Well I just really don't remember her doing anything that particularly indicated a complex AI. She would grab me and pull me up if I was in mid-air and pressed a particular button. No real AI there. She would rescue me if I died, but that doesn't sound like complicated decision-making. IIRC, you could use her for some fight moves, but again, that's player-controlled.
So was all that complicated AI just to make her seem more natural in the way that she followed you around? 10 minutes into playing the game, I forgot she was there. Can someone explain what she did that warranted eating lots of clock cycles?
Well the worst thing about his complaints is, the new Prince of Persia wasn't a good a very good game. Elika's AI may have been complicated, but it wasn't reflected in the end-product by her doing anything very cool. The "open-world" concept of the game was pretty weak-- getting from point A to point B was linear, but you were just given the option of whether you wanted to go from point A to point B, or from point A to point C.
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time was a better game, and it was linear. The girl sidekick from that game was just as good as Elika. It didn't require particularly high-end hardware.
It seems to me like there should be a good "introductory" language where, though the utility of knowing that language may or may not be practical, would help teach programming concepts and good practices to new programmers. That is, if the goal is really to teach programming. Usually, when you're introducing someone to a topic, it's a good idea to start with something representative and likely to instill interest in the topic.
I don't know which programming language fits the bill, though.
Yeah, some people mentioned Google appliances, which I suppose is a sort-of solution. I've never used one of those internally, but I wouldn't trust that to be the end-all solution to your organizational problems. What if there's a file that Google can't read or gather good metadata for? What if you're searching for common terms, and the file you're looking for is on the 75th page? What if you're not remembering the correct search parameters and so your file just isn't turning up in your searches?
There's really no substitute yet for real organization and discipline. The first thing you should do is define your needs/parameters. Does everyone from every site need read access to all files? Do they all need write access? Most likely, the answer to both of these questions is "no", so narrow it down to specifically "who needs access to what". That will help you figure out the rest of these things. Also ask, who needs to be able to find which documents under which circumstances? What information will they have? You're going to want to use those pieces of information in your organization so that people can intuitively find the files that they need, without necessarily needing to see everyone else's files.
Come up with a hierarchical organization for your files, requesting user input if appropriate. Then create a directory structure that matches it. Make sure you've communicated the organization clearly to your users, and try to get them to use it.
If necessary, use directory permissions to try to restrict writing files to appropriate places. For example, if you break down the file structure by particular engineering groups or departments, then only provide write access to members of that group or department. Designate the head of that department as the person responsible for organization within that folder. If need be, restrict write access in a particular folder to only one person, and make that person responsible for checking files in and maintaining the organization for the group or department. Do the same sort of control with individual satellite sites, if appropriate.
Be a little tiny bit of a control freak, but you might want to give people a particular folder share where they can transfer files in a more freeform manner in a pinch. Someone might want to share one particular file, back something up for a minute, or whatever, but make it clear that this share is completely insecure and temporary. Let people know that everyone has access to that share, anyone can delete any file, you won't be backing it up, and in fact you might be clearing it out (deleting it) on a regular basis. Make a habit of deleting it all on a regular basis, or people will start dumping everything there to sidestep the organization. To be careful, you might want to actually move everything into a non-shared folder for a week, and then deleting it later, so if someone shows up and says, "Oh crap! You deleted business-critical information!" you can sigh, and say, "I'll see what I can do, but you really shouldn't store business-critical data there."
So, to go back and summarize: Come up with an organization, stick to it, enforce it, and retrain your users to use it properly.
I kind of doubt it's a new Dell Distro, but my guess-- just from the term "SMB-in-a-box"-- is that it might be their normal Linux desktop/server configurations with some of the configuration done ahead of time. Getting email (including POP3, IMAP, SMTP, spam filtering, webmail) and other groupware up and running in Linux can be more daunting than setting up an Exchange box. I hate to say that because I'm not a fan of Microsoft generally, but it's true. Knowing which email packages to install and how to configure each optimally can be a little confusing.
I'd really love to see some OEM (Dell or HP seem like good candidates) roll their own distro based on the market they plan on servicing, provide their own repositories, and generally take responsibility for making the setup and maintenance of their clients and servers as painless as possible. In short: do what Apple is doing, but servicing a different market. Apple kind of has the high-end consumer locked up, they're making some headway into the high-end SMB market. Dell could use all FOSS to provide integrated solutions of the market that wants greater freedom (no proprietary pieces) or lower-price solutions.
I think we may be done with people upgrading desktop PCs just to keep up with increasingly bloated operating systems-- at least for the time being. Anything desktop from the past 5 years is good enough for basic web browsing, word processing, etc. If you're upgrading for faster hardware, there's a good chance that you're a gamer, an engineer, or maybe someone who just wants the latest-and-greatest regardless of whether they actually need it. If I were Dell, I wouldn't be relying on Microsoft bloating things up to sell my computers. It hasn't been working.
On the other hand, there are still going to be instances where people want to buy a new computer. The old one breaks, a business is expanding, or... whatever. In those cases, it sure would help Dell if they could save on software licensing costs, enabling them to either drop their price a little bit extra or increase their profit margin just a tad. Plus, it would allow them to better service the customers who are actually looking to run FOSS.
Don't consider getting to know your coworkers to be 'politics'. That's an anti-pattern.
I disagree (obviously), but I bet it's because we have different opinions on what constitutes "politics". You might say, "Don't get political. Just get to know your users, and learn how to talk to them in productive ways. Learn how to explain yourself to them, how to convince them of your positions, and how to anticipate the pitfalls of those social interactions."
And to that, I would respond, "That sounds like politics to me." Of course empty politics are often unproductive. Malevolent political attacks are harmful. But learning how to interact with people such that you can achieve what you want to is a valid and honest skill.
For some people, "computer guy" may be the niche. There are plenty of smaller businesses that really need a jack-of-all-trades "computer guy", even if he's a master of none. You may have other ambitions, but as you said, "There are as many varied roles in the workplace as there are people."
I agree as far as "They treat us like crap when everything is working perfectly." I've been in places where everything worked smoothly, and we were treated like garbage, and I've been in places where nothing worked, and we were treated like kings.
Yeah, I've told the story here on slashdot before, so I won't tell the whole thing, but I'll give the quickest possible version:
I was talking to this guy at one of my jobs a few years back, and he was kind of criticizing me by saying, "You're not as good as the IT guy at my last job. He was so good at running around fixing things, all the time. The world was falling down around him but he managed to keep it all going. You seem to work much slower. But you're lucky you have it so easy here, because all of the computers and servers here just work!"
So I had to point out to him that it was at least possible, just possible, that the guy at his last company might not have been doing a very good job if everything was always falling apart around him. It's possible that I might be doing a good job, and maybe that's why the systems at our company always seemed to work. It might not be that our computers magically worked correctly all on their own, but they worked because I was doing things that he didn't notice that were keeping them working.
The reason I tell this story is because I think it's illustrative of a certain sort of problem. Two people look at the same phenomena and come up with drastically different and even opposing interpretations. Sometimes it's funny how people who don't understand computers perceive those of us who fix them.
Disney already owned all the rights to all the Pixar characters as part of their distribution deals, and already had a Toy Story 3 in the works.
Yeah, but IIRC, Disney didn't own the character models until they bought Pixar. So basically they owned the rights to the characters and likenesses, but they would have had to rebuild all the animation from scratch. It's not as easy as it seems.
Up until the purchase of Pixar, there were still leaks of infighting between Disney (who wanted sequels) and Pixar (who was refusing to do it).
Yeah, your post reminds me of something else: there's really no substitute for being right.
The first and hardest part of this is that you have to be "right" a lot. I can't help you there. Study hard, think deeply, and choose your words carefully.
But also, don't pretend to know what you're talking about if you don't, because that can bite you in the ass. When you're guessing, make it clear that you're just offering a guess. When you know what you're talking about, speak confidently. Offer your suggestions, and make your warnings clear. If they're not doing what you suggest, don't fight too hard. It's fine to say, "Ok, if that's what you think is best. I was just offering a suggestion." Just make sure you've been heard and understood.
If it turns out enough time that your suggestions are good and your predictions come true, you're greatly increasing your chances that someone is going to listen to you. On the other hand, no matter how smart you are, people aren't going to want to listen to you if you're an asshole about it. So watch out for that.
But when someone is right often enough, then listening to their suggestions becomes its own carrot, and listening to their warnings becomes its own stick.
I have an answer that's probably not going to be too popular around these parts, but I'm going to give it anyway: Learn to be political.
There's not a particular technique or trick. You're going to have to learn about the culture of the company you are, and observe who is getting treated decently and getting respect. Get in with one or more of those people, and that connection will help you. Learn what the "popular kids" have in common and make it your own. Experiment and learn how to complain productively, how to get what you want, how to persuade those who disagree with you, and how to defend yourself against attacks. It's strategy. It's war. It's the way of the weasel.
Now I'm not advocating that you actually lie, cheat, or do a bad job. Just understand that success takes more than doing a good job. Political savvy is a valid skill of its own.
Yeah, that wasn't what I was talking about when I said "original". I just meant "movies Disney produced" rather than "movies Disney did not produce, but distributed."
Yeah, but you'd hope that they'd actually buy Pixar for their obvious skill and talent at producing good movies, and not just to allow the Disney marketing department to run the company into the ground. I'm struggling to come up with a good analogy, but: if Dell were to buy Apple, you'd hope it was because they saw some value in OSX and Apple's design. It's be unfortunate and disappointing if Dell then dropped development on OSX, made the whole operation a Windows-only shop, and fired Apple's entire industrial design team.
I'm not trying to turn this into a Dell/Apple argument, but my point is: Yes, buying a company puts you in a position to have them do what you want. That doesn't mean that "what you want" won't show itself to be foolish mismanagement of the resources you've just bought.
Disney has been turning out product that most/.ers would consider utter dreck but make just gobs of money in the market
But making "gobs of money" doesn't mean that it's a quality product. Walmart makes "gobs of money". Up until a year ago, Bear Stearns and AIG were making "gobs of money".
But seriously, look at this list. Look at how many sequels are near the top of the list.
Go back through the list and mentally check off all the movies that you would actually want to watch. Now eliminate from your list those movies made by Pixar. What does that distribution look like? How many movies are there on your list after Aladdin? If there are more than a couple, then something is wrong.
Sorry, I'll give people Lilo and Stich, but Mulan, Tarzan, and Hunchback weren't good. They were heavy attempts to replay the same old formula that had gone stale. Oh, and they're trying to release yet another movie in the same exact formula, but with a non-white princess? Wow, those are some real creative folk over there, aren't they?
Well define "original". If you were to google, you might find a list. Most of them are derivative dreck, but I was trying to draw a distinction between Disney's own movies vs. Pixar movies or Japanese movies that Disney distributes.
A "subsidy" doesn't need to come out of the goodness of anyone's heart or a sense of "right". Hell, even government subsidies are usually the result of some kind of bribe or fear of opposing political power.
It's a "subsidy" in the sense that AT&T is contributing toward the price of the phone, but not paying for the phone fully. So they're "subsidizing" your purchase of the phone. I don't know a more accurate term for the transaction.
Well the larger problem here is what the sequels indicate: Disney is getting its way.
Disney has been churning out utter dreck for years. Go ahead, what was the last good original animated Disney movie (not counting those made by Pixar)? I don't know, but I'm estimating something like 20 years ago. It's common knowledge that Disney had been pressuring Pixar to do sequels to all their hits because Disney can't think of or even appreciate new ideas. The big question a few years back was, "When Disney buys Pixar, will Pixar be able to maintain their independence, or will Disney's 'creative' minds start steering the ship?"
I don't know if we really have a complete and definitive answer, since Pixar may have enough talent to make these sequels good. What's more it might be that these sequels are a blip, and after them we'll get a rash of original characters and story-lines. On the other hand, this doesn't seem like a good sign.
I have a hard time being sure whether it's biased. Personally, I read that Google Wave is the "Anti-Web" and I thought, "Sounds cool. Does that mean it fixes all the dumb stuff about the web? Or... wait, is 'anti-web' a bad thing?"
I read, "If you have something, that by its very nature is very complex, with many goals... then you need open source to have many instances of it because nobody will be able to do an independent implementation of it," and I thought, "Yeah, isn't open source awesome? It can accomplish things that are really too complex for a proprietary vendor, but it can still work out because lots of different people can work together on the solution!" And then I thought, "Er... wait, or is that supposed to be a bad thing?"
I couldn't really tell if it was praise or criticism until I looked up who Ray Ozzie was, and then I knew it was supposed to be criticism. To my ears, that Microsoft's approach doesn't require things to be open source really only sounds like an advantage for Microsoft, not for the users or developers who might be interested in the products.
I guess so, but right now they're getting complaints, "I bought an iPhone last year, and now I have to wait another year before I can get AT&T to subsidize it." So if they allow these people to go for a 2-year extension, what happens next year when Apple comes out with the next version of the iPhone, or the year after that?
People will be screaming, "WHAT?! You let me extend my contract last year, but now you're saying I can't? You're saying now I have to wait *4 YEARS* before I can upgrade again?! That's absurd! I want a new iPhone NOW!!!" The longer the extension they allow, the worse it gets.
I mean, I don't really want to defend AT&T too much. I pretty well hate AT&T, and I wouldn't mind if they gave additional subsidies to everyone. But I'm afraid their approach seems pretty reasonably to me.
Well for one thing, the GUIs for apt that I've seen don't really display things as discrete applications. You search for an application, ask to install it, and then you're given a whole list of other packages and files that are going to need to be installed. Now I'm not complaining about that behavior, but that's a very different experience than buying an iPhone app on iTunes.
Also many packages aren't applications in themselves, but services, libraries, or other stuff that a non-technical end user wouldn't know what to do with. The descriptions are vague and technical, and a lot of times you pretty well have to know what you want before you go looking for it.
What I mean is, imagine I want to look for a word processor. Right now Synaptic gives me 3 categories: "Word Processing", "Word Processing (multiverse)", and "Word Processing (universe)". End users won't necessarily understand what to do with that breakdown, but let's say I just pick "Word Processing". I'm given a couple hundred packages, including things like "linuxdoc-tools" and "myspell-bg" and "xmlto". Kind of confusing, since I'm just looking for a word processor.
OpenOffice is in the "Word Processor" category, but there are 20 different packages that all start with "openoffice.org", and it's not immediately clear which one I should be trying to install. Strangely, Abiword isn't anywhere in the "Word Processing" category as far as I can tell. If I do happen to find both Abiword and OpenOffice in Synaptic, it's not going to be very obvious to non-technical end-users which package they should install. There aren't complete feature lists, screenshots, or links to the programs' homepages. The descriptions themselves don't really give a whole lot of information, and there aren't user reviews to help me make my decision.
The situation only gets worse if I'm trying to find a spreadsheet program. There's a "Word Processing" category, but there's no "Spreadsheet" category.
Now, like I said, I'm not complaining. When I go to download an application, I like knowing which packages I'm going to be installing. I know whether I want OpenOffice or Abiword. But I bet this "app store" would be targeted toward people with less experience and knowledge, and who don't want to do a whole lot of research in order to find the program they want.
Futurama has tonnes of very intelligent and subversive themes, and actual plots.
Not only that, but the plots are often weirdly interwoven and planned out in advance. Nibbler's shadow is briefly visible (you'd hardly notice it) in the first episode, which is something that remains unexplained for long time. You don't even get introduced to Nibbler for a while.
On the other hand, that opens up a weird kind of situation. I could keep buying phones every month for another 2 year extension and after a few years find myself in a 100 year phone contract. From a certain perspective, that might seem like a win-win situation, because you keep getting the phones you want and AT&T gets you locked in for a lifetime. On the other hand, it's sort of a lose-lose because you're locked into a ridiculous contract, while AT&T has put out a bunch of money to buy a contract that they aren't likely to be able to collect on.
Now I admit that's an extreme case, but the point is that AT&T has to draw the line somewhere, however arbitrary that particular location seems to you and me.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I just really don't remember her doing anything that particularly indicated a complex AI. She would grab me and pull me up if I was in mid-air and pressed a particular button. No real AI there. She would rescue me if I died, but that doesn't sound like complicated decision-making. IIRC, you could use her for some fight moves, but again, that's player-controlled.
So was all that complicated AI just to make her seem more natural in the way that she followed you around? 10 minutes into playing the game, I forgot she was there. Can someone explain what she did that warranted eating lots of clock cycles?
Well the worst thing about his complaints is, the new Prince of Persia wasn't a good a very good game. Elika's AI may have been complicated, but it wasn't reflected in the end-product by her doing anything very cool. The "open-world" concept of the game was pretty weak-- getting from point A to point B was linear, but you were just given the option of whether you wanted to go from point A to point B, or from point A to point C.
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time was a better game, and it was linear. The girl sidekick from that game was just as good as Elika. It didn't require particularly high-end hardware.
Disclaimer: I am not a programmer.
It seems to me like there should be a good "introductory" language where, though the utility of knowing that language may or may not be practical, would help teach programming concepts and good practices to new programmers. That is, if the goal is really to teach programming. Usually, when you're introducing someone to a topic, it's a good idea to start with something representative and likely to instill interest in the topic.
I don't know which programming language fits the bill, though.
Yeah, some people mentioned Google appliances, which I suppose is a sort-of solution. I've never used one of those internally, but I wouldn't trust that to be the end-all solution to your organizational problems. What if there's a file that Google can't read or gather good metadata for? What if you're searching for common terms, and the file you're looking for is on the 75th page? What if you're not remembering the correct search parameters and so your file just isn't turning up in your searches?
There's really no substitute yet for real organization and discipline. The first thing you should do is define your needs/parameters. Does everyone from every site need read access to all files? Do they all need write access? Most likely, the answer to both of these questions is "no", so narrow it down to specifically "who needs access to what". That will help you figure out the rest of these things. Also ask, who needs to be able to find which documents under which circumstances? What information will they have? You're going to want to use those pieces of information in your organization so that people can intuitively find the files that they need, without necessarily needing to see everyone else's files.
Come up with a hierarchical organization for your files, requesting user input if appropriate. Then create a directory structure that matches it. Make sure you've communicated the organization clearly to your users, and try to get them to use it.
If necessary, use directory permissions to try to restrict writing files to appropriate places. For example, if you break down the file structure by particular engineering groups or departments, then only provide write access to members of that group or department. Designate the head of that department as the person responsible for organization within that folder. If need be, restrict write access in a particular folder to only one person, and make that person responsible for checking files in and maintaining the organization for the group or department. Do the same sort of control with individual satellite sites, if appropriate.
Be a little tiny bit of a control freak, but you might want to give people a particular folder share where they can transfer files in a more freeform manner in a pinch. Someone might want to share one particular file, back something up for a minute, or whatever, but make it clear that this share is completely insecure and temporary. Let people know that everyone has access to that share, anyone can delete any file, you won't be backing it up, and in fact you might be clearing it out (deleting it) on a regular basis. Make a habit of deleting it all on a regular basis, or people will start dumping everything there to sidestep the organization. To be careful, you might want to actually move everything into a non-shared folder for a week, and then deleting it later, so if someone shows up and says, "Oh crap! You deleted business-critical information!" you can sigh, and say, "I'll see what I can do, but you really shouldn't store business-critical data there."
So, to go back and summarize: Come up with an organization, stick to it, enforce it, and retrain your users to use it properly.
I kind of doubt it's a new Dell Distro, but my guess-- just from the term "SMB-in-a-box"-- is that it might be their normal Linux desktop/server configurations with some of the configuration done ahead of time. Getting email (including POP3, IMAP, SMTP, spam filtering, webmail) and other groupware up and running in Linux can be more daunting than setting up an Exchange box. I hate to say that because I'm not a fan of Microsoft generally, but it's true. Knowing which email packages to install and how to configure each optimally can be a little confusing.
I'd really love to see some OEM (Dell or HP seem like good candidates) roll their own distro based on the market they plan on servicing, provide their own repositories, and generally take responsibility for making the setup and maintenance of their clients and servers as painless as possible. In short: do what Apple is doing, but servicing a different market. Apple kind of has the high-end consumer locked up, they're making some headway into the high-end SMB market. Dell could use all FOSS to provide integrated solutions of the market that wants greater freedom (no proprietary pieces) or lower-price solutions.
I think we may be done with people upgrading desktop PCs just to keep up with increasingly bloated operating systems-- at least for the time being. Anything desktop from the past 5 years is good enough for basic web browsing, word processing, etc. If you're upgrading for faster hardware, there's a good chance that you're a gamer, an engineer, or maybe someone who just wants the latest-and-greatest regardless of whether they actually need it. If I were Dell, I wouldn't be relying on Microsoft bloating things up to sell my computers. It hasn't been working.
On the other hand, there are still going to be instances where people want to buy a new computer. The old one breaks, a business is expanding, or... whatever. In those cases, it sure would help Dell if they could save on software licensing costs, enabling them to either drop their price a little bit extra or increase their profit margin just a tad. Plus, it would allow them to better service the customers who are actually looking to run FOSS.
Don't consider getting to know your coworkers to be 'politics'. That's an anti-pattern.
I disagree (obviously), but I bet it's because we have different opinions on what constitutes "politics". You might say, "Don't get political. Just get to know your users, and learn how to talk to them in productive ways. Learn how to explain yourself to them, how to convince them of your positions, and how to anticipate the pitfalls of those social interactions."
And to that, I would respond, "That sounds like politics to me." Of course empty politics are often unproductive. Malevolent political attacks are harmful. But learning how to interact with people such that you can achieve what you want to is a valid and honest skill.
You need to find your niche.
For some people, "computer guy" may be the niche. There are plenty of smaller businesses that really need a jack-of-all-trades "computer guy", even if he's a master of none. You may have other ambitions, but as you said, "There are as many varied roles in the workplace as there are people."
I agree as far as "They treat us like crap when everything is working perfectly." I've been in places where everything worked smoothly, and we were treated like garbage, and I've been in places where nothing worked, and we were treated like kings.
Yeah, I've told the story here on slashdot before, so I won't tell the whole thing, but I'll give the quickest possible version:
I was talking to this guy at one of my jobs a few years back, and he was kind of criticizing me by saying, "You're not as good as the IT guy at my last job. He was so good at running around fixing things, all the time. The world was falling down around him but he managed to keep it all going. You seem to work much slower. But you're lucky you have it so easy here, because all of the computers and servers here just work!"
So I had to point out to him that it was at least possible, just possible, that the guy at his last company might not have been doing a very good job if everything was always falling apart around him. It's possible that I might be doing a good job, and maybe that's why the systems at our company always seemed to work. It might not be that our computers magically worked correctly all on their own, but they worked because I was doing things that he didn't notice that were keeping them working.
The reason I tell this story is because I think it's illustrative of a certain sort of problem. Two people look at the same phenomena and come up with drastically different and even opposing interpretations. Sometimes it's funny how people who don't understand computers perceive those of us who fix them.
Disney already owned all the rights to all the Pixar characters as part of their distribution deals, and already had a Toy Story 3 in the works.
Yeah, but IIRC, Disney didn't own the character models until they bought Pixar. So basically they owned the rights to the characters and likenesses, but they would have had to rebuild all the animation from scratch. It's not as easy as it seems.
Up until the purchase of Pixar, there were still leaks of infighting between Disney (who wanted sequels) and Pixar (who was refusing to do it).
Yeah, your post reminds me of something else: there's really no substitute for being right.
The first and hardest part of this is that you have to be "right" a lot. I can't help you there. Study hard, think deeply, and choose your words carefully.
But also, don't pretend to know what you're talking about if you don't, because that can bite you in the ass. When you're guessing, make it clear that you're just offering a guess. When you know what you're talking about, speak confidently. Offer your suggestions, and make your warnings clear. If they're not doing what you suggest, don't fight too hard. It's fine to say, "Ok, if that's what you think is best. I was just offering a suggestion." Just make sure you've been heard and understood.
If it turns out enough time that your suggestions are good and your predictions come true, you're greatly increasing your chances that someone is going to listen to you. On the other hand, no matter how smart you are, people aren't going to want to listen to you if you're an asshole about it. So watch out for that.
But when someone is right often enough, then listening to their suggestions becomes its own carrot, and listening to their warnings becomes its own stick.
I have an answer that's probably not going to be too popular around these parts, but I'm going to give it anyway: Learn to be political.
There's not a particular technique or trick. You're going to have to learn about the culture of the company you are, and observe who is getting treated decently and getting respect. Get in with one or more of those people, and that connection will help you. Learn what the "popular kids" have in common and make it your own. Experiment and learn how to complain productively, how to get what you want, how to persuade those who disagree with you, and how to defend yourself against attacks. It's strategy. It's war. It's the way of the weasel.
Now I'm not advocating that you actually lie, cheat, or do a bad job. Just understand that success takes more than doing a good job. Political savvy is a valid skill of its own.
Yeah, that wasn't what I was talking about when I said "original". I just meant "movies Disney produced" rather than "movies Disney did not produce, but distributed."
Well, they do own them after all...
Yeah, but you'd hope that they'd actually buy Pixar for their obvious skill and talent at producing good movies, and not just to allow the Disney marketing department to run the company into the ground. I'm struggling to come up with a good analogy, but: if Dell were to buy Apple, you'd hope it was because they saw some value in OSX and Apple's design. It's be unfortunate and disappointing if Dell then dropped development on OSX, made the whole operation a Windows-only shop, and fired Apple's entire industrial design team.
I'm not trying to turn this into a Dell/Apple argument, but my point is: Yes, buying a company puts you in a position to have them do what you want. That doesn't mean that "what you want" won't show itself to be foolish mismanagement of the resources you've just bought.
Disney has been turning out product that most /.ers would consider utter dreck but make just gobs of money in the market
But making "gobs of money" doesn't mean that it's a quality product. Walmart makes "gobs of money". Up until a year ago, Bear Stearns and AIG were making "gobs of money".
But seriously, look at this list. Look at how many sequels are near the top of the list.
Go back through the list and mentally check off all the movies that you would actually want to watch. Now eliminate from your list those movies made by Pixar. What does that distribution look like? How many movies are there on your list after Aladdin? If there are more than a couple, then something is wrong.
Sorry, I'll give people Lilo and Stich, but Mulan, Tarzan, and Hunchback weren't good. They were heavy attempts to replay the same old formula that had gone stale. Oh, and they're trying to release yet another movie in the same exact formula, but with a non-white princess? Wow, those are some real creative folk over there, aren't they?
Well define "original". If you were to google, you might find a list. Most of them are derivative dreck, but I was trying to draw a distinction between Disney's own movies vs. Pixar movies or Japanese movies that Disney distributes.
A "subsidy" doesn't need to come out of the goodness of anyone's heart or a sense of "right". Hell, even government subsidies are usually the result of some kind of bribe or fear of opposing political power.
It's a "subsidy" in the sense that AT&T is contributing toward the price of the phone, but not paying for the phone fully. So they're "subsidizing" your purchase of the phone. I don't know a more accurate term for the transaction.
Well the larger problem here is what the sequels indicate: Disney is getting its way.
Disney has been churning out utter dreck for years. Go ahead, what was the last good original animated Disney movie (not counting those made by Pixar)? I don't know, but I'm estimating something like 20 years ago. It's common knowledge that Disney had been pressuring Pixar to do sequels to all their hits because Disney can't think of or even appreciate new ideas. The big question a few years back was, "When Disney buys Pixar, will Pixar be able to maintain their independence, or will Disney's 'creative' minds start steering the ship?"
I don't know if we really have a complete and definitive answer, since Pixar may have enough talent to make these sequels good. What's more it might be that these sequels are a blip, and after them we'll get a rash of original characters and story-lines. On the other hand, this doesn't seem like a good sign.
Summery seems a little bias, imo.
I have a hard time being sure whether it's biased. Personally, I read that Google Wave is the "Anti-Web" and I thought, "Sounds cool. Does that mean it fixes all the dumb stuff about the web? Or... wait, is 'anti-web' a bad thing?"
I read, "If you have something, that by its very nature is very complex, with many goals... then you need open source to have many instances of it because nobody will be able to do an independent implementation of it," and I thought, "Yeah, isn't open source awesome? It can accomplish things that are really too complex for a proprietary vendor, but it can still work out because lots of different people can work together on the solution!" And then I thought, "Er... wait, or is that supposed to be a bad thing?"
I couldn't really tell if it was praise or criticism until I looked up who Ray Ozzie was, and then I knew it was supposed to be criticism. To my ears, that Microsoft's approach doesn't require things to be open source really only sounds like an advantage for Microsoft, not for the users or developers who might be interested in the products.
I guess so, but right now they're getting complaints, "I bought an iPhone last year, and now I have to wait another year before I can get AT&T to subsidize it." So if they allow these people to go for a 2-year extension, what happens next year when Apple comes out with the next version of the iPhone, or the year after that?
People will be screaming, "WHAT?! You let me extend my contract last year, but now you're saying I can't? You're saying now I have to wait *4 YEARS* before I can upgrade again?! That's absurd! I want a new iPhone NOW!!!" The longer the extension they allow, the worse it gets.
I mean, I don't really want to defend AT&T too much. I pretty well hate AT&T, and I wouldn't mind if they gave additional subsidies to everyone. But I'm afraid their approach seems pretty reasonably to me.
Well for one thing, the GUIs for apt that I've seen don't really display things as discrete applications. You search for an application, ask to install it, and then you're given a whole list of other packages and files that are going to need to be installed. Now I'm not complaining about that behavior, but that's a very different experience than buying an iPhone app on iTunes.
Also many packages aren't applications in themselves, but services, libraries, or other stuff that a non-technical end user wouldn't know what to do with. The descriptions are vague and technical, and a lot of times you pretty well have to know what you want before you go looking for it.
What I mean is, imagine I want to look for a word processor. Right now Synaptic gives me 3 categories: "Word Processing", "Word Processing (multiverse)", and "Word Processing (universe)". End users won't necessarily understand what to do with that breakdown, but let's say I just pick "Word Processing". I'm given a couple hundred packages, including things like "linuxdoc-tools" and "myspell-bg" and "xmlto". Kind of confusing, since I'm just looking for a word processor.
OpenOffice is in the "Word Processor" category, but there are 20 different packages that all start with "openoffice.org", and it's not immediately clear which one I should be trying to install. Strangely, Abiword isn't anywhere in the "Word Processing" category as far as I can tell. If I do happen to find both Abiword and OpenOffice in Synaptic, it's not going to be very obvious to non-technical end-users which package they should install. There aren't complete feature lists, screenshots, or links to the programs' homepages. The descriptions themselves don't really give a whole lot of information, and there aren't user reviews to help me make my decision.
The situation only gets worse if I'm trying to find a spreadsheet program. There's a "Word Processing" category, but there's no "Spreadsheet" category.
Now, like I said, I'm not complaining. When I go to download an application, I like knowing which packages I'm going to be installing. I know whether I want OpenOffice or Abiword. But I bet this "app store" would be targeted toward people with less experience and knowledge, and who don't want to do a whole lot of research in order to find the program they want.
Futurama has tonnes of very intelligent and subversive themes, and actual plots.
Not only that, but the plots are often weirdly interwoven and planned out in advance. Nibbler's shadow is briefly visible (you'd hardly notice it) in the first episode, which is something that remains unexplained for long time. You don't even get introduced to Nibbler for a while.
Your post reminds me of the time Jesus entered a hotdog eating contest.
(Meh. It's not that hard.)
Comedy Central doesn't seem to censor South Park too badly. I mean, maybe they do, but that show still gets away with an awful lot.
On the other hand, that opens up a weird kind of situation. I could keep buying phones every month for another 2 year extension and after a few years find myself in a 100 year phone contract. From a certain perspective, that might seem like a win-win situation, because you keep getting the phones you want and AT&T gets you locked in for a lifetime. On the other hand, it's sort of a lose-lose because you're locked into a ridiculous contract, while AT&T has put out a bunch of money to buy a contract that they aren't likely to be able to collect on.
Now I admit that's an extreme case, but the point is that AT&T has to draw the line somewhere, however arbitrary that particular location seems to you and me.