I personally think anyone who says the dialogue in ANY Star Wars films any more than cheese is really kidding themselves. The real problem with the prequels are that the dialogue are usually delivered with a lot more emphasis and deliberation. e.g. the "I have a bad feeling about this" line, instead of being said off-hand, was given it's own cut-away scene. It's subtle point but it just looks like Lucas is being way to serious about his films, which are essential cool, pop-corn, bad vs good epic stories.
For me, and I suspect many people, one of the things that made the old series was Han Solo. He was the "rascal" a bit of a bastard who became a reluctant and yet impetuos hero. He was edgy but was really a good guy at heart. Whether it be Lucas's design or Harrison FOrd's spontineity, Han was a relactively interesting character in the black & white Star Wars world.
If we look at Annakin, it's a little hard to see him as ANYTHING but plain nasty. From the word go he was a petulent little brat. Unlike Han he had pretty much no redeeming features. It's surprising the Jedi order didn't pick up on this much earlier. IMHO, Annakin's meant to be a good guy that'd been drawn to the dark side but was essentially good. I liked the scenes in Tatooine as far as his character descent into evil goes but he was essentially on the Dark (or at least pretty murky brown) side of the force by then. It would've been better, and more dramatic, to have a more restrained Anakin, WANTING to break free, at the start before seccumbing to the path of the Dark side at Tatooine. IMHO, that would've also made ANakin's "romance" a little more plausible. It's hard to see anyone falling for such a wanker, especially one who uses "not like you, you're soft and smooth"... huh? what? Anyway, that's my rant.
The dialogue is lame and the "love story" is even tackier. But some of the special effects weren't right either.
I remember 2 scenes where the matted backgroiund just kinda looked stupid. I mean they were pretty paintings but they seemed to have forgotten / neglected to animate the moving bits. One scene where they first land on Naboo, the waterfalls in the background where dead still... Then on the landing of the raininy planet, the ocean was still and not animated... Is this just my screening (in Oz)? Lame direction / writing is a competency issue, I'm sure George didn't purposefully write lame dialogue but all these obvious special effects faults is pretty poor for a movie that is essentially a SFx movie.
Also, just about the funniest scene was when the princess fell onto the desert and was rolling around in agonising pain.. and then a troooper asks "Are you okay?". She then springs up and says yep and walks around as if nothing's happened. Very monty python, although I'm not sure if it was particularly intended.
I think you're missing the point a bit there by attacking the quality of Starwars as a serious film. I think the general, if you tried to look at the old Starwars movies is a complex, interwoven piece of art, you'll find that there is a bit of a void.
Despite what George might try to have you believe after the movies came out, Starwars ain't a deep and complex film. It's a neat Good VS Evil, shoot them up, cut them down popcorn movie. I think all the comments on the plot and acting are very valid but I don't think the old series really pretend to be either.
The problem with trying to redo this for the 90s and 00s is that the audience expectations have changed. Watching old chessy 70s and 80s movies, you can really have a good laugh at the cheesy lines and crummy plot. What episode I did that really failed was that it recapture the chessy taciness in plot, but really took itself way too seriously. There was no real send-ups of itself - just more of the cheese, without any recognition of its own chessiness. Audiences are must more critical and in many ways, cynical. Episode I was a pretty ordinary movie and given all the hype, it was almost always going to fall well short of expectations.
Basically, yeah, Starwars is chessy. It's tacky but hey, we still love it.
it's the whole movie experience man : )
on
Movies Online?
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· Score: 1
i think that orginal thought will be pretty rare for this subject but i'll give my 2 cents worth anyway
i think that even if u can get any movie on your computer for free, there is still a time a a place for going to the movies. The whole "getting your mates together and heading off the the cinemas" thing is definitely much more fun and socialble than waiting for that 26368374 gig movie to d/l on your computer : ) it's just a different thing. Sitting at home by yourself, hell or even with your mum or sth, watching some movie could be quite fun... but you kinda gotta get tired of that sometimes... i think there's definitely something tribal and communal with a huge hoard of people cheering and throwing pop-corn at the movies:)
and yeah it doesn't happen at EVERY movie, and certainly there are things best seen in the comfort of your 21". But if you're into the whole movie experience and u don't go to the cinemas JUST for the movie itself, then i suspect you'd prolly not snap up the net-only movie so fast
I think the quote you give was taken out of context a little. The guy was really referring to the fact that the Mac OS, while not the first GUI, was really the first to really drill home the need to focus on the needs of a consumer. It said that the main alternative in the 80s was just the ol' DOS for windows and in that context, the OS was quite a revolutionary - it paved the way for other GUIs into the consumer market.
As far as stability goes.. I think the Mac OS has really felt the impact of Apple's flirt with liquidation in the mid-90s. I do remember being promised pre-emptively multitasking and protected memory a bit before Windows 95 came out.... after that bungle after bungle... the whole thing seemed to just get pushed back and back... and it never really came. Mac OS isn't great by any stretch of the imagination but it certainly WAS revolutionary for its tiome
Changes under the hood in OS X is long overdue but IMHO Apple have usually (with QT Player being a notable exception) hit the mark with vibrant, clean, intuitive and innovative GUI. Which, I feel is pretty much the only claim that's being made in teh 1st para
like u said, would any self -respecting yuppie have ANYTHING to do with anything as daggy and uncool as speedracer a "poor quality anime that lacks creativity" as you say?
It's geek culture... it's cheap tacky scifi that we all watched and love when we were growing up... and it's still quite a laugh when u look back on it now:) pretty funny stuff actually...
and like some other guy said... if you don't wanna read it, just don't?! It's the same story when people whinge about Katz and his articles - if you don't wanna read it, just excercise some control and DON'T CLICK that read more link
As far as I know, this doesn't seem particularly ground-breaking. While it's great to find it since it's really just another step in the right direction of trying to deduce that there is life out there, it's not a particularly massive breakthrough... Scientists have known the existance of amino-acids in inter-stellar objects for quite sometime now and they actually are quite common even. I have NFI about Chemistry but as far as i know glucose is just a string of amino acids strung together. As amino acids were so common, it wasd really just a matter of time before we found sth
I suppose the benchmarks are prolly trying to give you "real world" benchmarks - testing activities they think that a majority of computer users use on a regular basis. Things like MS-Word & Q3 are pretty well common and your average jo are much more likely to have experiences with this rather than having to compile Mozila on linux box... So I guess what I'm saying is that programmers are prolly not really who the reviewers had in mind when they designed the benchmarks... In going for the most generally known tests I suppose they need to over-look certain aspects...
That said you could prolly argue that poepl reading Tom's Hardware Reviews are more likely than not, tekkies who would know a few more apps than just MS-Word...but hell.. EVERYONE can relate to Quake 3 i'm sure
so which Microsoft will own this? It's a worry whichever way it falls but I'm just thinking that if Windows gets Bungie then they could conceiveably cut development to other platforms (like the mac & linux) and focus on offering windows only apps?
... which leads me to another point, how on earth are Microsoft's holdings in other companies be divided? Would companies and shares aquired by Microsoft be spilt evenly? or will one half get more of another?
Maybe you've missed the point?
on
Mattel Spyware
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· Score: 1
I have a feeling you've kinda missed his main point - that being that we shouldn't trust big businesses to run our lives so unconditionally. That it's strange how dispite all that's happened people are still quite willing to trust companies to do the best thing by them. Surely, they would know better.
As for the stats go, I haven't got the stats either but I'm certain that if you do look into it, you'll find that people are staying away in droves and reluctant to adopt e-commerce since most do fear for their privacy - more specifically, the privacy of their credit cards. This is probably one of the main reasons why adoption of business-customer e-commerce hasn't quite been as spectacular as the forecasts a coula years back... The fact of the matter is, people are quite worried about e-commerce privacy. The post suggests that considering this, it was strange that they seem to still have so much faith in software that they don't really know what it's doing
probably because it's not particularly effective i suppose... just because there is an interfearence with some navigation systems would more likely to cause a "scare" and maybe the plane landing badly.. or hell even over-shooting the runway!!! but it doesn't really ensure that the plane with be blown out of the sky and people sitting up and taking notice (which seems to be the an important reason for terrorists) planes can land with engines burning - so although there is a risk of a failure and we shouldn't tempt fate, terrorists aren't really gonna think this idea is any good
I think you have to realise that some people are very good at what they do, accountants, lawyers, doctors and in that domain, they are highly "intelligent" people. But often they do not work in a dynamic environment, forcing them to challenge themselves with new skills everyday and thus change comes quite hard to a lot of them... They lack a real computing "common sense" to be able to function even at a basic level with technology.
Admittedly I'd say probably 80% of workers outside IT handle computers to a reasonable level in their field. It's just the other 20% that constantly rings up help desk and take up 80% of their time with pretty dumb question about changing fonts or sth
And i think half the problem is that knowledge about computers is somehow intertwined with computer geeks shacked up in some underground bumker 10ft underground wearing 3 inch thick glasses playing with Linux. Although there's nothing inherently wrong with it, it's a lifestyle choice after-all, it's not a desireable image either. But why does being in IT preclude you from having a social life? Why does spending uni/college days studying UML and Java any different than reading through volumes of law books? I enjoy computers and I enjoy going out, and i suspect many other people do too... And for the people who don't enjoy going out, it's probably because they have sth better to do than watching the footy and getting drunk at the local pub, which, i guess, is should be fair enough
Re:Cool... is this the modernized Amiga?
on
AtheOS
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· Score: 1
must second that... as much as i'm a mac fan and rated the orginal msg up, not quite sure how the post could be flamebait
hardly diplomatic, but hardly flaming one would've thought
As much as I feel the decision to dismiss the case was pretty dubious, I think you're clutching for straws a bit to accuse a judge of conspiring with the government to send chills down the spines of the Australian public.
More likely, the judge has no real understanding of the Internet medium and perhaps more thought and correspondence was needed before he made his decision to dismiss the case. One feels he dismissed the case since he wasn't quite sure how the avaialbility of this sort of information on the net could impact a jury, not to further any secret agendas in the censorship of the Net down under.
The same sort of "Oz Government are evil, freedom strangling scum" vibe have been flowing freely since the "censorship" laws was introduced a bit back. While it's arguable whether or not they're scums, I doubt very much that they are actively trying suppress freedom on the internet.
The fact is, John Howard (the PM) and his cronies wouldn't know the Net if it ran him over on an Autumn Sunday morning. As much as the net does pose a threat to the establishment, I doubt Howard understands its potential well enough to even be scared of it. Basically, I doubt Howard is clever enough to come up with such a plan to censor the net. Pretty much everybody in Oz knew that the censorship laws that were passed were just a big Political stunt in order to gain support of an independent, no more, no less. Apart from telstra shutting down a couple of teenies porn newsgroups, i've heard no cases of the effects of the legislation, and definitely no ISP being shut down because of it.... it was a law witout any bite.
Basically, the Oz government and the legal system is about 7 years behind the world in the technology stakes. They are so far behind the eight ball that they don't even seem to be trying to catch up. It will have to take a new generation of politicians with some technological awareness to bring them up to speed. Until then, for little Johnnie Howard and his boys, the Internet is merely this one enormous porn site that needs to be kept in check once in a while ; )
applescript is one of those pretty darn easy "scripting language"... it's basically like a macro in word or excel i guess... surely that kinda thing would be considered scripting for novices?
well we've probably just about given up on a whole bunch of ourselves. Being intelligent and thinking and caring about what goes on around us just doesn't rate that highly any more. I think people are more interested in tangibles these days, what you can see is what you have and so enjoy it... People are pretty apathetic about "obtaining" abstract intelligence when they can just learn how to make $40K a year a live happily ever after or sth...
Maybe though, the development of A.I. could really inspire a lot of people to get involved, much like a ton of people became interested in space, space travel & physics in part due to break throughs in space travel, maybe AI just needs that one big breakthrough to bring back the romanticism in it all again... The blissful optimism that anything is possible, today and tomorrow...
If there's one thing Katz can do then it's to insipre passionate, and i mean PASSIONATE, debate from his readers... He makes highly subjective "ibg calls" on the big issues, net-culture, geek-culture, women. Most of them seems to take generalisations a little far, some of them are intriuiging, some are pretty tabloid-esqure and a fair few are pretty painful to read...
But I don't think anyone one could possibly disagree on the fact that Kataz inspires the most passionate and indeed informative posts. He writes opionion pieces which are always taking one side of the argument, never the middle ground. That side is usually not the side most/.ers agree with. Undoubtedly, these people realise that they should share their views to the world. The thread becomes a pool full of awesome ideas as well as some of the usual Katz sux comments, but that's to be expected...
Just reading through the posts on this article without reading too much of the article itseelf (which doesn't sound like one of his better efforts) has been a pretty informative experience... I don't personally know of any other forum where you will here so many passionate people talk about a topic like this. It's been a great read
Maybe some people don't think/. should be about people having a slanging match about net-culture, it should be just news about the coolest bits and pieces in geek hardware and open-source... Maybe these are valid views, but personally, I think listening/reading what views other people have to say on somethings can be a very rewarding experience indeed...
a good question to ask may be what exactly "is" mean. Is it still there? Well when is "is"? Is it when the light was emitted from the object out in space? Or is it when these photons of light hit us... From our persepective, the photons arriving here is 13 billion years old - yet for us to see what "now" is over there would take another 13 billion years... Is "now" what is happening "now" over there or what happened 13 billion years ago?
Although I can understand companies being fairly weary about jumping into the Linux market, I don't really see flooding them with e-mails saying that you want "game x ported to Linux" as such a bad thing...
Surely, having a whole bunch of difficult-to-please-game enthusiasts is much better than having no one there at all. I think it's good that users give these companies a yell that the market is there if they're willing to take some risks. Surely the best thing to do would be just writing them enquiring about what their stance on porting to linux and politely encourage them to do so. Pretty soon, tehy'll get the message.
A perceived problem of Linux might be that the users may seem a little too demanding... like some companies may be scared of going anywhere near open-sourced software for example.... though i've no idea- i'm just speculating
Although I can understand companies being fairly weary about jumping into the Linux market, I don't really see flooding them with e-mails saying that you want "game x ported to Linux" as such a bad thing...
Surely, having a whole bunch of difficult-to-please-game enthusiasts is much better than having no one there at all. I think it's good that users give these companies a yell that the market is there if they're wiulling to take some risks.
A perceived problem of Linux might be that the users may seem a little too demanding... like some companies may be scared of going anywhere near open-sourced software for example.... though i've no idea- i'm just speculating
The article seems to be suggesting that you can actually see/detect the existance of these quark things... maybe i'm not reading this thoroughly enough but they don't seem to be mentioning how they actually detected these quark things. All it says is that, in so many words, you blast the crap outta sth to heat it up big time and little quarks separate from the atoms...
I'm quite keen to know how they detected these little quarks spraying off
Slashdot Mirror
maybe those Helmets have special filters on them that would nullify that?
interesting though
I personally think anyone who says the dialogue in ANY Star Wars films any more than cheese is really kidding themselves. The real problem with the prequels are that the dialogue are usually delivered with a lot more emphasis and deliberation. e.g. the "I have a bad feeling about this" line, instead of being said off-hand, was given it's own cut-away scene. It's subtle point but it just looks like Lucas is being way to serious about his films, which are essential cool, pop-corn, bad vs good epic stories.
For me, and I suspect many people, one of the things that made the old series was Han Solo. He was the "rascal" a bit of a bastard who became a reluctant and yet impetuos hero. He was edgy but was really a good guy at heart. Whether it be Lucas's design or Harrison FOrd's spontineity, Han was a relactively interesting character in the black & white Star Wars world.
If we look at Annakin, it's a little hard to see him as ANYTHING but plain nasty. From the word go he was a petulent little brat. Unlike Han he had pretty much no redeeming features. It's surprising the Jedi order didn't pick up on this much earlier. IMHO, Annakin's meant to be a good guy that'd been drawn to the dark side but was essentially good. I liked the scenes in Tatooine as far as his character descent into evil goes but he was essentially on the Dark (or at least pretty murky brown) side of the force by then. It would've been better, and more dramatic, to have a more restrained Anakin, WANTING to break free, at the start before seccumbing to the path of the Dark side at Tatooine. IMHO, that would've also made ANakin's "romance" a little more plausible. It's hard to see anyone falling for such a wanker, especially one who uses "not like you, you're soft and smooth"... huh? what? Anyway, that's my rant.
The dialogue is lame and the "love story" is even tackier. But some of the special effects weren't right either.
I remember 2 scenes where the matted backgroiund just kinda looked stupid. I mean they were pretty paintings but they seemed to have forgotten / neglected to animate the moving bits. One scene where they first land on Naboo, the waterfalls in the background where dead still... Then on the landing of the raininy planet, the ocean was still and not animated... Is this just my screening (in Oz)? Lame direction / writing is a competency issue, I'm sure George didn't purposefully write lame dialogue but all these obvious special effects faults is pretty poor for a movie that is essentially a SFx movie.
Also, just about the funniest scene was when the princess fell onto the desert and was rolling around in agonising pain.. and then a troooper asks "Are you okay?". She then springs up and says yep and walks around as if nothing's happened. Very monty python, although I'm not sure if it was particularly intended.
I think you're missing the point a bit there by attacking the quality of Starwars as a serious film. I think the general, if you tried to look at the old Starwars movies is a complex, interwoven piece of art, you'll find that there is a bit of a void.
Despite what George might try to have you believe after the movies came out, Starwars ain't a deep and complex film. It's a neat Good VS Evil, shoot them up, cut them down popcorn movie. I think all the comments on the plot and acting are very valid but I don't think the old series really pretend to be either.
The problem with trying to redo this for the 90s and 00s is that the audience expectations have changed. Watching old chessy 70s and 80s movies, you can really have a good laugh at the cheesy lines and crummy plot. What episode I did that really failed was that it recapture the chessy taciness in plot, but really took itself way too seriously. There was no real send-ups of itself - just more of the cheese, without any recognition of its own chessiness. Audiences are must more critical and in many ways, cynical. Episode I was a pretty ordinary movie and given all the hype, it was almost always going to fall well short of expectations.
Basically, yeah, Starwars is chessy. It's tacky but hey, we still love it.
i think that orginal thought will be pretty rare for this subject but i'll give my 2 cents worth anyway
i think that even if u can get any movie on your computer for free, there is still a time a a place for going to the movies. The whole "getting your mates together and heading off the the cinemas" thing is definitely much more fun and socialble than waiting for that 26368374 gig movie to d/l on your computer : ) it's just a different thing. Sitting at home by yourself, hell or even with your mum or sth, watching some movie could be quite fun... but you kinda gotta get tired of that sometimes... i think there's definitely something tribal and communal with a huge hoard of people cheering and throwing pop-corn at the movies :)
and yeah it doesn't happen at EVERY movie, and certainly there are things best seen in the comfort of your 21". But if you're into the whole movie experience and u don't go to the cinemas JUST for the movie itself, then i suspect you'd prolly not snap up the net-only movie so fast
I think the quote you give was taken out of context a little. The guy was really referring to the fact that the Mac OS, while not the first GUI, was really the first to really drill home the need to focus on the needs of a consumer. It said that the main alternative in the 80s was just the ol' DOS for windows and in that context, the OS was quite a revolutionary - it paved the way for other GUIs into the consumer market.
As far as stability goes.. I think the Mac OS has really felt the impact of Apple's flirt with liquidation in the mid-90s. I do remember being promised pre-emptively multitasking and protected memory a bit before Windows 95 came out.... after that bungle after bungle... the whole thing seemed to just get pushed back and back... and it never really came. Mac OS isn't great by any stretch of the imagination but it certainly WAS revolutionary for its tiome
Changes under the hood in OS X is long overdue but IMHO Apple have usually (with QT Player being a notable exception) hit the mark with vibrant, clean, intuitive and innovative GUI. Which, I feel is pretty much the only claim that's being made in teh 1st para
like u said, would any self -respecting yuppie have ANYTHING to do with anything as daggy and uncool as speedracer a "poor quality anime that lacks creativity" as you say?
It's geek culture... it's cheap tacky scifi that we all watched and love when we were growing up... and it's still quite a laugh when u look back on it now :) pretty funny stuff actually...
and like some other guy said... if you don't wanna read it, just don't?! It's the same story when people whinge about Katz and his articles - if you don't wanna read it, just excercise some control and DON'T CLICK that read more link
As far as I know, this doesn't seem particularly ground-breaking. While it's great to find it since it's really just another step in the right direction of trying to deduce that there is life out there, it's not a particularly massive breakthrough... Scientists have known the existance of amino-acids in inter-stellar objects for quite sometime now and they actually are quite common even. I have NFI about Chemistry but as far as i know glucose is just a string of amino acids strung together. As amino acids were so common, it wasd really just a matter of time before we found sth
I suppose the benchmarks are prolly trying to give you "real world" benchmarks - testing activities they think that a majority of computer users use on a regular basis. Things like MS-Word & Q3 are pretty well common and your average jo are much more likely to have experiences with this rather than having to compile Mozila on linux box... So I guess what I'm saying is that programmers are prolly not really who the reviewers had in mind when they designed the benchmarks... In going for the most generally known tests I suppose they need to over-look certain aspects...
That said you could prolly argue that poepl reading Tom's Hardware Reviews are more likely than not, tekkies who would know a few more apps than just MS-Word.. .but hell.. EVERYONE can relate to Quake 3 i'm sure
so which Microsoft will own this? It's a worry whichever way it falls but I'm just thinking that if Windows gets Bungie then they could conceiveably cut development to other platforms (like the mac & linux) and focus on offering windows only apps?
... which leads me to another point, how on earth are Microsoft's holdings in other companies be divided? Would companies and shares aquired by Microsoft be spilt evenly? or will one half get more of another?
I have a feeling you've kinda missed his main point - that being that we shouldn't trust big businesses to run our lives so unconditionally. That it's strange how dispite all that's happened people are still quite willing to trust companies to do the best thing by them. Surely, they would know better.
As for the stats go, I haven't got the stats either but I'm certain that if you do look into it, you'll find that people are staying away in droves and reluctant to adopt e-commerce since most do fear for their privacy - more specifically, the privacy of their credit cards. This is probably one of the main reasons why adoption of business-customer e-commerce hasn't quite been as spectacular as the forecasts a coula years back... The fact of the matter is, people are quite worried about e-commerce privacy. The post suggests that considering this, it was strange that they seem to still have so much faith in software that they don't really know what it's doing
probably because it's not particularly effective i suppose... just because there is an interfearence with some navigation systems would more likely to cause a "scare" and maybe the plane landing badly.. or hell even over-shooting the runway!!! but it doesn't really ensure that the plane with be blown out of the sky and people sitting up and taking notice (which seems to be the an important reason for terrorists) planes can land with engines burning - so although there is a risk of a failure and we shouldn't tempt fate, terrorists aren't really gonna think this idea is any good
I think you have to realise that some people are very good at what they do, accountants, lawyers, doctors and in that domain, they are highly "intelligent" people. But often they do not work in a dynamic environment, forcing them to challenge themselves with new skills everyday and thus change comes quite hard to a lot of them... They lack a real computing "common sense" to be able to function even at a basic level with technology.
Admittedly I'd say probably 80% of workers outside IT handle computers to a reasonable level in their field. It's just the other 20% that constantly rings up help desk and take up 80% of their time with pretty dumb question about changing fonts or sth
And i think half the problem is that knowledge about computers is somehow intertwined with computer geeks shacked up in some underground bumker 10ft underground wearing 3 inch thick glasses playing with Linux. Although there's nothing inherently wrong with it, it's a lifestyle choice after-all, it's not a desireable image either. But why does being in IT preclude you from having a social life? Why does spending uni/college days studying UML and Java any different than reading through volumes of law books? I enjoy computers and I enjoy going out, and i suspect many other people do too... And for the people who don't enjoy going out, it's probably because they have sth better to do than watching the footy and getting drunk at the local pub, which, i guess, is should be fair enough
must second that... as much as i'm a mac fan and rated the orginal msg up, not quite sure how the post could be flamebait
hardly diplomatic, but hardly flaming one would've thought
As much as I feel the decision to dismiss the case was pretty dubious, I think you're clutching for straws a bit to accuse a judge of conspiring with the government to send chills down the spines of the Australian public.
More likely, the judge has no real understanding of the Internet medium and perhaps more thought and correspondence was needed before he made his decision to dismiss the case. One feels he dismissed the case since he wasn't quite sure how the avaialbility of this sort of information on the net could impact a jury, not to further any secret agendas in the censorship of the Net down under.
The same sort of "Oz Government are evil, freedom strangling scum" vibe have been flowing freely since the "censorship" laws was introduced a bit back. While it's arguable whether or not they're scums, I doubt very much that they are actively trying suppress freedom on the internet.
The fact is, John Howard (the PM) and his cronies wouldn't know the Net if it ran him over on an Autumn Sunday morning. As much as the net does pose a threat to the establishment, I doubt Howard understands its potential well enough to even be scared of it. Basically, I doubt Howard is clever enough to come up with such a plan to censor the net. Pretty much everybody in Oz knew that the censorship laws that were passed were just a big Political stunt in order to gain support of an independent, no more, no less. Apart from telstra shutting down a couple of teenies porn newsgroups, i've heard no cases of the effects of the legislation, and definitely no ISP being shut down because of it.... it was a law witout any bite.
Basically, the Oz government and the legal system is about 7 years behind the world in the technology stakes. They are so far behind the eight ball that they don't even seem to be trying to catch up. It will have to take a new generation of politicians with some technological awareness to bring them up to speed. Until then, for little Johnnie Howard and his boys, the Internet is merely this one enormous porn site that needs to be kept in check once in a while ; )
.... i'm prolly just missing joke/point but anyway : )
potatoE is English and potato is American... Last time checked I'm speaking English so i think i'll just keep on using potatoe ; )
applescript is one of those pretty darn easy "scripting language"... it's basically like a macro in word or excel i guess... surely that kinda thing would be considered scripting for novices?
well we've probably just about given up on a whole bunch of ourselves. Being intelligent and thinking and caring about what goes on around us just doesn't rate that highly any more. I think people are more interested in tangibles these days, what you can see is what you have and so enjoy it... People are pretty apathetic about "obtaining" abstract intelligence when they can just learn how to make $40K a year a live happily ever after or sth...
Maybe though, the development of A.I. could really inspire a lot of people to get involved, much like a ton of people became interested in space, space travel & physics in part due to break throughs in space travel, maybe AI just needs that one big breakthrough to bring back the romanticism in it all again... The blissful optimism that anything is possible, today and tomorrow...
If there's one thing Katz can do then it's to insipre passionate, and i mean PASSIONATE, debate from his readers... He makes highly subjective "ibg calls" on the big issues, net-culture, geek-culture, women. Most of them seems to take generalisations a little far, some of them are intriuiging, some are pretty tabloid-esqure and a fair few are pretty painful to read...
But I don't think anyone one could possibly disagree on the fact that Kataz inspires the most passionate and indeed informative posts. He writes opionion pieces which are always taking one side of the argument, never the middle ground. That side is usually not the side most /.ers agree with. Undoubtedly, these people realise that they should share their views to the world. The thread becomes a pool full of awesome ideas as well as some of the usual Katz sux comments, but that's to be expected...
Just reading through the posts on this article without reading too much of the article itseelf (which doesn't sound like one of his better efforts) has been a pretty informative experience... I don't personally know of any other forum where you will here so many passionate people talk about a topic like this. It's been a great read
Maybe some people don't think /. should be about people having a slanging match about net-culture, it should be just news about the coolest bits and pieces in geek hardware and open-source... Maybe these are valid views, but personally, I think listening/reading what views other people have to say on somethings can be a very rewarding experience indeed...
for those rather clueless people (like myself), what's in kansas?
ie can someone explain that joke to me? (i mean it got a 5 rating, so it's bound to be quite clever or sth)
a good question to ask may be what exactly "is" mean. Is it still there? Well when is "is"? Is it when the light was emitted from the object out in space? Or is it when these photons of light hit us... From our persepective, the photons arriving here is 13 billion years old - yet for us to see what "now" is over there would take another 13 billion years... Is "now" what is happening "now" over there or what happened 13 billion years ago?
... then again, i'm prolly just rambling : P
Although I can understand companies being fairly weary about jumping into the Linux market, I don't really see flooding them with e-mails saying that you want "game x ported to Linux" as such a bad thing...
Surely, having a whole bunch of difficult-to-please-game enthusiasts is much better than having no one there at all. I think it's good that users give these companies a yell that the market is there if they're willing to take some risks. Surely the best thing to do would be just writing them enquiring about what their stance on porting to linux and politely encourage them to do so. Pretty soon, tehy'll get the message.
A perceived problem of Linux might be that the users may seem a little too demanding... like some companies may be scared of going anywhere near open-sourced software for example.... though i've no idea- i'm just speculating
Although I can understand companies being fairly weary about jumping into the Linux market, I don't really see flooding them with e-mails saying that you want "game x ported to Linux" as such a bad thing...
Surely, having a whole bunch of difficult-to-please-game enthusiasts is much better than having no one there at all. I think it's good that users give these companies a yell that the market is there if they're wiulling to take some risks.
A perceived problem of Linux might be that the users may seem a little too demanding... like some companies may be scared of going anywhere near open-sourced software for example.... though i've no idea- i'm just speculating
The article seems to be suggesting that you can actually see/detect the existance of these quark things... maybe i'm not reading this thoroughly enough but they don't seem to be mentioning how they actually detected these quark things. All it says is that, in so many words, you blast the crap outta sth to heat it up big time and little quarks separate from the atoms...
I'm quite keen to know how they detected these little quarks spraying off