Jericho was a fucking awesome show. This is a fucking awful show. Do yourself a favor and read the book. I know people say that shit all the time, but really -- don't ruin it for yourself by watching the show first.
Also, the rushed end to Jericho (you know, after the whole "Nuts" campaign) was so awful... I actually tuned in the week after the finale, because I didn't realize I had watched the end of the show. I mean, I watched the end of the show, but it wasn't exactly conclusive. It was several weeks before I finally found out "no, that was actually the end of the story"...
Hey, there's endless sports and shitty fucking reality shows, right?!
Yes, in typical Stephen King fashion, the whole part where The Dome comes down and everyone encounters it (a thing that takes minutes) literally takes chapter after chapter after chapter. I don't remember how many pages it was, but I'm now listening to the audio book (what can I say?) and it is literally TWO HOURS into it... and we are STILL dealing with people smacking into the dome moments after it arrives.
Stephen King is one prolific mother fucker. A wordy motherfucker, too -- but even he gets to shit faster than Tolkien, I have to say.:)
This is probably the most cringe-inducing minute of the show, so far. I'm going to continue watching it -- but only because I have now read the book and want to see how awful the show keeps becoming:
I really like Stephen King. I met him, when I was a kid. I consumed his books ravenously. I had him autograph a special edition of F&SF Magazine that covered some of his shorts. Even his worst is a fun read. But god damn does he have bad luck with TV conversions.
Oh god, I'm watching it over and over and over and I can't stop laughing..
Junior is way worse in the book, but at least they give him a fucking compelling *reason* right out of the gate for why he is that way.
Even Big Jim is hard to give a shit about in the show and we all love him in Breaking Bad.
Still, though, it's hard to say Junior is worse than the other two shitty kids on the show. Without spoiling it for others, the whole thing that they are doing that they record themselves (on their Microsoft Windows 8 touch-phone) doing is so painfully bad to watch. It actually made me cringe.
What the fuck is it with adaptations of King's work to television that nobody can ever quite get it right? Golden Years, the haunted hospital show, The Stand, etc, etc. It's always poorly acted, often not so well shot, and usually changed so much as to be an embarassment.
Which also reminds me.. I wonder if we will see him in a cameo in the show? Or did we already and I didn't catch it?
Oh, PS: Haven was actually pretty fucking good. I'll give them that.
WRONG: The whole TV series is an ad for Microsoft Surface and Windows 8.:D
But yeah, the book is actually really fucking good. After three episodes, I realized the book couldn't actually be as awful as the show, so I turned it off and picked up the novel. Great decision. Even basic shit like is different in the book (like in the TV show, the dome walls are sound-proof, but not in the book... this is a really minor and almost immediate point made in both, so not really a spoiler).
Well, you're really just paying $80/yr for Amazon Prime -- the shipping service. That's what it started out as and that's what it still primarily (Prime..arily -- HAH!.. meh) is. They just keep throwing all sorts of little extra bonuses in on top of it, is all. I would say that Netflix is a better deal for the price, if you're just going for streaming content... but if you also shop at Amazon, that changes everything.
What I would really like is for digital content to be treated like everything else that is sold in the world. I don't have to choose between Safeway and Albertsons for groceries, because "well, Safeway has TIDE laundry detergent, but only Albertsons is the exclusive retailer of CLOROX!". Both stores carry almost identical products and they compete on price, service, store hours, cleanliness, etc.
Netflix, Amazon, Steam, Origin... these should all carry the same things their competitors do... "Only we carry Justified, the TV show" shouldn't be a beneficial point of the competition. "We have the fastest, most reliable streaming at the cheapest price with the best user interface on the most devices and the best customer service!" is what they should be competing on.
Until recently, I didn't give a shit about Amazon Prime. It was just one of those things Amazon offers to those of us who pay annually for "free" shipping. Then, I started to notice they often had content that Netflix didn't have, or didn't have yet, or only had some of (content agreements are such bullshit -- I hate having to get some seasons on one service and the others on another). Since I already pay the $80/yr (about $1.50/mo less than I pay for Netflix), it is a pretty nice little bonus to have. It makes me occasionally check out TV shows that I would never bother getting around to, otherwise.
The affordability of things like Netflix, Amazon Prime Streaming, and MOG (and other music services) have actually made it impossible for me to ever consider paying the ridiculous prices for other content elsewhere. Sorry, I'm not paying $10 to own (or rent for a day, sometimes!) a shitty movie on iTunes. And I'm not going to pay $3-5 for each episode of some show on iTunes as it rolls out. I'm certainly not going to pay $150-$200/mo for premium cable television packages so that I can then have the privilege of paying *another* $15/mo to get HBO content and watch it on my iPad. I mean, think about that -- a month of a complete cable TV package (especially after the cost for the digital tuners per TV, the taxes, fees, surcharges) is more than two entire years of access to the massive Netflix or Amazon library. It's absolutely *nuts*
I think you often reach a certain age where you are just happy to find the time and patience to watch *something* . . . even if it isn't the latest thing. I often find myself just now catching up on TV shows or movies that are a decade old, even though they are "the biggest thing ever". No biggie to miss it at the time and wait until later...
Hell, I don't think I have seen more than two or three Oscar *nominated* films from the past decade or more *combined* and other than Arrested Development, the last sit-com I remember watching (of course, 99% of them are shit) was Rosanne, in the 90s.
Anyway, the show in question is on Amazon Prime. It airs on television Mondays (I think) and is available on Amazon each Friday (for free, if you are a Prime member).
Yep. I used to horde movies. I had tens of terabytes of movies. Stuff I would probably never get around to watching. I needed it, right? I mean, you never know!
Then Netflix streaming and Amazon Prime came along and for $8/mo I could get more than enough content to satisfy. Purged all that crap and now I'm only down for services like Netflix. Give me massive libraries of instantly accessible everything for a very cheap monthly price with no hurdles (I can watch this shit on my computer, my laptop, my ipad, my phone, my xbox 360, my wii, my ps3, my roku, and my apple tv) and acquiring content any other way becomes a *hassle*.
Everywhere I've lived in the states, it runs you $200 *just for the cable television alone* if you want all the channels.
I make a decent income and I can't fathom spending $200/mo on cable television or $100/mo on cell phone plans and data plans for them. I know people with a third my income and at least double the responsibility and obligation who spend that much money on those things. I don't know how the hell they do that. I dont' understand where -- mathematically -- the money pulls from in their budget.
Anyway, you should look into ting.com -- I was paying $40/mo for my phone plant with Sprint and even with my 20% discount that employees at my company get, ting.com turned out cheaper. I average about $12/mo. I usually only use a handful of minutes (an hour or so) and a few dozen text messages. My phone was $65. Basically, you buy whatever phone you want out-right (no subsidy bullshit) and then you pay for the minutes and data you use. There's no such thing as "going over" (in fact, if you use more, you pay less, per minute/megabyte/text). No termination fees. Just generally no bullshit. And when I called customer service once, a *human* answered... on the first ring. (This is run by the same guys who created Tucows and Hover.com domain registry).
I guess it sounds like an ad, but I am just a geek who found their service and fucking love it. Worth checking out. Also, they piggy on the Sprint network, so as long as Sprint serves your area, you're good to go.
In order for most torrents to work (you can leech, but it is a miserably slow and often impossible experience), you have to upload data that you have downloaded, back into the cluster of peers. You may have "already paid for" the content, but you are distributing it out to others who may or may not have paid for it.
Additionally, content is heavily controlled, these days. You can't assume that just because you have "license" to watch content on your television that is directly hooked up to cable company hardware and fed direction by a cable company pipe when it is live or via the cable company provided DVR that you somehow also have license to access that content through other means or view it on other devices.
Granted, that is a totally shit situation, but that is how it is viewed from their side.
That's actually a pretty reasonable price. If you want the full range of available cable channels, you're looking at at least $150. That is before fees, taxes, surcharges, renting the HD/PVR box (multiplied by however many televisions) at $20/mo, etc. And then the cost of internet on top of that. And if you want actual unlimited access (or, at least as far as my experience has shown), you need a business account which will run you about $125/mo for the same speeds (actually, usually less) than a residential account has for much cheaper.
Fast, unlimited cap internet access -- especially if you work from home -- is easily worth $125/mo. There is no television that is worth $200/mo, though.
Our household uses a lot of internet. As in, always at least a terabyte (two people with very healthy Steam libraries that can often run 100 or 200 gigabytes per month just in combined automated title updates/patches, lots of Netflix, Amazon Prime, MOG/Spotify, podcasts, HD podcasts, VPNs into our offices, gaming, etc) and often closer to two terabytes. After being frustrated a few years ago by a Comcast Security phone call that warned me I had used too much bandwidth and would be "banned for a year if you use too much again", but refused to answer the question "how much did I use and how much do I have to stay under to avoid being banned?", I had no option but to switch to a business account. For 27/10mbps, it runs me $125/mo.
I am not, on top of that, spending $100 or $200 for the full plate of cable channels (especially since only HBO/SHO/AMC and a couple others are ever worth watching and even then, not often). Of course, I *can't* do that, anyway . . . because I have a business account. With a business account, I can only get their business cable TV line-up; not the full choice that I would have as a residential account (even though this is at a residence).
So, I rely on Netflix for almost everything (I considered Hulu, but I'm not paying to have 6-12 commercials per hour and have a very limited set of shows to watch... most stuff I looked at didn't have the early seasons and only had the later ones... or sometimes the other way around... or sometimes just the middle seasons but not the earlier or later ones... or sometimes only the latest episode, but only a week or two after airing, but then quickly removed some time after that...) and have found a ton of entertainment via podcasts and the better youtube channels.
Only rarely do I seek content from . . . erm . . . alternative means. Even for the things I love most, they'll usually end up on Netflix and/or Amazon Prime within a year of airing -- including AMC and SHO shows.
The funnier thing about Under the Dome is that it's awful. Mostly bad acting, terribly pandering story, character, and plot changes and . . . well, all it encouraged me to do was to stop watching it after the third episode and pick up the book, instead (I am about fifteen or twenty years behind on my Stephen King, right now).
"You've been an engineer for a number of years, why haven't you decided to push paper for a living, by now?"
Sounds an awful lot like miserably married people with children asking people who enjoy their lives "when are you going to get married and have children? Why haven't you squired out children, yet?"
Management sounds miserable, frankly. Since when has liking the career and field you've chosen become a negative? Do we go around asking MBAs "so, you've been a paper-pusher for five years, now, how come you haven't picked up a keyboard and started coding?"
The assertion is obviously that it should be subject to SEC regulation and oversight to prevent such ponzi-schemes and scummy behavior. The same SEC that has spent much of the last fifteen or twenty years with their heads in their asses? This is a lot more like stating that a call-girl is the same as a street-walker and, therefore, must fall under the same street-pimp purview.
That happened all the time, to me. It would usually grind the browser to a halt and hang forever or even crash. This became an increasingly common occurrence. The response was generally "well, you are probably using lots of tabs and keeping them open for a long time, dummy! it is your fault!".
Well, that's nice and all, but then I went to chrome and did not have to change my browsing practices. It often consumes 3gb or even more (although I know Chrome has a problem reporting its memory usage properly and claims it is using far more than it really is, so maybe it's not actually that bad) and *VERY RARELY* a tab will even eat ass.
But you know what? The browser doesn't grind to a halt, hang forever, or crash!
So what it came down to was "I can browse how I want on one browser and not on the other. Enough excuses."
I hope the best for Mozilla. Give me reasons to return.
Slashdot Mirror
Jericho was a fucking awesome show. This is a fucking awful show. Do yourself a favor and read the book. I know people say that shit all the time, but really -- don't ruin it for yourself by watching the show first.
Also, the rushed end to Jericho (you know, after the whole "Nuts" campaign) was so awful... I actually tuned in the week after the finale, because I didn't realize I had watched the end of the show. I mean, I watched the end of the show, but it wasn't exactly conclusive. It was several weeks before I finally found out "no, that was actually the end of the story"...
Hey, there's endless sports and shitty fucking reality shows, right?!
Yes, in typical Stephen King fashion, the whole part where The Dome comes down and everyone encounters it (a thing that takes minutes) literally takes chapter after chapter after chapter. I don't remember how many pages it was, but I'm now listening to the audio book (what can I say?) and it is literally TWO HOURS into it... and we are STILL dealing with people smacking into the dome moments after it arrives.
Stephen King is one prolific mother fucker. A wordy motherfucker, too -- but even he gets to shit faster than Tolkien, I have to say. :)
This is probably the most cringe-inducing minute of the show, so far. I'm going to continue watching it -- but only because I have now read the book and want to see how awful the show keeps becoming:
Ssshhhhhhh!
I really like Stephen King. I met him, when I was a kid. I consumed his books ravenously. I had him autograph a special edition of F&SF Magazine that covered some of his shorts. Even his worst is a fun read. But god damn does he have bad luck with TV conversions.
Oh god, I'm watching it over and over and over and I can't stop laughing..
SHHHHHH!
Hahaha. Oh fuck me.
Junior is way worse in the book, but at least they give him a fucking compelling *reason* right out of the gate for why he is that way.
Even Big Jim is hard to give a shit about in the show and we all love him in Breaking Bad.
Still, though, it's hard to say Junior is worse than the other two shitty kids on the show. Without spoiling it for others, the whole thing that they are doing that they record themselves (on their Microsoft Windows 8 touch-phone) doing is so painfully bad to watch. It actually made me cringe.
What the fuck is it with adaptations of King's work to television that nobody can ever quite get it right? Golden Years, the haunted hospital show, The Stand, etc, etc. It's always poorly acted, often not so well shot, and usually changed so much as to be an embarassment.
Which also reminds me.. I wonder if we will see him in a cameo in the show? Or did we already and I didn't catch it?
Oh, PS: Haven was actually pretty fucking good. I'll give them that.
WRONG: The whole TV series is an ad for Microsoft Surface and Windows 8. :D
But yeah, the book is actually really fucking good. After three episodes, I realized the book couldn't actually be as awful as the show, so I turned it off and picked up the novel. Great decision. Even basic shit like is different in the book (like in the TV show, the dome walls are sound-proof, but not in the book... this is a really minor and almost immediate point made in both, so not really a spoiler).
Because corporations are people and infringing the copyright of a corporation is just like raping a person!
Well, you're really just paying $80/yr for Amazon Prime -- the shipping service. That's what it started out as and that's what it still primarily (Prime..arily -- HAH!.. meh) is. They just keep throwing all sorts of little extra bonuses in on top of it, is all. I would say that Netflix is a better deal for the price, if you're just going for streaming content... but if you also shop at Amazon, that changes everything.
What I would really like is for digital content to be treated like everything else that is sold in the world. I don't have to choose between Safeway and Albertsons for groceries, because "well, Safeway has TIDE laundry detergent, but only Albertsons is the exclusive retailer of CLOROX!". Both stores carry almost identical products and they compete on price, service, store hours, cleanliness, etc.
Netflix, Amazon, Steam, Origin... these should all carry the same things their competitors do... "Only we carry Justified, the TV show" shouldn't be a beneficial point of the competition. "We have the fastest, most reliable streaming at the cheapest price with the best user interface on the most devices and the best customer service!" is what they should be competing on.
Until recently, I didn't give a shit about Amazon Prime. It was just one of those things Amazon offers to those of us who pay annually for "free" shipping. Then, I started to notice they often had content that Netflix didn't have, or didn't have yet, or only had some of (content agreements are such bullshit -- I hate having to get some seasons on one service and the others on another). Since I already pay the $80/yr (about $1.50/mo less than I pay for Netflix), it is a pretty nice little bonus to have. It makes me occasionally check out TV shows that I would never bother getting around to, otherwise.
The affordability of things like Netflix, Amazon Prime Streaming, and MOG (and other music services) have actually made it impossible for me to ever consider paying the ridiculous prices for other content elsewhere. Sorry, I'm not paying $10 to own (or rent for a day, sometimes!) a shitty movie on iTunes. And I'm not going to pay $3-5 for each episode of some show on iTunes as it rolls out. I'm certainly not going to pay $150-$200/mo for premium cable television packages so that I can then have the privilege of paying *another* $15/mo to get HBO content and watch it on my iPad. I mean, think about that -- a month of a complete cable TV package (especially after the cost for the digital tuners per TV, the taxes, fees, surcharges) is more than two entire years of access to the massive Netflix or Amazon library. It's absolutely *nuts*
I think you often reach a certain age where you are just happy to find the time and patience to watch *something* . . . even if it isn't the latest thing. I often find myself just now catching up on TV shows or movies that are a decade old, even though they are "the biggest thing ever". No biggie to miss it at the time and wait until later...
Hell, I don't think I have seen more than two or three Oscar *nominated* films from the past decade or more *combined* and other than Arrested Development, the last sit-com I remember watching (of course, 99% of them are shit) was Rosanne, in the 90s.
Anyway, the show in question is on Amazon Prime. It airs on television Mondays (I think) and is available on Amazon each Friday (for free, if you are a Prime member).
PLEX+ROKU is a pretty magical thing.
Yep. I used to horde movies. I had tens of terabytes of movies. Stuff I would probably never get around to watching. I needed it, right? I mean, you never know!
Then Netflix streaming and Amazon Prime came along and for $8/mo I could get more than enough content to satisfy. Purged all that crap and now I'm only down for services like Netflix. Give me massive libraries of instantly accessible everything for a very cheap monthly price with no hurdles (I can watch this shit on my computer, my laptop, my ipad, my phone, my xbox 360, my wii, my ps3, my roku, and my apple tv) and acquiring content any other way becomes a *hassle*.
Everywhere I've lived in the states, it runs you $200 *just for the cable television alone* if you want all the channels.
I make a decent income and I can't fathom spending $200/mo on cable television or $100/mo on cell phone plans and data plans for them. I know people with a third my income and at least double the responsibility and obligation who spend that much money on those things. I don't know how the hell they do that. I dont' understand where -- mathematically -- the money pulls from in their budget.
Anyway, you should look into ting.com -- I was paying $40/mo for my phone plant with Sprint and even with my 20% discount that employees at my company get, ting.com turned out cheaper. I average about $12/mo. I usually only use a handful of minutes (an hour or so) and a few dozen text messages. My phone was $65. Basically, you buy whatever phone you want out-right (no subsidy bullshit) and then you pay for the minutes and data you use. There's no such thing as "going over" (in fact, if you use more, you pay less, per minute/megabyte/text). No termination fees. Just generally no bullshit. And when I called customer service once, a *human* answered... on the first ring. (This is run by the same guys who created Tucows and Hover.com domain registry).
I guess it sounds like an ad, but I am just a geek who found their service and fucking love it. Worth checking out. Also, they piggy on the Sprint network, so as long as Sprint serves your area, you're good to go.
In order for most torrents to work (you can leech, but it is a miserably slow and often impossible experience), you have to upload data that you have downloaded, back into the cluster of peers. You may have "already paid for" the content, but you are distributing it out to others who may or may not have paid for it.
Additionally, content is heavily controlled, these days. You can't assume that just because you have "license" to watch content on your television that is directly hooked up to cable company hardware and fed direction by a cable company pipe when it is live or via the cable company provided DVR that you somehow also have license to access that content through other means or view it on other devices.
Granted, that is a totally shit situation, but that is how it is viewed from their side.
Frankly, I'm surprised that they saw any discernable spikes. CBS programming is still generally for the elderly, Under The Dome aside.
A lot of providers no longer offer CableCARD and those who do tend to make them ridiculously expensive.
That's actually a pretty reasonable price. If you want the full range of available cable channels, you're looking at at least $150. That is before fees, taxes, surcharges, renting the HD/PVR box (multiplied by however many televisions) at $20/mo, etc. And then the cost of internet on top of that. And if you want actual unlimited access (or, at least as far as my experience has shown), you need a business account which will run you about $125/mo for the same speeds (actually, usually less) than a residential account has for much cheaper.
Fast, unlimited cap internet access -- especially if you work from home -- is easily worth $125/mo. There is no television that is worth $200/mo, though.
Our household uses a lot of internet. As in, always at least a terabyte (two people with very healthy Steam libraries that can often run 100 or 200 gigabytes per month just in combined automated title updates/patches, lots of Netflix, Amazon Prime, MOG/Spotify, podcasts, HD podcasts, VPNs into our offices, gaming, etc) and often closer to two terabytes. After being frustrated a few years ago by a Comcast Security phone call that warned me I had used too much bandwidth and would be "banned for a year if you use too much again", but refused to answer the question "how much did I use and how much do I have to stay under to avoid being banned?", I had no option but to switch to a business account. For 27/10mbps, it runs me $125/mo.
I am not, on top of that, spending $100 or $200 for the full plate of cable channels (especially since only HBO/SHO/AMC and a couple others are ever worth watching and even then, not often). Of course, I *can't* do that, anyway . . . because I have a business account. With a business account, I can only get their business cable TV line-up; not the full choice that I would have as a residential account (even though this is at a residence).
So, I rely on Netflix for almost everything (I considered Hulu, but I'm not paying to have 6-12 commercials per hour and have a very limited set of shows to watch... most stuff I looked at didn't have the early seasons and only had the later ones... or sometimes the other way around... or sometimes just the middle seasons but not the earlier or later ones... or sometimes only the latest episode, but only a week or two after airing, but then quickly removed some time after that...) and have found a ton of entertainment via podcasts and the better youtube channels.
Only rarely do I seek content from . . . erm . . . alternative means. Even for the things I love most, they'll usually end up on Netflix and/or Amazon Prime within a year of airing -- including AMC and SHO shows.
The funnier thing about Under the Dome is that it's awful. Mostly bad acting, terribly pandering story, character, and plot changes and . . . well, all it encouraged me to do was to stop watching it after the third episode and pick up the book, instead (I am about fifteen or twenty years behind on my Stephen King, right now).
"You've been an engineer for a number of years, why haven't you decided to push paper for a living, by now?"
Sounds an awful lot like miserably married people with children asking people who enjoy their lives "when are you going to get married and have children? Why haven't you squired out children, yet?"
Management sounds miserable, frankly. Since when has liking the career and field you've chosen become a negative? Do we go around asking MBAs "so, you've been a paper-pusher for five years, now, how come you haven't picked up a keyboard and started coding?"
The assertion is obviously that it should be subject to SEC regulation and oversight to prevent such ponzi-schemes and scummy behavior. The same SEC that has spent much of the last fifteen or twenty years with their heads in their asses? This is a lot more like stating that a call-girl is the same as a street-walker and, therefore, must fall under the same street-pimp purview.
Bloat? Feature creap? Isn't all of this shit why we jumped to Firefox, in the first place?
That happened all the time, to me. It would usually grind the browser to a halt and hang forever or even crash. This became an increasingly common occurrence. The response was generally "well, you are probably using lots of tabs and keeping them open for a long time, dummy! it is your fault!".
Well, that's nice and all, but then I went to chrome and did not have to change my browsing practices. It often consumes 3gb or even more (although I know Chrome has a problem reporting its memory usage properly and claims it is using far more than it really is, so maybe it's not actually that bad) and *VERY RARELY* a tab will even eat ass.
But you know what? The browser doesn't grind to a halt, hang forever, or crash!
So what it came down to was "I can browse how I want on one browser and not on the other. Enough excuses."
I hope the best for Mozilla. Give me reasons to return.
Well, as we've been told for half a decade or more "Firefox doesn't have any memory problems! You are using the internet wrong!".
One of the reasons I switched, sadly, away.
I used to be repulsed by the "Google is probably archiving every bit of information about me through this browser" thing, too.
Then I realized that my ISP is definitely doing that, so it doesn't matter.
Without hands, they'll probably never come *anywhere* ever again.