In season 1, episode 6 of the new Doctor Who there is a scene roughly 23 minutes in where a human says, "Great big alien death machine defeated by a flight of stairs" and then the Dalek says, "EL-E-VATE", and hovers up the stairs.
Amy is some nice eye candy, but between the two characters I think it would be a good twist if Rory ended up being the only companion in the end. He is the better human, afterall.
Also, Supernatural. It is one of the few U.S. shows where the creator had a finite-season vision instead of a never-ending series. It is a story arc that spans 5 seasons, yet works very, very well.
Of course, the ratings were so good that the network asked for more seasons. The original show runner stepped down because he said he has told his story. While Supernatural season 6 isn't horrible, you can feel that it somewhat lacks the direction of previous seasons.
I wish more U.S. shows were planned around a set number of seasons.
I know a lot of people dislike Russel T Davies, but I loved the Bad Wolf story arc throughout the first season. It wasn't overbearing and it just made you go, "what the hell does that mean?!". The plots of the episodes themselves weren't overly convoluted and shoe-horned to fit the story arc.
I found season 5's time crack story arc a bit too in-your-face and was overly used.
Also, the season 5 finale felt anti-climatic. It just did not have much of an epic feel. It just didn't seem up-to-standard, especially with all the lead-in hype.
I think the Daleks will be back, but probably not before season 7. I suspect the rest of this season will involve Amy, her baby, and what ever alien race is involved.
Part of me thinks the Amy-having-a-timelord-baby story arc is borderline jumping the shark. I hate it when shows use babies as plot devices. It just feels too much like a cheesy soap opera gimmick. The other part of me is going to give it a chance because I can sort of see an overall theme emerging. Either her baby is a genetic experiment or it is hers and Rory's but since it could have been conceived on the TARDIS then due to all the time energy it could be part time lord.
We've seen TARDIS-like consoles in two episodes. The first was in the Lodger, in the "upstairs apartment" where people were being zapped while being forced to try to power the ship. The second time was in The Day of the Moon, in the sewers with the Silence. I do not think the Silence are responsible for the TARDIS-like ships, and we will see a new, different enemy that is trying to build a TARDIS and has kidnapped or engineered Amy's baby so it can power the ship. This is just my speculation.
I can see this story arc spanning many more episodes, so there isn't really any room for Daleks. I do think we can use a proper break from Daleks and Cybermen, so that it'll actually mean something again when they are re-introduced.
As for the 11th doctor, I like him more than I thought I would when I heard David Tennant was leaving the show. Matt Smith plays a very quirky doctor and the 11th doctor feels more vulnerable, quirky, and child-like. He makes mistakes and his technology is more fallible (e.g.: the sonic screwdriver doesn't work in every situation). As much as I love the 10th doctor, the writers made him too powerful and god-like and near the end I never really felt he was in much danger (with few exceptions). Moffat either had to tone down Doctor Who's invincible awesomeness, or he had to introduce ever-more-powerful enemies. There is more wiggle room if he weakened the doctor, so I think that was a good decision. My only real complaint about Matt Smith as the doctor is that he needs to be more intense at times. I love his quirkiness, but if he can add in some intensity to the mix then he has potential to be one of the best doctors.
I also like Rory, because he is a stand up guy that does the right thing. He is the best of humanity. I think he is a better person than Amy. He is a bit insecure, but wouldn't we all if we were standing next to the Doctor? I am happy the writers ended up making Amy and Rory be together and love each other without making her another wide-eyed lovesick Doctor groupie. I hate love triangles and I am glad that plot device is not being used... for now.
KDE is the default DE for openSUSE, which is another very popular Linux distro. It is not quite as popular as Ubuntu, but openSUSE is big. Also, how much of Ubuntu's userbase actually uses Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu?
Between the two, KDE has much more of a Windows feel and if I were t set up Linux for a family member used to Windows then I'd opt for KDE for an easier transition.
I personallyuse Xfce these days and what I love about it is that I can make it look similar to Windows or make it look similar to Gnome 2.x... a lot of flexibility. In the Gnome vs. KDE war, I decided to leave the battlefield and enjoy the other alternatives.
One example is if you are in charge of the company website and the boss tells you, "We need all the pages to be available in espanol, because we're getting more non-English-speaking customers"
An easy way to accomplish this with minimal work is to output buffer everything, send to a translation service, and then turn around and spit out the translated HTML instead of the original HTML.
I can't remember which service, Babelfish I think, but you could send all your HTML to them and it was smart enough to not translate HTML tags and only the content itself. Then, they realized that everybody was using them in such a manner so they added a character length limit to translations, I believe.
You were then faced finding another service, such as Google Translate, or actually set up an official integration with Systran and pay them for translation services.
I suspect the era of finding workarounds and piggybacking off of free translation services are coming to an end.
I have switched from Gnome 2 to Xfce on my Ubuntu 11.04 box. It is not xubuntu, but I just installed Xfce and made some adjustments. I managed to tweak the Xfce interface to closely resemble that of Gnome 2.
I am now fully prepared for Ubuntu 11.10 when they remove Ubuntu Classic sessions (aka Gnome 2).
IE9 is showing a lot of promise and is light-years beyond the days of when they stagnated on IE6.
I haven't used Office in years, though. OpenOffice (or LibreOffice) is a very nice alternative and is free. If it weren't for Exchange/Outlook, I think Office would lose a lot more ground.
I'd be happy if they managed to make a very flexible, powerful interface that the user can customize between mobile and desktop modes (and can toggle on individual mobile or desktop features/functionality/modules).
Instead of having separate OS for desktop, tablet, or netbook they can use one unified codebase with some variance in the UI settings for each type of device.
However, looking at the movement of projects like Unity and Chrome who are simplifying and dumbing down interfaces, they do not provide much customization and flexibility.
I do not worry in the land of Linux, because you have so much choice. You have Uniity, Gnome, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, Enlightenment, and so forth. If Windows goes a certain direction, then if you want to run Windows then you are pretty much stuck with what they give you.
I'd rather them try to cram a desktop experience into a mobile device instead of being like many others who are now trying to cram a mobile experience into a desktop device.
I hope there isn't a movement within Microsoft to jump on the bandwagon of dumbing down and "simplifying" their desktop environment so that it looks like it would be right at home on a tablet, netbook, or other mobile devices.
If being stuck in the past means having a fully featured, straightforward desktop environment then consider me an old timer who refuses to change with the times.
I do not like Gnome Shell. I do not like Unity. I do not want Windows to move in that direction.
I think people are seriously underestimating the importance and continued usage of desktops and laptops in the future. We will not all be using tablets.
Perhaps we'll finally see the glory days of Opera. They have innovated so much over the years that other browsers copied, yet Opera never got the mainstream marketshare.
I admit that I was turned off to Opera early on due to the advertisements in their free version, but that is an era long gone and it is a solid and free browser now.
Microsoft is doing a good job catching up with IE9 and with each iteration their browser gets better and better. I suppose it just took a long time to get back in the groove after stagnating on IE6 for all those years.
I agree with other posters who ask why they should bother with Firefox if all it is going to be is a Chrome copycat. I used to love Firefox, but I do not like some of the decisions they have been making lately. Some of those decisions can be undone with addons, but still..
No matter how you look at it, as long as not all the browsers shed the URL bar then there will always be a browser for me. I want the URL bar. I want to quickly and easily know where I am at. I do not need to type in a URL in the Google search box to find every site.
It is on Slashdot not because it has a lot of momentum, but because it is being heavily pushed by Google. If it were anybody other than Google, we wouldn't still be talking about WebP. That, and Google makes a browser so at least one browser will support it.
This isn't much different if Microsoft tried pushing their own format.
I understand what Google is saying about licensing, but in the real world it won't make much difference.
PNG was introduced in a similar fashion to work around GIF legal issues. PNG is superior to GIF from a technical and quality perspective, and it still has sluggish adoption.
Sorry, no matter what the generation, they should not be allowed to bring more attack vectors and security vulnerabilities in to the workplace.
They are not special snowflakes, and their personal devices are not necessary for productivity.
Businesses where mobile devices are useful and helpful should already have their infrastructures designed to handle it, so again Gen Z will make no difference.
As long as I can still install XFCE in 11.10 I'll probably stick with Ubuntu for my desktop workstation for now. I hate that Gnome 2.x will no longer be an option, but XFCE is a decent alternative that is still being actively developed.
PC users knew all along that the only reason Mac users went relatively unscathed throughout all those years is that the Mac install base was too small to bother. The more popular Macs became, the bigger the target on their backs.
Likewise, if Linux ever became a big contender on the desktop, you would see a surge in Linux rootkits.
Being unpopular does not mean you are safe, but it doesn't hurt. Crackers, virus writers, malware creators, and botnets target the path of least effort.
... is that anybody can be a member. This isn't a borg collective with a unified vision.
As an outsider, the first sign that Anonymous has gone off the tracks is when they poked the WBC. While the WBC are a vile group of human beings, it seemed odd that Anonymous would even bother with them. After that, they started to attack the Koch Brothers. I can't remember a few of their other more recent operations, but the term "jumping the shark" comes to mind.
As an outsider, Anonymous seems to have two major issues: 1) it is spreading itself too thin with a plethora of weak objectives and 2) it has started to take itself too seriously
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Jinks! It is funny we both posted the same Youtube video response.
I tried finding a video of the "EL-E-VATE" scene from season 1 of the new Doctor Who but I couldn't find one.
Daleks navigated stairs in the class series.
Here is a Youtube clip from Remembrance of the Daleks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BuWFXYcDk4
(36 seconds in to the clip you see a Dalek going up stairs)
In season 1, episode 6 of the new Doctor Who there is a scene roughly 23 minutes in where a human says,
"Great big alien death machine defeated by a flight of stairs" and then the Dalek says, "EL-E-VATE", and hovers up the stairs.
Amy is some nice eye candy, but between the two characters I think it would be a good twist if Rory ended up being the only companion in the end. He is the better human, afterall.
If you want gritty realism then you watch Torchwood. That has to be one of the most depressing TV shows I have ever watched.
Also, Supernatural. It is one of the few U.S. shows where the creator had a finite-season vision instead of a never-ending series. It is a story arc that spans 5 seasons, yet works very, very well.
Of course, the ratings were so good that the network asked for more seasons. The original show runner stepped down because he said he has told his story. While Supernatural season 6 isn't horrible, you can feel that it somewhat lacks the direction of previous seasons.
I wish more U.S. shows were planned around a set number of seasons.
I know a lot of people dislike Russel T Davies, but I loved the Bad Wolf story arc throughout the first season. It wasn't overbearing and it just made you go, "what the hell does that mean?!". The plots of the episodes themselves weren't overly convoluted and shoe-horned to fit the story arc.
I found season 5's time crack story arc a bit too in-your-face and was overly used.
Also, the season 5 finale felt anti-climatic. It just did not have much of an epic feel. It just didn't seem up-to-standard, especially with all the lead-in hype.
I think the Daleks will be back, but probably not before season 7. I suspect the rest of this season will involve Amy, her baby, and what ever alien race is involved.
Part of me thinks the Amy-having-a-timelord-baby story arc is borderline jumping the shark. I hate it when shows use babies as plot devices. It just feels too much like a cheesy soap opera gimmick. The other part of me is going to give it a chance because I can sort of see an overall theme emerging. Either her baby is a genetic experiment or it is hers and Rory's but since it could have been conceived on the TARDIS then due to all the time energy it could be part time lord.
We've seen TARDIS-like consoles in two episodes. The first was in the Lodger, in the "upstairs apartment" where people were being zapped while being forced to try to power the ship. The second time was in The Day of the Moon, in the sewers with the Silence. I do not think the Silence are responsible for the TARDIS-like ships, and we will see a new, different enemy that is trying to build a TARDIS and has kidnapped or engineered Amy's baby so it can power the ship. This is just my speculation.
I can see this story arc spanning many more episodes, so there isn't really any room for Daleks. I do think we can use a proper break from Daleks and Cybermen, so that it'll actually mean something again when they are re-introduced.
As for the 11th doctor, I like him more than I thought I would when I heard David Tennant was leaving the show. Matt Smith plays a very quirky doctor and the 11th doctor feels more vulnerable, quirky, and child-like. He makes mistakes and his technology is more fallible (e.g.: the sonic screwdriver doesn't work in every situation). As much as I love the 10th doctor, the writers made him too powerful and god-like and near the end I never really felt he was in much danger (with few exceptions). Moffat either had to tone down Doctor Who's invincible awesomeness, or he had to introduce ever-more-powerful enemies. There is more wiggle room if he weakened the doctor, so I think that was a good decision. My only real complaint about Matt Smith as the doctor is that he needs to be more intense at times. I love his quirkiness, but if he can add in some intensity to the mix then he has potential to be one of the best doctors.
I also like Rory, because he is a stand up guy that does the right thing. He is the best of humanity. I think he is a better person than Amy. He is a bit insecure, but wouldn't we all if we were standing next to the Doctor? I am happy the writers ended up making Amy and Rory be together and love each other without making her another wide-eyed lovesick Doctor groupie. I hate love triangles and I am glad that plot device is not being used ... for now.
A major chunk of the World of Warcraft player-base already loathes Activision. That is a great start.
His neckbeard feels more at home in the middle east
KDE is the default DE for openSUSE, which is another very popular Linux distro. It is not quite as popular as Ubuntu, but openSUSE is big. Also, how much of Ubuntu's userbase actually uses Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu?
Between the two, KDE has much more of a Windows feel and if I were t set up Linux for a family member used to Windows then I'd opt for KDE for an easier transition.
I personallyuse Xfce these days and what I love about it is that I can make it look similar to Windows or make it look similar to Gnome 2.x ... a lot of flexibility. In the Gnome vs. KDE war, I decided to leave the battlefield and enjoy the other alternatives.
One example is if you are in charge of the company website and the boss tells you, "We need all the pages to be available in espanol, because we're getting more non-English-speaking customers"
An easy way to accomplish this with minimal work is to output buffer everything, send to a translation service, and then turn around and spit out the translated HTML instead of the original HTML.
I can't remember which service, Babelfish I think, but you could send all your HTML to them and it was smart enough to not translate HTML tags and only the content itself. Then, they realized that everybody was using them in such a manner so they added a character length limit to translations, I believe.
You were then faced finding another service, such as Google Translate, or actually set up an official integration with Systran and pay them for translation services.
I suspect the era of finding workarounds and piggybacking off of free translation services are coming to an end.
I think KDE, Xfce, and LXDE are all going to have very bright futures.
I still have some hope for Gnome Shell. They haven't gone as far off the deep end as Unity and so they can still change course.
I have switched from Gnome 2 to Xfce on my Ubuntu 11.04 box. It is not xubuntu, but I just installed Xfce and made some adjustments. I managed to tweak the Xfce interface to closely resemble that of Gnome 2.
I am now fully prepared for Ubuntu 11.10 when they remove Ubuntu Classic sessions (aka Gnome 2).
Windows 7 is a good OS.
IE9 is showing a lot of promise and is light-years beyond the days of when they stagnated on IE6.
I haven't used Office in years, though. OpenOffice (or LibreOffice) is a very nice alternative and is free. If it weren't for Exchange/Outlook, I think Office would lose a lot more ground.
I'd be happy if they managed to make a very flexible, powerful interface that the user can customize between mobile and desktop modes (and can toggle on individual mobile or desktop features/functionality/modules).
Instead of having separate OS for desktop, tablet, or netbook they can use one unified codebase with some variance in the UI settings for each type of device.
However, looking at the movement of projects like Unity and Chrome who are simplifying and dumbing down interfaces, they do not provide much customization and flexibility.
I do not worry in the land of Linux, because you have so much choice. You have Uniity, Gnome, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, Enlightenment, and so forth. If Windows goes a certain direction, then if you want to run Windows then you are pretty much stuck with what they give you.
I'd rather them try to cram a desktop experience into a mobile device instead of being like many others who are now trying to cram a mobile experience into a desktop device.
I hope there isn't a movement within Microsoft to jump on the bandwagon of dumbing down and "simplifying" their desktop environment so that it looks like it would be right at home on a tablet, netbook, or other mobile devices.
If being stuck in the past means having a fully featured, straightforward desktop environment then consider me an old timer who refuses to change with the times.
I do not like Gnome Shell. I do not like Unity. I do not want Windows to move in that direction.
I think people are seriously underestimating the importance and continued usage of desktops and laptops in the future. We will not all be using tablets.
Perhaps we'll finally see the glory days of Opera. They have innovated so much over the years that other browsers copied, yet Opera never got the mainstream marketshare.
I admit that I was turned off to Opera early on due to the advertisements in their free version, but that is an era long gone and it is a solid and free browser now.
Microsoft is doing a good job catching up with IE9 and with each iteration their browser gets better and better. I suppose it just took a long time to get back in the groove after stagnating on IE6 for all those years.
I agree with other posters who ask why they should bother with Firefox if all it is going to be is a Chrome copycat. I used to love Firefox, but I do not like some of the decisions they have been making lately. Some of those decisions can be undone with addons, but still..
No matter how you look at it, as long as not all the browsers shed the URL bar then there will always be a browser for me. I want the URL bar. I want to quickly and easily know where I am at. I do not need to type in a URL in the Google search box to find every site.
It is on Slashdot not because it has a lot of momentum, but because it is being heavily pushed by Google. If it were anybody other than Google, we wouldn't still be talking about WebP. That, and Google makes a browser so at least one browser will support it.
This isn't much different if Microsoft tried pushing their own format.
I understand what Google is saying about licensing, but in the real world it won't make much difference.
PNG was introduced in a similar fashion to work around GIF legal issues. PNG is superior to GIF from a technical and quality perspective, and it still has sluggish adoption.
Sorry, no matter what the generation, they should not be allowed to bring more attack vectors and security vulnerabilities in to the workplace.
They are not special snowflakes, and their personal devices are not necessary for productivity.
Businesses where mobile devices are useful and helpful should already have their infrastructures designed to handle it, so again Gen Z will make no difference.
Are you seeing this behavior actually sitting at the desktop or are you using VNC?
Vino (aka Gnome Remote Desktop) has major redraw issues in 11.04. I installed x11vnc and it works like a champ with no performance issues.
As long as I can still install XFCE in 11.10 I'll probably stick with Ubuntu for my desktop workstation for now. I hate that Gnome 2.x will no longer be an option, but XFCE is a decent alternative that is still being actively developed.
If people are conditioned to not having a URL bar, then won't it make it easier to set up phishing scam sites?
Google is really going off the reservation with respect to minimalism.
PC users knew all along that the only reason Mac users went relatively unscathed throughout all those years is that the Mac install base was too small to bother. The more popular Macs became, the bigger the target on their backs.
Likewise, if Linux ever became a big contender on the desktop, you would see a surge in Linux rootkits.
Being unpopular does not mean you are safe, but it doesn't hurt. Crackers, virus writers, malware creators, and botnets target the path of least effort.
... is that anybody can be a member. This isn't a borg collective with a unified vision.
As an outsider, the first sign that Anonymous has gone off the tracks is when they poked the WBC. While the WBC are a vile group of human beings, it seemed odd that Anonymous would even bother with them. After that, they started to attack the Koch Brothers. I can't remember a few of their other more recent operations, but the term "jumping the shark" comes to mind.
As an outsider, Anonymous seems to have two major issues: 1) it is spreading itself too thin with a plethora of weak objectives and 2) it has started to take itself too seriously