I went to see this film last week, based on other glowing reviews... And 3 or 4 hours later, I staggered out, insulted that I'd wasted $10.50 (including popcorn) on this stinker.
The entire movie in a nutshell: There's this guy who loves making movies. His family think he's never going to finish them (and they're pretty close to right). He's broke. He drinks too much. His friends drink too much. He keeps at it (though the documentary skips entire years at a time, so you have to piece together that he works on it at most one month a year...)
And that's it. By the end, he gets his 30-minute money-making movie done, which is supposed to finance his big drama feature. Woo-hoo.
With someone else, this could have been "heroic", as Katz says, but most of his problems are self-made, and while he's steadily working away at everything, he does it so mind-bendingly slowly that it's no wonder he's still stuck in Milwaukee.
The documentary was poorly edited, disjointed, almost incoherent, and after many tedious hours, just stops.
Now, I like independant movies. I've even liked films about filmmaking before. But this is just a waste of celluloid.
Ah, so you're an Infernal Exploder luser? Congratulations, you're a victim, just like everyone else who subjects themselves to that crap, and especially to ActiveVirus! Did you reformat your HD, at least? What kind of fool admits to using MSIE on/., anyway?
Go on, then, critique my web site. What "horrid" feature of it don't you like:
Valid HTML (admittedly mostly 2.0 and 3.2, which is all I've needed so far - next revision is to go to an XML-based scheme compiled into HTML 4.0 pages).
Accessibility. EVERYTHING is usable with Lynx or any other browser.
Consistent appearance and design.
Readable web pages that don't sear your retinas with green and purple on black-and-blue fractal-pattern backgrounds, like your company's alleged site does.
Actual content, as well as useful off-site links. You have probably never heard this term "content" before, but some of us think it's the entire reason for HAVING a World Wide Web.
Access to the first two levels of the entire site tree from every page, so you can never be trapped at the end of a twisty set of links.
Complete lack of animated GIFs and shockwave plugins, and only one entirely optional javascript toy.
I just checked usage stats for my site - last month, 5152 sites made 9249 visits and received 13219 pages and files (excluding sounds and images). And that's to a PERSONAL HOME PAGE. You didn't even have the balls to link your own page in. What do you get, 1 hit a month?
I looked over at your work site, www.jyster.com, and I feel sorry for any customers you victimize... and I didn't even experience it in its full shockwave suckiness. --- jyster.com ---
[LINK] [EMBED] You need a browser that supports Netscape plugins or ActiveX controls to view this page. if you see a broken puzzle piece above, click here to get the plugin. click here after the Shockwave installer has completed. You do not need to restart your browser. __________________________________________________ _______________
--- 1032 ---
Just shoot your computer, your cow-orkers, and yourself now, and get it over with, for the good of the Web. Yeesh.
Look, an optimistic estimate would be that 99.9% of all web pages suck. That's pretty much a given. Why do they suck? Because people who don't know anything about human interface design, HTML standards, accessibility, and are often color-blind and respond only to blinking lights and shiny objects (thus explaining the popularity of animated GIFs and the BLINK tag).
The U.S. Gov't has recently mandated that all gov't and contractor web pages be accessible, striking a blow for a usable Web.
We should be trying to *RAISE* the level-of-entry training needed to make a web page, not *LOWER* it.
Make 'em use FTP and vi and the W3C specification like real designers do. Ban Sams.Net's alleged books. Make 'em pass a certified site design course *AND* have their pages pass validator.w3.org and Bobby before their page can be viewed by anyone else. Imprison the inventor of animated GIFs.
We can have a decent, readable Web, or we can have point-and-drool "Information Superhighway Publishing Made Easy In 12 Minutes, Unlimited Edition!"
Villainous Micros vs. Noble Mainframes
on
Philosophies of IT
·
· Score: 1
My real problem with this article is that he paints microcomputer engineers and programmers as idiots for using inferior solutions - while completely missing that the more complex solutions just wouldn't have worked on the limited hardware available.
Yes, X has a lot of neat features. But it always has been, and always will be, slower than direct-to-hardware systems, especially for graphics-intensive applications like VR and games (thus svgalib's niche). It wasn't until the early '90s that X became even remotely acceptable on most micro hardware.
Yes, Novell and other LANs are inferior to other networking solutions. That's why TCP/IP has won, now. But at the time, they were the fastest, most reliable, and cheapest way to get a network.
Over and over, he shows a preference for blue-sky solutions rather than what actually works, and works at a fraction of the cost.
He even goes off on local application execution, which is a FAR superior solution in most cases - a big expensive server and xterms are more expensive than a cheap file and database server and a bunch of PCs for the same horsepower.
Take a look at the source to their pages, if you're really masochistic. Aaaugh, could you make something more hideous and bloated if you tried? They serve 69 lines (2.5K) of one actual article in 55K...
Remind me never to go to zdnet again. I'm gonna go vomit repeatedly now for their sins against HTML.
This is a very common practice for them. Over in comp.lang.java.advocacy, take a look at the pro-MS posters' NNTP-Posting-Host header - it's VERY often msn.net (even though nobody else on the planet uses it) or microsoft.com.
They do the same thing in the OS/2 newsgroups. And the Linux newsgroups. And anywhere else they feel threatened.
Redmond. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Go over to www.lyrics.ch and fill out their petition, it takes just a few seconds and shows your support for them. The more people backing it, the better the chance that the music industry will settle in their favor.
Slashdot Mirror
I went to see this film last week, based on other glowing reviews... And 3 or 4 hours later, I staggered out, insulted that I'd wasted $10.50 (including popcorn) on this stinker.
The entire movie in a nutshell: There's this guy who loves making movies. His family think he's never going to finish them (and they're pretty close to right). He's broke. He drinks too much. His friends drink too much. He keeps at it (though the documentary skips entire years at a time, so you have to piece together that he works on it at most one month a year...)
And that's it. By the end, he gets his 30-minute money-making movie done, which is supposed to finance his big drama feature. Woo-hoo.
With someone else, this could have been "heroic", as Katz says, but most of his problems are self-made, and while he's steadily working away at everything, he does it so mind-bendingly slowly that it's no wonder he's still stuck in Milwaukee.
The documentary was poorly edited, disjointed, almost incoherent, and after many tedious hours, just stops.
Now, I like independant movies. I've even liked films about filmmaking before. But this is just a waste of celluloid.
-Blank Mark
Ah, so you're an Infernal Exploder luser? Congratulations, you're a victim, just like everyone else who subjects themselves to that crap, and especially to ActiveVirus! Did you reformat your HD, at least? What kind of fool admits to using MSIE on /., anyway?
Go on, then, critique my web site. What "horrid" feature of it don't you like:
I just checked usage stats for my site - last month, 5152 sites made 9249 visits and received 13219 pages and files (excluding sounds and images). And that's to a PERSONAL HOME PAGE. You didn't even have the balls to link your own page in. What do you get, 1 hit a month?
I looked over at your work site, www.jyster.com, and I feel sorry for any customers you victimize... and I didn't even experience it in its full shockwave suckiness.
_ _______________
--- jyster.com ---
[LINK]
[EMBED] You need a browser that supports Netscape plugins or ActiveX
controls to view this page.
if you see a broken puzzle piece above, click here to get the plugin.
click here after the Shockwave installer has completed. You do not
need to restart your browser.
_________________________________________________
--- 1032 ---
Just shoot your computer, your cow-orkers, and yourself now, and get it over with, for the good of the Web. Yeesh.
Look, an optimistic estimate would be that 99.9% of all web pages suck. That's pretty much a given. Why do they suck? Because people who don't know anything about human interface design, HTML standards, accessibility, and are often color-blind and respond only to blinking lights and shiny objects (thus explaining the popularity of animated GIFs and the BLINK tag).
The U.S. Gov't has recently mandated that all gov't and contractor web pages be accessible, striking a blow for a usable Web.
We should be trying to *RAISE* the level-of-entry training needed to make a web page, not *LOWER* it.
Make 'em use FTP and vi and the W3C specification like real designers do. Ban Sams.Net's alleged books. Make 'em pass a certified site design course *AND* have their pages pass validator.w3.org and Bobby before their page can be viewed by anyone else. Imprison the inventor of animated GIFs.
We can have a decent, readable Web, or we can have point-and-drool "Information Superhighway Publishing Made Easy In 12 Minutes, Unlimited Edition!"
My real problem with this article is that he paints microcomputer engineers and programmers as idiots for using inferior solutions - while completely missing that the more complex solutions just wouldn't have worked on the limited hardware available.
Yes, X has a lot of neat features. But it always has been, and always will be, slower than direct-to-hardware systems, especially for graphics-intensive applications like VR and games (thus svgalib's niche). It wasn't until the early '90s that X became even remotely acceptable on most micro hardware.
Yes, Novell and other LANs are inferior to other networking solutions. That's why TCP/IP has won, now. But at the time, they were the fastest, most reliable, and cheapest way to get a network.
Over and over, he shows a preference for blue-sky solutions rather than what actually works, and works at a fraction of the cost.
He even goes off on local application execution, which is a FAR superior solution in most cases - a big expensive server and xterms are more expensive than a cheap file and database server and a bunch of PCs for the same horsepower.
He needs to get out and get a real job.
This is the coolest, Rob. It's FAST (with my pipe, rendering used to take longer than downloading)! It's easy on the eyes!
Keep up the good work, mon.
This is off-topic as such, but...
Take a look at the source to their pages, if you're really masochistic. Aaaugh, could you make something more hideous and bloated if you tried? They serve 69 lines (2.5K) of one actual article in 55K...
Remind me never to go to zdnet again. I'm gonna go vomit repeatedly now for their sins against HTML.
This is a very common practice for them. Over in comp.lang.java.advocacy, take a look at the pro-MS posters' NNTP-Posting-Host header - it's VERY often msn.net (even though nobody else on the planet uses it) or microsoft.com.
They do the same thing in the OS/2 newsgroups. And the Linux newsgroups. And anywhere else they feel threatened.
Redmond. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Go over to www.lyrics.ch and fill out their
petition, it takes just a few seconds and shows
your support for them. The more people backing it, the better the chance that the music industry
will settle in their favor.
Heh. Ever notice that the only Microsoft fans in these flamewars are Anonymous Cowards?
Say, Rob, suppose you could pull out the hostname logs for them? I want to see just how many come from microsoft.com...
Over on Dogman's page, I also found: http://www.europa.com/~dogman/motivation/ .
These rule. And the "I found the cure for hope" t-shirt is too cool...