Out of the frying pan and into the punch in the face.

The cast of hit sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf are to reunite for a new two-part storyline which will see them finally return to Earth.

Red Dwarf cast to be reunited

I really don’t know what to think about this. I liked Red Dwarf. Quite a bit actually– I own the first seven seasons on DVD and they have been watched many times.

But see, that’s the thing, I own the first seven seasons on DVD, the eighth remains pointedly unpurchased.

Like so many TV shows seem to do, Red Dwarf peaked in the 2nd / 3rd season and steadily dropped from there on (although they managed to mix it up a bit in the 7th, which did add quite a bit imo), with a rather remarkable drop in the eighth and final season.

As much as I’d like to like this, I can imagine that, 10 years on, it’s going to be a real challenge to avoid this feeling like an awkward deeply unfunny skit of the Red Dwarf that fans know and love.

In most cases, when people sue power-tool manufacturers because they’ve lost a finger or hand in an accident, they’re unsuccessful — because it’s tough to prove that the manufacturer did anything wrong. Add SawStop to the mix, however, and the picture changes. Suddenly, the industry is promising an injury-proof saw. What if someone got hurt?

He Took On the Whole Power-Tool Industry

The comments of the most recent Coding Horror post about eating your own dogfood linked to this — It’s about the guy who invented a way to reduce table saw accidents and the trouble he’s had getting industry leaders to adopt the technology.

via Language Log

Anyway, that’s only for professors.. so it doesn’t count for professionals, right?

Right?

The tech tells you it [Linux] will take a while to install, so you head off for an hour-and-a-half Presidential coffee break. When you come back, the tech is nowhere to be found and your computer looks different. Nothing works the same as it used to. All of your programs are missing and you can’t figure out how to access the company file share. Everything is fucked up, and you can’t do your job. Score one for superior engineering.

Linux to spend eternity in shadow of ‘little blue E’

It’s a well written rant (containing a startling lack of cursing.. what’s up Dziuba?) that I think today at least is totally valid.

It’s interesting that MacOS is managing breaking out of this trap (as in, they are becoming rather mainstream) but I imagine this is due to:

1. Actually having marketing
2. Their products looking different from standard PCs. This means that users view them as actually different things (a ‘mac’ computer instead of a ‘windows’ computer) — linux has no such advantage

This critique started when some women systematically looked up at the top of society and saw men everywhere: most world rulers, presidents, prime ministers, most members of Congress and parliaments, most CEOs of major corporations, and so forth — these are mostly men.

Seeing all this, the feminists thought, wow, men dominate everything, so society is set up to favor men. It must be great to be a man.

The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men. Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Likewise, who gets killed in battle? Even in today’s American army, which has made much of integrating the sexes and putting women into combat, the risks aren’t equal. This year we passed the milestone of 3,000 deaths in Iraq, and of those, 2,938 were men, 62 were women.

Is there anything good about men?

It’s a really interesting essay centered around how men and women deal with relationships, why they do it they way they do and what this has meant for the evolution of human societies.

For those of you using Opera, did you know that you can perform mouse gestures on the actual tabs of the page without having that page open?

For example, if you right-mouse+drag-right on a tab it will attempt to go forward for that tab.

The more you know [rainbow]!

There is something rather odd about the new Prince of Persia. It’s almost like they bought the script to a light hearted buddy-comedy hopefully staring Will Farrel or Vince Vaughn by mistake and then thought, “Ah, fuck it” and went with it anyway.

The entire intro sequence / tutorial section is littered with cocky woah-zany-fun-time-disney dialogue. You never take The Prince (he never reveals his true name) seriously. The Prince never takes himself seriously. It wouldn’t surprise me if The Prince pulls a Boston Legal and breaks the fourth wall at some stage, he’s that comically out of place.

Everyone else is very serious though. While your side kick chick is talking about how it’s imperative you do this thing involving balls of light that really does sound like it’s ripped straight from Twilight Princess you / The Prince are off in your own little world making random adolescent comments about your donkey and how you could have had woman, wine and thick carpets.

As much as it sounds like I’m ripping on (sorry, dogging on) the script I actually really like it. The writing style is something you would expect to find in Firefly, Buffy or Angel. There are the good lines with surprisingly competent voice acting; then there are the standard talking-into-a-microphone-but-thinking-about-lunch deliveries we’ve come to know and love in computer games.

A lot has changed since the previous three PoP titles revived the franchise and made us forget about PoP3D. The main gist of the it seems to be this: PC gaming is out, console — especially that inspried by the Japanese — is in.

In the previous trilogy the acrobatics feats The Prince performed were impressive, but they maintained some semblance of realism. You could be fairly sure that the laws of physics were actually present there, somewhere, even if they were being.. repressed, from time to time.

This new game though.. it feels less like Jacky Chan and more like Jet Li. Less Hardboiled and more Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, you know?

Every aspect, from the way he runs to the sound effect played when you jump from a swing bar to the knitting-cut-scenes style of fighting gives the game an anime-like sense of unreality. Which is good, don’t get me wrong. It’s just not what I was expecting.

But then again, I wasn’t expecting so-bad-it’s-good dialogue either, nor voice acting that doesn’t make me want to shear my ears off with a paring knife.

And just think, I’ve only played it for an hour. Better get cracking..

Edit: If you don’t care about spoiling the beginning of the game this is a compilation of the funny moments from the first 20min or so.

Pretty Pictures of earth.