Posts by Winston Smith 42 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jul 2008
I think I'll wait for the expansion pack to the game, in which you have lost communication with Earth because the main communications dish has gone on the blink, and you must replace the AE-35 unit with the help of your friendly AI guide. Extra points given for locating mysterious magnetic anomalies and for contacting advanced alien civilizations.
Do you remember after Hurricane Katrina, that short video clip with Mike Myers staring dumbfounded as a clearly agitated man said "George Bush doesn't care about black people!"? That man was Kanye West.
Also, re: "IT MAKES ME QUESTION WHAT OTHER SO CALLED CELEBRITY TWITTERS ARE ACTUALLY REAL OR FAKE."
I'm sympathetic enough to Mr. West's problem of having his identity "stolen", but is this really the first time it ever occurred to him that some people *pretend* to be celebrities on the internet? Seriously? Has he actually *seen* the internet before? No wonder he's behind on delivering content...
To the Reg editors: I hereby request a "facepalm" comment icon. Or are we supposed to use Paris for that?
No disrespect intended to the inestimable Mr. Hendrix, but I think the divinity here belongs to Bob Dylan, who wrote the song. As usual.
I have heard, though, that Dylan now prefers to perform "Watchtower" in the Hendrix style. And who wouldn't?
As for the ending, I found it oddly satisfying. We didn't get all the answers that the promos on the SciFi (er, "SyFy") Channel promised, but it still just worked so nicely...
With this color* scheme, I'd say it looks more like a Star Wars clone trooper than a Cylon. That's not such a bad thing - a bit tacky and very sci-fi, but still generally good-looking to anyone who would drive a concept car (if they could).
The back end... not so much. It looks like they wanted to put a rocket engine back there. But, you know... they *couldn't*. <eye-roll>
*Yes, I'm in the U.S., where "U"s are the *only* thing we conserve.
Nice article, and the series promises to be a big help to new users who want to get a little more out of their machine than the manufacturer had in mind. But there was one little shock towards the end:
"I don't need to tell you how to use [vi] here, because the MSI Wind Suse Linux implementation comes complete with all the Unix man - for 'manual' - pages. If your machine is an MSI Wind, just type man vi."
Now, I've been using vi in various forms for 15 years, and I happily (even evangelically) recommend it as a very powerful text editor. But to tell a Linux newbie (whom you assume has not previously used "less") to try using vi with ONLY the man page as a guide... Well, I can't think of anything that will drive the poor n00b away from Linux any faster than that. The mode-switching alone may invoke cold sweats when he tries to escape (literally) from an inscrutable tilde-filled screen.
Of course, vi *can* be learned, and learned very well, but I think that this particularly gentle reader would be better served by a link to a vi usage guide or tutorial. This was the first good option I could find in a hurry:
http://www.eng.hawaii.edu/Tutor/vi.html
This reminds me of the ads we see in the US for prescription medications that deal with *ahem* personal issues - the ones that say "ask your doctor if Hypochondrixol is right for you" without ever saying what the drug is actually supposed to _do_ for you. That's because it legally allows the manufacturers to not mention the nasty side-effects, either.
It seems like the same advertising model. If M$ instead made an ad (like Mojave, maybe - I haven't seen that) describing what Vista actually does (the purported benefits over other OSs, including their own XP), then they would somehow get forced into defending themselves publicly when someone points out the very obvious defects in the product. They avoid the direct criticism by not saying anything specific enough to criticize.
@Francis- I'm not a Mac fan either, but I don't see this cheapening the Mac ads by comparison. The Mac ads are short, smart, and always _funny_. I generally watch each new one once (but only once) as it comes out instead of TiVoing past it. This indicates to me that Apple has found a good ad model for the DVR age, in that it gets attention from eyes that would otherwise be averted. Jerry's ads might accomplish the same for M$, but will they actually convince anyone that Vista is worth using? (Not me - I mean someone who isn't already a devoted penguin-head.)
Like this guy? (scroll down a bit)
http://pax.grsecurity.net/
Re: "track down and deal with the perpetrators"
This is a short quote from a presumably longer message from McIntyre, and a few commenters here have taken it (possibly out of context) as an indication that he isn't treating this crime seriously enough. I do hope that he is contacting the appropriate law-enforcement authorities.
That'll be "Short Circuit", of course:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091949/
I'll be more impressed with this overpriced beer ad (the robot's overpriced, dunno about the beer) if it can gain self-awareness from a lightning bolt and learn to mix a gin and tonic by reading a bar manual.
Oh, they have those already, mainly for return trips from Iraq & Afghanistan. And for added security, they're never photographed so the public might see how many of them there are.
More on-topic: "Hawley claims, however, there won't be any confusion about what passes or not because security officers will be well informed about them."
I see no chance for confusion, then. The rent-a-cop with the metal wand surely knows just how to tell *your* bag from the old-fashioned checkpoint-unfriendly ones.
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