Which government is this?
I work in government. A federal government agency. In a G7 country. I had to, on my own time, use a python script, zsh and sed to split and turn several > 150mb ASCII text files (yes you read that right) into a series of CSV files so that the information could be meaningfully used in MS Office, the only software we're allowed to use for anything. I brought my own laptop to work and finished that job in less than half an hour.
Our local IT department wanted a budgetary commitment of $15,000 and 3 months to do the same thing. It may just be our agency but government IT seems to be staffed with washouts and supervised by people with absolutely no technical ability. They can keep our infrastructure duct-taped together but that's it.
"We'll fixed that squeaky floor board in one room by tearing down your house and dropping a new, unfinished prefab on the lot. Hope you backed up all your stuff."
As soon as you use a graphic interface, the advantages of Linux on old hardware pretty much disappear, in my experience.
Not necessarily. You still have the option of running lightweight window managers and you have a whole raft of alternative applications (AbiWord instead of OO.o Writer, GNUmeric instead of Calc, Firefox, Sylpheed instead of Evolution...)
As a single data point, I run Slack 10 with WindowMaker, Firefox, Sylpheed and aterm/vi on a P1-120/32Mb laptop. It's cozy but it feels like home. And I can work on it.
Like everything else, these kinds of compromises are more effective if you know what you're doing.
Anthony Lane [the New Yorker] couldn't stomach it:
From Lane's review: Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. "I hope right you are." Break me a fucking give.
Well one symptom might be the cost of books at colleges - notice how they are very expensive, where the tabloids are dirt cheap, even though much of the information (esp in math) has existed for 100s of years - I claim this isn't natural.
Some questions you might ask yourself to help your understanding of your own example:
* what is the cost to produce one tabloid newspaper?
* how many units can the tabloid press expect to sell?
* what is the cost to produce a hardbound, 4-color, 600-page textbook?
* how many units can the texbook publisher expect to sell?
* How does the existence of copyright laws directly influence the above business equation?
I love the blooper moment in Blown Away: a long tracking helicopter shot over a gov't building in Boston flying a honking big Canadian flag.
Hello Ottawa!
Imagine a full army of robots! No loss of life and we still get to kick your butt. Imagine having an enemy think about attacking you, and the response is an army of kamakazi robots. The enemy thinks twice at that moment.
Welcome to Business 101. My name is Mr. Schemanista. Please take out your text books and turn to page 21: "Running a business".
Rent, wages, utilities, property and business taxes, licenses to show movies... a movie theatre is a service business. They don't have a "cost of goods sold" which can adjust the price to view each movie: you've confused your local cineplex with your local supermarket. Instead movie theatres have a "cost to deliver services", also known as "expenses incurred to generate revenue". They have to spread those costs across their service revenues, including concessions, or else they can't afford to stay in business!
They, like the studios, make money on some movies and lose money on others and the moneymakers finance the money-losers.
Their "sweet spot" for profitability is very narrow. Seriously, do you think that AMC is charging 600% markup on popcorn because they plan to buy their own Caribbean corporate island? They're jacking you because, even at $15CAD/head, admissions don't cover their costs.
No, they were lampooning the O.J. Simpson Trial. Chewbacca could have just as easily been Star Trek slime.
The South Park creaters didn't use Star Trek. They made a deliberate choice to use the logical inconsistencies of Star Wars as the basis of their satire, and they scored a bigger "hit" as a result. Ask yourself why or demonstrate to me that you'll get the same mileage from a Star Trek joke.
No one--and I mean, NO ONE--felt any great strength in the force from Leia, probably because she never used it.
Think about it: to whom does Yoda refer when he mentions "another" near the end of Ep. V? In RoTJ, we're led to believe that it's Leia. How is she part of the same "hope" mentioned in Ep. IV, if the "hope" has to do with the "Force" embodied by Luke, and presumably, his sister (otherwise, why is she "another")? Yoda tells Ben that there is "another". "Another", means "like this one". "Like" means "the Force is strong in her". What other possible meaning could you come up with? If the "another" is not Leia, then who is it? If the "hope" for the overthrow of the Emperor doesn't lie with one in whom the Force is strong, why are Kenobi and Yoda working so hard to get Luke ready for his closeup?
Lucas tells us that you don't have to use the Force for its presence to be felt. It permeates all living things. Sure, some people are more in tune with it because they have those mitichlorians, which are detectable in a blood test. DarthAnakin knows all of this. Wouldn't he routinely perform mitichlorian tests on his enemies, and maybe even his subordinates, so that he can keep an eye on the competition? Let's face it: in Lucas' weird view, it's the masters of the Force who are supposed to exhert the most influence over events, even though the outcome of the whole Rebellion gets decided by a Wookie, a smuggler-turned-guerilla, and a former Tibana gas mine administrator.
Lucas is supposed to be creating these movies as part of a coherent whole. The middle tryptych was internally inconsistent and all of the "prequels" have only made a bigger mess of things, which supports my original assertion: he can't plot worth a damn.
Trey and Matt lampooned Star Wars, ergo the source of the Chewbacca Defence is Star Wars, which is a story by George Lucas, realized by several different screenwriters. To be even more blunt: it was the blatant illogic of Star Wars which made the Chewbacca defence "true", hence funny. Therefore, Lucas "invented" the Chewbacca Defence.
Nope. The force wasn't strong in Leia--never was, even in the books.
Forget the books. They're a red herring. This is a criticism of the movies. So let's see:
BEN: That boy is our last hope.
YODA: (looks up) No. There is another.
Now view this entire discussion in the context provided by the midichlorian nonsense from The Phantom Menace.
IT'S DARTHANAKIN'S FAMILY TOO! You don't think during at least one of his heavy-breathing sessions, he didn't bonk himself on the helmet and say "Wait a minute: Owen lives on Tatooine... And if that was the planet to which Leia was trying to flee with the stolen Death Star plans...? He knew Leia was on the Alderaanian freighter and that she had the DS plans with her. He finds out she's headed for Tatooine--which just happens to be the planet where the man who married his mother lives. He can sense the Force in Luke after the wuffleball affair but he can't detect the presense of his former mentor (you know--the man who tried to kill him during an upcoming lava-surfing session) on a planet with an ostensibly low popluation density: a presence he manages to detect when Kenobi infiltrates the Death Star which is large enough to be mistaken for a moon and probably has a crew numbering in the tens of thousands?
Guy, seriously, have you actually thought about Star Wars? The entire opus is one gigantic Chewbacca defence. Lucas doesn't ask you to suspend your disbelief: he demands that you take it out back and put two in the brain.
If my spouse ever absconded with my daughter, the last place she'd hide is with one of her relatives because those are the first possibilities I'd check. Apparently, elementary logic has no place in "Jedi business".
"If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests."
When Darth sensed the force in Luke, it was AFTER
Luke had learned to fight a wuffleball with his eyes closed,
and he could talk to the discorporate Ben.
How did the destruction of Leia's homeworld cause such a great "disturbance in the Force" that Kenobi could sense it presumably from lightyears away? Was it the instant of stress experienced by millions or billions of low-Force individuals as they were vaporized, or did they happen to be fighting wuffleballs when the Death Star attacked?
The middle tryptych (Episodes IV, V, VI) gives me the impression that the Force "permeates all living things" and is detectible by the sensitive, so how does DarthAnakin, one of the Greatest Jedis to ever live[TM] not sense the same Force in Leia when she's enduring the stress of torture?
Star Wars was cool when I was young enough not to concern myself with these things but Lucas keeps trying to make it "mean something", and that bothers me. If Lucas is really writing for the seven year-old in all of us, how come he keeps trying to inject so much mystical significance into what is ostensibly "light entertainment"?
If you dissect the moral premise behind Star Wars, it's pretty disturbing: the death and suffering of billions is justified by the redemption of the one man who had a hand in causing most of it. As if a shall-remain-nameless mid-20th-century tyrant had a sudden epiphany, turned away from the Dark Side and saved the life of a Russian general and the world collectively said "Oh, well that's all right then: war's over!"
The plot has hardly been Lucas's problem -- it's the dialogue, script, & directing. Plot-wise, he's fine.:)
No, his plots suck pretty badly too.
A couple of examples: Obi Wan stashes Luke on the same planet where Anakin grew up. Oh yeah, DarthAnakin would never think to look there... And Leia is supposed to be Plan B should Luke fail but Darth can't sense that the Force is strong in her, even when he's personally overseeing her torture?
Slashdot Mirror
Which government is this? I work in government. A federal government agency. In a G7 country. I had to, on my own time, use a python script, zsh and sed to split and turn several > 150mb ASCII text files (yes you read that right) into a series of CSV files so that the information could be meaningfully used in MS Office, the only software we're allowed to use for anything. I brought my own laptop to work and finished that job in less than half an hour. Our local IT department wanted a budgetary commitment of $15,000 and 3 months to do the same thing. It may just be our agency but government IT seems to be staffed with washouts and supervised by people with absolutely no technical ability. They can keep our infrastructure duct-taped together but that's it.
"We'll fixed that squeaky floor board in one room by tearing down your house and dropping a new, unfinished prefab on the lot. Hope you backed up all your stuff."
But what about typing with one hand?
Stop using your computer to view porn. Or you could learn a one-handed method.Was it because of cultural dominance? Then why aren't Canadians and Europeans bombing the hell out of the United States? They bear the worst of it.
We've launched Bryan Adams, Nelly Furtado and Celine Dion at you. Damn you Americans for being impervious to our mind-control rays.As soon as you use a graphic interface, the advantages of Linux on old hardware pretty much disappear, in my experience.
Not necessarily. You still have the option of running lightweight window managers and you have a whole raft of alternative applications (AbiWord instead of OO.o Writer, GNUmeric instead of Calc, Firefox, Sylpheed instead of Evolution...)
As a single data point, I run Slack 10 with WindowMaker, Firefox, Sylpheed and aterm/vi on a P1-120/32Mb laptop. It's cozy but it feels like home. And I can work on it.
Like everything else, these kinds of compromises are more effective if you know what you're doing.
Anthony Lane [the New Yorker] couldn't stomach it:
From Lane's review: Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. "I hope right you are." Break me a fucking give.
Best line EVER.
* what is the cost to produce one tabloid newspaper?
* how many units can the tabloid press expect to sell?
* what is the cost to produce a hardbound, 4-color, 600-page textbook?
* how many units can the texbook publisher expect to sell?
* How does the existence of copyright laws directly influence the above business equation?
but by today's standards, the characters are flat, the dialogue is ridiculous and the plots are very basic.
Even by Slashdot's standards that statement is ridiculously uninformed.a bunch of programmers form an alliance (i.e. laywers and docters to this every day) we can survive and live well
Until you lose immunity and then it comes time to vote someone out.
Have you learned nothing from television?
Both will clean out your cache.
I love the blooper moment in Blown Away : a long tracking helicopter shot over a gov't building in Boston flying a honking big Canadian flag. Hello Ottawa!
I saw that shot more than a few times back when Starbuck was a man.
You realize that's an instantThe only problem with (La)TeX is that it is very hard to write documents that looks like sh*t.
Which is why Management[TM] has banned its use in my workplace.For a second there, I thought you were about to suggest that an AOL CD was an ingredient in a sandwich.
Really? I thought it meant that Burger King was cooking frisbees.
Now if Motorhead and The Ramones started growing on her things would be perfect. :)
You're not a dermatologist, are you?
Imagine a full army of robots! No loss of life and we still get to kick your butt. Imagine having an enemy think about attacking you, and the response is an army of kamakazi robots. The enemy thinks twice at that moment.
Now imagine beowulf clusters of all of the above!Welcome to Business 101. My name is Mr. Schemanista. Please take out your text books and turn to page 21: "Running a business".
Rent, wages, utilities, property and business taxes, licenses to show movies... a movie theatre is a service business. They don't have a "cost of goods sold" which can adjust the price to view each movie: you've confused your local cineplex with your local supermarket. Instead movie theatres have a "cost to deliver services", also known as "expenses incurred to generate revenue". They have to spread those costs across their service revenues, including concessions, or else they can't afford to stay in business!
They, like the studios, make money on some movies and lose money on others and the moneymakers finance the money-losers.
Their "sweet spot" for profitability is very narrow. Seriously, do you think that AMC is charging 600% markup on popcorn because they plan to buy their own Caribbean corporate island? They're jacking you because, even at $15CAD/head, admissions don't cover their costs.
How about the Xwindows "select-copy" feature.
I miss that more than anything when I'm working in Windows.
I want acoustically-activated spike strips. About two and a half miles later, (b)asshat is driving on four flat tires.
Either that, or some kind of narrow EMP which would fry all the (b)asshat's electronics, including his cell with its Justin Timberlake ring tone.
trying to make a movie based on a game with 2 paragraphs worth of plot is not a good idea.
Two paragraphs of plot is a friggin trilogy!
No, they were lampooning the O.J. Simpson Trial. Chewbacca could have just as easily been Star Trek slime.
The South Park creaters didn't use Star Trek. They made a deliberate choice to use the logical inconsistencies of Star Wars as the basis of their satire, and they scored a bigger "hit" as a result. Ask yourself why or demonstrate to me that you'll get the same mileage from a Star Trek joke.
No one--and I mean, NO ONE--felt any great strength in the force from Leia, probably because she never used it.
Think about it: to whom does Yoda refer when he mentions "another" near the end of Ep. V? In RoTJ, we're led to believe that it's Leia. How is she part of the same "hope" mentioned in Ep. IV, if the "hope" has to do with the "Force" embodied by Luke, and presumably, his sister (otherwise, why is she "another")? Yoda tells Ben that there is "another". "Another", means "like this one". "Like" means "the Force is strong in her". What other possible meaning could you come up with? If the "another" is not Leia, then who is it? If the "hope" for the overthrow of the Emperor doesn't lie with one in whom the Force is strong, why are Kenobi and Yoda working so hard to get Luke ready for his closeup?
Lucas tells us that you don't have to use the Force for its presence to be felt. It permeates all living things. Sure, some people are more in tune with it because they have those mitichlorians, which are detectable in a blood test. DarthAnakin knows all of this. Wouldn't he routinely perform mitichlorian tests on his enemies, and maybe even his subordinates, so that he can keep an eye on the competition? Let's face it: in Lucas' weird view, it's the masters of the Force who are supposed to exhert the most influence over events, even though the outcome of the whole Rebellion gets decided by a Wookie, a smuggler-turned-guerilla, and a former Tibana gas mine administrator.
Lucas is supposed to be creating these movies as part of a coherent whole. The middle tryptych was internally inconsistent and all of the "prequels" have only made a bigger mess of things, which supports my original assertion: he can't plot worth a damn.
that was South Park, doofus.
Trey and Matt lampooned Star Wars, ergo the source of the Chewbacca Defence is Star Wars, which is a story by George Lucas, realized by several different screenwriters. To be even more blunt: it was the blatant illogic of Star Wars which made the Chewbacca defence "true", hence funny. Therefore, Lucas "invented" the Chewbacca Defence.
Nope. The force wasn't strong in Leia--never was, even in the books.
Forget the books. They're a red herring. This is a criticism of the movies. So let's see:
Now view this entire discussion in the context provided by the midichlorian nonsense from The Phantom Menace.
Thanks for playing.
Doofus.
IT'S DARTHANAKIN'S FAMILY TOO! You don't think during at least one of his heavy-breathing sessions, he didn't bonk himself on the helmet and say "Wait a minute: Owen lives on Tatooine... And if that was the planet to which Leia was trying to flee with the stolen Death Star plans...? He knew Leia was on the Alderaanian freighter and that she had the DS plans with her. He finds out she's headed for Tatooine--which just happens to be the planet where the man who married his mother lives. He can sense the Force in Luke after the wuffleball affair but he can't detect the presense of his former mentor (you know--the man who tried to kill him during an upcoming lava-surfing session) on a planet with an ostensibly low popluation density: a presence he manages to detect when Kenobi infiltrates the Death Star which is large enough to be mistaken for a moon and probably has a crew numbering in the tens of thousands?
Guy, seriously, have you actually thought about Star Wars? The entire opus is one gigantic Chewbacca defence. Lucas doesn't ask you to suspend your disbelief: he demands that you take it out back and put two in the brain.
If my spouse ever absconded with my daughter, the last place she'd hide is with one of her relatives because those are the first possibilities I'd check. Apparently, elementary logic has no place in "Jedi business".
"If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests."
When Darth sensed the force in Luke, it was AFTER Luke had learned to fight a wuffleball with his eyes closed, and he could talk to the discorporate Ben.
How did the destruction of Leia's homeworld cause such a great "disturbance in the Force" that Kenobi could sense it presumably from lightyears away? Was it the instant of stress experienced by millions or billions of low-Force individuals as they were vaporized, or did they happen to be fighting wuffleballs when the Death Star attacked?
The middle tryptych (Episodes IV, V, VI) gives me the impression that the Force "permeates all living things" and is detectible by the sensitive, so how does DarthAnakin, one of the Greatest Jedis to ever live[TM] not sense the same Force in Leia when she's enduring the stress of torture?
Star Wars was cool when I was young enough not to concern myself with these things but Lucas keeps trying to make it "mean something", and that bothers me. If Lucas is really writing for the seven year-old in all of us, how come he keeps trying to inject so much mystical significance into what is ostensibly "light entertainment"?
If you dissect the moral premise behind Star Wars, it's pretty disturbing: the death and suffering of billions is justified by the redemption of the one man who had a hand in causing most of it. As if a shall-remain-nameless mid-20th-century tyrant had a sudden epiphany, turned away from the Dark Side and saved the life of a Russian general and the world collectively said "Oh, well that's all right then: war's over!"
The plot has hardly been Lucas's problem -- it's the dialogue, script, & directing. Plot-wise, he's fine. :)
No, his plots suck pretty badly too.
A couple of examples: Obi Wan stashes Luke on the same planet where Anakin grew up. Oh yeah, DarthAnakin would never think to look there... And Leia is supposed to be Plan B should Luke fail but Darth can't sense that the Force is strong in her, even when he's personally overseeing her torture?
Remember, Lucas invented the Chewbacca defense.