If Sun can come out with a 2GHz UltraSparc IV by the end of next year, they'll at least be back in the workstation market. (2GHz USIV will approximately compare to a 6GHz P4.) As far as true innovation at Sun, there are three things which MIGHT pan out into a quantum leap like they've pulled off before.
1) Throughput computing. Actually having a complete system (processor, RAM, I/O, video, and all busses) built together to efficiently stream data from any one end to any other might offer big advances. Possibly. Perhaps. 2) "N-1." If Sun can actually pull off computing as a commodity (even though they vehemently claim that that's NOT what they're doing), they might appear as visionaries, yet again. 3) Um, I can't remember the third one. Maybe just two ways out for them, then.
The big IT-related companies decide who will be big or not, and SuSE is definitely in the running.
Sun has partnerships with RH, SuSE, and Debian; but are currently offering their enterprise Java desktop on SuSE and RH. Most of the Geophysicial apps out there are moving (or at least expanding) from Sun to Linux, and the distro of choice there seems to be RH. On the other hand, SuSE has a much bigger market (and mind) share in Europe, and that should help them.
All I know is that I'd rather run Debian or SuSE over RH any day.
Aside from playing better players than you, the best resource I know of for a 'now that you know the rules' reference is a book called "The Second Book of Go." It should be the best selling Go book of all time, by rights.
Go find a copy, if you want to learn Go. You'll probably only get half of it the first time through, but it'll last you a long time.
Yep. Just like people being responsible for peds being run over by someone in their stolen car.
The crime is the theft. Stupidity which gives criminals an easier job (insecure computers, unlocked cars) doesn't make someone responsible for crimes done by someone else. It just makes them stupid.
If the US decided to trash all of the international treaties on Antarctica, they could land a force there, toss everyone out, and claim ownership. Same thing on the moon. It's a question of carrying a big stick, more than anything.
Of course claiming ownership of the moon would have SERIOUS repurcussions for a country, possibly right up to a global war.
The first movie was a fine and elegant translation of the first book. Some parts were sadly cut (Tom Bombadil leaps to mind), but there's really no way around that in such a long story. It was clear to me that the movie was about as good and failthful as possible.
The second movie has moved from a faithful translation to 'loosely based on a novel by...' Rewriting Faramir as a carbon copy of his brother was downright awful, and Helms deep was well, trivial. All in all, it was a pretty damned good movie, but it wasn't NEARLY as good as the book; and the deviations from the book weren't done of necessity, but rather for gimmickry. (Dwarf tossing? Come ON!)
I am fully expecting the third movie to be an epic which bears little resemblance to the book, has way too many cheap gimmicks, falls far short of what it should have been, and still manages to be one of the best movies of the last few years. The only real problem is that it could have been immortally good, but instead will be viewed as 'decent, but not good enough' in ten years.
Pity. Too many producers/directors try to 'improve' on great books, and end up screwing up.
> PII-200MHz, just because you can probably find one around. > RAID controller, and a RAID array. How can they even USE the word reliability when they have no redundancy??? > Dual power supplies. > ECC RAM. > Dual network cards. They almost got this right, and then put them on different networks. WTF??!!! > No extra video card. (get a motherboard with something cheap built in) > Reliable OS. If you're going to use an MS OS , you'd better make sure that all of your equipment is on the HCL. > Good backups. I can't get far enough to see if they have a backup scheme or not, but I doubt it. > A clue. Half a clue. 1.3% of a clue!!! ANYTHING more than this author had!
Originally you mentioned that vi (vim?) was a full point-release behind, in Debian-stable. My answer to that is 'who cares, ESPECIALLY in a production environment?' I haven't seen a useful feature added to vi since sometime before 1989. "Upgrades" like this are not something I want to screw around with on my production servers.
But security fixes? Stable has 'em. If you look at your sources.list file, you'll see that there's all of the entries for stable, testing, and unstable (if you've got all three), PLUS one for security. It's not particularly clear, but if you do some digging, you'll find that security patches are added to stable ASAP, and have a higher priority than anything else.
Debian stable, I'm coming to realise, is an excellent production server environment. It's conservative, stable, and patched for security. That's what my new firewall is being built as.
For the desktop, Redhat/Fedora is probably a better choice, unless you like mucking about.
All they've realised is that they pushed too fast and too hard. I don't for a second think that they've changed their mind about the goodness of controlling their customers, one way or another. Nor do I believe that they've suddenly discovered the badness of commercialisation of the internet's infrastructure.
Until they prove me wrong, I'm going to assume they're just as sleazy today as they were yesterday.
I hate to dissappoint you. I'm grown up, and entered the real world some decades ago. I have a very polite but firm stock letter that, with a few modifications, has already been sent to Belkin.
My take on your third goal is the crux of the matter. An apology and a fix are fine, but my point to/. and to Belkin is that it's not enough. The companies have to realise that commercialisation of the infrastructure is a horrible idea, and they cannot be allowed to get away with it.
Imagine if the roads were such that only Toyotas could go down 3rd and 7th Avenue, and Fords weren't allowed on odd streets at all? That's the sort of thing that Belkin and Verisign and no doubt many other companies out there are heading towards, with no thought towards anything except their short-term profits.
I made it clear in my letter that I won't be buying Belkin until I see substantial action from them to counter this behaviour, from them and from others.
Belkin has lost my business, until they very aggressively do something to FIX the problems of the internet.
All that backing off here is doing, is admitting that they pushed a bit too hard. Nobody can tell me that the goal of Belkin has changed, or is any different from VeriSign's. They want to manipulate the infrastructure of the internet. They want control over my computer, and how it works.
Fuck 'em. They have to REALLY work hard to win back my business. Apologizing and issuing a firmware patch ain't good enough by half.
I have more respect for most pharmacists than I do for most doctors. They know their medicines far better than the doctors who prescibe the stuff, and are generally far better at informing the patient about what they're about to take.
And they are NOT the reason drugs cost a lot. Not even a substantial part of the reason, in fact.
Given that the internet is fundamentally international, international controlle of it makes MUCH more sense than a California non-profit government spinoff.
The rest of the world should not be beholden to ICANN. Either they need to become truly international, or someone--the UN or another international body--needs to take the reins.
A 900 page book on Unix and Unix-like OSes (Linux, etc.) is probably about right. Hell, Nemeth and co. managed to fit four OSes into a book about that sized.
Now a 900 page book on a single version of a single distribution of Linux is crazy overkill! Have they copied the man pages (oops--info shitty pages) verbatim, or is Linux (between distros and also between versions within a distro) so badly unstandardised and non-static that it needs a book this big, per version/distro/OS?
While I don't use Linux for the desktop, I use the 1.4 and 1.5 releases of mozilla on various machines (Windows 98/2000/NT/XP, Solaris 8/9) and find them rock solid stable. Prior to 1.4, I was killing mozilla daily.
Now I have to ask--does Linux (RH or other) have a 'pkill' command? If so, then killing a hung process on Linux is no worse than through task manager on Windows. Not that this alone will make it ready for the desktop though.
Hmm. I agree with almost all of what you say, except that there's one thing which misses or sidesteps my point.
Making a sequel to a complete story is the problem. After you've closed the book, the heros ride off into the sunset, etc., you have to reopen the book and say, "oh by the way..." in order to create a sequel. This is horrible, and very common.
Creating a movie (original or sequel) with deliberately hanging ends just in case they "need" to make a sequel (i.e. can make money at it) is downright pathetic, and also all too common.
Creating a series of movies from a very large story seems to be a popular idea lately, and has the potential to create great and somewhat new art, but 90% of it will still be typical hollywoodesque fluff. Creating a perpetual series is the easy way out, even if it works quite nicely.
"Yeah, right. They got married. You really wanna call that the end of the story?"
Yep, absolutely. That is, if that's the story that's being told.
Read my other post on the subject to see why sequels to stories like Shrek are difficult to pull off.
As for your friend, he's telling a different story--what happens after happily ever after. That's fine, but it has little bearing on the story that leads up to happily ever after.
Hmm. Let me see if I can explain myself clearly here.
Bond is, was, and always has been a serial. The introductory premise is one that lends itself to an infinite variety of stories, each of which is effectively a chapter in the life of 007.
Serialisation is certainly a way to spawn many stories, but calling them 'sequels' isn't exactly correct.
Now when you take Shrek (and for that matter, any of the more traditional fairy tales; not to mention most of the stories written) the characters are created from nothing, to tell a story. Generally there's some transformance, which is certainly the case with Shrek and Fiona.
The thing is that after the story ends, after the transformance has occurred, there is no more development that can be done on those characters without going back and gluing stuff onto them, and it's usually a very awkward process.
Serialisation is fine, if created as such. Bond, great. Miss Marples, lovely. Sam Spade, definitely. Serialization of a complete story is generally (not always, but close) doomed to disaster.
Sequels are a great case for pulling out exceptions to the 'rule' that sequels suck.
There are definitely some good sequels made. In fact, there are even some good sequels made to movies that weren't written with sequels in mind. Nonetheless, I'd say that the ratio of crap/good is MUCH higher for sequels than for original (or rather, initial) stories. The problem is, you've created a story with characters designed for that story, and then the story ends. Either you retell the story, redevelop the characters (often at odds with the first movie), or if you're lucky/smart, you've created enough depth in the first movie to tell a different story with the same characters.
The other reasons that sequels mostly suck is that studios don't want to waste any money making a GOOD movie, when the viewing audience is already guaranteed.
You're missing an important point here, which actually strengthens your argument. Most of the original movies weren't all that original to begin with! Hell, almost everything being made these days that isn't a direct sequel, is a remake of a 'classic.' The rest are live action movies of comics or sitcoms.
Hollywood will stop doing this when people stop paying for it. Ditto for the music industry. Unfortunately, that will NEVER happen. Fortunately, there's lots of room in the music industry and an increasing amount of room in the movie industry for people with good and creative ideas to express themselves. In the last two years, we've had "Frida," "Amelie," and "The Barbarian Invasion," as examples of big-budget movie making that kicks ass! (although one of them _was_ a sequel, now that I think of it:-)
It's pretty simple: The mass-market entertainment industry will ALWAYS pander to the lowest common denominator, and take the fewest risks possible. The only thing we can hope for is that the few good ideas out there don't get squashed.
Part of the problem with LOTR of course, is that the original script was already written, and not with the intent of being made into a movie. I must say that Jackson did an excellent job of adapting the first book, and an acceptable job of the second, which is more than most book-->movie translations get. I guess it's more understandable to have multiple versions when adapting someone elses's well-known material.
The most interesting part of this whole process is that many movies now are deliberately being made with 'optional' bits that can be cut for the theatrical release, and added in for the DVD. On original screenplays, this strikes me as a money grab, at the expense of the movie's integrity.
Every time I see a movie that comes out with extra footage, I wonder which is the 'real' vision of the movie, or if there really was one. If it's the theatrical release, then we're wasting our time and money by getting the extras. If it's the extended DVD version, then why the hell did we pay $$$ to watch an incomplete movie in the theatre? If it's neither or both, then does the director really know what he's doing with the movie?
I'm all for commentary and 'behind the scenes' stuff, but it seems to me that a director is supposed to be the one who ties everything together into a single, cohesive story. Where's the single story here?
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, I agree with you for the most part.
If Sun can come out with a 2GHz UltraSparc IV by the end of next year, they'll at least be back in the workstation market. (2GHz USIV will approximately compare to a 6GHz P4.) As far as true innovation at Sun, there are three things which MIGHT pan out into a quantum leap like they've pulled off before.
1) Throughput computing. Actually having a complete system (processor, RAM, I/O, video, and all busses) built together to efficiently stream data from any one end to any other might offer big advances. Possibly. Perhaps.
2) "N-1." If Sun can actually pull off computing as a commodity (even though they vehemently claim that that's NOT what they're doing), they might appear as visionaries, yet again.
3) Um, I can't remember the third one. Maybe just two ways out for them, then.
The big IT-related companies decide who will be big or not, and SuSE is definitely in the running.
Sun has partnerships with RH, SuSE, and Debian; but are currently offering their enterprise Java desktop on SuSE and RH. Most of the Geophysicial apps out there are moving (or at least expanding) from Sun to Linux, and the distro of choice there seems to be RH. On the other hand, SuSE has a much bigger market (and mind) share in Europe, and that should help them.
All I know is that I'd rather run Debian or SuSE over RH any day.
Aside from playing better players than you, the best resource I know of for a 'now that you know the rules' reference is a book called "The Second Book of Go." It should be the best selling Go book of all time, by rights.
Go find a copy, if you want to learn Go. You'll probably only get half of it the first time through, but it'll last you a long time.
Yep. Just like people being responsible for peds being run over by someone in their stolen car.
The crime is the theft. Stupidity which gives criminals an easier job (insecure computers, unlocked cars) doesn't make someone responsible for crimes done by someone else. It just makes them stupid.
But the point is, so what?
If the US decided to trash all of the international treaties on Antarctica, they could land a force there, toss everyone out, and claim ownership. Same thing on the moon. It's a question of carrying a big stick, more than anything.
Of course claiming ownership of the moon would have SERIOUS repurcussions for a country, possibly right up to a global war.
The first movie was a fine and elegant translation of the first book. Some parts were sadly cut (Tom Bombadil leaps to mind), but there's really no way around that in such a long story. It was clear to me that the movie was about as good and failthful as possible.
The second movie has moved from a faithful translation to 'loosely based on a novel by...' Rewriting Faramir as a carbon copy of his brother was downright awful, and Helms deep was well, trivial. All in all, it was a pretty damned good movie, but it wasn't NEARLY as good as the book; and the deviations from the book weren't done of necessity, but rather for gimmickry. (Dwarf tossing? Come ON!)
I am fully expecting the third movie to be an epic which bears little resemblance to the book, has way too many cheap gimmicks, falls far short of what it should have been, and still manages to be one of the best movies of the last few years. The only real problem is that it could have been immortally good, but instead will be viewed as 'decent, but not good enough' in ten years.
Pity. Too many producers/directors try to 'improve' on great books, and end up screwing up.
"No good deed goes unpunished."
Really doesn't make you want to bother with preferential disclosure, does it?
> PII-200MHz, just because you can probably find one around.
> RAID controller, and a RAID array. How can they even USE the word reliability when they have no redundancy???
> Dual power supplies.
> ECC RAM.
> Dual network cards. They almost got this right, and then put them on different networks. WTF??!!!
> No extra video card. (get a motherboard with something cheap built in)
> Reliable OS. If you're going to use an MS OS , you'd better make sure that all of your equipment is on the HCL.
> Good backups. I can't get far enough to see if they have a backup scheme or not, but I doubt it.
> A clue. Half a clue. 1.3% of a clue!!! ANYTHING more than this author had!
Oh man, what an utterly bad article.
Ah hah, now we're getting down to brass tacks.
Originally you mentioned that vi (vim?) was a full point-release behind, in Debian-stable. My answer to that is 'who cares, ESPECIALLY in a production environment?' I haven't seen a useful feature added to vi since sometime before 1989. "Upgrades" like this are not something I want to screw around with on my production servers.
But security fixes? Stable has 'em. If you look at your sources.list file, you'll see that there's all of the entries for stable, testing, and unstable (if you've got all three), PLUS one for security. It's not particularly clear, but if you do some digging, you'll find that security patches are added to stable ASAP, and have a higher priority than anything else.
Debian stable, I'm coming to realise, is an excellent production server environment. It's conservative, stable, and patched for security. That's what my new firewall is being built as.
For the desktop, Redhat/Fedora is probably a better choice, unless you like mucking about.
You're a much more optimistic soul than me, then.
All they've realised is that they pushed too fast and too hard. I don't for a second think that they've changed their mind about the goodness of controlling their customers, one way or another. Nor do I believe that they've suddenly discovered the badness of commercialisation of the internet's infrastructure.
Until they prove me wrong, I'm going to assume they're just as sleazy today as they were yesterday.
I hate to dissappoint you. I'm grown up, and entered the real world some decades ago. I have a very polite but firm stock letter that, with a few modifications, has already been sent to Belkin.
/. and to Belkin is that it's not enough. The companies have to realise that commercialisation of the infrastructure is a horrible idea, and they cannot be allowed to get away with it.
My take on your third goal is the crux of the matter. An apology and a fix are fine, but my point to
Imagine if the roads were such that only Toyotas could go down 3rd and 7th Avenue, and Fords weren't allowed on odd streets at all? That's the sort of thing that Belkin and Verisign and no doubt many other companies out there are heading towards, with no thought towards anything except their short-term profits.
I made it clear in my letter that I won't be buying Belkin until I see substantial action from them to counter this behaviour, from them and from others.
Belkin has lost my business, until they very aggressively do something to FIX the problems of the internet.
All that backing off here is doing, is admitting that they pushed a bit too hard. Nobody can tell me that the goal of Belkin has changed, or is any different from VeriSign's. They want to manipulate the infrastructure of the internet. They want control over my computer, and how it works.
Fuck 'em. They have to REALLY work hard to win back my business. Apologizing and issuing a firmware patch ain't good enough by half.
Bah.
I have more respect for most pharmacists than I do for most doctors. They know their medicines far better than the doctors who prescibe the stuff, and are generally far better at informing the patient about what they're about to take.
And they are NOT the reason drugs cost a lot. Not even a substantial part of the reason, in fact.
Given that the internet is fundamentally international, international controlle of it makes MUCH more sense than a California non-profit government spinoff.
The rest of the world should not be beholden to ICANN. Either they need to become truly international, or someone--the UN or another international body--needs to take the reins.
This is really really silly.
A 900 page book on Unix and Unix-like OSes (Linux, etc.) is probably about right. Hell, Nemeth and co. managed to fit four OSes into a book about that sized.
Now a 900 page book on a single version of a single distribution of Linux is crazy overkill! Have they copied the man pages (oops--info shitty pages) verbatim, or is Linux (between distros and also between versions within a distro) so badly unstandardised and non-static that it needs a book this big, per version/distro/OS?
Hmm. Which version of Mozilla are you using?
While I don't use Linux for the desktop, I use the 1.4 and 1.5 releases of mozilla on various machines (Windows 98/2000/NT/XP, Solaris 8/9) and find them rock solid stable. Prior to 1.4, I was killing mozilla daily.
Now I have to ask--does Linux (RH or other) have a 'pkill' command? If so, then killing a hung process on Linux is no worse than through task manager on Windows. Not that this alone will make it ready for the desktop though.
Hmm. I agree with almost all of what you say, except that there's one thing which misses or sidesteps my point.
Making a sequel to a complete story is the problem. After you've closed the book, the heros ride off into the sunset, etc., you have to reopen the book and say, "oh by the way..." in order to create a sequel. This is horrible, and very common.
Creating a movie (original or sequel) with deliberately hanging ends just in case they "need" to make a sequel (i.e. can make money at it) is downright pathetic, and also all too common.
Creating a series of movies from a very large story seems to be a popular idea lately, and has the potential to create great and somewhat new art, but 90% of it will still be typical hollywoodesque fluff. Creating a perpetual series is the easy way out, even if it works quite nicely.
"Yeah, right. They got married. You really wanna call that the end of the story?"
Yep, absolutely. That is, if that's the story that's being told.
Read
my other post on the subject to see why sequels to stories like Shrek are difficult to pull off.
As for your friend, he's telling a different story--what happens after happily ever after. That's fine, but it has little bearing on the story that leads up to happily ever after.
Hmm. Let me see if I can explain myself clearly here.
Bond is, was, and always has been a serial. The introductory premise is one that lends itself to an infinite variety of stories, each of which is effectively a chapter in the life of 007.
Serialisation is certainly a way to spawn many stories, but calling them 'sequels' isn't exactly correct.
Now when you take Shrek (and for that matter, any of the more traditional fairy tales; not to mention most of the stories written) the characters are created from nothing, to tell a story. Generally there's some transformance, which is certainly the case with Shrek and Fiona.
The thing is that after the story ends, after the transformance has occurred, there is no more development that can be done on those characters without going back and gluing stuff onto them, and it's usually a very awkward process.
Serialisation is fine, if created as such. Bond, great. Miss Marples, lovely. Sam Spade, definitely. Serialization of a complete story is generally (not always, but close) doomed to disaster.
Sequels are a great case for pulling out exceptions to the 'rule' that sequels suck.
There are definitely some good sequels made. In fact, there are even some good sequels made to movies that weren't written with sequels in mind. Nonetheless, I'd say that the ratio of crap/good is MUCH higher for sequels than for original (or rather, initial) stories. The problem is, you've created a story with characters designed for that story, and then the story ends. Either you retell the story, redevelop the characters (often at odds with the first movie), or if you're lucky/smart, you've created enough depth in the first movie to tell a different story with the same characters.
The other reasons that sequels mostly suck is that studios don't want to waste any money making a GOOD movie, when the viewing audience is already guaranteed.
You're missing an important point here, which actually strengthens your argument. Most of the original movies weren't all that original to begin with! Hell, almost everything being made these days that isn't a direct sequel, is a remake of a 'classic.' The rest are live action movies of comics or sitcoms.
:-)
Hollywood will stop doing this when people stop paying for it. Ditto for the music industry. Unfortunately, that will NEVER happen. Fortunately, there's lots of room in the music industry and an increasing amount of room in the movie industry for people with good and creative ideas to express themselves. In the last two years, we've had "Frida," "Amelie," and "The Barbarian Invasion," as examples of big-budget movie making that kicks ass! (although one of them _was_ a sequel, now that I think of it
It's pretty simple: The mass-market entertainment industry will ALWAYS pander to the lowest common denominator, and take the fewest risks possible. The only thing we can hope for is that the few good ideas out there don't get squashed.
OK, Shrek was a whole story. It ended, and did so in the classic fairy tale manner! Making a sequel to a finished story is usually a terrible idea.
That said, Mike Meyers has a history of making better than average sequels. We'll see.
Just one thing.
"Google groups" is nothing more than a web client to usenet news, and a massive archive of usenet history.
One doesn't post to google groups--one posts to usenet, using google.
Hmm, interesting.
Part of the problem with LOTR of course, is that the original script was already written, and not with the intent of being made into a movie. I must say that Jackson did an excellent job of adapting the first book, and an acceptable job of the second, which is more than most book-->movie translations get. I guess it's more understandable to have multiple versions when adapting someone elses's well-known material.
The most interesting part of this whole process is that many movies now are deliberately being made with 'optional' bits that can be cut for the theatrical release, and added in for the DVD. On original screenplays, this strikes me as a money grab, at the expense of the movie's integrity.
Every time I see a movie that comes out with extra footage, I wonder which is the 'real' vision of the movie, or if there really was one. If it's the theatrical release, then we're wasting our time and money by getting the extras. If it's the extended DVD version, then why the hell did we pay $$$ to watch an incomplete movie in the theatre? If it's neither or both, then does the director really know what he's doing with the movie?
I'm all for commentary and 'behind the scenes' stuff, but it seems to me that a director is supposed to be the one who ties everything together into a single, cohesive story. Where's the single story here?