Vorlonagent

Moore's Law willing...

This is the sad place people find themselves in from time to time. We all think differently. Sometimes there's conflict and difficulty that come from that. Ed Verres is not an innately prejudiced man and Tedd for all his issues is not consumed by his anger and alienation. There's every reason to think they'll work it out over time.

You're right. Catalina plays it more like a psych disad. She either gets the will roll -4 version or no will roll at all unless there's intervention by a third party. After Catalina kissed Elliot and the dust settled and Catalina realized what kissing Elliot could mean to Rhoda, it was relatively easy for Elliot to talk Catalina out of "the greatest apology ever" and suggest, "just tell your girlfriend what happened". Catalina internalized it and followed through without needing additional rolls (that were shown to us anyway).

Or these high school kids aren't as good at maintaining operational security as they think they are and Ed Verres is letting them think they're successfully keeping stuff from him.

Nope. My screen says you posted your reply "20 minutes ago". Your english usage was about my only possible cue. You're overall very good but you don't always do plurals right for an American, but then, neither do the British. You're right about data width. I misremembered and got my powers of 2 messed up. Both 8086 and 8088 used the overlay scheme I mentioned to achieve 20-bit addressing, so both processors could address a full MB of memory if the programmers were willing to jump through the necessary code hoops.

Catalina took the GIURPS disadvantage "Impulsive" at double normal strength,

Yes. My company is medium sized with maybe 10,000 people total, mostly in the US (Silicon Valley) and India, but with small offices everywhere it seems. There's only so many links in the chain needed for that.

Yup. Two grades of "supervisor" then two grades of "Vice President" and then the CEO. It makes the most sense when you talk about concentric circles of responsibility. My supervisor = responsible for my unit. Her supervisor = responsible for all related units. The grades of VP work the same way.

You could be right. "aggressively unfunny" is the best capsule description of the trailers I have ever read. I fully intend to steal the phrase in the unlikely event I talk about Ghostbusters anywhere else. The political nonsense was how I first became aware of the film (news reporting about the internet backlash and sanctimonious HuffPo articles on how men can't handle women in lead roles). By the time I hit Youtube, any politics that might have gone into the making of the trailers (or perception thereof by me) would stand out. I still think the internet mirrored, amplified and returned with interest the aggressive aspect of the trailers, opening the way for much more and worse unpleasantness aimed at the movie and cast than would otherwise have occurred. Possibly a case of Geurilla marketing backfiring.

I would say iTemple. Primarily because the iPhone and iPad were Jobs' crowning achievements. But there are less-flattering reasons. Really? I'm surprised. Heck I didn't know you lived in Europe.... Jobs treated his tumor the way he ran his company...on his own terms with him thoroughly in control. IIRC he ran down every blind ally and tried every quack-remedy looking for a cure. Everything except chemotherapy. And he died as he lived. I don't know if he just didn't care near the end, was consumed by hatred of Google and wouldn't budge on anything, just wanted this one last thing for his ego, or honestly thought it would help his company survive. One of the guiding principles that went into Apple's HQ was ideas sparked by chance meetings in the hallway or in the breakroom. The idea was to get everybody together and contour the place to passively pool creativity. Like most such fad-ideas there's both something to it and confirmation bias that has over-sold it. The new Nvidia HQ, a much less ambitious affair that's going up about 250 meters away from my desk, is being built with this same principle in mind. My supervisor's supervisor is skeptical. S100 was not a consumer industry and wasn't going to be. It isn't relevant to what I was saying. All the 6502-based consumer microcomputers were company-centric ecosystems as I stated. Technically the 8088 had a sort-of 12-bit memory addressing scheme. It had two registers associated with each memory access register. Each segment register accessed an 8-bit wide data path (64K), but there was a second register that changed what 8 bit segment was being accessed. The second register was overlaid on the first such that it added 4 bits to the effective range of accessible memory, though moving the segment around was a pretty big deal codewise... The 8088 was a cut down version of the 8086, which IIRC was a true 16-bit processor, including memory access. Intel has a history of making the "good" version you want to buy and the brain-damaged version you can afford (*cough*Celeron*cough*)

There are European consumers who behave differently, also Japanese and South Korean consumers and lately, Chinese consumers. I can't speak to which if any would be more open to Apple's product line but Americans are distinct in their/our degree of price consciousness and Apple is located in the US, making the US its prime market. Apple needs ideas, yes. Desperately. That's what I meant by leading at a pace others can't catch up to. Apple also needs the money to develop and market those ideas. Innovation is not done on the cheap. Especially since some ideas are going to be failures. They need money a lot more than they need a fancy new HQ. I imagine it's considered something of a monument to Jobs since he put its construction in motion. Certainly it's too late to back out now. It's done or almost so. It's just Jobs should have realized Apple needed the money more.

They generally do deliver a better product that is more accessible. But Apple is also very controlling. You have to do it their way whether it's how the OS works or how they source components. The premium Apple puts on their products means they would always eventually be undercut. The American consumer is more price conscious than anything else. "Good enough" which is significantly cheaper wins over even "demonstrably better" if it's also "demonstrably more expensive". With Steve Jobs gone, I consider Apple to be circling the drain. I personally think Apple's nifty new HQ to be something of a white elephant. Too big a drain on resources when Apple really needs to focus on not just leading the market but blazing a trail at a speed where others can't catch up. The alternative is death. Either the death of Apple's premiums and the way Jobs did business or the death of the company. Their business model isn't and was never sustainable. Maybe it'll be a shopping mall in 20 years....

DEC didn't seem interested in minicomputers. Dominance would have shifted to Apple, Atari, Commodore or possibly Radio Shack. What am I saying? Not Apple. Apple wins when it innovates and the premium it charges for its stuff is justified, loses when "good enough" overtakes Apple's focus on excellence. The premium creates a natural niche for "good enough". PCs filled that niche in the case of the desktop/laptop market, where Apple's share as been 5%. Apple's failed lawsuit against Microsoft over the "look and feel" of Windows vs Mac OS was an attempt to protect Apple's market share. When it failed, Apple was consigned to some niche applications which Macs were head and shoulders above PCs. I believe Steve Jobs could see the same writing on the wall when Google came out with Android. I think that's why he is reported to want to destroy Google and willing to crash Apple in the process if he had to.

The public schematics made it easy to cement the PC as dominant in the economy. Otherwise we would have seen the scattershot world of the 6502 computers continue until attrition cut the number of players back enough for one to achieve dominance. IBM made it all happen faster. I doubt anybody would have published the design for their machine, especially those companies like Apple or Atari where these small computers (microcomputers) were all they made. It took a big company with IBM's dominance in the pre-computer office environment and hidebound difficulty handling disruptive technology to make the PC what it is today. Yes they were right. IBM wrongly assumed that they could hold back the future. They were looking at their own obsolescence but had in their hands the means to survive and thrive. Instead or rising to the challenge, they tried to protect what they already had and lost it all anyway, including this new market that might have sustained them. In fairness to IBM, it would have taken a lot of courage and vision to see what PCs could become, even though the hints were there by the time the 386 came on the scene.

I didn't know that. I consider IBM's decision RE the PC to be a necessary stupidity, if such a thing can exist, for the PC to become what we now know today. The crucial thing was them publishing the schematics. Not only could someone make devices to plug into the PC, they could make their own PC without paying a dime to IBM. I consider that opening up of the market to be crucial since all other microcomputers were company-centric ecosystems the way Apple still is today. IBM still defined the PC specification. It took a second stupidity to completely pull IBM's fingers off the PC. When Intel developed with the 80386 chip, IBM's execs looked at it and turned a bit pale. They declined to make a computer around it. They were concerned a 386-based PC would cannibalize their minicomputer sales. A third-party PC-maker named Compaq picked up the challenge. I wasn't aware of these stories either. I knew DOS was a CP/M clone but I thought Microsoft developed it in-house.

IBM made the mistake of looking at the PC as a trivial side-project. Which is why they published the PC's schematics. They couldn't be bothered to develop all the peripheral devices their PC might need so they made it possible for 3rd parties to pick up the slack. It's also why they outsourced the OS-writing duties to some geeks at a small no-name software company called "Microsoft".

To be honest, it's not my thing, but I'm glad it's there, for people where it is their thing. All of Dan's demographics need love and fanservice.

What really makes this drawing for me is Pandora's expression.

This is normal for me as well. The right clothes are better than skin.

I'd phrase it as Tedd forcing himself to act male in certain circumstances (at school, around Dad) regardless of what gender he feels he is at any moment. And this is why Tedd's lab and Grace are such godsends for Tedd. In his Lab, Tedd has a safe space where he can be himself whether pursuing SCIENCE! or playing transformation games. And Grace simply loves the entire being that is Tedd. She can roll with either and contribute to both research and play. Now we have Sarah who can join in both sides of that dance as well. And she has.

Farscape has a really good body-swap episode...

...which itself was a hasty retcon. If you watch Encounter at Farpoint again, Data was phrased as the standard "ship's android" all starfleet vessels had. Roddenberry's ideals were not all they were cracked up to be. Heresy, I know. His 24th Century was sanctimoniously bland. The self-actualized paragons that Roddenberry wanted the cast (or at least Picard) to be would destroy 90% of character conflicts if continued and character is why we tune in. Roddenberry's ideals had to be left in the dust for the Franchise to fly at all. All the greater sin to lay at Rick Berman's door. They didn't have 6 Wesley-saves-the-day scripts. They had 6 scripts that were rewritten to become Wesley-saves-the-day scripts by Roddenberry. Wil Wheaton took a lot of fan hate for it too, up to and including death threats aimed and him and his family (who needs the internet, right?). He reportedly threatened to quit if Roddenberry didn't stop. Wesley Crusher was Roddenberry's Marty Stu. I was never impressed with Jonathan Frakes until I saw him play Thomas Riker. I didn't realize how much of his acting ability was a prisoner of the character he played.

For me it's just the original Master of Orion. It transfers poorly to a touchscreen by the way. What were the devs thinking?

I never felt pushed by you to prove myself to you or anybody else. That was how I experienced the Ghostbusters trailer. I was handed characters I found unsympathetic in a bland reboot* and demanded that I go enthusiastically to the theaters. I think that this aggressive quality contributed to the blowback against the film. I cannot imagine who could have looked at the trailers for that film and actually thought "This is gonna be awesome! I can't wait for this to hit the theaters!" It was as if feminism hasn't "arrived" until a reboot* film built to repel men starring 4 relatively unknown pushy-broad comedians matches the success of the same film starring two original (male) Saturday Night Live cast members, and one of the (male) brains behind the success of SCTV. It's hard not to think the only reason the project was greenlit was because the (male) movie execs were afraid to cancel it. *Reboot...a mark of quality! Filmmaker(s) seem to feel compelled to "reinterpret" the IP being rebooted "for the current audience", which often destroys the advantage of working with a previously proven concept. I'm sure we all have our own favorite failures (and successes) to mention. A determined few go further deciding to keep only the necessary set-dressings and make some kind of gimmick film. These failures include Dark Shadows, Lone Ranger, and now Ghostbusters. (Edit: How could I have forgotten Land of the Lost?)

then you probably should search app stores for something called DosBox.