she turned and said. "My God that was tedious. Why don't they just give him the damn ring and get on with it?" Needless to say, we did not see the other two installments You are quite possibly the luckiest guy in the world. Congrats! Basically all of my friends are in love with LOTR. I saw the original 3 times with them, but after that all the hype just got to me.. I don't mind long movies at all, I usually enjoy the experience, but in this case I wouldn't want to put myself through all of them again.. Star Wars yes.. Harry Potter not quite either though (I loved the books, but the films have been getting steadily worse.. especially the last one, the directing was awful..)
That could explain some things. I never did find write-only a very workable design philosophy. Air guitar in particular just doesn't seem to work for me.
He certainly isn't a Tolkien - his stories are much more personally involved, his magic more interesting, his geographical descriptions not quite so boring..:p
Terry Pratchett actually has to be one of the best fantasy writers out there - even without the awesome humour all the way through, the depth of his characters, plots and the Discworld itself (I've not read much of his non Discworld stuff, just Good Omens) is excellent, and almost always a good read. The times when I haven't enjoyed his books were probably just me, rather than the books, though strangely a lot of people seem to like best the books that I thought were the worst (the Hogfather for example.. the plot didn't have much to it at all)
:D yep, LOTR is too heavy and lacking in fun for its own good. Funnily enough I was considering gettin an Elise/Excige this year (after they take away my license next month, then give it back to me in a few months that is..!). As well as being more fun, the Elise would waste those other cars around a track (unless there were a lot of straights and you didn't have the 190bhp version..)
I just looked up Gene Roddenberry (because I know he wrote Andromeda as well as Star Trek). Just look how many of his show/movie scripts are still being used even though he died in 1991.. crazy! http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0734472/
There is plenty of good literature that was written before last century y'know.. Ever heard of Charles Dickens? Shakespeare maybe?;) Tolkien did do a lot for fantasy though.
Pan's labyrinth isn't about those characters (and btw I found the guy with eyes in his hands extremely creepy even though I'm not usually bothered by monsters in movies), the plot goes far beyond that. I don't even remember Hellboy having much going on in it, but Pan's Labyrinth is very unique and memorable (though The Orphanage is quite similar to it in some ways). Perhaps you spent too much time watching the puppets/CGI effects and not enough time reading the subtitles?;)
I think that may have been the third one. Blade II was the first of that series that I saw, and IMO probably the best. Hellboy didn't have much of a story, but the atmosphere was pretty good. Pan's Labyrinth and The Orphanage are both good slighty fantasy-ish films - I can't wait to see how the Hobbit turns out with this guy at the helm:)
The Hobbit is a much better story than LOTR. Just my opinion of course - LOTR drags on and on and on and on and on* while The Hobbit is a much more intimate story (while still being on a pretty massive scale in parts)
*Though apparently I stopped reading just before it got interesting (about 20-40 pages from the end of the second book.. I just couldn't take any more geography! I'd be better able to cope these days after Operation Flashpoint improved my mapreading and visualisation skills, but I cba at this point in my life, I have much better things to read/watch/play), near the end of the second book - I don't make a habit of not finishing books, but LOTR was one that I just couldnt be bothered with as I was used to faster moving stuff like the Riftwar Saga back when I used to read a lot.
Fair enough. Though I doubt the original pictures even have that much colour information o_0 So only if you're going to actually manipulate the pictures a lot would you need that much depth? Do you even get printers that can print at print at the equivalent of 96 bit colour, or are you just referring to the fact that the higher the quality of the source, the higher the quality of the final output (especially if you're having to edit the pictures a lot). I prefer not to cheat if I can avoid it anyway:P
I really liked using Microsoft Visual C++ 6:p And the Exchange/Windows Mobile DirectPUSH combo is way better for email on the go than those crapberry things..
When I said 'my model', I meant the one that I prefer to be on the receiving end of:p For example, Dell's support is usually okay. It started off great when I first used it, then went rapidly downhill with the Indian call centres, though the last couple of times I had to deal with them they were pretty good - a mix of call centres in India and Ireland I think, and they were happy to send out replacement hardware pretty quickly.. if I was providing support myself there's no fricken way I'd do it for free!!!:)
if you're running Vista more than likely you got a new PC or you upgraded an old PC to be Vista capable. I meant that if a computer is running Vista, there is no reason to upgrade to it, unless it was awesomely specced and cost less with Vista than with no OS. But even then I personally wouldn't want to give MS the impression that they got another Vista sale..
An upgrade only needs the previous version as a kind of validation, not because it uses components of the previous version.
I went through a photography phase and the GIMP was always enough for anything I wanted to do. Usually it was just modifying the levels, but I even edited some wedding photos for a professional photographer friend (cloned out a statue that she thought was ruining the composition). There's not much at all to touching up photographs.. definitely not worth spending $1000/£500 on unless you need some funky filters that only Photoshop has, or you are incapable of learning a different interface.
I think it just predicts a lack of concentration. Though funnily enough, the times when I screw up in Guitar Hero are the times when I start thinking too much about what my fingers are doing instead of letting them get on with it, and then I panic when I realise how crazy it is trying to do 20 hammer ons in a row precisely (The Metal on Expert is crazy.. completed it twice now though in the last couple of days:) ).. it's a similar situation on a real guitar.. a song can be in muscle memory, but I can't always figure out the notes individually after not playing it for years.. I can only 'play' it rather than think about playing it:P Which is kind of the opposite of what this summary is talking about, so it shows that not all tasks require the same type of concentration?
I didn't say they weren't but that guy was just doing a little idealistic rant with no indication as to how the GPL works in practice. People don't just do open source to help people. Personally the only open source stuff I've done so far was to help people, though I also enjoyed doing it a lot and made use of my dll a lot myself (CS bots, back in my 56k days). Picking one of the most famous OSS pioneers is an edge case anyway, it's not very representative of the rest..
Ah.. I was thinking more of a per-incident cost rather than an actual contract. Sorry. Should have known, what with all the upgrade/maintenance contracts we have around here. We very rarely use our support (though I noticed one of our guys in particular phones up people at the slightest little issue with our CAD program, which I had guessed fairly quickly had to do with the actual machine he was running on rather than the program itself).
I hate both insurance and support contracts;) I see the benefit of them for the idiots, but I would rather just pay for everything out of my own pocket (as long as the idiots can pay for any damage they do to my vehicle too!). I did have a couple of accidents just after I started driving, almost completely my own fault, but they were both pretty minor, and now I know I'm in one of the lowest risk driver groups in the country (after doing me advanced driver training, w00t).
Hmm... I distinctly remembered reading that different companies could implement the hardware, and missed the 'stringent hardware requirements' bit, sorry. I still think statements like "Graphics hardware in particular has recently hit a plateau" is a load of bull, because to double your graphics power, you basically just need to double up the transistor count, since graphics rendering is emminently parallelisable.. games controllers have also come in all variety of different shapes, but admittedly they do have a similar number of buttons and very similar functionality (apart from the Wii's controller of course). I do think though that if the dream came to pass and the standard was implemented by all the big players, that there would be less incentive to develop faster graphics processors unless the PC gaming market was still going strong?
Hmm.. well as long as you didn't write your server side software using GPL'ed code then you could charge for a connection.. there are games like MapleStory where you can pay to get different clothes for your character and such (I even paid for that a couple of times before I stopped playing - the fact that the game itself was entirely free made me happy to do so)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid you hath lost me.
That could explain some things. I never did find write-only a very workable design philosophy. Air guitar in particular just doesn't seem to work for me.
This grown man is actually a 6 year old girl! Where were you in Determining Age and Sex via Grammatical Construction classes?
He certainly isn't a Tolkien - his stories are much more personally involved, his magic more interesting, his geographical descriptions not quite so boring.. :p
Terry Pratchett actually has to be one of the best fantasy writers out there - even without the awesome humour all the way through, the depth of his characters, plots and the Discworld itself (I've not read much of his non Discworld stuff, just Good Omens) is excellent, and almost always a good read. The times when I haven't enjoyed his books were probably just me, rather than the books, though strangely a lot of people seem to like best the books that I thought were the worst (the Hogfather for example.. the plot didn't have much to it at all)
:D yep, LOTR is too heavy and lacking in fun for its own good. Funnily enough I was considering gettin an Elise/Excige this year (after they take away my license next month, then give it back to me in a few months that is..!). As well as being more fun, the Elise would waste those other cars around a track (unless there were a lot of straights and you didn't have the 190bhp version..)
Was it possibly an analogy for the state of yoghurt production in the 1820s?
I just looked up Gene Roddenberry (because I know he wrote Andromeda as well as Star Trek). Just look how many of his show/movie scripts are still being used even though he died in 1991.. crazy! http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0734472/
;) Tolkien did do a lot for fantasy though.
There is plenty of good literature that was written before last century y'know.. Ever heard of Charles Dickens? Shakespeare maybe?
Pan's labyrinth isn't about those characters (and btw I found the guy with eyes in his hands extremely creepy even though I'm not usually bothered by monsters in movies), the plot goes far beyond that. I don't even remember Hellboy having much going on in it, but Pan's Labyrinth is very unique and memorable (though The Orphanage is quite similar to it in some ways). Perhaps you spent too much time watching the puppets/CGI effects and not enough time reading the subtitles? ;)
I think that may have been the third one. Blade II was the first of that series that I saw, and IMO probably the best. Hellboy didn't have much of a story, but the atmosphere was pretty good. Pan's Labyrinth and The Orphanage are both good slighty fantasy-ish films - I can't wait to see how the Hobbit turns out with this guy at the helm :)
The Hobbit is a much better story than LOTR. Just my opinion of course - LOTR drags on and on and on and on and on* while The Hobbit is a much more intimate story (while still being on a pretty massive scale in parts)
*Though apparently I stopped reading just before it got interesting (about 20-40 pages from the end of the second book.. I just couldn't take any more geography! I'd be better able to cope these days after Operation Flashpoint improved my mapreading and visualisation skills, but I cba at this point in my life, I have much better things to read/watch/play), near the end of the second book - I don't make a habit of not finishing books, but LOTR was one that I just couldnt be bothered with as I was used to faster moving stuff like the Riftwar Saga back when I used to read a lot.
Fair enough. Though I doubt the original pictures even have that much colour information o_0 So only if you're going to actually manipulate the pictures a lot would you need that much depth? Do you even get printers that can print at print at the equivalent of 96 bit colour, or are you just referring to the fact that the higher the quality of the source, the higher the quality of the final output (especially if you're having to edit the pictures a lot). I prefer not to cheat if I can avoid it anyway :P
I really liked using Microsoft Visual C++ 6 :p And the Exchange/Windows Mobile DirectPUSH combo is way better for email on the go than those crapberry things..
When I said 'my model', I meant the one that I prefer to be on the receiving end of :p For example, Dell's support is usually okay. It started off great when I first used it, then went rapidly downhill with the Indian call centres, though the last couple of times I had to deal with them they were pretty good - a mix of call centres in India and Ireland I think, and they were happy to send out replacement hardware pretty quickly.. if I was providing support myself there's no fricken way I'd do it for free!!! :)
I didn't claim to be being any more sensitive :P Plus, astronauts *have* died on launch before, but Iraq has never been nuked..
That's presumably a close relative of Opium-lord Opposum?
An upgrade only needs the previous version as a kind of validation, not because it uses components of the previous version.
I went through a photography phase and the GIMP was always enough for anything I wanted to do. Usually it was just modifying the levels, but I even edited some wedding photos for a professional photographer friend (cloned out a statue that she thought was ruining the composition). There's not much at all to touching up photographs.. definitely not worth spending $1000/£500 on unless you need some funky filters that only Photoshop has, or you are incapable of learning a different interface.
I think it just predicts a lack of concentration. Though funnily enough, the times when I screw up in Guitar Hero are the times when I start thinking too much about what my fingers are doing instead of letting them get on with it, and then I panic when I realise how crazy it is trying to do 20 hammer ons in a row precisely (The Metal on Expert is crazy.. completed it twice now though in the last couple of days :) ).. it's a similar situation on a real guitar.. a song can be in muscle memory, but I can't always figure out the notes individually after not playing it for years.. I can only 'play' it rather than think about playing it :P Which is kind of the opposite of what this summary is talking about, so it shows that not all tasks require the same type of concentration?
It was a poor choice.. but when there are 900k other registered users, you get a bit desperate with the name choices!
I didn't say they weren't but that guy was just doing a little idealistic rant with no indication as to how the GPL works in practice. People don't just do open source to help people. Personally the only open source stuff I've done so far was to help people, though I also enjoyed doing it a lot and made use of my dll a lot myself (CS bots, back in my 56k days). Picking one of the most famous OSS pioneers is an edge case anyway, it's not very representative of the rest..
Ah.. I was thinking more of a per-incident cost rather than an actual contract. Sorry. Should have known, what with all the upgrade/maintenance contracts we have around here. We very rarely use our support (though I noticed one of our guys in particular phones up people at the slightest little issue with our CAD program, which I had guessed fairly quickly had to do with the actual machine he was running on rather than the program itself).
;) I see the benefit of them for the idiots, but I would rather just pay for everything out of my own pocket (as long as the idiots can pay for any damage they do to my vehicle too!). I did have a couple of accidents just after I started driving, almost completely my own fault, but they were both pretty minor, and now I know I'm in one of the lowest risk driver groups in the country (after doing me advanced driver training, w00t).
I hate both insurance and support contracts
Hmm... I distinctly remembered reading that different companies could implement the hardware, and missed the 'stringent hardware requirements' bit, sorry. I still think statements like "Graphics hardware in particular has recently hit a plateau" is a load of bull, because to double your graphics power, you basically just need to double up the transistor count, since graphics rendering is emminently parallelisable.. games controllers have also come in all variety of different shapes, but admittedly they do have a similar number of buttons and very similar functionality (apart from the Wii's controller of course). I do think though that if the dream came to pass and the standard was implemented by all the big players, that there would be less incentive to develop faster graphics processors unless the PC gaming market was still going strong?
Hmm.. well as long as you didn't write your server side software using GPL'ed code then you could charge for a connection.. there are games like MapleStory where you can pay to get different clothes for your character and such (I even paid for that a couple of times before I stopped playing - the fact that the game itself was entirely free made me happy to do so)
My bad. I don't regard improvements as innovation either.. improvement is generally an incremental process.