The live-action Aeon Flux movie was entertaining, although it had little in common with the original animated series other than some shared names and a fascination with super-spy/assasin heroines. For hollywood, I'd say it was a pretty imaginative effort.
Go see it for the eye-candy, and then go home and watch the newly-released complete DVD set of the original animated series for the true Aeon Flux experience.
Not that it matters, but what are the usual attendance levels at the various "hacker" conventions throughout the world?
The Indypendent newspaper said there were "over 2000" people at the 5th HOPE, and nobody was claiming HOPE was the biggest. Is the Chaos Communications Camp the biggest? Perhaps someone with better Google skills than I could enlighten me?
It was my old Zaurus SL-5000D that taught me one novel way to combine quality time with the family and geekery. I'd run kismet on the Z and put it in my pocket while pushing my 3-year-old daughter around my suburban neighborhood in her stroller. Whenever we'd pass a neighbor proudly polishing his car in his driveway, I'd give a cheerful "Hello!" and my Z would give an equally-cheerful "I found an open AP" bleep.
Hopefully my new SL-6000L will last me a long time...
Don't worry. Wait till Intel releases their "most unhappy campuses" - WPI's gonna kick ass on that one.;^)
Back when I was there, when you ran into a friend on campus, you seldom began a conversation by asking "how are you doing?" or "how's it going?" because you already knew the answer was going to be pretty grim. (With some notable exceptions, most WPI students in those days led miserably lonely and overworked monastic existences.)
The correct question was "what are you working on?", because everyone was always hard at work on some project or other, and being geeks, everyone enjoyed a good technical discussion. Explaining a clever hack you'd made to a friend who could appreciate its value was one of the few joys of the time.
I'm not sure which part makes me more angry: the fact that they sold me bootlegged DVDs, or the fact that they charged $20US each for them. As Chibi said, it's a "double-whammy".
I think they aren't bootlegs, but I suppose I can't really be sure. Here's the info:
My DVDs are region-free, Japanese audio with Chinese and English subtitles. I claim they're imported from Taiwan only because the DVD cases had additional cardboard overlays under the shrink-wrap that were apparently added by a Taiwanese distributor. These overlays had the title translated into Chinese ("something-or-other infantry"), along with contact information for the distributor and a short list of their other products.
I don't have them with me here at work (sadly!), but at least one google-rific on-line store that's advertising DVDs with the same titles and cover art claims that the distributor is "anime cartoon".
Oh, the horror! In my search for this information, I have found a site offering all but the last DVD for $25US each, or the boxed set with all the episodes for $80US. I will now weep quietly for a while.
I don't think the Ghost in the Shell Standalone Complex TV series would have to be edited too much for US TV. I have all but the last DVD (imported from Taiwan), and I think most of the episodes are free of anything that might cause US TVs to melt down in a fit of self-righteous indignation.
Of course, perhaps the good/bad stuff is in the last few episodes I don't have. I can't seem to get the last DVD. One of my local Anime dealers told me that this is intentional - He said that the producers of these (non-US) releases don't release the last DVD until they release the whole series as a boxed set. Their plan is to force all the fools (like myself) who bought the single DVDs to buy them all again in the boxed set in order to get the last episodes.
I agree that such corporate behavior is unreasonable, and I share your sense of indignation. In my case, I didn't expect any kind of notice, because of the peculiar notion of "at will" employment.
I've always worked as a regular employee, not a contractor. My corporate employers have always taken care to define our relationship as "at will" employment, explaining that "at will" means that they are free to fire me, and I am free to quit at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all.
However, because in all cases I ultimately signed some form of agreement, I have to admit that I don't know what really happens when the corporation is forced to make good on their threats. The answer probably depends on local laws.
> but how can you claim anything on > what people do in their own time.
This is a question I once wondered about, too. Based on my experience with software companies, the short answer is that employers will insist you sign an "intellectual property agreement" that specifically grants them ownership of anything you create while under their employ.
How do they get you to sign such a silly thing? Well, here's how it's gone down in my life (outside of California); YMMV:
You work for company A. You want to work for company B. You negotiate with B, get an offer letter, and resign politely from A. You've crossed your Rubicon at this point; you've cast your lot with B and going back to A would be hard. But, you're happy to be free of A so you enjoy some time off between jobs.
At the apppointed time, you show up at company B and start working. Some time on or after your first day of work, your new masters present you with an "Intellectual Property Agreement" and demand you sign away your entire soul. If company B has played their cards optimally, this will be the first time you have seen this document. They will tell you that your employment cannot continue unless you sign, and will attempt to intimidate you into signing on the spot.
This is a tough spot to find yourself in. Company B has chosen the time and place for the argument - you have much less bargaining power now that you have started with B than you had when you were still at A and negotiating with B for a new job. Your choice now is: sign or find a new job.
So, your best defense is to demand to see their "IP" agreement during salary negotiation, and refuse to sign while you still have your company A job.
Failing that, if Company B is small - like a dozen-person startup - you can organize collective bargaining. The tables are turned if at least half of the company's employees refuse to sign. I've been involved in a group that did this. Ultimately, we still had to sign, but we managed to force management into including the "your work is yours" provisions from California law into their IP agreement first.
Good luck dealing with all the Company B's out there...
Back in 1997 my workplace was essentially an all-BSD/OS shop. We had a source license, and I think it's fair to say that all of us who hacked around in it admired the BSD/OS kernel for its stability and clean code.
Unfortunately, a year or so later Windows NT swept down upon our group like a plague of management-mandated locusts. When the dust settled, our BSD/OS desktops were gone. I was sitting in front of a windows NT workstation, trying to convince myself that the SCO X server I had duct-taped on top of it was as good as the real thing.
But through it all, our humble BSD/OS fileserver continued chugging along. That thing was rock-solid. It exceeded 1 year of continuous uptime on at least two occasions while I was working there, brought down only by power failures.
I agree there is some truth in what you say. But, in defense of 2001 in particular, I found that seeing it on the big screen was a much more interesting experience than watching it on a standard TV screen.
In many of the in-space shots, the bulkheads were decorated with warning signs and instructions that were interesting to read. On my TV at home, the words were not discernable. But on a huge 60's-era screen (is 70mm panavision the proper term?) they're easily readable.
They gave clues about what it was like to live and work in space - a topic that was probably of considerable popular interest when the movie was first released.
I caught the re-release of 2001 a year or two ago at a classic 1-screen theater with the proper equipment to handle the 70mm print. It increased my appreciation of the movie a great deal.
OK, I know the original post was supposed to be a joke, but...
Richard Stallman is one of the co-authors of the first edition of the "hacker's dictionary" printed in paper-book form. (Guy Steele was another co-author.)
After much searching through used book stores, I managed to acquire a copy two years ago. (No, every word is not prefixed with "GNU/".) It contains a number of amusing entries not found in the more modern versions. I was particularly amused by the highly-detailed entry for Intercal (the "come from" programming language). It listed the inventive spoken names for many ASCII characters and character combinations. Something like:
greater than symbol = "angle", less than symbol = "bangle", - = "worm", " ->" = "angleworm".
Setting out to read GEB is like setting out to conquer Everest. I've made three attempts over the last eight years, determined to understand it fully and solve all the exercises. I've never made it all the way, but I've gone a little farther each time, and each time I've come away having learned something new.
My first time was as a 2nd-year undergraduate. My roommates and I were racing to see who could read it first. We raced up to the first exercise, and immediately hurled ourselves upon the problem, beating on it with our antelope thighbones like the primitive ape-men at the beginning of "2001 -- A Space Odessey". After untold hours of frantic amateurish hair-pulling, one of us finally read on past the exercise and found that its was unsolvable (*). We were all pissed-off that we'd been had, and that was the last I looked at GEB for several years.
But... I eventually came back for another try. This book has helped me to understand what a formal system really is, and what "proof" really means. It's a good cure for math anxiety; this understanding can help you use these tools to solve problems when designing software.
Perhaps it's time to make another attempt.
- Tim
(*) Before the GEB fans attack me, I seem to recall that the first exercise was a challenge to derive a given string using the axioms of a small formal system, also given. If you'd done this sort of thing before, you could probably tell right away that you couldn't derive the target string, but to a newbie it wasn't as obvious. After you wrestled with the problem for a while, you learned in a very concrete and unforgettable sort of way.:^)
I think you are right in pointing out that there are limits on how far you can take this hacker==painter analogy. However, I felt that the article contained some amusing insights, nonetheless.
I've spent the majority of my (admittedly short) career turning DARPA grants into math-envious papers, just as the author described.
A couple of years ago, I did step back and wonder if what I was doing was really science. I didn't seem to fit the idealized notion of a scientist that I learned about in high school: I didn't seem to be forming hypotheses about some already-existing aspect of the universe and testing them in a methodical way. And I didn't have a labcoat.
I spent most of my time hacking around, following my intuition, trying to make the computer do interesting things. I also experienced the sometimes-on, sometimes-off rollercoaster of inspiration that the author described.
So, some of the aspects of the author's painter-analogy seemed apt, at least in my case. Your mileage may vary, of course.
Anyways, now I've got to go convince my boss that it would be good for our project if I went and spent a day at the art musem!;^)
This event looks like great fun! I'm looking at the sea of monitors showing on one of the webcam images: I guess they don't have to worry about heating the building.
Perhaps you could post a more detailed report so those of us stuck at work could enjoy The Gathering vicariously?
The on-line schedule mentions deadlines for various "hand-in"s. Are these opportunities for attendees to register items for presentation? The schedule also mentions voting. What's that about?
Slashdot Mirror
The live-action Aeon Flux movie was entertaining, although it had little in common with the original animated series other than some shared names and a fascination with super-spy/assasin heroines. For hollywood, I'd say it was a pretty imaginative effort.
Go see it for the eye-candy, and then go home and watch the newly-released complete DVD set of the original animated series for the true Aeon Flux experience.
...and everybody knows emacs is better than vi!
- Tim
Not that it matters, but what are the usual attendance levels at the various "hacker" conventions throughout the world?
The Indypendent newspaper said there were "over 2000" people at the 5th HOPE, and nobody was claiming HOPE was the biggest. Is the Chaos Communications Camp the biggest? Perhaps someone with better Google skills than I could enlighten me?
Just curious.
Lord John Whorfin: Where are we going?
Red Lectroids: Planet Ten!
Lord John Whorfin: When?
Red Lectroids: Real soon!!
I loved Digital's VT terminals. I've still got three, but none of the last few machines I've bought have RS-232 ports to connect them. Sad...
- Tim Fraser
ROFL -- My hat is off to you. One hilarious word like this can dispel a whole week's worth of workplace misery. Thanks nizo, and thanks Slashdot.
- Tim
It was my old Zaurus SL-5000D that taught me one novel way to combine quality time with the family and geekery. I'd run kismet on the Z and put it in my pocket while pushing my 3-year-old daughter around my suburban neighborhood in her stroller. Whenever we'd pass a neighbor proudly polishing his car in his driveway, I'd give a cheerful "Hello!" and my Z would give an equally-cheerful "I found an open AP" bleep.
Hopefully my new SL-6000L will last me a long time...
Tim Fraser
Don't worry. Wait till Intel releases their "most unhappy campuses" - WPI's gonna kick ass on that one. ;^)
Back when I was there, when you ran into a friend on campus, you seldom began a conversation by asking "how are you doing?" or "how's it going?" because you already knew the answer was going to be pretty grim. (With some notable exceptions, most WPI students in those days led miserably lonely and overworked monastic existences.)
The correct question was "what are you working on?", because everyone was always hard at work on some project or other, and being geeks, everyone enjoyed a good technical discussion. Explaining a clever hack you'd made to a friend who could appreciate its value was one of the few joys of the time.
- Tim
No kidding...
:^(
I'm not sure which part makes me more angry: the fact that they sold me bootlegged DVDs, or the fact that they charged $20US each for them. As Chibi said, it's a "double-whammy".
- Tim
I think they aren't bootlegs, but I suppose I can't really be sure. Here's the info:
My DVDs are region-free, Japanese audio with Chinese and English subtitles. I claim they're imported from Taiwan only because the DVD cases had additional cardboard overlays under the shrink-wrap that were apparently added by a Taiwanese distributor. These overlays had the title translated into Chinese ("something-or-other infantry"), along with contact information for the distributor and a short list of their other products.
I don't have them with me here at work (sadly!), but at least one google-rific on-line store that's advertising DVDs with the same titles and cover art claims that the distributor is "anime cartoon".
Oh, the horror! In my search for this information, I have found a site offering all but the last DVD for $25US each, or the boxed set with all the episodes for $80US. I will now weep quietly for a while.
- Tim
I don't think the Ghost in the Shell Standalone Complex TV series would have to be edited too much for US TV. I have all but the last DVD (imported from Taiwan), and I think most of the episodes are free of anything that might cause US TVs to melt down in a fit of self-righteous indignation.
Of course, perhaps the good/bad stuff is in the last few episodes I don't have. I can't seem to get the last DVD. One of my local Anime dealers told me that this is intentional - He said that the producers of these (non-US) releases don't release the last DVD until they release the whole series as a boxed set. Their plan is to force all the fools (like myself) who bought the single DVDs to buy them all again in the boxed set in order to get the last episodes.
Can anyone confirm or debunk this theory?
- Tim
I agree that such corporate behavior is unreasonable, and I share your sense of indignation. In my case, I didn't expect any kind of notice, because of the peculiar notion of "at will" employment.
I've always worked as a regular employee, not a contractor. My corporate employers have always taken care to define our relationship as "at will" employment, explaining that "at will" means that they are free to fire me, and I am free to quit at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all.
However, because in all cases I ultimately signed some form of agreement, I have to admit that I don't know what really happens when the corporation is forced to make good on their threats. The answer probably depends on local laws.
Again, YMMV.
- Tim
> but how can you claim anything on
> what people do in their own time.
This is a question I once wondered about, too. Based on my experience with software companies, the short answer is that employers will insist you sign an "intellectual property agreement" that specifically grants them ownership of anything you create while under their employ.
How do they get you to sign such a silly thing? Well, here's how it's gone down in my life (outside of California); YMMV:
You work for company A. You want to work for company B. You negotiate with B, get an offer letter, and resign politely from A. You've crossed your Rubicon at this point; you've cast your lot with B and going back to A would be hard. But, you're happy to be free of A so you enjoy some time off between jobs.
At the apppointed time, you show up at company B and start working. Some time on or after your first day of work, your new masters present you with an "Intellectual Property Agreement" and demand you sign away your entire soul. If company B has played their cards optimally, this will be the first time you have seen this document. They will tell you that your employment cannot continue unless you sign, and will attempt to intimidate you into signing on the spot.
This is a tough spot to find yourself in. Company B has chosen the time and place for the argument - you have much less bargaining power now that you have started with B than you had when you were still at A and negotiating with B for a new job. Your choice now is: sign or find a new job.
So, your best defense is to demand to see their "IP" agreement during salary negotiation, and refuse to sign while you still have your company A job.
Failing that, if Company B is small - like a dozen-person startup - you can organize collective bargaining. The tables are turned if at least half of the company's employees refuse to sign. I've been involved in a group that did this. Ultimately, we still had to sign, but we managed to force management into including the "your work is yours" provisions from California law into their IP agreement first.
Good luck dealing with all the Company B's out there...
- Tim
Back in 1997 my workplace was essentially an all-BSD/OS shop. We had a source license, and I think it's fair to say that all of us who hacked around in it admired the BSD/OS kernel for its stability and clean code.
Unfortunately, a year or so later Windows NT swept down upon our group like a plague of management-mandated locusts. When the dust settled, our BSD/OS desktops were gone. I was sitting in front of a windows NT workstation, trying to convince myself that the SCO X server I had duct-taped on top of it was as good as the real thing.
But through it all, our humble BSD/OS fileserver continued chugging along. That thing was rock-solid. It exceeded 1 year of continuous uptime on at least two occasions while I was working there, brought down only by power failures.
Thanks for all the good bits, BSDi!
- Tim
Godzilla?
I agree there is some truth in what you say. But, in defense of 2001 in particular, I found that seeing it on the big screen was a much more interesting experience than watching it on a standard TV screen.
In many of the in-space shots, the bulkheads were decorated with warning signs and instructions that were interesting to read. On my TV at home, the words were not discernable. But on a huge 60's-era screen (is 70mm panavision the proper term?) they're easily readable.
They gave clues about what it was like to live and work in space - a topic that was probably of considerable popular interest when the movie was first released.
I caught the re-release of 2001 a year or two ago at a classic 1-screen theater with the proper equipment to handle the 70mm print. It increased my appreciation of the movie a great deal.
- Tim
OK, I know the original post was supposed to be a joke, but...
Richard Stallman is one of the co-authors of the first edition of the "hacker's dictionary" printed in paper-book form. (Guy Steele was another co-author.)
After much searching through used book stores, I managed to acquire a copy two years ago. (No, every word is not prefixed with "GNU/".) It contains a number of amusing entries not found in the more modern versions. I was particularly amused by the highly-detailed entry for Intercal (the "come from" programming language). It listed the inventive spoken names for many ASCII characters and character combinations. Something like:
greater than symbol = "angle", less than symbol = "bangle", - = "worm", " ->" = "angleworm".
- Tim
Actually, "the last eight years" should have been "the last 12 years". Dang, I'm getting old.
Setting out to read GEB is like setting out to conquer Everest. I've made three attempts over the last eight years, determined to understand it fully and solve all the exercises. I've never made it all the way, but I've gone a little farther each time, and each time I've come away having learned something new.
:^)
My first time was as a 2nd-year undergraduate. My roommates and I were racing to see who could read it first. We raced up to the first exercise, and immediately hurled ourselves upon the problem, beating on it with our antelope thighbones like the primitive ape-men at the beginning of "2001 -- A Space Odessey". After untold hours of frantic amateurish hair-pulling, one of us finally read on past the exercise and found that its was unsolvable (*). We were all pissed-off that we'd been had, and that was the last I looked at GEB for several years.
But... I eventually came back for another try. This book has helped me to understand what a formal system really is, and what "proof" really means. It's a good cure for math anxiety; this understanding can help you use these tools to solve problems when designing software.
Perhaps it's time to make another attempt.
- Tim
(*) Before the GEB fans attack me, I seem to recall that the first exercise was a challenge to derive a given string using the axioms of a small formal system, also given. If you'd done this sort of thing before, you could probably tell right away that you couldn't derive the target string, but to a newbie it wasn't as obvious. After you wrestled with the problem for a while, you learned in a very concrete and unforgettable sort of way.
I think you are right in pointing out that there are limits on how far you can take this hacker==painter analogy. However, I felt that the article contained some amusing insights, nonetheless.
;^)
I've spent the majority of my (admittedly short) career turning DARPA grants into math-envious papers, just as the author described.
A couple of years ago, I did step back and wonder if what I was doing was really science. I didn't seem to fit the idealized notion of a scientist that I learned about in high school: I didn't seem to be forming hypotheses about some already-existing aspect of the universe and testing them in a methodical way. And I didn't have a labcoat.
I spent most of my time hacking around, following my intuition, trying to make the computer do interesting things. I also experienced the sometimes-on, sometimes-off rollercoaster of inspiration that the author described.
So, some of the aspects of the author's painter-analogy seemed apt, at least in my case. Your mileage may vary, of course.
Anyways, now I've got to go convince my boss that it would be good for our project if I went and spent a day at the art musem!
- Tim
This event looks like great fun! I'm looking at the sea of monitors showing on one of the webcam images: I guess they don't have to worry about heating the building.
Perhaps you could post a more detailed report so those of us stuck at work could enjoy The Gathering vicariously?
The on-line schedule mentions deadlines for various "hand-in"s. Are these opportunities for attendees to register items for presentation? The schedule also mentions voting. What's that about?
- Tim
Happy birthday RMS, and thanks for all the good bits!
There's the "Terrapin Trader" surplus store at U Maryland College Park:
http://www.purchase.umd.edu/ttrader/
Or, you might check out hamfests:
http://www.arrl.org/hamfests.html
Happy hacking!
- Tim
For those of us who were lucky enough to miss this experience back in 1995, you may find this link to be educational, and this link to be amusing.
- Tim
If you could revise Hafner and Lyon's book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet", what changes would you make?
- Tim