I'm pretty sure the original AC was trying to be facetious here. Honestly, if they weren't they obviously don't live in a part of the U.S. with movie theatre technology. Let's look at the "comedies" that are out right now, shall we? "Be Cool", "Guess Who", "Meet the Fockers", "The Pacifier" (Vin! What were you thinking? Didn't you see Kindergarten Cop?). Let's not even go back to the unending stream of mindless yammering that comes out under the banner of "National Lampoon's". I'm not saying I didn't enjoy at least some of these movies, but cerebral humour this is not.
For some of us, free software matters and closed drivers are not an options. For some others, closed drivers are okay, but not much good when you're on ppc and the drivers are x86 only.
Unless you're saying ATI's proprietary drivers are open source, then the above statement is bordering on being a non sequitur. The assertion was that new nVidia hardware performs quite well in Linux while new ATI hardware does not. Both require (as far as I know) closed source drivers. The fact that older ATI hardware performed acceptably well with DRI is nice, but irrelevant since that hardware is now sitting at the bottom of the video card lists for most computer stores. Meaning that in just a few months the odds are good you won't be able to buy one of these new.
"Brannon and Rick [Berman] have a couple of other projects that they've had in development, in their heads at least," Keating said, admitting that he had heard "that they might be taking something of a sojourn or a sabbatical in some respects on this season."
Ah, but DS9 [had the guts to show two women attracted to each other]. Check out Reassociation.
I presume you actually mean Rejoined here since I couldn't find any reference to a DS9 episode called "Reassociation". The problem, though, is that the air date for this was October 1995. Though sexual tension between two female characters may not have been as commonplace then as it is today, DS9 was by no means a trailblazer here. Three years earlier Poison Ivy starring Drew Barrymore and Sara Gilbert managed to turn a largely forgettable movie into a media sensation with a kiss that isn't even in all cuts according to IMDB. It was a big deal then, but by the time Trek got around to this subject it was already becoming old news.
TOS used to do things that had the network execs threatening to pull the plug on nearly every episode but the people working on the show pushed back. Nobody involved in Trek since about the second movie was made (that includes Gene, by the way) seems to have any idea what those old days were like. Someone should tell the current Trek team that good stories make people uncomfortable by challenging them to think about things they take for granted. If you don't have the bosses threatening to fire you because of the story you just told, you aren't doing your job as a storyteller.
Want to know what it's like when you tell a story that really makes an impact? Girlfriend is challenging the society in which it was made and getting a reaction. Trek managed that with the first interracial kiss on television. There hasn't been one minute of Trek that radical since the 1960s.
When Obi-Wan was faced with the proposition that a Sith Lord had infiltrated the senate and that Count Duku was trying to stop this, what if Duku had been telling the truth?
See, that's the only bit of really good writing I could find in the second movie. The good count was telling just enough of the truth to make the lie work. He was gambling on turning Obi-Wan to their cause but he wasn't sure about it. So what did he do? He told the truth (a Sith Lord had infiltrated the senate) and bookended it with lies.
Unless you believe, like I do, that maybe the count actually believed his lie, in the same way Luke agreed to go to the Death Star II hoping to get a shot at taking down Emperor Palpatine, maybe Dooku really thought he was just playing Darth Sideous by pretending to be one of the converts. If that was the case, maybe he really was telling the truth when he said that Qui-Gonn would have joined him if he were in Obi-Wan's place.
As wel all know, potentially large sums of money can put a deceased loved one to rest.
Clearly you, sir, are not a Roman Catholic.;-) (scroll down to the section entitled System of Indulgences) I am and I found this whole quote about putting the dead great uncle's soul to rest very amusing.
I'm hardly a linux zealot, I'm just saying that it's best to not think too hard about what's going on over at Channel9 since it's obvious right from the get-go that there's either (a) an overabundance of cluelessness (they've chosen a presentation format they aren't aware isn't available to everyone) or (b) there's a low-grade hostility already present toward anyone who isn't already a windows user. (Meaning they really don't want to hear from anyone who isn't using windows by making a website that can only be viewed properly while using Windows).
Okay, I'll be fair. Maybe I am a zealot. After all, I took one look at the site, saw huge empty squares all over it that were meant to be the content, realized that I'd need to go get a different operating system to properly view the content and decided they probably weren't interested in what I had to say. Yep, that probably makes me a fanatically committed person.
Except that the required codec to view them is Microsoft's own and even using it on Linux (without being the proud owner of some version of Windows too) is legally questionable, is it not? Hell, maybe it's legally questionable to use it on Linux even if you do own Windows and have a reasonable reason to already have the required dll because the ones mplayer uses are modified.
It seems to me that whether you can see the videos or not is irrelevant. The issue is whether you're legally allowed to see the videos, and it seems to me that you're not.
Holy crap! Did Darl really say he was pounding on the table? As soon as I read that I thought of Eben Moglen's article and this bit from the very first:
There's a traditional definition of a shyster: a lawyer who, when the law is against him, pounds on the facts; when the facts are against him, pounds on the law; and when both the facts and the law are against him, pounds on the table.
Not a good picture to paint of yourself, even if you aren't the lawyer.
Exactly! I mean, it wasn't ESB, but ATOC was a lot darker than any of the other offerings by far. Not only that, it was also a lot smarter than the others. I wouldn't go so far as to call it "thinking man's sci-fi" but I have to give credit to the sort of writing that has one of the villians say "I wish the major good guy from the last movie was here, he'd agree with me" then immediately tell the absolute truth about how all the rest of the good guys have been tricked and are being played for patsies. It makes you wonder if maybe Dooku was right and if Qui-Gonn was still alive, maybe he would have sided with the confederation. I mean, Qui-Gonn always seemed a bit strange to begin with and Dooku really was telling the truth about how a Sith Lord had taken over the senate, right?
Then there's the perverse chuckle I get out of watching that scene where Boba picks up Jango's severed head. I mean, is it any wonder Boba is so screwed up when he grows up? He had to shake his father's head out of the helment before he could wear it, right?
... or maybe it's just me. I'm looking at their big, honkin' graphic that shows "Percentage of market" and the November winner seems to be clearly IIS 6.0 on W2K+3 (relative to all other IIS servers). But the gigantic pie chart, which also shows a breakdown of what IIS is the particular favorite seems to be IIS 5.0 with ~44% of the market. I understand that these are different measures, but shouldn't the relative weightings of IIS-IIS be about the same here?
Re:Doesn't Inspire a Lot of Confidence
on
WineX 3.0 Examined
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· Score: 1
I'd be more interested to know what your take on the article over at Tom's Hardware Guide Windows Gaming In Linux With WineX 2.0 is and how WineX 2.1 and 3.0 compared with the results Mr. Reese reported. I'd been seriously considering subscribing to WineX so I could play a few of the games I miss, but after reading this article I've decided to hold onto my $5 (USD, meaning something like $83,000 CDN) a month until I hear of someone having comparable Linux/Windows performance.
I may be remembering incorrectly, but I thought I once read an interview with Joe Perry of Aerosmith where he'd said something about Aerosmith having to go on tour to make enough money to pay for their recording time in the studio for the next album. Maybe the real problem is that the artists don't make money off record sales. The record sales are just a way to put asses in the seats at live shows and thus sharing is a good thing.
And maybe guys like Moby, who couldn't perform an unplugged version of their chart-topping songs by definition, are doomed from the get-go.
Oh wait, we all know the recording industry screws both the public and the artist at every turn, right? This whole thing is probably redundant.:-)
The decision to adopt a closed-source policy is typically driven by other motivations, such as foiling competition or protecting the reputation of the developer by limiting information about flaws, he said.
Which brings us to the inevitable conclusion that there must be an unusually large number of flaws in closed-source software simply because of the number of reports that come out about those flaws. Either that, or one of the motivations for choosing a closed-source model (protecting the reputation of the developer by limiting information about flaws) is in error.
Why do I say that? A quick survey of CERT® Summary CS-2002-02 reveals that at least 4 of the 7 alerts mentioned in it are in closed source software. This gives them about 57% of the notifications (for our admittedly small sample size, but I'm no statistician). With closed-source still claiming the lion's share of security issues, you have to conclude that they, had far more than 57% of the total number of issues during the same period unless their attempts to conceal flaws was completely ineffectual.
The principal? Really? That's very nice of him, but unless the principal paid for the software, I really don't think he should be sending it back for me.
Oh, wait. You probably meant principle, didn't you.;-)
I've mentioned this before, but for a game that's supposedly being released for linux (and the press release mentioning that us linux folks are getting delayed in an off-hand manner doesn't fill me with confidence) these guys at Bioware sure haven't been doing much to hype it to linux users. I still wouldn't have known it was coming out for linux if I hadn't seen it here, and until very recently there wasn't even a mention of linux in their FAQ.
So now my complaint is this: where the hell are the system requirements for the linux version? All I saw on their site was: PII 450 or K6 450, 16meg TNT2-level card and 96 megs of ram on Windows, plus a DirectX soundcard and DirectX 8.1. Am I to assume exactly the same hardware requirements are going to apply to linux? What about the poor Mac folks? Since everything else they've said suggests they only know what the windows version will look like, I'm half expecting something that requires WineX.
Okay, so I know it's being released for Linux and I gather it's well-known that it'll be released at the same time as the Windows version, but don't you think it might be a good idea to put this information on the official website somewhere? I just hit nearly every page from the NWN front page and searched for linux and didn't find anything. More over, I didn't find anything about a release date, either. I'm not suggesting there's something funny going on here, I'm just annoyed that this, apparently very cool, game would have gone totally ignored by me if various folks around here hadn't confirmed that it's being released for linux.
Maybe part of the problem with the linux gaming market is folks like me that will buy the games but lose interest very quickly if it isn't clear it'll be available for linux.
This all makes no sense to me. Exactly six days ago I downloaded both the Windows and Linux clients. Saturday I installed the Windows client. About twenty hours ago I installed the linux one and was using it no more than tweleve hours ago. I haven't logged in yet today, but it was working last night.
That happened to me last week when I saw a mention of linuxgames.org. Since I didn't hit this place, I can't say for sure, but it sure sounds like the same bunch of yahoos doing it. Maybe they're trying to get mentioned on slashdot?:-)
Hey, does someone want to donate a Solaris 2.6 (Sparc) build? There hasn't been one since M17 and after several incredibly frustrating attempts to build one, I've just given up.
That's a very nice Rah, Rah, look for the union label rant you have going there, Publicus, but the fact remains that we are not talking about unionized tradesmen (which I think is generally a very good idea, particularly for miserable, dangerous and thankless work like mining and such) but unionized techies. And we aren't talking about changes brought about by organized labor during the industrial revolution, we're talking about working in a nasty, cut-throat market during a market decline.
I've worked both as a unionized techie and as a non-unionized one and I'm happy to say that despite (or perhaps because) of the possible threat of layoffs with a meager severance package, everyone I work with seems to take more pride in their work and generally has a much better attitude. In the union shop where I worked there were routine fights about things (I shit you not) like who had "the good pencil tray" (that one lasted two days) and how evil this one manager was for giving a poor performance review to someone, even though it had absolutely no impact on their pay.
Yes, some unions are good and are still very necessary to maintain an acceptable standard of living, but not in in the tech sector. All they accomplish there is encouraging sloth and complacancy and if you don't believe that, go work for the government as a techie and see for yourself.
Has nobody heard of the Quadrantids? Usually peaking either January 4th or 5th, it's one of the best of the year, usually hitting a peak rate between 40 and 60 meteors an hour.
Okay, not the most convenient (the Perseid's have that one locked up) for the northern hemisphere crowd, but don't write them off just 'cause you don't want to get your butt frozen off.
There's nothing 'mysterious' about it at all (the theories have been revised
over and over since the late '60s) if your expierence with black holes isn't
limited to the Disney movie of the same name and that travesty with Sam Neill
in it
Provided they exist at all, they are most likely collapsed neutron stars, so
think of the event horizon as the surface of the black hole, the same way the
neutron star had a surface before it collapsed. The escape velocity (speed at
which you must travel in order to escape the gravitational pull of the body) on
earth is about 11km/s. The escape velocity on a black hole at this 'surface'
is the speed of light, hence 'black'.
By the way, I know you weren't claiming it to be mysterious, you were just
slamming the Discovery Channel, but it seemed like a good opening for me to
ramble a bit.
Did anyone read this article and not get the urge
on
Son of HAL For Sale
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· Score: 2
I mean, holy crap! This is the sickest bit of marketing hype I've heard since LinuxOne (those Direct-To-IPO boobs last year).
Let's review the facts stated in the article:
"Omniputer"?!?
"verging on artificial intelligence" - what does that mean? It enjoys a good sonata but it can't grasp the underlying meaning of the music?
"It will start off addressing issues of consciousness" - 'It' being the Omniputer? You boot it up and it won't do anything until you adequately explain why you bought it?
"will . . . have an instinct to protect itself" - Ree-hee-healy.
"it is thought unlikely that it will try to kill its owner." - Now that is a reassuring statement.
"suffered a setback . . . because [De Saram's other company has] £1 million debts." - what more needs to be said?
"[De Saram's] life in the UK was made intolerable by MI5 and the National Criminal Intelligence Service . . . because an advanced new encryption programme he devised" - And I'll bet he wears a tinfoil hat the whole time he's outdoors.
Dear Mr. Clarke,
We regret to inform you that you have given your name to be used by a loon at best, a not-particularly-inventive con-man at the worst. Please accept our sincerest condolances on the death of your public image.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure the original AC was trying to be facetious here. Honestly, if they weren't they obviously don't live in a part of the U.S. with movie theatre technology. Let's look at the "comedies" that are out right now, shall we? "Be Cool", "Guess Who", "Meet the Fockers", "The Pacifier" (Vin! What were you thinking? Didn't you see Kindergarten Cop?). Let's not even go back to the unending stream of mindless yammering that comes out under the banner of "National Lampoon's". I'm not saying I didn't enjoy at least some of these movies, but cerebral humour this is not.
Fortunate, then, that they finally have moved the hell out of the way, huh?
I presume you actually mean Rejoined here since I couldn't find any reference to a DS9 episode called "Reassociation". The problem, though, is that the air date for this was October 1995. Though sexual tension between two female characters may not have been as commonplace then as it is today, DS9 was by no means a trailblazer here. Three years earlier Poison Ivy starring Drew Barrymore and Sara Gilbert managed to turn a largely forgettable movie into a media sensation with a kiss that isn't even in all cuts according to IMDB. It was a big deal then, but by the time Trek got around to this subject it was already becoming old news.
TOS used to do things that had the network execs threatening to pull the plug on nearly every episode but the people working on the show pushed back. Nobody involved in Trek since about the second movie was made (that includes Gene, by the way) seems to have any idea what those old days were like. Someone should tell the current Trek team that good stories make people uncomfortable by challenging them to think about things they take for granted. If you don't have the bosses threatening to fire you because of the story you just told, you aren't doing your job as a storyteller.
Want to know what it's like when you tell a story that really makes an impact? Girlfriend is challenging the society in which it was made and getting a reaction. Trek managed that with the first interracial kiss on television. There hasn't been one minute of Trek that radical since the 1960s.
See, that's the only bit of really good writing I could find in the second movie. The good count was telling just enough of the truth to make the lie work. He was gambling on turning Obi-Wan to their cause but he wasn't sure about it. So what did he do? He told the truth (a Sith Lord had infiltrated the senate) and bookended it with lies.
Unless you believe, like I do, that maybe the count actually believed his lie, in the same way Luke agreed to go to the Death Star II hoping to get a shot at taking down Emperor Palpatine, maybe Dooku really thought he was just playing Darth Sideous by pretending to be one of the converts. If that was the case, maybe he really was telling the truth when he said that Qui-Gonn would have joined him if he were in Obi-Wan's place.
I sense a bit of sarcasm here:
Clearly you, sir, are not a Roman Catholic. ;-) (scroll down to the section entitled System of Indulgences) I am and I found this whole quote about putting the dead great uncle's soul to rest very amusing.
I'm hardly a linux zealot, I'm just saying that it's best to not think too hard about what's going on over at Channel9 since it's obvious right from the get-go that there's either (a) an overabundance of cluelessness (they've chosen a presentation format they aren't aware isn't available to everyone) or (b) there's a low-grade hostility already present toward anyone who isn't already a windows user. (Meaning they really don't want to hear from anyone who isn't using windows by making a website that can only be viewed properly while using Windows).
Okay, I'll be fair. Maybe I am a zealot. After all, I took one look at the site, saw huge empty squares all over it that were meant to be the content, realized that I'd need to go get a different operating system to properly view the content and decided they probably weren't interested in what I had to say. Yep, that probably makes me a fanatically committed person.
Except that the required codec to view them is Microsoft's own and even using it on Linux (without being the proud owner of some version of Windows too) is legally questionable, is it not? Hell, maybe it's legally questionable to use it on Linux even if you do own Windows and have a reasonable reason to already have the required dll because the ones mplayer uses are modified.
It seems to me that whether you can see the videos or not is irrelevant. The issue is whether you're legally allowed to see the videos, and it seems to me that you're not.
Exactly! I mean, it wasn't ESB, but ATOC was a lot darker than any of the other offerings by far. Not only that, it was also a lot smarter than the others. I wouldn't go so far as to call it "thinking man's sci-fi" but I have to give credit to the sort of writing that has one of the villians say "I wish the major good guy from the last movie was here, he'd agree with me" then immediately tell the absolute truth about how all the rest of the good guys have been tricked and are being played for patsies. It makes you wonder if maybe Dooku was right and if Qui-Gonn was still alive, maybe he would have sided with the confederation. I mean, Qui-Gonn always seemed a bit strange to begin with and Dooku really was telling the truth about how a Sith Lord had taken over the senate, right?
Then there's the perverse chuckle I get out of watching that scene where Boba picks up Jango's severed head. I mean, is it any wonder Boba is so screwed up when he grows up? He had to shake his father's head out of the helment before he could wear it, right?
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e14'
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Line 1: Incorrect syntax near 't'.
... or maybe it's just me. I'm looking at their big, honkin' graphic that shows "Percentage of market" and the November winner seems to be clearly IIS 6.0 on W2K+3 (relative to all other IIS servers). But the gigantic pie chart, which also shows a breakdown of what IIS is the particular favorite seems to be IIS 5.0 with ~44% of the market. I understand that these are different measures, but shouldn't the relative weightings of IIS-IIS be about the same here?
I'd be more interested to know what your take on the article over at Tom's Hardware Guide Windows Gaming In Linux With WineX 2.0 is and how WineX 2.1 and 3.0 compared with the results Mr. Reese reported. I'd been seriously considering subscribing to WineX so I could play a few of the games I miss, but after reading this article I've decided to hold onto my $5 (USD, meaning something like $83,000 CDN) a month until I hear of someone having comparable Linux/Windows performance.
I may be remembering incorrectly, but I thought I once read an interview with Joe Perry of Aerosmith where he'd said something about Aerosmith having to go on tour to make enough money to pay for their recording time in the studio for the next album. Maybe the real problem is that the artists don't make money off record sales. The record sales are just a way to put asses in the seats at live shows and thus sharing is a good thing.
And maybe guys like Moby, who couldn't perform an unplugged version of their chart-topping songs by definition, are doomed from the get-go.
Oh wait, we all know the recording industry screws both the public and the artist at every turn, right? This whole thing is probably redundant. :-)
Wait a minute. The third paragraph says this:
Which brings us to the inevitable conclusion that there must be an unusually large number of flaws in closed-source software simply because of the number of reports that come out about those flaws. Either that, or one of the motivations for choosing a closed-source model (protecting the reputation of the developer by limiting information about flaws) is in error.Why do I say that? A quick survey of CERT® Summary CS-2002-02 reveals that at least 4 of the 7 alerts mentioned in it are in closed source software. This gives them about 57% of the notifications (for our admittedly small sample size, but I'm no statistician). With closed-source still claiming the lion's share of security issues, you have to conclude that they, had far more than 57% of the total number of issues during the same period unless their attempts to conceal flaws was completely ineffectual.
Food for thought.
The principal? Really? That's very nice of him, but unless the principal paid for the software, I really don't think he should be sending it back for me.
;-)
Oh, wait. You probably meant principle, didn't you.
So now my complaint is this: where the hell are the system requirements for the linux version? All I saw on their site was: PII 450 or K6 450, 16meg TNT2-level card and 96 megs of ram on Windows, plus a DirectX soundcard and DirectX 8.1. Am I to assume exactly the same hardware requirements are going to apply to linux? What about the poor Mac folks? Since everything else they've said suggests they only know what the windows version will look like, I'm half expecting something that requires WineX.
Pfft. I miss Loki.
Okay, so I know it's being released for Linux and I gather it's well-known that it'll be released at the same time as the Windows version, but don't you think it might be a good idea to put this information on the official website somewhere? I just hit nearly every page from the NWN front page and searched for linux and didn't find anything. More over, I didn't find anything about a release date, either. I'm not suggesting there's something funny going on here, I'm just annoyed that this, apparently very cool, game would have gone totally ignored by me if various folks around here hadn't confirmed that it's being released for linux.
Maybe part of the problem with the linux gaming market is folks like me that will buy the games but lose interest very quickly if it isn't clear it'll be available for linux.
This all makes no sense to me. Exactly six days ago I downloaded both the Windows and Linux clients. Saturday I installed the Windows client. About twenty hours ago I installed the linux one and was using it no more than tweleve hours ago. I haven't logged in yet today, but it was working last night.
That happened to me last week when I saw a mention of linuxgames.org. Since I didn't hit this place, I can't say for sure, but it sure sounds like the same bunch of yahoos doing it. Maybe they're trying to get mentioned on slashdot? :-)
Hey, does someone want to donate a Solaris 2.6 (Sparc) build? There hasn't been one since M17 and after several incredibly frustrating attempts to build one, I've just given up.
That's a very nice Rah, Rah, look for the union label rant you have going there, Publicus, but the fact remains that we are not talking about unionized tradesmen (which I think is generally a very good idea, particularly for miserable, dangerous and thankless work like mining and such) but unionized techies. And we aren't talking about changes brought about by organized labor during the industrial revolution, we're talking about working in a nasty, cut-throat market during a market decline.
I've worked both as a unionized techie and as a non-unionized one and I'm happy to say that despite (or perhaps because) of the possible threat of layoffs with a meager severance package, everyone I work with seems to take more pride in their work and generally has a much better attitude. In the union shop where I worked there were routine fights about things (I shit you not) like who had "the good pencil tray" (that one lasted two days) and how evil this one manager was for giving a poor performance review to someone, even though it had absolutely no impact on their pay.
Yes, some unions are good and are still very necessary to maintain an acceptable standard of living, but not in in the tech sector. All they accomplish there is encouraging sloth and complacancy and if you don't believe that, go work for the government as a techie and see for yourself.
Has nobody heard of the Quadrantids? Usually peaking either January 4th or 5th, it's one of the best of the year, usually hitting a peak rate between 40 and 60 meteors an hour.
Okay, not the most convenient (the Perseid's have that one locked up) for the northern hemisphere crowd, but don't write them off just 'cause you don't want to get your butt frozen off.
There's nothing 'mysterious' about it at all (the theories have been revised over and over since the late '60s) if your expierence with black holes isn't limited to the Disney movie of the same name and that travesty with Sam Neill in it
Provided they exist at all, they are most likely collapsed neutron stars, so think of the event horizon as the surface of the black hole, the same way the neutron star had a surface before it collapsed. The escape velocity (speed at which you must travel in order to escape the gravitational pull of the body) on earth is about 11km/s. The escape velocity on a black hole at this 'surface' is the speed of light, hence 'black'.
By the way, I know you weren't claiming it to be mysterious, you were just slamming the Discovery Channel, but it seemed like a good opening for me to ramble a bit.
I mean, holy crap! This is the sickest bit of marketing hype I've heard since LinuxOne (those Direct-To-IPO boobs last year).
Let's review the facts stated in the article:
Dear Mr. Clarke,
We regret to inform you that you have given your name to be used by a loon at best, a not-particularly-inventive con-man at the worst. Please accept our sincerest condolances on the death of your public image.
Sincerely
Joe MacDonald