If this trailer is an accurate sample of how Elijah Wood is going to play Frodo, then it's as I said about a year go in one of the Tolkien newsgroups: The boy has no grasp whatsoever of the character and will suck royally.
Fortunately, he's surrounded by enough truly great talent that he doesn't have to carry the movie. But I'd rather Frodo were portrayed competently. They should have hired an older actor, one with more life experience who might have had a better understanding of some of Frodo's thoughts and reactions.
Yes. Of course the very idea of a method for adjusting your monitor settings over the Internet is completely absurd.
The part describing the questions the "author" had to answer in his interview was noticably similar to the beginning of a Salon article about a bad experience at a software company we discussed here a short time ago.
The Yellow Pages aren't trademarked. This was a famous oversight by Bell Telephone, which is why anyone who wants to can publish a Yellow Pages telephone directory.
Do you, personally, know of anyone who made management decisions by rolling a d12?
There was this large foot next to the story listing on the front page, which generally indicates a humorous article.
It seems to me as if this guy used a whole bunch of words to say pretty much, "I worked too hard for a bunch of assholes, and it sucked."
Well, OK. But there have been a bunch of people left a lot worse off than him, like the poor slobs with the worthless stock options who owe thousands of dollars they don't have on the Alternative Minimum Tax. I have trouble working up a lot of sympathy for someone who, by comparison, not only got off easy but did it to himself.
nobody knew physically where the machine existed until the joint team followed the clues in the form of the actual physical cable that connected it through a wall that maintenance workers had inadvertently put up, sealing off the server.
I want to know just how the hell you can inadvertently put up a wall.
After reading a number of posts bemoaning the end of the Ultima games and the declining quality of the games later in the series, I thought I should point out that Ultima-style RPGs are alive and well. Spiderweb Software started out in 1994 with Exile, a massive retro-RPG in the style of Ultima IV. This was followed by two sequels, Exile II: Crystal Souls and Exile III: Ruined World, both of which implemented minor enhancements but were still basically in the same style. Blades of Exile was an expandable version of the game engine. It shipped with three sample scenarios and the Scenario Editor which allowed users to create their own. The best of them can be downloaded from Spiderweb's website.
The company shifted to a new engine that offered a pseudo-3D orthogonal projection with Nethergate. Nethergate was also innovative in that it allowed the player to roleplay either side of the conflict. Now they're working on re-releasing the Exile games using the new engine and under new titles. Avernum and the recently released Avernum 2 do not disappoint.
Although I have linked to the Windows versions of the games, Spiderweb actually develops and releases for the Mac first, and later ports its games to Windows. They also distribute a number of games that they do not produe, but IMO they're nowhere near as good.
All Spiderweb games are shareware, and you can play a fairly substantial portion of the game before having to pay. So if you miss Ultima, give them a try!
The only reason I didn't post earlier is that it would have been -1, Redundant. Several others had spotted it before I bothered to read any comments. The idea that a 13th century monk would have invented both the Cartesian coordinate system and complex numbers, both of which are required to draw the Mandelbrot set in the form to which we are accustomed, is ludicrous on the face of it and not at all "semi-plausible." And the copyright date specifying 4/1 when it ordinarily contains only the year should have been a dead giveaway to anyone.
Update 20 mins later by J: Yes, this is an April Fool's joke - very well done, too.
It's about as well done as most of the "All your base are belong to us" Photoshop jobs, and just about as easy to spot. Hemos really had his head up his butt on this one. It's a two year old joke for crying out loud!
I said "impossible to single out", not "impossible to identify." I seriously doubt that even Harlan Ellison would contemplate suing the owners of every single news spool in the country.
And here Yahoo is putting up these nice, shiny, new buildings here in Sunnyvale. I work at Lockheed Martin Space Systems. Formerly Lockheed Missiles & Space, after the merger with Martin-Marietta we found ourselves with this enormous plant in a new corporate culture that simply did not conceive of plants this size. So parcels of land began to get sold off, and one of them was bought by Yahoo. One of their new buildings sits on the former site of our old Employee Recreation facility. (Which buildings, incidentally, despite the current power crunch and the fact that they are as yet completely unoccupied, have all functioning lights on 24/7.) They're right across the street from VA Linux's old offices.
They're boring as hell, with lots of turquoise panels, and look like they were designed by the same guy who did the Juniper Networks buildings down the street -- which also sit on former Lockheed-Martin land. But they sit next to Lockheed-Martin buildings which were all constructed with overhead money from government contracts, so they look real good by comparison.
I think this is all a ploy by our management, which must be cleverer than it looks, to get some nice new buildings for free, or even with a small profit. Sell the cute little.com the land, let them put their buildings up on it, and then buy it back at a discount when they go under due to the inherent flaws in their business plan. I give them another 3 years at most.
While Harlan Ellison is one of the best fantasists around, he's also a well-known technophobe who has never taken to computers even as word processors. It's rather well-known that he still does all his writing on a typewriter. He probably has a limited understanding for his own part on the nature of online communities, Usenet in particular, since he confuses the parties providing connectivity (remarQ, for example) with the parties actually hosting the pirated work (impossible to single out due to Usenet's decentralized nature.)
Pirated text has the potential to be a serious problem. Unfortunately, Harlan's legendary bluster obscures a clear understanding of what the problem might be exactly and how extensive it in. In particular, he's going to have a hell of a time proving any actual monetary damages, and I think he is almost certainly not going to collect from the service providers.
No, it's keeping them safe from things that might harm them. Which is neither here nor there; you have no sound rational basis for the ethical statement you made, which was couched in terms as authoritarian as any parent has ever been. Write back when you know how to be consistent.
I am a parent with two children. The way you keep them from playing video games you don't want them to play and from watching TV shows you don't want them to watch is to exercise your parental authority and forbid them to do it. This means, of course, that you must actually spend the time to raise your children yourself and not rely on "electronic nanny" to raise them for you.
If it is worthwhile to bring children into the world, then it is worthwhile to make the effort to raise them properly. All the V-chips in the world can't substitute for it, and they're unnecessary if you're doing it.
If you aren't good at Math, get a CSc degree, a CEng degree is four years of math.
You are completely off your nut. I was a CSc major and could handle the math the engineers had to do with half my brain tied behind my back. The math required for CSc was the most abstruse I have ever encountered, especially when it came to language and automata theory. It's dense.
Here's a clue: In institutions where they do not have dedicated departments for these subjects, the equivalent of a CEng goes through the EE department. A CSc goes through the Math department.
The ISPs mentioned in the article, or at least those I'd heard of such as Slip.net, Hooked.net, Creative.net, Concentric, Best, are not what I would call "Mom & Pop" operations. A "Mom & Pop" operation (even though there's no Mom in this case) is something like my ISP, ihwy.com, a small ISP in the Santa Cruz mountains. He (not "they") has maybe a thousand subscribers on a dual T1. You can indeed turn a profit on an operation like this. Not a handsome profit, and you're not going to get rich with it, but you can make a descent living. And the customer service can't be beat, which is to be expected when you live across the street from the guy.
Matter produces a gravitational field, the strength of which is proportionsl to its mass. Any sufficiently massive body can acquire a satellite. Until recently nobody thought asteroids had satellites either, but it's been discovered that some do. Deal with it.
Is this serious? Comets only have tails as they approach the Sun as material is evaporated from their surfaces by the heat and energized by the solar wind. Pluto is far too distant from the Sun for this to happen.
Also, it's alone
Read the article, will you? It shares it's orbit with about 70 other objects that we know about, and crosses orbits with many other objects in the Kuiper belt.
If you think about it, what are the rest of the planets? Hunks of rock and ice.
The terrestrial planets are rock, with small amounts of ice occurring only on the surface of two of them. Ice isn't a major component of their composition. The gas giants may have small rocky cores, but they're mostly hydrogen and other gases. If Pluto is a planet, its composition is entirely unique relative to the others.
At least one asteroid does. But even so, Charon is awfully big for a moon. No other planet has a moon that's so large relative to it, and the two bodies are more or less in a position of orbiting each other. In any event, I don't see how any of this disqualifies Pluto from comet-hood.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately, he's surrounded by enough truly great talent that he doesn't have to carry the movie. But I'd rather Frodo were portrayed competently. They should have hired an older actor, one with more life experience who might have had a better understanding of some of Frodo's thoughts and reactions.
Conclusion: IT'S A PARODY!
Sheesh!
Well, OK. But there have been a bunch of people left a lot worse off than him, like the poor slobs with the worthless stock options who owe thousands of dollars they don't have on the Alternative Minimum Tax. I have trouble working up a lot of sympathy for someone who, by comparison, not only got off easy but did it to himself.
I want to know just how the hell you can inadvertently put up a wall.
The company shifted to a new engine that offered a pseudo-3D orthogonal projection with Nethergate. Nethergate was also innovative in that it allowed the player to roleplay either side of the conflict. Now they're working on re-releasing the Exile games using the new engine and under new titles. Avernum and the recently released Avernum 2 do not disappoint.
Although I have linked to the Windows versions of the games, Spiderweb actually develops and releases for the Mac first, and later ports its games to Windows. They also distribute a number of games that they do not produe, but IMO they're nowhere near as good.
All Spiderweb games are shareware, and you can play a fairly substantial portion of the game before having to pay. So if you miss Ultima, give them a try!
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons... From Hasbro!
EEEEEEEEEEEEKKK!
The only reason I didn't post earlier is that it would have been -1, Redundant. Several others had spotted it before I bothered to read any comments. The idea that a 13th century monk would have invented both the Cartesian coordinate system and complex numbers, both of which are required to draw the Mandelbrot set in the form to which we are accustomed, is ludicrous on the face of it and not at all "semi-plausible." And the copyright date specifying 4/1 when it ordinarily contains only the year should have been a dead giveaway to anyone.
Pphhphptthththtpptththt!
It's about as well done as most of the "All your base are belong to us" Photoshop jobs, and just about as easy to spot. Hemos really had his head up his butt on this one. It's a two year old joke for crying out loud!
I said "impossible to single out", not "impossible to identify." I seriously doubt that even Harlan Ellison would contemplate suing the owners of every single news spool in the country.
They're boring as hell, with lots of turquoise panels, and look like they were designed by the same guy who did the Juniper Networks buildings down the street -- which also sit on former Lockheed-Martin land. But they sit next to Lockheed-Martin buildings which were all constructed with overhead money from government contracts, so they look real good by comparison.
I think this is all a ploy by our management, which must be cleverer than it looks, to get some nice new buildings for free, or even with a small profit. Sell the cute little .com the land, let them put their buildings up on it, and then buy it back at a discount when they go under due to the inherent flaws in their business plan. I give them another 3 years at most.
Pirated text has the potential to be a serious problem. Unfortunately, Harlan's legendary bluster obscures a clear understanding of what the problem might be exactly and how extensive it in. In particular, he's going to have a hell of a time proving any actual monetary damages, and I think he is almost certainly not going to collect from the service providers.
No, it's keeping them safe from things that might harm them. Which is neither here nor there; you have no sound rational basis for the ethical statement you made, which was couched in terms as authoritarian as any parent has ever been. Write back when you know how to be consistent.
If it is worthwhile to bring children into the world, then it is worthwhile to make the effort to raise them properly. All the V-chips in the world can't substitute for it, and they're unnecessary if you're doing it.
The original T'Pau may well have been hot a century or two before "Amok Time"!
"Sub-Commander T'Pau" -- Is this supposed to be the T'Pau from Amok Time?
You are completely off your nut. I was a CSc major and could handle the math the engineers had to do with half my brain tied behind my back. The math required for CSc was the most abstruse I have ever encountered, especially when it came to language and automata theory. It's dense.
Here's a clue: In institutions where they do not have dedicated departments for these subjects, the equivalent of a CEng goes through the EE department. A CSc goes through the Math department.
Well, had you used this Google search you might have found a number of pages that mention it however briefly, like this one. Some of them even have pictures.
The ISPs mentioned in the article, or at least those I'd heard of such as Slip.net, Hooked.net, Creative.net, Concentric, Best, are not what I would call "Mom & Pop" operations. A "Mom & Pop" operation (even though there's no Mom in this case) is something like my ISP, ihwy.com, a small ISP in the Santa Cruz mountains. He (not "they") has maybe a thousand subscribers on a dual T1. You can indeed turn a profit on an operation like this. Not a handsome profit, and you're not going to get rich with it, but you can make a descent living. And the customer service can't be beat, which is to be expected when you live across the street from the guy.
If the evidence merits it, then so be it. I don't know why anyone should find such a designation particularly disturbing.
Matter produces a gravitational field, the strength of which is proportionsl to its mass. Any sufficiently massive body can acquire a satellite. Until recently nobody thought asteroids had satellites either, but it's been discovered that some do. Deal with it.
That's the surface. Water, solid or liquid, comprises only a very small portion of the total composition of the Earth.
Is this serious? Comets only have tails as they approach the Sun as material is evaporated from their surfaces by the heat and energized by the solar wind. Pluto is far too distant from the Sun for this to happen.
Also, it's alone
Read the article, will you? It shares it's orbit with about 70 other objects that we know about, and crosses orbits with many other objects in the Kuiper belt.
and has a definable orbit.
So do most other comets. So what?
The terrestrial planets are rock, with small amounts of ice occurring only on the surface of two of them. Ice isn't a major component of their composition. The gas giants may have small rocky cores, but they're mostly hydrogen and other gases. If Pluto is a planet, its composition is entirely unique relative to the others.
At least one asteroid does. But even so, Charon is awfully big for a moon. No other planet has a moon that's so large relative to it, and the two bodies are more or less in a position of orbiting each other. In any event, I don't see how any of this disqualifies Pluto from comet-hood.