I was able to watch most of ESB after reading your comment. Hmm. Things I liked:
Vader has a better voice than in the first movie.
Yoda, before he admits his identity.
Cloud City and Lando
Luke confonting Vader in the "tunnel of the unconscious".
All the Imperial interiors, with their cold lighting, grates, and cool features on the walls.
"I am your father." Even Luke's acting is good in this scene.
Things I didn't like:
The elevated status of our heroes. "Commander Skywalker" (WTF? One lucky shot does not make you a military officer.) Military dudes taking order from Han Solo. It would have been wiser to show the inevitable tensions between this freewheeling mercenary and the idealistic rebels.
Everything before Luke gets to Yoda-land seems like filler.
Luke's petulant, immature, self-indulgent approach to training with Yoda. I know it's part of his character, but I think it's exaggerated beyond credibility.
The vulgarization of the Force. I see now that it starts in ESB. Where the Force was elegant and subtle in Star Wars, suddenly it's a bunch of comic book tricks like lifting a multi-ton chunk of metal out of a swamp. And suddenly it's emphasized that prowess in these telekinetic stunts comes not from enlightenment but from effort and yearning. We've gone from a zenlike stance to complete anti-zen.
Adding insult to the above injury is the lazy and whining Luke's rapid ascent to the big league of tossing spaceships around. I could accept that after a lifetime of study Ben Kenobi could convince some troopers that those weren't the droids they were looking for. I can't accept that after a crash course in force-ology Luke is now the human dredging machine.
Things I'm ambivalent about:
Vader's efforts to recruit Luke. Maybe he's blinded by love of his son, but you'd think a smart guy like Vader would come up with a better plan.
If you let it go too long, you have a nightmare in/etc/. I think I had 143 files to merge. Mostly, I just blindly hit the keys in the horrible etc-update app and of course made some bad mistakes.
The problem is that this system mixes trivial application defaults with critical host configuration info. It works OK as long as you update frequently.
Nice fable, but I don't buy it. Suppose Microsoft alleges patent infringement in Linux, and demands that Linux distribution stop. You think hundreds of angry geeks are going to sue Microsoft? What would be the basis of their lawsuit? If the lawsuits are baseless, and merely a "legal DOS", they would be dismissed and the plaintiffs would be subject to penalties.
The point is that American companies had a pipe dream of selling into the emerging Chinese market. Anyone sensible saw right away that it would not happen. China will sell to America - they will not buy from America.
You're right - I'm afraid that one got past my BS filter somehow. A quick google did not yield any independent confirmation.
Disney's own explanation is that big corporations need to stay apolitical. In a way, it's a more polite version of the explanation I gave. A big corporation has so many linkages to government that it probably doesn't want to be seen bashing the government.
Simple. One leads the corporate line through the stern chock, ensuring that it is well protected by chafing gear, and makes it fast to the stern deck padeye of the towing corporation. (That padeye rests on heavy foundations which are worked down among the assets of the corporation).
Needless to say, a pelican hook must be placed between the padeye and the corporate line, and an executive of the towing corporation must stand watch with a mallet, prepared to strike loose the pelican hook if the towed corporation gets out of hand.
Afterwards, if the corporate line is of wire rope, it should be overhauled and slushed down with grease.
Incidentally, is Eisener going to reimburse Disney shareholders the $30 million or so that they lost out on due to his refusal to distribute Farenheight 9-11?
The stated reason for dropping the movie was that it would harm Disney's relations with the state of Florida. That could be a lot more serious than $30 million. For example, Disney is always fighting to preserve the autonomy of the Reedy Creek Improvement District, so that they continue to own their own government. Florida intermittently pushes back. If Florida pushes too hard, Disney loses some of its key advantages over Universal Studios and the International Drive cluster, such as the ability to issue themselves building permits.
So Disneyworld is very much at Jeb Bush's mercy. Eisner would be a foolish CEO if he ignored that.
Because I liked the first movie. Accepted the next two. Abhorred the subsequent ones. Resent Lucas's retroactive tampering with the one good movie - calling it "Episode 4" and adding show-off effects that don't fit.
When people try to determine the "facts" of the Star Wars universe, they demean themselves by sifting through this cynically cranked-out junk as if it were penned by Tolkien or Asimov. The people who hacked together these scripts must be laughing their asses off watching fanboys argue about how lightsabers work or whatever. I'm sure the scriptwriters knew less than the average fanboy about such things. They just pulled the script out of their nether regions.
I'm not sure I can communicate this to you, but I don't regard any website as official. I don't think owning the Star Wars IP gives one the right to make authoritative pronouncements, especially since it's clear that George Lucas has lost touch with the original Star Wars vision.
I appreciate hearing your experiences. I think IT departments need to draw a bright line between supported, standard workstations (user does not have root) and self-supported workstations. I, and many other programmers, self-admin our workstations, but we don't expect IT to take responsibility.
The desktop problem you described seems like it could have a similar solution. If the home directories are NFS mounted, maybe set up a web page where users can authenticate and change some settings. One button would "restore my desktop to default configuration". That gives the user the freedom to play around, knowing he can reset without calling IT.
Remember, if the users feel freedom, power and stability, they'll be happy with the IT department and with Linux.
But how can anyone tell, based only on the movie? I guess we're basing it on the novel, but if that changed his name to Chucuba or something we'd assume it was wrong.
I think there is no authoritative source for the spelling of Chewbacca.
Most small business owners I know work their asses off.
I have been a small business owner, and I worked my ass off. But I did not refer to myself as a "working man" during that period. I was a businessman, or entrepreneur.
All this Businesses/Rich People(if they're conservative) are evil crap is so old and so off base, grow up!!
That is not what I said. I said that it's not true that working men will be angry that they have to clean up after vandals. I've been there, and I wasn't angry.
When you call a store owner a "working man" you're pushing it. Look how the phrase was used in the above comment - now substitute "store owner" and it's a bit different.
I might as well call George Bush a student becaues he studies secret CIA reports.
when the working people of the city are pissed off because they have to clean up vandalism
Why would working people be pissed? It's not their property. I've been the guy replacing the stolen/vandalized thing a few times, and it didn't even mildly annoy me. I got paid by the hour. I probably owe many hours of gainful employment to people's larcenous and destructive nature.
That's great, thanks. Now I'm working on turning on the bookmarks toolbar in Galeon - I can turn it on and off in the menu, but it never seems to show up.
Seems that this technology puts too much control in the designer's hands and not enough in the user's. I was pretty happy when the text zoom buttons were added to Mozilla so I could defeat the tiny fonts on some pages. I would still like a rapid way to defeat designer colors so I can read gray on white text more easily.
But flash seems to have taken the user-hostile approach of letting the designer forbid pasting, for example, which sentences people to typing in what they see on the screen.
If your point is that Flash could be used wisely, I accept it. But I hope you understand that when we encounter Flash on the web, and have to interact with it, it usually causes soaring blood pressure.
Having worked in commercial web development for the last several years, I have to accept that there is no "higher purpose" to the web. The web is what clients and servers make it. The laudable goals you cited only make sense to geeks. As William Gibson put it, "The street finds its own uses for things."
Site owners want a site that looks and feels a very specific way. They don't care that this desire is "wrong" by a geek's standard. And they are primarily selling to users who think exactly the same way. Nobody wants to sell to cantankerous geeks - it's not worth it.
If there were a "DMCA bit" that prevented any client from saving or printing the page, I think almost every commercial web site would turn it on. They don't want any of the geek attributes of the web - they simply want a remote GUI.
I think the original poster meant the ability to configure the account to forward all mail to a new address. Say you use gmail for two years and hand out the address widely. Now you want to switch elsewhere. You don't want to lose mail during the transition.
Obviously it's in Google's interest to make the switching cost as high as possible.
Seems like as computer folks get older, their ideas get stinkier. They start luanching blanket criticisms of computing while they're totally out of touch with what's happening.
Bill Joy abandoned vi, stopped doing anything useful, and now runs around complaining about computers. Stallman, who helped bring us GCC and Emacs, is now mostly famous for his beliefs about the phrase "GNU/Linux".
Kay complains that web browsers are not authoring tools. That might have a shred of validity, but:
We've learned that writing a good web browser is hard enough - probably the single hardest thing on a desktop - that other tasks should not be mixed in. Let me pick the best web browser without bundling some mediocre mail client, web authoring tool, etc. The chances of one program being best at everything are slim.
Most of the time a web browser is used to view content that the user is not authorized to edit.
If you want an environment with a low threshold for user contribution, set up a Wiki or a web board.
Kay never mentions Linux or anything else that would show he's come out of his cave in the last ten years. He has an annoying tendency common to these aging geeks - he takes Microsoft as the sum of all modern computing, and then complains how it didn't incorporate his pet ideas.
If I were a purchasing executive, and had just blown a large amount of money on an SL8500, I'd seriously reconsider buying from StorageTek...
I doubt that. Enterprise class customers normally look to the vendor to take responsibility for their product - they're not planning to buy service or mods from some third party. If you buy Sun servers, you're probably going to get all parts and service from Sun. Most of the people who buy tape libraries won't care at all that Storagetek chased away some competitor that was sticking his fingers in their stuff.
Now if you were an executive with the ideas of a slashdotter, you'd be an unsuccessful executive. Instead of picking the best vendor for your employer, you'd be punishing vendors who offended the geeks.
Not that you can really appreciate good output quality in a noisy environment such as a car anyway..
Sure you can. You just need to play the music louder than the background noise. This is easy to do with pop because it has little dynamic range. It would be hard to do with chamber music because that has quiet parts and spectrally sparse parts.
Cars can have great pop playback systems because the position of the listeners' heads is constant and relatively small speakers sound big in the confined space.
How do you know any of this? Are you in the embedded systems business? If a company like ARM was using those tactics, the average slashdotter would never hear about it. Even if you code ARM assembly for a living your probably not in the room when the ARM salesman meets with your CEO.
I'm not saying ARM does this stuff, just that I think we let them off because they don't sell to consumers or general businesses, so we have no idea what they do.
Slashdot Mirror
- Vader has a better voice than in the first movie.
- Yoda, before he admits his identity.
- Cloud City and Lando
- Luke confonting Vader in the "tunnel of the unconscious".
- All the Imperial interiors, with their cold lighting, grates, and cool features on the walls.
- "I am your father." Even Luke's acting is good in this scene.
Things I didn't like:- The elevated status of our heroes. "Commander Skywalker" (WTF? One lucky shot does not make you a military officer.) Military dudes taking order from Han Solo. It would have been wiser to show the inevitable tensions between this freewheeling mercenary and the idealistic rebels.
- Everything before Luke gets to Yoda-land seems like filler.
- Luke's petulant, immature, self-indulgent approach to training with Yoda. I know it's part of his character, but I think it's exaggerated beyond credibility.
- The vulgarization of the Force. I see now that it starts in ESB. Where the Force was elegant and subtle in Star Wars, suddenly it's a bunch of comic book tricks like lifting a multi-ton chunk of metal out of a swamp. And suddenly it's emphasized that prowess in these telekinetic stunts comes not from enlightenment but from effort and yearning. We've gone from a zenlike stance to complete anti-zen.
- Adding insult to the above injury is the lazy and whining Luke's rapid ascent to the big league of tossing spaceships around. I could accept that after a lifetime of study Ben Kenobi could convince some troopers that those weren't the droids they were looking for. I can't accept that after a crash course in force-ology Luke is now the human dredging machine.
Things I'm ambivalent about:If you let it go too long, you have a nightmare in /etc/. I think I had 143 files to merge. Mostly, I just blindly hit the keys in the horrible etc-update app and of course made some bad mistakes.
The problem is that this system mixes trivial application defaults with critical host configuration info. It works OK as long as you update frequently.
Nice fable, but I don't buy it. Suppose Microsoft alleges patent infringement in Linux, and demands that Linux distribution stop. You think hundreds of angry geeks are going to sue Microsoft? What would be the basis of their lawsuit? If the lawsuits are baseless, and merely a "legal DOS", they would be dismissed and the plaintiffs would be subject to penalties.
What other kind of sting do you have in mind?
The point is that American companies had a pipe dream of selling into the emerging Chinese market. Anyone sensible saw right away that it would not happen. China will sell to America - they will not buy from America.
You're right - I'm afraid that one got past my BS filter somehow. A quick google did not yield any independent confirmation.
Disney's own explanation is that big corporations need to stay apolitical. In a way, it's a more polite version of the explanation I gave. A big corporation has so many linkages to government that it probably doesn't want to be seen bashing the government.
Simple. One leads the corporate line through the stern chock, ensuring that it is well protected by chafing gear, and makes it fast to the stern deck padeye of the towing corporation. (That padeye rests on heavy foundations which are worked down among the assets of the corporation).
Needless to say, a pelican hook must be placed between the padeye and the corporate line, and an executive of the towing corporation must stand watch with a mallet, prepared to strike loose the pelican hook if the towed corporation gets out of hand.
Afterwards, if the corporate line is of wire rope, it should be overhauled and slushed down with grease.
The stated reason for dropping the movie was that it would harm Disney's relations with the state of Florida. That could be a lot more serious than $30 million. For example, Disney is always fighting to preserve the autonomy of the Reedy Creek Improvement District, so that they continue to own their own government. Florida intermittently pushes back. If Florida pushes too hard, Disney loses some of its key advantages over Universal Studios and the International Drive cluster, such as the ability to issue themselves building permits.
So Disneyworld is very much at Jeb Bush's mercy. Eisner would be a foolish CEO if he ignored that.
Because I liked the first movie. Accepted the next two. Abhorred the subsequent ones. Resent Lucas's retroactive tampering with the one good movie - calling it "Episode 4" and adding show-off effects that don't fit.
When people try to determine the "facts" of the Star Wars universe, they demean themselves by sifting through this cynically cranked-out junk as if it were penned by Tolkien or Asimov. The people who hacked together these scripts must be laughing their asses off watching fanboys argue about how lightsabers work or whatever. I'm sure the scriptwriters knew less than the average fanboy about such things. They just pulled the script out of their nether regions.
I agree. As 12 year old, I wanted to be Vader and to kill Luke. But Han Solo was pretty cool.
Vader is a well-done incarnation of the Jungian "evil father" archetype. The ideas flowed from Jung through Joseph Campbell to Lucas.
Watching the movie again ("ep 4") I'm annoyed that Vader's voice is not as deep as I remembered.
I'm not sure I can communicate this to you, but I don't regard any website as official. I don't think owning the Star Wars IP gives one the right to make authoritative pronouncements, especially since it's clear that George Lucas has lost touch with the original Star Wars vision.
I appreciate hearing your experiences. I think IT departments need to draw a bright line between supported, standard workstations (user does not have root) and self-supported workstations. I, and many other programmers, self-admin our workstations, but we don't expect IT to take responsibility.
The desktop problem you described seems like it could have a similar solution. If the home directories are NFS mounted, maybe set up a web page where users can authenticate and change some settings. One button would "restore my desktop to default configuration". That gives the user the freedom to play around, knowing he can reset without calling IT.
Remember, if the users feel freedom, power and stability, they'll be happy with the IT department and with Linux.
But how can anyone tell, based only on the movie? I guess we're basing it on the novel, but if that changed his name to Chucuba or something we'd assume it was wrong.
I think there is no authoritative source for the spelling of Chewbacca.
That is not what I said. I said that it's not true that working men will be angry that they have to clean up after vandals. I've been there, and I wasn't angry.
When you call a store owner a "working man" you're pushing it. Look how the phrase was used in the above comment - now substitute "store owner" and it's a bit different.
I might as well call George Bush a student becaues he studies secret CIA reports.
Why would working people be pissed? It's not their property. I've been the guy replacing the stolen/vandalized thing a few times, and it didn't even mildly annoy me. I got paid by the hour. I probably owe many hours of gainful employment to people's larcenous and destructive nature.
On what box? On the Tivo? How would it end up there?
That's great, thanks. Now I'm working on turning on the bookmarks toolbar in Galeon - I can turn it on and off in the menu, but it never seems to show up.
Seems that this technology puts too much control in the designer's hands and not enough in the user's. I was pretty happy when the text zoom buttons were added to Mozilla so I could defeat the tiny fonts on some pages. I would still like a rapid way to defeat designer colors so I can read gray on white text more easily.
But flash seems to have taken the user-hostile approach of letting the designer forbid pasting, for example, which sentences people to typing in what they see on the screen.
If your point is that Flash could be used wisely, I accept it. But I hope you understand that when we encounter Flash on the web, and have to interact with it, it usually causes soaring blood pressure.
Emotionally, I agree. But ...
Having worked in commercial web development for the last several years, I have to accept that there is no "higher purpose" to the web. The web is what clients and servers make it. The laudable goals you cited only make sense to geeks. As William Gibson put it, "The street finds its own uses for things."
Site owners want a site that looks and feels a very specific way. They don't care that this desire is "wrong" by a geek's standard. And they are primarily selling to users who think exactly the same way. Nobody wants to sell to cantankerous geeks - it's not worth it.
If there were a "DMCA bit" that prevented any client from saving or printing the page, I think almost every commercial web site would turn it on. They don't want any of the geek attributes of the web - they simply want a remote GUI.
Posted with Lynx, FWIW.
I think the original poster meant the ability to configure the account to forward all mail to a new address. Say you use gmail for two years and hand out the address widely. Now you want to switch elsewhere. You don't want to lose mail during the transition.
Obviously it's in Google's interest to make the switching cost as high as possible.
Sowell says that he found older software easier to use. His complaint is that too much junk has been crammed into current software.
I totally agree, and it was a major reason I left Windows.
Bill Joy abandoned vi, stopped doing anything useful, and now runs around complaining about computers. Stallman, who helped bring us GCC and Emacs, is now mostly famous for his beliefs about the phrase "GNU/Linux".
Kay complains that web browsers are not authoring tools. That might have a shred of validity, but:
Kay never mentions Linux or anything else that would show he's come out of his cave in the last ten years. He has an annoying tendency common to these aging geeks - he takes Microsoft as the sum of all modern computing, and then complains how it didn't incorporate his pet ideas.
I doubt that. Enterprise class customers normally look to the vendor to take responsibility for their product - they're not planning to buy service or mods from some third party. If you buy Sun servers, you're probably going to get all parts and service from Sun. Most of the people who buy tape libraries won't care at all that Storagetek chased away some competitor that was sticking his fingers in their stuff.
Now if you were an executive with the ideas of a slashdotter, you'd be an unsuccessful executive. Instead of picking the best vendor for your employer, you'd be punishing vendors who offended the geeks.
Sure you can. You just need to play the music louder than the background noise. This is easy to do with pop because it has little dynamic range. It would be hard to do with chamber music because that has quiet parts and spectrally sparse parts.
Cars can have great pop playback systems because the position of the listeners' heads is constant and relatively small speakers sound big in the confined space.
How do you know any of this? Are you in the embedded systems business? If a company like ARM was using those tactics, the average slashdotter would never hear about it. Even if you code ARM assembly for a living your probably not in the room when the ARM salesman meets with your CEO.
I'm not saying ARM does this stuff, just that I think we let them off because they don't sell to consumers or general businesses, so we have no idea what they do.