And you keep missing the fact that most people will probably never add anything outside of one or two peripherals. You keep talking about a LOT of people, but that LOT of people is stilly a tiny fragment of the market.
The crappy graphics card options alone are a huge turn off to a lot more people than you seem to think. I've talked with lots of families that chose not to buy a Mac simply because their kids wanted to play games on it but the available graphics options in the mini and the imac were a big turn off. There simply were no acceptable options.
And on the other side of the aisle PC vendors were practically bending over backwards to sell them exactly the PC specs they were looking for... maybe not in as sleek a box... but exactly the right performance at the right price.
The group affected is not just 'extreme gamers' and 'geeks', it's every family with a boy or possibly even a girl child between the ages of 8 and 18, or a father who still plays games.
Most people don't want to open the case, don't want to buy cards, and don't really care. They'll order the computer with the feature if they want it, or they'll drag it to Best Buy and have them upgrade it, or they'll find that computer-savvy niece or nephew to fix "that clicking noise".
Precisely. The trouble is you can't order an imac with those features. If you could people wouldn't be so annoyed with the imac.
The trouble with the iMac isn't that its 'all in one' its that it doesn't come with the features a LOT of people want. The fact that its all in one just aggravates the issue, because it goes from inconvenient to impossible.
Really, regular people prefer the flexibility of external devices. If the computer never got opened, that would be fine by them.
I agree... but the people who are buying into the sleek imac look are the people LEAST interested in having a bunch of parts that really should be inside the computer scattered over and under their desk in a rat's nest of wiring. The LAST thing these people want is an external hard drive, usb2 hub, external bluray reader, external tv tuner... all while bitching that an ati 2600 was a piece of shit they never would have ordered given a choice.
Cards and screwdrivers are for IT people and geeks. That's it.
Right. People want to be able to order an imac that does what they want out of the box. The problem is that we can't even do THAT.
However, "perfectly normal" people tend to just want to turn it on, pound out a couple pages in Word or fire off a few emails, and be done with things.
A lot of people yes. But the whole media center thing is catching on. Normal people *and their kids* are demanding a lot more than word and email today. Even grandma has a digital camera now. Your fooling yourself if you think otherwise.
TV, not so much, and blu-ray far less so (just spend the money on a PS3 and get blu-ray and gaming done in one).
Actually lots of people are starting to just watch TV on their PCs. Its not in their 'home theatre', but why bother with a TV in the kids room or the bedroom or the kitchen... a 20-24" LCD sitting on the desk can do double duty in a smaller room. And if they've ALREADY got a hometheater with a ps3 for games and bluray, guess what, the kids and parents want to watch those BD movies they've been accumulating on their other screens too. On a tower PC, a bluray reader is ~$150.
PC gamers that want Macs is a relatively small market, but except for the even smaller subset of overclockers who tend to truly be performance-on-a-budget-obsessed (I've been there), the Mac Pro isn't insanely out of reach given the specs it has.
PC gamers that want macs is a small due to the macs that are available.
Any adult with kids is a potential parent of a budding gamer that just wants 'windows and a fast graphics card'. Seriously.
Yes, there are self-described 'gamers' out there that spend their paycheques constantly upgrading and tweaking... but there are an awful lot more of 8-18 year olds out there that just use the 'family PC', and when dad says, hey guys its time to upgrade the PC, what do think we should get... they'll come back with 'we want to play new games', 'we want to watch tv', 'can it do bluray?'...
The imac falls out of consideration because it can't, and the mac pro is simply out of reach for what 'Dad' wants to spend, given he can get a 'deluxe' PC from HP or Dell that does everything the kids want, comes with windows, the 8800GT that the kids saw on all the game review sites, a bluray reader, and a TV tuner from HP all for $1500-1600 or whatever. Half of what he'd have to spend on the Mac Pro -- EVEN if he drops out the extra Xeon. (Because after adding in the graphics card, blu ray, tv card, and a monitor he's back up to $3200+...)
Your right that an extreme gamer whose "my other pc is a watercooled SLI 'rig' in krypton green" might not balk at a $3000+ price tag for a suitably equipped Mac Pro. A dual Xeon is just bragging rights... even if it doesn't make much difference in Crysis... But 'Dad buying the family PC' isn't going to drop that kind of cash.
Sure the Mac Pro is very good value for what it comes with... but its got value in the wrong places to appeal to a home consumer looking for a media centre PC to satisfy his family.
End of the day, I agree with you... we aren't going to see a 'consumer mac tower' anytime soon. But its a shame. They'd sell like hotcakes. Because even a lot of people who were ok buying imacs would have preferred the flexibility of a tower.
This is completely subjective. I am not interested in raiding. I'm not interested in PvP either.
I used to play Civilisation a lot, but I'm not really interested in empire buiding, micro-management, or research trees...I don't have the time or interest to figure all that out or be bothered with it.
I just drive my settlers around exploring the map picking up bonuses until they get munched by barbarians.
Some people might say I'm not really playing Civ, but they're wrong. Civ can be played in a variety of ways...
It's what WoW is to many people, but WoW can be played in a variety of ways.
Yes. Just like Civ. So I'm not saying you are 'wrong'. I'm saying that you aren't getting good value. If I only enjoyed the part of Civ involved with driving my settlers around, I'd have been better off playing a different game.
Similarly if you reject WoW's PvP, and Raiding, and group content...well.. you're spending $15/month for what exactly? Like paying $1000/week extra to stay at a 5 star all inclusive resort and only eating lettuce salads and drinking water.
I'm not saying you should be a gluttonous drunk... but if you consume too little you are getting terrible value... I mean... why not just skip 'all inclusive' and just pay for your salads?
Indeed I'd probably still play WoW if I could buy time pay-as-you-go... buy a hundred hours for 20 bucks, and that would probably see me through 6 months. 0.20 cents an hour seem low to you? It shouldn't. That's still easily double or triple what most raiders pay, and they are seeing parts of the game you never will too.
It just does.
I hear that a lot. Even the most avid solo players can't find much to recommend it. Its boring and tedious and repetitive and you don't even have a hope of seeing the 'endgame'. There's really not much to recommend it is there?
I played it myself for a year. I still can't figure out what I actually enjoyed about it, maybe nothing. I started out with a friend, and that was genuinely fun, but after a while we drifted apart due to different time availability...we eneded up different levels, in different places, and mostly on at different times. So ultimately we ended up just soloing, and maybe chatting the odd time we happened to both be logged in...
Reminds of me smoking. There's a reason these games are called 'addictive'.
Hmm, desktop hard drive? Check. Standard laptop RAM? Check. Ability to replace the video card? Technically, check. It can be replaced as it's a separate module. Upgrading...well, you'd have to have a lower-end card and find a service provider willing to order/install the better one for you. However, it's kind of a moot point. You know why?
Yes, because I can't get the video card I want put in.
BECAUSE MOST PEOPLE DON'T GIVE A SHIT. Geeks need to get that through their obstinate skulls. The vast majority of the buying public doesn't give a shit about upgrading their video card. They just want a computer that works so they can check their email, do word processing, and organize their photos.
And plays their games, and works with their PCI video capture card, and has enough USB ports for all their toys, and space for a 2nd hard drive to hold all their stuff.
Upgrade-happy geeks are a tiny sliver of the overall market.
Your right most people don't ugprade all the time. However, a LOT of people can't buy an imac that does what they want it to do. If they want something better than a crappy 8800GS, tough shit. Its not that they want to buy new graphics cards every couple months... they can't even get a decent one the day they buy it. And if they don't want a 24" behemoth, they can't even buy one with a crappy 800GS, they have to get the utterly abysmal ATi 2400/2600.
And LOTs of people never upgrade hard drives, but if the PC fills up before they are done with it, adding an $80 internal hard drive is easy, neat, and no fuss... and not possible on an imac.
Most PCs these days come with 6 to 8 usb ports. iMacs have 3 and one is tied up by the keyboard/mouse. Want more? Tough.
Want a TV-tuner card? Tough.
Bluray reader? Tough.
These aren't the contant 'willy-nilly upgrades' demanded by niche hardcore gamers, these are the sorts of things perfectly normal people want from their computers in the normal course of using them, or coming out of the store.
A tower form factor affords this flexibility.
One shouldn't have to pony up for a dual core 2 quad just so they can have more than 2 available usb ports and a decent graphics card.
To use a 'bad car analagy' it would be like a car manufacturer requiring you to buy the top of the line model in order to get basic optional features, you know, like a trunk and a passenger seat.
It's for the Mac so I haven't used it, so I don't know how great it is, and there's probably good reasons why it can't be done on Windows or Linux hosts.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Vista could pull it off. The whole underpinnings of 'aero glass', in terms of the hardware abstraction layer its got, are essentially exactly what you'd need to 3d accelerate a VM.
See this is what I really don't understand. $1000 is approximately £500. I earn that in one day. From here it looks like the US economy must be really going down the pan if $1000 is too much for a high end computer.
According to the British government, the median wage in the UK, as of April 2007 was £457 per -week- for full time employees. Even at the 90th percentile one would only be making £1,019/week. So you are claiming to be what? In top 1% of the income scale? Go figure such a person could afford a computer easily.
Meanwhile in the US, the median wage is currently ~$35,000/year, which is ~$675/wk. Which works out to about £100 less than in Britain...
Of course, gas at even at record levels is still half the price of europe, and housing is cheaper in the US, the tax situation is different, etc... so one can't really speculate who is really further ahead based on wage alone. but a $1000 PC is FAR more than a day's pay for well over 90% of the population in either country.
Oh... according to the HDI index, the standard of living in the US is higher than UK. US is ranked 12th, UK is ranked 16th. You can draw your own conclusions from that.
But I'd have thought Britain would have scored better than that... what with everyone apparently making in a day nearly what an american makes in a week?!
You don't expect to see or do most of interesting parts of the game. How much lower can they get?
I have no interest in joining a guild or structuring my life around raid schedules.
I completely understand and respect that. However, that's what Warcraft -is-.
Rejecting that and just doing the 'other stuff' is pretty thin value for $15/mo.
Plus, for you to tell me you are the sort who picks up a game plays it for a few days and then is bored... but simultaneously can play WoW month after month after month... how does that work? Especially since you can't even do most of the interesting stuff in WoW, and WoW even at its best isn't that interesting, unless you are part of a social group doing bigger things... but that's the part you aren't interested in...
Anyone can lower their expectations to the point that whatever they are doing is an accomplishment.
I don't meant to be offensive, because you might genuinely be enjoying yourself... but imagine if you bought a movie, and could only watch the first half. No matter how much you enjoyed it, you've paid full price for a movie, and you've only seen half of it, maybe you can be satisfied with that... I'd feel ripped off.
What's also a tough pill to swallow is paying 70 euros for a 360 game and getting bored after a few days. It's an epic waste of money.
Ah, but they have a solution for people with just that problem. Its called 'rentals'.
I've found that eliminating compiler warnings will do a lot for finding bugs. Sure, there may be a number of "harmless" ones, but cleaning them up will still do a lot of good to the code too, and make the other not-so-harmless ones stand out even more.
The last bit is the big one. If you've got a project that compiles with 3000 warnings, you don't look at them. And your stupid typeo:
if (x = y) {//do something... }
doesn't get caught...
But if your code is warning clear, when you do get the compiler warning... "Warning: x=y is an assignment not a comparison" hey you might just have saved an hour or so of debugging.
Why is it that 2 trips to the movies, lasting MAYBE 6 hours tops, is treated as worth $14.95,
And if you go to a see a major rock band, you can expect to pay several hundred dollars for a couple hours of entertainment. Why these major price differences?
How about: supply and demand? and cost of the product?
but a game needs to be played "several hours per day every day" to meet the same value?
Lets compare WoW to other video games, because that actually makes sense.
For the price of WoW+expansions you could buy buy a new game every couple months. If you are only playing a few hours here and there this is probably better value. If nothing else, at the end of a year you've got half a dozen different games to play whenever you get the itch.
Plus, if you are only playing a game like WoW sporadically, its almost impossible to accomplish things, you are perpetually miles behind your friends, you are left out of the social element, its hard to get into a worthwhile guild or group when you do login... so now you are paying $15/month for a much poorer experience than the game has to offer.
On top of that, relativism kicks in. The people gettin the most out of the game, playing 60 hours a week, are paying 0.6 cents per hour. And sees FAR more of the game for that price. Me, on the other hand, averaging 10 hours a month, was paying 1.50 per hour for a much reduced experience... I was paying 25x times as much per hour as the hard core player to futz around in crappy neglected parts of the game struggling to find groups to go into crappy instances, while he explored the end game content that was actually interesting. That's a tough pill to swallow.
We'll assume 30 hours per week as a nice approximation of "several hours per day every day". What you're then saying is that an entertainment venue is too expensive to you until it gets below $0.50 per hour. Just how broke are you?
30 hours per week is 12.5 cents per hour. And yes, he's saying MMRPG entertainment isn't good value until it hits about that threshold. Personally I think that sounds about right. Other forms of entertainment have different price thresholds, there is nothing strange about that.
Maybe I (or one of the above posters) missed something, but I thought the point of this submission was to get advice on a mobile device. As I understand it, its a little difficult to drop the VM in your pocket and run off for coffee with friends (or in most/.ers cases, co-workers).
The OP wants a 'subnotebook' device for email / web / etc. He apparently ALSO wants to play around with cluster computing, so instead of buying one 2-3 year old $400-500 unit, he wants to buy four $100-$120 units from 10 years ago.
Obviously he's not planning on doing anything terribly mission critical or demanding with his 'cluster' if its going to be made of $100 notebooks from 10 years ago. Its clearly a toy, for learning/experimentation/fun.
Thus buying the $400-$500 unit and making his toy cluster out of VMs is just as suitable. And probably actually better; as when he's not playing with his cluster, he's got a much stronger laptop to browse the internet with.
No. It's 100% CPU, with each VM taking 25%. You can only get as much CPU power out as you put in, and virtualisation doesn't magically generate CPU from air. As the GP said, "virtualisation is not the answer to everything".
And that matters why? if you are doing 'cluster computing research', presumably you are interested in how the cluster works, not how absolutely fast it is. If it runs at 25% what it would run on 4 dedicated machines, how often does that matter?
And even if you if DO care how absolutely fast it is, throwing one modern 1GHz CPU at 4VMs is still going to outperform 4 190MHz CPUs from the 90s, which is what the OP is suggesting having a preference for.
As the GP said, "virtualisation is not the answer to everything".
That's true. but nobody has made a good case for why it isn't an acceptable answer for THIS.
The operating system is a component of the computer, just like the processor, video card, sound card, network card, monitor, keyboard, mouse,...
Defining the difference between 'illegal' tying and bundling is a complicated affair. You can't simply wave it away by saying, "I can't order a car without sparkplugs, how is this any different."
Suffice it to say that there is not simple litmus test for tying vs bundling, and often 'its legal bundling' until someone takes it to court and the court decides 'it illegal tying'.
But if you look at the checklist of characteristics... if *any* of these apply to the bundle:
'its regarded as not being in the publics interest' 'the products are not naturally related' 'products are tied by contract'
It may be illegal tying.
Clearly here the products are naturally related so that's not the issue. However, both the public interest and the contract might apply...
Windows comes with an EULA, your processor doesn't. When you buy a computer with windows 'bundled', you enter into a contract with Microsoft. This is coercive because you receive a non-transferable license that is bound to that physical computer, upon which the non-removable OEM license sticker is affixed. You can elect not to use Windows... but you are still contractually prevented from unbundling them and using the license on a different machine, or giving it away or selling it off the Windows license. (Yes, people do it all the time, but that's beside the point.) None of the other components have this contractual obligation -- you can unbundle and re-sell your processor anytime you like to whomever you want.
2ndly, the 'public interest part crops up'. If Staples starts bundling bic pens with its staplers brand paper - nobody's going to blink -- The office supply market is competitive -- You can easily buy other brands of paper without bic pens. Bic isn't a convicted monopolist. Bic isn't charging Staples a premium for its pens if they don't bundle them with every ream of paper, and Bic isn't putting Staples at a significant disadvantage relative to other office supply vendors if they don't bundle them.
Microsoft is ALL of those. The OS market is not exactly competitive. MS is a convicted monopololist. You cannot easily buy brand name computers without Windows. Microsoft contracts have forced OEMs into bundling the system or face higher pricing, and that will put them at a serious disadvantage relative to other OEMs.
Thus it may not be in the public interest to allow this.
Okay, fair enough. Not presenting the EULA until after purchase is a bit sneaky, even if it is common practice. But in this case, since the customer didn't buy the OS itself, wouldn't "return for a refund" be referring to the whole PC?
No. In this case, probably to avoid charges of illegal tying, the deal was *specifically* that you could, at your option, return Microsoft Windows for a refund. However the refund was oddly low, and you had to ship the computer to them and back at your expense with no idea how long it might take, to excercise this 'option'.
The court agreed that this 'refund offer' was deliberately unfair, and designed to prevent the purchaser from exercising it. You can say, caveat emptor, with respect to the customer not looking at what the refund offer was exactly before buying the PC... but by simply having such an unfair refund offer, its effect at mitigating the charge of illegal tying was nullified.
Sort of like saying "If you buy the car you are obligated to buy Chevron gas. Oh, no we're not tying, we do have an option for not buying Chevron gas too that you can exercise after buying the car, at no charge to exercise." And then after buying it, you discover that to get out of buying only Chevron gas you have to send sending the car back to the factory in Mexico, by train, at your expense, both ways. And their technicians will set the switch that will allow it take non-Chevron gas... this process takes around 1 hour but the factory could take up to a year to turn around your order... they're pretty busy ya know."
A court would reasonably conclude that they were still tieing, even though they provided a so-called escape option.
If marketers can figure out how to get the right message across to the right people at the right time, its pretty much a win-win for everyone.
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
As a marketer of profoundly useless products, that generally barely work, and are universally of low quality, I would like to know which people are the biggest suckers and what time they are most vulnerable to making a purchase of one of my many products.
I make items such as tiger wards, rocks with googly eyes, q-ray bracelets, nordic-trac exercise equipment, gold-making guides for mmorpgs that I copied from web posts and the manual, sea monkeys, evidence eliminator software for your PC, and many other fine products I'm sure you've seen in countless ads. Frankly I'm amazed I sell any at all. But thanks to the miracles of marketing, I am able to connect with people who need these products. People looking to trade their hard earned cash...aw hell, some of them even put it on already racked up credit cards and go into debt for this stuff, that's how badly they need it!!
I couldn't agree more that further imroving the my sales is win-win for everyone.
the grub gui, if its actually any good will eventually get installed on my desktop linux machines...
The rest of the crud the article mentioned? Wow... what a completely uninspiring and underwhelming list.
Oooh... another rss solution? ooxml for abiword? bragging rights for game I've never heard of? Theming support for Pidgin? VLC for Windows CE? I can gaurantee you that I'm not going to EVER go out of my way to install ANY of that crud.
Not that I have a problem with people working on its... its their time. But none of this is remotely 'must have' software.
If they think he has an unfair advantage, why don't they get their legs amputated, too?
What if they do? What if it that becomes what it takes to win? The olympics is already a freakshow... but it could descend much much further... we could attach flipper feet to swimmers, and implant gills designed to breath in chlorinated pools...
At what point do we draw the line?
And if we don't draw a line and let the olympics devolve into a league for pharma-cyborg-supermen, can we start up a new 'new olympics' for natural human beings?? Because I'd find that more interesting.
Which is why the war with Russia was cold, not hot. Russia was a serious and credible threat to the United States and vice versa. So they were worth the trouble not to get into it with them.
You can almost gauge how much of a threat a nation is by a nations unwillingness to engage it in a hot war. Iraq? Afghanistan? We would never have voluntarily gone to full scale war with either if they'd been actually dangerous to the US.
Russia? North Korea? Pakistan? China? Suddenly diplomacy seems the way to go. Go figure.
The United States (sensibly) likes likes to conduct its hot wars at the shallow end of the 'axis of evil'.
What do they really want it for? What sort of adhoc queries do they imagine they need to run?
Odds are they only need access to a couple of tables... I'd consider creating a couple copies of those tables for them, and set it to update daily from the 'real' ones (with just their data of course), and then give them read only access to that. They are happy, and you are happy, hell if its small enough / simple enough, you could trhow up a mySQL or postgresql server somewhere to host 'their' data for them, and they won't even be able to touch your real server.
Not saying this is a good idea or even feasible... but it may be possible to satisfy their request without opening up your database to them.
That's the problem. There is no possible basis of objective comparison which is meaningful.
Strictly speaking your right. In practical terms there are objective comparisons which are meaningful.
You can talk about the quality of the acting, costuming, set design, and so forth with *some* objectivity. You can also talk about the plot itself, in terms of depth, complexity, consistency, novelty, with *some* objectivity.
Contrast "Maximum Overdrive" to "Trucks" for a trivial example.
A review is simply an opinion, which means no more than yours or mine.
The difference is that a professional reviewer is, in theory at least, if he's actually being professional will do his best to judge the movie's merits as objectively as possible according to a set of criteria. Sure 'objectively as possible' is still subjective, and the selection of criteria can also color things, but its not nearly as subjective as some random twit's 'opinion'.
Consider journalism vs. editorial. People can't write anything without imparting bias and subjectivity into it... but a decent journalist is at least trying to be objective. Whereas an editorialist isn't.
Bull. If a movie entertains you, it's good. If it doesn't, it's crappy. There is ONE axis, no more, no less. A movie which is revolutionary or thought-provoking is just providing icing on the cake.
That's just defining good and crappy according to how much you liked it, but ultimately not very useful when talking about movies with anyone else. When a professional critic gives a movies 4 stars its still subjective, but its at least grounded in some basis of objective comparison.
When I read a critics review I want and expect that critical perspective. If I want to know how much YOU liked the movie, I'll ask you.
I enjoy lots of movies that met with 0 critical acclaim, and in most cases I agree with the critics. I still like the movie though.
You're entitled to your (extremely wrong) opinion. The new Star Wars movies were quite good, with the first one being the worst in the saga, the second being somewhere in the middle, and the most recent being easily better than any of the originals.
And you are entitled to your opinion. And I'm glad someone enjoyed them. But they were terrible movies. The acting was wooden, the direction was terrible, the character development was LAUGHABLE.
I mean, my God, it had everything you could ask for from Star Wars. It had cool battle scenes. That's what Star Wars is about!
Except most of them managed to incorporate being meaningless and boring into their amazing visual effects. Half of them simply didn't matter. The only bettle scenes in the entire series that were even slightly compelling were the ones between Obi-Wan and Anakin at the end of the 3rd episode, the sand-people slaughter, and the implied jedi children slaughter... the rest... pointless.
Yoda vs Dooku pointless. Yoda vs Palpatine pointless. Quigon/Obiwan vs Maul -- hell... the whole Maul character was pointless, so killing him was pointless. Mace Windu -- another pointless character. Jango Fett? I guess you could count how it might affect little Boba... but then that's not in this trilogy and lets face it Boba isn't really in the other one either... so Pointless. General Grevious? Completely Pointless character, completely pointless battle. The battle against the pit monsters? Pointless and stupid in a classic James Bond villain sort of way.
As an added bonus, it had an actual (interesting) PLOT
The plot was diarrhea. Most of the stuff they did hinged on the characters behaving in ways that was largely irrational and completely unjustified by what happened previously.
The trouble is if you need plausible deniabiliy, its already gone farther than we'd have liked. We want to avoid raising suspicions and being asked about our stash of encrypted files in the first place.
And just because I have TrueCrypt installed doesn't mean I even have an encrypted volume at all! It could be for reading that encrypted USB drive I didn't bring to the airport.
That may well be. But that isn't going to stop customs from having their suspicions raised and seizing the laptop for further investigation.
The trouble is that using truecrypt likely RAISES the likelihood of customs getting suspicious in the first place. Like wearing an empty holster raises the likelihood that you've stashed a gun. Sure you might have left the gun at home... you might not even have a gun... but the presence of a holster is suspicious.
Most travellers don't wish to be hassled by customs in the first place. They want customs give their laptop a look and not have it set off any red flags. A big icon saying "I may or may not have something encrypted on here that you'll never break and I can deny having" is precisely the sort of thing that would raise suspicion.
Truecrypt protects your privacy once you are in an interrogation room and your laptop is seized and customs is demanding passwords, and generally making your life hell. And that's great. But what if truecrypt is part of the reason you are in the interrogation room in the first place?
For most of us, it would be better to trade 'plausible deniability' for 'decreased suspiciousness'. For those few who are genuinely moving illegal data then yes, 'plausible deniability' at the expense of 'decreased suspiciousness' is probably worth it.
The people who write those reviews are almost always elitist movie snobs, who are missing the point that it's a *movie*, not high art.
They aren't missing the point. You are. There's only so much information you can pack into a 'star rating'
Movie Critics are rating movies by how good they are on a multitude of levels. A 4 star movie has to be entertaining, interesting, thought provoking, well written, well directed, well acted, etc, etc, etc.
The Phantom Menace might hit the entertaining button but its a dismal fail on most other criteria. Its poorly acted, poorly written, poorly directed...
People go to the movies to be entertained for 2 hours. A simple popcorn-muncher is sometimes all you really want.
You are practically admitting it right here, that you KNOW and AGREE they are crappy movies!! But you like watching them anyway. That's fine... I do too... a one or two star rating doesn't mean you won't enjoy the movie and shouldn't go see it, but rather you shouldn't expect it be a 'Godfather II'.
I'm personally looking forward to the new Indy.
Me too. However I'm now expecting it to be 'summer popcorn fun' not 'groundbreaking brilliant'. (Which if you'd seen the previous 3, 'summer popcorn fun' is really what you should have been expecting all along.)
The other thing that ruins reviews like this is a fanboy gets his crush on, and waits in anticipation for 10-20 years, and has all these grandiose ideas of what the movie should or shouldn't look/feel/smell like, and then there's no possible way for the movie to live up to that much internal-hype.
To a point, but I don't think it affects the movie's rating overall as much as all that. The last crusade came out in 89. Anyone under 25 is pretty much immune to that effect and will see the movie for its own merit. A lot of people under 30 haven't even seen the first 3.
That's what happened with the new Star Wars trilogy (although Jar-Jar made me want to stab Lucas in the throat...)
No. The new Star Wars was just shit. The originals were defining movies for a generation. Most kids today have already forgotten the new trilogy. They had no pent up expectations, and they still couldn't care less about them. Face it, they just weren't that good.
None of the new star wars movies made the imdb top 250. All 3 of the Lord of the Rings movies made the top 30. Both trilogies had MASSIVE fanboy followings and pent up expectations and both movies faced the wrath of the screaming fanboys. But at the end of it all Star Wars competely sucked. LotR didn't. It's just that simple.
So first, they would have to know you even have something encrypted (which is just a guess if they see TrueCrypt installed). Then they'd have to know what/which files was/were encrypted (which can't be determined by examining the file). Then they'd have to ask you to mount the volume and provide the password (at which time you then provide the shadow volume password, which only contains innocuous files).
Yes, because there's no way customs people could know that truecrypt supports shadow volumes and two passwords....Oh wait...
So what happens if they note you are using truecrypt and ask for both passwords?
I can't be the only dummy to figure that out.
You are correct. Even customs can figure that out.
That's a good idea, but in my experience I'm not always able to use VPNs or nonstandard TCP ports while I'm using a hotel's internet access.
So use a standard port, like port 80.
It might be prudent to simply upload your sensitive stuff to Google Apps before your flight, work on it locally while you're out of town, and then zap it back up to Apps before you return home.
If its sensitive the last place you should stick it is google apps.
And what makes you so sure its deleted from google apps when you are done with it? They aren't big on deleting anything over there. Sure they might make it so you no longer see it, but delete it? Don't be so sure.
Slashdot Mirror
And you keep missing the fact that most people will probably never add anything outside of one or two peripherals. You keep talking about a LOT of people, but that LOT of people is stilly a tiny fragment of the market.
The crappy graphics card options alone are a huge turn off to a lot more people than you seem to think. I've talked with lots of families that chose not to buy a Mac simply because their kids wanted to play games on it but the available graphics options in the mini and the imac were a big turn off. There simply were no acceptable options.
And on the other side of the aisle PC vendors were practically bending over backwards to sell them exactly the PC specs they were looking for... maybe not in as sleek a box... but exactly the right performance at the right price.
The group affected is not just 'extreme gamers' and 'geeks', it's every family with a boy or possibly even a girl child between the ages of 8 and 18, or a father who still plays games.
Most people don't want to open the case, don't want to buy cards, and don't really care. They'll order the computer with the feature if they want it, or they'll drag it to Best Buy and have them upgrade it, or they'll find that computer-savvy niece or nephew to fix "that clicking noise".
Precisely. The trouble is you can't order an imac with those features. If you could people wouldn't be so annoyed with the imac.
The trouble with the iMac isn't that its 'all in one' its that it doesn't come with the features a LOT of people want. The fact that its all in one just aggravates the issue, because it goes from inconvenient to impossible.
Really, regular people prefer the flexibility of external devices. If the computer never got opened, that would be fine by them.
I agree... but the people who are buying into the sleek imac look are the people LEAST interested in having a bunch of parts that really should be inside the computer scattered over and under their desk in a rat's nest of wiring. The LAST thing these people want is an external hard drive, usb2 hub, external bluray reader, external tv tuner... all while bitching that an ati 2600 was a piece of shit they never would have ordered given a choice.
Cards and screwdrivers are for IT people and geeks. That's it.
Right. People want to be able to order an imac that does what they want out of the box. The problem is that we can't even do THAT.
However, "perfectly normal" people tend to just want to turn it on, pound out a couple pages in Word or fire off a few emails, and be done with things.
A lot of people yes. But the whole media center thing is catching on. Normal people *and their kids* are demanding a lot more than word and email today. Even grandma has a digital camera now. Your fooling yourself if you think otherwise.
TV, not so much, and blu-ray far less so (just spend the money on a PS3 and get blu-ray and gaming done in one).
Actually lots of people are starting to just watch TV on their PCs. Its not in their 'home theatre', but why bother with a TV in the kids room or the bedroom or the kitchen... a 20-24" LCD sitting on the desk can do double duty in a smaller room. And if they've ALREADY got a hometheater with a ps3 for games and bluray, guess what, the kids and parents want to watch those BD movies they've been accumulating on their other screens too. On a tower PC, a bluray reader is ~$150.
PC gamers that want Macs is a relatively small market, but except for the even smaller subset of overclockers who tend to truly be performance-on-a-budget-obsessed (I've been there), the Mac Pro isn't insanely out of reach given the specs it has.
PC gamers that want macs is a small due to the macs that are available.
Any adult with kids is a potential parent of a budding gamer that just wants 'windows and a fast graphics card'. Seriously.
Yes, there are self-described 'gamers' out there that spend their paycheques constantly upgrading and tweaking... but there are an awful lot more of 8-18 year olds out there that just use the 'family PC', and when dad says, hey guys its time to upgrade the PC, what do think we should get... they'll come back with 'we want to play new games', 'we want to watch tv', 'can it do bluray?'...
The imac falls out of consideration because it can't, and the mac pro is simply out of reach for what 'Dad' wants to spend, given he can get a 'deluxe' PC from HP or Dell that does everything the kids want, comes with windows, the 8800GT that the kids saw on all the game review sites, a bluray reader, and a TV tuner from HP all for $1500-1600 or whatever. Half of what he'd have to spend on the Mac Pro -- EVEN if he drops out the extra Xeon. (Because after adding in the graphics card, blu ray, tv card, and a monitor he's back up to $3200+...)
Your right that an extreme gamer whose "my other pc is a watercooled SLI 'rig' in krypton green" might not balk at a $3000+ price tag for a suitably equipped Mac Pro. A dual Xeon is just bragging rights... even if it doesn't make much difference in Crysis... But 'Dad buying the family PC' isn't going to drop that kind of cash.
Sure the Mac Pro is very good value for what it comes with... but its got value in the wrong places to appeal to a home consumer looking for a media centre PC to satisfy his family.
End of the day, I agree with you... we aren't going to see a 'consumer mac tower' anytime soon. But its a shame. They'd sell like hotcakes. Because even a lot of people who were ok buying imacs would have preferred the flexibility of a tower.
This is completely subjective. I am not interested in raiding. I'm not interested in PvP either.
I used to play Civilisation a lot, but I'm not really interested in empire buiding, micro-management, or research trees...I don't have the time or interest to figure all that out or be bothered with it.
I just drive my settlers around exploring the map picking up bonuses until they get munched by barbarians.
Some people might say I'm not really playing Civ, but they're wrong. Civ can be played in a variety of ways...
It's what WoW is to many people, but WoW can be played in a variety of ways.
Yes. Just like Civ. So I'm not saying you are 'wrong'. I'm saying that you aren't getting good value. If I only enjoyed the part of Civ involved with driving my settlers around, I'd have been better off playing a different game.
Similarly if you reject WoW's PvP, and Raiding, and group content...well.. you're spending $15/month for what exactly? Like paying $1000/week extra to stay at a 5 star all inclusive resort and only eating lettuce salads and drinking water.
I'm not saying you should be a gluttonous drunk... but if you consume too little you are getting terrible value... I mean... why not just skip 'all inclusive' and just pay for your salads?
Indeed I'd probably still play WoW if I could buy time pay-as-you-go... buy a hundred hours for 20 bucks, and that would probably see me through 6 months. 0.20 cents an hour seem low to you? It shouldn't. That's still easily double or triple what most raiders pay, and they are seeing parts of the game you never will too.
It just does.
I hear that a lot. Even the most avid solo players can't find much to recommend it. Its boring and tedious and repetitive and you don't even have a hope of seeing the 'endgame'. There's really not much to recommend it is there?
I played it myself for a year. I still can't figure out what I actually enjoyed about it, maybe nothing. I started out with a friend, and that was genuinely fun, but after a while we drifted apart due to different time availability...we eneded up different levels, in different places, and mostly on at different times. So ultimately we ended up just soloing, and maybe chatting the odd time we happened to both be logged in...
Reminds of me smoking. There's a reason these games are called 'addictive'.
Hmm, desktop hard drive? Check. Standard laptop RAM? Check. Ability to replace the video card? Technically, check. It can be replaced as it's a separate module. Upgrading...well, you'd have to have a lower-end card and find a service provider willing to order/install the better one for you. However, it's kind of a moot point. You know why?
Yes, because I can't get the video card I want put in.
BECAUSE MOST PEOPLE DON'T GIVE A SHIT. Geeks need to get that through their obstinate skulls. The vast majority of the buying public doesn't give a shit about upgrading their video card. They just want a computer that works so they can check their email, do word processing, and organize their photos.
And plays their games, and works with their PCI video capture card, and has enough USB ports for all their toys, and space for a 2nd hard drive to hold all their stuff.
Upgrade-happy geeks are a tiny sliver of the overall market.
Your right most people don't ugprade all the time. However, a LOT of people can't buy an imac that does what they want it to do. If they want something better than a crappy 8800GS, tough shit. Its not that they want to buy new graphics cards every couple months... they can't even get a decent one the day they buy it. And if they don't want a 24" behemoth, they can't even buy one with a crappy 800GS, they have to get the utterly abysmal ATi 2400/2600.
And LOTs of people never upgrade hard drives, but if the PC fills up before they are done with it, adding an $80 internal hard drive is easy, neat, and no fuss... and not possible on an imac.
Most PCs these days come with 6 to 8 usb ports. iMacs have 3 and one is tied up by the keyboard/mouse. Want more? Tough.
Want a TV-tuner card? Tough.
Bluray reader? Tough.
These aren't the contant 'willy-nilly upgrades' demanded by niche hardcore gamers, these are the sorts of things perfectly normal people want from their computers in the normal course of using them, or coming out of the store.
A tower form factor affords this flexibility.
One shouldn't have to pony up for a dual core 2 quad just so they can have more than 2 available usb ports and a decent graphics card.
To use a 'bad car analagy' it would be like a car manufacturer requiring you to buy the top of the line model in order to get basic optional features, you know, like a trunk and a passenger seat.
It's for the Mac so I haven't used it, so I don't know how great it is, and there's probably good reasons why it can't be done on Windows or Linux hosts.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Vista could pull it off. The whole underpinnings of 'aero glass', in terms of the hardware abstraction layer its got, are essentially exactly what you'd need to 3d accelerate a VM.
See this is what I really don't understand. $1000 is approximately £500. I earn that in one day. From here it looks like the US economy must be really going down the pan if $1000 is too much for a high end computer.
According to the British government, the median wage in the UK, as of April 2007 was £457 per -week- for full time employees. Even at the 90th percentile one would only be making £1,019/week. So you are claiming to be what? In top 1% of the income scale? Go figure such a person could afford a computer easily.
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=285
Meanwhile in the US, the median wage is currently ~$35,000/year, which is ~$675/wk. Which works out to about £100 less than in Britain...
Of course, gas at even at record levels is still half the price of europe, and housing is cheaper in the US, the tax situation is different, etc... so one can't really speculate who is really further ahead based on wage alone. but a $1000 PC is FAR more than a day's pay for well over 90% of the population in either country.
Oh... according to the HDI index, the standard of living in the US is higher than UK. US is ranked 12th, UK is ranked 16th. You can draw your own conclusions from that.
But I'd have thought Britain would have scored better than that... what with everyone apparently making in a day nearly what an american makes in a week?!
I haven't lowered my expectations.
You don't expect to see or do most of interesting parts of the game. How much lower can they get?
I have no interest in joining a guild or structuring my life around raid schedules.
I completely understand and respect that. However, that's what Warcraft -is-.
Rejecting that and just doing the 'other stuff' is pretty thin value for $15/mo.
Plus, for you to tell me you are the sort who picks up a game plays it for a few days and then is bored... but simultaneously can play WoW month after month after month... how does that work? Especially since you can't even do most of the interesting stuff in WoW, and WoW even at its best isn't that interesting, unless you are part of a social group doing bigger things... but that's the part you aren't interested in...
I haven't had problems "accomplishing things."
Anyone can lower their expectations to the point that whatever they are doing is an accomplishment.
I don't meant to be offensive, because you might genuinely be enjoying yourself... but imagine if you bought a movie, and could only watch the first half. No matter how much you enjoyed it, you've paid full price for a movie, and you've only seen half of it, maybe you can be satisfied with that... I'd feel ripped off.
What's also a tough pill to swallow is paying 70 euros for a 360 game and getting bored after a few days. It's an epic waste of money.
Ah, but they have a solution for people with just that problem. Its called 'rentals'.
I've found that eliminating compiler warnings will do a lot for finding bugs. Sure, there may be a number of "harmless" ones, but cleaning them up will still do a lot of good to the code too, and make the other not-so-harmless ones stand out even more.
//do something... }
The last bit is the big one. If you've got a project that compiles with 3000 warnings, you don't look at them. And your stupid typeo:
if (x = y) {
doesn't get caught...
But if your code is warning clear, when you do get the compiler warning... "Warning: x=y is an assignment not a comparison" hey you might just have saved an hour or so of debugging.
Why is it that 2 trips to the movies, lasting MAYBE 6 hours tops, is treated as worth $14.95,
And if you go to a see a major rock band, you can expect to pay several hundred dollars for a couple hours of entertainment. Why these major price differences?
How about: supply and demand? and cost of the product?
but a game needs to be played "several hours per day every day" to meet the same value?
Lets compare WoW to other video games, because that actually makes sense.
For the price of WoW+expansions you could buy buy a new game every couple months. If you are only playing a few hours here and there this is probably better value. If nothing else, at the end of a year you've got half a dozen different games to play whenever you get the itch.
Plus, if you are only playing a game like WoW sporadically, its almost impossible to accomplish things, you are perpetually miles behind your friends, you are left out of the social element, its hard to get into a worthwhile guild or group when you do login... so now you are paying $15/month for a much poorer experience than the game has to offer.
On top of that, relativism kicks in. The people gettin the most out of the game, playing 60 hours a week, are paying 0.6 cents per hour. And sees FAR more of the game for that price. Me, on the other hand, averaging 10 hours a month, was paying 1.50 per hour for a much reduced experience... I was paying 25x times as much per hour as the hard core player to futz around in crappy neglected parts of the game struggling to find groups to go into crappy instances, while he explored the end game content that was actually interesting. That's a tough pill to swallow.
We'll assume 30 hours per week as a nice approximation of "several hours per day every day". What you're then saying is that an entertainment venue is too expensive to you until it gets below $0.50 per hour. Just how broke are you?
30 hours per week is 12.5 cents per hour. And yes, he's saying MMRPG entertainment isn't good value until it hits about that threshold. Personally I think that sounds about right. Other forms of entertainment have different price thresholds, there is nothing strange about that.
Maybe I (or one of the above posters) missed something, but I thought the point of this submission was to get advice on a mobile device. As I understand it, its a little difficult to drop the VM in your pocket and run off for coffee with friends (or in most /.ers cases, co-workers).
The OP wants a 'subnotebook' device for email / web / etc. He apparently ALSO wants to play around with cluster computing, so instead of buying one 2-3 year old $400-500 unit, he wants to buy four $100-$120 units from 10 years ago.
Obviously he's not planning on doing anything terribly mission critical or demanding with his 'cluster' if its going to be made of $100 notebooks from 10 years ago. Its clearly a toy, for learning/experimentation/fun.
Thus buying the $400-$500 unit and making his toy cluster out of VMs is just as suitable. And probably actually better; as when he's not playing with his cluster, he's got a much stronger laptop to browse the internet with.
-cheers
No. It's 100% CPU, with each VM taking 25%. You can only get as much CPU power out as you put in, and virtualisation doesn't magically generate CPU from air. As the GP said, "virtualisation is not the answer to everything".
And that matters why? if you are doing 'cluster computing research', presumably you are interested in how the cluster works, not how absolutely fast it is. If it runs at 25% what it would run on 4 dedicated machines, how often does that matter?
And even if you if DO care how absolutely fast it is, throwing one modern 1GHz CPU at 4VMs is still going to outperform 4 190MHz CPUs from the 90s, which is what the OP is suggesting having a preference for.
As the GP said, "virtualisation is not the answer to everything".
That's true. but nobody has made a good case for why it isn't an acceptable answer for THIS.
The operating system is a component of the computer, just like the processor, video card, sound card, network card, monitor, keyboard, mouse, ...
Defining the difference between 'illegal' tying and bundling is a complicated affair. You can't simply wave it away by saying, "I can't order a car without sparkplugs, how is this any different."
Suffice it to say that there is not simple litmus test for tying vs bundling, and often 'its legal bundling' until someone takes it to court and the court decides 'it illegal tying'.
But if you look at the checklist of characteristics... if *any* of these apply to the bundle:
'its regarded as not being in the publics interest'
'the products are not naturally related'
'products are tied by contract'
It may be illegal tying.
Clearly here the products are naturally related so that's not the issue. However, both the public interest and the contract might apply...
Windows comes with an EULA, your processor doesn't. When you buy a computer with windows 'bundled', you enter into a contract with Microsoft. This is coercive because you receive a non-transferable license that is bound to that physical computer, upon which the non-removable OEM license sticker is affixed. You can elect not to use Windows... but you are still contractually prevented from unbundling them and using the license on a different machine, or giving it away or selling it off the Windows license. (Yes, people do it all the time, but that's beside the point.) None of the other components have this contractual obligation -- you can unbundle and re-sell your processor anytime you like to whomever you want.
2ndly, the 'public interest part crops up'. If Staples starts bundling bic pens with its staplers brand paper - nobody's going to blink -- The office supply market is competitive -- You can easily buy other brands of paper without bic pens. Bic isn't a convicted monopolist. Bic isn't charging Staples a premium for its pens if they don't bundle them with every ream of paper, and Bic isn't putting Staples at a significant disadvantage relative to other office supply vendors if they don't bundle them.
Microsoft is ALL of those. The OS market is not exactly competitive. MS is a convicted monopololist. You cannot easily buy brand name computers without Windows. Microsoft contracts have forced OEMs into bundling the system or face higher pricing, and that will put them at a serious disadvantage relative to other OEMs.
Thus it may not be in the public interest to allow this.
Okay, fair enough. Not presenting the EULA until after purchase is a bit sneaky, even if it is common practice. But in this case, since the customer didn't buy the OS itself, wouldn't "return for a refund" be referring to the whole PC?
No. In this case, probably to avoid charges of illegal tying, the deal was *specifically* that you could, at your option, return Microsoft Windows for a refund. However the refund was oddly low, and you had to ship the computer to them and back at your expense with no idea how long it might take, to excercise this 'option'.
The court agreed that this 'refund offer' was deliberately unfair, and designed to prevent the purchaser from exercising it. You can say, caveat emptor, with respect to the customer not looking at what the refund offer was exactly before buying the PC... but by simply having such an unfair refund offer, its effect at mitigating the charge of illegal tying was nullified.
Sort of like saying "If you buy the car you are obligated to buy Chevron gas. Oh, no we're not tying, we do have an option for not buying Chevron gas too that you can exercise after buying the car, at no charge to exercise." And then after buying it, you discover that to get out of buying only Chevron gas you have to send sending the car back to the factory in Mexico, by train, at your expense, both ways. And their technicians will set the switch that will allow it take non-Chevron gas... this process takes around 1 hour but the factory could take up to a year to turn around your order... they're pretty busy ya know."
A court would reasonably conclude that they were still tieing, even though they provided a so-called escape option.
If marketers can figure out how to get the right message across to the right people at the right time, its pretty much a win-win for everyone.
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
As a marketer of profoundly useless products, that generally barely work, and are universally of low quality, I would like to know which people are the biggest suckers and what time they are most vulnerable to making a purchase of one of my many products.
I make items such as tiger wards, rocks with googly eyes, q-ray bracelets, nordic-trac exercise equipment, gold-making guides for mmorpgs that I copied from web posts and the manual, sea monkeys, evidence eliminator software for your PC, and many other fine products I'm sure you've seen in countless ads. Frankly I'm amazed I sell any at all. But thanks to the miracles of marketing, I am able to connect with people who need these products. People looking to trade their hard earned cash...aw hell, some of them even put it on already racked up credit cards and go into debt for this stuff, that's how badly they need it!!
I couldn't agree more that further imroving the my sales is win-win for everyone.
the grub gui, if its actually any good will eventually get installed on my desktop linux machines...
... another rss solution? ooxml for abiword? bragging rights for game I've never heard of? Theming support for Pidgin? VLC for Windows CE? I can gaurantee you that I'm not going to EVER go out of my way to install ANY of that crud.
The rest of the crud the article mentioned? Wow... what a completely uninspiring and underwhelming list.
Oooh
Not that I have a problem with people working on its... its their time. But none of this is remotely 'must have' software.
If they think he has an unfair advantage, why don't they get their legs amputated, too?
What if they do? What if it that becomes what it takes to win? The olympics is already a freakshow... but it could descend much much further... we could attach flipper feet to swimmers, and implant gills designed to breath in chlorinated pools...
At what point do we draw the line?
And if we don't draw a line and let the olympics devolve into a league for pharma-cyborg-supermen, can we start up a new 'new olympics' for natural human beings?? Because I'd find that more interesting.
Which is why the war with Russia was cold, not hot. Russia was a serious and credible threat to the United States and vice versa. So they were worth the trouble not to get into it with them.
You can almost gauge how much of a threat a nation is by a nations unwillingness to engage it in a hot war. Iraq? Afghanistan? We would never have voluntarily gone to full scale war with either if they'd been actually dangerous to the US.
Russia? North Korea? Pakistan? China? Suddenly diplomacy seems the way to go. Go figure.
The United States (sensibly) likes likes to conduct its hot wars at the shallow end of the 'axis of evil'.
What do they really want it for? What sort of adhoc queries do they imagine they need to run?
Odds are they only need access to a couple of tables... I'd consider creating a couple copies of those tables for them, and set it to update daily from the 'real' ones (with just their data of course), and then give them read only access to that. They are happy, and you are happy, hell if its small enough / simple enough, you could trhow up a mySQL or postgresql server somewhere to host 'their' data for them, and they won't even be able to touch your real server.
Not saying this is a good idea or even feasible... but it may be possible to satisfy their request without opening up your database to them.
That's the problem. There is no possible basis of objective comparison which is meaningful.
Strictly speaking your right. In practical terms there are objective comparisons which are meaningful.
You can talk about the quality of the acting, costuming, set design, and so forth with *some* objectivity. You can also talk about the plot itself, in terms of depth, complexity, consistency, novelty, with *some* objectivity.
Contrast "Maximum Overdrive" to "Trucks" for a trivial example.
A review is simply an opinion, which means no more than yours or mine.
The difference is that a professional reviewer is, in theory at least, if he's actually being professional will do his best to judge the movie's merits as objectively as possible according to a set of criteria. Sure 'objectively as possible' is still subjective, and the selection of criteria can also color things, but its not nearly as subjective as some random twit's 'opinion'.
Consider journalism vs. editorial. People can't write anything without imparting bias and subjectivity into it... but a decent journalist is at least trying to be objective. Whereas an editorialist isn't.
Bull. If a movie entertains you, it's good. If it doesn't, it's crappy. There is ONE axis, no more, no less. A movie which is revolutionary or thought-provoking is just providing icing on the cake.
That's just defining good and crappy according to how much you liked it, but ultimately not very useful when talking about movies with anyone else. When a professional critic gives a movies 4 stars its still subjective, but its at least grounded in some basis of objective comparison.
When I read a critics review I want and expect that critical perspective. If I want to know how much YOU liked the movie, I'll ask you.
I enjoy lots of movies that met with 0 critical acclaim, and in most cases I agree with the critics. I still like the movie though.
You're entitled to your (extremely wrong) opinion. The new Star Wars movies were quite good, with the first one being the worst in the saga, the second being somewhere in the middle, and the most recent being easily better than any of the originals.
And you are entitled to your opinion. And I'm glad someone enjoyed them. But they were terrible movies. The acting was wooden, the direction was terrible, the character development was LAUGHABLE.
I mean, my God, it had everything you could ask for from Star Wars. It had cool battle scenes. That's what Star Wars is about!
Except most of them managed to incorporate being meaningless and boring into their amazing visual effects. Half of them simply didn't matter. The only bettle scenes in the entire series that were even slightly compelling were the ones between Obi-Wan and Anakin at the end of the 3rd episode, the sand-people slaughter, and the implied jedi children slaughter... the rest... pointless.
Yoda vs Dooku pointless. Yoda vs Palpatine pointless. Quigon/Obiwan vs Maul -- hell... the whole Maul character was pointless, so killing him was pointless. Mace Windu -- another pointless character. Jango Fett? I guess you could count how it might affect little Boba... but then that's not in this trilogy and lets face it Boba isn't really in the other one either... so Pointless. General Grevious? Completely Pointless character, completely pointless battle. The battle against the pit monsters? Pointless and stupid in a classic James Bond villain sort of way.
As an added bonus, it had an actual (interesting) PLOT
The plot was diarrhea. Most of the stuff they did hinged on the characters behaving in ways that was largely irrational and completely unjustified by what happened previously.
Slasher films have better plots.
It's called "plausible deniability."
The trouble is if you need plausible deniabiliy, its already gone farther than we'd have liked.
We want to avoid raising suspicions and being asked about our stash of encrypted files in the first place.
And just because I have TrueCrypt installed doesn't mean I even have an encrypted volume at all! It could be for reading that encrypted USB drive I didn't bring to the airport.
That may well be. But that isn't going to stop customs from having their suspicions raised and seizing the laptop for further investigation.
The trouble is that using truecrypt likely RAISES the likelihood of customs getting suspicious in the first place. Like wearing an empty holster raises the likelihood that you've stashed a gun. Sure you might have left the gun at home... you might not even have a gun... but the presence of a holster is suspicious.
Most travellers don't wish to be hassled by customs in the first place. They want customs give their laptop a look and not have it set off any red flags. A big icon saying "I may or may not have something encrypted on here that you'll never break and I can deny having" is precisely the sort of thing that would raise suspicion.
Truecrypt protects your privacy once you are in an interrogation room and your laptop is seized and customs is demanding passwords, and generally making your life hell. And that's great. But what if truecrypt is part of the reason you are in the interrogation room in the first place?
For most of us, it would be better to trade 'plausible deniability' for 'decreased suspiciousness'. For those few who are genuinely moving illegal data then yes, 'plausible deniability' at the expense of 'decreased suspiciousness' is probably worth it.
The people who write those reviews are almost always elitist movie snobs, who are missing the point that it's a *movie*, not high art.
They aren't missing the point. You are. There's only so much information you can pack into a 'star rating'
Movie Critics are rating movies by how good they are on a multitude of levels. A 4 star movie has to be entertaining, interesting, thought provoking, well written, well directed, well acted, etc, etc, etc.
The Phantom Menace might hit the entertaining button but its a dismal fail on most other criteria. Its poorly acted, poorly written, poorly directed...
People go to the movies to be entertained for 2 hours. A simple popcorn-muncher is sometimes all you really want.
You are practically admitting it right here, that you KNOW and AGREE they are crappy movies!! But you like watching them anyway. That's fine... I do too... a one or two star rating doesn't mean you won't enjoy the movie and shouldn't go see it, but rather you shouldn't expect it be a 'Godfather II'.
I'm personally looking forward to the new Indy.
Me too. However I'm now expecting it to be 'summer popcorn fun' not 'groundbreaking brilliant'. (Which if you'd seen the previous 3, 'summer popcorn fun' is really what you should have been expecting all along.)
The other thing that ruins reviews like this is a fanboy gets his crush on, and waits in anticipation for 10-20 years, and has all these grandiose ideas of what the movie should or shouldn't look/feel/smell like, and then there's no possible way for the movie to live up to that much internal-hype.
To a point, but I don't think it affects the movie's rating overall as much as all that. The last crusade came out in 89. Anyone under 25 is pretty much immune to that effect and will see the movie for its own merit. A lot of people under 30 haven't even seen the first 3.
That's what happened with the new Star Wars trilogy (although Jar-Jar made me want to stab Lucas in the throat...)
No. The new Star Wars was just shit. The originals were defining movies for a generation. Most kids today have already forgotten the new trilogy. They had no pent up expectations, and they still couldn't care less about them. Face it, they just weren't that good.
None of the new star wars movies made the imdb top 250. All 3 of the Lord of the Rings movies made the top 30. Both trilogies had MASSIVE fanboy followings and pent up expectations and both movies faced the wrath of the screaming fanboys. But at the end of it all Star Wars competely sucked. LotR didn't. It's just that simple.
So first, they would have to know you even have something encrypted (which is just a guess if they see TrueCrypt installed). Then they'd have to know what/which files was/were encrypted (which can't be determined by examining the file). Then they'd have to ask you to mount the volume and provide the password (at which time you then provide the shadow volume password, which only contains innocuous files).
...Oh wait...
Yes, because there's no way customs people could know that truecrypt supports shadow volumes and two passwords.
So what happens if they note you are using truecrypt and ask for both passwords?
I can't be the only dummy to figure that out.
You are correct. Even customs can figure that out.
That's a good idea, but in my experience I'm not always able to use VPNs or nonstandard TCP ports while I'm using a hotel's internet access.
So use a standard port, like port 80.
It might be prudent to simply upload your sensitive stuff to Google Apps before your flight, work on it locally while you're out of town, and then zap it back up to Apps before you return home.
If its sensitive the last place you should stick it is google apps.
And what makes you so sure its deleted from google apps when you are done with it? They aren't big on deleting anything over there. Sure they might make it so you no longer see it, but delete it? Don't be so sure.