One thing about SMG - she works out a lot, in fact, her hobby is kickboxing (or taebo, or something like that), and this, I think was a very good thing for her in this part, because she was mostly a pretty believable fighter in scenes where they didn't use a stunt double. In my opinion, a lot of women who try to play a "fighter" type, just have bad form. I've even seen women who are black-belts, who just have bad form, and they don't really look like good fighters. It's partially posture, and partially their agression and commit when throwing punches, or blocking. SMG, as an actress, dispelled that for me. I don't know if she's really a good fighter, or not. But she moves like one. (and actually, she started out in the first season as having a lot of hesitation and visible weakness, and greatly improved over the years). And if it makes her figure skinny, and less curvy, then that's fine. As long as she doesn't look like that chick from the Plasmatics.
What's unattractive about Callista Flockhart is that she looks like you'd crush her hand when you shook it. I don't think SMG has that quality about her at all.
The reason why convenience is such a highly valued feature now, is because of technology.
The reason why QUALITY is no longer as highly valued, is - the COST of decent quality sound equipment.
Case in point: Cost of an MP3 player= $100 (or basically free, if you've got a computer - unless you bought your computer JUST to listen to MP3s, in which case, you're a moron). Cost of audio equipment capable of detecting the difference between an MP3 and CD, in case you're also one of the gifted 10% of people who can detect the difference= $5000
I know, I know, you can play them side by side on fairly average equipment and tell the difference, but no played side by side, it's fairly cheap to fool yourself and enjoy "good enough" music quality. And the convenience helps too.
And nobody ever accidentally scratched a PRAM chip or hard disk while trying to switch to a different album while they were driving.
What about those non-Enron employees, who had 401k's invested broadly, but whose value was sucked dry thanks to the depression in stock prices caused by the rampant fraud, not only by Enron, but Worldcom, and all the others, Citigroup, etc. plus all the rumored stuff that's out there, that the government won't even have the chance to think about investigating because the SEC is so underfunded and has their hands tied by it's own corruption?
What about you, what about me? I had nothing at all to do with Enron (except for how they bankrupted my State and subjected us to rolling blackouts in 2000-2001, just so they could "game the system" and manipulate market prices for their own gain. - yes the system was flawed, but it was designed by Energy Industry lobbyists in the first place, wasn't it?) But my 401k as well as my stock portfolio, job security, and standard of living, have all suffered vastly as an indirect result of these crimes. Others have suffered far, far more than I have. It's outrageous that these guys are still out walking the streets. Our government can affort hundreds of millions of $ for street cops, border patrols, phone tapping, planes, bombs, guns, but can't afford to hire enough lawyers and prosecutors to keep our corporate boards of directors in line when so much is riding on them?
I understand that the economy was in serious trouble before the impact of Enron was felt (maybe a big part of that was the fallout from the power crisis - I know that MY Silicon Valley-based company lost millions due to the blackouts). I also understand that 9/11 had a pretty big impact as well. I also understand that the extended fear of possibility of a ground-war in Iraq is depressing things too. But you can't tell me that corporate fraud is not a majorly significant part of why things went bad as far as they did, and that loss of trust isn't a huge factor preventing the economy from beginning a recovery. We've had several false-starts at a recovery over the past year. Wonder why they aren't catching? Same reason nobody wants to start a Software Company these days. The criminals walk free and unpunished.
Mastrubation won't make you go blind. Stay the fuck away from women; in the year 1995, you'll have access to more pornography than you can possibly view in your lifetime, free.
In fact, this wonderful "tough on crime" administration we have in this country has seen violent crime rates rise to their highest levels in more than 12 years. . . gee, didn't we have a "tough on crime" Republican president 12 years ago too?
Fuck that. Flushing someone's life's savings down the toilet causes at least as much mental anguish. I was a millionaire two years ago, and let me tell you, I've got buttloads of mental anguish right now. Tell me where the fuckers are. I'll bring my own pitchfork, torches, and rope.
yeah, but failing to prosecute them doesn't help much either.
The point is - When I, as a potential investor, see the stock market as a Vegas Casino game, rigged to give certain people the opportunity to steal from me without even being prosecuted, I sure as hell am not going to invest my money in the stock market.
Does this explain why stocks have been in the toilet for the past two years? Not alone, but it's sure a big factor. It's the government's job to ensure trust in these institutions by creating a robust regulatory environment, and then enforcing those regulations. (unless you're a Libertarian, in which case, it's the investor's job to hire a personal force of hitmen to hunt these fuckers down, and lock them up in your basement).
As long as this trust is absent, so will investment dollars. And as long as investment dollars are absent, so will corporate hiring. And as long as corporate hiring is absent, so will any semblance of a middle class. And as long as the middle class is absent, so will tax revenues. And as long as tax revenues are absent, low interest rates will be the next thing to evaporate, as the government prints money as fast as it can to pay it's expenses. When interest rates go back up, so will bankruptcies, and you can kiss the whole fucking economy good bye then.
It doesn't matter if these fuckers think they'll get caught or not. What matters is that they ARE caught, and severely punished so that we can restore some trust to the market and get this economy going again.
Enron may have had only a few thousand employees, but what about the fallout; Arthur Anderson's tens of thousands of employees on the streets overnight, and the impact of this on the economy - tens of thousands of high-paid accountants and energy traders lose their source of income, the businesses they used to buy their precious things from are now out of business, and their people unemployed. Additionaly the huge amount of resources the government must now spend hunting down these fuckers. Add to that the economic cost that will be incurred by ALL businesses as a result of the now-necessary changes in the regulatory environment; needed to restore trust in the markets. (of course, these changes haven't really happened, and may not actually ever happen - but they should - one kid spits his gum on the gym floor, and now they gotta ban gum for everyone). For Conservatives who supposedly favor "minimizing friction" in the business environment, they've sure encouraged it.
More than a few of these unemployed people are going to see additional fallout from this: divorce, troubled children, emotional problems - then consider the lost tax revenues from all those out of work people, and when those state-funded programs lose their funding, those employees will also be out of work (there's nothing more pathetic than an unemployed civil servant).
It's my opinion that one cannot underestimate the negative impact of the crimes of these white-collar criminals.
And when you consider the wide-reaching economic impact, and the overall strategic picture, one could very easily argue that these fellows have done as least as much to weaken the American position as Al Qaida. In fact, I wouldn't cry at all if these miserable fucks ended up in Camp X-Ray.
what would be nice is if some nice mobo manufacturer put OF on an x86 motherboard, so Linux and *BSD people can have the best of both worlds; decent hardware-level management, with commodity-hardware prices. Who cares about Windows?
I think that someone who is building a business based on providing database solutions ought to thoroughly investigate the various competing products before making a choice.
Obviously, the individuals who did such research, did their research based on Gartner's biased benchmarks, and Microsoft's colorful brochures, and perhaps a free T-Shirt from one of Microsoft's reps at a trade show. Such individuals are quite often very well compensated for this labor. Obviously, in the case where these analysts chose MS SQL Server, they didn't do a very good job. Those fuckers ought to be fired, and never allowed to work around computers again. They represent everything that's wrong with the computer industry today. Engineering decisions being made by non-engineers.
yeah, now tell us about the Airbus avionics code. You know, the stuff that brought down an A320 into the woods 300ft past the end of the runway as the Pilots sat staring at a screen that said "Please Wait".
I have had the pleasure of working for two separate closed-source software companies. One was one of the top 10 largest software companies in the world. The other was not strictly a software company, but did large custom projects.
All and all, I'd say talent on the engineering team and management team were about equal.
The first company had rigorous testing processes, but did not adhere to them when schedules got tight. The engineering process was rather ad hoc. The result was fairly typical bug-ridden business software. Easy to install and use, but if something went wrong, it was usually "off to the developer for a code-dive". There was almost nothing that could be done in the field to troubleshoot. The only option was to hope it might possibly be reproduced in the lab where a developer could sit and debug it.
The second company had extremely rigorous engineering, internal peer-review, testing, and change-control processes, and they stuck to them, schedule be damned (often the schedule was padded to account for this - but the managers only rarely got it right), and in many cases, it saved their asses. Their product was still rather buggy, performed poorly, and fell far short of the customer's requirements. The UI was a usability nightmare, but the software was so specialized, it didn't really matter - the answer to that was thorough documentation. When it came to troubleshooting in the field, it was by comparison, very transparent. And there was no shortage of available team-members who knew what was going on in any given part of the project, so if Sammy was sick, and his component was acting weird, Debbie could tell you what was going on and fix it.
Guess which company I'd MUCH rather work for? Sure, the rules and regulations of the rigorous process are a huge pain in the ass, and watching helplessly as schedules slip over and over is a pain. But when you need to know something, it's nice not to get a vacant stare or a shrug from the developer who was supposed to be the guy who wrote that particular component.
In the end, this is an apples to apples comparison of two closed-source software projects. The difference was the engineering process. And THAT is where I think open source software really shines - because behind the seemingly ad hoc collaboration of hobbyists and geeks is an engineering process that results in a team that knows what the fuck they're doing. In the closed-source world, there's really no guarantee what the development team is doing behind the scenes, and in my opinion, is MUCH LESS worthy of trust.
One additional example I'll provide, is an experience I had with Microsoft Developer Support. I had been having problems with a component of the Windows 2000 OS, not behaving as it should. And it was affecting our product. So I got ahold of developer support, and at first, they took 3 days to figure out which team I was supposed to be routed to. Then, after talking with the manager of this team, stressing how important this issue was to one of our large accounts, they listened to my description of the problem again, looked at my logs and analysis, and sent me to some canned PowerPoint presentation about how this component was supposed to work. I went through it, and again, concluded that this component was definately not working as Microsoft was advertising. I could demonstrate that - independent of my own product and the problems we saw. Using only Windows, and Sysinternals Filemon. So I called back, and they admitted that they were stumped, and were trying to get ahold of the developer who wrote that part of Windows. They could not locate a person who knew how this component worked, or could look at the code, or could explain the behavior I saw. They basically gave me the okay to tell the customer that this was a bug in Windows 2000 (XP does it too), and even gave me a reference number. To my knowlege, nobody has looked at this issue within Microsoft. This, to me, illustrates precisely, the problem with closed-source software, and the sloppy engineering practices it conceals.
I'd be MUCH more worried about helium balloons, because they can lift heavy objects, and drift over densely populated cities from unwatched cargo ships off the coast.
The Japs did this in WW II, and if they had had access to WMD, and a GPS receiver as a crude trigger, they might have actually hurt somebody, instead of those bombs landing and exploding in the California desert somewhere.
As things stand today, VPC can be used to run everything from Darwin x86 to Linux x86 to BeOS x86, and sometimes WIndows too, for those so inclined. Connectix beat the crap out of it's rival SoftWindows by writing VPC as an x86 emulator, not a Windows emulator.
So with Microsoft running Connectix, how long do you think that situation will continue?
The thing is, almost ALL orbits are going in the same direction, that is, the same direction in which the earth rotates. It's nearly impossible to orbit an object in the other direction, unless you want to expend a buttload of extra propellant for a given mass. ANd there's no real benefit in doing so, so it's just not done.
The problem comes when orbits of different inclination happen - Columbia was on a low-inclination orbit. ISS is on a high inclination orbit. These orbits cross paths. The effective velocity in a collision is going to be nowhere near 17,000 mph, but it can be pretty high.
But when you have your polar orbits crossing the relatively equatorial orbits, then it's nearly at right angles, and you've got a serious relative velocity problem. Polar orbits tend to be higher altitudes, because those birds are normally intended to stay up longer. (think communications and spy satellites). But when they pop, debris will tend to decay over time, and will cross the lower orbits.
Slashdot Mirror
How about; "Bored Now" Willow?
Mmmmmm- puppy. . .
One thing about SMG - she works out a lot, in fact, her hobby is kickboxing (or taebo, or something like that), and this, I think was a very good thing for her in this part, because she was mostly a pretty believable fighter in scenes where they didn't use a stunt double. In my opinion, a lot of women who try to play a "fighter" type, just have bad form. I've even seen women who are black-belts, who just have bad form, and they don't really look like good fighters. It's partially posture, and partially their agression and commit when throwing punches, or blocking. SMG, as an actress, dispelled that for me. I don't know if she's really a good fighter, or not. But she moves like one. (and actually, she started out in the first season as having a lot of hesitation and visible weakness, and greatly improved over the years). And if it makes her figure skinny, and less curvy, then that's fine. As long as she doesn't look like that chick from the Plasmatics.
What's unattractive about Callista Flockhart is that she looks like you'd crush her hand when you shook it. I don't think SMG has that quality about her at all.
hell, thanks to the XBox, even Windows won't have half the games as Windows. . .
This just proves that he didn't have a storyline hashed out before he made the first movie.
Hell, it provves that he didn't have a storyline hashed out prior to finishing Ep II.
The reason why convenience is such a highly valued feature now, is because of technology.
The reason why QUALITY is no longer as highly valued, is - the COST of decent quality sound equipment.
Case in point:
Cost of an MP3 player= $100 (or basically free, if you've got a computer - unless you bought your computer JUST to listen to MP3s, in which case, you're a moron).
Cost of audio equipment capable of detecting the difference between an MP3 and CD, in case you're also one of the gifted 10% of people who can detect the difference= $5000
I know, I know, you can play them side by side on fairly average equipment and tell the difference, but no played side by side, it's fairly cheap to fool yourself and enjoy "good enough" music quality. And the convenience helps too.
And nobody ever accidentally scratched a PRAM chip or hard disk while trying to switch to a different album while they were driving.
What about those non-Enron employees, who had 401k's invested broadly, but whose value was sucked dry thanks to the depression in stock prices caused by the rampant fraud, not only by Enron, but Worldcom, and all the others, Citigroup, etc. plus all the rumored stuff that's out there, that the government won't even have the chance to think about investigating because the SEC is so underfunded and has their hands tied by it's own corruption?
What about you, what about me? I had nothing at all to do with Enron (except for how they bankrupted my State and subjected us to rolling blackouts in 2000-2001, just so they could "game the system" and manipulate market prices for their own gain. - yes the system was flawed, but it was designed by Energy Industry lobbyists in the first place, wasn't it?) But my 401k as well as my stock portfolio, job security, and standard of living, have all suffered vastly as an indirect result of these crimes. Others have suffered far, far more than I have. It's outrageous that these guys are still out walking the streets. Our government can affort hundreds of millions of $ for street cops, border patrols, phone tapping, planes, bombs, guns, but can't afford to hire enough lawyers and prosecutors to keep our corporate boards of directors in line when so much is riding on them?
I understand that the economy was in serious trouble before the impact of Enron was felt (maybe a big part of that was the fallout from the power crisis - I know that MY Silicon Valley-based company lost millions due to the blackouts). I also understand that 9/11 had a pretty big impact as well. I also understand that the extended fear of possibility of a ground-war in Iraq is depressing things too. But you can't tell me that corporate fraud is not a majorly significant part of why things went bad as far as they did, and that loss of trust isn't a huge factor preventing the economy from beginning a recovery. We've had several false-starts at a recovery over the past year. Wonder why they aren't catching? Same reason nobody wants to start a Software Company these days. The criminals walk free and unpunished.
Mastrubation won't make you go blind.
Stay the fuck away from women; in the year 1995, you'll have access to more pornography than you can possibly view in your lifetime, free.
In fact, this wonderful "tough on crime" administration we have in this country has seen violent crime rates rise to their highest levels in more than 12 years. . . gee, didn't we have a "tough on crime" Republican president 12 years ago too?
Fuck that. Flushing someone's life's savings down the toilet causes at least as much mental anguish. I was a millionaire two years ago, and let me tell you, I've got buttloads of mental anguish right now. Tell me where the fuckers are. I'll bring my own pitchfork, torches, and rope.
yeah, but failing to prosecute them doesn't help much either.
The point is -
When I, as a potential investor, see the stock market as a Vegas Casino game, rigged to give certain people the opportunity to steal from me without even being prosecuted, I sure as hell am not going to invest my money in the stock market.
Does this explain why stocks have been in the toilet for the past two years? Not alone, but it's sure a big factor.
It's the government's job to ensure trust in these institutions by creating a robust regulatory environment, and then enforcing those regulations. (unless you're a Libertarian, in which case, it's the investor's job to hire a personal force of hitmen to hunt these fuckers down, and lock them up in your basement).
As long as this trust is absent, so will investment dollars. And as long as investment dollars are absent, so will corporate hiring. And as long as corporate hiring is absent, so will any semblance of a middle class. And as long as the middle class is absent, so will tax revenues. And as long as tax revenues are absent, low interest rates will be the next thing to evaporate, as the government prints money as fast as it can to pay it's expenses. When interest rates go back up, so will bankruptcies, and you can kiss the whole fucking economy good bye then.
It doesn't matter if these fuckers think they'll get caught or not. What matters is that they ARE caught, and severely punished so that we can restore some trust to the market and get this economy going again.
CEO Salaries are up again this year. Is yours? They must be doing something worthwhile to earn all that money, right?
Thousands?
How about millions?
Enron may have had only a few thousand employees, but what about the fallout; Arthur Anderson's tens of thousands of employees on the streets overnight, and the impact of this on the economy - tens of thousands of high-paid accountants and energy traders lose their source of income, the businesses they used to buy their precious things from are now out of business, and their people unemployed.
Additionaly the huge amount of resources the government must now spend hunting down these fuckers.
Add to that the economic cost that will be incurred by ALL businesses as a result of the now-necessary changes in the regulatory environment; needed to restore trust in the markets. (of course, these changes haven't really happened, and may not actually ever happen - but they should - one kid spits his gum on the gym floor, and now they gotta ban gum for everyone). For Conservatives who supposedly favor "minimizing friction" in the business environment, they've sure encouraged it.
More than a few of these unemployed people are going to see additional fallout from this: divorce, troubled children, emotional problems - then consider the lost tax revenues from all those out of work people, and when those state-funded programs lose their funding, those employees will also be out of work (there's nothing more pathetic than an unemployed civil servant).
It's my opinion that one cannot underestimate the negative impact of the crimes of these white-collar criminals.
And when you consider the wide-reaching economic impact, and the overall strategic picture, one could very easily argue that these fellows have done as least as much to weaken the American position as Al Qaida. In fact, I wouldn't cry at all if these miserable fucks ended up in Camp X-Ray.
Especially when compared to the kids who routinely purchase term papers.
what would be nice is if some nice mobo manufacturer put OF on an x86 motherboard, so Linux and *BSD people can have the best of both worlds; decent hardware-level management, with commodity-hardware prices. Who cares about Windows?
actually, due to the sweet stock options deals they got, pretty much every Spyglass employee made out like bandits on that deal.
coming to a bankruptcy court near you soon. . .
Veritas (we're making our own Volume Manager and Tape Backup software).
Nuthin like walking on the edge. . .
I think that someone who is building a business based on providing database solutions ought to thoroughly investigate the various competing products before making a choice.
Obviously, the individuals who did such research, did their research based on Gartner's biased benchmarks, and Microsoft's colorful brochures, and perhaps a free T-Shirt from one of Microsoft's reps at a trade show.
Such individuals are quite often very well compensated for this labor.
Obviously, in the case where these analysts chose MS SQL Server, they didn't do a very good job. Those fuckers ought to be fired, and never allowed to work around computers again. They represent everything that's wrong with the computer industry today. Engineering decisions being made by non-engineers.
Just my opinion.
yeah, now tell us about the Airbus avionics code. You know, the stuff that brought down an A320 into the woods 300ft past the end of the runway as the Pilots sat staring at a screen that said "Please Wait".
I have had the pleasure of working for two separate closed-source software companies.
One was one of the top 10 largest software companies in the world.
The other was not strictly a software company, but did large custom projects.
All and all, I'd say talent on the engineering team and management team were about equal.
The first company had rigorous testing processes, but did not adhere to them when schedules got tight. The engineering process was rather ad hoc. The result was fairly typical bug-ridden business software. Easy to install and use, but if something went wrong, it was usually "off to the developer for a code-dive". There was almost nothing that could be done in the field to troubleshoot. The only option was to hope it might possibly be reproduced in the lab where a developer could sit and debug it.
The second company had extremely rigorous engineering, internal peer-review, testing, and change-control processes, and they stuck to them, schedule be damned (often the schedule was padded to account for this - but the managers only rarely got it right), and in many cases, it saved their asses. Their product was still rather buggy, performed poorly, and fell far short of the customer's requirements. The UI was a usability nightmare, but the software was so specialized, it didn't really matter - the answer to that was thorough documentation. When it came to troubleshooting in the field, it was by comparison, very transparent. And there was no shortage of available team-members who knew what was going on in any given part of the project, so if Sammy was sick, and his component was acting weird, Debbie could tell you what was going on and fix it.
Guess which company I'd MUCH rather work for? Sure, the rules and regulations of the rigorous process are a huge pain in the ass, and watching helplessly as schedules slip over and over is a pain. But when you need to know something, it's nice not to get a vacant stare or a shrug from the developer who was supposed to be the guy who wrote that particular component.
In the end, this is an apples to apples comparison of two closed-source software projects. The difference was the engineering process. And THAT is where I think open source software really shines - because behind the seemingly ad hoc collaboration of hobbyists and geeks is an engineering process that results in a team that knows what the fuck they're doing. In the closed-source world, there's really no guarantee what the development team is doing behind the scenes, and in my opinion, is MUCH LESS worthy of trust.
One additional example I'll provide, is an experience I had with Microsoft Developer Support. I had been having problems with a component of the Windows 2000 OS, not behaving as it should. And it was affecting our product. So I got ahold of developer support, and at first, they took 3 days to figure out which team I was supposed to be routed to. Then, after talking with the manager of this team, stressing how important this issue was to one of our large accounts, they listened to my description of the problem again, looked at my logs and analysis, and sent me to some canned PowerPoint presentation about how this component was supposed to work. I went through it, and again, concluded that this component was definately not working as Microsoft was advertising. I could demonstrate that - independent of my own product and the problems we saw. Using only Windows, and Sysinternals Filemon. So I called back, and they admitted that they were stumped, and were trying to get ahold of the developer who wrote that part of Windows. They could not locate a person who knew how this component worked, or could look at the code, or could explain the behavior I saw. They basically gave me the okay to tell the customer that this was a bug in Windows 2000 (XP does it too), and even gave me a reference number. To my knowlege, nobody has looked at this issue within Microsoft. This, to me, illustrates precisely, the problem with closed-source software, and the sloppy engineering practices it conceals.
It's very simple to stop a determined enemy. Be more determined.
I'd be MUCH more worried about helium balloons, because they can lift heavy objects, and drift over densely populated cities from unwatched cargo ships off the coast.
The Japs did this in WW II, and if they had had access to WMD, and a GPS receiver as a crude trigger, they might have actually hurt somebody, instead of those bombs landing and exploding in the California desert somewhere.
yes, my favorite news article from last year was the one about the London Bobby that was stabbed to death by a butter knife.
Damn good thing those Brits outlawed guns.
Very bad.
As things stand today, VPC can be used to run everything from Darwin x86 to Linux x86 to BeOS x86, and sometimes WIndows too, for those so inclined. Connectix beat the crap out of it's rival SoftWindows by writing VPC as an x86 emulator, not a Windows emulator.
So with Microsoft running Connectix, how long do you think that situation will continue?
Actually, I was out at a retirement lunch the other day, at a chinese restaurant, and the new thing is to read the fortune cookie thusly:
." (text of fortune cookie).
"In Soviet Russia. .
Which is a refreshing change, but often not as funny as:
(text of fortune cookie) ". . . in bed."
The thing is, almost ALL orbits are going in the same direction, that is, the same direction in which the earth rotates. It's nearly impossible to orbit an object in the other direction, unless you want to expend a buttload of extra propellant for a given mass. ANd there's no real benefit in doing so, so it's just not done.
The problem comes when orbits of different inclination happen - Columbia was on a low-inclination orbit. ISS is on a high inclination orbit. These orbits cross paths. The effective velocity in a collision is going to be nowhere near 17,000 mph, but it can be pretty high.
But when you have your polar orbits crossing the relatively equatorial orbits, then it's nearly at right angles, and you've got a serious relative velocity problem. Polar orbits tend to be higher altitudes, because those birds are normally intended to stay up longer. (think communications and spy satellites). But when they pop, debris will tend to decay over time, and will cross the lower orbits.