It has the worst hardware because it came out first, and what matters in a console isn't the hardware, it's the software. Somebody mod this down. 'Insightful' my ass.
I realise you're being humorous, but Phipps does make excellent points. Yes, I'll defend the clean-cut suit against the moustachioed idiotarian.
First off, the only reason SCO are suing IBM isn't because of the relevance of their contribution to the OSS community, but simply because they're bigger and they're a household name -> more publicity.
But Phipps is right : IBM's long term strategy is basically to switch from "big iron" to becoming an IT consulting firm. Linux is a big part of that strategy, so they're advocating Open Source all over the place to get support from the community. But fundamentally they still do behave like an old-fashioned company, no matter how much you and I may love their ads.
But more to the point, I wholeheartedly agree with Phipps. ESR/RMS et al have pretty much become OSS ideologues who see everything as black and white. Open Source means Utopia, absolute freedom, great code and happiness for the people. Closed Source means totalitarian control by blood-sucking suits, kludgy software and the death of dozens of cute, cute kitties.
This is why he proclaims that Sun must choose between ubiquity or control for Java -- when they already made that choice! No other development platform became so predominant so quickly! And why was that? Because the runtime was always free and good tools were cheap or free. Sure, they were free as in beer, not "free as in speech", but Sun did give up control, and now they did get the ubiquity in return. But ESR can't see that distinction, that blurry area of grey, because all is black and white for the President of the Open Source Initiative.
Every company that wants to be successful selling a platform must make the obcious-yet-ballsy choice to give up control for the sake of ubiquity, and Sun have made that choice, and it has profited everyone -- them, the developers and the users. ESR just can't understand that there can be freedom and beauty outside of the Brave New Open Source World. I recognize his great skills as a programmer, writer and thinker, but his ideological tendancies just get the better of him and make him spin out of control into ideological rants that don't make sense in the real world.
Let me just finish by throwing something he wrote in the Jargon File back at him, on the Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality : "Because of their passionate embrace of (what they consider to be) the Right Thing, hackers can be unfortunately intolerant and bigoted on technical issues, in marked contrast to their general spirit of camaraderie and tolerance of alternative viewpoints otherwise."
*sigh* Merrian-Webster isn't a dictionary of political science or political philosophy.
No, the Roman Republic wasn't a republic in the modern sense (actually, it could be argued that the Plebeian Tribune acted as a counter-power to the Patrician Senate) -- just like the Athenian Democracy wasn't a democracy in the modern sense. However modern political philosophers since Jean Bodin and Montesquieu have defined a Republic as a regime where different areas of power are split into different governing bodies.
That is actually not how a Republic is defined.:-)
A Republic is defined as a regime where the powers are separate. For instance, legislative, executive and judiciary branches as in most modern democraties. However a Republic can very well be headed by a monarch. When Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon's grand-nephew) took over France thanks to a coup, he got crowned Emperor but maintained the Republic. His letterheads read "French Republic -- Emperor Napoleon III" A Republic doesn't have to be a democracy (defined as one where the leaders are elected) either. A regime can have separated powers and none of them are elected (like in most Communist regimes).
Oh lord God, yes! Friends, relatives, even friends of friends... A couple years ago I simply informed everyone I would now simply refuse to help out with any computer-related problems, at least from clueless people. I realised that most of those easy problems could be solved by reading a book and simply gaining some understanding of the machines and that by fixing their computers for them I was just perpetuating the problem. So I threw some darwinism at them, either they adapt or they give up.
The AC who wrote this blurb tells us of a study saying that feature-heavy phones are starting to dominate the market. Cool. And then he tells us that he 'begs to differ,' because 'one of the few things stopping [him] from purchasing a phone is the fact that [he does] not want to pay for hundreds of features that [he] will never use.'
Ass.
First of all, what do we care what kind of phone you like? A/. blurb is not the place for you to tell us about your cell phone preferences, your cat or the tiles on your patio. But most of all,your reasoning is flawed. A report says a certain taste is starting to predominate, but you beg to differ because you have a different taste? I know this post is trollish/OT but this is the kind of reasoning flaws that just drive me up the fucking wall. Either you think that the market analysis is wrong because your personal tastes don't match with that of the rising trends and it means you have an overinflated ego and are an idiot, either you meant to say that you beg to differn with the people buying the feature heavy phones and then you are (arguably) out of place in a/. blurb, and cannot formulate simple thoughts clearly and are, therefore, an idiot.
Thank you, now feel free to moderate me to the gates of Hell.
Yes, the character of Jack Sparrow is very similar to his character in Fear and Loathing. However, it's also very similar to his character in, say, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and, well the way he behaves in real life. Every actor has 'trademarks'. You can't accuse him of ripping himself off, because, in the end, you'll find that most actors often end up playing similar roles in similar ways (*cough*Pacino*cough*), and it doesn't make their performances any less worthy.
And as far as whether Depp's work on Sparrow was 'difficult', first of all I think you're underestimating the difficulty of it. Sure it sounds easy to walk that walk, and say why don't I wear beads in my hair and strange pirate clothes, but you have to come up with all the ideas and elements that make up the character (even if you're gonna recycle them three times), but most importantly you have to consider how difficult it is to do it right. There are a billion of tiny elements and factors which come into breathing life into a character, some we can't even imagine. That's what the actor's job is, and Johnny Depp did his impeccably. If it wasn't 'difficult', why are there so few who can pull it off right?
But ultimately, I would say that whether it was difficult simply doesn't matter. What matters is that when the credits started rolling Johnny Depp's performance left me thoroughly impressed. He helped create, and breathed life into one of the year's most charismatic characters, and did it fantastically. It doesn't matter whether it was difficult or not. What matters when giving out awards is how good the end product is, not how much work came into it.
Every actor has a different work process. Some work their asses off, research everything about the character/period/etc that they'll play, some just learn their lines, get in front of the camera and say them. Humphrey Bogart was quite famous for that. He would just walk in the set, smoking because he felt like it, hands in his pockets, and carelessly recite his lines, but there was such charisma oozing out of every pore of this guy that he simply came out amazing. Is that unfair? Maybe. But did his performances merit the awards he earned? Definitely. You hand out awards looking at how good the end product is, not rating how much work came into doing it. That's how you give awards to gradeschoolers.
It is if the actor builds the character. The fake nose and diet thing were just add-ons required by the part. It's not the same as Johnny Depp creating and taking for his own his character. It was Marlon Brando who had the idea to stuff his cheeks with kleenex and use that hoarse voice when he was hired to play in The Godfather. Tell me that doesn't contribute to his acting performance and to how deserving of an award he is. It's what we remember from the character!
...and Johnny Depp was the one who designed his costume. He actually built the character, coming up with the beaded hair, the makeup, the 'walk', the clothes, and (I assume) the teeth.
I know it's OT (somewhat), but I have to vent about this.
I'm getting sick and tired of people writing "A media player [sorry, "digital jukebox"] which can hold up to X songs". It's annoying when there are articles that go "It can hold 20 gigs of data (the equivalent of X songs)" but it's downright infuriating when you only get the figure in "songs".
I understand the need of a more "down to earth" unit of measure than gigs or megs for the non tech savvy (even though it could be argued that nowadays everyone should have an idea of what a gigabyte is), but the "it can hold X songs" is just preposterous. How long is "a song"? Encoded in which format? At which rate? It would make (a little) more sense if they said "it can hold X albums," because all albums have about the same length, and besides it's easier to visualize -- you know how many CDs there are in your collection, so it's quick to think about how much of that you can put on your iPod(Jr). Do people know how many "songs" they have? I sure as hell don't.
An other problem with that is the removable media MP3 players. A flash card player about which they say "can hold up to X songs" without mentioning that you have to use a 128 meg flash card to hold them, and Jane Soccer Mom or Kelli Cheerleader is going to be surprised when her 16 meg flashcard can't hold a Britney Spears album.
This whole thing is mind numbingly dumb, imprecise and misleading. Putting the equivalent of gigs and megs in albums/CDs, sure. But songs? It just makes no fucking sense.
You're quite right. I noticed that the other day when I was watching MTV (it's my guilty pleasure to watch these, they're so bad they become funny) and I noticed that they blurred out things like guns and cigarettes and beeped out cusswords.
In here (France) this isn't a problem at all, but there is a law that prohibits mentioning brand names on television (except when it's part of news), in order to undercut "product placement schemes". So in music videos, all the carefully placed products are blurred out in the French broadcasts, but if you watch the same MTV from the US, it's the cusswords, guns and smokes that are left out.
Exactly. I did the same for Shaolin Soccer, the U.S. version of which 20 minutes were cut and the movie was re-scored with shitty hip hop instead of the brilliant orchestral music of the first movie. I had the DVD one year before it came out in the U.S. and when that version finally came here I didn't even budge -- I had owned the movie for three years.
As far as Hero is concerned, it's a fantastic movie, and definitely meant for the big screen, that's why I'm happy and grateful that it was released here (France) in its full version and glory. I saw it three times, the photography is purely brilliant, as is the storytelling, writing, fight choereography (it was refreshing to see someone else than the ubiquitous Yuen Wo-Ping).
Why is it that Miramax is often the last studio promoting good, independent American filmmakers, but butchering the good foreign filmmakers?
If you look at the Vaporware Awards of 2001, the #2 item on the list is Warcraft III, which did indeed make it to the shelves, to critical acclaim and record sales... Could 2003's vaporware be 2004's hit product? Let's hope so.
Unless we're talking about the infringing SCO code.;)
"
As in years before, technology companies promised to ship products in 2003 that simply didn't materialize -- just like Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."
^ The first paragraph of the article. And this got to 5, Insightful?
I so happen to have one of "those god awful 'mini' 'cube' PCs" and it's fantastic, thank you very much. I used to be a vocal opponent of those things because they were kludgy and underperformant, but I got myself one of them "mailboxes" some time ago and it's been great. I had the mother of all great big cases, the Antec 1080, which I loved (and still do, for its purpose it's the best case out there), but I realised that for normal PC operation, something that weighs 35 kilos and has eight fans is overkill.
When it was time to upgrade, I was simply going to get the same only smaller, but a friend sold me into getting one of "those god awful 'mini' 'cube' PCs" and I must say, it's one of the best computing choices I've made.
With a combo drive it can do everything a regular PC can, without significantly more noise/heat, while being smaller, lighter, and looking damn cool in black. I already upgraded the system twice with no worries, and as the time draws near to update the system again, I'm thinking about going 64-bit, but whatever I do you can bet it's going to come in a tiny black box.
News: Call me old fashioned, but I subscribe to quality newspapers and magazines. For net news, I use their websites, Google News and for "niche" news,/., Blue's News and The Onion.
Music: Word of mouth.
I'm not one of those "All RIAA music sucks now!" cookies, there is still some major label music which is good, and I mostly hear about it through word of mouth!
Ads (aka: mental engineering): Mozilla Firebird blocks popups and I really don't mind spam. Also, I don't trust filters, I don't want to miss anything important. And guess what, some ads on the web are actually worth clicking.
Cheap Products: Word of mouth!
Oh, and both Mulholland Drive and The Matrix Revolutions are great movies. But it isn't any reviewer's opinion that made me think that, or go see them in the first place.
Yes, but aren't there still homeless people and illegal immigrant workers? Besides, with the globalization of economy it isn't about whether there are Norwegians exploiting Norwegians, but whether Europe, N. America and East Asia are exploiting the world, and the answer to that question is YES.
As long as humans are humans there will always be a top and a bottom, exploiters and exploitees. All human societies are pyramid-shaped, and all efforts to change that end up killing millions.
All that one can hope for is that some day the said exploitees won't be starving to death as we speak, but somehow I don't think even that is likely.
Slashdot Mirror
Troll.
It has the worst hardware because it came out first, and what matters in a console isn't the hardware, it's the software. Somebody mod this down. 'Insightful' my ass.
I realise you're being humorous, but Phipps does make excellent points. Yes, I'll defend the clean-cut suit against the moustachioed idiotarian.
First off, the only reason SCO are suing IBM isn't because of the relevance of their contribution to the OSS community, but simply because they're bigger and they're a household name -> more publicity.
But Phipps is right : IBM's long term strategy is basically to switch from "big iron" to becoming an IT consulting firm. Linux is a big part of that strategy, so they're advocating Open Source all over the place to get support from the community. But fundamentally they still do behave like an old-fashioned company, no matter how much you and I may love their ads.
But more to the point, I wholeheartedly agree with Phipps. ESR/RMS et al have pretty much become OSS ideologues who see everything as black and white. Open Source means Utopia, absolute freedom, great code and happiness for the people. Closed Source means totalitarian control by blood-sucking suits, kludgy software and the death of dozens of cute, cute kitties.
This is why he proclaims that Sun must choose between ubiquity or control for Java -- when they already made that choice! No other development platform became so predominant so quickly! And why was that? Because the runtime was always free and good tools were cheap or free. Sure, they were free as in beer, not "free as in speech", but Sun did give up control, and now they did get the ubiquity in return. But ESR can't see that distinction, that blurry area of grey, because all is black and white for the President of the Open Source Initiative.
Every company that wants to be successful selling a platform must make the obcious-yet-ballsy choice to give up control for the sake of ubiquity, and Sun have made that choice, and it has profited everyone -- them, the developers and the users. ESR just can't understand that there can be freedom and beauty outside of the Brave New Open Source World. I recognize his great skills as a programmer, writer and thinker, but his ideological tendancies just get the better of him and make him spin out of control into ideological rants that don't make sense in the real world.
Let me just finish by throwing something he wrote in the Jargon File back at him, on the Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality : "Because of their passionate embrace of (what they consider to be) the Right Thing, hackers can be unfortunately intolerant and bigoted on technical issues, in marked contrast to their general spirit of camaraderie and tolerance of alternative viewpoints otherwise."
*sigh* Merrian-Webster isn't a dictionary of political science or political philosophy.
No, the Roman Republic wasn't a republic in the modern sense (actually, it could be argued that the Plebeian Tribune acted as a counter-power to the Patrician Senate) -- just like the Athenian Democracy wasn't a democracy in the modern sense. However modern political philosophers since Jean Bodin and Montesquieu have defined a Republic as a regime where different areas of power are split into different governing bodies.
That is actually not how a Republic is defined. :-)
A Republic is defined as a regime where the powers are separate. For instance, legislative, executive and judiciary branches as in most modern democraties. However a Republic can very well be headed by a monarch. When Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon's grand-nephew) took over France thanks to a coup, he got crowned Emperor but maintained the Republic. His letterheads read "French Republic -- Emperor Napoleon III" A Republic doesn't have to be a democracy (defined as one where the leaders are elected) either. A regime can have separated powers and none of them are elected (like in most Communist regimes).
You buy it to go with this!
Accessorize baby, accessorize!
The link in the blurb is to the second part of the article. Here is the actual link.
Also Samsung is Korean and Siemens is German. :)
Oh lord God, yes! Friends, relatives, even friends of friends... A couple years ago I simply informed everyone I would now simply refuse to help out with any computer-related problems, at least from clueless people. I realised that most of those easy problems could be solved by reading a book and simply gaining some understanding of the machines and that by fixing their computers for them I was just perpetuating the problem. So I threw some darwinism at them, either they adapt or they give up.
The AC who wrote this blurb tells us of a study saying that feature-heavy phones are starting to dominate the market. Cool. And then he tells us that he 'begs to differ,' because 'one of the few things stopping [him] from purchasing a phone is the fact that [he does] not want to pay for hundreds of features that [he] will never use.'
/. blurb is not the place for you to tell us about your cell phone preferences, your cat or the tiles on your patio. But most of all,your reasoning is flawed. A report says a certain taste is starting to predominate, but you beg to differ because you have a different taste? I know this post is trollish/OT but this is the kind of reasoning flaws that just drive me up the fucking wall. Either you think that the market analysis is wrong because your personal tastes don't match with that of the rising trends and it means you have an overinflated ego and are an idiot, either you meant to say that you beg to differn with the people buying the feature heavy phones and then you are (arguably) out of place in a /. blurb, and cannot formulate simple thoughts clearly and are, therefore, an idiot.
Ass.
First of all, what do we care what kind of phone you like? A
Thank you, now feel free to moderate me to the gates of Hell.
Yes, the character of Jack Sparrow is very similar to his character in Fear and Loathing. However, it's also very similar to his character in, say, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and, well the way he behaves in real life. Every actor has 'trademarks'. You can't accuse him of ripping himself off, because, in the end, you'll find that most actors often end up playing similar roles in similar ways (*cough*Pacino*cough*), and it doesn't make their performances any less worthy.
And as far as whether Depp's work on Sparrow was 'difficult', first of all I think you're underestimating the difficulty of it. Sure it sounds easy to walk that walk, and say why don't I wear beads in my hair and strange pirate clothes, but you have to come up with all the ideas and elements that make up the character (even if you're gonna recycle them three times), but most importantly you have to consider how difficult it is to do it right. There are a billion of tiny elements and factors which come into breathing life into a character, some we can't even imagine. That's what the actor's job is, and Johnny Depp did his impeccably. If it wasn't 'difficult', why are there so few who can pull it off right?
But ultimately, I would say that whether it was difficult simply doesn't matter. What matters is that when the credits started rolling Johnny Depp's performance left me thoroughly impressed. He helped create, and breathed life into one of the year's most charismatic characters, and did it fantastically. It doesn't matter whether it was difficult or not. What matters when giving out awards is how good the end product is, not how much work came into it.
Every actor has a different work process. Some work their asses off, research everything about the character/period/etc that they'll play, some just learn their lines, get in front of the camera and say them. Humphrey Bogart was quite famous for that. He would just walk in the set, smoking because he felt like it, hands in his pockets, and carelessly recite his lines, but there was such charisma oozing out of every pore of this guy that he simply came out amazing. Is that unfair? Maybe. But did his performances merit the awards he earned? Definitely. You hand out awards looking at how good the end product is, not rating how much work came into doing it. That's how you give awards to gradeschoolers.
It is if the actor builds the character. The fake nose and diet thing were just add-ons required by the part. It's not the same as Johnny Depp creating and taking for his own his character. It was Marlon Brando who had the idea to stuff his cheeks with kleenex and use that hoarse voice when he was hired to play in The Godfather. Tell me that doesn't contribute to his acting performance and to how deserving of an award he is. It's what we remember from the character!
...and Johnny Depp was the one who designed his costume. He actually built the character, coming up with the beaded hair, the makeup, the 'walk', the clothes, and (I assume) the teeth.
I know it's OT (somewhat), but I have to vent about this.
I'm getting sick and tired of people writing "A media player [sorry, "digital jukebox"] which can hold up to X songs". It's annoying when there are articles that go "It can hold 20 gigs of data (the equivalent of X songs)" but it's downright infuriating when you only get the figure in "songs".
I understand the need of a more "down to earth" unit of measure than gigs or megs for the non tech savvy (even though it could be argued that nowadays everyone should have an idea of what a gigabyte is), but the "it can hold X songs" is just preposterous. How long is "a song"? Encoded in which format? At which rate? It would make (a little) more sense if they said "it can hold X albums," because all albums have about the same length, and besides it's easier to visualize -- you know how many CDs there are in your collection, so it's quick to think about how much of that you can put on your iPod(Jr). Do people know how many "songs" they have? I sure as hell don't.
An other problem with that is the removable media MP3 players. A flash card player about which they say "can hold up to X songs" without mentioning that you have to use a 128 meg flash card to hold them, and Jane Soccer Mom or Kelli Cheerleader is going to be surprised when her 16 meg flashcard can't hold a Britney Spears album.
This whole thing is mind numbingly dumb, imprecise and misleading. Putting the equivalent of gigs and megs in albums/CDs, sure. But songs? It just makes no fucking sense.
You're quite right. I noticed that the other day when I was watching MTV (it's my guilty pleasure to watch these, they're so bad they become funny) and I noticed that they blurred out things like guns and cigarettes and beeped out cusswords.
In here (France) this isn't a problem at all, but there is a law that prohibits mentioning brand names on television (except when it's part of news), in order to undercut "product placement schemes". So in music videos, all the carefully placed products are blurred out in the French broadcasts, but if you watch the same MTV from the US, it's the cusswords, guns and smokes that are left out.
And Frenchmen.
Exactly. I did the same for Shaolin Soccer, the U.S. version of which 20 minutes were cut and the movie was re-scored with shitty hip hop instead of the brilliant orchestral music of the first movie. I had the DVD one year before it came out in the U.S. and when that version finally came here I didn't even budge -- I had owned the movie for three years.
As far as Hero is concerned, it's a fantastic movie, and definitely meant for the big screen, that's why I'm happy and grateful that it was released here (France) in its full version and glory. I saw it three times, the photography is purely brilliant, as is the storytelling, writing, fight choereography (it was refreshing to see someone else than the ubiquitous Yuen Wo-Ping).
Why is it that Miramax is often the last studio promoting good, independent American filmmakers, but butchering the good foreign filmmakers?
If you look at the Vaporware Awards of 2001, the #2 item on the list is Warcraft III, which did indeed make it to the shelves, to critical acclaim and record sales... Could 2003's vaporware be 2004's hit product? Let's hope so.
;)
Unless we're talking about the infringing SCO code.
Insightful? How so?
I so happen to have one of "those god awful 'mini' 'cube' PCs" and it's fantastic, thank you very much. I used to be a vocal opponent of those things because they were kludgy and underperformant, but I got myself one of them "mailboxes" some time ago and it's been great. I had the mother of all great big cases, the Antec 1080, which I loved (and still do, for its purpose it's the best case out there), but I realised that for normal PC operation, something that weighs 35 kilos and has eight fans is overkill.
When it was time to upgrade, I was simply going to get the same only smaller, but a friend sold me into getting one of "those god awful 'mini' 'cube' PCs" and I must say, it's one of the best computing choices I've made.
With a combo drive it can do everything a regular PC can, without significantly more noise/heat, while being smaller, lighter, and looking damn cool in black. I already upgraded the system twice with no worries, and as the time draws near to update the system again, I'm thinking about going 64-bit, but whatever I do you can bet it's going to come in a tiny black box.
What I like better is to darken the sky by reciting the Ring poem in Mordor Elvish.
Wait... Parties?! You're not one of us!
It comes from Latin pulcher, which means beautiful and I think it's a very beautiful word.
/. on a sunny Sunday afternoon? Yes, lady and gentlemen, I am a geek.
So, I know Latin and I'm on
Exactly. Here are the information filters I use :
/., Blue's News and The Onion.
Movies: Word of mouth.
Books: Word of mouth.
News: Call me old fashioned, but I subscribe to quality newspapers and magazines. For net news, I use their websites, Google News and for "niche" news,
Music: Word of mouth.
I'm not one of those "All RIAA music sucks now!" cookies, there is still some major label music which is good, and I mostly hear about it through word of mouth!
Ads (aka: mental engineering): Mozilla Firebird blocks popups and I really don't mind spam. Also, I don't trust filters, I don't want to miss anything important. And guess what, some ads on the web are actually worth clicking.
Cheap Products: Word of mouth!
Oh, and both Mulholland Drive and The Matrix Revolutions are great movies. But it isn't any reviewer's opinion that made me think that, or go see them in the first place.
Yes, but aren't there still homeless people and illegal immigrant workers? Besides, with the globalization of economy it isn't about whether there are Norwegians exploiting Norwegians, but whether Europe, N. America and East Asia are exploiting the world, and the answer to that question is YES.
As long as humans are humans there will always be a top and a bottom, exploiters and exploitees. All human societies are pyramid-shaped, and all efforts to change that end up killing millions.
All that one can hope for is that some day the said exploitees won't be starving to death as we speak, but somehow I don't think even that is likely.