Alien is one of the greatest horror movies ever made. Aliens is one of the greatest action movies ever made. Despite being in the same franchise, they're different genres. (As you've touched on.) If you were judging Aliens as a horror movie, then of course it won't add up (horror-wise)-- it's not supposed to. Similarly, if you judged Alien as an action movie, you'd consider it a snore.
Unless of course the person in question is a *known* paid anti-odf shill from Microsoft. As in this case.
Proooooof?
People say this on Slashdot all the time. I've been personally accused of being a paid shill for Microsoft dozens of times. (For the record, I'm not. If you know how I can get money to post my opinions, though, please let me in on it.) I think it's all bullshit. Nobody's even been able to prove anything.
You didn't like The Emperor's New Groove? Have you seen it, it's fucking hilarious? I notice you also left Lilo and Stitch off your list, one of the best (easily in the top 5) animated movies of the last decade.
It's good weird. So is Emperor's New Groove. That's why I used those two of examples of good "recent" (for certain values of "recent") Disney movies.
That scene in Emperor's New Groove where they completely lose the movie and zoom in to a random monkey sitting on a random branch always makes me crack up. Also this part: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhOrxkGlLDM Bring it on.
They were heavy attempts to replay the same old formula that had gone stale. Oh, and they're trying to release yet another movie in the same exact formula, but with a non-white princess?
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hunchback was not a typical Disney "Princess" movie, although I admit that it shared more elements than it probably should have, considering the subject matter. It also is probably the only Disney movie to include a passionate song about rape: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRO-M4XyAbM
Notes 6.5.1 (the last version I have extensive experience with) did not come out a decade ago. It came out in 2004, and it a gigantic piece of crap. The only thing good I can say about it is that it *finally* worked correctly on NT with multiple users-- only 10 full years after every other piece of software on Earth did!
Are you really complaining that a version of software a over a decade out of date was unstable? If your apps were flimsy, you should have talked to your developers. The Domino system is and has been for a long time a very robust system.
Dude, reality check:
IBM sells Lotus Domino/Notes as an email system, "groupware" if you want to use that term. Look: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/ Right there on the website, it says the top two features are Email and Calendaring.
Email and Calendaring. Lotus Notes may work for many tasks, but two tasks is *does not* work for is Email and Calendaring. Not even close. Hell, I had to reset Palms at my workplace 3 times a week when Notes would reliably bug-out create appointments that ended before they began-- which of course confused the poor Palm software to no end.
The amount of lost data due to Notes' failure of a UI is legendary. Deleting a copy of an email filed into a folder *also* deleted any other copy in any other folder. Amazingly retarded design. Notes didn't open attachments in the Temp folder as Read Only, so it encouraged users to edit them and save their changes. While, at the same time, it was super-aggressive about cleaning up the Temp folder. I can't even guess at how many documents were lost that way by poor, understandably confused, users.
Yes, Lotus Notes can do all that and a bag of crap, but it's sold as groupware and that is how it shall be judged. I'd go as far as saying that I don't even give a shit what else it can do: it's sold as groupware, and it *sucks* as groupware, and thus it's a failure of a product. (It also costs twice as much per-seat as Outlook, for a far inferior product.)
The anti-Notes trolls always crack me up. They basically say "I once saw a badly implemented application in Notes a decade ago, and it didn't compare to applications that are being written today." It makes about as much sense as complaining about Windows because you didn't like WindowsME.
Oh please. Compare Notes 6.5.1 with Outlook 2003. NIGHT AND DAY. (Notes being "night.")
Here's what I'll acknowledge: there is a certain subclass of human being, you included among them, that are not only blind to Notes' downsides, but actually are huge fans of the program. I won't attempt to change your mind, because I know from experience that your brainwashing is total and complete. But I'd really appreciate it if you didn't just dismiss all criticism of Notes out-of-hand.
Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back, arguably Aliens... there are a lot of examples of sequels that are better than the first film. On the other hand, there's Chronicles of Riddick.
You're being unfair. Dreamworks might not be the most brilliant studio in the history of the world, but they're definitely healthy competition, and you can guarantee that when, for example, a Over the Hedge or Kung-Fu Panda comes out it gets Pixar taking a close look at their own film pipeline.
It's a hell of a lot more healthy than, say, the consumer broadband market in the US. Or the operating systems market.
Disney has been churning out utter dreck for years. Go ahead, what was the last good original animated Disney movie (not counting those made by Pixar)? I don't know, but I'm estimating something like 20 years ago.
Don't even diss Lilo and Stitch, or I will come over there and personally kick your ass! Or The Emperor's New Groove, for that matter. (Although, given, other than those two Disney's been pretty poor.)
So far, nobody's even begun to convince me that we ought to do jack about it. But no matter how many changes you make, you'll never make a city dark enough to see the milky way. Period. At some point you're going to have to pick up and move, so you might as well do it now rather than spend ages on a futile quest to get everybody else in the world to bow to your whim, then end up having to move anyway.
A) If you look at a photo of Earth at night, you'll see why a clear view of the night sky is not just a train-ride to the suburbs away.
If that's not the case for you, then *move*. Seriously, if this is important to you, you can pick up your things and move-- just like if gambling (for example) is important to you, you can move to Nevada. Or if high school football is important to you, you can move to Texas.
C) Seeing the wonder of the universe is a good thing. Living in a cave is not. Is that distinction so difficult to comprehend? "The rest is technology at work, for better or worse." Oh, so maybe you do grasp the point! Except that we don't have to just accept technology "for better or worse"; we can choose to use technology in ways that makes our lives better and not to use technology in ways that makes it worse.
Use technology like the "automacar" and the "zepplaplane" to move your ass somewhere where you can see the stars.
Christ, I hate this thread. It's basically a bunch of people whining, "this issue is important to me, but not important enough to change anything in my life!" Waaah. Either move to where you can see stars, or shut up already.
I don't know if I'd rule out time-travel just yet. IIRC, these guys: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097883/ would send the crash debris back to the past after abducting the passengers!
Surely you could build a "configuration" layer that would use the registry on OSes with it, and some kind of XML format on OSes without it, right? I mean, thousands of cross-platform programs do this now.
Or is it some kind of misguided knee-jerk "we hate the registry!" emotional thing? Double ironic, considering they're trying to re-implement a feature the registry adds practically for free.
This *is* a hell of a lot of effort to avoid using the OS features (including the registery) as they're designed to be used.
Eh. Maybe they're religious fanatics and their religion dictates that they should. Maybe they have a pharaoh and this is his tomb. Maybe they just have like a hundred old space stations in orbit and want to find some way of recycling the metal. Who knows? But I can think of reasons.
The sooner you acknowledge my position *before* arguing against it, the sooner I assume you're not an idiot who simply didn't understand my position in the first place.
I mean, I know this is Slashdot and human interaction is hard, but come on. You wasted a lot of your (and my) time from my repeating this over and over again because I assumed you didn't get it.
But that's a stupid (to the level of outright suicidal) design: The colonists have a maybe 1-in-4 chance (if they are lucky, and I'm probably over-estimating) of living once they arrive in such a ship, just because you can't guarantee they will have anyplace to land. A minimal amount of extra work up front will allow them to decide if they can live where they've arrived, or go on if they can't.
I disagree that it's a minimal amount of work. Making a one-use ship compared to a ship that can be re-used over and over again?
Besides, put yourself in the colonist's position. We've been traveling for 900 years. If we abort, it's another 900 years (at least) to get back home. Would you even *want* to go home? Keep in mind that you're the kind of super ambitious Type-A personality person who would volunteer for this mission in the first place.
Have you seen Apollo 13? Remember the scene where, despite their malfunction, they contemplated landing on the moon anyway, even knowing it would be their death? And that was just the moon!
If you are sending single-destination ships, you'll want to either send out explorers first, or have a way to ask for help from home. Either way they'd have to solve the lightspeed problem (at least in communication), and that's way beyond our level of tech.
So you're saying they should delay their colonization program until they develop FTL communication, even though that might be physically impossible? What if the aliens don't think like you do? What if they think a 25% chance is worth it? (Or are willing to dedicate enough resources to build 4-5 ships instead of one?)
Put it in, and you'll immeasurably improve the odds of actually having a viable colony at the end of the trip. Mass cost would be not insignificant, but it's easily worth it.
It seems to me the only two options remain either land, or turn around and go home.
Of course, another thing here... your original post mentioned going out to grab some asteroids and "nuke them from orbit, it's the only way to be sure." But why? What's the motivation? If you're trying to colonize a planet, and it turns out there's already intelligent life there, I think your odds probably just improved by leaps and bounds. I don't see that discovery as necessarily changing the mission plan at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Alien is one of the greatest horror movies ever made. Aliens is one of the greatest action movies ever made. Despite being in the same franchise, they're different genres. (As you've touched on.) If you were judging Aliens as a horror movie, then of course it won't add up (horror-wise)-- it's not supposed to. Similarly, if you judged Alien as an action movie, you'd consider it a snore.
Unless of course the person in question is a *known* paid anti-odf shill from Microsoft. As in this case.
Proooooof?
People say this on Slashdot all the time. I've been personally accused of being a paid shill for Microsoft dozens of times. (For the record, I'm not. If you know how I can get money to post my opinions, though, please let me in on it.) I think it's all bullshit. Nobody's even been able to prove anything.
You didn't like The Emperor's New Groove? Have you seen it, it's fucking hilarious? I notice you also left Lilo and Stitch off your list, one of the best (easily in the top 5) animated movies of the last decade.
It's good weird. So is Emperor's New Groove. That's why I used those two of examples of good "recent" (for certain values of "recent") Disney movies.
That scene in Emperor's New Groove where they completely lose the movie and zoom in to a random monkey sitting on a random branch always makes me crack up. Also this part: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhOrxkGlLDM Bring it on.
And Lilo and Stitch caught me early on with "sandwich day": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuazDKt2ID0 Pudge controls the weather.
They were heavy attempts to replay the same old formula that had gone stale. Oh, and they're trying to release yet another movie in the same exact formula, but with a non-white princess?
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hunchback was not a typical Disney "Princess" movie, although I admit that it shared more elements than it probably should have, considering the subject matter. It also is probably the only Disney movie to include a passionate song about rape: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRO-M4XyAbM
When Gmail first launched, they did not support POP3 or IMAP. (no other web provider did either, for that matter)
Lots of webmail providers had POP3 before Gmail. Hell, AOL did. Hotmail did. I think Yahoo did if you paid them a token amount.
The only thing new Gmail brought there is IMAP, and from my experience their IMAP doesn't even work half the time.
Oh come on! You're living in a fantasy world!
Notes 6.5.1 (the last version I have extensive experience with) did not come out a decade ago. It came out in 2004, and it a gigantic piece of crap. The only thing good I can say about it is that it *finally* worked correctly on NT with multiple users-- only 10 full years after every other piece of software on Earth did!
Are you really complaining that a version of software a over a decade out of date was unstable? If your apps were flimsy, you should have talked to your developers. The Domino system is and has been for a long time a very robust system.
Dude, reality check:
IBM sells Lotus Domino/Notes as an email system, "groupware" if you want to use that term. Look: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/ Right there on the website, it says the top two features are Email and Calendaring.
Email and Calendaring. Lotus Notes may work for many tasks, but two tasks is *does not* work for is Email and Calendaring. Not even close. Hell, I had to reset Palms at my workplace 3 times a week when Notes would reliably bug-out create appointments that ended before they began-- which of course confused the poor Palm software to no end.
The amount of lost data due to Notes' failure of a UI is legendary. Deleting a copy of an email filed into a folder *also* deleted any other copy in any other folder. Amazingly retarded design. Notes didn't open attachments in the Temp folder as Read Only, so it encouraged users to edit them and save their changes. While, at the same time, it was super-aggressive about cleaning up the Temp folder. I can't even guess at how many documents were lost that way by poor, understandably confused, users.
Yes, Lotus Notes can do all that and a bag of crap, but it's sold as groupware and that is how it shall be judged. I'd go as far as saying that I don't even give a shit what else it can do: it's sold as groupware, and it *sucks* as groupware, and thus it's a failure of a product. (It also costs twice as much per-seat as Outlook, for a far inferior product.)
The anti-Notes trolls always crack me up. They basically say "I once saw a badly implemented application in Notes a decade ago, and it didn't compare to applications that are being written today." It makes about as much sense as complaining about Windows because you didn't like WindowsME.
Oh please. Compare Notes 6.5.1 with Outlook 2003. NIGHT AND DAY. (Notes being "night.")
Here's what I'll acknowledge: there is a certain subclass of human being, you included among them, that are not only blind to Notes' downsides, but actually are huge fans of the program. I won't attempt to change your mind, because I know from experience that your brainwashing is total and complete. But I'd really appreciate it if you didn't just dismiss all criticism of Notes out-of-hand.
Uh, hello! We let Canada in some of the time. Geez, you act as if we're all insular and stuff. Canada!
They'll buy droids from the jawas, like the Star Wars moisture farms all have. Duh.
Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back, arguably Aliens... there are a lot of examples of sequels that are better than the first film. On the other hand, there's Chronicles of Riddick.
You're being unfair. Dreamworks might not be the most brilliant studio in the history of the world, but they're definitely healthy competition, and you can guarantee that when, for example, a Over the Hedge or Kung-Fu Panda comes out it gets Pixar taking a close look at their own film pipeline.
It's a hell of a lot more healthy than, say, the consumer broadband market in the US. Or the operating systems market.
Disney has been churning out utter dreck for years. Go ahead, what was the last good original animated Disney movie (not counting those made by Pixar)? I don't know, but I'm estimating something like 20 years ago.
Don't even diss Lilo and Stitch, or I will come over there and personally kick your ass! Or The Emperor's New Groove, for that matter. (Although, given, other than those two Disney's been pretty poor.)
The only thing more annoying that arrows pointing to the Reply button are people posting about "we" without telling us all who "we" is. Who's "we?"
So far, nobody's even begun to convince me that we ought to do jack about it. But no matter how many changes you make, you'll never make a city dark enough to see the milky way. Period. At some point you're going to have to pick up and move, so you might as well do it now rather than spend ages on a futile quest to get everybody else in the world to bow to your whim, then end up having to move anyway.
But, to be fair, you came from San Diego, which is basically a nightmare hellscape.
All the good cities are in the west half of Washington. Also, Tacoma. But there's good one thing I can say about Spokane: it's not Yakima!
A) If you look at a photo of Earth at night, you'll see why a clear view of the night sky is not just a train-ride to the suburbs away.
If that's not the case for you, then *move*. Seriously, if this is important to you, you can pick up your things and move-- just like if gambling (for example) is important to you, you can move to Nevada. Or if high school football is important to you, you can move to Texas.
C) Seeing the wonder of the universe is a good thing. Living in a cave is not. Is that distinction so difficult to comprehend? "The rest is technology at work, for better or worse." Oh, so maybe you do grasp the point! Except that we don't have to just accept technology "for better or worse"; we can choose to use technology in ways that makes our lives better and not to use technology in ways that makes it worse.
Use technology like the "automacar" and the "zepplaplane" to move your ass somewhere where you can see the stars.
Christ, I hate this thread. It's basically a bunch of people whining, "this issue is important to me, but not important enough to change anything in my life!" Waaah. Either move to where you can see stars, or shut up already.
It takes 15 minutes to log in.
I don't know if I'd rule out time-travel just yet. IIRC, these guys: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097883/ would send the crash debris back to the past after abducting the passengers!
From what I've heard, you can get a payscale reset if you do lose your job, as well, since the payscale is almost entirely based on seniority.
What's the purpose of not using the registry?
Surely you could build a "configuration" layer that would use the registry on OSes with it, and some kind of XML format on OSes without it, right? I mean, thousands of cross-platform programs do this now.
Or is it some kind of misguided knee-jerk "we hate the registry!" emotional thing? Double ironic, considering they're trying to re-implement a feature the registry adds practically for free.
This *is* a hell of a lot of effort to avoid using the OS features (including the registery) as they're designed to be used.
Finally we can play Lunar Outpost again?
Oh... not that Epyx. Nevermind.
Thanks, and you're right. It's basically the set up for the story... and I'm sure I care way too much about it. :)
Eh. Maybe they're religious fanatics and their religion dictates that they should. Maybe they have a pharaoh and this is his tomb. Maybe they just have like a hundred old space stations in orbit and want to find some way of recycling the metal. Who knows? But I can think of reasons.
I get that's what you are saying.
The sooner you acknowledge my position *before* arguing against it, the sooner I assume you're not an idiot who simply didn't understand my position in the first place.
I mean, I know this is Slashdot and human interaction is hard, but come on. You wasted a lot of your (and my) time from my repeating this over and over again because I assumed you didn't get it.
But that's a stupid (to the level of outright suicidal) design: The colonists have a maybe 1-in-4 chance (if they are lucky, and I'm probably over-estimating) of living once they arrive in such a ship, just because you can't guarantee they will have anyplace to land. A minimal amount of extra work up front will allow them to decide if they can live where they've arrived, or go on if they can't.
I disagree that it's a minimal amount of work. Making a one-use ship compared to a ship that can be re-used over and over again?
Besides, put yourself in the colonist's position. We've been traveling for 900 years. If we abort, it's another 900 years (at least) to get back home. Would you even *want* to go home? Keep in mind that you're the kind of super ambitious Type-A personality person who would volunteer for this mission in the first place.
Have you seen Apollo 13? Remember the scene where, despite their malfunction, they contemplated landing on the moon anyway, even knowing it would be their death? And that was just the moon!
If you are sending single-destination ships, you'll want to either send out explorers first, or have a way to ask for help from home. Either way they'd have to solve the lightspeed problem (at least in communication), and that's way beyond our level of tech.
So you're saying they should delay their colonization program until they develop FTL communication, even though that might be physically impossible? What if the aliens don't think like you do? What if they think a 25% chance is worth it? (Or are willing to dedicate enough resources to build 4-5 ships instead of one?)
Put it in, and you'll immeasurably improve the odds of actually having a viable colony at the end of the trip. Mass cost would be not insignificant, but it's easily worth it.
It seems to me the only two options remain either land, or turn around and go home.
Of course, another thing here... your original post mentioned going out to grab some asteroids and "nuke them from orbit, it's the only way to be sure." But why? What's the motivation? If you're trying to colonize a planet, and it turns out there's already intelligent life there, I think your odds probably just improved by leaps and bounds. I don't see that discovery as necessarily changing the mission plan at all.
Sorry about that, I spent all of yesterday tinkering with my blog. For some reason that page got "unpublished" in the process-- works now.