Re:Screw Katz ... I LIKED Antitrust!
on
Antitrust
·
· Score: 2
I'd definitely agree here. There are many points of view from which I could look at this film.
I could be a film critic, looking at every plot flaw, every shallow character, every blatant product placement, every buzzword thrown... all of which were present in this movie.
If I went to the movie looking to gain some deep-down philosophical insight, I would probably criticize the movie for lack thereof.
If I saw this movie for education on the current state of the software industry, I would find little more than stuffed shirts and lip service.
If I decided to view this film for a stirring emotional story, a compelling commentary on modern society, or a treatise on the moral ambiguity of our age, I would probably come away a disappointed.
However, none of these points of view represents me. I can choose why I want to watch movies. I can read reviews, and I can agree or disagree with them. But in the end, in my personal lifestyle, I choose to watch movies purely for entertainment. Perhaps for some people, to be entertained, they must also be intellectually engaged by the form of entertainment. There's nothing wrong with that - and if you are a person who does derive intellectual worth from films, then that's perfectly fine. I don't. My brain is stimulated by my academic studies, by work, by reading of literature, and by my observation and reflection on the real people around me. I watch movies because I want to laugh at stupidity, say "oooh" at "cool" things, wince at blood and gore. I don't go out to the first-run movies too often, so I am willing to shell out $8.50 on occasion to catch such a film.
I've had this discussion before, after riding home from several movies with friends who are film students. We basically reach the impasse that they are analyzing the movies, looking for the artistic qualities in them, and generally feeling disappointed. I, on the other hand, came away from those same movies feeling entertained.
I feel that both points of view are equally valid - people who are very critical of movies should realize and accept that there are those of us out there who simply aren't critical, and those of us who are not critical of movies need not feel threatened by those who are.
In the end, AntiTrust served its purpose to me of entertainment, and justified a rare $8.50 ticket price.
There is no way I would switch back to MacOS with OS X.
1) Support - I have a UMAX SuperMac Clone. Apple no longer supports these, and they never will again. MacOS has not been officially supported on it for a while, and I am sure they will take steps to make sure that future OS's, such as OS X, will not run either. Linux will always be supported - the kernel doesn't care who made your hardware, and even if it did, we could change it so that it didn't.
2) Features Linux Lacks- I realize that I do not need most of the features that a MacOS-type OS provides. I don't care about the multimedia industry - digital video, video editing, composition, etc... Everything I want and need, Linux can do, and do it well.
3) Features Linux Has - With the 2.4 kernel, my system is running better than ever before. It's got efficient memory/virtual memory management, SMP support, etc. In the userland side, I have Gimp if I need to work with graphics, xmms for listening to music, mozilla for browsing the web, gaim for chatting, abiword for word processing, gcc, perl, python, php, apache, on and on...
4) Price - LinuxPPC is free. Why the HECK would I want to pay for an OS ever again? Support? If I do need support, and I rarely do, I can get support from the Linux community faster than I can get it from Apple's tech support. Documentation? All the Linux documentation I need is online. Media? I can just download the software and burn to a cd.
I used the MacOS from August 1991 through June 1999. Then I switched to LinuxPPC. In the end, I guess I have come to the conclusion that I never truly was a "Mac" user, as I have no idea to go back to the flaky, over-simplified, eye candy MacOS.
IANTMBG, but I believe up until John Henry they recorded their tracks digitally - recording each instrument separately and then putting them all together. All done on a Mac SE/30 or something like that, IIRC. John Henry was the first album they recorded with a live band. I don't know exactly how they're recording now, but I'm sure it's in some way digital. As to the purist analog soul, as I said, I think they've been pretty digital all along. But feel free to correct me.
I highly recommend the Landware Stowaway. I use a Handspring Visor Deluxe, and use the Stowaway to enter various types of data. It's especially wonderful in classes where I would normally be writing a lot of notes by hand. I have a RhinoSkin 2000 carrying case, which holds my Stowaway, my Visor, batteries, a pen, and has a bit of room left over for a cell phone and some papers. I think the best part about the Stowaway is its portability. It folds up to just a bit larger than the size of your average Palm PDA. It has an extremely high cool factor, and I also enjoy typing on it. I actually prefer the tactile response of the Stowaway's keys to those on my Adesso NuForm ergo keyboard... and I even feel that it lets me type faster.
I don't know too much about the GoType, but if you're looking for portability, I can't recommend it. It doesn't fold up, and seems rather bulky to carry around.
At my school, we compile and test our programming projects on a variety of platforms - VAX/VMS, IRIX, and Linux/x86. In my C++ programming class, we wrote code mainly on the VAX, since that's what the professor had used for years. In my operating systems class, we wrote mostly on IRIX systems. I think it's a good experience to practice on different platforms. For the most part, I actually wrote and tested most of my code on my own Linux/PowerPC box, and then ported it over to whatever platform was required by the professor. The only time this became a problem was when my prfessor had provided a pre-compiled object file to be inserted into the project - something that as part of the assignment we students weren't supposed to (and really didn't need to) see the source for. In those cases, I had to do all the coding/testing on the required platform since you can't link a VAX object into a Linux/PowerPC executable:)
Anyway, I'd suggest just going along with it. Get experience on as many platforms and in as many environments as you can.
There is a hack you can get for PalmOS that lets you use the entire screen to write Graffiti on, as well as making it easier to do upper/lowercase letters (you write smaller graffiti to do lowercase, and larger graffiti to do uppercase). It's called ScreenWrite and you can find it here, along with some other useful little hacks. It also displays your actual graffiti stroke on the screen as you draw, which is a nice feature, and it will let you set up some shortcuts to turn it on and off, since it causes some apps to be funky. Requires HackMaster, which the author is nice enough to include along with the hack. It's shareware $5.
Yes, I know it's a hack, and sure, maybe Palm should've included such functionality. But hey, there is a solution. You get a much larger space in which to enter text, if that's the main issue. If you also would like a larger screen, well, not much you can do about that.
Television networks sell commercial time to companies in order to make a profit from the free movies and shows they are broadcasting. Many television and vcr manufacturers include 'commercial skip' features which allow the viewer to black out or skip commercials while recording their own copy of the program. So far, I haven't seen the TV networks make a fuss about this. Why would it be a big deal for people to do something similar to commercials attached to mp3's?
I actually created a system for this purpose from scratch, for an ISP I used to work for. I may be a bit biased, but I thought it worked pretty well.:) I did it back in the day using cgi-lib.pl/Perl. It was nice, I designed it with case logging so that any user could simply view a list of open helpdesk tickets, click on one, get all the details and the log of all actions on it, and add their comments/updates. I used a flat text file database of my own devise for this sytem. And it worked quite well for the small scale.
I'm now designing a similar system for the company I'm currently working for, only this project, I'm using mod_perl and MySQL.
So in a word, yes, web-based helpdesks are workable and good. You can use them from any web browser, anywhere in the world.
I visited Deneba's download page, and found unfortunately that there is not a PowerPC version available. Perhaps Deneba could contact the folks at LinuxPPC to obtain a box to develop on? Or is there a version in the works that they simply haven't come out with yet?
Well, on my system, performance is great when I am using the OSS plugin, but it's not quite as good when using the Esound plugin. I get less than 1% CPU utilization and generally faster performance with OSS, and 6-7% CPU utilization and slower performance with the Esound plugin. This is on a 300 Mhz PowerPC G3 with LinuxPPC. I have also built the binary myself from the latest CVS build.
I think login/password is fine, as long as you have a good password.
I learned this when the other day one of my CS professors emailed me to inform me that he had cracked my password on our SGI cluster, as well as the passwords of several other students, who were using dictionary based passwords. Needless to say, I've changed it to something non-dictionary based. I had never thought someone on our small campus which is protected with a firewall would even try to break in to my account. Naivete is definitely an issue in security.
If you've got a non-dictionary based password that's one step. Another step is always use encryption - I always log into hosts on campus via ssh, and never share credit card info online unless the server has some kind of good encryption.
I have used BankBoston's HomeLink web banking in the past, and they required you to use a 128-bit encrypting browser. Has a 128-bit encryption scheme been cracked yet? I know that the RC5-64 bit encryption was cracked...
And of course making sure that your system/the system you're working with uses shadowed passwords is another level of protection.
But in the final analysis, I'd say that whenever you can log in to something, it can most likely be cracked. It might take some extra effort by the cracker, but if they want it badly enough they'll take the time to do it right.
If I'm programming in Prolog for my AI coursework, I can't listen to any music. Prolog takes up too much of my brain's cpu time and music causes it to crash. However if I'm coding in a language I like to program in, such as Perl or C++, I like to listen all kinds of music - Robert Miles, Moby, Radiohead, U2, Crystal Method, Sarah McLachlan, Jimi, Pearl Jam, Cranberries, really pretty much anything. I also have a thing for Japanese Pop, and Anime soundtracks (NG Evangelion, Akira, Macross Plus are some good ones).
Ohio is a great place to live. I'm from Mount Vernon, Ohio - small farming community of 15,000 in the middle of nowhere. Only about an hour's drive from Columbus, also a great place to live. And Cedar Point is great - the most roller coasters in the world, the biggest, the fastest, the best - if you haven't been there, book yourself a trip to go see it.
However, I'm currently living near Boston, MA, on the north shore, where I attend school during the year. The disadvantages of this area include crazy drivers, whacked-out streets (cow-paths), high prices on *everything*, and a silly law that college students are eligible for jury duty, even if they're from out of state. Also, there are no really cool amusement parks of the likes of Cedar Point.
Advantages are: high-tech jobs abound, tons of historic and cultural stuff to do, BOSTON, commuter rail systems, BOSTON, the ocean & beaches, BOSTON, Newbury Comics, MIT, home of the free software foundation, Seiji Ozawa and the BSO, BOSTON, oh and did I mention that great town called BOSTON?
Ok.
But it still doesn't have CEDAR POINT. Plan? Transport CEDAR POINT to Connecticut, strike a deal with the Native American folk and transplant it next to Foxwoods, problem solved!
Oh, I didn't say the Matrix wasn't a great movie, I was just kinda observing a side issue. I should have also said that I thought The Matrix was an awesome flick. It seriously was very good and the special effects were incredible. And the whole concept of the perception of reality is pretty cool. But I was just pointing out an interesting observation I had made and wanted to see if any others had made it. By the way, you really should see Dark City just to see what I mean. It doesn't have even half the action or special effects of The Matrix but it's still pretty good in its own right.
I went and saw The Matrix last night, and all I could think about was how incredibly similar it was to Dark City, a movie which came out last year amidst the fury of Armageddon, Godzilla, etc and was not much noticed. Has anyone else seen Dark City? Essentially I think the equation representing The Matrix is: The Matrix = Dark City + Terminator + Hackers or reduced to 1x4 augmented matrix form [DC T H M];) There were so many similarities - I could point them out, but if you've seen Dark City then you can probably see them too. If you *haven't* seen Dark City go out and rent it and you'll see what I mean.
Funny, whenever I looked at the name I always thought "Seuss" like Dr. Seuss. Of course I know who Sousa is but I didn't put together "Seuss" and "composer"....... hmm.:)
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I'd definitely agree here. There are many points of view from which I could look at this film.
I could be a film critic, looking at every plot flaw, every shallow character, every blatant product placement, every buzzword thrown... all of which were present in this movie.
If I went to the movie looking to gain some deep-down philosophical insight, I would probably criticize the movie for lack thereof.
If I saw this movie for education on the current state of the software industry, I would find little more than stuffed shirts and lip service.
If I decided to view this film for a stirring emotional story, a compelling commentary on modern society, or a treatise on the moral ambiguity of our age, I would probably come away a disappointed.
However, none of these points of view represents me. I can choose why I want to watch movies. I can read reviews, and I can agree or disagree with them. But in the end, in my personal lifestyle, I choose to watch movies purely for entertainment. Perhaps for some people, to be entertained, they must also be intellectually engaged by the form of entertainment. There's nothing wrong with that - and if you are a person who does derive intellectual worth from films, then that's perfectly fine. I don't. My brain is stimulated by my academic studies, by work, by reading of literature, and by my observation and reflection on the real people around me. I watch movies because I want to laugh at stupidity, say "oooh" at "cool" things, wince at blood and gore. I don't go out to the first-run movies too often, so I am willing to shell out $8.50 on occasion to catch such a film.
I've had this discussion before, after riding home from several movies with friends who are film students. We basically reach the impasse that they are analyzing the movies, looking for the artistic qualities in them, and generally feeling disappointed. I, on the other hand, came away from those same movies feeling entertained.
I feel that both points of view are equally valid - people who are very critical of movies should realize and accept that there are those of us out there who simply aren't critical, and those of us who are not critical of movies need not feel threatened by those who are.
In the end, AntiTrust served its purpose to me of entertainment, and justified a rare $8.50 ticket price.
There is no way I would switch back to MacOS with OS X.
1) Support - I have a UMAX SuperMac Clone. Apple no longer supports these, and they never will again. MacOS has not been officially supported on it for a while, and I am sure they will take steps to make sure that future OS's, such as OS X, will not run either. Linux will always be supported - the kernel doesn't care who made your hardware, and even if it did, we could change it so that it didn't.
2) Features Linux Lacks- I realize that I do not need most of the features that a MacOS-type OS provides. I don't care about the multimedia industry - digital video, video editing, composition, etc... Everything I want and need, Linux can do, and do it well.
3) Features Linux Has - With the 2.4 kernel, my system is running better than ever before. It's got efficient memory/virtual memory management, SMP support, etc. In the userland side, I have Gimp if I need to work with graphics, xmms for listening to music, mozilla for browsing the web, gaim for chatting, abiword for word processing, gcc, perl, python, php, apache, on and on...
4) Price - LinuxPPC is free. Why the HECK would I want to pay for an OS ever again? Support? If I do need support, and I rarely do, I can get support from the Linux community faster than I can get it from Apple's tech support. Documentation? All the Linux documentation I need is online. Media? I can just download the software and burn to a cd.
I used the MacOS from August 1991 through June 1999. Then I switched to LinuxPPC. In the end, I guess I have come to the conclusion that I never truly was a "Mac" user, as I have no idea to go back to the flaky, over-simplified, eye candy MacOS.
IANTMBG, but I believe up until John Henry they recorded their tracks digitally - recording each instrument separately and then putting them all together. All done on a Mac SE/30 or something like that, IIRC. John Henry was the first album they recorded with a live band. I don't know exactly how they're recording now, but I'm sure it's in some way digital. As to the purist analog soul, as I said, I think they've been pretty digital all along. But feel free to correct me.
What is the proper pronunciation of Oregon?
I highly recommend the Landware Stowaway. I use a Handspring Visor Deluxe, and use the Stowaway to enter various types of data. It's especially wonderful in classes where I would normally be writing a lot of notes by hand. I have a RhinoSkin 2000 carrying case, which holds my Stowaway, my Visor, batteries, a pen, and has a bit of room left over for a cell phone and some papers. I think the best part about the Stowaway is its portability. It folds up to just a bit larger than the size of your average Palm PDA. It has an extremely high cool factor, and I also enjoy typing on it. I actually prefer the tactile response of the Stowaway's keys to those on my Adesso NuForm ergo keyboard... and I even feel that it lets me type faster.
I don't know too much about the GoType, but if you're looking for portability, I can't recommend it. It doesn't fold up, and seems rather bulky to carry around.
Anyway, I'd suggest just going along with it. Get experience on as many platforms and in as many environments as you can.
Yes, I know it's a hack, and sure, maybe Palm should've included such functionality. But hey, there is a solution. You get a much larger space in which to enter text, if that's the main issue. If you also would like a larger screen, well, not much you can do about that.
Television networks sell commercial time to companies in order to make a profit from the free movies and shows they are broadcasting. Many television and vcr manufacturers include 'commercial skip' features which allow the viewer to black out or skip commercials while recording their own copy of the program. So far, I haven't seen the TV networks make a fuss about this. Why would it be a big deal for people to do something similar to commercials attached to mp3's?
I actually created a system for this purpose from scratch, for an ISP I used to work for. I may be a bit biased, but I thought it worked pretty well. :) I did it back in the day using cgi-lib.pl/Perl. It was nice, I designed it with case logging so that any user could simply view a list of open helpdesk tickets, click on one, get all the details and the log of all actions on it, and add their comments/updates. I used a flat text file database of my own devise for this sytem. And it worked quite well for the small scale.
I'm now designing a similar system for the company I'm currently working for, only this project, I'm using mod_perl and MySQL.
So in a word, yes, web-based helpdesks are workable and good. You can use them from any web browser, anywhere in the world.
I visited Deneba's download page, and found unfortunately that there is not a PowerPC version available. Perhaps Deneba could contact the folks at LinuxPPC to obtain a box to develop on? Or is there a version in the works that they simply haven't come out with yet?
-Peter
Well, on my system, performance is great when I am using the OSS plugin, but it's not quite as good when using the Esound plugin. I get less than 1% CPU utilization and generally faster performance with OSS, and 6-7% CPU utilization and slower performance with the Esound plugin. This is on a 300 Mhz PowerPC G3 with LinuxPPC. I have also built the binary myself from the latest CVS build.
I think login/password is fine, as long as you have a good password.
I learned this when the other day one of my CS professors emailed me to inform me that he had cracked my password on our SGI cluster, as well as the passwords of several other students, who were using dictionary based passwords. Needless to say, I've changed it to something non-dictionary based. I had never thought someone on our small campus which is protected with a firewall would even try to break in to my account. Naivete is definitely an issue in security.
If you've got a non-dictionary based password that's one step. Another step is always use encryption - I always log into hosts on campus via ssh, and never share credit card info online unless the server has some kind of good encryption.
I have used BankBoston's HomeLink web banking in the past, and they required you to use a 128-bit encrypting browser. Has a 128-bit encryption scheme been cracked yet? I know that the RC5-64 bit encryption was cracked...
And of course making sure that your system/the system you're working with uses shadowed passwords is another level of protection.
But in the final analysis, I'd say that whenever you can log in to something, it can most likely be cracked. It might take some extra effort by the cracker, but if they want it badly enough they'll take the time to do it right.
-P
If I'm programming in Prolog for my AI coursework, I can't listen to any music. Prolog takes up too much of my brain's cpu time and music causes it to crash. However if I'm coding in a language I like to program in, such as Perl or C++, I like to listen all kinds of music - Robert Miles, Moby, Radiohead, U2, Crystal Method, Sarah McLachlan, Jimi, Pearl Jam, Cranberries, really pretty much anything. I also have a thing for Japanese Pop, and Anime soundtracks (NG Evangelion, Akira, Macross Plus are some good ones).
Ohio is a great place to live. I'm from Mount Vernon, Ohio - small farming community of 15,000 in the middle of nowhere. Only about an hour's drive from Columbus, also a great place to live. And Cedar Point is great - the most roller coasters in the world, the biggest, the fastest, the best - if you haven't been there, book yourself a trip to go see it.
However, I'm currently living near Boston, MA, on the north shore, where I attend school during the year. The disadvantages of this area include crazy drivers, whacked-out streets (cow-paths), high prices on *everything*, and a silly law that college students are eligible for jury duty, even if they're from out of state. Also, there are no really cool amusement parks of the likes of Cedar Point.
Advantages are: high-tech jobs abound, tons of historic and cultural stuff to do, BOSTON, commuter rail systems, BOSTON, the ocean & beaches, BOSTON, Newbury Comics, MIT, home of the free software foundation, Seiji Ozawa and the BSO, BOSTON, oh and did I mention that great town called BOSTON?
Ok.
But it still doesn't have CEDAR POINT. Plan? Transport CEDAR POINT to Connecticut, strike a deal with the Native American folk and transplant it next to Foxwoods, problem solved!
Oh, I didn't say the Matrix wasn't a great movie, I was just kinda observing a side issue. I should have also said that I thought The Matrix was an awesome flick. It seriously was very good and the special effects were incredible. And the whole concept of the perception of reality is pretty cool. But I was just pointing out an interesting observation I had made and wanted to see if any others had made it. By the way, you really should see Dark City just to see what I mean. It doesn't have even half the action or special effects of The Matrix but it's still pretty good in its own right.
Peter
Hey all,
;) There were so many similarities - I could point them out, but if you've seen Dark City then you can probably see them too. If you *haven't* seen Dark City go out and rent it and you'll see what I mean.
I went and saw The Matrix last night, and all I could think about was how incredibly similar it was to Dark City, a movie which came out last year amidst the fury of Armageddon, Godzilla, etc and was not much noticed. Has anyone else seen Dark City? Essentially I think the equation representing The Matrix is: The Matrix = Dark City + Terminator + Hackers or reduced to 1x4 augmented matrix form [DC T H M]
Peter
Funny, whenever I looked at the name I always thought "Seuss" like Dr. Seuss. Of course I know who Sousa is but I didn't put together "Seuss" and "composer"....... hmm. :)