First off - I liked the show. Pacing was a bit off, especially in the fight scenes, but one can hope they iron that out as they settle in.
I hear a lot of people griping about the lack of Die Fleidermaus and American Maid. Well, they don't have the rights to those characters, since the Fox Kids TV Consortium (Saban and a few others) won't release them. According to an interview with Ben Edlund, the reason that they won't release them is...wait for it...they still want to make an animated Tick movie.
Now THAT would be cool.
The same interview also explained why the Tick in the TV series doesn't have the facemask of the comic. Apparenlty they tried several different permutations of the mask idea, but it always seemed to freeze the Tick's facial expression in one position. And on TV, a lot of acting comes from facial expressions (and Warburton doubly so) so they opened up the face. It ended up being simple TV logistics.
Meanwhile, I thought BatManuel was hilarious. He gets the pompous womanizing essence of Die Fleidermaus but seems even more low-rent. And he made a Falco joke, which is always alright by me. Jury's still out on Captain Liberty, though.
Audacity is cool and all, but it's not even *close* in capability to Pro Tools. It's not even close in capability to Pro Tools LE. SOundforge, yeah, maybe closer, but even then there's some room for improvement. Maybe after a few more revisions it'll be there, like gimp is to photoshop, but it's got a ways to go.
I've used several of the mentioned audio packages (although admittedly, not all) and have never seen a multitrack audio editor or seqeuncer for Linux that has the power or hardware support of the commercial ones for Win and Mac. While I'd *love* to see it happen, it's going to be a few years before I trade into a linux system for doing audio.
The problem, as such for Linux right now is manifold.
First, there's no actual good multitrack audio recoding/sequencing software for it. Audacity is nice (and I even use it for tweaking on my mac) but it lacks the functionality of a cubase, a Logic, a Pro Tools, etc.
Second, there's no support for the hardware. And when I say the hardware, I'm not talking about Saoundblaster audio cards and the like - the real money for digital audio isn't in the "guy making techno in his bedroom" market, it's in the professional sound design, recording and mastering area, where you get things like the Kyma Capybara, the Fairlight Dreamsystem, the Ensoniq RADAR, and a myrid of other big digital consoles. These are bastards that cost $1000 easy. Even my home studio soundcard, which is sorta consumer-endish (MOTU 828) costs $700. The capabilites required for professional digital audio outstrip the capabilities of most consumer-level gear (multiple ins and outs, ADAT, Sync, TDAT, Word Clock, yadda yadda). Until there's support for this hardware, there's little point to having audio software. Some companies are taking the first steps - M-audio, MOTU, and a few others are starting to support linux with drivers. Full support for the big stuff is a ways off.
Third, there's just the installed base problem - there's already a zillion studios that have Macs or wintel machines at the core of their systems, and there's hardware and software options aplenty. It's a tough market to break itno.
Finally, there's the problem of profitability. It kinda goes with #3. Most audio software and even hardware companies run on a pretty thin margin. They're not big shops with lots of developers - adding support to another platform with only a small marketshare makes it real difficult for these companies to expand. Even comparative giants like Avid (parent company of digidesign, who make pro tools and a lot of hardware solutions) are having trouble these days economically.
It'd be nice to have a wide variety of open-source audio options, but it's going to be slow in coming.
(for reference, I've got a Mac at home running most of my audio, although I've got a Win machine for some audio apps as well. Gotta love Absynth, though. Mmmm)
You want to make music that you can sell/play on the radio/use for video/make a CD out of/Make a record out of, you use a recording studio. As it has been since the dawn of time. WHile the pricepoint has come down a lot, it's still not cheap by any means to record at home with the kind of quality required (and by that, I mean "doesn't sound like it was recorded under a blanket in some guy's basement"). You don't need to *build* your own studio - a real pro one costs several thousands to hundreds-of-thousands to do. You rent it for a few hundred bucks a day. You and your band learn your parts at home, then go into the studio and you're there. It's what everyone has done, from the lowliest garage band to the lofty overproduced pop bands (plus you usually get the services of an engineer who knows what he's doing in the bargain).
I know a lot of folks (myself included) with decent, semi-pro home/project studios, and none of them spent less than a few grand on them, not counting the computer. It's a lot cheaper than it used to be, but it still isn't cheap.
That's not true at all, unless you're talking about the TDM plugins for specific hardware, in which case they're just plain expensive for everyone.
There's a lot more freeware plugs for PC, sure, but the "professional" ones (there are few that are really of quality sufficient for a commercial recording) are either cross-platform...or mac-only!
Well, lessee...on the upside, the show's look-n-feel is well done, and so far they haven't fscked with continuity too much (although if they screw with TOS continuity I won't be too upset, since much of TOS was self-contradictory and just dumb). The characters are a bit one-note right now, but they did give some room for development. The "space boomer" guy has some potential, as does the vulcan hottie. Dr. Phlox is interesting, although sort of weird. And for the first time in a very long time on trek we don't have a character who perpetually has to deal with trying to become human (Spock, Data, HoloDoc...).
Cochrane unsplit the infinitive. That was surprising. Just having James Cromwell cameo was surprising.
The theme song has got to go. I believe I can fly...
Count Bakula needs to settle into his role. He seemed a bit wooden, in the same way that most of the former soap stars on B5 did in the first two seasons, or John Ritter did for the entire run of "Hooperman."
The "lather up" scene was just gratuitous. But then again, this *is* UPN.
So far - slightly better than "Encounter at Farpoint" (something actually *happened* in this show - E@F didn't do more than introduce Q). Better than "Caretaker" (breaking new ground in the use of the "reset button" ending. "The ship is now repaired..."). Not as cool as Emmisary, IMHO.
Re:Dammit, more to add to my reading list
on
American Gods
·
· Score: 1
If you can find his earlier short story collection "Angels and Visitations" then I recomend you buy it. There is a lot of overlap between it and "Smoke and Mirrors", but A&V has some of his nonfiction works too, and one or two differnet stories that in my mind make it worth the price of admission. ("Six til Six" is my favorite - Neil observing london from six pm to six am, hoping something exciting will happen)
I think a little bit of my youth, and a little bit of the soul of my geek-dom (and probably that of many others) has died with him.
Reading HHG in my youth was one of those experiences that changed my life in many subtle ways. Knowledge of the book became somewhat of a badge of recognition - if I walked up to someone, said "42" and got a knowing giggle, I knew I had found one of my own.
The characters of his books were microcosmic - each one represented a different facet of the people I knew and the person I was. Arthur was the solid but put-upon individual who always felt slightly out-of-place, Ford was the hard-drinking-yet-reliable eccentric (and apparent role model for sysadmins everywhere), Trillian was the ultra-smart collected type, Dirk Gently was the nerdish type who still managed to find the answers and get the girl, Zaphod was...well Zaphod was something else entirely.
He wrote good humour. It was off-beat and overtly silly, yet had a strange resonance. There was a great sense of wonder in all his writing; behind every bizzare metaphor and outlandish scenario was the sense that deep-down, this was still something we could - and should - relate to.
Douglas Adams will surely be missed.
As a side note, Peter Jones, who had played the voice of the narrator/book in the original radio series, passed away last month.
if these home artistes were so good, why wouldn't they sign w/ a real label?
Some are. Remember ca. 1998, there was a heavily MTV-rotated synthpop dittie called "Your Woman" by the band White Town. WT was one guy working out of his bedroom studio.
The rest - well, not all of us make the kind of commercial music that a major major lable wants. The stuff I write? Probably wouldn't sell to the MTV crowd. But I know plenty of people making interesting music and are having it released on interesting small labels.
I've been putting together my home studio for about 5 years now, bit by bit. I think the most expensive part was the computer thats the core of the system. While I may not have the special gear and training to do a professional master of many of my tracks, so far most of what I've been able to rpodcue on a veritable shoestring has been club-and-radio friendly.
Technology may be no substitiute for talent, but the playing field is starting to level a bit - those with the talent can afford the tech to realize it.
He did supposedly boycott because the IC's had lost six in a row. Of course, when they showed him later, he looked like hell, which makes me think he'd just been really ill and couldn't do the speaking part.
The IC's do have a very good record, and they probably do have an advantage - after all they're recognizeable and their food is fairly famous in Japan - finding totally impartial judges would be difficult. But the show really isn't about who wins or loses - it's about the food. Oh, the food.
Except for the cod soft roe ice cream. That was disgusting. Got Milt?
The US Space Program was a victim of the accident. With Challenger there was no Apollo 13 heroic-engineers-to-the-rescue story, just 7 people and a lot of hope gone in a flash.
I don't think the astronauts themselves would've considered it a waste the way the media did. They were astronauts and test pilots, after all, they knew that essentially they were strapped to a controlled bomb and being hurled at unbelievable speeds. They knew the risks, they knew what they payoff would be if they suceeded, and what would happen if they failed.
The Soviets had numerous accidents - most hushed up - but their programs went forward. Nobody really knows how many people have given their lives to the fledgling Chinese space program. Yet with the US, we have 10 lost lives (7 challenger, 3 apollo) and a proprotionally high sucess rating, and yet NASA is seen as a failure. We send probes past the planets and into deep space, land robots on mars, and a few probes gone amiss on their way to mars...MARS!...make the whole program "beleagured."
I don't get it. The sucess rate is astronomical compared to a lot of other US-funded endeavors, but because of the public spectacle that is the space program (and the jadedness of the public towards it), failure can kill the whole project.
Don't get me wrong - the Challenger disaster was a tragedy, a tragedy caused by some stupid management at Morton Thiokol, but I think the astronauts themselves would've hoped that their legacy would've been a near-complete shutdown of the programs they'd given their lives to.
Strictly speaking, it doesn't. BUt that doesn't mean it's not a good idea.
Hyperlinking doesn't really add to the content of the web, but I don't see too many people screaming to bring back gopher.
When used properly, HTML4, XHTML, XSL, XML, CSS, blah blah blah aren't just pretty design tools to be abused by a million no-talent web hacks. They're tools for accessing and presenting content in a clear, usable manner. Does vi add anything to your information that, say, ed doesn't? No. But it makes it easier for you to edit and read your data. CSS allows you, when used well, to standardize your presentation of information across multiple parts of your information space and display it in a logical and hopefully meaningful way.
The abuse happens when people try and use the web as a layout and design tool. I admit, when just doing raw marketing "brochureware" for a client, I'm guilty of that. But when it comes right down to it, for raw content, it's all about usability over design. CSS is a handy tool for enhancing the usability - when it works. It can be made to work and degrade gracefully into browsers that don't support it.
In the end, it's not the tool that does the damage, it's the person using that tool. Is C inherently a bad language? No. Is there crappy C code aplenty in many shipping products? Yes. Is HTML4 a bad spec? No. Are people abusing it? Yes.
Reliance on client side functionality - IE or Netscape - is bad for everyone. Yeah, okay, maybe I have the latest and greatest version of every browser on my machines, but does someone like my father, who typifies the internet-interested/technically-unskilled average Joe User?
Certainly not. Next Flash plugin comes along, will he upgrade voluntarily? Maybe, maybe not. He probably won't even know about it. Since this represents a slice of the large populace, designing browser-specific in any form is essentially alienating someone. Sure, maybe it doesn't have to be beautiful in NS3, but if it degrades somewhat gracefully, you're doing better than most sites on the internet.
While his views are often a bit extreme, the oft-quoted Jakob Neilsen has it right. The web is not a design tool, it's an information tool. Web sites are getting simpler in design now, as the content on them increases. I used to work for a biotech company, and the website started small and was elaborately designed (for the time, anyway). After we managed to get about 14,000 technical documents online, suddenly our designs became simpler and more efficient - we needed ease of management and our users needed ease-of-location. Trying to maintain multiple browser-specific versions and fancy designs became just too much work for such little return. IN the end, it's all about the content, not the wrapping. To paraphrase Jakob; "when you go to the theater, do you want people to comment on the play or the costumes?"
As for the Browser war...Microsoft won, maybe not fairly, but they did. While Netscape kept adding and adding widgets to their browser like collaboration services and mail systems and such, Microsoft went quietly about building a series of browsers that worked in a mostly logical way. While Netscape was upgrading Communicator, IE was adding reasonably consistent support for CSS. While Netscape worked on built-in editors and a fancy mail client, IE made table support more logical (mix-and-match pixels and percentages, you say? Empty cells appear as empty cells and not ugly white blocks? Huh?)
The Gecko layout engine addresses many of these issues but it's a bit late for that now.
Yes, it's depressing. But don't fret - there are still enough tags that work across all browsers and work for all users (including the disabled) and do a fine job of conveying information. They may be boring, but they do their job.
I encourage anyone who deals with developing for the web to research web usability. Not only do you learn how to make a website that works for people, but you can pick up some fascinating tidbits about the way people deal with information. www.useit.com is a place to start. See also the basic but sturdy ORA book "Information Architecture for the WWW", Neilsen's "Designing Web Usability" and the new one from Jeffrey Veen whose title escapes me currently.
Beware of smallish companies that have both. It's usually a sign of internal politics. CIO not telling the CEO what he wants to hear? Hire a CTO. I've seen one publishing company that has both, one runs the IS department, one runs the IT department, and NOBODY in the company has any idea what the difference is.
I once worked for a company in which the CIO delivered news to the company president/CEO that he wasn't keen on hearing (that being "you can't set up a good ecommerce system without updating the back-end stuff first"). The CEO wanted ecommerce now, so he hired a "Chief Knowledge Officer" who was above the CIO. That was a mistake that ended up costing him close to $7M and set his ecommerce project back almost a year in the end.
The moral of this story is: if it looks like the company doesn't need more than one CxO, it probably doesn't and you should stay clear.
Iceland's not *that* cold. In fact, right now it's warmer in Reykjavik than it is anywhere in Wisconsin or Minnesota.
It's the short days in the winter that'd get to me. But I'd hopefully try to make up for that by taking advantage of the long nights.:)
Seriously, I've been to Iceland and I loved it. But I think a lot of their freedom and the sucess of participatory democracy is a function of their small population. If every slashdotter moved to Iceland, their population would triple and all their advantages would stop working. Same is probably true for other Scandinavian countries, although less so since they already have much larger population bases.
Dave Barry once described Sweden as "Much like an Ingmar Bergman movie, except the taxes are higher."
If it were a square wave, just think what you could do with an EMP, a really big set of speakers, and some good squelchy resonant lowpass synthesizer filters.
Post-apocalyptic techno!
----
Re:My vacuum tube equipment kept working just fine
on
EMP Artillery Shells
·
· Score: 1
Your superiour intellect is no match for our puny weapons!
Look out! He's got a board with a nail in it!
----
Same job, different preparations
on
CS vs CIS
·
· Score: 1
I got a CS degree. I work in the IS/IT field.
Ups and downs?
Pros:
I'm a better programmer than most of my CIS-trained fellows.
I tend to understand the low-level stuff a bit better
I tend to be better at picking tools (langauges, compilers, etc) for jobs because of my background
Cons:
CS classes taught nothing about Sysadmin/Network stuff
They tended to focus on more "academic" programming and less of the ugly kind of coding business apps often require
Their operating environments usually didn't match those in the real world - like it or not there's a lot of M$ environments out there
I never learned any businessy-type stuff.
So it's pretty much been a tossup. My CS background has allowed me to progress as a programmer and given me a competative edge there, but the lack of business knoweldge has handicapped me in other (and frankly I"m fine with them) ways.
NOne of the miniseries was shot on location - they couldn't afford it, basically. Harrison scouted Tunisia and elsewhere, but decided that moving the cast there and shooting (with limited amounts of daylight, weather, etc) would've eaten up most of the budget.
I decided last night that if you watch the mini as if you were watching a stage play, it seemed easier to suspend disbelief.
Yeah, and having climactic scene of the movie obscured entirely by flying sand (better to be accurate than to tell the story) would've been *great* television.
There are two versions of the Lynch film: the two-hour theatrical version and a 4-hour TV version (directed by Alan Smithee).
There is no six-hour version of the Lynch film. There can't be, since he only shot six hours of footage total (and some of it was retakes, fixes, and so forth).
Harrison said in an interview that he was making Irulan a bigger character because of her role in future books and of course her prefacing every chapter in the book - he felt he needed to give her some reason to be so fascianted with the life of Paul Atreides.
Guess it wasn't such a popular idea.
At least in this version Duncan got to speak before he got killed.
Music: there was music? Nearly unnoticed, unlike the movie, which had a theme that has stuck with me since the first time I watched it.
This would probably be enough to ruin it for me even if the rest was perfect. Music is important. As a matter of fact, I think sound in general is what makes Lynch's Dune what it is; they could have left out the picture entirely, and it would still be an impressive movie.
I'm not sure how you could miss the very lush and beautiful score by Graeme Revell. The music for the miniseries is one of the best things about it, IMHO. Revell has done some fabulous work in the past (i.e. The Crow, just about every Wim Wenders film ever made) and the sweeping pan-ethnic stuff he's got going in the miniseries is really quite impressive
In the 1984 version I really did not like the 80's prog-rock score by Toto. BY the time the movie was released, it already seemed dated. Although I did like the Brian Eno "prophecy theme."
Making the eyes flat blue would make them look black onscreen. Which admittedly would've been easier to film (give 'em all black contacts) but doesn't give the visual device to show Paul/Jessica's changes as dramatically.
Slashdot Mirror
Dammit, where's my /a? I know I put it someplace...
I hear a lot of people griping about the lack of Die Fleidermaus and American Maid. Well, they don't have the rights to those characters, since the Fox Kids TV Consortium (Saban and a few others) won't release them. According to an interview with Ben Edlund, the reason that they won't release them is...wait for it...they still want to make an animated Tick movie.
Now THAT would be cool.
The same interview also explained why the Tick in the TV series doesn't have the facemask of the comic. Apparenlty they tried several different permutations of the mask idea, but it always seemed to freeze the Tick's facial expression in one position. And on TV, a lot of acting comes from facial expressions (and Warburton doubly so) so they opened up the face. It ended up being simple TV logistics.
The interview is hiding out at newenglandcomics.com and it's a good read for all Tick fans.
Meanwhile, I thought BatManuel was hilarious. He gets the pompous womanizing essence of Die Fleidermaus but seems even more low-rent. And he made a Falco joke, which is always alright by me. Jury's still out on Captain Liberty, though.
Audacity is cool and all, but it's not even *close* in capability to Pro Tools. It's not even close in capability to Pro Tools LE. SOundforge, yeah, maybe closer, but even then there's some room for improvement. Maybe after a few more revisions it'll be there, like gimp is to photoshop, but it's got a ways to go.
I've used several of the mentioned audio packages (although admittedly, not all) and have never seen a multitrack audio editor or seqeuncer for Linux that has the power or hardware support of the commercial ones for Win and Mac. While I'd *love* to see it happen, it's going to be a few years before I trade into a linux system for doing audio.
The problem, as such for Linux right now is manifold.
First, there's no actual good multitrack audio recoding/sequencing software for it. Audacity is nice (and I even use it for tweaking on my mac) but it lacks the functionality of a cubase, a Logic, a Pro Tools, etc.
Second, there's no support for the hardware. And when I say the hardware, I'm not talking about Saoundblaster audio cards and the like - the real money for digital audio isn't in the "guy making techno in his bedroom" market, it's in the professional sound design, recording and mastering area, where you get things like the Kyma Capybara, the Fairlight Dreamsystem, the Ensoniq RADAR, and a myrid of other big digital consoles. These are bastards that cost $1000 easy. Even my home studio soundcard, which is sorta consumer-endish (MOTU 828) costs $700. The capabilites required for professional digital audio outstrip the capabilities of most consumer-level gear (multiple ins and outs, ADAT, Sync, TDAT, Word Clock, yadda yadda). Until there's support for this hardware, there's little point to having audio software. Some companies are taking the first steps - M-audio, MOTU, and a few others are starting to support linux with drivers. Full support for the big stuff is a ways off.
Third, there's just the installed base problem - there's already a zillion studios that have Macs or wintel machines at the core of their systems, and there's hardware and software options aplenty. It's a tough market to break itno.
Finally, there's the problem of profitability. It kinda goes with #3. Most audio software and even hardware companies run on a pretty thin margin. They're not big shops with lots of developers - adding support to another platform with only a small marketshare makes it real difficult for these companies to expand. Even comparative giants like Avid (parent company of digidesign, who make pro tools and a lot of hardware solutions) are having trouble these days economically.
It'd be nice to have a wide variety of open-source audio options, but it's going to be slow in coming.
(for reference, I've got a Mac at home running most of my audio, although I've got a Win machine for some audio apps as well. Gotta love Absynth, though. Mmmm)
You can make music at home with a tape recorder.
You want to make music that you can sell/play on the radio/use for video/make a CD out of/Make a record out of, you use a recording studio. As it has been since the dawn of time. WHile the pricepoint has come down a lot, it's still not cheap by any means to record at home with the kind of quality required (and by that, I mean "doesn't sound like it was recorded under a blanket in some guy's basement"). You don't need to *build* your own studio - a real pro one costs several thousands to hundreds-of-thousands to do. You rent it for a few hundred bucks a day. You and your band learn your parts at home, then go into the studio and you're there. It's what everyone has done, from the lowliest garage band to the lofty overproduced pop bands (plus you usually get the services of an engineer who knows what he's doing in the bargain).
I know a lot of folks (myself included) with decent, semi-pro home/project studios, and none of them spent less than a few grand on them, not counting the computer. It's a lot cheaper than it used to be, but it still isn't cheap.
That's not true at all, unless you're talking about the TDM plugins for specific hardware, in which case they're just plain expensive for everyone.
There's a lot more freeware plugs for PC, sure, but the "professional" ones (there are few that are really of quality sufficient for a commercial recording) are either cross-platform...or mac-only!
Well, lessee...on the upside, the show's look-n-feel is well done, and so far they haven't fscked with continuity too much (although if they screw with TOS continuity I won't be too upset, since much of TOS was self-contradictory and just dumb). The characters are a bit one-note right now, but they did give some room for development. The "space boomer" guy has some potential, as does the vulcan hottie. Dr. Phlox is interesting, although sort of weird. And for the first time in a very long time on trek we don't have a character who perpetually has to deal with trying to become human (Spock, Data, HoloDoc...).
Cochrane unsplit the infinitive. That was surprising. Just having James Cromwell cameo was surprising.
The theme song has got to go. I believe I can fly...
Count Bakula needs to settle into his role. He seemed a bit wooden, in the same way that most of the former soap stars on B5 did in the first two seasons, or John Ritter did for the entire run of "Hooperman."
The "lather up" scene was just gratuitous. But then again, this *is* UPN.
So far - slightly better than "Encounter at Farpoint" (something actually *happened* in this show - E@F didn't do more than introduce Q). Better than "Caretaker" (breaking new ground in the use of the "reset button" ending. "The ship is now repaired..."). Not as cool as Emmisary, IMHO.
----
Reading HHG in my youth was one of those experiences that changed my life in many subtle ways. Knowledge of the book became somewhat of a badge of recognition - if I walked up to someone, said "42" and got a knowing giggle, I knew I had found one of my own.
The characters of his books were microcosmic - each one represented a different facet of the people I knew and the person I was. Arthur was the solid but put-upon individual who always felt slightly out-of-place, Ford was the hard-drinking-yet-reliable eccentric (and apparent role model for sysadmins everywhere), Trillian was the ultra-smart collected type, Dirk Gently was the nerdish type who still managed to find the answers and get the girl, Zaphod was...well Zaphod was something else entirely.
He wrote good humour. It was off-beat and overtly silly, yet had a strange resonance. There was a great sense of wonder in all his writing; behind every bizzare metaphor and outlandish scenario was the sense that deep-down, this was still something we could - and should - relate to.
Douglas Adams will surely be missed.
As a side note, Peter Jones, who had played the voice of the narrator/book in the original radio series, passed away last month.
----
Some are. Remember ca. 1998, there was a heavily MTV-rotated synthpop dittie called "Your Woman" by the band White Town. WT was one guy working out of his bedroom studio.
The rest - well, not all of us make the kind of commercial music that a major major lable wants. The stuff I write? Probably wouldn't sell to the MTV crowd. But I know plenty of people making interesting music and are having it released on interesting small labels.
I've been putting together my home studio for about 5 years now, bit by bit. I think the most expensive part was the computer thats the core of the system. While I may not have the special gear and training to do a professional master of many of my tracks, so far most of what I've been able to rpodcue on a veritable shoestring has been club-and-radio friendly.
Technology may be no substitiute for talent, but the playing field is starting to level a bit - those with the talent can afford the tech to realize it.
----
The IC's do have a very good record, and they probably do have an advantage - after all they're recognizeable and their food is fairly famous in Japan - finding totally impartial judges would be difficult. But the show really isn't about who wins or loses - it's about the food. Oh, the food.
Except for the cod soft roe ice cream. That was disgusting. Got Milt?
----
I don't think the astronauts themselves would've considered it a waste the way the media did. They were astronauts and test pilots, after all, they knew that essentially they were strapped to a controlled bomb and being hurled at unbelievable speeds. They knew the risks, they knew what they payoff would be if they suceeded, and what would happen if they failed.
The Soviets had numerous accidents - most hushed up - but their programs went forward. Nobody really knows how many people have given their lives to the fledgling Chinese space program. Yet with the US, we have 10 lost lives (7 challenger, 3 apollo) and a proprotionally high sucess rating, and yet NASA is seen as a failure. We send probes past the planets and into deep space, land robots on mars, and a few probes gone amiss on their way to mars...MARS!...make the whole program "beleagured."
I don't get it. The sucess rate is astronomical compared to a lot of other US-funded endeavors, but because of the public spectacle that is the space program (and the jadedness of the public towards it), failure can kill the whole project.
Don't get me wrong - the Challenger disaster was a tragedy, a tragedy caused by some stupid management at Morton Thiokol, but I think the astronauts themselves would've hoped that their legacy would've been a near-complete shutdown of the programs they'd given their lives to.
----
Strictly speaking, it doesn't. BUt that doesn't mean it's not a good idea.
Hyperlinking doesn't really add to the content of the web, but I don't see too many people screaming to bring back gopher.
When used properly, HTML4, XHTML, XSL, XML, CSS, blah blah blah aren't just pretty design tools to be abused by a million no-talent web hacks. They're tools for accessing and presenting content in a clear, usable manner. Does vi add anything to your information that, say, ed doesn't? No. But it makes it easier for you to edit and read your data. CSS allows you, when used well, to standardize your presentation of information across multiple parts of your information space and display it in a logical and hopefully meaningful way.
The abuse happens when people try and use the web as a layout and design tool. I admit, when just doing raw marketing "brochureware" for a client, I'm guilty of that. But when it comes right down to it, for raw content, it's all about usability over design. CSS is a handy tool for enhancing the usability - when it works. It can be made to work and degrade gracefully into browsers that don't support it.
In the end, it's not the tool that does the damage, it's the person using that tool. Is C inherently a bad language? No. Is there crappy C code aplenty in many shipping products? Yes. Is HTML4 a bad spec? No. Are people abusing it? Yes.
----
While his views are often a bit extreme, the oft-quoted Jakob Neilsen has it right. The web is not a design tool, it's an information tool. Web sites are getting simpler in design now, as the content on them increases. I used to work for a biotech company, and the website started small and was elaborately designed (for the time, anyway). After we managed to get about 14,000 technical documents online, suddenly our designs became simpler and more efficient - we needed ease of management and our users needed ease-of-location. Trying to maintain multiple browser-specific versions and fancy designs became just too much work for such little return. IN the end, it's all about the content, not the wrapping. To paraphrase Jakob; "when you go to the theater, do you want people to comment on the play or the costumes?"
As for the Browser war...Microsoft won, maybe not fairly, but they did. While Netscape kept adding and adding widgets to their browser like collaboration services and mail systems and such, Microsoft went quietly about building a series of browsers that worked in a mostly logical way. While Netscape was upgrading Communicator, IE was adding reasonably consistent support for CSS. While Netscape worked on built-in editors and a fancy mail client, IE made table support more logical (mix-and-match pixels and percentages, you say? Empty cells appear as empty cells and not ugly white blocks? Huh?) The Gecko layout engine addresses many of these issues but it's a bit late for that now.
Yes, it's depressing. But don't fret - there are still enough tags that work across all browsers and work for all users (including the disabled) and do a fine job of conveying information. They may be boring, but they do their job.
I encourage anyone who deals with developing for the web to research web usability. Not only do you learn how to make a website that works for people, but you can pick up some fascinating tidbits about the way people deal with information. www.useit.com is a place to start. See also the basic but sturdy ORA book "Information Architecture for the WWW", Neilsen's "Designing Web Usability" and the new one from Jeffrey Veen whose title escapes me currently.
----
I once worked for a company in which the CIO delivered news to the company president/CEO that he wasn't keen on hearing (that being "you can't set up a good ecommerce system without updating the back-end stuff first"). The CEO wanted ecommerce now, so he hired a "Chief Knowledge Officer" who was above the CIO. That was a mistake that ended up costing him close to $7M and set his ecommerce project back almost a year in the end.
The moral of this story is: if it looks like the company doesn't need more than one CxO, it probably doesn't and you should stay clear.
----
It's the short days in the winter that'd get to me. But I'd hopefully try to make up for that by taking advantage of the long nights. :)
Seriously, I've been to Iceland and I loved it. But I think a lot of their freedom and the sucess of participatory democracy is a function of their small population. If every slashdotter moved to Iceland, their population would triple and all their advantages would stop working. Same is probably true for other Scandinavian countries, although less so since they already have much larger population bases.
Dave Barry once described Sweden as "Much like an Ingmar Bergman movie, except the taxes are higher."
----
Post-apocalyptic techno!
----
Look out! He's got a board with a nail in it!
----
Ups and downs?
Pros:
Cons:
- CS classes taught nothing about Sysadmin/Network stuff
- They tended to focus on more "academic" programming and less of the ugly kind of coding business apps often require
- Their operating environments usually didn't match those in the real world - like it or not there's a lot of M$ environments out there
- I never learned any businessy-type stuff.
So it's pretty much been a tossup. My CS background has allowed me to progress as a programmer and given me a competative edge there, but the lack of business knoweldge has handicapped me in other (and frankly I"m fine with them) ways.This is just my experience. YMMV.
----
I decided last night that if you watch the mini as if you were watching a stage play, it seemed easier to suspend disbelief.
----
----
There is no six-hour version of the Lynch film. There can't be, since he only shot six hours of footage total (and some of it was retakes, fixes, and so forth).
----
Harrison said in an interview that he was making Irulan a bigger character because of her role in future books and of course her prefacing every chapter in the book - he felt he needed to give her some reason to be so fascianted with the life of Paul Atreides.
Guess it wasn't such a popular idea.
At least in this version Duncan got to speak before he got killed.
----
In the 1984 version I really did not like the 80's prog-rock score by Toto. BY the time the movie was released, it already seemed dated. Although I did like the Brian Eno "prophecy theme."
----
----