or "Louie Louie"

The good: Visually impressive. The sound was excellent. 3D was tastefully done and not gimmicky. Special effects didn't seem to overreach and I wasn't sitting there irritated by a lens flare overload. Good cameo for Stan Lee. The extra scene at the end of the credits (like in every Marvel movie) left some interesting loose ends.

The bad: It seems like they cut out some minor parts of the plot and various explanations/reveals for things so they could fit more action into the time allotted. At multiple points during the movie, I thought to myself, "What is this and why didn't they introduce it?" Maybe it's a movie for people more familiar with Thor's comic book history.

I bet they will put some of the things I wanted in an extended director's cut later. So I'll probably watch for that in the stores in a few months.

Summary: It was a pretty interesting fantasy/action movie, and is very appealing to the senses. Don't leave until ALL the credits are over. The fact that I *wanted* additional exposition is good. I am just a little bit dissatisfied. Worth it for a matinee showing at least.

Sweet, ANOTHER "standard".

Did we really need it?

And how do you propose to know if any particular compiler or library is or isn't compromised?

Promotion in that position? What's that look like?

I hereby promote you to the rank of "Corporal Chair-napper over by the nukes"...

I ran into this a few months ago. I had bought my player back when most models had all the outputs. In the past few years, though... almost all of them got rid of the analog ports.

I was shopping for a Blu-ray player with someone who had a decent CRT TV with no HDMI port. We went into various big box stores: Target, Best Buy, Walmart, Sears, local home theater stores, etc. and among those, there was only one model of Blu-ray player offered among all of those stores that had more than an HDMI port - and it was out of stock all over the place. It was coincidentally one of the most expensive models. They are available but they are hard to get.

The funny thing about the story is that this person has an SDTV and only needs or gets 3G cell phone data service for their Internet usage, rents from Blockbuster and Redbox all the time, and needed a BD player because the DVD selection is shrinking as the BD collection grows at Blockbuster and Redbox. It's gotten difficult to find DVDs to rent or buy but the BD selection is really great. So there are cases out there, you know?

Oh man, I had to deal with ZIPs... Those things were horrible. You never knew when it would just stop working. CLICK CLICK CLICK... there goes that copy of my work.

I did. There's usually one model which is the top end of their offerings, for which you pay a premium, but isn't the best you can get. It's positioned in a strange place. It's not enthusiast gear for anyone other than a Thunderbolt enthusiast, since the other models have better features. It's too expensive for mainstream use. So it's basically a niche product and they know it, but they offer it to basically say they offer it. System builders other than Apple aren't going "hey, buy Thunderbolt!" because the products just aren't there to be marketed for Windows or Linux or whatever. You've gotta have a whole ecosystem (of sorts) built to push it and Apple makes their own. Nobody else. Not Sony, not Samsung, nobody that you'd imagine would have consumer credibility with higher-end stuff. The middle of the line like Dell and Lenovo aren't doing it either. Down at the bottom, it's not offered because it's expensive to license.

Thunderbolt is almost exclusively a 2012 Apple thing. Even people who HAVE Thunderbolt ports wind up wishing they had an extra USB port instead. I know I do and that's the sense I get from plenty of other people. (I have not polled a statistically significant audience.)

USB caught on because it was supported by a zillion cheapo devices and was first with the whole Plug n Play thing. I mean, I know of people who called USB "Plug and Play" when talking about the port. It was that ubiquitous. USB 2 kept the momentum going because USB had brand recognition at that point. USB 3 is still just "USB" as far as consumers know and it tends to work wherever you find a USB port. Including on Apple, which has USB ports next to the Thunderbolt. And now that they can combine USB3 and ESATA ports... why do you need something else for external disks, which was one of the things Thunderbolt was supposed to be good at?

Thunderbolt is only available on expensive devices and there was a lot of licensing kerfuffle in its infancy while USB 3 was being developed. So USB 3 stole its thunder. So, it got stuck in the Apple premium price corner, only people with that kind of money are buying it, and the USB 2/3 alternatives of the same products (and their less-expensive lower end brethren) are available in large supply to satisfy a larger market than just Apple. And you usually have a USB port right there next to your Thunderbolt port, reminding you that you don't have to spend the premium ordering a Thunderbolt device when you can just walk into a bricks-and-mortar store and buy the USB version.

I see the problem... It's a great idea, but they're really trying to make something stick that doesn't have what it takes to stick in a very competitive market - should have gone with USB 3.0, or made Thunderbolt much more accessible to manufacturers early on. If they had played their cards differently, it would have been a very different story today. To disrupt a market you have to create something everyone in that market can get their hands on.

It was very surprising to find them for that price. The "professional" model, versus the "premium" model, lacks a bunch of the chrome and costs about $100 less. Here's a plain search for DT990 with no referral codes. http://www.amazon.com/s?field-keywords=dt990

I have heard that the 600-ohm Premium version, which is almost $400, is even better. Is it really $250 better, though?? The distortion is already so low on the 250 ohm Pro version.

It's not for everyone though. You and I have specialized headphone amplifiers in one form or another on our rigs, most people don't... you get disappointing volume levels plugging a 250 ohm set into a cell phone, definitely would be even quieter on the 600 ohm version.

DVD-Audio... sigh. The format that should have been.

Where do you get them now? I used to buy them at Media Play, but they went under a long time ago.

Yup, buy the kit and do it yourself. They made them for drummers, originally: http://www.musiciansfriend.com/search.jsp?sB=r&Ntt=buttkicker

There are now commercial "gaming chairs" with built-in subwoofers too, but I bet you the Buttkickers work better: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/game-room-bar-furniture/gaming-chairs/abcat0106021.c?id=abcat0106021

Yes, Oracle Unbreakable Linux is repackaged Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Those are some respectable headphones. Hope you still use them for other things! I have some ~$150 Sony MDRs from 2000 as well and I just recently retired them after someone else blew them out at a gig when I wasn't at the board. Until then, they were still good enough for live mixing.

You're totally right, good reproduction shows poorly produced audio for what it is. That's why we need monitor headphones in the studio, so we can make sure we don't produce audio that sounds like garbage on good hi-fi systems. Back in the 90s, it was much too expensive for your average game developer to do much audio editing. Only the biggest developers had the budget for it. Maxis, Sierra, those guys.

The art continues to move forward, though, and a lot of great games have equally great sound production now. I bet you would be pleasantly surprised if you gave them another try on today's popular games. I have heard some stellar audio coming from games lately.

Old timers' note... Back in the day, we all got our friends together and laughed at those hilarious 160x120 RealPlayer clips from sites like Break and Milkandcookies playing full-screen on our 13" SVGA CRT monitors and thought "Hey, cool, we have video on the Internet." Now we see a video in 240 resolution (four times the resolution of those old clips!) on YouTube and make snarky comments about upgrading to a newer potato for the next recording. How about that transition from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray to the new 4k formats... it's amazing how far digital content has come!

You can easily spend that much if you don't find the less-known options while doing your research, that's very true. Stay away from the marked-up versions that are easily accessible and order yourself something for professionals instead. Especially look out for the brands like Sony, which may have innovated with their high end MDRs in the 1980s, but can't really justify the price tag today when everyone else is using the same drivers for much less money. You don't have to spend that kind of money.

I am a sound engineer, live and in the studio. I have to have accurate, reliable cans that I can use for hours every day and I can find them for far less than $500. You can get Etymotic in-ears for vocalists, drummers, etc onstage for $200-250. You can buy a nice pair of professional 250-ohm DT990 over-the-ears for $160 (new on Amazon no less) that you can wear all day. They stand up very well to a pair of $1500 electrostatic headphones and blow everything under $1500 away. Haven't heard them? Don't believe me? Try them out, A/B test with any more expensive pair through a few different audio clips, and you'll see exactly what I mean if your ears aren't shot. I acknowledge that some people have blown out their ears with concerts and construction equipment, or old age has taken its unfair toll on the ears. To them, there will be no difference and you just want comfort and construction quality at that point. But for those of us who somehow retained good hearing despite the odds... Talk to studio professionals to find out how to get a good pair of headphones, not gamers or people listening to their iPod on the bus. Good involves accurate sound, wearability all day, and replaceable parts that you can still order 10 years down the road. If you're spending that kind of money, you want it to be good.

To gamers: I guess that at the end of the day though, if you really want that unnatural jaw-vibrating bass boost for your explosions and dubstep soundtracks (and who wouldn't want that for their entertainment!!) you will probably want to start with good headphones that reach down very low and boost that bass with active electronics like an EQ or old DFX box. There's no substitute. Otherwise you'll have to buy the gimmicky crap like those battery-powered Beats / Monster headphones, but you know you're getting ripped off the whole time you do it. Get something that makes you happy but shop around for goodness' sake, you can be happy for a lot less than $500.

Helpful link to check out objective qualities of headphone sound: http://www.headphone.com/buildAGraph.php - and if you only shop by frequency response curves... you're missing the point. Look at the harmonic distortion curves as well.

Up... time? That would imply DOWNTIME!

Why, it's so good that I toggled the bits with a magnetized needle before I ever installed the hard drive!

Just you wait, someday MUDs will make a comeback and we'll see who laughs!

(Many jokes are present in this thread. Look a little closer.)

Don't worry, you will be able to boot to a text-mode console and fiddle endlessly with X server dependency hell trying to get a graphical environment going.