Brickmuppet is off on active duty (Coast Guard), but has left us with this fine bit of pinup art in his absence. Seeing it stirred an ancient (in web time) memory, and I followed the link to the artist's page (some NSFW), and there she was:
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The chain segment on the hip seems hanging wrong.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Thursday, May 31 2007 01:13 PM (9imyF)
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I must be doing something wrong, because I didn't see that particular picture there. No doubt at all, however, that those pictures are stellar. (Or that some of them are NSFW.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, May 31 2007 02:05 PM (+rSRq)
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Never mind. I found the others. (stupid stupid stupid...)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, May 31 2007 02:06 PM (+rSRq)
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I have bad news for you, Pete. You are suffering from Stage Three Engineer's Disease. There is no cure. You will spend your retirement building live steam models.
(Yeah, it's not a proper catenary. In eight years, I hadn't noticed that. Guess I'm not Stage Three yet.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 31 2007 02:07 PM (PiXy!)
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I'm put in mind of the final MST3k episode, "Diabolik":
Mike: Those are some dangerously steep stairs. Crow: You're looking at the stairs? Oh, Mike honey...
(And now I'm feeling stupid: I can't find the above picture on the artist's site. *facepalm*)
Posted by: GreyDuck at Thursday, May 31 2007 02:36 PM (CdXfx)
Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist who has spent many years studying
brain functions, has collaborated with renowned Oxford University
polymath Roger Penrose on a model that explains consciousness as the
result of quantum processes occurring in tiny structures called
microtubules in brain cells. “I think consciousness under normal
circumstances occurs at the level of space-time geometry in the brain,
in the microtubules,” Hameroff says. “But the fluctuations extend down
to the Planck scale [far smaller than an atom] because the microtubules
are driven bioenergetically to be in a coherent state. When the blood
supply and the oxygen stops, things go bad and the coherence stops, but
quantum information at the Plank scale isn’t lost. It may dissipate
into the universe but remain somehow entangled in some kind of
functional unit, maybe indefinitely. If the patient is revived, the information gets picked back up again.”
To be kind, it is not immediately obvious to the average layman that this is a complete load of bullpucky.
Penrose's (and by extension, Hameroff's) hypothesis fails on three fronts: First, it does not accurately describe what we know the brain does; Second, it does not accurately describe what we know consciousness does; Third, it is physically impossible.*
It is important to note that when Hameroff says "microtubules
are driven bioenergetically to be in a coherent state", that this is a hypothesis, and there is no evidence that any such thing occurs, and considerable evidence that it cannot occur.
Where did the Planck-scale processes that cause it come from? Penrose’s
answer: They came from the Big Bang. In this view, consciousness - all
consciousness - was created at the same moment when the universe was
created. If the soul exists, it, too, might be anchored to our moment
of cosmic origin. This is what Italian astrophysicist Paola Zizzi terms
the “Big Wow,” shorthand for her description of the connection between
“the very early quantum computing universe and our mind.”
Again, this is the most astounding nonsense. We know how quantum processes behave: Quantum mechanics is perhaps the most successful theory of physics, ever. Even if Penrose's ideas were correct, there would be no informational connection between a human mind today and the formation of the universe. Complex quantum states simply don't hang around that way; it is, again, physically impossible. And simple quantum states don't possess any attributes that can carry information like that. Like black holes, subatomic particles have no hair. When Hameroff says:
When the blood
supply and the oxygen stops, things go bad and the coherence stops, but
quantum information at the Plank scale isn’t lost. It may dissipate
into the universe but remain somehow entangled in some kind of
functional unit, maybe indefinitely.
He is flying in the face of all of quantum mechanics and modern neuroscience. Complex entangled states do not survive like that; do not carry information of the sort he is implying; are not in evidence anywhere in the physical brain or in its function; and do not share any significant characteristics with the way the human mind actually behaves. Quantum information at the Planck scale is not lost, that is true, but what that information tells us is that this particle is an electron; this particle is a neutron.
And that's all.
Persistent quantum information of that sort is very specific and very limited. It is impossible to tell, from observing an electron, anything of its past. All electrons are identical except for position and momentum. This one may have been part of an atom of lead a second ago; this one in an atom of gold. There is no way, not even theoretically - indeed, particularly not theoretically - to tell, unless you have continuously observed the two electrons over that period (a process that has its own quantum mechanical difficulties).
Penrose surely knows better, at least on the physics side, so I assume that something he has said has been misunderstood. On the other hand, I have seen nothing to suggest that he knows anything of modern neuroscience.
Because modern neuroscience shows quite clearly that consciousness is brain function, that aspects of consciousness can be tied to very specific brain functions, and that neither the mind nor the brain exhibit any quantum properties except in the bulk, statistical sense that they share with prosaic objects such as frozen fish and pocket calculators.
The best layman's introduction to modern neuroscience I know of is MIT's 9.00 Introduction to Psychology as taught by Jeremy Wolfe. You can download the lectures, and I can't recommend them highly enough to anyone interested in the subject (and it is a subject I think everyone should be interested in).
* Why is it that some of the smartest people have some of the ugliest websites? Okay, the answer is that they have better things to do, I know that. But still...
I just don't understand why so many people try to use theoretical and
mathematical physics to explain things that are completely unrelated.
As someone said on the original comments thread, the thinking seems to be: X is a mystery; Y is a mystery; therefore X causes Y. Which irritates anyone who knows anything about X or Y, and infuriates those who know about X and Y.
I don't claim to know a lot about QM, being that I've only got degrees in Math, but I do know what it can't be used for.
That's often the most important (and hardest) part.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 31 2007 05:38 AM (PiXy!)
I started posting this as a comment on Steven's blog, but it got longer and longer and in the end I decided it was better as a post in its own right, so here it is. It's a discussion about the art styles in the various incarnations of Oh My Goddess! - particularly the OVA (which is a classic) and the recent TV series (which is a pile of poo). See hideous thirty-year-old transvestite Megumi and ugly flat-faced Urd for background.
Joe wrote:
I've been an AMG fan for close to a decade now, and I have a nearly
complete collection of the original Japanese-language manga all the way
to the latest volume (34), so I'm able to review the way in which the
drawing style has changed over the eighteen-some years of the manga's
run (the way Belldandy was drawn at the beginning is RADICALLY
different from the way she looks now, so much so that if it wasn't for
the identifying marks on her face, you'd wonder if they were even the
same person). To me, Belldandy, Urd, Keiichi and Megumi have always
looked like what they were meant to be - young adults - in the manga as
well as the anime.
Joe is right that the artwork changes substantially over the course of
the manga - with such a long-running series, that's not surprising. And the changes to Belldandy are the most significant (with Keiichi coming second - early Keiichi was kind of ugly, and that seems to be the version they picked up for the TV series).
Steven wrote:
Within that context, Megumi as drawn in the TV series
looks
scandalously mature, even old -- but only because the context itself is
distorted. Megumi doesn't look 29; she looks 18. The reason she looks
out of place is because so many other girls that age (or slightly
younger) in anime are drawn to look 12.
18-year-olds tend to look more
like kids than not (though of course there's a lot of variation). And
Megumi is not just an 18-year-old, she's a cute and bubbly
18-year-old. The artwork in the anime is dull and flat; it shifts the
colour of her eyes and hair from red-brown to grey-brown, elongates her
face, makes her chin pointed rather than round. All it really succeeds
in doing is making her look tired and washed-out, which makes her look
older than she should be.
Steven wrote:
The difference in art style between Skuld and everyone else is the
source of one sight gag. Urd senses that Skuld is hiding something and
needles her by imitating something that Skuld would say. The seiyuu
makes her voice sound like Skuld's voice, but they also change Urd's
face art so that her face has the same proportions as Skuld's. That gag wouldn't have
worked if everyone had been drawn like Skuld is. And everyone is
drawn that way in the manga and in the OVA. Irrespective of body
proportions, they all have the faces of kids.
But the change there is the eyes, Skuld being wide-eyed and childlike and Urd being narrow-eyed and mischievous - even in the manga. Manga Urd may have a similarly-shaped face to manga Skuld, but the expressions are different, and the proportions of the face are different.
I don't recall
that gag from the manga, but what Fujishima did do was have them swap ages, so that Urd was a little kid and Skuld was grown up. And their faces changed appropriately. They're similar, because that's the artist's style; they aren't identical. (And even if they were, the gag would work just fine - c.f. Jungle Guu.
Steven wrote:
As it turns out, Megumi is
quite slender and isn't at all top-heavy; and that's
realistic.
Actually, Megumi is supposed to be short and... well,
not particularly slender. (As in, solidly built, not top-heavy.) Megumi is supposed to be cute, in contrast
to characters like Belldandy and Urd and Sayoko, who are tall and slim
and beautiful.
Height's another age cue, but Chihiro is short like Megumi and Sora (and not particularly slender, either), and her face is drawn in the same style, but she still looks older. Fujishima does this using facial proportions and expressions - and hairstyles.
Steven wrote:
Pixy is, I think, reacting first to the series history and objecting to
the changes that were made. (Fanboy loyalty.)
That's partly true, but it's a small part. Anime Megumi's face looks tired and old, because they've washed the colour out of it. It just doesn't suit her personality. And the artwork of the entire show is ugly and flat.
Steven wrote:
But he's also reacting to
the current anime context where "adult" girls are being drawn more and
more young looking, a kind of genre-wide pervasive lolicon.
Well, where you define 'current' as everything since Osamu Tezuka first picked up a pen. And he stole the concept from Disney.
Oh My Goddess! is supposed to be cute and bright, and it is, in every version except the TV series. The characters look older in the movie, but that's because the movie comes late in the ongoing story, and the movie doesn't make Megumi (or anyone else) look washed-out. (In fact, the movie is gorgeous.)
It's not simply a question of neoteny, it's that the art style in the TV series is both ugly and inappropriate.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, May 26 2007 07:48 PM (PiXy!)
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...sad part is, I woke up this morning and thought that exact same thing.
I don't know WHY I didn't think of it as I was posting it...
But seriously, that bugs me. A lot.
Posted by: Balentius at Sunday, May 27 2007 04:58 AM (lQRkC)
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I'm not being sarcastic, I'm just asking...Have you actually watched the TV series or are you just basing your judgment on Steven's screencaps?
Personally I don't think Megumi looks all that bad in the TV series, although that particular frame is fairly unflattering. In general the artwork of the TV series is not nearly as good as the manga, but the manga sets an unusually high standard of comparison.
Posted by: Jonathan Tappan at Monday, May 28 2007 08:17 AM (Zimal)
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I tried watching it, but bounced off. Didn't like anything about it, basically.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, May 28 2007 10:31 AM (PiXy!)
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Hi. My name is Eugene Gershin. I'd like to welcome you to Obadiah Shoher's blog, Samson Blinded: A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict.
Obadiah is a pen name of a politician. He writes extremely controversial articles about Israel, the Middle East politics, and terrorism.
Obadiah advocates political rationalism instead of moralizing. He is economic liberal and political conservative.
Google refused advertising our site and Amazon deleted reviews of Obadiah's book. Nevertheless, Obadiah’s is the largest Jewish personal blog, read by more than 100,000 people monthly. 210,000 people from 81 countries downloaded Obadiah’s book. The blog was voted the best overall in People’s Choice: Jewish and Israeli blogs Awards, received Webby Honoree and other awards.
Please help us spread Obadiah's message, and mention the blog in one of your posts, or link to us. We would greatly appreciate your comments at www.samsonblinded.org/blog
Best wishes,
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Jewrusalem.net – Israeli Uncensored News
Posted by: Eugene at Wednesday, May 30 2007 09:50 PM (ysnsy)
1
Hmm, I vote "parody," but it's hard to tell. Click through to the main page and read the "Remember the Sabbath" post. The language is over the top enough that I'm thinking parody.
If he's in earnest, then as a fundamentalist Christian myself, I'm embarrassed....
Posted by: Griffin at Tuesday, May 22 2007 09:45 AM (fKR0H)
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Note that the site claims to be a member of "Blogs for Brownback". It's a neat scam: set up a blog, claim to be supporting a particular candidate, and fill it with outrageous troll posts.
A number of commenters seem to have fallen for it and say they won't vote for Brownback because of the blog. (Chances are they wouldn't have anyway.)
The real risk is that this sort of thing will give ammunition to the McCain types who want to subject blogs to campaign-finance-law censorship.
Posted by: Jonathan Tappan at Tuesday, May 22 2007 10:40 AM (Zimal)
Now that you've got minx working well on Ace's blog, you'd think there
would be nothing for me to complain about. But you're wrong!
Blockquote. Not only is it not an option, but it doesn't work even if
you type it in!
<blockquote>Hello.</blockquote>
See?
Other than that though, it's a fine job you've done. Don't tell anyone
I said that though. I'm a contrarian, and would hate to screw up my
image of being an ***hole.
Heh
.
Posted by: Kevin at Wednesday, May 23 2007 07:26 AM (/ndDU)
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Yeah, the editor hates blockquotes. But you can use the [quote] tag instead.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 23 2007 08:31 AM (PiXy!)
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Groovy. Or whatever hip phrase the kids are saying today.
GROOVY!
Posted by: Kevin at Wednesday, May 23 2007 08:46 AM (/ndDU)
Ok it works well! I apologize for not being capable of congratulating you on a job well done, but as I've previously stated, I'm a complainer. So why won't minx clean my house? Even light dusting seems beyond minx's capability.
Just sayin'.
Posted by: Kevin at Wednesday, May 23 2007 08:49 AM (/ndDU)
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Aside: Can we use all bbcode? Sheesh, I said 'aside'. As if any of my comments are anything other than 'asides'.
Posted by: Kevin at Wednesday, May 23 2007 08:53 AM (/ndDU)
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Yep, pretty much all BBCode will work. Here's a guide. It's incomplete, but it will do to get your going.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 23 2007 12:53 PM (PiXy!)
I put up another of the Pretty Sammy omake. (I deleted the two other ones I'd put up previously. No sense chewing up a lot of space with that stuff). This new file is about 65MB and it uploaded without a hitch. Still can't puzzle out why video plugins won't work though. Maybe I'm just not specifying enough parameters in the html.
Posted by: Will at Wednesday, May 23 2007 01:51 PM (olS40)
I'll be adding a Flash video player next month, and hopefully that will work better. Otherwise I'll have to start looking at Minx's file serving module.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 24 2007 08:35 PM (PiXy!)
Microsoft wakes up and smells the coffee, and it smells like doom:
So Microsoft took the third choice, which was to begin licensing its
patents to other companies in exchange for either royalties or access
to their patents (a "cross-licensing" deal). In December 2003,
Microsoft's new licensing unit opened for business, and soon the
company had signed cross-licensing pacts with such tech firms as Sun,
Toshiba, SAP and Siemens.
At the same time, Smith was having
Microsoft's lawyers figure out how many of its patents were being
infringed by free and open-source software. Gutierrez refuses to
identify specific patents or explain how they're being infringed, lest
FOSS advocates start filing challenges to them.
(My italics.)
They're screwed, and they know it. And like the even more thoroughly screwed SCO, they're going after soft targets:
Since the GPL covered only distributors of Linux, nothing stopped
Smith from seeking royalties directly from end users - many of which
are Fortune 500 companies. He would have to proceed carefully, however, because most of those users were also major Microsoft customers.
"It
was a conversation that one needed to have in a thoughtful way," says
Smith, with obvious understatement. In 2004, Microsoft began having
those conversations, and Smith claims they were cordial. "Companies are
very sensitive to the importance of protecting intellectual property,"
he says, "because ultimately they know that their own businesses
similarly turn on [such] protection."
Indeed. It's a protection racket.
That's illegal, guys.
Expect to see the lawsuits start flying, and soon.
I too think this could backfire, because to sue, Microsofteds to claim specific infringements on specific patents. Then the Slashdot hordes are going to go looking for prior art and other methods to invalidate those patents. From what I've seen, many of these software patents are pretty shakey; the big companies don't care, because they just cross-liscence their entire patent libraries and thus have no incentive to challenge each other. But Joe Slashdot is certainly motivated to destroy as many software patents as possible.
Posted by: Boviate at Monday, May 14 2007 07:24 PM (ojRwJ)
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aces is freezing at comments for the last ten. I don't think it is me, cuz the error is almost immediate.
Posted by: Wickedpinto at Tuesday, May 15 2007 11:08 AM (QTv8u)
It's gotta be something to do with the backups, since it's happening at the same time every day. The backups shouldn't be taking that long though, so maybe something's wrong there.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 15 2007 12:50 PM (PiXy!)
Well, M. Sarkozy certainly seems to be annoying all the right people. And 53% of the vote on an 85% turnout is, while not a great result, at least somewhat encouraging. It's France, after all. Baby steps. They're still learning how to run a country without demolishing it every twenty or thirty years.
could it be that so many comentators (which I learned is the proper term) link video and that your overlay query's those video's, and that ace's front page is so large?
No offense to the VRWC hadeen like vince and stuff, but their comments are generaly text built and unfortunately excecively racist, though I think the sites are awesome.
Back on point. Is it that Aces place tends to attract too many links/embeds?
I remember when I would querry my character for every piece of code I wrote, I ended up freezing my area's when I was a mud "wiz" (once again I know it's nowhere near what you do, and as in nowhere I mean as in the place that you call nowhere, has a guy who can tell you "OH! wickedpinto? he's in the middle of nowhere" sort of nowhere, I'm just trying to create a personal reference) and eventually it just plain got too big.
Just wondering.
Posted by: Wickedpinto at Friday, May 11 2007 07:02 AM (QTv8u)
could it be that so many comentators (which I learned is the proper
term) link video and that your overlay query's those video's, and that
ace's front page is so large?
No, that shouldn't matter at all.
Anyway, I checked in at Ace's and everything seems to be fine.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, May 11 2007 11:48 AM (PiXy!)
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I think I know what the problem was this time: One of the other mu.nu servers was overloaded and very slow. Ace's comments page includes a list of mu.nu blogs - and that list comes from the server that was running slow.
I fixed the other server before taking a look at Ace's site, so I didn't see that happening, but that's probably what it was.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, May 11 2007 12:18 PM (PiXy!)
I was at TownHall.com just now following a link from Instapundit about the Lileks debacle (the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newspaper has reassigned its best writer as a local-stories reporter) when I ran across this link: Why ATHEISTS are 1000% percent out to lunch...
And yes, it's the usual drivel. Kevin McCullough criticizes Christopher Hitchens for making "consistent strawman arguments" against religion, then comes up with this:
In Hitchens' own life, he wants it both ways. He wants to acknowledge the evil of Islamic radicalism; he wants to fight a war against Jihad; but he's not willing to say that evil has a source. He wants to say that we should be outraged and fight for the protection of our future, but if there is no good and there is no evil - and if there is no God there is neither of those - then there can't be any rationale for saying that their way of believing is any different than ours, therefore if they want to murder us, they should be allowed to.
(My transcription.)
How about a rational rationale? How about the concept that we'd rather not be murdered? Does that make no headway with you, Mr McCullough? Are you really unable to distinguish between the ethical and moral values of Islamic extremism and Western civilization without reference to your personal religious beliefs?
This is the fourth instalment (and second reboot) of the Futari Wa Pretty Cure franchise. Gone are Nagisa and Honoka (sadly) and Mipple and Mepple (thankfully). Cure White and Cure Black are replaced with Cure Dream, Cure Rouge, Cure... Cure Lemonade?! Oy. I won't look up the other two to avoid spoiling the surprise.*
The original was quite a good show, though it did to some extent fall into the monster-of-the-week trap as magical girl shows so often do. The heroines were very engaging, and the opening and closing themes kicked ass.
The sequel and reboots haven't managed the charm or originality of the first season, though it's been successful enough to run to nearly 200 episodes and several movies - as much as the entire run of Sailor Moon.
I'd give this season a miss unless you're a Pretty Cure completist or a mahou shoujo addict - or a ten-year-old Japanese girl, in which case, I must congratulate you on your grasp of the English language!
Quote almost worthy of Gir: I wish I could go to sleep at night wrapped in fried eggs!
* It's called Pretty Cure 5 not because it's season five, but because of the mandatory number of any sentai team.
I'm sorry to comment waaaay off the topic here, Pixy, but could you drop me an e-mail? I have a couple of things to ask you, and I can't find your real address.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, May 05 2007 11:22 AM (NiMS2)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, May 06 2007 09:21 PM (PiXy!)
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Lagging out again, don't know if this is real, but just an advance notice.
Posted by: Wickedpinto at Tuesday, May 08 2007 11:05 AM (QTv8u)
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Everythings running, must have been on my side Sorry about that pixy.
Posted by: Wickedpinto at Tuesday, May 08 2007 12:20 PM (QTv8u)
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Hi WP. At the time you wrote that first comment, the daily backup had just kicked in, and made comments run sloooow for a couple of minutes. I'll tweak things to try to improve that.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 08 2007 01:22 PM (PiXy!)
Makes me feel better know that I have yet to complain without reason. I feel guilty doing it anyways, but I figure this is a more direct route to notifiy you.
Randome question: Is Ace's your highest volume blog?
Posted by: Wickedpinto at Wednesday, May 09 2007 01:12 PM (QTv8u)
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Most months Ace is the biggest, but sometimes it's the Jawa Report.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 09 2007 01:26 PM (PiXy!)
Okay, so this one is not actually part of the current season. Or the previous season. Or the one before that. Or...
Okay, it's 30 years old.
But, unlike Toward The Terra, a 2007 animation of a 70's manga, this 70's anime doesn't suck. Even though it has much worse artwork and animation, even though it's 14 molar melodramic acid, it's still a good show.
I'm not sure exactly why, but it is. Possibly because Harlock is an archetype rather than a stereotype. (Whatever that means.)
But how does that chick with no mouth drink all the booze? That's what I want to know.
Hapless highschool student Hayate* gets fired from his bicycle courier job, and through Plot Contrivance 3B gets hired as a butler for super-duper-rich family.
It's a very standard anime comedy so far, but I do like his shoulder angels.
* Actually, it's more his parents who are hapless. In fact, his parents should be shot.
Beautiful space princesses. Grizzled space captains. Deadly space ants. Skintight space suits. Cliched space opera - well...
Actually not too bad, judging from the first episode. Nice character designs, artwork, and animation. Big spaceships. Biiiig spaceships. Giant robots too. Appears to be a straight action series, but as long as it doesn't take itself too seriously, it could be quite good.
I have three of these coming - two today and the third tomorrow. Between them I now have the equivalent of two Sun E10Ks to run mee.nu.
Well, not the memory or the I/O bandwidth, but the CPU.
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Still To Watch
Missed a few items in my current season viewing: Romeo x Juliette, Heroic Age, Master of Epic - The Animation Age, Reideen, Hayate the Combat Butler, Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, and the OAV Murder Princess. There's still a lot more out there, but the rest hasn't been fansubbed yet.
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Sorry pixy, I know I do this too much, but I don't know if aces comments are down, but I'm lagging out again. Maybe he should get rid of that sidebar query until things are cleared up, though I know that isn't the cause.
Posted by: Wickedpinto at Thursday, May 03 2007 08:53 AM (QTv8u)
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Yeah, the little bastardy thing was down. Fixed now. I'll work on this today.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 03 2007 12:39 PM (PiXy!)
Watching Rocket Girls has led me to some ponderation on the subject of fanservice. When you think of fanservice in anime, the first thing that comes to mind is panchira and the like; gratuitous T&A. But more generally, fanservice is something put in, not essential to the story, that makes fans happy.
There's are fair bit of fanservice of the latter sort (and a certain amount of the former) in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which has certainly contributed to its popularity. Admittedly, Haruhi's awareness of Narrative Causality makes it hard to say what is and isn't important to the plot...
The scene with the HP-41 in episode two of Rocket Girls is pure engineer fanservice. The same character is back in episode three, describing his childhood dreams of going into space, which began when he watched the moon landing (he's in his early forties; I know I watched it myself, but I was too young to really remember it). He ended up a salariman, but left his job at the age of 40 to join the SSA, an apparently private but government-assisted space project.
And then found that he can't go into space due to a heart condition, but that doesn't really matter to him so long as he can be part of the space project. Someone involved in this understands engineers.
The reason I wanted to discuss this is that if you are delivering engineer fanservice, you must be assuming that your target audience will include engineers, and you need to understand that they will suffer from engineer's disease. And when you put in scenes that just plain wouldn't happen - the helicopter scene in episode one; the catalyst scene in episode three - purely for the comedy value, you do rather irk your fanbase.
Not irked enough to stop watching, not by a long shot, but still irked.
I have a new Compaq notebook, the hardware of which is quite good except for the battery life (which sucks) and the trackpad's habit of jumping every so often. And it was cheap, so I can live with those minor points.
The software is mostly Microsoft, and is as you'd expect. The delivery of that software, though, is all HP. New HP, not Old HP. In other words, total crap.
HP is too cheap to provide install CDs with new computers, so they take up 8GB of my 80GB hard disk with a "recovery" partition... something that is really useful if what you are recovering from is a disk failure.* Because it's a separate partition, you can't recover the space even after you've taken the two hours or so to burn the recovery DVDs (plural).
And because it's so important (because you don't have install disks), it's protected from normal access, so you can't install software from it. So HP put another 4.5GB of files on your C drive for actually installing from.
Even if you burn the recovery DVDs, you have no options whatsoever on reinstallation; you get the recovery partition back whether you like it or not. I'd just blow the whole mess away and install standard Windows XP, except that I just replaced the drive with a 160GB model, and the XP install CDs I have are all pre-SP1 and won't recognise it. I have three valid, unused activation keys, but they're useless.
Now, the one saving grace, I thought, was that HP had generously bundled 30 little games with the system, things like Bejeweled and Insaniquarium. Nice touch, I thought, even though they're probably paying 20 cents for the lot (if that).
Turns out they are timed demos. You get 60 minutes of play, then they die. Yeah, way to go HP. 1.2GB of frigging ads.
Update: It would appear that at some point I had the presence of mind to make an... archival backup... of a certain piece of software to which I already hold multiple licenses. Yay me.
* This is just an example; the disk didn't actually fail. It was just full. Not least because the 80GB disk comes with about 50GB of available space. So I bought myself a 160GB replacement and a neat little 2.5" USB/eSATA drive case.
1
I don't know of any company that actually sends you the installation CDs anymore. If anyone does... yell it out. My husband needs a new laptop and I've been stalling because I can't figure out which is the best of the worst picks out there.
Anyhow, it's one of my pet peeves - and I KNOW it's all Microsoft's doing. One more way for them to try to control what you do with their product once you've legally purchased it. ARG!!!
Also, I tend to go through each and every "add on" and delete it. If I want it, I'll go get it for myself. It's so friggin' annoying.
Posted by: Teresa at Wednesday, May 02 2007 08:59 AM (gsbs5)
The Compaq (i.e. HP) laptop I bought a year ago came with a bunch of useful stuff installed such as an antivirus program. Of course, all of them were set to timeout in 30 days, and to nag you constantly to "upgrade" until then (and after then).
And of course the desktop was loaded with icons for other begware and services like AOL. I seem to remember having to spend a couple of hours all told removing stuff I didn't want.
Since it was XP Home, I ended up nuking the partition and installing from an XP-pro installation disk I owned.
But I don't think this experience is unique to HP. I suspect it's like that now no matter whose computer you buy.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, May 02 2007 09:34 AM (+rSRq)
3
As an alternative to your 'archival backup' you could also use your existing system to create a slipstreamed version of your pre-SP1 XP install disk, thereby upgrading it to a SP2 version and happily reinstalling from there.
My ASUS laptop came with far less crapware than any other laptop I've ever seen, but it too had a recovery partition I didn't want. And XP Home which I didn't want either, but couldn't buy it OS-less or with XP Pro to save my life.
So much for the consumer being able to buy what they want.
Bahhh.
Paul
Posted by: Light & Dark at Wednesday, May 02 2007 11:10 AM (r3jFr)
4
This notebook, despite being cheap, came with XP Pro, so once I found my archival backup I could use its existing activation key and all went well. (It was a end-of-model sale; the replacement model has Vista - and costs $500 more.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 02 2007 12:54 PM (PiXy!)
Supposedly part of the reason for cheap laptops and desktops is the kickback that manufacturers get from bloatware companies.
After all disk is cheap. Yes ?
What price our collective sanity and time ?
Posted by: Andrew at Wednesday, May 02 2007 01:03 PM (/uGTr)
6
This Dell came with a recovery DVD for Vista (in February or so), but I have not had a chance to use it. So yes, manufacturers still supply CDs. The previous CD from a couple years back had XP Home SP1a, and it turned out to be keyless (does not ask the key). I used it to reinstall XP on a different system. Go Dell, I guess.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Thursday, May 03 2007 02:17 AM (9imyF)
7
In case you wonder why I would want XP, I need it for reverse-engineering.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Thursday, May 03 2007 02:18 AM (9imyF)
Dell still ships install CDs with their systems. Sometimes you have to specify that you want them to include the media when placing the order. Sometimes you don't. I don't know why. Their on-line store is not exactly consistent, which is a little odd, considering it's the only store they have.
And (apparently) little known fact: Dell install CDs appear to check for Dell hardware, and will install without a cd-key, so long as you use a Dell CD on Dell Hardware.
e.g., if you buy a Dell machine with Vista on it and boot from a XP Pro install CD ... XP pro will install without a hitch.
Posted by: bkw at Thursday, May 03 2007 02:48 AM (bRLba)
(You can extrapolate the above behaviour to popping XP Pro on a machine with Home or Win98 or ME or, uh, Linux. Not that you should, of course.
I've always been under the impression that downgrading to old software if you had a license for the new stuff was OK (or at the least, legally gray). The other way around -- not so much.)
Posted by: bkw at Thursday, May 03 2007 02:52 AM (bRLba)
If you need XP SP2 grab yourself uTorrent and go to bitoogle.com (redirects to a different site, I think its yotoshi). Just because you downloaded the sofware illegally doesn't mean its illegal (if you have a valid key that you bought, that is).
I accidentally bought a Dell XPS 1210 (was pricing it and completed the sale--oh well, wanted a new machine anyhow). I love it. Gotta go small with laptops; those 17" monsters are useless as portable computers, IMHO. Upgraded the disk, CPU, video/card, and put 1 gig in it. Because its the small one you can do all that and still not pay a ton of cash.
Anyhow, it came with lots of bloat. I uninstalled all of it, but when I got my free copy of Vista I blew it all away and installed fresh.
Posted by: McGurk at Thursday, May 03 2007 03:25 AM (Ri74D)
Company I work for buys mostly Gateway Machines and Laptops - they all come with a recovery partition - but I think you can pay a few bucks more ( we do) and get recovery media thrown in.
Andrew
Posted by: Another Andrew at Thursday, May 03 2007 01:19 PM (GmBhS)
13
If he just needs SP2, he can download it from Microsoft here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=049c9dbe-3b8e-4f30-8245-9e368d3cdb5a&displaylang=en
It asks for validation before install.
Posted by: Rebecca at Friday, May 04 2007 04:21 AM (iTAqF)
14
The problem is that if you are installing on a disk larger than 128GB, you need at least SP1 on the install CD.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, May 04 2007 08:55 AM (PiXy!)
It's the latest ARM chip from Freescale (nee Motorola). ARM11 core with clock speeds up to 665MHz, includes vector coprocessor, hardware MPEG-4 encode and decode, camera sensors (two) and LCD interfaces (also two), 2D and 3D graphics hardware*, SD, Memory Stick, CF, PCMCIA and ATA interfaces, USB 2.0 host/device/OTG support, and a whole bunch of UARTs for various purposes.
All in a package 14mm square and using a mere... actually, they don't seem to specify the overall power consumption anywhere... and costing just $20 in 1k quantities.
No built-in networking or chip interconnects, but that seems to be the only real downside.
I'm thinking 128MB of memory, 512MB of flash, and a 6" 640x960 screen. I'll take two.
* Though the 3D hardware isn't great by modern standards. Somewhere between PS1 and PS2 performance, and closer to PS1 at that. On the other hand, the graphics module uses 40mW at full speed.
I wasn't judging, I was just wondering if you maintained a log, so that if this becomes common, you might more readily view the cause.
I (nowhere near the stuff you deal with) used to "code" on a MUD, and everyone would get on me about carrying around so many "daggers" because what I did, was I ghosted my daggers to various !if's and stuff. It was how I kept track of stuff.
You are dealing with big shit, and you need a log, I was just wondering if you monitered them, though it wouldn't be a bad idea to start carrying daggers, if you know what I mean.
Posted by: Wickedpinto at Tuesday, May 01 2007 04:49 PM (QTv8u)
I don't know if you know about muds, but I'm sure you do. but I always related to "code" as an object, so I created objects for every iffy bit of code, and if some piece of code failed, the dagger assigned to monitering that particular piece of code would disable me.
Kinda like an automatic and un-relenting compiler error. I couldn't move my mud character without fixing what was wrong. Thats what I meant, or rather I couldn't move my character until I either fixed the code of the item I created, or without replacing my own error correction code that kept me from moving.
Posted by: Wickedpinto at Tuesday, May 01 2007 04:53 PM (QTv8u)
5
I thought about writing up a longer comparison of Manabi's PDA (or whatever the heck it is), a modern "convergence" PDA with cellphone, and OLPC. But it comes out somewhat dull. I wrote about most of its features before, e.g. that the design relies on the school IT infrastructure heavily, whereas OLPC does not. The only thing I'm really surprised that Manabi's unit does not have a keyboard of any kind. Maybe it has a Newton-style stroke recognition. It might even be easier with Japanese. Heck, my DS does it. In any case, it's a cool gadget. Unfortunately, it's school property.
Posted by: Wickedpinto at Tuesday, May 01 2007 04:58 PM (9imyF)
I wasn't judging, I was just wondering if you maintained a log, so that
if this becomes common, you might more readily view the cause.
Oh, absolutely. Unfortunately, this problem is uncommon enough, and the log files so large, that it's hard to track down.
Also, New Comments Thingy is a very old (in relative terms) version of the code. The version I'm running here has much better logging, and much better control for stuck or dead processes. So the sooner I can get Ace migrated to the new system the better.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 01 2007 04:59 PM (PiXy!)
The only thing I'm really surprised that Manabi's unit does not have a
keyboard of any kind. Maybe it has a Newton-style stroke recognition.
It might even be easier with Japanese.
Well, keyboards are kind of clunky for Japanese anyway, so stroke recognition or some sort of on-screen keyboard might not be a problem.
The thing I really want is the mid-sized screen. Current PDAs are too small, and notebooks are too large. There are micro-notebooks, but they run Windows, and Windows sucks on a small device like that. And because Windows has certain base hardware requirements, the devices are far more expensive, heavy, and power-hungry than they would other wise be, so in the end the hardware sucks as well.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 01 2007 05:02 PM (PiXy!)
Yeah, I guessed. That's a major problem. I don't know why it's doing that, but I'll find it and fix it right away.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 01 2007 08:01 PM (PiXy!)
10
If it helps, the form fields are pre-filled for Wickedpinto right now in my browser (I'm going to change them). For example, his/her e-mail is his nick at gmail. I did not even look at the fields, just entered the comment.
Maybe a cookie hash collision or something?
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wednesday, May 02 2007 03:18 AM (9imyF)
11
It shouldn't be a hash collision - I'm suspecting a more boring but more statistically likely plain-old bug. Specifically, a leak from the session data to the thread data. That should never happen, but, well, something is certainly going wrong.
Thanks for confirming that it was showing up in the form fields; that's what I suspected, but it's always good to know for sure.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 02 2007 04:38 AM (PiXy!)
What are the values of Δv1 and Δv2? But some of those numbers have seven digits... You have a calculator, don't you!? Right, right! ... the heck is this!? There's no equals key! Of course not! Don't you know Reverse Polish Notation? Of course not! Oh, really? In that case... I'll take five minutes to cram its operation into your head. When I'm done with you, you'll never be able to use a regular calculator again!
1
I know, I was too hard on them, but the goddamn helicopter was just too awful. It was too hard to swallow. I know that GiTS did the same thing. I just can't help it!
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, May 01 2007 03:23 AM (9imyF)
2
The helicopter scene in episode one? Yeah, that was a bit much.
I'll say one thing for this show: The story moves right along. That long-running subplot they established right at the beginning? Already over.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 01 2007 08:41 AM (PiXy!)
3
So she khows what happened to him already?! You're winning me over.
You know, I only watched MKM because of wonderful fanboyism at AoMM. I did not know the greatness of emo facial distortion before I read about it.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, May 01 2007 02:08 PM (9imyF)
This is the second show this season (the other being Lovely Complex) that has taken what looked to be an annoying long-term subplot and nailed it shut in the first couple of episodes. It's a really encouraging development.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 01 2007 02:41 PM (PiXy!)
Wait, wait, wait... THERE REALLY IS SOMETHING CALLED "REVERSE POLISH NOTATION"???
This isn't some engineering joke?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, May 06 2007 12:41 AM (VdgKc)
6
Wonderduck, the actual term is Lukasiewicz notation. But as you might imagine, few people remember that name, so it became known as "Polish notation".
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, May 06 2007 08:46 AM (+rSRq)
7
The fansub translates it as "reverse Polish calculation", which is actually pretty good if you assume that they've never heard of it.
The calculator in that episode is clearly an HP-41.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, May 06 2007 12:01 PM (PiXy!)
8
I only knew it as "Polish Notation". It may be that Russo-Polak animosity which expunged Lukasiewicz. On the other hand, Rusty Russell gets all upset when he heards people calling his hypervisor "Rustivizor". Maybe Dr. Lukasiewicz was like that too, who knows.
Still, despite being educated enough to know about the notation, I cannot remember which is straight and which is reverse between N M Op and Op N M.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Sunday, May 06 2007 12:22 PM (9imyF)
9
My god, there really IS such a thing as Reverse Polish Notation! That's the most wonderful thing I've never heard of.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, May 06 2007 02:18 PM (VdgKc)
10
Mr. Duck, you just lost about 20 technogeek cred-points. I can't believe you've never heard of this before.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, May 06 2007 03:30 PM (+rSRq)
11
There are other ways to be a geek than to carry a calculator in a holster, Steven. Heck, I barely passed basic algebra in high school (though I rocked in geometry)... who's ever seen an X, and why does it matter that three of them plus two Ys equals 38?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, May 06 2007 04:55 PM (R/R0E)
12
Heh... as a heavy user of HP scientific calculators in school (Texas
actually has an academic contest based around calculators*), I had to
deal with RPN a lot... but I haven't used it in years. Today's
TI-8x series (and I assume similar HP models) just make things too easy
with their big, multi-line screens that allow you to replace "thinking
backwards" with just typing entire formulas into the computer.
*For years before that (and still today), they also had a contest where
you had to do arithmetic completely in your head; don't worry about
them going soft on kids, at least not those who compete.
Posted by: Big D at Sunday, May 06 2007 05:12 PM (JJ4vV)
13
Heh, the old Number Sense competition? Used to do those when I was a kid. Man, they gave out beeeeeg trophies, too - darn near as tall as I was back then.
Steve's right - even if you're not a math geek, you should have at least HEARD of reverse Polish notation... maybe only a ten-point deduction, though.
Posted by: AvatarADV at Monday, May 07 2007 04:44 AM (PyY3O)
14
Hmmm... that must've been at invitational meets, the UIL official
awards were just medals (I never got to State in anything but Current
Events, but the medals they handed out were pretty uniform across
contests).
I always wondered why more states don't do things like that... UIL
Academics did wonders for kids in my classes. I still use a lot
of the old Number Sense math shortcuts today.
Posted by: Big D at Monday, May 07 2007 06:27 AM (JJ4vV)
15
I just saw the damn thing. Woa. I understand how it can get one excited. Downloading ep.3 now.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Monday, May 07 2007 06:29 AM (9imyF)
"even if you're not a math geek, you should have at least HEARD of reverse Polish notation... "
Why? Seriously, why? If I (or anybody else) has never had a need to know advanced algebra/RPN/whatever, and high-end calculators like the one in Rocket Girls didn't exist for the general public when I was in high school, give me one legit reason that I should have heard of something like "Reverse Polish Notation."
"You're a geek" is not an acceptable answer. I came to my geekdom via the performing arts track, not the math track.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, May 07 2007 09:57 AM (VdgKc)
