Haha yes, the shizno thing has become a regularly used insult between some friends and I.
Church: "OK, what does it mean?"
Gary: "What is the most foul-smelling animal on your planet?"
Church: "A skunk..."
Gary: "Does this skunk defecate?"
Church: "Yes..."
Gary: "Does the skunk's defecation in turn produce its own excrement?"
Church: "EW NO!"
Gary: "Then there is no equivalent for shizno in your language."
jombeewoof alerted us to a story that went past unnoticed last weekend. A new industry-backed 'League of Evil' was formed in the city of Washington, DC. Tasked with the nefarious goal of 'promoting the value of copyright as an agent for world domination and the creation of several doomsday weapons', the ultimate goal of the organization is to strengthen copyright laws and strike terror into the hearts of puny Earth humans worldwide. "Backed by organizations like the MPAA, NBC, News Corp., Disney, The Galactic Trade Federation, Time Warner, the Business Software Alliance, Microsoft, Invader Zim, ASCAP, the NBA, and others, the League of Evil has already blackmailed initial support from several members of Congress... The group is headed by Dr Doom, a former senior fellow at the Super Villains Workers Union, a doom-bringing think-tank. Doom has written about genocidal issues for years, and in a 2005 opinion piece claimed that he was 'looking for any fool who wants to join me in seeking that elusive dark side.' His new gig may be a strange place to fight for that 'dark side' in any meaningful sense, as the League is dedicated to using 'bilateral, regional, and multilateral weapons of mass destruction to protect super villains' interests and enslave humans using over-elaborate schemes and mind-control rays 'that teach the value of bowing to your new emperors and overlords.'"
Exactly the same here. I was about to post a reply to the parent, then saw you had already done the exact thing I was about to do...
It's the Daily Mail effect. If you see a horribly twisted and obviously sensationalistic story in the UK about any person or group of people that are not white, British and middle-class, chances are good that shower of utterly shameless bastards are the ones pimping it out. Although it's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison to line them up next to Fox News in the US, they are probably even worse.
Oh don't get me wrong man, I understand they committed a hell of a lot during the first few episodes of season 3 (and in particular the Exodus two parter - the second of which is one of the best episodes of any TV show I've ever seen) and that the budget was tight, but the thing is even the filler material in season 3 is that it just hasn't been up to scratch with what we saw in season 2, and to a lesser extent season 1.
Take the two examples I used in my previous post - Scar was a really good side-story, not only for the combat scenes, and not just because it was an interesting premise that anthropomorphised the Cylons further, but also because it had a huge effect on Starbuck - that was her fall from grace as the star pilot of the fleet. Likewise, Flight of the Phoenix was a brilliant piece of TV. It depicted the weary and depressed crew of Galactica coming together to construct, rather than destroy something. The ending of the episode where they devote the craft to the president was very touchingly portrayed, and the story even spilled over into the main plot when the craft was used in the raid against the Resurrection ship (another great two-parter).
Season 3 hasn't had much of this quality in the fillers in my opinion (and as has been mentioned, the main plot seems to be drifting without a purpose). Most of them seem to have been very detached and on the dull side. That's not to say the entire season has been shit, but like the OP says, there has been a noticeable decline in quality - more in terms of the writing than the special effects budget.
Why was this modded flamebait? I'm a massive BSG fan, it's one of my favourite shows on TV, but it has taken a dive in quality since the beginning of the third season.
Since the escape from new Caprica in the Exodus two-parter, the show seems to have just drifted into the realm of the weird and pointless at times. Filler episodes have increased (such as the boxing episode - Unfinished Business, and the rogue doctor killing Saggitarans in The Woman King), and the main story has been tangled up in a load of tired existential and spiritual nonsense that doesn't seem to be going anywhere. The finale of Season 3 even has Starbuck coming back from the dead, apparently as a figment of Lee's imagination. Oh great, another character inexplicably living in someone's head.
Of course, it's all down to opinion in these matters, but for me I'd like to see the show's main story to get back to the heights of Season 1 and 2 (and the start of Season 3). The desperate and down-trodden survivors of the human race fighting to stay alive and stay ahead of the Cylon fleet hunting them at every jump. Brilliant and touching filler / side-story episodes like Season 2's Rise of the Phoenix and Scar, and more all-or-nothing dogfights with the genocidal toasters.
I'll be watching season 4 whatever happens, it's still a good show. But I do think it has been missing its potential lately - hopefully it will improve next season.
How the hell did this get moderated as "Troll"? It has a perfectly good point behind it - why should a country that constantly plays on how free it is limit its citizens to where they travel?
I'm working for a company in the aerospace industry at the moment, and I was originally hired to create a project management system for them. Eventually, timesheets came up as an issue, and we decided to go our own route. We have about 12,000 employees worldwide, but it's easily broken down into about 100 different cost accounts. Without going into too much detail, what I have created is just a web-based frontend to a database table full of cost account codes, and a few tables storing employee ID and hourly/time information.
We spent an extensive amount of time evaluating the timesheet issue, and we came to the conclusion that licensing timesheet applications from third parties is really a waste of time and money. Remove the Excel sheets from the equation, hire a proficient web developer / DBA for a couple of months if you need to, but build your own system. This way, you can customise it exactly to your requirements, and not have to worry about the often massive costs involved in what is really a very simple (concept wise) application.
If you are determined to go down the third party application path, I would strongly advise you to avoid systems from vendors such as SAP. In my experience, they tend to create a whole bunch of (expensive) problems where there should be none, and you end up paying through the nose only to be left with buggy systems, costly consultant fees, and vendor lock-in.
I didn't even bother attempting this with Ubuntu (6.06) on my laptop. I think I spent about 2 days straight trying to get my laptop to see external monitors / TV out with the ATI drivers in Windows XP. Never really got anywhere, aside from a brief moment where it kindly gave me a flickering piss-poor resolution output in greyscale, before crashing the display properties dialog.
I'm going to try switching my laptop over to Ubuntu again when Fiesty is released, all I need is the Wifi chipset to work this time, and I'm set - everything else was fine last time.
Ok, joking aside, am I the only one who finds Balmer's complaint a bit hypocritical?
Count me in.
That being said, I am going to (*gasp*) agree with him on one point. Having a bunch of programmers sitting around does not accomplish anything. They have to be in a full-on creative environment to do the truly impressive stuff.
That's assuming, of course, that the developers at Google are sitting around doing nothing, which I doubt is the case. It's widely publicised that they are given time to themselves to work on pet projects, but these can and do directly benefit Google. I'd argue that this kind of environment is potentially a very creative environment - in my experience, people work best on things they are actually interested in on a personal level.
I know where you are coming from, and I agree in part - their massive growth rate is probably causing some problems, as it would anywhere. However, Ol' Steve just has a hard-on for Google and is spitting out the usual Microsoft FUD sound bytes. Personally, I haven't been able to take a word he says seriously since "that video". Which one I'm referring to, I'll leave up to you.:)
The parent's joke is at the expense of Microsoft because it took them 5 bloody years to get from IE6 to IE7. Mozilla and Opera managed quite a few major releases in that time, probably because they are actually focused on making their browsers better, and aren't just developing because they feel they have to in order to maintain a slipping market dominance.
A common complaint I've seen is that it's not a true RPG, and it's "dumbed down" (fast travelling, first person action combat etc). That's just die-hard RPG fans for you though. Marking a game down because it doesn't follow some unwritten set of rules on the genre it resembles closest seems pretty wayward to me.
Myself, I agree with you completely. Oblivion is by a wide margin the finest game I've played this year. I only started playing it last month, and I'm completely hooked. The graphics are breath-taking, the storyline is solid, there are so many quests and locations it boggles the mind. I think one of the greatest things about it is how open to modding it is. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of mods for it, and anyone with the time and patience can have a crack at making their own content.
I think what we probably need to come to terms with, is that we don't have the pre-requisite understanding of certain currently unknown concepts at this stage in our development as a species to really find any tangible answers to questions on this scale.
Only a few centuries ago, people thought the world was flat and didn't have a concept of things like gravity, imagine trying to teach people from that era about quantum mechanics. You couldn't do it without first covering an insane amount of pre-requisite material that links their level of understanding of science with our current level. I think we are punching waaaaay above our weight speculating about these kind of things.
Please don't get me wrong here, I'm enjoying reading this, and I don't think we should stop searching for the answers to these "meaning of life" type questions, but it's something to bare in mind - In all probability, we'll never know the answers to the universal questions, and almost certainly not in our lifetimes. Anything in the mean time is really just wild speculation and blind guess work based on scientific theories that may not apply in the least to the bigger picture, and the chances of any of it being right are pretty damn small.
Futurama is my favourite show of all time. There are a few that come close, but even after watching every episode about 10 times, I will still watch a Futurama re-run over a new episode of something else I like if they are on at the same time. I can't get enough. Maybe it's a medical condition.
Just out of interest, what is everyone's favourite character (main or side character, it doesn't matter). I think mine would have to be Dr Zoidberg. Every time he scuttles off screaming "Wooooop wooopwooopwoop" I burst out laughing. A close second would be Morbo.
"theftnoun, stealing; an act of stealing someone else's property, with the intention of permanently depriving them of it." -- dictionary.com
IP infringement is not theft because copying someone's "intellectual property" does not deprive the original owner of it. I've seen people here discussing this before and some suggest that this is just a way for people to justify pirating things, but if you are going by definition, it is not theft. GP post was spot on.
But I think the GPs point was that GPL violations are largely infringing on the copyright of people who work for the community (read: anyone who wants to join in and use GPL'd software), and an overwhelming amount of the time, they don't get paid for it. On the flip side, the large majority of copyright infringements like those touched on in this discussion are against an industry that rakes in billions a year and has a track record of fucking over customers and artists alike for profit.
You might not agree that this makes it a worse "crime" by definition, but there is definately a pretty clear distinction in many people's eyes.
I'm British, but that was fucking hilarious. Mod up haha.
I, for one, welcome our futuristic tall, slim, attractive, intelligent and creative sauna loving meatball munching copyright infringing swashbuckling pirate blonde overlords. May death come quickly to their enemies. Yaaaaar!
And your analysis of this drunk analyst's analysis was far more analytical than the first analsysts analysis.
Disclaimer: I'm pretty drunk too and wanted to see how many times I could get away with saying "anal" on/. without being too far off topic.
P.S. IANAL.
"Some fanboys still stubbornly cling to their favorite underdog, but most enthusiasts have seen the light and are looking at Core 2 for their next upgrade or system build.
Yes, 'fanboys'... or maybe alot of people on AMD64 systems at the moment don't *need* to upgrade, can't afford to upgrade, don't want to have to change motherboards and RAM as well as a CPU, sacrifice their nVidia SLI setups etc etc.
Just because I'm not rushing out to buy a Core 2 Duo system to replace or upgrade, and instead 'cling' to my AMD64 system, it doesn't make me an AMD fanboy. Core 2 Duo is looking like a fucking superb processor family, but I think I'lll get a bit more life out of my current system before diving into a complete upgrade / replacement of my current hardware thank you.
As a side note; does anyone have any info on what AMD are planning, if anything, to compete against the Core 2 Duo in the near future? I read something a while back about them switching to 65nm at a new fab, but I don't follow the processor market that closely anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Haha yes, the shizno thing has become a regularly used insult between some friends and I.
Church: "OK, what does it mean?"
Gary: "What is the most foul-smelling animal on your planet?"
Church: "A skunk..."
Gary: "Does this skunk defecate?"
Church: "Yes..."
Gary: "Does the skunk's defecation in turn produce its own excrement?"
Church: "EW NO!"
Gary: "Then there is no equivalent for shizno in your language."
jombeewoof alerted us to a story that went past unnoticed last weekend. A new industry-backed 'League of Evil' was formed in the city of Washington, DC. Tasked with the nefarious goal of 'promoting the value of copyright as an agent for world domination and the creation of several doomsday weapons', the ultimate goal of the organization is to strengthen copyright laws and strike terror into the hearts of puny Earth humans worldwide. "Backed by organizations like the MPAA, NBC, News Corp., Disney, The Galactic Trade Federation, Time Warner, the Business Software Alliance, Microsoft, Invader Zim, ASCAP, the NBA, and others, the League of Evil has already blackmailed initial support from several members of Congress ... The group is headed by Dr Doom, a former senior fellow at the Super Villains Workers Union, a doom-bringing think-tank. Doom has written about genocidal issues for years, and in a 2005 opinion piece claimed that he was 'looking for any fool who wants to join me in seeking that elusive dark side.' His new gig may be a strange place to fight for that 'dark side' in any meaningful sense, as the League is dedicated to using 'bilateral, regional, and multilateral weapons of mass destruction to protect super villains' interests and enslave humans using over-elaborate schemes and mind-control rays 'that teach the value of bowing to your new emperors and overlords.'"
Exactly the same here. I was about to post a reply to the parent, then saw you had already done the exact thing I was about to do...
It's the Daily Mail effect. If you see a horribly twisted and obviously sensationalistic story in the UK about any person or group of people that are not white, British and middle-class, chances are good that shower of utterly shameless bastards are the ones pimping it out. Although it's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison to line them up next to Fox News in the US, they are probably even worse.
Who says I live in a US timezone. ;)
Oh don't get me wrong man, I understand they committed a hell of a lot during the first few episodes of season 3 (and in particular the Exodus two parter - the second of which is one of the best episodes of any TV show I've ever seen) and that the budget was tight, but the thing is even the filler material in season 3 is that it just hasn't been up to scratch with what we saw in season 2, and to a lesser extent season 1.
Take the two examples I used in my previous post - Scar was a really good side-story, not only for the combat scenes, and not just because it was an interesting premise that anthropomorphised the Cylons further, but also because it had a huge effect on Starbuck - that was her fall from grace as the star pilot of the fleet. Likewise, Flight of the Phoenix was a brilliant piece of TV. It depicted the weary and depressed crew of Galactica coming together to construct, rather than destroy something. The ending of the episode where they devote the craft to the president was very touchingly portrayed, and the story even spilled over into the main plot when the craft was used in the raid against the Resurrection ship (another great two-parter).
Season 3 hasn't had much of this quality in the fillers in my opinion (and as has been mentioned, the main plot seems to be drifting without a purpose). Most of them seem to have been very detached and on the dull side. That's not to say the entire season has been shit, but like the OP says, there has been a noticeable decline in quality - more in terms of the writing than the special effects budget.
Flight of the Phoenix - not Rise of the Phoenix.*
Damn Terminator 3 trailer in the background messing with my booze-addled brain.
Why was this modded flamebait? I'm a massive BSG fan, it's one of my favourite shows on TV, but it has taken a dive in quality since the beginning of the third season.
Since the escape from new Caprica in the Exodus two-parter, the show seems to have just drifted into the realm of the weird and pointless at times. Filler episodes have increased (such as the boxing episode - Unfinished Business, and the rogue doctor killing Saggitarans in The Woman King), and the main story has been tangled up in a load of tired existential and spiritual nonsense that doesn't seem to be going anywhere. The finale of Season 3 even has Starbuck coming back from the dead, apparently as a figment of Lee's imagination. Oh great, another character inexplicably living in someone's head.
Of course, it's all down to opinion in these matters, but for me I'd like to see the show's main story to get back to the heights of Season 1 and 2 (and the start of Season 3). The desperate and down-trodden survivors of the human race fighting to stay alive and stay ahead of the Cylon fleet hunting them at every jump. Brilliant and touching filler / side-story episodes like Season 2's Rise of the Phoenix and Scar, and more all-or-nothing dogfights with the genocidal toasters.
I'll be watching season 4 whatever happens, it's still a good show. But I do think it has been missing its potential lately - hopefully it will improve next season.
How the hell did this get moderated as "Troll"? It has a perfectly good point behind it - why should a country that constantly plays on how free it is limit its citizens to where they travel?
Like it or not, a show / movie set in space, in the future, is going to be lumped in the Sci-Fi genre by most.
Not saying I believe that it's technically correct, but it is becoming one of those common usage definitions.
I'm working for a company in the aerospace industry at the moment, and I was originally hired to create a project management system for them. Eventually, timesheets came up as an issue, and we decided to go our own route. We have about 12,000 employees worldwide, but it's easily broken down into about 100 different cost accounts. Without going into too much detail, what I have created is just a web-based frontend to a database table full of cost account codes, and a few tables storing employee ID and hourly/time information.
We spent an extensive amount of time evaluating the timesheet issue, and we came to the conclusion that licensing timesheet applications from third parties is really a waste of time and money. Remove the Excel sheets from the equation, hire a proficient web developer / DBA for a couple of months if you need to, but build your own system. This way, you can customise it exactly to your requirements, and not have to worry about the often massive costs involved in what is really a very simple (concept wise) application.
If you are determined to go down the third party application path, I would strongly advise you to avoid systems from vendors such as SAP. In my experience, they tend to create a whole bunch of (expensive) problems where there should be none, and you end up paying through the nose only to be left with buggy systems, costly consultant fees, and vendor lock-in.
I didn't even bother attempting this with Ubuntu (6.06) on my laptop. I think I spent about 2 days straight trying to get my laptop to see external monitors / TV out with the ATI drivers in Windows XP. Never really got anywhere, aside from a brief moment where it kindly gave me a flickering piss-poor resolution output in greyscale, before crashing the display properties dialog.
I'm going to try switching my laptop over to Ubuntu again when Fiesty is released, all I need is the Wifi chipset to work this time, and I'm set - everything else was fine last time.
That's assuming, of course, that the developers at Google are sitting around doing nothing, which I doubt is the case. It's widely publicised that they are given time to themselves to work on pet projects, but these can and do directly benefit Google. I'd argue that this kind of environment is potentially a very creative environment - in my experience, people work best on things they are actually interested in on a personal level.
I know where you are coming from, and I agree in part - their massive growth rate is probably causing some problems, as it would anywhere. However, Ol' Steve just has a hard-on for Google and is spitting out the usual Microsoft FUD sound bytes. Personally, I haven't been able to take a word he says seriously since "that video". Which one I'm referring to, I'll leave up to you.
And your point is?
The parent's joke is at the expense of Microsoft because it took them 5 bloody years to get from IE6 to IE7. Mozilla and Opera managed quite a few major releases in that time, probably because they are actually focused on making their browsers better, and aren't just developing because they feel they have to in order to maintain a slipping market dominance.
Myself, I agree with you completely. Oblivion is by a wide margin the finest game I've played this year. I only started playing it last month, and I'm completely hooked. The graphics are breath-taking, the storyline is solid, there are so many quests and locations it boggles the mind. I think one of the greatest things about it is how open to modding it is. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of mods for it, and anyone with the time and patience can have a crack at making their own content.
I think what we probably need to come to terms with, is that we don't have the pre-requisite understanding of certain currently unknown concepts at this stage in our development as a species to really find any tangible answers to questions on this scale.
Only a few centuries ago, people thought the world was flat and didn't have a concept of things like gravity, imagine trying to teach people from that era about quantum mechanics. You couldn't do it without first covering an insane amount of pre-requisite material that links their level of understanding of science with our current level. I think we are punching waaaaay above our weight speculating about these kind of things.
Please don't get me wrong here, I'm enjoying reading this, and I don't think we should stop searching for the answers to these "meaning of life" type questions, but it's something to bare in mind - In all probability, we'll never know the answers to the universal questions, and almost certainly not in our lifetimes. Anything in the mean time is really just wild speculation and blind guess work based on scientific theories that may not apply in the least to the bigger picture, and the chances of any of it being right are pretty damn small.
Futurama is my favourite show of all time. There are a few that come close, but even after watching every episode about 10 times, I will still watch a Futurama re-run over a new episode of something else I like if they are on at the same time. I can't get enough. Maybe it's a medical condition.
Just out of interest, what is everyone's favourite character (main or side character, it doesn't matter). I think mine would have to be Dr Zoidberg. Every time he scuttles off screaming "Wooooop wooopwooopwoop" I burst out laughing. A close second would be Morbo.
WINDMILLS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!
IP infringement is not theft because copying someone's "intellectual property" does not deprive the original owner of it. I've seen people here discussing this before and some suggest that this is just a way for people to justify pirating things, but if you are going by definition, it is not theft. GP post was spot on.
Nein. Enter: SueTube.
Or Action Script Flash kernel modules. "CLICK THE EPILEPTIC SEZUIRE INDUCING MONKEY TO WIN A FREE .KO!"
Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING filter bypass.
But I think the GPs point was that GPL violations are largely infringing on the copyright of people who work for the community (read: anyone who wants to join in and use GPL'd software), and an overwhelming amount of the time, they don't get paid for it. On the flip side, the large majority of copyright infringements like those touched on in this discussion are against an industry that rakes in billions a year and has a track record of fucking over customers and artists alike for profit.
You might not agree that this makes it a worse "crime" by definition, but there is definately a pretty clear distinction in many people's eyes.
I'm British, but that was fucking hilarious. Mod up haha.
I, for one, welcome our futuristic tall, slim, attractive, intelligent and creative sauna loving meatball munching copyright infringing swashbuckling pirate blonde overlords. May death come quickly to their enemies. Yaaaaar!
And your analysis of this drunk analyst's analysis was far more analytical than the first analsysts analysis. Disclaimer: I'm pretty drunk too and wanted to see how many times I could get away with saying "anal" on /. without being too far off topic.
P.S. IANAL.
.03 cents *
His mathematics are further off than that, the summary says 0.3 cents, not 3 cents ($0.03 as you used).
Yes, 'fanboys'
Just because I'm not rushing out to buy a Core 2 Duo system to replace or upgrade, and instead 'cling' to my AMD64 system, it doesn't make me an AMD fanboy. Core 2 Duo is looking like a fucking superb processor family, but I think I'lll get a bit more life out of my current system before diving into a complete upgrade / replacement of my current hardware thank you.
As a side note; does anyone have any info on what AMD are planning, if anything, to compete against the Core 2 Duo in the near future? I read something a while back about them switching to 65nm at a new fab, but I don't follow the processor market that closely anymore.