Even though my first job out of college didn't pay much, it was great experience and I traveled all the time. For two years of my life, I traveled all over the US and to three other continents. Though business travel isn't always glamourous (The airlines lost my luggage twice in one trip) and the works wasn't all that wonderful all the time, either (Milwaukee isn't all that great at 3am).
I'm married now, and all that travel wouldn't sit with my wife very well. I'm with that company still ("again", actually, after brief time with a dot-bomb). I'm a QA guy now, and making more money. But I will remember my travel-days as a lot of fun.
My employeer doesn't even hire trainers. They have what's called "on-line" training (though "on-line" is misleading, because you don't even use the internet nor intranet at all for it, once you download it). To say "piss-poor" is an understatement. It gives you worthless examples, and no way to ask any questions.
In fact, how it even presents material is piss-poor. A perfect example is the questions before each unit. Before each unit, you are forced to answer a question in which the answer is within that unit. For example, if you were doing the basic Java lessons, and you got to the inheritance chapter, it would ask you: "How many classes are you allowed to interhit from when creating a new class?" and it would give you options, and you choose the answer, and it will say if you are right or wrong. But, really it's just guess work, because you don't know!!! If you did, you wouldn't be doing that lesson, would you? Instead, if they asked you the same questions after that unit, that would be one thing (but they don't), or if they gave you a "in this lesson you will lean foo and bar" it would be another.
I don't own it now, because my wife wants to buy it for my b-day.
Anyway, I've thumbed through it several times in the bookstore, and though he mainly uses meat as the main ingrediant, he also does some vegatable dishes too. The book is about applying heat, and different ways to do it, not about a particular ingrediant.
If I was a vegatarian, I'd head to a bookstore and look at it before purchasing.
. . . but it costs a lot to re-edit the film, pay those working on the edit, choosing the scenes, re-mixing the music, et al. It's not just cost of burning each DVD that New Line/AOL-TW has to worry about.
That said, I think they are milking the fans of the movie for all they got. And why? The first movie made $800 mil and all three costs $350 mil. And that's before the DVD release!!!
There were also rumors floating around that after all three films are done and released, a fifth mega-box set of all three with possible additional material may be released, which would be sometime in 2004.
That doesn't surprise me, but I'm sure as heck not waiting until 2004 ... .
It would also be neat if the magic system worked like it does in Niven's old Magic Goes Away universe. There would be magic rich and magic poor areas (and using too many flashy spells will start to deplete the magic from the area).
Square did one better with Chrono Cross (the best PS1 RPG, IMHO) — every person and every "spell" (they called them Element Attacks) were assigned a color. The battlefield was made of circles, and for every spell that was cast, the low-level circle changed to the corresponding color of the spell. When the next spell was cast, the first color moved up one level. There are three levels on the battle field, an on the fourth spell, that color disappeared.
So, what does this do? Well, if you had a character whose color was red, they were stronger in red circles (attack, defense, even magic) and weaker in blue circles (the opposite color). The Bad Guys were the same as well. Also, you could only use summons if the the entire battlefield was the same color as the summon element.
Sounds kinda silly, and hard, but quite powerful when you had to be careful what colors the battlefied was and you just couldn't cast the same spell over and over again . .
I usually just use Python, and then code an extension module or find an executable to use a system call out to some executable for the processor/memory intense parts -- but those are few and far between. I've also used a little Jython, which is Python's Java implementation, and that works well, too, especially when interfacing with Java apps.
I once wrote a fairly complex XML to HTML converter, the GUI in wxPython, the conversion in XSLT, and Python code to "manage" it. Works wonderfully.
In college, I lived by myself in a second story apartment. One night, about 3am, I woke up and heard voices. Yeah, voices. I couldn't understand what they were saying, but they were definatly of human origin. So I get up and try to figure out what it was, if someone was robbing me, etc. But no -- I was alone. But I still was hearing voices, but this time I could understand a little what they were saying. Stuff about girls, street names, etc. And then I traced it to the source -- my stereo, which I had left on in CD mode, but had not been playing a CD. But I still didn't figure out what it was, until I noticed a car passing my apartment building and then heard the voices.
The problem? My stereo was picking up a CB channel, but it would only pick it up when someone was talking on the CB as the car went past.
It still sends chills up my spine thinking about it.
My cousin had something like this -- only worse. He would fall out of bed, with scratches on this face, etc. His mom thought demons were after him (yeah, yeah, I know . ..). The real reason?? He was having seizures, and still has them today, and during the day, if he doesn't take his medication.
This is what I think a logically progression of the Matrix movies would be:
(the one we have all seen). Intro to the characters and a description of the problem.
Most humans are still in the Matrix. Neo and the rest of Zion defeat the machines, not without signifigant losses.
Most of humanity hates the Real World (and why wouldn't they?) and they want to go back into the Matrix. Now it's a war for humans vs humans.
I always thought that this would make a more interesting story progression than just a continuation of the same thing. We know who Neo is, what he can do, so aren't the machines pretty much finished?
All that aside, I'm still going to see the next two -- the first one was so highly creative, that, if nothing else, I want to know what the W Bros are going to come up with.
I had a job that had me traveling a lot, like 30-40% of the time. Doing simple things like sending a check to pay the bills, became really complicated when you weren't at home!! The bank I was at required $7.95/month for online access, and required you to use Quicken for it. Stoopid. So I found another bank that let me do all that for free! And more!
Now I rarely write a check -- if I do, its for church offering, and maybe rent (the management office tends to screw up my rent check if it's from the bank). Otherwise, I have automatic bill pay -- I tell the bank how much to send to who, and that's about it. Some are the same every month (car loan), and I even have some utilities sending bills straight to the bank! It's wonderful . . .
The whole cashless/checkless world is coming. I see checks fading out more quickly, more because of privacy issues, it's cheaper, and more convinent (Guys - how many of you like to carry a checkbook around all the time??). If you use a debit card at a grocery store, they like it because the money is moved to their account quicker (at the "point-of-sale", POS, POS machine, get it?), you like it because no everyone in payment processing at the store sees your address, and you get through the line quicker (no more having to check your driver's license). I've been to several restaurants that do not take checks at all -- just cash and credit cards. Of course, I've been to one restaurant that only takes cash -- no credit cards, no checks. But they do have ATMs inside! =)
I had forgotten about FK, but, once I think about it, there are a lot of similarities.
FK was really depressing, and Angel can be (like when he was on the edge for about 1/3 of this season). But it's better in the way that there is a bit of humor to lighten things up some, the wisecracks, etc. FK was pretty serious almost all of the time, but Angel really mixes it
As far as Angel's motivation for doing stuff . . . some of it is just that he wants to make up for everything he did before he got his soul back, and the other is just because he's an agent of TPTB (watch the show, or do a Google search for that one. =) so he has no choice. It's been a while, but Nikolaus's motivation was just because he wanted to be a nice guy.
I've waxed and waned on the SciFi channel - they have series that start good, but I just can't get into them. I do agree that Farscape is a lot better now than in the first seaon.
And, though it technically isn't SciFi (more horror) what about "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and it's spin-of "Angel". Though I'm worred what UPN will do to it, Buffy has been the best written and the best acted show on TV, and Angel isn't far behind. The characters in those shows laugh, cry, and hurt. And, though it gets silly once in a while, it knows it's silly and just laughs at itself.
Buffy is definitely the most "junvenile" of the two, though the themes it has discussed (sexuality, loss of a loved one) are biggies and they give it the weight that those themes deserve. Angel is more of an adult-oriented, with more of a Batman: The Animated Serie feel to it.
Go ahead - call me a troll, but I, too, thought that Doug Miller gave us honest answers - except for #8. That was a hot button question, and he avoided it (and thanks to Phoenix_SEC for asking it).
Of course he was schooled by the spin doctors in the marketing dept. Of course I didn't agree with it all. But I *do* agree that we in the Linux community need to unite under one desktop. Paraphrasing Larry Wall: "Throw out what sucks, keep what rules."
And he was asking how much money Red Hat and Caldera made?? Well, I know that Red Hat made money last year. Okay, not the billions that MS made, but they still made money.
The funny thing is . ..XSLT isn't that hard, once you figure out that how XSLT works with the document. That "how" is very important. Unfortunately, there isn't much out there, bookwise, about XSLT. I would try XSLT: Working with XML and HTML by Fung. Of course, that book wasn't out yet when I needed to bone-up on XSLT, so I had to use the other book that's out - XSLT Programmer's Reference by Michael Kay. It's way, way too detailed to get up and running fast on. And I still hate wading through it to look up something. Also, ORA's new XML in a Nutshell seems to have some promise in a reference for all things XML.
Where's Python?? and other ramblings
on
Inside XML
·
· Score: 1
I do work with XML for a living, but I use Python for my DOM/SAX work. Python 2.0 and 4Suite are really the best for rapid XML programming. However, most of the documentation for DOM, SAX, and XSLT apply to all implentations . . . I can read the Java examples and can translate that into Python. Granted, they are pretty similiar languages, but this should work for plenty of other programmers working this into their language of choice.
It is fishy that C and C++ aren't really mentioned, but there really doesn't seem to be much out there for XML-type stuff. Maybe someone here will post the URL's for more info on that.
Off the Python topic, I just bought ORA's new "XML in a Nutshell". I haven't had a chance to put it through the trenches yet, but it seems to be the best general XML book out there. Which I am glad, because I want to retire Kay's "XSLT Programmer's Reference" in a hurry. What ORA did to sum-up XPATH and XSLT in 200 pages, it took Kay (no lie) 500 pages. And it's the exact same thing!!!!
Actually, Internet is quite useful (and quite popular) in rural areas. The reasons: updated commodity prices from Chicago Board of Trade, research into new farming techniques, buying selling equipment (kinda like classifieds, only cheaper), keeping up with children/relatives, - This list goes on and on . . .
The problem with dialup in rural areas is that the local telcos have not done a very good job catching up. My parents (on the farm) cannot get 56k(bits) from their dialup provider to save their lives. Their modem is a USR/3com 56k, and their provider (the telco) swears up and down that the pop they dial into is 56k-ready. After doing some research I discovered that, while all that may be true, if the phone switches between them and the pop are not new enough to handle 56k, then that speed isn't possible. In fact, my parents celebrate when they get 28.8k!!
I personally think that Prarie iNet will make a fortune. There are no other options for high-speed access in rural areas. I mean, my parents can't even get cable (although they do have DirectTV). In case you didn't figure that out - yes, I didn't grow up with cable. Heck, I didn't even have Fox . . .
I tried for quite some time to have my little homepage to look nice. It was a pain - decent graphics took too long, then you had to mess around with different colors on the background. Then you had to go to a different machine to look at it, to make sure that it look the same on a Win9x machine w/ IE as on my Linux machine running Netscape 4.x. And, of course, it never did.
So I stopped - I think I now have three graphics on my whole "home site". I made all the colors the default (usually black on white, but on my Linux machine it's black on light gray, thanks to Netscape). So, since I made that decision, I decided to do something else on my site, to make sure that people would come back. Something rarely seen on the Web today (though that hasn't always been the case). I put in actual content. Naturally, it's my website, so it's all about me and my not-so-exciting life, but still - there is actual content on my web site.
Talk about a concidence . . . yesterday, the largest local cell phone service provider (all praise Alltel) came to my employeer's campus, offering extremely cheap phones in price, but not so much in quality. Of course, you had to pay for everything on the spot.
I know for a fact Sprint PCS (the provider I use) doesn't make any money off the phones that they sell - they make money off of selling their service. So if Motorola, Qualcomm, Erikson, etc. are worried about making money, they should talk to the service providers instead of concentrating on the end-users.
I think it must work different in Europe, though. I was there a few months ago and everyone had a cell phone. It was crazy. We in the US think we use them all the time, but we really don't, compared with that side of the pond.
I concur - I have been using Everybuddy for quite a few months, and have had no troubles with it. It's fast, and friendly, and it checks spelling.=)
The thing is - I have some friends on Yahoo, and some on ICQ. The fact that you can talk to them all with one program (and people who use AIM and M$ IM, which I have never used), it's fanstastic. Add to the fact that it's free (as in speech) makes it even better.
Before the movie came out, I heard a rumor that they were already filming the sequel. That made sense to me - the book is *huge* (1000 pages in paperback) and there is no way to do that in a whole 2 hour movie. So I figured that they were doing the first half of the book as the first movie, and the second part of the book as the second movie.
I thought the book was so-so. However, they did make the movie out of the best part of the book. The second part explains why the Psyclos wanted the gold - to pay off the debts of the Earth invasion plus other invasions. Then the humans destroyed the Psyclos (sorry for the spoiler - didn't think anyone would care, though), so the humans inherited the debt. So what did the humans do? Well, get the surviviors from Luxumberg to help! You see, they are bankers, so they know how to fix the problem.
So my entry is - at least they made the movie out of the good part of the book.
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Even though my first job out of college didn't pay much, it was great experience and I traveled all the time. For two years of my life, I traveled all over the US and to three other continents. Though business travel isn't always glamourous (The airlines lost my luggage twice in one trip) and the works wasn't all that wonderful all the time, either (Milwaukee isn't all that great at 3am). I'm married now, and all that travel wouldn't sit with my wife very well. I'm with that company still ("again", actually, after brief time with a dot-bomb). I'm a QA guy now, and making more money. But I will remember my travel-days as a lot of fun.
My employeer doesn't even hire trainers. They have what's called "on-line" training (though "on-line" is misleading, because you don't even use the internet nor intranet at all for it, once you download it). To say "piss-poor" is an understatement. It gives you worthless examples, and no way to ask any questions.
In fact, how it even presents material is piss-poor. A perfect example is the questions before each unit. Before each unit, you are forced to answer a question in which the answer is within that unit. For example, if you were doing the basic Java lessons, and you got to the inheritance chapter, it would ask you: "How many classes are you allowed to interhit from when creating a new class?" and it would give you options, and you choose the answer, and it will say if you are right or wrong. But, really it's just guess work, because you don't know!!! If you did, you wouldn't be doing that lesson, would you? Instead, if they asked you the same questions after that unit, that would be one thing (but they don't), or if they gave you a "in this lesson you will lean foo and bar" it would be another.
I don't own it now, because my wife wants to buy it for my b-day.
Anyway, I've thumbed through it several times in the bookstore, and though he mainly uses meat as the main ingrediant, he also does some vegatable dishes too. The book is about applying heat, and different ways to do it, not about a particular ingrediant.
If I was a vegatarian, I'd head to a bookstore and look at it before purchasing.
. . . but it costs a lot to re-edit the film, pay those working on the edit, choosing the scenes, re-mixing the music, et al. It's not just cost of burning each DVD that New Line/AOL-TW has to worry about.
That said, I think they are milking the fans of the movie for all they got. And why? The first movie made $800 mil and all three costs $350 mil. And that's before the DVD release!!!
There were also rumors floating around that after all three films are done and released, a fifth mega-box set of all three with possible additional material may be released, which would be sometime in 2004. That doesn't surprise me, but I'm sure as heck not waiting until 2004 . .. .
Square did one better with Chrono Cross (the best PS1 RPG, IMHO) — every person and every "spell" (they called them Element Attacks) were assigned a color. The battlefield was made of circles, and for every spell that was cast, the low-level circle changed to the corresponding color of the spell. When the next spell was cast, the first color moved up one level. There are three levels on the battle field, an on the fourth spell, that color disappeared.
So, what does this do? Well, if you had a character whose color was red, they were stronger in red circles (attack, defense, even magic) and weaker in blue circles (the opposite color). The Bad Guys were the same as well. Also, you could only use summons if the the entire battlefield was the same color as the summon element.
Sounds kinda silly, and hard, but quite powerful when you had to be careful what colors the battlefied was and you just couldn't cast the same spell over and over again . .
but, but, if you do that, then Hot or Not doesn't work too well ..
Dear Lord -- what a troll . . .
I usually just use Python, and then code an extension module or find an executable to use a system call out to some executable for the processor/memory intense parts -- but those are few and far between. I've also used a little Jython, which is Python's Java implementation, and that works well, too, especially when interfacing with Java apps.
I once wrote a fairly complex XML to HTML converter, the GUI in wxPython, the conversion in XSLT, and Python code to "manage" it. Works wonderfully.
In college, I lived by myself in a second story apartment. One night, about 3am, I woke up and heard voices. Yeah, voices. I couldn't understand what they were saying, but they were definatly of human origin. So I get up and try to figure out what it was, if someone was robbing me, etc. But no -- I was alone. But I still was hearing voices, but this time I could understand a little what they were saying. Stuff about girls, street names, etc. And then I traced it to the source -- my stereo, which I had left on in CD mode, but had not been playing a CD. But I still didn't figure out what it was, until I noticed a car passing my apartment building and then heard the voices.
The problem? My stereo was picking up a CB channel, but it would only pick it up when someone was talking on the CB as the car went past.
It still sends chills up my spine thinking about it.
My cousin had something like this -- only worse. He would fall out of bed, with scratches on this face, etc. His mom thought demons were after him (yeah, yeah, I know . . .). The real reason?? He was having seizures, and still has them today, and during the day, if he doesn't take his medication.
According to IMDB, it was Matthew Waterhouse
Wil -- go and find some Dr Who videos (esp the Tom Baker years). You won't be disappointed -- it's good, campy, scifi fun.
This is what I think a logically progression of the Matrix movies would be:
I always thought that this would make a more interesting story progression than just a continuation of the same thing. We know who Neo is, what he can do, so aren't the machines pretty much finished?
All that aside, I'm still going to see the next two -- the first one was so highly creative, that, if nothing else, I want to know what the W Bros are going to come up with.
I had a job that had me traveling a lot, like 30-40% of the time. Doing simple things like sending a check to pay the bills, became really complicated when you weren't at home!! The bank I was at required $7.95/month for online access, and required you to use Quicken for it. Stoopid. So I found another bank that let me do all that for free! And more!
Now I rarely write a check -- if I do, its for church offering, and maybe rent (the management office tends to screw up my rent check if it's from the bank). Otherwise, I have automatic bill pay -- I tell the bank how much to send to who, and that's about it. Some are the same every month (car loan), and I even have some utilities sending bills straight to the bank! It's wonderful . . .
The whole cashless/checkless world is coming. I see checks fading out more quickly, more because of privacy issues, it's cheaper, and more convinent (Guys - how many of you like to carry a checkbook around all the time??). If you use a debit card at a grocery store, they like it because the money is moved to their account quicker (at the "point-of-sale", POS, POS machine, get it?), you like it because no everyone in payment processing at the store sees your address, and you get through the line quicker (no more having to check your driver's license). I've been to several restaurants that do not take checks at all -- just cash and credit cards. Of course, I've been to one restaurant that only takes cash -- no credit cards, no checks. But they do have ATMs inside! =)
I had forgotten about FK, but, once I think about it, there are a lot of similarities.
FK was really depressing, and Angel can be (like when he was on the edge for about 1/3 of this season). But it's better in the way that there is a bit of humor to lighten things up some, the wisecracks, etc. FK was pretty serious almost all of the time, but Angel really mixes it
As far as Angel's motivation for doing stuff . . . some of it is just that he wants to make up for everything he did before he got his soul back, and the other is just because he's an agent of TPTB (watch the show, or do a Google search for that one. =) so he has no choice. It's been a while, but Nikolaus's motivation was just because he wanted to be a nice guy.
just my $0.02, coming back at you.
I've waxed and waned on the SciFi channel - they have series that start good, but I just can't get into them. I do agree that Farscape is a lot better now than in the first seaon.
And, though it technically isn't SciFi (more horror) what about "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and it's spin-of "Angel". Though I'm worred what UPN will do to it, Buffy has been the best written and the best acted show on TV, and Angel isn't far behind. The characters in those shows laugh, cry, and hurt. And, though it gets silly once in a while, it knows it's silly and just laughs at itself.
Buffy is definitely the most "junvenile" of the two, though the themes it has discussed (sexuality, loss of a loved one) are biggies and they give it the weight that those themes deserve. Angel is more of an adult-oriented, with more of a Batman: The Animated Serie feel to it.
Try it - you may like it!
Go ahead - call me a troll, but I, too, thought that Doug Miller gave us honest answers - except for #8. That was a hot button question, and he avoided it (and thanks to Phoenix_SEC for asking it). Of course he was schooled by the spin doctors in the marketing dept. Of course I didn't agree with it all. But I *do* agree that we in the Linux community need to unite under one desktop. Paraphrasing Larry Wall: "Throw out what sucks, keep what rules." And he was asking how much money Red Hat and Caldera made?? Well, I know that Red Hat made money last year. Okay, not the billions that MS made, but they still made money.
The funny thing is . . .XSLT isn't that hard, once you figure out that how XSLT works with the document. That "how" is very important. Unfortunately, there isn't much out there, bookwise, about XSLT. I would try XSLT: Working with XML and HTML by Fung. Of course, that book wasn't out yet when I needed to bone-up on XSLT, so I had to use the other book that's out - XSLT Programmer's Reference by Michael Kay. It's way, way too detailed to get up and running fast on. And I still hate wading through it to look up something. Also, ORA's new XML in a Nutshell seems to have some promise in a reference for all things XML.
I do work with XML for a living, but I use Python for my DOM/SAX work. Python 2.0 and 4Suite are really the best for rapid XML programming. However, most of the documentation for DOM, SAX, and XSLT apply to all implentations . . . I can read the Java examples and can translate that into Python. Granted, they are pretty similiar languages, but this should work for plenty of other programmers working this into their language of choice.
It is fishy that C and C++ aren't really mentioned, but there really doesn't seem to be much out there for XML-type stuff. Maybe someone here will post the URL's for more info on that.
Off the Python topic, I just bought ORA's new "XML in a Nutshell". I haven't had a chance to put it through the trenches yet, but it seems to be the best general XML book out there. Which I am glad, because I want to retire Kay's "XSLT Programmer's Reference" in a hurry. What ORA did to sum-up XPATH and XSLT in 200 pages, it took Kay (no lie) 500 pages. And it's the exact same thing!!!!
Actually, Internet is quite useful (and quite popular) in rural areas. The reasons: updated commodity prices from Chicago Board of Trade, research into new farming techniques, buying selling equipment (kinda like classifieds, only cheaper), keeping up with children/relatives, - This list goes on and on . . .
The problem with dialup in rural areas is that the local telcos have not done a very good job catching up. My parents (on the farm) cannot get 56k(bits) from their dialup provider to save their lives. Their modem is a USR/3com 56k, and their provider (the telco) swears up and down that the pop they dial into is 56k-ready. After doing some research I discovered that, while all that may be true, if the phone switches between them and the pop are not new enough to handle 56k, then that speed isn't possible. In fact, my parents celebrate when they get 28.8k!!
I personally think that Prarie iNet will make a fortune. There are no other options for high-speed access in rural areas. I mean, my parents can't even get cable (although they do have DirectTV). In case you didn't figure that out - yes, I didn't grow up with cable. Heck, I didn't even have Fox . . .
- mikehI tried for quite some time to have my little homepage to look nice. It was a pain - decent graphics took too long, then you had to mess around with different colors on the background. Then you had to go to a different machine to look at it, to make sure that it look the same on a Win9x machine w/ IE as on my Linux machine running Netscape 4.x. And, of course, it never did.
So I stopped - I think I now have three graphics on my whole "home site". I made all the colors the default (usually black on white, but on my Linux machine it's black on light gray, thanks to Netscape). So, since I made that decision, I decided to do something else on my site, to make sure that people would come back. Something rarely seen on the Web today (though that hasn't always been the case). I put in actual content. Naturally, it's my website, so it's all about me and my not-so-exciting life, but still - there is actual content on my web site.
- mikeh
Talk about a concidence . . . yesterday, the largest local cell phone service provider (all praise Alltel) came to my employeer's campus, offering extremely cheap phones in price, but not so much in quality. Of course, you had to pay for everything on the spot.
I know for a fact Sprint PCS (the provider I use) doesn't make any money off the phones that they sell - they make money off of selling their service. So if Motorola, Qualcomm, Erikson, etc. are worried about making money, they should talk to the service providers instead of concentrating on the end-users.
I think it must work different in Europe, though. I was there a few months ago and everyone had a cell phone. It was crazy. We in the US think we use them all the time, but we really don't, compared with that side of the pond.
- mikeh
I concur - I have been using Everybuddy for quite a few months, and have had no troubles with it. It's fast, and friendly, and it checks spelling.=)
The thing is - I have some friends on Yahoo, and some on ICQ. The fact that you can talk to them all with one program (and people who use AIM and M$ IM, which I have never used), it's fanstastic. Add to the fact that it's free (as in speech) makes it even better.
so, check it out - http://www.everybuddy.com
- mikehBefore the movie came out, I heard a rumor that they were already filming the sequel. That made sense to me - the book is *huge* (1000 pages in paperback) and there is no way to do that in a whole 2 hour movie. So I figured that they were doing the first half of the book as the first movie, and the second part of the book as the second movie.
I thought the book was so-so. However, they did make the movie out of the best part of the book. The second part explains why the Psyclos wanted the gold - to pay off the debts of the Earth invasion plus other invasions. Then the humans destroyed the Psyclos (sorry for the spoiler - didn't think anyone would care, though), so the humans inherited the debt. So what did the humans do? Well, get the surviviors from Luxumberg to help! You see, they are bankers, so they know how to fix the problem.
So my entry is - at least they made the movie out of the good part of the book.