Delight Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.
YouthMisspent ...By a Brit ;) Sure it had some minor flaws and cliches, but it had a very important message about failure and finding inner strength to continue trying to find the next big thing.. and finding solace if not. Those of us who happen to work in startups especially in the tech arena can well relate to the characters and story lines, and for those that don't - it's all very much like that. Whether it's scrounging a lift to a conference to demo something because your company is in dire straits (or because the board doesn't approve) or seeing key people being asked to leave having inadvertently almost destroyed the thing they started to create...Halt tells the stories and is gripping start to end in a job well done. Farewell, great ride whilst it lasted.
box-67727 Joe MacMillan & Cameron Howe became two of the most annoying characters on TV history. You could tell when Joe was serious and moody, as his glasses disappeared and his hair became longer. I also lost track of the amount of 'motivating' and pacing speeches he made - usually followed by a scene of him getting moody. Cameron Howe's personality disorder made her all but likeable other than the first 2 episodes that she appeared in. Immaturity and the ive aggressive tone, tends to lose its appeal after a certain amount of episodes?Watch the first couple of seasons - they ain't bad, but 3 and 4 is the same scene played over and over. They break up, get back together, emotional scene, happy him, happy her, moody him, moody her, funny interlude, loud guitar music, good mood, bad mood...etc etc etc. The final 2 episodes weren't too bad though - probably because they had more to think about? Also (and as an important side note) Kerry Bishé as Donna Clark, totally wins in her portrayal of the MILF of the week - which looking back, is probably what kept me hanging in until the end.
jimoflaguna And many of the plot points roughly parallel things going on in the industry at the time, going on with the founding of Compaq, HP, Intel, Apple and Microsoft. It is quick and dry and funny.It confounded me though to see the pronunciation of "kluge" butchered so completely and repeatedly. After the second time I thought to myself, "these people weren't even born when this industry was cutting its teeth!"Looking forward to seeing another season. In case no one ever got back to you about it, here's an examination of the word "kluge" from The Atlantic. com ===== "The vocabulary of computing can be baffling, and just when you have finally figured out the difference between a mainframe and a mini, they're almost obsolete," wrote Peter H. Lewis in a column for The New York Times back in 1993. In it, Lewis defined a brief list of from corporate computing culture, words and phrases like "server," "open systems," and "outsourcing." He also listed a few words and phrases that had trickled into the mainstream, like "hard-wired," "beta," and "bandwidth." And then, there was "kludge:"KLUDGE, pronounced klooj, is an inelegant but expedient solution to a problem, or a solution done hastily that will eventually fail. Examples: "We kludged it until we can figure out the right way to do it."The pronunciation of "kludge"-it rhymes with subterfuge and ice luge, not nudge and fudge-hints at its alternate spelling, "kluge," which is still commonly used among programmers. The discrepancy may also offer hints as to the earliest uses of the word, which, like "bug," has its own thicket of folklore to untangle."It's, um, complicated," the linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer told me in an email. "The short answer is that the word was originally spelled 'kluge'-derived from the surname Kluge, in turn from German klug, 'clever.' But then later it began to be spelled as 'kludge,' merging with a U.K. slang term with that spelling (apparently derived from a Scots word for 'toilet'). So now we often get the 'kludge' spelling with the 'kluge' pronunciation." Whew.Several sources trace the word's origins back to 1940s military usage, where it was apparently used in the Navy to describe electronic equipment that "worked well on shore but consistently failed at sea," according to the Jargon File, a compendium of hacker slang created by the developer Eric S. Raymond. But there are other hints that "kluge," dates back farther, perhaps as a reference to printing press equipment manufactured by Brandtjen & Kluge in the 1930s. A portion of a W.H. Farwell Company ment, which appeared in The Morning Herald (Uniontown, Pennsylvania) in 1938. (Newspapers.com) Newspaper ads from that decade describe Brandtjen & Kluge systems as modern marvels-automatic and ultra-fast-but they also had a reputation for being, well, pretty klugey, according to the Raymond's site: "temperamental, subject to frequent breakdowns, and devilishly difficult to repair.""The result of this history is a tangle," the Jargon File concludes. "Some observers consider this mess appropriate in view of the word's meaning."But ironically, given its definition, kluge is itself a fantastically nuanced word, too. Here's how the File describes sophisticated shades of its meaning:Take the distinction between a kluge and an elegant solution, and the differing connotations attached to each. The distinction is not only of engineering significance; it reaches right back into the nature of the generative processes in program design and asserts something important about two different kinds of relationship between the hacker and the hack. Hacker slang is unusually rich in implications of this kind, of overtones and undertones that illuminate the hackish psyche.The File also points out that kluge exists on a spectrum of related slang that might be used to describe the functionality (and beauty) of code more broadly, from "monstrosity" to "perfection."(Perfection in computer programming, of course, being a "mythical absolute, approximated but never actually attained.")
