Looking back, all his shows had a rocky start. The first season of Buffy wasn't great, Angel took a long while to get into a groove, Dollhouse didn't get good until the back-half of the first season, the only one that really hit the ground running was Firefly. I think it just takes a while for most writers,…

If you think of the first chunk of the season in terms of synopsis and character arcs, you can see what they were trying to do. They just didn't do a very good job. It was like the writers got bored with their red herring plotlines while waiting for the good stuff.

Well, it's a synonym for a scheme or tactic, so it works with gambling as well as chess.

Yeah, that "stocking with holes for my face and hair, and that is somehow glued to my cheekbones" thing was a bad, bad trend there for a while. But that's actually a plus for Gambit as a movie character, not a lot of bitching about "hey, where's the pink breastplate!" Long coat, long hair, and preferably the black/red…

Yup. Born and raised in NC, and there are some strange ideas on what constitutes a southern accent. And also how confusing it is to some people that there's more than one accent. You've got the hillfolk, the costal hoi-toiders, the city southerners, and that's just a fraction of what you hear in one state.

For cajun it really won't. In the Wolverine movie, I kept wondering why Gambit sounded like he was from Georgia.

'Bama's not really cajun country. It's a really tough accent to get right, mostly because a heavy cajun accent sounds like a ridiculous cartoon in real life, not to mention it's damn near impossible to understand. Native speakers need to tone it way the hell down for it to make a bit of sense on camera. Basically,…

He's the only reason I started watching, and the only reason I occasionally check back in. This is one of those shows I really wanted to be good. And it could BE good, if they'd just give it an IQ boost of about fifty points. I can think of some amazing "Red-the-super-genius-criminal" things they could do, but they…

It's definitely a conversation-starter rather than a rubric. It also doesn't measure feminism or sexism of films. It does, however, shine a light on how male-centric Hollywood tends to be. Most parts tend to be male by default. Women are only cast if the role specifically calls for a woman. With just a little thought…

Yeah, the back-end is really okay. They were just trying to build an OS that worked exactly the same with both tablet and desktop and ended up with a weird hybrid that's really annoying. If you're buying a machine and can personalize it to your heart's content, it's perfectly acceptable.

That damn animation doesn't do well when you're in a remote session across the country, either. A server OS REALLY ought to default to a "no graphic bells and whistles" setting upon install.

Dorek, it depends on your perspective. 95 was such a mess that 98 was a godsend. Sure, it would crash occasionally, but if you managed three hours on a machine on 95 without a reboot, you were lucky. There was no way XP WASN'T going to have driver issues since it was based off of a different kernel that was previously…

We're talking about consumer operating systems, so XP is part of the "line" in practice, if not in origin, since there was no longer a distinction between the professional OS and the home OS (outside of the artificial designation between the "home" and "office" versions of XP.)

Well, Win2K wasn't a consumer operating system and not in the same production pipeline as the 95/98/ME path, it was really the successor to Windows NT meant for business only. It was the last release that was specifically for business, XP blended the consumer and professional OS, which is when we started getting the…

When I'm working on a server I'm generally not launching a lot of programs from the start menu except for powershell or regedit. And oftentimes there isn't a dedicated "windows" key on the tiny keyboards used in the server closets. And it's annoying to bounce back and forth between interfaces when I'm digging around…

If they're smart, 8.2 (or 9, or whatever) will have a setting that allows you to default to a 7-like desktop-only mode with full access and a window for those Metro apps to run in. All they need is a button on install "do you have a touch screen" "no" "okay, then you don't have to do the touchscreen interface with a…

Windows 7 is to Windows Vista and Windows 8 as Windows XP is to Windows ME and Windows Vista.

What's bizarre is that Server 2012 uses the same damn interface. Who the hell uses a touch screen on their servers? I'm a certified professional and every time I run across one I end up clicking around, trying to figure out where everything lives. "Oh yeah, there's a stupid little dock that pops out from the right…

If they're telling him *not* to uninstall Norton AV they're a bunch of hacks. Norton has been awful for years.

I thought it was fairly obvious in the books that . . .
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