Quite why I am giving you the time of day, I don't know, but - whatever else he is - Peter Jackson is not a Hollywood Hack, even if we're prepared to put aside the small matter of six and a half thousand miles. A hack is, I'd argue, someone who cares little about the subject of their work, so long as they get paid. His dispute with New Line does make him look money-grubbing (though if someone owed me $100 million I'd probably pursue them for it). But even if his claim is totally bogus, it wouldn't change the fact that the LoTR movies, and King Kong for that matter, are obviously labours of love. The care and attention to detail - like having every sword forged by a traditional blacksmith, rather than moulded in plastic - is far above the call of duty, bordering on obsessively self-indulgent. I have no love for his early splatter movies like Eat The Rich, but - again - not hack-work by any stretch. You are, I'm afraid (but not very), completely and utterly wrong.
I'd be quite surprised if Gimli is in it at all; there are eleven dwarves in The Hobbit - all of them potentially annoying, but no Gimli. The closest we get is his cousin once removed, Balin.
Yeah, let's add another bullet point to Ckwop's list:
6. If a user visits a page whose markup doesn't precisely reflect the meaning of its contents (eg using p tags for a list of items, or - heaven forbid! - a table), the browser sanitises their PC by wiping all their personal data.
</sarcasm>
I mean, I'm a web dev, and all for the semantic web and proper markup, but recognise that typoes and unescaped characters can slip through and mess up your validation. One thing that bugs me is that in XHTML empty lists are marked as errors, when semantically they're perfectly valid.
Even Firefox is kind to small mistakes. HTML 5 will specifically address this, by prescribing how the user agent should handle bad markup.
I've only seen this on my laptop, which I often connect to an external monitor for extra screen space. During its Vista period, now happily a fading bad memory, it I would try hard to prevent it from sleeping, because when it woke up one or both monitors would have forgotten their resolutions and/or relative physical positions.
True, but it's not the first thing I'd fix. How about Hibernation, multiple monitor support (how did they manage to break that?) and system restore? Before I switched back to XP, these were my main areas of Vista pain, even worse than the general slowness and resource-hogginess.
I want one that's not only the size of a magazine, but can be rolled up like one and is waterproof enough to read in the bath and survive the occasional dunking.
I care about playlists. If you can't make a playlist, the only alternative to playing albums in full is to shuffle your entire collection. Do you really want nothing in between?
Thanks to the GP for this info, as I am looking for an MP3 player that will actually synch well with my Windows laptop (ie that doesn't require me to run iTunes), and was actually considering Zune. Back to one of he new Archos units, I guess.
I noticed yesterday that two things had changed about my Gmail: the "Loading.." button is now in the middle of the screen, not top right as before, and... <drum roll>
This sounds great, and very pure, BUT javascript suffers from some atrocious cross-platform incompatibilities which aren't going away any time soon. jQuery is, as much as anything else, a cross-platform wrapper for javascript, so you don't have to worry about how, say, ajax is implemented on various browsers. This is probably true of the other js libraries people are mentioning here, and a very good reason to use one of them.
I started using jQuery about 2 years ago because I found it much easier to learn that dojo or prototype. I'm not sure why it's so important to you that people "learn the language" (ie javascript) when presumably you wouldn't expect someone learning C++ to necessarily know assembler. As it happens I think the core ecmaScript language is very beautiful, but there's nothing to stop me including as much or as little of it as I wish in my jQuery code.
In short, this particular framework is not the straitjacket you seem to think it is.
Being able to take screenshots of the entire screen and saved to a file on the desktop. Later versions (9.1?) added the ability to take screen shots of areas selected by the mouse. I'm still fighting to find a decent screen capture program in XP. Press 'print screen' key, paste into Paint or other image editing app of your choice. To capture a particular window, alt+print screen. Not sure about arbitrary mouse drag areas.
Actually it sounds from the story as if the irate mum *did* buy standalone Vista. Who would have thought a new operating system could make your computer worse? No wonder she was pissed off.
As you say, the rest of us have had it imposed. Not sure why you got modded up for re-stating my point.
How do you know what percentage of visitors actively bought Vista? My point was that most new PCs come pre-loaded with Vista. It could be that 50% of visitors were using a PC that had come with Vista, but so far only 39% had gotten around to installing an OS that works in its place.
By contrast, every new version of Windows seems to throw out huge chunks of the old system How true that is. I recently switched my laptop from Vista (which it came with) to XP. There were many reasons for doing this, but the two things I appreciate most post-retrofit (other than the drastic improvements in responsiveness and resource use) are that Hibernate and System Restore are no longer broken. Does Microsoft actually do unit testing? These critical features work perfectly in XP and are dismal in Vista.
the numbers are a little low Absolutely. I'd be surprised if the number of Kazaa users is anything like 2M now, but BitTorrent will more than make up for it. I can't find Big Champagne's current estimate of the total number of filesharers active at any given moment, but they say "literally millions".
The point is that it's way beyond unfair to punish a few people for what is socially acceptable behaviour for many. Copyright laws are the Prohibition of the 21st Century.
I'd never heard of jury nullification before today, so I'm certainly no expert(!), but it seems that by its very nature there are no rules as to when it may or may not be appropriate. If some or all jury members refuse to convict, no matter what the case, what can the judge do?
Clearly this was not such a trial. If the jury had unanimously agreed on the lowest possible damages, then we could argue that they might have wanted an even less punitive action. If the defendant had made a better case, or if the jury had been better informed, or could spot the unfairness in prosecuting one person who was doing the same thing as two million others...
This was clearly not that trial. But, civil or criminal, if there's a jury involved they could all refuse to convict, in the face of the facts, in the face of the law. Nice to be reminded of the power of the masses.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite why I am giving you the time of day, I don't know, but - whatever else he is - Peter Jackson is not a Hollywood Hack, even if we're prepared to put aside the small matter of six and a half thousand miles. A hack is, I'd argue, someone who cares little about the subject of their work, so long as they get paid. His dispute with New Line does make him look money-grubbing (though if someone owed me $100 million I'd probably pursue them for it). But even if his claim is totally bogus, it wouldn't change the fact that the LoTR movies, and King Kong for that matter, are obviously labours of love. The care and attention to detail - like having every sword forged by a traditional blacksmith, rather than moulded in plastic - is far above the call of duty, bordering on obsessively self-indulgent. I have no love for his early splatter movies like Eat The Rich, but - again - not hack-work by any stretch. You are, I'm afraid (but not very), completely and utterly wrong.
Jackson lives in New Zealand.
Fair enough; I have been out-nerded. I know when I'm beat.
I'd be quite surprised if Gimli is in it at all; there are eleven dwarves in The Hobbit - all of them potentially annoying, but no Gimli. The closest we get is his cousin once removed, Balin.
So what is this new (old) name for Tyrannosaurus?
In Soviet Russia the ground hits you.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Yeah, let's add another bullet point to Ckwop's list:
6. If a user visits a page whose markup doesn't precisely reflect the meaning of its contents (eg using p tags for a list of items, or - heaven forbid! - a table), the browser sanitises their PC by wiping all their personal data.
</sarcasm>
I mean, I'm a web dev, and all for the semantic web and proper markup, but recognise that typoes and unescaped characters can slip through and mess up your validation. One thing that bugs me is that in XHTML empty lists are marked as errors, when semantically they're perfectly valid.
Even Firefox is kind to small mistakes. HTML 5 will specifically address this, by prescribing how the user agent should handle bad markup.
I've only seen this on my laptop, which I often connect to an external monitor for extra screen space. During its Vista period, now happily a fading bad memory, it I would try hard to prevent it from sleeping, because when it woke up one or both monitors would have forgotten their resolutions and/or relative physical positions.
True, but it's not the first thing I'd fix. How about Hibernation, multiple monitor support (how did they manage to break that?) and system restore? Before I switched back to XP, these were my main areas of Vista pain, even worse than the general slowness and resource-hogginess.
Pah, is that all?
I want one that's not only the size of a magazine, but can be rolled up like one and is waterproof enough to read in the bath and survive the occasional dunking.
With 4TB of storage, natch.
I care about playlists. If you can't make a playlist, the only alternative to playing albums in full is to shuffle your entire collection. Do you really want nothing in between?
Thanks to the GP for this info, as I am looking for an MP3 player that will actually synch well with my Windows laptop (ie that doesn't require me to run iTunes), and was actually considering Zune. Back to one of he new Archos units, I guess.
and mod parent even further up.
I noticed yesterday that two things had changed about my Gmail: the "Loading.." button is now in the middle of the screen, not top right as before, and ... <drum roll>
...the whole thing is much, much faster!
Now I know why.
This sounds great, and very pure, BUT javascript suffers from some atrocious cross-platform incompatibilities which aren't going away any time soon. jQuery is, as much as anything else, a cross-platform wrapper for javascript, so you don't have to worry about how, say, ajax is implemented on various browsers. This is probably true of the other js libraries people are mentioning here, and a very good reason to use one of them.
I started using jQuery about 2 years ago because I found it much easier to learn that dojo or prototype. I'm not sure why it's so important to you that people "learn the language" (ie javascript) when presumably you wouldn't expect someone learning C++ to necessarily know assembler. As it happens I think the core ecmaScript language is very beautiful, but there's nothing to stop me including as much or as little of it as I wish in my jQuery code.
In short, this particular framework is not the straitjacket you seem to think it is.
What about IE8?
Actually it sounds from the story as if the irate mum *did* buy standalone Vista. Who would have thought a new operating system could make your computer worse? No wonder she was pissed off.
As you say, the rest of us have had it imposed. Not sure why you got modded up for re-stating my point.
How do you know what percentage of visitors actively bought Vista? My point was that most new PCs come pre-loaded with Vista. It could be that 50% of visitors were using a PC that had come with Vista, but so far only 39% had gotten around to installing an OS that works in its place.
How many of those copies of Vista were sold directly to the consumer, rather than through an OEM? Do what I did - retrofit XP.
The point is that it's way beyond unfair to punish a few people for what is socially acceptable behaviour for many. Copyright laws are the Prohibition of the 21st Century.
I'd never heard of jury nullification before today, so I'm certainly no expert(!), but it seems that by its very nature there are no rules as to when it may or may not be appropriate. If some or all jury members refuse to convict, no matter what the case, what can the judge do?
Clearly this was not such a trial. If the jury had unanimously agreed on the lowest possible damages, then we could argue that they might have wanted an even less punitive action. If the defendant had made a better case, or if the jury had been better informed, or could spot the unfairness in prosecuting one person who was doing the same thing as two million others...
This was clearly not that trial. But, civil or criminal, if there's a jury involved they could all refuse to convict, in the face of the facts, in the face of the law. Nice to be reminded of the power of the masses.