"The 60s series built up sticky fanboy steam for two decades plus before TNG came out."
No, the 60's built up fanboy steam for about 15 years until "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" came out. After that, there were three more motion pictures released over the course of the slightly-less-than-a-decade between TMP and TNG to give fanboys their Trek fix.
In fact, TNG came out shortly after the massively popular-for-everyone-not-just-fanboys Star Trek IV. TNG was largely riding the wave of popularity from that movie, not pent up fanboy steam.
It's also important to note that every other show you mentioned except for Space 1999 started off really good and got progressively worse over time. Beauty and the Beast was downright pathetic by the time it was killed. Linda Hamilton had even left the show. Moonlighting made the mistake of killing the sexual tension between the two main characters (Dave and Maddie?). Lois and Clark got a bit silly after Lex got in trouble with the law. The show started relying to heavily on sci-fi crap instead of good story writing (complete with guest appearances by Jonathan Frakes). Quantum Leap made the mistake of going against a major philosophical point in the series and started leaping Sam into famous people. After Sam spending many a season harping over how the small changes hend up making big waves, it was a put off to see him inhabit people who could make big changes even if the stories all emphasized the small changes he made as the famous people.
Not exactly on topic, but isn't 4 just a subset of 2? For example, the Dallas Cowboys are a franchise of the NFL in that the NFL authorizes the Cowboys to sell or distribute the NFL's goods (a US football game) in a certain area.
In the words of the Wolf, "Let's not start sucking each other's [word removed by Google safe search] just yet."
It would be rather easy for Bell South to let massively popular sites like Google get away with not paying while throttling out less popular sites for not paying. It would also be somewhat easy for Bell South to not throttle bandwidth on what Google is typically used for (searches) while throttling Google's other features that Bell South might want to compete with.
How they managed to take a Western set in space and denegrate it into an alternate reality crapfest, I'll never understand. (It did get better in the 4th season but it was too late.)
I knew I should've bought the Canon I was also looking at! Now I get all the benefits of going to Sony with repair/replacement issues. Couldn't Minolta at least sell of to Nikon or Canon?
Star Trek will once again be more popular dead than it ever will be alive. Look at the Trek conventions. They began during a lull between the original series and the Motion Picture. Star Trek is very popular but the recent implementation was lacking. Expect the fan base to miss Trek more and more the longer it is off the air and out of the theater. In the meantime, I expect there will be an increase in alternative formats for new Trek (much like the Virgin and BBC Dr. Who novel lines). If game developers like Mad Doc can actually pull off a decent RTS based on Star Trek, there are a lot of people who will buy into that just to get a new Trek experience. That might not've been the case while TNG, DS9, or even Enterprise was still on the air.
I don't know what Mac users most people hang around with but the ones I know wouldn't know security or virus protection if it came up and bit them on the nose. A lot of these folks can barely turn on their machines and fire up their browser and word processor. I realize that I'm just speaking for the people I know but those people are Apple's target audience.
Layout isn't really an exact science (or at least it doesn't need to be). The concrete that will eventually be poured there will shift and expand to a small extent while drying. For a land surveyor, sub-centimeter accuracy can be important. When pouring a product that is going to shift more than a centimeter in some cases while drying and is goind to be covered completely by a wood or steel structure, sub-centimeter accuracy becomes somewhat less important. You can't just eyeball it, but close enough usually is as close as you'll end up even if you stake everything perfectly. This is speaking strictly from a residental building standpoint.
If someone gets paid to be a carpenter, they are a "real carpenter." They might not be a good ones but they are putting together houses and I'd be a little worried buying one of them. You can toss out elistist terms like "real carpenter" and "real framer" all you'd like but it won't change the fact that unqualified carpenters are out there and they're growing in number and the current state of building inspections in most places is not going to stop them from building poor quality houses.
Likewise, "real framers" (by which I assume you mean good framers) don't typically need anything but a square for simple roof systems but that blue book and calculator can be helpful for doublechecking your work and figuring out what to do about some of the more complex roofing situations.
Example that I remember: A valley joining a roof with a different pitched extrusion (covered deck maybe) butting into it that extends out to the hip. Sure, you can hack it out with the square, but if you're not very careful you can end up with something that is very hard to deck and prone to leaking or even worse the extrusion might not line up properly with the hip. I know that's a silly situation, if you've ever worked on McMansions or even just larger houses in fancy neighborhood you'll see a lot of that sort of nonsense. I think the architects who design those larger houses are under too much pressure to make something complicated for the sake of being complicated. Even with trusses, that sort of thing can be a nightmare to get everything set up right.
And FWIW, I too have spent many a summer (and even a few winters) bulding houses in the southeastern US. Most of those guys certainly do waste a LOT of time. They'll show up late, leave early, and not do much in between. It was pretty nice being able to work circles around other crews just by showing up and working.
There's actually a framing calculator that has a much more useful square root function on it. It will return values that aren't decimal so it's easier to to use with a tape measure.
If you think that was bad, you should look at how most framers put up rafters. My dad could do all those measurements in his head. On one house we did, my dad actually had me use the blue book (the one you get when you buy a speed sqaure) and the framing calculator to figure up the roof system. We still finished that house faster and better than the guys down the street who put a "pilot rafter" up to mark it by eye and monkeyed with it until it worked out. Most framers just spend an inordinate amount of time fiddling with the book and making prototype rafters until they are sure they will work.
Maybe it's a history of gamepads? Even then, the Nintendo gamepad would be the first but it would be on their Game N Watch systems instead of the NES which came a few years later. I think we were all severely misled by the Slashdot title. Not even an Atari Proline or the Genesis controller were mentioned.
I've used PHP regularly for about the same amount of time. I've also used other languages, but I primarily use PHP. PHP does require you to be careful about program design. If you don't build a web app to scale properly then that's your fault in PHP. The language is not going to help you. However, most programs I've ever built don't require any sort of scalability other than playing nice with others. Even the ones that do need a lot of scalability can be done in PHP. You just have to be careful during the design phase. Sure a lot of things look like nails if you only have a hammer, but a lot of things really ARE nails.
I was confused beause the topic of discussion rampant throughout the posting was comparing old Simpsons episodes to new Simpsons episodes. When you brought up Dr. Who, I assumed it was to compare the old eps to the new ones.
From reading the RGVAC newsgroup, I was under the understanding that the word "Ground" was in the title because it is also a coffee shop. I was also under the understanding that if that arcade relied only on its arcade revenue, it would fail. Arcades ARE dead. Make no mistake. As much as it brings a tear to my eye to say it, arcades are value adding gimmicks at best in today's world.
But people DO like the new Who. In fact, they really like it over in the UK. It's consistently in the top 5 in nightly ratings and spends most of its time in the top 3 right behind juggernauts like Coronation Street. The new Dr. Who is just as cool as the old show to most people. In fact, I consider myself to be pretty hardcore fan of the old show. I prefer the newer stuff to the drivel that Pip and Jane put out under Jonathan Nathan Turner. Anyone remember the Timelash anagram (hint: the first word is "lame" and the last word ends with "it")? Then again I'm not a continuity monster. I'll gladly trade away some obscure continuity issues from a 40 year old show in order to get see good stories.
"for hauling jobs a pickup truck is likely to be superior so there probably was some non-practical aspect to the choice"
The typical body-on-frame SUV is just a truck with a back seat. For towing (which I realize is only half of hauling), there is really no difference compared to a similar sized truck. It may seem different because an SUV usually looks bigger than it's truck counterpart. For example, the Explorer looks the size of an F150 but it's really on an extended bed Ranger frame (at least until 2000).
Now I don't know if this was the case with those students, but I am assuming college students with summer jobs have used vehicles. An SUV might've been the best value they could find in the used market. Pickup trucks hold their value very well. SUVs do not.
"Twilight War, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game using the Source engine (first featured in Half-Life 2), would have been Smiling Gator's first game. The company had billed Twilight War as 'an MMORPG with an integrated first-person-shooter-style combat system where thousands of online players come together in an expansive and immersive three-dimensional world.'"
I think this should read: "Twilight War, a massively multiplayer online FPS using the Source engine (first featured in Half-Life 2), would have been Smiling Gator's first game. The company had billed Twilight War as 'an FPS that we will call an MMORPG so we can sucker you out of a monthly fee.'"
You could also do the same by buying a pickup truck. I remember a Biology class (taught by an Ecology professor) I took in college where I called out my professor for not mentioning pickups when he asked who in the classes owned SUVs and tried to convince them that they shouldn't.
What's funny is that he started asking what the students needed their SUVs for and then quickly stopped when three of the first four students he asked actually needed their SUV for summer jobs (towing a large landscaping trailer, carrying tools and saw horses for decking, and carpooling six people to an internship an hour away). It was priceless because you could tell he was going to use anecdotal evidence to blast their choice of vehicle until he realized that their vehicle choices weren't too bad given their situation.
Don't forget about towing. I have yet to see a minivan that is good at towing. That's a pretty significant downside. The GMC Safari is good, but it's not exactly "mini." The only American vehicle that is reasonable for towing and relatively small is the now-defunct Jeep Cherokee (NOT Grand Cherokee, which is quite a bit larger). It weighs about 3500 lbs and can tow 5000 lbs. It's basically a raised station wagon. I've towed up to 4000 in one pretty comfortably but I have an OLD Explorer I keep around for most towing duties.
And I realize that there are people in Europe who tow all the time with small cars but there's two big differences: 1. European trailers tend to have brakes on them a lot more often. Tow ratings in America tend to be lower because most mid-sized American trailers don't have brakes. 2. If you tow over the specified tow ratings in America and you get into an accident, you are in for a whole world of problems since your insurance company might not pay for any damages.
Personally, I'd love to get a minivan but until they do something about towing capacity, I'll use my Explorer.
Slashdot Mirror
"The 60s series built up sticky fanboy steam for two decades plus before TNG came out."
No, the 60's built up fanboy steam for about 15 years until "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" came out. After that, there were three more motion pictures released over the course of the slightly-less-than-a-decade between TMP and TNG to give fanboys their Trek fix.
In fact, TNG came out shortly after the massively popular-for-everyone-not-just-fanboys Star Trek IV. TNG was largely riding the wave of popularity from that movie, not pent up fanboy steam.
It's also important to note that every other show you mentioned except for Space 1999 started off really good and got progressively worse over time. Beauty and the Beast was downright pathetic by the time it was killed. Linda Hamilton had even left the show. Moonlighting made the mistake of killing the sexual tension between the two main characters (Dave and Maddie?). Lois and Clark got a bit silly after Lex got in trouble with the law. The show started relying to heavily on sci-fi crap instead of good story writing (complete with guest appearances by Jonathan Frakes). Quantum Leap made the mistake of going against a major philosophical point in the series and started leaping Sam into famous people. After Sam spending many a season harping over how the small changes hend up making big waves, it was a put off to see him inhabit people who could make big changes even if the stories all emphasized the small changes he made as the famous people.
Not exactly on topic, but isn't 4 just a subset of 2? For example, the Dallas Cowboys are a franchise of the NFL in that the NFL authorizes the Cowboys to sell or distribute the NFL's goods (a US football game) in a certain area.
In the words of the Wolf, "Let's not start sucking each other's [word removed by Google safe search] just yet."
It would be rather easy for Bell South to let massively popular sites like Google get away with not paying while throttling out less popular sites for not paying. It would also be somewhat easy for Bell South to not throttle bandwidth on what Google is typically used for (searches) while throttling Google's other features that Bell South might want to compete with.
You did watch Enterprise, didn't you?
How they managed to take a Western set in space and denegrate it into an alternate reality crapfest, I'll never understand. (It did get better in the 4th season but it was too late.)
"Sony, on the other hand, gains a huge boost in its R&D."
I don't doubt it's good for Sony. I still think it's bad for me as a Minolta purchaser (FWIW film, not digital).
The Sharpie, Sony's natural enemy.
Heat, the XBox 360's natural enemy.
I knew I should've bought the Canon I was also looking at! Now I get all the benefits of going to Sony with repair/replacement issues. Couldn't Minolta at least sell of to Nikon or Canon?
Star Trek will once again be more popular dead than it ever will be alive. Look at the Trek conventions. They began during a lull between the original series and the Motion Picture. Star Trek is very popular but the recent implementation was lacking. Expect the fan base to miss Trek more and more the longer it is off the air and out of the theater. In the meantime, I expect there will be an increase in alternative formats for new Trek (much like the Virgin and BBC Dr. Who novel lines). If game developers like Mad Doc can actually pull off a decent RTS based on Star Trek, there are a lot of people who will buy into that just to get a new Trek experience. That might not've been the case while TNG, DS9, or even Enterprise was still on the air.
No, they both have attractive women attending but in both cases they are paid to be there.
I don't know what Mac users most people hang around with but the ones I know wouldn't know security or virus protection if it came up and bit them on the nose. A lot of these folks can barely turn on their machines and fire up their browser and word processor. I realize that I'm just speaking for the people I know but those people are Apple's target audience.
Layout isn't really an exact science (or at least it doesn't need to be). The concrete that will eventually be poured there will shift and expand to a small extent while drying. For a land surveyor, sub-centimeter accuracy can be important. When pouring a product that is going to shift more than a centimeter in some cases while drying and is goind to be covered completely by a wood or steel structure, sub-centimeter accuracy becomes somewhat less important. You can't just eyeball it, but close enough usually is as close as you'll end up even if you stake everything perfectly. This is speaking strictly from a residental building standpoint.
If someone gets paid to be a carpenter, they are a "real carpenter." They might not be a good ones but they are putting together houses and I'd be a little worried buying one of them. You can toss out elistist terms like "real carpenter" and "real framer" all you'd like but it won't change the fact that unqualified carpenters are out there and they're growing in number and the current state of building inspections in most places is not going to stop them from building poor quality houses.
Likewise, "real framers" (by which I assume you mean good framers) don't typically need anything but a square for simple roof systems but that blue book and calculator can be helpful for doublechecking your work and figuring out what to do about some of the more complex roofing situations.
Example that I remember: A valley joining a roof with a different pitched extrusion (covered deck maybe) butting into it that extends out to the hip. Sure, you can hack it out with the square, but if you're not very careful you can end up with something that is very hard to deck and prone to leaking or even worse the extrusion might not line up properly with the hip. I know that's a silly situation, if you've ever worked on McMansions or even just larger houses in fancy neighborhood you'll see a lot of that sort of nonsense. I think the architects who design those larger houses are under too much pressure to make something complicated for the sake of being complicated. Even with trusses, that sort of thing can be a nightmare to get everything set up right.
And FWIW, I too have spent many a summer (and even a few winters) bulding houses in the southeastern US. Most of those guys certainly do waste a LOT of time. They'll show up late, leave early, and not do much in between. It was pretty nice being able to work circles around other crews just by showing up and working.
There's actually a framing calculator that has a much more useful square root function on it. It will return values that aren't decimal so it's easier to to use with a tape measure.
If you think that was bad, you should look at how most framers put up rafters. My dad could do all those measurements in his head. On one house we did, my dad actually had me use the blue book (the one you get when you buy a speed sqaure) and the framing calculator to figure up the roof system. We still finished that house faster and better than the guys down the street who put a "pilot rafter" up to mark it by eye and monkeyed with it until it worked out. Most framers just spend an inordinate amount of time fiddling with the book and making prototype rafters until they are sure they will work.
Careful, that's also the description of most of the guys at the trade shows. (Ok , MAYBE not the hips.)
Maybe it's a history of gamepads? Even then, the Nintendo gamepad would be the first but it would be on their Game N Watch systems instead of the NES which came a few years later. I think we were all severely misled by the Slashdot title. Not even an Atari Proline or the Genesis controller were mentioned.
I've used PHP regularly for about the same amount of time. I've also used other languages, but I primarily use PHP. PHP does require you to be careful about program design. If you don't build a web app to scale properly then that's your fault in PHP. The language is not going to help you. However, most programs I've ever built don't require any sort of scalability other than playing nice with others. Even the ones that do need a lot of scalability can be done in PHP. You just have to be careful during the design phase. Sure a lot of things look like nails if you only have a hammer, but a lot of things really ARE nails.
I was confused beause the topic of discussion rampant throughout the posting was comparing old Simpsons episodes to new Simpsons episodes. When you brought up Dr. Who, I assumed it was to compare the old eps to the new ones.
From reading the RGVAC newsgroup, I was under the understanding that the word "Ground" was in the title because it is also a coffee shop. I was also under the understanding that if that arcade relied only on its arcade revenue, it would fail. Arcades ARE dead. Make no mistake. As much as it brings a tear to my eye to say it, arcades are value adding gimmicks at best in today's world.
But people DO like the new Who. In fact, they really like it over in the UK. It's consistently in the top 5 in nightly ratings and spends most of its time in the top 3 right behind juggernauts like Coronation Street. The new Dr. Who is just as cool as the old show to most people. In fact, I consider myself to be pretty hardcore fan of the old show. I prefer the newer stuff to the drivel that Pip and Jane put out under Jonathan Nathan Turner. Anyone remember the Timelash anagram (hint: the first word is "lame" and the last word ends with "it")? Then again I'm not a continuity monster. I'll gladly trade away some obscure continuity issues from a 40 year old show in order to get see good stories.
"for hauling jobs a pickup truck is likely to be superior so there probably was some non-practical aspect to the choice"
The typical body-on-frame SUV is just a truck with a back seat. For towing (which I realize is only half of hauling), there is really no difference compared to a similar sized truck. It may seem different because an SUV usually looks bigger than it's truck counterpart. For example, the Explorer looks the size of an F150 but it's really on an extended bed Ranger frame (at least until 2000).
Now I don't know if this was the case with those students, but I am assuming college students with summer jobs have used vehicles. An SUV might've been the best value they could find in the used market. Pickup trucks hold their value very well. SUVs do not.
"Twilight War, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game using the Source engine (first featured in Half-Life 2), would have been Smiling Gator's first game. The company had billed Twilight War as 'an MMORPG with an integrated first-person-shooter-style combat system where thousands of online players come together in an expansive and immersive three-dimensional world.'"
I think this should read:
"Twilight War, a massively multiplayer online FPS using the Source engine (first featured in Half-Life 2), would have been Smiling Gator's first game. The company had billed Twilight War as 'an FPS that we will call an MMORPG so we can sucker you out of a monthly fee.'"
You could also do the same by buying a pickup truck. I remember a Biology class (taught by an Ecology professor) I took in college where I called out my professor for not mentioning pickups when he asked who in the classes owned SUVs and tried to convince them that they shouldn't.
What's funny is that he started asking what the students needed their SUVs for and then quickly stopped when three of the first four students he asked actually needed their SUV for summer jobs (towing a large landscaping trailer, carrying tools and saw horses for decking, and carpooling six people to an internship an hour away). It was priceless because you could tell he was going to use anecdotal evidence to blast their choice of vehicle until he realized that their vehicle choices weren't too bad given their situation.
Don't forget about towing. I have yet to see a minivan that is good at towing. That's a pretty significant downside. The GMC Safari is good, but it's not exactly "mini." The only American vehicle that is reasonable for towing and relatively small is the now-defunct Jeep Cherokee (NOT Grand Cherokee, which is quite a bit larger). It weighs about 3500 lbs and can tow 5000 lbs. It's basically a raised station wagon. I've towed up to 4000 in one pretty comfortably but I have an OLD Explorer I keep around for most towing duties.
And I realize that there are people in Europe who tow all the time with small cars but there's two big differences:
1. European trailers tend to have brakes on them a lot more often. Tow ratings in America tend to be lower because most mid-sized American trailers don't have brakes.
2. If you tow over the specified tow ratings in America and you get into an accident, you are in for a whole world of problems since your insurance company might not pay for any damages.
Personally, I'd love to get a minivan but until they do something about towing capacity, I'll use my Explorer.
Well they can't exactly say that publisher demand is going to force this new format down our throats.
I thought the groupthink was that we're heading for a gaming crash.