Seriously. Most of the fun of watching a really abysmal movie is making up all the rude comments to say while it's running. If you're not creative enough to do that on your own, then you're not qualified to do it. Having someone else do it for you is the nadir of witlessness.
You may well be correct. However, in this case I think it has more to do with the fact that 95% of/.ers don't bother to RTFA before shooting off their mouths. It was clearly a satire, and a damn funny one at that, from the first page on. That pie chart should have clued readers in even if nothing else did. Anyone who didn't get it right away can't possibly have read the thing.
It wasn't really a trilogy as there were actually 6 seperate books and an appendix. Most publishers bound it into three volumes, however.
No. It wasn't really a trilogy because it was written as a single cohesive narrative. A trilogy is three related narratives all of which stand on their own as a complete story. The six "books" were never supposed to be six volumes, but are merely narrative divisions.
The three-volume form in which LOTR is usually published is in fact a throwback to the "triple-decker" of Regency and Victorian novels. Authors from Austen to Dickens had novels published in this form. However, its worth noting that LOTR isn't really a novel either. Tolkien himself considered it a Romance in the medieval sense of the word. (A "Romance" in the modern sense is really a novel.)
To answer the original poster's question, no there is not. There's a bit of fanfic circulating that purports to be a further volume, but its bogus. However, Tolkien did write an epilogue that was dropped from the published version. He also began a sequel but found he had no story to tell.
Round about 1979 my high school got rid of the Data General minicomputer with the ASR33 TTY that had served the computer class so well for lo, those many years and replaced them with a set of TRS-80s, one of which had a whole 16K of memory!
The extra memory and the CRTs were very nice by contrast, but in at least one major respect this was a mistake. When you turned in an assignment on paper tape, you knew it would still be there when the teacher attempted to load and run it. The same could not be said of the "tape drives" provided for the TRS-80. These were, of course, nothing more than ordinary cassette recorders. Via an "interface" i.e. monaural audio cable running from the computer to the MIC jack on the recorder, you could record "files" as a modulated audio signal. It was not unlike recording the signal coming out of a 110 baud modem. Perhaps that's exactly what it was; I never found out.
Completing an assignment became a game of Russian Roulette. Would the program actually be readable this time, or was there yet another "Incomplete" in the offing? You never knew until the teacher actually attempted to load your program. Work hell, we were happy if it was just there.
There was another plug on the cable that served to control the cassette recorder's motor, like the on/off switch on a microphone, so the computer itself could start and stop the recorder -- after the operator set it to either "Record" or "Play", write or read in computer talk.
Naturally, students in a room full of costly computer equipment (as it truly was at the time) couldn't be trusted with anything so precious as a cassette recorder, so these were kept in the library across the hall and could be checked out at need. But the detachable power cord and the cables for connecting cassette to computer were all left in place in the computer lab so the library didn't have to deal with a bunch of inconvenient wires.
So a bunch of bored geeks were messing around in the lab one fine afternoon when one of us (not me, I swear!) got the idea to jam the plugs for the cassette into the sockets at the end of the power cord. No one was too worried until I spotted smoke rising from the vents at the back of the keyboard/CPU unit.
Despite the disturbing smell of burned PVC that lingered in the lab for some hours after, the TRS-80 never suffered any apparent ill effects. It ran just as blindingly fast as it did before, and recording programs on a cassette was no slower, and no more or less reliable, than it had been. The teacher never noticed, and our unspoken code of silence concerning the event was never tested.
Not enough. Sailing ships always took on water from the land whenever they could. And if they were ever becalmed, look out. Rations of both food and water could get very short very quickly.
There was never any guarantee that they could pull enough fish out of the water to feed themselves either. As a general rule they couldn't. That's why they had to carry so much food and so often resorted to eating maggot-ridden biscuit instead of nice fresh fish.
You're very good at these pat answers, but try reading some history. You'll also find if you do so that a large sailing ship was a highly complex vessel requiring expert design and experienced operators who needed years of training before they became truly proficient. Surely it was less complex than a rocket, but that doesn't mean it was simple.
And no, man can't live in the ocean. It's an extremely hostile environment. A man overboard was as good as dead unless he was noticed and rescued. Not as hostile as space of course, but to a dead man it hardly matters.
Yes. '80s. Parent is saying that if readers here don't get '80s references, they sure as hell aren't going to get '60s references.
Get this: A couple of years ago I was shopping at the local open-24-hours Safeway. This was about the time Donny and Marie Osmond had started up their abortive attempt at a talk show, and the ads over the checkstands were all over promoting it. I remarked on this to the PFY running the cash register, and he informed me that D&M "used to be in a group or something." I couldn't quite find it within myself to bemoan the fact that he was unfamiliar with their earlier variety show and family act, so I told him about it but pointed out it wasn't as bad as not knowing Paul McCartney was in another group before "Wings" or anything like that. So what does the little shit ask me?
"Who's Paul McCartney?"
Needless to say, I called this to the attention of the senior staff and demanded the child be better educated.
And what the hell makes you think Frank Zappa's a '60s reference? The man was making great music to the end of his life.
The article said that ATMs has NOT reduced the number of branches or tellers, people do still prefer real life human contact and decision making to occur.
Well, yeah, kinda. I use Wells Fargo. They've shut down dozens of branches -- but they've also got counters in half the supermarkets around here and they're calling those "branches." So I suppose there are just as many as there used to be, but it's hardly the same thing.
Have you actually tried to do business with a human being in a bank these days? Tellers have dwindled to little more than human ATMs. There is not a single thing I can do with them that I cannot do at a machine. You'd think they'd be helpful if you needed some service out of the ordinary, but guess what: They don't actually perform any of those services! I am invariably sent to the telephone to talk with their customer support center when I need to do anything more complicated than making a deposit. It's pretty damn useless.
I don't see how I can possibly be any clearer. I, of course, explained myself even more fully in the portions of my post which you didn't bother addressing above. Is it possible you can't understand written English?
Oddly enough, I feel no further obligation to attempt to convince you of anything. You silly person.
Groklaw is "paying attention" to every motion, brief, memorandum, and letter that's filed in every court where SCO is involved in Linux litigation. That was just an article I noticed because it seemed to me that, if the judge grants Red Hat's motion to lift the stay, SCO will be forced to confront the copyright issues there, and that's the issue that's mainly of interest around here. It's also a very nice summary of the "shell game" SCO is playing with the contradictory statements it's making in different courtrooms, which is surely worth at least a dry chuckle.
Now if your only point is that you disagree with that and you don't really think it's of interest -- well, it's just too damn bad you can't do anything about it, isn't it?
I was the previous poster, and I was doing nothing more than pointing out that/. was 2 days behind Groklaw on this story. Period. Who said anything about influence?
Of course Groklaw's articles are post-event. All reporting and analysis of events happen after the fact. Don't be silly. No one can research a document that doesn't exist yet.
You've confused the pronouns. "This" is the Red Hat case, not the Groklaw site. It may well be that SCO's Linux copyright claims will first be ajudicated there, not in the IBM or Auto Zone cases.
Late post, but if anyone discussed this I missed it.
This kind of thing is covered in copyright law under the rubric of "work made for hire". Unless the contract contains specific language to the contrary, you, not the photographer, will own the copyright on these photographs since you're the one who is commissioning the work. See Circular 9 from the Copyright Office.
Simply put, this guy was being misleading at best. He has no copyright to sell you that wasn't explicitly assigned to him by the contract he insists on. If there is no such language in his contract then he's an out-and-out liar. The law says that you own the copyrights, not him, and he has nothing to sell you at all.
But let's assume he's being honest. It's perfectly reasonable that you want to do whatever you want with photographs you commission of your own wedding. If this guy's being too much of a butthead to take the language assigning him the copyright out of his contract, then find someone else who will, or who doesn't have that language in his contract in the first place.
Geez,/. is behind the curve on this one. Groklaw had it two days ago.
Back on Saturday there was a far more interesting Groklaw article discussing Red Hat's letter to the judge in their case. They lay out in clear detail the contradictory stories SCO has been telling in the different courtrooms across the country in an effort to convince her to lift the stay and let them smoosh SCO's Linux copyright claims into the mud. This, I think, is probably where we'll want to be paying some attention next.
Profitability is based on the console PLUS the average number of games purchased by each console owner. The Xbox seems to do quite well in this area.
If that were true, then MS would be turning a profit on the Xbox. They're not.
Three years ago, there was no Xbox and Microsoft was not a player at all in the console market. Now they are the number 2 brand worldwide...
This is Microsoft we're talking about. As someone else pointed out elsewhere in the discussion, it would have been a shocking embarrassment if they couldn't make a significant dent in the market. No one with that kind of marketing department and that much cash to throw around ought to have accomplished any less.
Microsoft is in the console market for the long haul, and profitably of their first attempt at the market was never their goal.
No other company could have done that, not at the volume of Xbox sales. That's not a cause for admiration. It means that MS can afford to be either slack or lackluster, where other companies do not have that luxury.
Your comparison of dot-coms is pretty much irrelevant because the failure of most dot-coms was because they had no real revenue model over the longterm.
Well, MS had better. Even their pockets are only so deep. Do they? No doubt they have a "model", but is it realistic? Other posters here have demonstrated how MS must crack the Japanese market to have even a slim hope of overtaking Sony, and how little chance they have of really doing that.
That wouldn't be a problem for most companies, but then most companies are turning a profit when they're the #2 player in a market the size of the one for gaming consoles. MS has to be #1. They clearly no longer understand any other way of doing business.
Well, it's now been nearly 3 years since the Xbox was launched. This is past the "first years" now, isn't it? To be sure, you shouldn't worry too much about profitability at first. But a "viable company" must become profitable at some point. A money-losing operation, over a run of years, is the very definition of non-viable.
"Insightful?" I suppose parts it are, but I'd intended it as humor. Now that I read it over I see it's not very funny, so I'll take what I can get though.
It's far too dry. I needed to add the verbal equivalent of an arrow-through-the-head thingie or something.
Do you think Bill Gates wrote BASIC for the Altair, or pulled off his buy-an-OS-and-name-it-MS-DOS move, based on mountains of official market research and hard data telling him that it's what people wanted?
Credit where credit is due, please. Gates did some good work on Altair BASIC, but he didn't do it alone. Paul Allen did a great deal of work -- I believe he was responsible for the Altair emulator that made the language's development possible in the first place -- and Monte Davidoff wrote the math functions.
Did Gates base his purchase of QDOS on market research? Of course not. He did it because he had a contract with IBM to provide an operating system for their new PC and this was easier than writing one. It was therefore based indirectly on IBM's market research. Incidentally, he only got that contract because the folks responsible for CP/M, the most common OS for small computers at the time, punted on it, and Bill's mother sat on IBM's board. The OS became popular only because IBM's computer became popular, and this was because of IBM's marketing department and the presence of the IBM nameplate on the front. (As anyone working on small computers at the time could tell you, it certainly wasn't because of the machine's technical merits relative to what else was available. No one ever got fired for buying IBM, but in this case they could have done a hell of a lot better.)
You don't seem to understand the syndrome very well here.
Young men know they're mortal. It's just that their hormone-addled brains don't allow them to care much about it.
I'm in my early 40s. When I was in my 20s, there were no 3D graphics cards for the consumer market, nor were there MP3 players. These were ipso facto not things I wanted. And I had a sports car back then. It was a tad beyond my income, but I determined, correctly as it turned out, that practical considerations would mean I'd never have another opportunity to own one.
The typical dream of most young men is not to build some kind of killer software library. It has more to do with changing the world in a meaningful way. This typically requires a hardware-based solution.
The difference between the sex you get when you're 40 and the sex you get when you're 19 is that when you're 40 it involved another person. This is way better even if it's (of necessity) less frequent. You're just going to have to take my word for it if you don't know this from personal experience.
Could someone with some legal training please explain how a state court can even have jurisdiction here, when a IP address is clearly an interstate, or even an international, asset? Why isn't this being taken up at the federal level in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't have to see the original. It clearly had the same plot as 90% of all cheap Hong Kong action flicks ever made. It's a very generic spoof.
Seriously. Most of the fun of watching a really abysmal movie is making up all the rude comments to say while it's running. If you're not creative enough to do that on your own, then you're not qualified to do it. Having someone else do it for you is the nadir of witlessness.
The upside is that we're not all going around dressed in Spandex jumpsuits. Spandex remains a privilege, not a right!
No. It wasn't really a trilogy because it was written as a single cohesive narrative. A trilogy is three related narratives all of which stand on their own as a complete story. The six "books" were never supposed to be six volumes, but are merely narrative divisions.
The three-volume form in which LOTR is usually published is in fact a throwback to the "triple-decker" of Regency and Victorian novels. Authors from Austen to Dickens had novels published in this form. However, its worth noting that LOTR isn't really a novel either. Tolkien himself considered it a Romance in the medieval sense of the word. (A "Romance" in the modern sense is really a novel.)
To answer the original poster's question, no there is not. There's a bit of fanfic circulating that purports to be a further volume, but its bogus. However, Tolkien did write an epilogue that was dropped from the published version. He also began a sequel but found he had no story to tell.
The extra memory and the CRTs were very nice by contrast, but in at least one major respect this was a mistake. When you turned in an assignment on paper tape, you knew it would still be there when the teacher attempted to load and run it. The same could not be said of the "tape drives" provided for the TRS-80. These were, of course, nothing more than ordinary cassette recorders. Via an "interface" i.e. monaural audio cable running from the computer to the MIC jack on the recorder, you could record "files" as a modulated audio signal. It was not unlike recording the signal coming out of a 110 baud modem. Perhaps that's exactly what it was; I never found out.
Completing an assignment became a game of Russian Roulette. Would the program actually be readable this time, or was there yet another "Incomplete" in the offing? You never knew until the teacher actually attempted to load your program. Work hell, we were happy if it was just there.
There was another plug on the cable that served to control the cassette recorder's motor, like the on/off switch on a microphone, so the computer itself could start and stop the recorder -- after the operator set it to either "Record" or "Play", write or read in computer talk.
Naturally, students in a room full of costly computer equipment (as it truly was at the time) couldn't be trusted with anything so precious as a cassette recorder, so these were kept in the library across the hall and could be checked out at need. But the detachable power cord and the cables for connecting cassette to computer were all left in place in the computer lab so the library didn't have to deal with a bunch of inconvenient wires.
So a bunch of bored geeks were messing around in the lab one fine afternoon when one of us (not me, I swear!) got the idea to jam the plugs for the cassette into the sockets at the end of the power cord. No one was too worried until I spotted smoke rising from the vents at the back of the keyboard/CPU unit.
Despite the disturbing smell of burned PVC that lingered in the lab for some hours after, the TRS-80 never suffered any apparent ill effects. It ran just as blindingly fast as it did before, and recording programs on a cassette was no slower, and no more or less reliable, than it had been. The teacher never noticed, and our unspoken code of silence concerning the event was never tested.
Not enough. Sailing ships always took on water from the land whenever they could. And if they were ever becalmed, look out. Rations of both food and water could get very short very quickly.
There was never any guarantee that they could pull enough fish out of the water to feed themselves either. As a general rule they couldn't. That's why they had to carry so much food and so often resorted to eating maggot-ridden biscuit instead of nice fresh fish.
You're very good at these pat answers, but try reading some history. You'll also find if you do so that a large sailing ship was a highly complex vessel requiring expert design and experienced operators who needed years of training before they became truly proficient. Surely it was less complex than a rocket, but that doesn't mean it was simple.
And no, man can't live in the ocean. It's an extremely hostile environment. A man overboard was as good as dead unless he was noticed and rescued. Not as hostile as space of course, but to a dead man it hardly matters.
Get this: A couple of years ago I was shopping at the local open-24-hours Safeway. This was about the time Donny and Marie Osmond had started up their abortive attempt at a talk show, and the ads over the checkstands were all over promoting it. I remarked on this to the PFY running the cash register, and he informed me that D&M "used to be in a group or something." I couldn't quite find it within myself to bemoan the fact that he was unfamiliar with their earlier variety show and family act, so I told him about it but pointed out it wasn't as bad as not knowing Paul McCartney was in another group before "Wings" or anything like that. So what does the little shit ask me?
"Who's Paul McCartney?"
Needless to say, I called this to the attention of the senior staff and demanded the child be better educated.
And what the hell makes you think Frank Zappa's a '60s reference? The man was making great music to the end of his life.
Well, yeah, kinda. I use Wells Fargo. They've shut down dozens of branches -- but they've also got counters in half the supermarkets around here and they're calling those "branches." So I suppose there are just as many as there used to be, but it's hardly the same thing.
Have you actually tried to do business with a human being in a bank these days? Tellers have dwindled to little more than human ATMs. There is not a single thing I can do with them that I cannot do at a machine. You'd think they'd be helpful if you needed some service out of the ordinary, but guess what: They don't actually perform any of those services! I am invariably sent to the telephone to talk with their customer support center when I need to do anything more complicated than making a deposit. It's pretty damn useless.
You're right. Never mind!
Oddly enough, I feel no further obligation to attempt to convince you of anything. You silly person.
Groklaw is "paying attention" to every motion, brief, memorandum, and letter that's filed in every court where SCO is involved in Linux litigation. That was just an article I noticed because it seemed to me that, if the judge grants Red Hat's motion to lift the stay, SCO will be forced to confront the copyright issues there, and that's the issue that's mainly of interest around here. It's also a very nice summary of the "shell game" SCO is playing with the contradictory statements it's making in different courtrooms, which is surely worth at least a dry chuckle.
Now if your only point is that you disagree with that and you don't really think it's of interest -- well, it's just too damn bad you can't do anything about it, isn't it?
I explained exactly what I meant two responses up. I was talking about the Red Hat case. Not Groklaw.
I was the previous poster, and I was doing nothing more than pointing out that /. was 2 days behind Groklaw on this story. Period. Who said anything about influence?
You've confused the pronouns. "This" is the Red Hat case, not the Groklaw site. It may well be that SCO's Linux copyright claims will first be ajudicated there, not in the IBM or Auto Zone cases.
This kind of thing is covered in copyright law under the rubric of "work made for hire". Unless the contract contains specific language to the contrary, you, not the photographer, will own the copyright on these photographs since you're the one who is commissioning the work. See Circular 9 from the Copyright Office.
Simply put, this guy was being misleading at best. He has no copyright to sell you that wasn't explicitly assigned to him by the contract he insists on. If there is no such language in his contract then he's an out-and-out liar. The law says that you own the copyrights, not him, and he has nothing to sell you at all.
But let's assume he's being honest. It's perfectly reasonable that you want to do whatever you want with photographs you commission of your own wedding. If this guy's being too much of a butthead to take the language assigning him the copyright out of his contract, then find someone else who will, or who doesn't have that language in his contract in the first place.
Back on Saturday there was a far more interesting Groklaw article discussing Red Hat's letter to the judge in their case. They lay out in clear detail the contradictory stories SCO has been telling in the different courtrooms across the country in an effort to convince her to lift the stay and let them smoosh SCO's Linux copyright claims into the mud. This, I think, is probably where we'll want to be paying some attention next.
If that were true, then MS would be turning a profit on the Xbox. They're not.
Three years ago, there was no Xbox and Microsoft was not a player at all in the console market. Now they are the number 2 brand worldwide...
This is Microsoft we're talking about. As someone else pointed out elsewhere in the discussion, it would have been a shocking embarrassment if they couldn't make a significant dent in the market. No one with that kind of marketing department and that much cash to throw around ought to have accomplished any less.
Microsoft is in the console market for the long haul, and profitably of their first attempt at the market was never their goal.
No other company could have done that, not at the volume of Xbox sales. That's not a cause for admiration. It means that MS can afford to be either slack or lackluster, where other companies do not have that luxury.
Your comparison of dot-coms is pretty much irrelevant because the failure of most dot-coms was because they had no real revenue model over the longterm.
Well, MS had better. Even their pockets are only so deep. Do they? No doubt they have a "model", but is it realistic? Other posters here have demonstrated how MS must crack the Japanese market to have even a slim hope of overtaking Sony, and how little chance they have of really doing that.
That wouldn't be a problem for most companies, but then most companies are turning a profit when they're the #2 player in a market the size of the one for gaming consoles. MS has to be #1. They clearly no longer understand any other way of doing business.
Well, it's now been nearly 3 years since the Xbox was launched. This is past the "first years" now, isn't it? To be sure, you shouldn't worry too much about profitability at first. But a "viable company" must become profitable at some point. A money-losing operation, over a run of years, is the very definition of non-viable.
They turn a profit. RTFA. MS is losing money on the Xbox. That pretty much means its not a successful product right there.
If you think that's not important in deciding whether or not it's successful, I've got some dot-com shares to sell you.
It's far too dry. I needed to add the verbal equivalent of an arrow-through-the-head thingie or something.
Credit where credit is due, please. Gates did some good work on Altair BASIC, but he didn't do it alone. Paul Allen did a great deal of work -- I believe he was responsible for the Altair emulator that made the language's development possible in the first place -- and Monte Davidoff wrote the math functions.
Did Gates base his purchase of QDOS on market research? Of course not. He did it because he had a contract with IBM to provide an operating system for their new PC and this was easier than writing one. It was therefore based indirectly on IBM's market research. Incidentally, he only got that contract because the folks responsible for CP/M, the most common OS for small computers at the time, punted on it, and Bill's mother sat on IBM's board. The OS became popular only because IBM's computer became popular, and this was because of IBM's marketing department and the presence of the IBM nameplate on the front. (As anyone working on small computers at the time could tell you, it certainly wasn't because of the machine's technical merits relative to what else was available. No one ever got fired for buying IBM, but in this case they could have done a hell of a lot better.)
Young men know they're mortal. It's just that their hormone-addled brains don't allow them to care much about it.
I'm in my early 40s. When I was in my 20s, there were no 3D graphics cards for the consumer market, nor were there MP3 players. These were ipso facto not things I wanted. And I had a sports car back then. It was a tad beyond my income, but I determined, correctly as it turned out, that practical considerations would mean I'd never have another opportunity to own one.
The typical dream of most young men is not to build some kind of killer software library. It has more to do with changing the world in a meaningful way. This typically requires a hardware-based solution.
The difference between the sex you get when you're 40 and the sex you get when you're 19 is that when you're 40 it involved another person. This is way better even if it's (of necessity) less frequent. You're just going to have to take my word for it if you don't know this from personal experience.
Double discounts for members with UIDs under 100000, right?
Heckboy, perhaps?
Could someone with some legal training please explain how a state court can even have jurisdiction here, when a IP address is clearly an interstate, or even an international, asset? Why isn't this being taken up at the federal level in the first place?