The problem with the celebrity voice-overs
on
The Simpsons Movie
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· Score: 2, Insightful
We should remember that Sideshow Bob was an actual character, he wasn't playing Kelsey Grammar. But even beyond this, the early celebrity voice-overs were great. The problem only began when they started working the episodes around the celebrities, rather than working the celebrities into an episode. I think Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger were the start of this.
"El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Homer"
on
The Simpsons Movie
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Homer's chilli-trip is one of the classics, 'cinematography' wise. My gf teaches art history, and used this episode in one of her classes, asking her students to recognise the different artists parodied.
Well, the Simpsons used to be about plot and writing quality rather than slick commercialism (can you say celebrity voice-overs), and some of the all-time classics are from season 1. If you get the DVD box-sets, you can see that the character art had basically matured by season 2 onwards; Groening makes this comment himself on the DVD commentary.
I hope they release a few more complete seasons on DVD now (I think it's only up to season 3 currently) as the show only started to flag after about the first 10 years. It's amazing how it managed to be so consistently good for so long; that might also explain how it's death has been so prolonged and painful.
South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut
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The Simpsons Movie
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· Score: 5, Insightful
South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut managed this with aplomb. I remember being in the theatre, everything going along relatively calmly, when "Uncle Fucker" started. I have *never* heard so many people explode with laughter. It was classic...
"You don't eat or sleep or mow the lawn, you just fuck your uncle all day long!" Inspired.
I suspect that this film may mark the end of the Simpsons. I certainly hope so, and just hope that they go back to the roots and manage to make a fitting coda to what was one of the most important shows in television history, rather than just a mindless parade of celebrity voice-overs.
Very true, but birth rates in first world countries are dropping, often below replacement levels, and this will cause serious problems for those countries with ageing populations. Some countries (Italy) have gone as far as offering cash payments to parents who have a second child.
Cloning, when promoted, is generally seen as a technology that could have research or medical therepeutic value, more rarely as one could allow infertile parents to have children that are genetically their own. That's not to say that I agree with human cloning (I'm not sure, and would lean towards against), but 'there are enough people in the world' is not all there is to the argument by a long shot. Look at IVF - it's not exactly producing people by the billions, but rather helping a small percentage of infertile couples.
Although, I agree that a bit of engraving would go some way towards supporting their value. Is there anything at all, beyond that 1 sentence on the website, for a purchaser to establish that they really do have one of the Virginia Tech machines?
SuSE is a logical choice given that it's a German company but this is part of a much larger move towards Open Source by the German government, which has been going on for some time now. They did a deal with IBM to let agencies buy IBM hardware and SuSE software at discounts competitive with MS. They are doing this, according to the Interior Minister, because "We raise the level of IT security by avoiding monocultures, we lower the dependency on single software vendors, and we reach costs savings in software and operation costs."
The difference with MS is that while using SuSE, due to the nature of Open Source they are not tied to and reliant on a single vendor. This is just the latest town to so convert, albeit with interesting staff-persuasion tactics!
What, you haven't seen the "She thinks Tux is cute" ads, etc. Ok, maybe you're a subscriber. Offtopic, but I never told./ my gender, yet the ads *always* feature women. You don't have to put 4 together to be a bit suspicious of the gender balance there...
Agreed, my first laptop, while I was a student, was the Psion MC400. Used ordinary AA batteries, went for around 40 hours on a charge, had a nice big screen for word processing that you could read outside, a full-travel keyboard, a nice Windowed GUI and a mousepad like modern notepads (you pressed it in to click, rather than having a seperate button). I'd sync it back to my PC over RS232 for backup or printing, although it could print directly either.
I had a Revo too, and it was great. Much better battery life than my current PocketPC - but this has nothing to do with the OS, it was due to the monochrome, non-backlit screen, no WiFi or sound, and the slow processor! (Still managed to do most of what I needed a PDA for, and I was sad to part with it). And Linux can work fine on some pretty low power devices.
Yeah, but the point here is that there are available, right *now*, much better alternatives than a RAID array of 8 compact flash cards. Choose any factor, cheaper, faster, smaller, more resilient, whatever, or any possible application, and there is a better solution. This has no bearing on whether solid-state will surpass magnetic media for longer-term storage in the future. Personally, I doubt it will in the near future; hard-disks have maintained a exponential capacity lead over solid-state ever since they were invented.
Now a beowulf cluster of flash cards, that would be a completely different matter;-)
That's true, but there are filesystems like JFFS2 that are specifically designed for flash and spread writes across the entire card. (This will still come nowhere near a hard disk, but can be sufficient for many applications.)
Lots of reasons. The sort things that use 'the smaller form factor of flash cards' aren't going to appreciate the CF card (already the largest form of flash storage) growing in size by a factor of eight. You've reached near 2.5" (laptop) hard-drive style sizes already, possibly larger with the necessary controlling circuitry. Factor in the expense of implementing the RAID controller in said portable device, and I don't think you're onto a winner. GB for GB, it is hardly a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks either.
CF is much slower. One of the fastest modern cards is the SanDisk Extreme or Ultra II, which claim 9-10MB/sec - that's for *sequential* read/write (in fairness, the sort of thing you are likely to do on a digital camera, but not on a computer). That's 60x-66x in CF terms. These new 8gb cards quote the same, if you RTA.
My own personal experience with a '26x high speed' card in a PC-Card adapter (a pretty fast interface) bears this out, CF is dead slow compared to even a 4200RPM HD (like the one in my laptop).
He has 'lost' many times in the past (e.g. as former CEO of mp3.com, he lost a major suit with the record companies). Have a look at his bio. He was also the person who put up a $100k prize for hacking the X-Box to run Linux.
Basically, his world view seems to be that he has enough money already, and will do things that he feels are right, irrespective of the consequences. This I highly respect him for, but I don't know that I'd like to have him running a company that I had invested in.
From the Lindows press release: "The decision means that the March 1, 2004 trial will not go forward. Instead, Microsoft will appeal the Court's ruling to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit."
It would be simply *impossible* for MS to prevail if the case went ahead on this basis. No-one disputes that 'windows' was a generic computing term before the introduction of MS Windows. The judge allowed them an option of appealing this ruling, and they are doing so. They would be mad not to.
Oh - and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article reports the facts and is perfectly fair and balanced to both sides. It might have been an idea to put this link first, rather than suggesting that it is biased.
I wouldn't say it's that simple. English was and is the prevailing tech language, that would be used for computing terms in other countries (witness France's efforts to replace the use of the term "e-mail" with "courriel" and then compare popularity on Google.fr.
And 'windows' was definately a generic computing term before MS took it for the name of their product.
But what if the public tell them that science would be better served by robotic exploration, and that he should prioritise the economy and public services here on earth? Would that make a difference?
From reading the first post, I honestly thought Gates *was* on this list. I kept pressing 'next' after John Perry Barlow, and the list would just bounce back to the start. I thought this looked like some sort of Gates protection mechanism in Opera, but no - after firing up IE (and typing in the URL), I can confirm he's just not on the list.
In fairness, it's not a troll, there *is* a smiley immediately after the domain name. Also, if you actually look at the text on the destination page, you might notice that rather than being a simple duplication of Sitefinder, it is making a comment on Verisign's potential aims with such a service.
In fairness, they are migrating from UNIX. In such a situation, I'm not surprised that Linux is a better fit for them.
The truth is, what is better for you will depend on your situation, existing applications, existing in-house skills, etc. I don't believe Microsoft's funded propaganda, but there can be situations in which Windows is an appropriate choice. Look at what you are running and then make a decision. In this case it is obviously Linux.
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I don't think that's much an advantage, when that single vendor is SCO. Like, how much longer are they going to be around?
And "lower[ing] the dependency on single software vendors" , as the German government is attempting to do in moving to Linux, is surely a good thing, anyway.
We should remember that Sideshow Bob was an actual character, he wasn't playing Kelsey Grammar. But even beyond this, the early celebrity voice-overs were great. The problem only began when they started working the episodes around the celebrities, rather than working the celebrities into an episode. I think Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger were the start of this.
Homer's chilli-trip is one of the classics, 'cinematography' wise. My gf teaches art history, and used this episode in one of her classes, asking her students to recognise the different artists parodied.
I hope they release a few more complete seasons on DVD now (I think it's only up to season 3 currently) as the show only started to flag after about the first 10 years. It's amazing how it managed to be so consistently good for so long; that might also explain how it's death has been so prolonged and painful.
...is the same reason as for Matrix 2 and 3.
"You don't eat or sleep or mow the lawn, you just fuck your uncle all day long!" Inspired.
I suspect that this film may mark the end of the Simpsons. I certainly hope so, and just hope that they go back to the roots and manage to make a fitting coda to what was one of the most important shows in television history, rather than just a mindless parade of celebrity voice-overs.
Cloning, when promoted, is generally seen as a technology that could have research or medical therepeutic value, more rarely as one could allow infertile parents to have children that are genetically their own. That's not to say that I agree with human cloning (I'm not sure, and would lean towards against), but 'there are enough people in the world' is not all there is to the argument by a long shot. Look at IVF - it's not exactly producing people by the billions, but rather helping a small percentage of infertile couples.
Although, I agree that a bit of engraving would go some way towards supporting their value. Is there anything at all, beyond that 1 sentence on the website, for a purchaser to establish that they really do have one of the Virginia Tech machines?
The difference with MS is that while using SuSE, due to the nature of Open Source they are not tied to and reliant on a single vendor. This is just the latest town to so convert, albeit with interesting staff-persuasion tactics!
What, you haven't seen the "She thinks Tux is cute" ads, etc. Ok, maybe you're a subscriber. Offtopic, but I never told ./ my gender, yet the ads *always* feature women. You don't have to put 4 together to be a bit suspicious of the gender balance there...
Did I mention that it was instant-on?
I had a Revo too, and it was great. Much better battery life than my current PocketPC - but this has nothing to do with the OS, it was due to the monochrome, non-backlit screen, no WiFi or sound, and the slow processor! (Still managed to do most of what I needed a PDA for, and I was sad to part with it). And Linux can work fine on some pretty low power devices.
Now a beowulf cluster of flash cards, that would be a completely different matter ;-)
That's true, but there are filesystems like JFFS2 that are specifically designed for flash and spread writes across the entire card. (This will still come nowhere near a hard disk, but can be sufficient for many applications.)
Lots of reasons. The sort things that use 'the smaller form factor of flash cards' aren't going to appreciate the CF card (already the largest form of flash storage) growing in size by a factor of eight. You've reached near 2.5" (laptop) hard-drive style sizes already, possibly larger with the necessary controlling circuitry. Factor in the expense of implementing the RAID controller in said portable device, and I don't think you're onto a winner. GB for GB, it is hardly a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks either.
My own personal experience with a '26x high speed' card in a PC-Card adapter (a pretty fast interface) bears this out, CF is dead slow compared to even a 4200RPM HD (like the one in my laptop).
Basically, his world view seems to be that he has enough money already, and will do things that he feels are right, irrespective of the consequences. This I highly respect him for, but I don't know that I'd like to have him running a company that I had invested in.
It would be simply *impossible* for MS to prevail if the case went ahead on this basis. No-one disputes that 'windows' was a generic computing term before the introduction of MS Windows. The judge allowed them an option of appealing this ruling, and they are doing so. They would be mad not to.
Oh - and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article reports the facts and is perfectly fair and balanced to both sides. It might have been an idea to put this link first, rather than suggesting that it is biased.
And 'windows' was definately a generic computing term before MS took it for the name of their product.
But what if the public tell them that science would be better served by robotic exploration, and that he should prioritise the economy and public services here on earth? Would that make a difference?
Well, camera phones have been more of a hit in Europe and Japan. And they don't even have a built in laser!
From reading the first post, I honestly thought Gates *was* on this list. I kept pressing 'next' after John Perry Barlow, and the list would just bounce back to the start. I thought this looked like some sort of Gates protection mechanism in Opera, but no - after firing up IE (and typing in the URL), I can confirm he's just not on the list.
In fairness, it's not a troll, there *is* a smiley immediately after the domain name. Also, if you actually look at the text on the destination page, you might notice that rather than being a simple duplication of Sitefinder, it is making a comment on Verisign's potential aims with such a service.
In fairness, they are migrating from UNIX. In such a situation, I'm not surprised that Linux is a better fit for them.
The truth is, what is better for you will depend on your situation, existing applications, existing in-house skills, etc. I don't believe Microsoft's funded propaganda, but there can be situations in which Windows is an appropriate choice. Look at what you are running and then make a decision. In this case it is obviously Linux.