Thanks to the forward-thinking folks at NewHew, many of us have been artificially tetrachromatic for some time now... The fourth, newly discovered primary color is called "Squant" and you can find out more about it at http://www.negativland.com/squant/index.html. Unfortunately the plugin is not available for Linux, yet.
I agree with Katz. I think you make just as important a statement when you don't vote as when you do. You're saying, in no uncertain terms, the system we are working with now doesn't work. Kind of like how Linux pundits deal with the rest of the world.
No, the equivalent to not voting would be not to use a computer at all -- or if you do use one, to use whatever OS it came bundled with.
Look, if you want to show how disgruntled you are with the system, do this -- go out and vote on every issue on the ballot *except* the Presidential race. Better yet, write yourself in for president. Heck, for that matter, vote for Buchanan and make your point through sarcasm...
I would suggest recondering the process we've become indebted to. Maybe if we downplay it enough, it will eventually change.
This is pure blindness. That process you're "downplaying" works just great for a whole lot of people. It's doing a bang-up job for Occidental Petroleum and Lockheed-Martin. For that matter, the process works pretty good for your voting grandmother -- one way or another, you can be pretty sure those pols are going to find some way to rescue Medicare and Social Security... And as much as I hate to agree with Libertarians, it's common sense that they'll do it on the backs of the non-voting majority. The idea that if you ignore the goverment it might go away isn't just naive, it's insane.
I would say that the difference is that modern comedy shows do the following:
1) Their references are necessary - if you don't get the reference, you don't get the joke
Not necessarily -- while the Simpsons' "Planet of the Apes" musical was obviously funnier if you'd actually seen the movie, it was pretty funny all on its lonesome as well.
2) The references of older shows are to a wider, or common pool of knowledge among everyone. If not, they are subtle, and not necessary
But this has been around forever... Monty Python made references to other BBC programs and British personalities an American audience -- or even a young British audience today -- would be perfectly unaware of. Not just subtle ones, either -- there are entire running gags or sketches that pretty much depend on the audience knowing about Britishisms like TV licence fees or early-70s-isms like hippie squatters. Likewise with old radio comedies -- these things are teeming with inside jokes that don't make sense if you're not aware of the styles and personalities of *other* radio shows -- especially stuff like Bob&Ray which was almost entirely parodies of standard radio fare like "Suspense" or "Johnny Dollar"...
3) Modern shows make references about other Modern shows and 'fads', which older shows just didn't
Check out war-era Warner Bros. cartoons -- or for that matter all those Tex Avery 'toons with zoot suits and swing music...
4)In modern shows these references are rammed down you're throat all the time. They seem to be the entire point of the show at times (cf The Simpsons)
That should be "your", not "you're".
I think rather, the point is that while in previous eras it could be safely assumed that everyone in your audience shared certain cultural touchstones -- everybody watched the same 3 channels, listened to Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby, and knew who Mussolini was. But nowadays, the culture pool is astoundingly huge and diverse. There's very little stuff left that *everybody* can be assumed to catch, and what little there is has been comedically strip-mined to the point of exhaustion.
Of course, the Simpsons has always been about the mildly obscure pop culture reference -- certainly it's the first cartoon I can recall seeing references to "Patton" in, much less "The Omega Man". But I don't think it's solely about trying to flaunt the writers' erudition -- Groening referred to the references as "time bombs"... The younger members of the audience may not get the whole joke right away, but some day when they come across the source material, there'll be a flash of recognition and they'll say "Oh! So *that's* what that was all about. I wonder how much more of this kind of cool stuff is out there?"
In short, I find the description and importance of his constants as described in the article highly questionable and of the same caliber as 'creation science'. Perhaps the article is simply of low quality - if so, Rees should correct them. But as it stands, it is nothing more than 'pop science' and has little value in my opinion.
Hear, hear...
This sort of fussing about with "if number X had only been a bit smaller, or larger, the universe could not exist!" always struck me as a bit wanky. Do mathematicians tear their hair out because if pi were a little larger, or smaller, we couldn't have circles? Of course not... These numbers are man-made observations about something deeper -- the underlying structure of the universe. The fact that there is a precise balance between the mass of a hydrogen atom and its component particles is no more mysterious than the fact that there is a precise ratio between a circle's diameter and circumference.
I think that this is really a side effect of the operation of human perception -- we mentally impose an orderly structure on the universe so that we can better understand it, and then fret ourselves to death asking where that order came from...
The explanation lies in the fact that the human eye can only see X frames per second. If I remember correctly, it is somewhere in the neighborhood of 40-60. So once you get above that range, your eyes/brain can't tell much (if any) of a difference from increased framerates.
IANANeurologist, but, I seem to recall some kinda fringe-sciencey research on increased framerates in film that suggested that higher framerates make a stronger impression on the brain -- they seem more real to the viewer, are more likely to be remembered or to influence his/her thinking. You may not be able to tell the difference between 60 and 80 fps at first glance, but subconsciously, there is an impression. The military was even rumored to be thinking of using faster-than-normal framerates in their training films.
This makes sense to me -- for one thing, whatever framerate the eye allegedly runs at, I doubt it does so with atomic-clock precision. Even if you're only seeing at 40 frames per second, you're not seeing precisely one frame every 40th/second. Framerates that double your rate of perception will seem clearer because there's less of a chance of your nervous system detecting the flicker between frames or other subtleties that betray that what you're seeing is not real.
Also, The nervous system may very well be able to register hundreds of images per second in moments of high stress -- many people in life-threatening situation later recall a sensation of time slowing down, and suddenly registering an outrageous level of detail with surprising clarity. While a heated game of Quake 3 doesn't necessarily qualify as life-threatening, a faster framerate may be better at fooling a brain in a high state of excitement -- it may even help stimulate the brain in and of itself.
Why First Person Shooters Beat Text Adventure Games
The article doesn't mention text games except obliquely -- the adventure games they're talking about are pixel-hunt games like King's Quest or Myst. Besides, OMM's article is not so much an indictment of adventure games as a parody of an earlier Gamecenter article which loudly proclaimed the death of the genre. (As OMM themselves point out, they've apparently been dying for 15 years or so now, so I think it's a bit late to be getting hysterical about it.) The bulk of the article is devoted to making fun of Gabriel Knight 3, a 3D adventure game cited by Gamecenter as the "last title of note in the genre."
"Old Man Murray has this commentary on why the adventure game genre lost out to titles like Doom, Quake,
Get with the decade. The adventure game genre is losing out to games like Half-Life, Deus Ex, Counterstrike and Soldier of Fortune -- games which present a relatively open, dynamic world for the player to explore (and blow up). They're also losing out to games like "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire", but that's a whole other story.
and why players would "rather run around in short shorts raiding tombs than experience real stories..."
Odd that the quote you chose isn't from the article you're linking to, but the Gamecenter article they're making fun of. Also odd that you chose what is arguably the unfunniest sentence on the entire page.
also provides an interesting look into the eyes of an adventure game writer."
I think you mean "through", not "into". Unless you thought there was a retinal scan mentioned somewhere in the article. Anyways, it doesn't provide a look through, into, or even in the general direction of anybody's eyes. It *does* provide a comprehensive list of the writer's Adventure Fan credentials ("My entire wardrobe consisted of five matching Gymboree Aspen Adventure Swing Top and Beret suits... The only philosophies I accepted were those of Age of Adventure thinkers such as Erasmus and Kepler") and a hilarious breakdown of the logic behind a GK3 puzzle ("Maybe Jane Jensen was too busy reading difficult books by Pär Lagerkvist to catch what stupid Quake players learned from watching the A-Team: The first step in making a costume to fool people into thinking you're a man without a moustache, is not to construct a fake moustache.")
All hysterics aside, the problem with adventure games is that they're difficult to do well. It's fairly rare that you find an adventure game that *doesn't* feel horribly stilted and limiting -- that "on-rails" feeling that RPGs and FPS have been moving away from for their entire history. After playing Opposing Force or Deus Ex, it seems ridiculous to a player that there should be exactly one, usually absurdly complex solution to a simple problem. A good adventure game must present a story that's so compelling that you *want* to progress, and present puzzles which are challenging without being absurd. (Or, like "Sam & Max Hit The Road" or the infamous Babel Fish puzzle from HHGTTG, revel in that absurdity and make it part of the joy of the game). It's so much easier to write a fun, fast-paced shooter than a smart, enthralling adventure game that it's no surprise there's more of the one than the other.
Anyways, there have already been several FPSes that included fairly advanced puzzle-solving -- Half-Life and, to a slightly greater extent HL:Opposing Force had quite a few puzzles to go with the gruesome slaughter. MDK2 was third-person, but managed to be a pretty good hybrid of puzzler, shooter and 3d platform game. Messiah was supposed to be a sort of shooter/adventure hybrid, but it turned out the biggest puzzle was getting it to run for more than a minute without crashing. And, of course, there's the "thinking man's shooter" games System Shock 1&2 and Deus Ex. They're no Grim Fandango, to be sure, but there's a lot more to FPSes these days than rocket launchers and blue keys.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but as I understand it, the basic idea here is not a big tower poking *up*, but rather a geosynchronous satellite running a long, hefty cable *down* to somewhere inside the earth's atmosphere that can be reached by more-or-less conventional means.
So, why try and get all the way down to the ground? Just have the terminus be a big hanging heliport somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. Something high enough to be above most storm systems, but reachable by something not much more outlandish than an SR-71.
Of course, the leaps of engineering required to build a structure like the space elevator are entirely over my head, so I'm just kind of assuming that if you can build an elevator that reaches all the way from LEO to the ground, you must be able to build one that reaches halfway...
Also, wouldn't you be able to recover some of the energy cost when you bring the elevator back down (regenerative braking) ?
Also, how about the energy generation possibilities of a vary long cable moving through a magnetic field...
Not to mention the 12 hrs a day of high-powered solar energy you could collect from outside the atmosphere, or the simple expedient of sticking a nuclear reactor in the thing. Efficiency isn't really the key, per se -- rocket fuel is (to my understanding) already very efficient, as combustibles go. The key is that you don't have to carry the mass of that fuel any more -- that is, you no longer have to spend the energy hauling from 0-100km the fuelmass you need to get from 100-200. See?
And, energy-expenditure-wise, low earth orbit is halfway to anywhere in the solar system. A system like the space elevator (or some other cheap route to LEO) would make travel to Mars or Europa considerably simpler. Haul the ship up the elevator in bits, strap on a couple tanks of conventional fuel, maybe an ion engine or three, and off you go. By reducing the cost per kg to orbit, large-scale interplanetary spacecraft become a much more realistic possibility.
Re:While I'm not the first to say it...
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Lawsuits Suck
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With regards to lobbyists: if the politicians weren't given so much control and influence over the economy, there wouldn't be so many lobbying groups trying to convince them to favor one company or industry over another one.
[...]
I think the answer is to take the power away from those in office and give it back to the people.
So that the folks with money can just rule us directly, instead of having to go to the bother of buying corrupt legislators? This makes no sense. You may want to look into the history of the phrase "power vacuum" and what generally follows one...
The answer, simply, is to *eliminate* lobbying and campaign financing in their current state -- what we have at present is essentially a legalized form of bribery and extortion... Corporations pay off politicians to get their bidding done, and politicians threaten corporations that don't wanna chip in with legislation. (Microsoft, as I'm sure most of you are aware, has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to *both* major-party candidates). I don't know how you go about enacting reforms at this deep a level (a ban on soft money would be a good start -- full funding for all major-party campaigns with no other monetary sources allowed would be another) but I strongly fear for the future of the US if steps in this direction aren't taken soon.
I'm not sure what kind of blind spot it requires to assert that corporations need *less* legislative oversight in a year which has seen rampant stock-market scams, oil industry price-gouging, and the Ford/Firestone massacre. I don't want to come off as a raging communist here -- I'm entirely in favor of making money -- but without the force of law, no corporation (and all-too-few individuals) will hesitate to make a profit at the expense of those with less power.
For those of you who missed this, the "Ben Edlund" who wrote this movie is the same guy who created "The Tick". Given the movie's openly cliche' plot and numerous pop references, I have to wonder if this didn't start out as a Tick-like deadpan satire, only to be brutally misused by Don Bluth and his team of Disney wannabes.
By the way, Katz neglected to mention the godawful soundtrack. Every 15 minutes they stop the movie to play some disposable pop song that directly relates to the plot. It's like at the last possible moment they decided they wanted to try to make it a musical. The characters might as well have put on top hats and done a cheery song-and-dance about asteroid fields.
It's a shame, because a lot of the dialogue and acting is actually quite good. John Leguisamo's toad-like critter who invents terrifying devices in his sleep, and is unable to figure out what they do after awakening should strike a chord for anyone here who's had to rewrite code they haven't looked at for a few months...
I'm thinking an ordinary text adventure just isn't going to play well... Personally, I'd never even try to play Zork on a celphone. Maybe a palmtop or something with decent text entry, but given the chance to spend five minutes fiddling with keypads and knobs so that a tiny LCD screen can ask me "what do you want to hit the troll with?", I believe I'd stick with my Game Boy Color.
One thing I can almost see working is if they can get some recognized authors to write stories for it. Douglas Adams recently attempted a commercial revival of the interactive fiction genre with "Starship Titanic" -- he might be intrigued by the notion of penning interactive short stories for the masses. For that matter, I'd like to see what Neil Stephenson or Terry Pratchett would come up with -- although, if you're planning to make money on this, you'll probably be wanting the big names. If you could offer adventures written by Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton or whoever's on the bestseller list this week, you might just find yourself a market.
A MUD sounds like a good idea, but on the other hand, the connect charges would be outrageous. Besides, the whole attraction of MUDding is that it's basically IRC+roleplaying. People with celphones already have a much more attractive "chat" interface than the keypad...
What *I'd* be trying to do is wrangle up a crowd of dime-romance writers to bang out some trashy bodice-rippers. No major puzzles, just some basic choose-your-own-adventure story forks. Maybe even serialize the thing, trickle it out a chapter at a time, with your choices determining which chapter you'll download next. I strongly suspect the existing crowd of videogamers isn't going to go for this product no matter what the games are like. But if you can somehow hook the Danielle Steele crowd (who, I'm guessing, aren't responsible for too many Resident Evil purchases), you've just found yourself a potentially lucrative niche.
The greatest disappointment I had upon turning 21 was finding out that in real life, going to bars only rarely results in shadowy individuals offering to pay you money to go on adventures.
And when they do, it usually turns out not to be the sort of adventures I had in mind.
The impression I get is, they pumped a light wave into a tunnel of cesium, and the cesium was provoked to spit out a similar, possibly identical wave before the original one had fully entered the tunnel. Somehow, the theory goes, the leading edge of the wave contained all the information necessary to recreate the entire wave. Exotic, but not unbelievable considering some of the other wildly non-intuitive results quantum physics has produced.
So, the wave isn't travelling faster than light, but the information *might* be -- and that's the important bit.
Similar apparently-FTL effects are widely accepted. "Entangled" photons continue to affect each other instantaneously across any spatial gap. The twist has always been that the Uncertainty Principle has ensured that this cannot be used to send information faster than light (although a novel encryption device has been proposed and, I think, built.) This experiment would seem to suggest that there may be loopholes in that law. Personally, I don't think the fact that this experiment seems to violate common sense is any barrier to its being true.
My question has always been, okay, maybe you can't use these FTL effects to actually encode a message in the photons -- but couldn't you detect the presence or absence of the effect to send, say, a message in Morse Code?
Shortly before the Hubble was launched, some science magazine -- I think it was probably "Discover" -- ran a big article about the process of making the main mirror. The article went on about the amazing technology and mind-blowing accuracy of the project. According to the article, if the mirror was blown up to the size of Lake Erie, there wouldn't be a ripple on the surface of more than a centimeter. In fact, they had *exceeded* NASA's accuracy requirements by a considerable amount.
As it later turned out, there was a miscalculation in the system that was responsible for calculating the accuracy of the mirror. In other words, what happened was that the main mirror was built to bad specifications, but followed those specifications *precisely* Two other systems used for testing the mirror had indicated that the mirror was warped, but weren't considered as trustworthy or sensitive as the one that turned out to be broken.
Luckily for NASA, they were able to go back and determine, with micron-level accuracy, the exact flawedness of the mirror. Then, they calculated the exact counter-deformation necessary to fix the Hubble's vision and so pulled off one of the greatest technical and PR coups of their history.
Which just goes to show... something. Anyways, I always thought that was a neat story.
Five elementary-school kids were suspended for *pretending* to play with guns last month. Here's an insightful, if not exactly fact-filled summary:
http://www.seanbaby.com/news/gunkids.htm
Best quote - "If you get someone in trouble for nothing, that's like giving them a Slaughter the School Free Card. You've already been punished for it, you might as well finally kill that kid that puts gum on your chair."
Think that's crazy? How 'bout this one -- Tuesday, a teacher in an Arizona school shot herself in an attempt to make a point about safety at her school:
I believe we've officially reached the point of hysteria, folks.
Incidentally, if there was one argument which I think might have swayed the Pinkerton folks, it would be this: "When some Microsoft millionaire's computer-geek kid gets harassed and branded "dangerous" by his peers and teachers at school because some jackass first-string football player passed on a bogus tip on your system, who, exactly, do you think is going to be first on the list of people getting sued?"
SGI is supposed to be working on C2 certification, which they're hoping to get into the mainstream so that pretty much any distro that wants it can be C2-certified, and also B1 or B2, I forget which (whichever one is legal to export). They are doing this specifically because they have reason to believe they can sell Linux to the DoD.
Unfortunately, I can't find anything confirming this on their site -- this is information I picked up at the recent SGI "Linux University" travelling show. If I recall correctly, and they manage to keep to their projected timetable, we should see the C2 Linux become reality sometime later this year, and Bn in 2001.
I was complaining to a friend the other day that our civilization is still reliant on wheels for transportation - this is *bronze age* technology and we're still totally dependent on the damn things. Why aren't I hovering or jetpacking to work yet? It's the year 2000, for chrissakes!
My friend pointed out that the wheels of today aren't altogether like the ones that graced Assyrian chariots. They're still circles on poles, but advances like pneumatic puncture-proof tires, shock absorbers, independent axles and all the other technologies that surround them have rendered them a very different beast. And while hovercars and personal jets are technologically *possible*, when it gets right down to cost-effectiveness and reliability, nothing yet invented beats wheels.
UNIX is very much the same way. It's old technology, and at its beginnings, there wasn't much to differentiate it from the sledges and log rollers that came before it. But its inherent virtues and inborn flexibility allowed it to grow, to take on and integrate new technologies, and to remain at the base of most of the best technologies out there -- and, in fact, to be the platform on which most innovations take place. It has changed, and it will continue to change, but I'll bet our civilization outgrows wheels before it outgrows UNIX.
Ever watch ER? One of the things I like about the show is they make an effort to include a reasonably high degree of technical accuracy, without totally letting the show get bogged down in trivia. Sure, they use the defib pads and crack open chests a little more often than real-life ER teams do, but generally speaking, what the characters do and say is grounded in the sorts of things that really go on in an emergency room.
Why is it then, that when television shows deal with computer technology, they simply cannot *ever* get it right? Obviously these guys did *some* research -- the parallels to real FPS games and the guest appearance of an adolescent, asian "Thresh"-alike show that somebody involved had skimmed a copy of PC Accelerator at some point -- but what the characters said and did *made no sense*. "He's not waiting for the reset! He's going straight for the kill!" What the *hell* does that mean? Why does the World's Best Gamer's brilliant strategy consist of standing perfectly still and firing a pair of lightweight MGs, then running full-tilt into a darkened room without looking? I didn't even stick around to see how they were going to explain how Hotshot Gamer managed to psychosomatically eject his own head... I switched off the TV and went off to play some Q3 CTF.
In a sense, this guy has some fairly good points -- Linux is not the final product of OS evolution (merely a high point), and Linux is by no means the most user-friendly system out there. However, I find a few flaws in his reasoning.
First of all, his ideal PC appears to be one which never crashes, is perfectly simple to use, and comes pre-installed and pre-configured. In short, his ideal PC isn't a PC at all, it's an *appliance*. I think he'll be seeing loads of computers in the near future that fit his dream exactly -- and plenty that run Linux -- but they won't be desktop systems.
Second, in one of the articles he cites, he mentions several tips to making a crash-proof PC -- run Windows 98 "because Microsoft has been fixing problems in Windows since 1990." (true, but they've also been creating *new* problems for the same amount of time), and "Once your computer is working well, leave it alone. Resist the urge to install the latest hardware options" -- this guy teaches computer science? Every single thing he says goes *precisely* against the grain of the computer geek.
Third, his comments about big companies leaning on the Linux community to produce features faster just doesn't ring true at all. Someone may want to remind him that Linux beat MS to the punch by several years on minor features like, say, 32-bit processing. And for that matter, no company is reliant upon the Linux community to provide the features they need -- they can simply *add* them, or pay someone to do so. (Bounty system, anyone?)
I really just think that his view of Linux and mine don't agree at all. I use Linux as a server because it's cheap and stable, and I use it as a workstation because it's an ideal hacking environment (well, my ideal anyways. No, I haven't tried BeOS yet...) I think as far as Charles C (or the audience he's apparently aiming towards) is concerned, Linux is never going to be the right answer because what they want isn't a PC at all -- they want a Playstation 2 that runs MS Word.
First of all, it didn't score last, SCO Unix did. RH came in third out of four, but the overall point spread was very narrow -- There wasn't even as a two-point difference between the highest scorer and the lowest.
Second of all, part of the score wasn't determined by performance but by things like administration tools. Unix has always been weaker in those areas, and I think will continue to be, because unlike Novell or MS, Unix products aren't built with the management interface in mind. Which is fine with me. I only need two management tools -- bash and vi. Anything else is great if it makes life easier for me, but 90% of the time, just gets in the way.
...On second thought, I think that Sam Raimi is directing Spiderman in a feature movie. [...] There is also about a Bruce Campbell Peter Parker.
CmdrTaco, I'm begging you here, PREVIEW BEFORE POSTING. Read the article aloud or something. These two lines made no sense at all.
As for Sam Raimi directing Spiderman, while I adore Raimi's work, I'm convinced at this point that nothing good can ever come of a Marvel comic adapted for film. Has anyone here ever seen The Punisher or Captain America? Live action Spidey is a no-win situation -- if you play him straight, the inherent ridiculousness of a guy in tights whose powers come from a radioactive spider bite is almost insurmountable. If you play it campy, you've got an unwatchable, embarassing farce, and you alienate all the comic geeks.
Personally, I stopped caring about Marvel comics when they broke up the Defenders and started mass-producing Wise-Cracking Superheroes(TM) by the truckload. I hope that Raimi proves me wrong (if he actually takes the job), but I just don't think that Spiderman, or any of his Marvelous ilk, have the depth of character to actually sustain a film.
We've ordered from Colorcases in the past -- hopefully y'all can benefit from our experience.
First of all, the cases themselves are good, generally well-designed minitower boxes. The metal cases are cut-proof and most are very easy to open. I've lost a lot of blood on computer cases in the past, and these are, by comparison, a joy to work with.
On the other hand, they are *mini* towers, and it gets cramped in there. Two fast SCSI drives is about the limit -- pack any more in and the heat will melt down your system. We had to pack in a pound of extra fans and coolers as it was. Also, depending on your mobo design, you'll have to take half the machine apart to make any changes -- I can't remove an HD or floppy without removing all my memory chips and unplugging most of the internal cables.
Don't count on getting your order in a timely fashion. They appear to have approximately one full-time employee, an overworked and perpetually exhausted-sounding woman who on several occasions was unable to even confirm that we had *placed* an order. As a result, we waited over a month for the 5th case of our order -- which just happened to be my penguin case.
All in all, I'd have to say I'm fairly pleased with the product, but I'm not overenthusiastic about ordering from there again. On the other hand, that penguin case *is* pretty cool...
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks to the forward-thinking folks at NewHew, many of us have been artificially tetrachromatic for some time now... The fourth, newly discovered primary color is called "Squant" and you can find out more about it at http://www.negativland.com/squant/index.html. Unfortunately the plugin is not available for Linux, yet.
Happy Squanting!
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
I agree with Katz. I think you make just as important a statement when you don't vote as when you do. You're saying, in no uncertain terms, the system we are working with now doesn't work. Kind of like how Linux pundits deal with the rest of the world.
No, the equivalent to not voting would be not to use a computer at all -- or if you do use one, to use whatever OS it came bundled with.
Look, if you want to show how disgruntled you are with the system, do this -- go out and vote on every issue on the ballot *except* the Presidential race. Better yet, write yourself in for president. Heck, for that matter, vote for Buchanan and make your point through sarcasm...
I would suggest recondering the process we've become indebted to. Maybe if we downplay it enough, it will eventually change.
This is pure blindness. That process you're "downplaying" works just great for a whole lot of people. It's doing a bang-up job for Occidental Petroleum and Lockheed-Martin. For that matter, the process works pretty good for your voting grandmother -- one way or another, you can be pretty sure those pols are going to find some way to rescue Medicare and Social Security... And as much as I hate to agree with Libertarians, it's common sense that they'll do it on the backs of the non-voting majority. The idea that if you ignore the goverment it might go away isn't just naive, it's insane.
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
I would say that the difference is that modern comedy shows do the following:
1) Their references are necessary - if you don't get the reference, you don't get the joke
Not necessarily -- while the Simpsons' "Planet of the Apes" musical was obviously funnier if you'd actually seen the movie, it was pretty funny all on its lonesome as well.
2) The references of older shows are to a wider, or common pool of knowledge among everyone. If not, they are subtle, and not necessary
But this has been around forever... Monty Python made references to other BBC programs and British personalities an American audience -- or even a young British audience today -- would be perfectly unaware of. Not just subtle ones, either -- there are entire running gags or sketches that pretty much depend on the audience knowing about Britishisms like TV licence fees or early-70s-isms like hippie squatters. Likewise with old radio comedies -- these things are teeming with inside jokes that don't make sense if you're not aware of the styles and personalities of *other* radio shows -- especially stuff like Bob&Ray which was almost entirely parodies of standard radio fare like "Suspense" or "Johnny Dollar"...
3) Modern shows make references about other Modern shows and 'fads', which older shows just didn't
Check out war-era Warner Bros. cartoons -- or for that matter all those Tex Avery 'toons with zoot suits and swing music...
4)In modern shows these references are rammed down you're throat all the time. They seem to be the entire point of the show at times (cf The Simpsons)
That should be "your", not "you're".
I think rather, the point is that while in previous eras it could be safely assumed that everyone in your audience shared certain cultural touchstones -- everybody watched the same 3 channels, listened to Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby, and knew who Mussolini was. But nowadays, the culture pool is astoundingly huge and diverse. There's very little stuff left that *everybody* can be assumed to catch, and what little there is has been comedically strip-mined to the point of exhaustion.
Of course, the Simpsons has always been about the mildly obscure pop culture reference -- certainly it's the first cartoon I can recall seeing references to "Patton" in, much less "The Omega Man". But I don't think it's solely about trying to flaunt the writers' erudition -- Groening referred to the references as "time bombs"... The younger members of the audience may not get the whole joke right away, but some day when they come across the source material, there'll be a flash of recognition and they'll say "Oh! So *that's* what that was all about. I wonder how much more of this kind of cool stuff is out there?"
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
In short, I find the description and importance of his constants as described in the article highly questionable and of the same caliber as 'creation science'. Perhaps the article is simply of low quality - if so, Rees should correct them. But as it stands, it is nothing more than 'pop science' and has little value in my opinion.
Hear, hear...
This sort of fussing about with "if number X had only been a bit smaller, or larger, the universe could not exist!" always struck me as a bit wanky. Do mathematicians tear their hair out because if pi were a little larger, or smaller, we couldn't have circles? Of course not... These numbers are man-made observations about something deeper -- the underlying structure of the universe. The fact that there is a precise balance between the mass of a hydrogen atom and its component particles is no more mysterious than the fact that there is a precise ratio between a circle's diameter and circumference.
I think that this is really a side effect of the operation of human perception -- we mentally impose an orderly structure on the universe so that we can better understand it, and then fret ourselves to death asking where that order came from...
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
The explanation lies in the fact that the human eye can only see X frames per second. If I remember correctly, it is somewhere in the neighborhood of 40-60. So once you get above that range, your eyes/brain can't tell much (if any) of a difference from increased framerates.
IANANeurologist, but, I seem to recall some kinda fringe-sciencey research on increased framerates in film that suggested that higher framerates make a stronger impression on the brain -- they seem more real to the viewer, are more likely to be remembered or to influence his/her thinking. You may not be able to tell the difference between 60 and 80 fps at first glance, but subconsciously, there is an impression. The military was even rumored to be thinking of using faster-than-normal framerates in their training films.
This makes sense to me -- for one thing, whatever framerate the eye allegedly runs at, I doubt it does so with atomic-clock precision. Even if you're only seeing at 40 frames per second, you're not seeing precisely one frame every 40th/second. Framerates that double your rate of perception will seem clearer because there's less of a chance of your nervous system detecting the flicker between frames or other subtleties that betray that what you're seeing is not real.
Also, The nervous system may very well be able to register hundreds of images per second in moments of high stress -- many people in life-threatening situation later recall a sensation of time slowing down, and suddenly registering an outrageous level of detail with surprising clarity. While a heated game of Quake 3 doesn't necessarily qualify as life-threatening, a faster framerate may be better at fooling a brain in a high state of excitement -- it may even help stimulate the brain in and of itself.
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s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
It would be cool if she won -- it would be even cooler if she won and then gave the money *back* to mp3.com.
I'd like to see more artists get in on this -- make it a class action suit.
Just so long as Universal doesn't use this as an excuse to ask for more damages.
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s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
Why First Person Shooters Beat Text Adventure Games
The article doesn't mention text games except obliquely -- the adventure games they're talking about are pixel-hunt games like King's Quest or Myst. Besides, OMM's article is not so much an indictment of adventure games as a parody of an earlier Gamecenter article which loudly proclaimed the death of the genre. (As OMM themselves point out, they've apparently been dying for 15 years or so now, so I think it's a bit late to be getting hysterical about it.) The bulk of the article is devoted to making fun of Gabriel Knight 3, a 3D adventure game cited by Gamecenter as the "last title of note in the genre."
"Old Man Murray has this commentary on why the adventure game genre lost out to titles like Doom, Quake,
Get with the decade. The adventure game genre is losing out to games like Half-Life, Deus Ex, Counterstrike and Soldier of Fortune -- games which present a relatively open, dynamic world for the player to explore (and blow up). They're also losing out to games like "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire", but that's a whole other story.
and why players would "rather run around in short shorts raiding tombs than experience real stories..."
Odd that the quote you chose isn't from the article you're linking to, but the Gamecenter article they're making fun of. Also odd that you chose what is arguably the unfunniest sentence on the entire page.
also provides an interesting look into the eyes of an adventure game writer."
I think you mean "through", not "into". Unless you thought there was a retinal scan mentioned somewhere in the article. Anyways, it doesn't provide a look through, into, or even in the general direction of anybody's eyes. It *does* provide a comprehensive list of the writer's Adventure Fan credentials ("My entire wardrobe consisted of five matching Gymboree Aspen Adventure Swing Top and Beret suits... The only philosophies I accepted were those of Age of Adventure thinkers such as Erasmus and Kepler") and a hilarious breakdown of the logic behind a GK3 puzzle ("Maybe Jane Jensen was too busy reading difficult books by Pär Lagerkvist to catch what stupid Quake players learned from watching the A-Team: The first step in making a costume to fool people into thinking you're a man without a moustache, is not to construct a fake moustache.")
All hysterics aside, the problem with adventure games is that they're difficult to do well. It's fairly rare that you find an adventure game that *doesn't* feel horribly stilted and limiting -- that "on-rails" feeling that RPGs and FPS have been moving away from for their entire history. After playing Opposing Force or Deus Ex, it seems ridiculous to a player that there should be exactly one, usually absurdly complex solution to a simple problem. A good adventure game must present a story that's so compelling that you *want* to progress, and present puzzles which are challenging without being absurd. (Or, like "Sam & Max Hit The Road" or the infamous Babel Fish puzzle from HHGTTG, revel in that absurdity and make it part of the joy of the game). It's so much easier to write a fun, fast-paced shooter than a smart, enthralling adventure game that it's no surprise there's more of the one than the other.
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
Where did you hear that? Their site certainly doesn't mention anything about a cancel... Of course, it also mentions a Fall 2000 release.
I assume you're referring to American McGee's Alice and not some other project.
Anyways, there have already been several FPSes that included fairly advanced puzzle-solving -- Half-Life and, to a slightly greater extent HL:Opposing Force had quite a few puzzles to go with the gruesome slaughter. MDK2 was third-person, but managed to be a pretty good hybrid of puzzler, shooter and 3d platform game. Messiah was supposed to be a sort of shooter/adventure hybrid, but it turned out the biggest puzzle was getting it to run for more than a minute without crashing. And, of course, there's the "thinking man's shooter" games System Shock 1&2 and Deus Ex. They're no Grim Fandango, to be sure, but there's a lot more to FPSes these days than rocket launchers and blue keys.
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
Maybe I'm missing something here, but as I understand it, the basic idea here is not a big tower poking *up*, but rather a geosynchronous satellite running a long, hefty cable *down* to somewhere inside the earth's atmosphere that can be reached by more-or-less conventional means.
So, why try and get all the way down to the ground? Just have the terminus be a big hanging heliport somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. Something high enough to be above most storm systems, but reachable by something not much more outlandish than an SR-71.
Of course, the leaps of engineering required to build a structure like the space elevator are entirely over my head, so I'm just kind of assuming that if you can build an elevator that reaches all the way from LEO to the ground, you must be able to build one that reaches halfway...
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
Also, wouldn't you be able to recover some of the energy cost when you bring the elevator back down (regenerative braking) ?
Also, how about the energy generation possibilities of a vary long cable moving through a magnetic field...
Not to mention the 12 hrs a day of high-powered solar energy you could collect from outside the atmosphere, or the simple expedient of sticking a nuclear reactor in the thing. Efficiency isn't really the key, per se -- rocket fuel is (to my understanding) already very efficient, as combustibles go. The key is that you don't have to carry the mass of that fuel any more -- that is, you no longer have to spend the energy hauling from 0-100km the fuelmass you need to get from 100-200. See?
And, energy-expenditure-wise, low earth orbit is halfway to anywhere in the solar system. A system like the space elevator (or some other cheap route to LEO) would make travel to Mars or Europa considerably simpler. Haul the ship up the elevator in bits, strap on a couple tanks of conventional fuel, maybe an ion engine or three, and off you go. By reducing the cost per kg to orbit, large-scale interplanetary spacecraft become a much more realistic possibility.
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
With regards to lobbyists: if the politicians weren't given so much control and influence over the economy, there wouldn't be so many lobbying groups trying to convince them to favor one company or industry over another one.
[...]
I think the answer is to take the power away from those in office and give it back to the people.
So that the folks with money can just rule us directly, instead of having to go to the bother of buying corrupt legislators? This makes no sense. You may want to look into the history of the phrase "power vacuum" and what generally follows one...
The answer, simply, is to *eliminate* lobbying and campaign financing in their current state -- what we have at present is essentially a legalized form of bribery and extortion... Corporations pay off politicians to get their bidding done, and politicians threaten corporations that don't wanna chip in with legislation. (Microsoft, as I'm sure most of you are aware, has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to *both* major-party candidates). I don't know how you go about enacting reforms at this deep a level (a ban on soft money would be a good start -- full funding for all major-party campaigns with no other monetary sources allowed would be another) but I strongly fear for the future of the US if steps in this direction aren't taken soon.
I'm not sure what kind of blind spot it requires to assert that corporations need *less* legislative oversight in a year which has seen rampant stock-market scams, oil industry price-gouging, and the Ford/Firestone massacre. I don't want to come off as a raging communist here -- I'm entirely in favor of making money -- but without the force of law, no corporation (and all-too-few individuals) will hesitate to make a profit at the expense of those with less power.
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
Worst crossover ever.
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s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
For those of you who missed this, the "Ben Edlund" who wrote this movie is the same guy who created "The Tick". Given the movie's openly cliche' plot and numerous pop references, I have to wonder if this didn't start out as a Tick-like deadpan satire, only to be brutally misused by Don Bluth and his team of Disney wannabes.
By the way, Katz neglected to mention the godawful soundtrack. Every 15 minutes they stop the movie to play some disposable pop song that directly relates to the plot. It's like at the last possible moment they decided they wanted to try to make it a musical. The characters might as well have put on top hats and done a cheery song-and-dance about asteroid fields.
It's a shame, because a lot of the dialogue and acting is actually quite good. John Leguisamo's toad-like critter who invents terrifying devices in his sleep, and is unable to figure out what they do after awakening should strike a chord for anyone here who's had to rewrite code they haven't looked at for a few months...
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
I'm thinking an ordinary text adventure just isn't going to play well... Personally, I'd never even try to play Zork on a celphone. Maybe a palmtop or something with decent text entry, but given the chance to spend five minutes fiddling with keypads and knobs so that a tiny LCD screen can ask me "what do you want to hit the troll with?", I believe I'd stick with my Game Boy Color.
One thing I can almost see working is if they can get some recognized authors to write stories for it. Douglas Adams recently attempted a commercial revival of the interactive fiction genre with "Starship Titanic" -- he might be intrigued by the notion of penning interactive short stories for the masses. For that matter, I'd like to see what Neil Stephenson or Terry Pratchett would come up with -- although, if you're planning to make money on this, you'll probably be wanting the big names. If you could offer adventures written by Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton or whoever's on the bestseller list this week, you might just find yourself a market.
A MUD sounds like a good idea, but on the other hand, the connect charges would be outrageous. Besides, the whole attraction of MUDding is that it's basically IRC+roleplaying. People with celphones already have a much more attractive "chat" interface than the keypad...
What *I'd* be trying to do is wrangle up a crowd of dime-romance writers to bang out some trashy bodice-rippers. No major puzzles, just some basic choose-your-own-adventure story forks. Maybe even serialize the thing, trickle it out a chapter at a time, with your choices determining which chapter you'll download next. I strongly suspect the existing crowd of videogamers isn't going to go for this product no matter what the games are like. But if you can somehow hook the Danielle Steele crowd (who, I'm guessing, aren't responsible for too many Resident Evil purchases), you've just found yourself a potentially lucrative niche.
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s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
The greatest disappointment I had upon turning 21 was finding out that in real life, going to bars only rarely results in shadowy individuals offering to pay you money to go on adventures.
And when they do, it usually turns out not to be the sort of adventures I had in mind.
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s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
The impression I get is, they pumped a light wave into a tunnel of cesium, and the cesium was provoked to spit out a similar, possibly identical wave before the original one had fully entered the tunnel. Somehow, the theory goes, the leading edge of the wave contained all the information necessary to recreate the entire wave. Exotic, but not unbelievable considering some of the other wildly non-intuitive results quantum physics has produced.
So, the wave isn't travelling faster than light, but the information *might* be -- and that's the important bit.
Similar apparently-FTL effects are widely accepted. "Entangled" photons continue to affect each other instantaneously across any spatial gap. The twist has always been that the Uncertainty Principle has ensured that this cannot be used to send information faster than light (although a novel encryption device has been proposed and, I think, built.) This experiment would seem to suggest that there may be loopholes in that law. Personally, I don't think the fact that this experiment seems to violate common sense is any barrier to its being true.
My question has always been, okay, maybe you can't use these FTL effects to actually encode a message in the photons -- but couldn't you detect the presence or absence of the effect to send, say, a message in Morse Code?
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s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
Shortly before the Hubble was launched, some science magazine -- I think it was probably "Discover" -- ran a big article about the process of making the main mirror. The article went on about the amazing technology and mind-blowing accuracy of the project. According to the article, if the mirror was blown up to the size of Lake Erie, there wouldn't be a ripple on the surface of more than a centimeter. In fact, they had *exceeded* NASA's accuracy requirements by a considerable amount.
As it later turned out, there was a miscalculation in the system that was responsible for calculating the accuracy of the mirror. In other words, what happened was that the main mirror was built to bad specifications, but followed those specifications *precisely* Two other systems used for testing the mirror had indicated that the mirror was warped, but weren't considered as trustworthy or sensitive as the one that turned out to be broken.
Luckily for NASA, they were able to go back and determine, with micron-level accuracy, the exact flawedness of the mirror. Then, they calculated the exact counter-deformation necessary to fix the Hubble's vision and so pulled off one of the greatest technical and PR coups of their history.
Which just goes to show... something. Anyways, I always thought that was a neat story.
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s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
Five elementary-school kids were suspended for *pretending* to play with guns last month. Here's an insightful, if not exactly fact-filled summary:
http://www.seanbaby.com/news/gunkids.htm
Best quote - "If you get someone in trouble for nothing, that's like giving them a Slaughter the School Free Card. You've already been punished for it, you might as well finally kill that kid that puts gum on your chair."
Think that's crazy? How 'bout this one -- Tuesday, a teacher in an Arizona school shot herself in an attempt to make a point about safety at her school:
http://dailynews.ya hoo.com/h/ap/20000411/us/teacher_shot_5.html
I believe we've officially reached the point of hysteria, folks.
Incidentally, if there was one argument which I think might have swayed the Pinkerton folks, it would be this: "When some Microsoft millionaire's computer-geek kid gets harassed and branded "dangerous" by his peers and teachers at school because some jackass first-string football player passed on a bogus tip on your system, who, exactly, do you think is going to be first on the list of people getting sued?"
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s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
SGI is supposed to be working on C2 certification, which they're hoping to get into the mainstream so that pretty much any distro that wants it can be C2-certified, and also B1 or B2, I forget which (whichever one is legal to export). They are doing this specifically because they have reason to believe they can sell Linux to the DoD.
Unfortunately, I can't find anything confirming this on their site -- this is information I picked up at the recent SGI "Linux University" travelling show. If I recall correctly, and they manage to keep to their projected timetable, we should see the C2 Linux become reality sometime later this year, and Bn in 2001.
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s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
I was complaining to a friend the other day that our civilization is still reliant on wheels for transportation - this is *bronze age* technology and we're still totally dependent on the damn things. Why aren't I hovering or jetpacking to work yet? It's the year 2000, for chrissakes!
My friend pointed out that the wheels of today aren't altogether like the ones that graced Assyrian chariots. They're still circles on poles, but advances like pneumatic puncture-proof tires, shock absorbers, independent axles and all the other technologies that surround them have rendered them a very different beast. And while hovercars and personal jets are technologically *possible*, when it gets right down to cost-effectiveness and reliability, nothing yet invented beats wheels.
UNIX is very much the same way. It's old technology, and at its beginnings, there wasn't much to differentiate it from the sledges and log rollers that came before it. But its inherent virtues and inborn flexibility allowed it to grow, to take on and integrate new technologies, and to remain at the base of most of the best technologies out there -- and, in fact, to be the platform on which most innovations take place. It has changed, and it will continue to change, but I'll bet our civilization outgrows wheels before it outgrows UNIX.
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
Ever watch ER? One of the things I like about the show is they make an effort to include a reasonably high degree of technical accuracy, without totally letting the show get bogged down in trivia. Sure, they use the defib pads and crack open chests a little more often than real-life ER teams do, but generally speaking, what the characters do and say is grounded in the sorts of things that really go on in an emergency room.
Why is it then, that when television shows deal with computer technology, they simply cannot *ever* get it right? Obviously these guys did *some* research -- the parallels to real FPS games and the guest appearance of an adolescent, asian "Thresh"-alike show that somebody involved had skimmed a copy of PC Accelerator at some point -- but what the characters said and did *made no sense*. "He's not waiting for the reset! He's going straight for the kill!" What the *hell* does that mean? Why does the World's Best Gamer's brilliant strategy consist of standing perfectly still and firing a pair of lightweight MGs, then running full-tilt into a darkened room without looking? I didn't even stick around to see how they were going to explain how Hotshot Gamer managed to psychosomatically eject his own head... I switched off the TV and went off to play some Q3 CTF.
And I got my ass *whupped*, I'll have you know.
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
In a sense, this guy has some fairly good points -- Linux is not the final product of OS evolution (merely a high point), and Linux is by no means the most user-friendly system out there. However, I find a few flaws in his reasoning.
First of all, his ideal PC appears to be one which never crashes, is perfectly simple to use, and comes pre-installed and pre-configured. In short, his ideal PC isn't a PC at all, it's an *appliance*. I think he'll be seeing loads of computers in the near future that fit his dream exactly -- and plenty that run Linux -- but they won't be desktop systems.
Second, in one of the articles he cites, he mentions several tips to making a crash-proof PC -- run Windows 98 "because Microsoft has been fixing problems in Windows since 1990." (true, but they've also been creating *new* problems for the same amount of time), and "Once your computer is working well, leave it alone. Resist the urge to install the latest hardware options" -- this guy teaches computer science? Every single thing he says goes *precisely* against the grain of the computer geek.
Third, his comments about big companies leaning on the Linux community to produce features faster just doesn't ring true at all. Someone may want to remind him that Linux beat MS to the punch by several years on minor features like, say, 32-bit processing. And for that matter, no company is reliant upon the Linux community to provide the features they need -- they can simply *add* them, or pay someone to do so. (Bounty system, anyone?)
I really just think that his view of Linux and mine don't agree at all. I use Linux as a server because it's cheap and stable, and I use it as a workstation because it's an ideal hacking environment (well, my ideal anyways. No, I haven't tried BeOS yet...) I think as far as Charles C (or the audience he's apparently aiming towards) is concerned, Linux is never going to be the right answer because what they want isn't a PC at all -- they want a Playstation 2 that runs MS Word.
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s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
First of all, it didn't score last, SCO Unix did. RH came in third out of four, but the overall point spread was very narrow -- There wasn't even as a two-point difference between the highest scorer and the lowest.
Second of all, part of the score wasn't determined by performance but by things like administration tools. Unix has always been weaker in those areas, and I think will continue to be, because unlike Novell or MS, Unix products aren't built with the management interface in mind. Which is fine with me. I only need two management tools -- bash and vi. Anything else is great if it makes life easier for me, but 90% of the time, just gets in the way.
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
...On second thought, I think that Sam Raimi is directing Spiderman in a feature movie.
[...]
There is also about a Bruce Campbell Peter Parker.
CmdrTaco, I'm begging you here, PREVIEW BEFORE POSTING. Read the article aloud or something. These two lines made no sense at all.
As for Sam Raimi directing Spiderman, while I adore Raimi's work, I'm convinced at this point that nothing good can ever come of a Marvel comic adapted for film. Has anyone here ever seen The Punisher or Captain America? Live action Spidey is a no-win situation -- if you play him straight, the inherent ridiculousness of a guy in tights whose powers come from a radioactive spider bite is almost insurmountable. If you play it campy, you've got an unwatchable, embarassing farce, and you alienate all the comic geeks.
Personally, I stopped caring about Marvel comics when they broke up the Defenders and started mass-producing Wise-Cracking Superheroes(TM) by the truckload. I hope that Raimi proves me wrong (if he actually takes the job), but I just don't think that Spiderman, or any of his Marvelous ilk, have the depth of character to actually sustain a film.
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
We've ordered from Colorcases in the past -- hopefully y'all can benefit from our experience.
First of all, the cases themselves are good, generally well-designed minitower boxes. The metal cases are cut-proof and most are very easy to open. I've lost a lot of blood on computer cases in the past, and these are, by comparison, a joy to work with.
On the other hand, they are *mini* towers, and it gets cramped in there. Two fast SCSI drives is about the limit -- pack any more in and the heat will melt down your system. We had to pack in a pound of extra fans and coolers as it was. Also, depending on your mobo design, you'll have to take half the machine apart to make any changes -- I can't remove an HD or floppy without removing all my memory chips and unplugging most of the internal cables.
Don't count on getting your order in a timely fashion. They appear to have approximately one full-time employee, an overworked and perpetually exhausted-sounding woman who on several occasions was unable to even confirm that we had *placed* an order. As a result, we waited over a month for the 5th case of our order -- which just happened to be my penguin case.
All in all, I'd have to say I'm fairly pleased with the product, but I'm not overenthusiastic about ordering from there again. On the other hand, that penguin case *is* pretty cool...
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perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,