
On, a serious note, I'm not sure what this article means. Obviously it's intended for the law community, but the urging to patent business METHODS?!?! A business method is useless unless you can get a large number of people to adopt/accept it, and who's going to if they have to pay royalties? Is there a patent for a location where you can exchange goods for money, and leave via a door? Sigh. Well, I'm not saying anything we don't all already know. Perhaps I ought to follow up on my patent for exchanging computer knowledge and skills for currency.
Rumor was a copy of SuSE Linux was going to be packed in with the game, but there are kernel requirements listed on the site. Did they opt not to include a distro? I thought that would have been a GREAT way to get more users . . .
Thought? Anyone with a box want to comment?
It seems that the links have been to fatbrain.com lately anyway, so it's not so much of an issue. Of course, they're running NT with Active Server Pages, so there goes Geek Idealisim ;-)
How effective will this be, really? I mean, yeah, a boycott is a fantastic way of protest, and I think this is a very worthy cause to protest. But really, when RMS speaks, who listens? Us. The geeks. The social idealists. The people who are 90% likely to be shopping from smaller independant retailers than someone like Amazon anyway. I know I try to feed as much of my purchases through the little guys as I can, and even when I DO go through a corporate monolith, I've only bought one or two things at Amazon.
So the message we're sending to Amazon is that people who didn't give them money will continue to not give them money? Again, it's all we can do, and a very commendable action, but will it really be more than a drop in the bucket? If anything, the publicity can't be great for them, but it'd be interesting to poll Amazon customers to see how many a) know who RMS is and b) cares what he has to say.
Hmmmm. Since I have the Shuttlecocks slashbox running, this story was in essence referenced twice on the Slashdot front page; that's got to count for something!
Seriously though, this one was cute, but far from the best. Hell, they've even done better Microsoft jokes. I'd include the links, but work, firewall, lalala . . . you know the deal. If you get bored, dig through the archives, a full 70-80% of the stuff is fantastic, and the weekly ratings are halarious.
However, Parker and Stone are NOT exactly motivated by creativity here. It's a total money grab situation. They say "we've had offers before", and if one thing they've ALWAYS known how to merchandise thier product. They knew they could get a hefty sum rather than going out on thier own like Spumco. 10% of Shockwave is a nice pile of dimes. They're not making cartoons; they're making commercials. They sell Macromedia's software (which I do generally like; Fireworks is an excellent tool), and they sell thier own tv series. It's not like they're giving that up (John K. doesn't do tv very often anymore . . . occasionally, but from what I understand he doesn't WANT another regular series).
And if that fails, they still have movies (which I'll admit was funnier than the tv show, but still bored me after the first fifteen minutes).
First: I'm sure there's something quite zen about reading the same paragraphs several times in a row ;-)
Second: I've found Tetris a great gateway to programming satori. I play a game or two, and my mind is buzzing, and elevated beyond the actions of the game, or the computer. I then fire up an editor, and get to work, no longer distracted by the physical actions of interfacing with the computer. Perhaps in the future I'll have trained myself to enter that state without the game, but for now, it really helps me focus. Who says video games aren't productive!
Third (and final, I swear): I don't have a problem with the "penalty zone". Perhaps it comes from growing up with pc keyboards instead of unix keyboards. I use the numeric keypad without missing a beat too. Or at least I don't THINK I miss a beat (as that I'm not too aware of typing). I agree the big caps lock and small ctrl keys are just damn stupid (but I do like the placement of ctrl . . . maybe switch tab down, and caps lock up where esc is?), but the great thing about humans is our ability to adapt and train ourselves. If you think of typing as just finger motions instead of hand motions, yeah, it's going to be awkward and slower.
Carrying the music metaphor, it's like playing a guitar solo in one hand position as opposed to moving up and down the neck. It's easy to learn to play in one position, and you can be brilliant doing nothing but that. But once you learn to move hand positions without checking yourself, you'll be a much more versitile player.
I'll shut up now.