I see they've beefed up Irulan's role a lot. I guess they felt bad that in the first book you only know about her through the chapter intros until the end.
I do like the fact that they are playing up the "young and brash" Paul angle. He is pretty moody in the book at the beginning, and really the book is a lot about his "coming-of-age."
Liet-Kynes: I'm glad they make a big deal out of his relation to the Fremen. That was one of the things I really thought was missing in the Lynch version. Liet is hugely important in the foundation of trust between the Fremen and the Atreides. Too bad the actor is kind of stilted (although less-so than Brad Douriff's Piter DeVries in the Lynch film).
Yueh seems to be a bit under-played. He's fairly important to the opening of the book but basically he's just a hologram until his "big scene." But on the upside we do get Duncan Idaho this time. In Lynch, Duncan showed up and was shot. Here we actually get to see his importance to the book (and he's REAL important in subsequent novels). I'd've liked to see a bit more explanation of the Mentats and their importance, but I'm willing to forgive that and let them just appear as "really smart advisor guys" in the miniseries.
Vlad Harkonnen is sort of...glutinous but not horridly disgusting. I think that's handled pretty well.
My biggest complain about the Lynch adaptation is that the Fremen were pretty much these guys that show up and end up as Paul's army. This version has, so far, a lot of development of the Fremen. The "spittin Stilgar" scene and a role of the Shadout Mapes underscore that, showing their traditions of water-value and highlighting their belief in Muad Dib.
Production design is fairly gorgeous and baroque. OKay, maybe the 'thopters aren't thopters, but really, I think being accurate would look fairly silly onscreen. Costuming seems a bit...forced. There's a bit too much "Dr. Who" in all the metalic fabrics and funky headgear. The FX are kind of a mixed bag...they're good for TV, pretty eh for a movie. Sometimes you can easily tell where the set ends and the matte painting begins. Sometimes they're just lovely. I liked the design of the Guild Steersman - much more in line with the Barlowe interpretation, even if he was very obviously a puppet.
And on a subject dear to my heart, the music is wonderful. I usually love Graeme Revell, but this is excellent stuff even for him. Nice blend of ethnic musics from around the world, without having too much that overpowers the action onscreen. Nicely done. Certianly better than the 80's pop-rock soundtrack by Toto.:)
Overall, it's not as good as I'd hoped, but then with an epic like Dune, hopes are set extrememly high. I'm interested to see how the really important sequences of the next two nights are handled. What we've had so far is really just exposition.
There's a lot of dialogue that looks *great* in print but sounds wooden and odd when spoken.
Read any really good graphic novel, like a Gaiman or a Morrison or an Ellis, then try speaking any of the really profound lines. You'll note how weird it often sounds.
A lot of printed dialogue is written as a method of exposition, to show a character's relationship with something...in many cases in a visual or interactive setting you don't need to say these things, you just can show them. Picking when to talk and when to "show" is probably the most difficult part of adapting to the screen.
RIAA themselves have doen more harm to the starving musician than just about anyone. They are NOT a performers rights group like BMI or ASCAP. They do not pay artist royalties. Rather, they are a lobbying group formed of executives of the big 4 record labels. According to their own press, they are "trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry. Our mission is to foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes our members' creative and financial vitality." One of their major lobbying subgroups is the one that tries to require blank CD and Tape manufacturers to pay recording royalties, since those blank media *could* be causing lost revenue.
Their job, basically, is to ensure that major record labels make money.
They claim to be fighing "illegal downloads", and to an extent I believe that illegal distribution of music is wrong (I say "to an extent" because without Napster most of my last album wouldn't have been heard outside my hometown). But pretty much in the end, their policies ensure that I wouldn't be able to distribute my music legally without the support of a major label, which makes the whole internet-indie-artist revolution pretty moot.
Of course, they're on a pretty sysiphean quest - anyone can encode and distribute music and no amount of legal wrangling is going to put that genie back in the bottle...
Sadly, almost all of those are urban legends.
Check the faq for alt.folklore.urban. German didn't lose to english by one vote...there *is* no official US language. There's more, too, but I won't list them here. AnnLanders gets balsted for running this story every election.
But for examples of really close margin elections:
http://www.fec.gov/pages/faqs.htm
For a brief time in college I worked for a sysadmin temp agency. They had me placed at two banks and a phone company.
The Telco had the highest security of all of 'em.
One bank was using an old Unisys A500, which I suppose is security through obscurity. But with each temp assigned to do weekend log dumps and backups getting the administrator password (which was a 4-character word taped to the console in the server cage) I could hardly call it secure. I just showed up, said I was the weekend operator, and they took me downstairs and gave me the serverroom doorcode, no questions asked. I coulda had the ATM upstairs spitting $20's onto the street if I had wanted to. Additionally, Having the doorcode gave me access to all the desk PC's in the back office, so I coulda pulled up plenty of personal records. As it stands all I did was play Wolfenstein3d, but still...
The other bank was slightly better. They had an IBM 3090, the temps had more limited access (but still enough to do damage), but the sheer number of temps employed and the frequency at which we rotated in and out of the roster makes me think that the capcity for security breaches was fairly high. With that many people having at least partial admin access, and AFAIK no password timeout policies.
The telco had various ID checks, temps were essentially tape monkeys only or had only limtied access to certain CICS jobs, and passwords were individual and your logs were spot-audited by the supervisors often.
Now, if a bank can't keep its internal procedures secure, how can they expect their web transactions to?
A while back the company I was working for was doing business with a large consulting company from The Alley.
At the time, their stock was at $93 a share. They were a smallish company, maybe $10M in revenues, with a staff of about 100 nationwide. The company I worked for was a relatively large company, about 1000 people worldwide, with revenues stable in the $100-$200M range. Our stock price was at about $50 a share.
I thought that was a little weird. But, I figured, I just don't understand stock market economics.
Now the dot-com's stock is at $0.90 a share. Their revenues are still about the same.
Hm. Maybe I do understand this stuff better than I thought.
V'Ger was Voyager 6. The Reprehensible Movie that Was Star Trek V had the klingons (specifically captain Klaa) blasting Pioneer 10.
Perhaps it was a long way away, having fallen through "what they used to call a black hole." After all, it seems spatial anomalies are everywhere in the trek world.
That's intersting. I too live in Wisconsin, and most of the recent grads I know are fighting off the offers. However, a lot of them are being recruited by big-name companies and being relocated...
But there IS a shortage of IT people around here. But it's not a shortage of high-end systems programmers and kernel hackers. It's a shortage of support people, sysadmins, business programmers, midrange systems support and all the day-to-day stuff that businesses need. I don't know if this is indicative of a training problem, or just because new workforce members aren't looking for these jobs...
And to top it all off, a lot of companies are hiring high-end developers and admins to do the "cool" stuff like develop ecommerce systems and run state-of-the-art servers, but don't have the baseline support staff to keep the network running. Thus, they can't keep their high-end folks (find me a senior solaris sysadmin who wants to spend his days mapping drives for the marketing department).
There's a workforce, and there's a market, they just don't seem to match.
I've had a number of opportunites to work with both of them in a head-to-head environment. While the hardware config was never exactly the same (so benchmarks are fairly meaningless), the config was similar enough that I could make some educated comparisons.
For day-to-day content services, there was very little difference in performance. Raw HTML is a snap for both of these suckers. We never hit 1megahit per day so I never did get to see which one bogged down first, though.
IIS crashed a lot more often. We had an average uptime of about 3 weeks. Apache had an uptime of about 6 weeks, but bringing it backup was a commandline operation as opposed to a reboot-the-whole-damn-machine deal.
The userbase (internal) was much mroe comfroatble with IIS, and from an admin standpoint, it was easier for the IS staff. NT and IIS integrate easier with a wintel desktop environment, despite the existence of Samba.
All our business developers were easily able to transition to ASP, since all of them spoke VB. ASP performance was quite acceptable for the majority of our applications, many of which saw some fairly high (500khits/day) loads. However, the ASP.dll for IIS4 leaked memory like a sieve and was the primary cause of the uptime problems. Conversely, Apache provided a whole lot of technology options for app development, almost none of which were as easy to port business apps to because of the app's legacy. I'm just thanking god we never found a web-cobol product, or we'd probably have been stuck with that (the midrange guy kept trying to convince us to host our apps on the AS/400). It's a poor justification, but unfortunatley that kind of crap happens in the business world.
The overall system ran a LOT faster under apache, since it didn't need the overhead of everything else Windows decides to do...it was easy to strip the server down to basically apache and SSH. NT, well, you kill one service and god knows what else will stop working. Apache it was a lot easier to remote-configure the server since all you needed was an SSH client as opposed to MMC or the Gaping Security Risk That Is HTML Manager. And frankly, that affects performance too. If you have to log in on the console and run a Big Slow App in order to change a virtual directory URL, your server is going to feel that impact.
When it came down to it, IIS was an acceptable for an intranet server because of its integration and apps properties, and was able to serve apps and info really well for that sort of target audience. But the uptime problems made it a poor choice for high availabilty this-is-what-the-customer-sees kind of applications.
I think the point he was trying to make is that Alessi stuff is always pretty much on the cutting edge of design.
And you have to admit, Apple is too. Regardles sof what you may think about Apple's decisions for hardware and software, much of what they've done has gone on to make deep impressions in the way industrial and computer design has gone. Since the introduction of the iMac, I've seen more products appear that are translucent and brightly colored than I could've imagined...everything from pens to power strips to lamps.
And let's face it...would MS have come up with windows, or at least windows as we now know it, if the MacUI hadn't existed? Okay, I'm not saying that it's a *good* thing per se, but it is
indicative of the influence Apple has had on pop culture and the evolution of design.
I had a separate machine set up to do all my IPChains stuff, and wouldn't ya know, the nic in it blew when I was moving it home from work. So while at the local computer shoppe, pricing a new nic and a bub, I stumbled across the Linksys home router, whcih is a DHCP server, firewall, and 4-port hub in one. And it cost the same as a new nic and a hub, so I bought it.
Turns out it's pretty sweet. Doesn't have the geek appeal of IPchains on a linuxbox, but it takes up a lot less desk space. So it make s a pretty decent solution.
Only the expensive version supports EJB, the JSP engine is almost entirely unhelpful for debugging (tomcat at least tells you soemthing beyond "compilation failed" when there's an error), it's excrutiatingly picky about what it runs with (needs a specific version of Oracle which naturally none of my other apps want to use), doesn't support JDK 1.2, has some OS issues...
In short, it's a good idea that came out rather messy. It might work fine under AIX or OS/400 with DB/2 as a backend, but if you ever want to add any functionality for any other platform or any other database, you're essentially boned.
Editing of Tea templates can be done in any text editor, Kettle is the easiest editor to develop Tea templates in because it is integrated with the Tea language.
It may be a bit friendlier, but, heck, every editor I've ever used for HTML has left me nervous enough to at least make me double-check and optimize my code by hand in vi or emacs (or notepad, or bbedit, or...). And if your artists complain, give 'em dreamweaver or something and build the template out of that.
I'd really like to see a head-to-head comparison of TeaKettle/OpenCMS/Mason/WebMacro etc etc. Maybe I'll do it when I've finished Diablo II.
It's not quite a full content management system, since it's missing workflow, but it seems to handle templating quite well. And since it's open source, there's a distinct chance that a decent workflow management system will be grafted on.
The real advantage of a system like this is that...well, it's fairly powerful and it's free. If you want something with this kind of templating power, you're stuck using a very limited set of toolkits, including high-end stuff like Vignette Storyserver (which can run in the USD100,000's). If you're a smaller company or don't have a system that requires such blunderbuss tactics for content, this rocks the house.
I mislike Razorfish. Some might say I have a personal vendetta against them, but thats not really true. I know some very talented and generally decent and cool people who work there. And they own a very nice guest house in the Twin Peaks neighborhood of San Francisco.
But I still think they're borderline evil.
Jeff Dachis (CEO) will issue a Razorfish press release each time he sucessfully wakes up in the morning.
They don't hire people. They acquire them. They've bought, to my recollection - Plastic Media (SF), Sunbather (London), I-Cube (baltimore?), Spray (Oslo/Stockholm) and one or two others. They can't attract their own employees, so they acquire companies to get what they need...
They can't hire their own employees because, last time I checked, they payed like crap. And initially they recommended that their employees sell back all their stock options to management because they "had not plans to ever go public." So employees did, they went public, and Dachis and co became rich while the grunts who do the actual work were stuck with their $50k salaries in downtown SFO.
They try harder to be hip than useful. Look at any of their designs - grpahics heavy, media rich pages for...a bank. What?
Rsub. What the hell? Maybe if they put less resources into making and marketing their rich media behemoth that is rsub (didn't we get sick of this sort of thing with Hotwired?) and more time into studying usability, the wouldn't be in the predicament they're in now. (although I do find it amusing that a lot of their rsub areas are listed as "clients" on their webpage. We call that "padding the list."
One of their tech guys once told me he though IIS was a "pretty cool server." That in and of itself is reason enough not to take them seriously.
My exeperiences with Razorfish haven't been the best. Their "product" as I've seen it is usually overdesigned and under-engineered. They also tend to have the attitude of "we're Razorfish, we're cooler than you, it's a privelege for you to work with us." While they may have an impressive pedigree, that's still a bad attitude to take when you're supposed to be doing things for a client.
They were also the only company I've ever talked to that actually said to me (after making me a laughably poor job offer) "we like to think that working here is it's own reward." And they wonder why they have to acquire companies to get developers.
Sadly, this also seems to be the norm in the web-site/systems integrator market. One that I'm currently working with, who unfortunately I can't mention cuz I'm under NDA (and even if I posted anon they'd probably still be able to figure it out) is about 3 months behind the launch date for the new site they're supposed to deliver, and we haven't even seen a single deliverable yet. This is a few million dollars already spent. Sure, my company has it coming for being buttheaded about the contract and not noticing loopholes and all that, but c'mon - three months, millions of dollars, and nothing?
Until these firms get a good shock of cold water and realize they're supposed to be working with their clients and not just "doing stuff with their client's logo on it" we're probably going to see a lot more of these types of lawsuits.
A while back a lab had grown several mice with luciferase/luciferin genes spliced into certain pigment-producing cells.
Glow-in-the-dark mice. Some had glowing tails, others had glowing spots.
Imagine having your own bioluminescent tatoos? (Glow sticks at raves would be a thing of the past, for one thing) Granted, you'd have to have had those spliced in at conception, but maybe you've had forethinking parents. Or maybe technology will overcome that sort of problem with some sort of vector that can be safely used in a tatoo ink.
I just want a glow-in-the-dark mouse. Must be hell on their nocturnal cycles, though.
Sadly, neither Nature, Biochemistry, nor The Cell have a "Forum" section.
"Dear Biochemistry Forum: I never thought this would happen to me. But I was in the lab one night and I spilled acrylomide all down the front of my lab coat. Luckily the new lab assistant was there to run the thermocycler for me while I decontaminated..."
Hm. It's just not the same.
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This would never have happened if...
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 1
If napster had been used for nothing but sharing underground or indie bands, RIAA woulda cared less. But toss one file from a big 5...er...4 now...label up there and they get their shorts in a wad.
The majors and RIAA are exceptionally paranoid. Meanwhile a lot of the good independent labels are doing it right and hopping on the digital music bandwagon early. 4AD distributs rarities and the like online through atomicpop, Beggar's Banquet is doing something similar. Nettwerk has digital downloads of some tracks...they understadn that it's an opportunity and not a threat.
They already killed Consumer DAT, tried to kill cassettes, and they keep CD prices artifically high (if it costs $.50 to make a CD in the quantities the majors do, and the artist gets maybe a buck or two off the sale, where does the other $12 go?). Someday a backlash is inevitable.
Even if the bandwidth was significantly less, this opens a huge door for "smart" homes and appliances. The "average" consumers are more likely to buy a fridge that doesn't require an ethernet cable snaking around their home. I can't see my dad wiring cat5 in his house, but I can see him plugging in a home monitoring system that knows when he left the oven on.
It's unfortunate that the self-annointed spokespeople for geek culture are often not members of it themselves.
I also find it interesting that the best summaries of the hacker mindset have appeared in fiction. While people reading Hamlet on the Halfshell or whatever it's called get very broad "ooh the future is cool and the net is the future" concepts, someone who reads Cryptonomicon will have a much better understanding of why the average geek would be more likely to have 10-year-old-hardware littering his/her apartment floor.
It's impressive that Costa Rica is going with this, since AFAIK they're the first latin-American nation to do this. Regardless of any other issues they might have implementing it, you gotta admit it's a pretty bold initiative.
So what other countries offer this sort of thing? I know Iceland national telecom has plans (if they haven't already) to offer free net to every citizen (all 278,000 of them - I admit to being an islenskaphile) and Finland has something along those lines too...anybody else?
Slashdot Mirror
Not *great* either, but not too bad.
I see they've beefed up Irulan's role a lot. I guess they felt bad that in the first book you only know about her through the chapter intros until the end.
I do like the fact that they are playing up the "young and brash" Paul angle. He is pretty moody in the book at the beginning, and really the book is a lot about his "coming-of-age."
Liet-Kynes: I'm glad they make a big deal out of his relation to the Fremen. That was one of the things I really thought was missing in the Lynch version. Liet is hugely important in the foundation of trust between the Fremen and the Atreides. Too bad the actor is kind of stilted (although less-so than Brad Douriff's Piter DeVries in the Lynch film).
Yueh seems to be a bit under-played. He's fairly important to the opening of the book but basically he's just a hologram until his "big scene." But on the upside we do get Duncan Idaho this time. In Lynch, Duncan showed up and was shot. Here we actually get to see his importance to the book (and he's REAL important in subsequent novels). I'd've liked to see a bit more explanation of the Mentats and their importance, but I'm willing to forgive that and let them just appear as "really smart advisor guys" in the miniseries.
Vlad Harkonnen is sort of...glutinous but not horridly disgusting. I think that's handled pretty well.
My biggest complain about the Lynch adaptation is that the Fremen were pretty much these guys that show up and end up as Paul's army. This version has, so far, a lot of development of the Fremen. The "spittin Stilgar" scene and a role of the Shadout Mapes underscore that, showing their traditions of water-value and highlighting their belief in Muad Dib.
Production design is fairly gorgeous and baroque. OKay, maybe the 'thopters aren't thopters, but really, I think being accurate would look fairly silly onscreen. Costuming seems a bit...forced. There's a bit too much "Dr. Who" in all the metalic fabrics and funky headgear. The FX are kind of a mixed bag...they're good for TV, pretty eh for a movie. Sometimes you can easily tell where the set ends and the matte painting begins. Sometimes they're just lovely. I liked the design of the Guild Steersman - much more in line with the Barlowe interpretation, even if he was very obviously a puppet.
And on a subject dear to my heart, the music is wonderful. I usually love Graeme Revell, but this is excellent stuff even for him. Nice blend of ethnic musics from around the world, without having too much that overpowers the action onscreen. Nicely done. Certianly better than the 80's pop-rock soundtrack by Toto. :)
Overall, it's not as good as I'd hoped, but then with an epic like Dune, hopes are set extrememly high. I'm interested to see how the really important sequences of the next two nights are handled. What we've had so far is really just exposition.
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Read any really good graphic novel, like a Gaiman or a Morrison or an Ellis, then try speaking any of the really profound lines. You'll note how weird it often sounds.
A lot of printed dialogue is written as a method of exposition, to show a character's relationship with something...in many cases in a visual or interactive setting you don't need to say these things, you just can show them. Picking when to talk and when to "show" is probably the most difficult part of adapting to the screen.
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A while back the company I was working for was doing business with a large consulting company from The Alley.
At the time, their stock was at $93 a share. They were a smallish company, maybe $10M in revenues, with a staff of about 100 nationwide. The company I worked for was a relatively large company, about 1000 people worldwide, with revenues stable in the $100-$200M range. Our stock price was at about $50 a share.
I thought that was a little weird. But, I figured, I just don't understand stock market economics.
Now the dot-com's stock is at $0.90 a share. Their revenues are still about the same.
Hm. Maybe I do understand this stuff better than I thought.
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Perhaps it was a long way away, having fallen through "what they used to call a black hole." After all, it seems spatial anomalies are everywhere in the trek world.
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But there IS a shortage of IT people around here. But it's not a shortage of high-end systems programmers and kernel hackers. It's a shortage of support people, sysadmins, business programmers, midrange systems support and all the day-to-day stuff that businesses need. I don't know if this is indicative of a training problem, or just because new workforce members aren't looking for these jobs...
And to top it all off, a lot of companies are hiring high-end developers and admins to do the "cool" stuff like develop ecommerce systems and run state-of-the-art servers, but don't have the baseline support staff to keep the network running. Thus, they can't keep their high-end folks (find me a senior solaris sysadmin who wants to spend his days mapping drives for the marketing department).
There's a workforce, and there's a market, they just don't seem to match.
----
I've had a number of opportunites to work with both of them in a head-to-head environment. While the hardware config was never exactly the same (so benchmarks are fairly meaningless), the config was similar enough that I could make some educated comparisons.
For day-to-day content services, there was very little difference in performance. Raw HTML is a snap for both of these suckers. We never hit 1megahit per day so I never did get to see which one bogged down first, though.
IIS crashed a lot more often. We had an average uptime of about 3 weeks. Apache had an uptime of about 6 weeks, but bringing it backup was a commandline operation as opposed to a reboot-the-whole-damn-machine deal.
The userbase (internal) was much mroe comfroatble with IIS, and from an admin standpoint, it was easier for the IS staff. NT and IIS integrate easier with a wintel desktop environment, despite the existence of Samba.
All our business developers were easily able to transition to ASP, since all of them spoke VB. ASP performance was quite acceptable for the majority of our applications, many of which saw some fairly high (500khits/day) loads. However, the ASP.dll for IIS4 leaked memory like a sieve and was the primary cause of the uptime problems. Conversely, Apache provided a whole lot of technology options for app development, almost none of which were as easy to port business apps to because of the app's legacy. I'm just thanking god we never found a web-cobol product, or we'd probably have been stuck with that (the midrange guy kept trying to convince us to host our apps on the AS/400). It's a poor justification, but unfortunatley that kind of crap happens in the business world.
The overall system ran a LOT faster under apache, since it didn't need the overhead of everything else Windows decides to do...it was easy to strip the server down to basically apache and SSH. NT, well, you kill one service and god knows what else will stop working. Apache it was a lot easier to remote-configure the server since all you needed was an SSH client as opposed to MMC or the Gaping Security Risk That Is HTML Manager. And frankly, that affects performance too. If you have to log in on the console and run a Big Slow App in order to change a virtual directory URL, your server is going to feel that impact.
When it came down to it, IIS was an acceptable for an intranet server because of its integration and apps properties, and was able to serve apps and info really well for that sort of target audience. But the uptime problems made it a poor choice for high availabilty this-is-what-the-customer-sees kind of applications.
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I've got just the one...
I think the point he was trying to make is that Alessi stuff is always pretty much on the cutting edge of design.
And you have to admit, Apple is too. Regardles sof what you may think about Apple's decisions for hardware and software, much of what they've done has gone on to make deep impressions in the way industrial and computer design has gone. Since the introduction of the iMac, I've seen more products appear that are translucent and brightly colored than I could've imagined...everything from pens to power strips to lamps.
And let's face it...would MS have come up with windows, or at least windows as we now know it, if the MacUI hadn't existed? Okay, I'm not saying that it's a *good* thing per se, but it is indicative of the influence Apple has had on pop culture and the evolution of design.
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It's difficult, and those 22 colors suck. BUt if you're crafty you can avoid having the disparities by not mixing browser and gif colors.
Or you can just assume that people with 8-bit color are just used to seeing weird things like that, and get on with your life.
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I had a separate machine set up to do all my IPChains stuff, and wouldn't ya know, the nic in it blew when I was moving it home from work. So while at the local computer shoppe, pricing a new nic and a bub, I stumbled across the Linksys home router, whcih is a DHCP server, firewall, and 4-port hub in one. And it cost the same as a new nic and a hub, so I bought it.
Turns out it's pretty sweet. Doesn't have the geek appeal of IPchains on a linuxbox, but it takes up a lot less desk space. So it make s a pretty decent solution.
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I've checked out websphere lately.
I'm still not impressed.
Only the expensive version supports EJB, the JSP engine is almost entirely unhelpful for debugging (tomcat at least tells you soemthing beyond "compilation failed" when there's an error), it's excrutiatingly picky about what it runs with (needs a specific version of Oracle which naturally none of my other apps want to use), doesn't support JDK 1.2, has some OS issues...
In short, it's a good idea that came out rather messy. It might work fine under AIX or OS/400 with DB/2 as a backend, but if you ever want to add any functionality for any other platform or any other database, you're essentially boned.
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Okay, so Kettle is win only.
So?
It's not required to write the templates:
It may be a bit friendlier, but, heck, every editor I've ever used for HTML has left me nervous enough to at least make me double-check and optimize my code by hand in vi or emacs (or notepad, or bbedit, or...). And if your artists complain, give 'em dreamweaver or something and build the template out of that.
I'd really like to see a head-to-head comparison of TeaKettle/OpenCMS/Mason/WebMacro etc etc. Maybe I'll do it when I've finished Diablo II.
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This is all very interesting.
It's not quite a full content management system, since it's missing workflow, but it seems to handle templating quite well. And since it's open source, there's a distinct chance that a decent workflow management system will be grafted on.
The real advantage of a system like this is that...well, it's fairly powerful and it's free. If you want something with this kind of templating power, you're stuck using a very limited set of toolkits, including high-end stuff like Vignette Storyserver (which can run in the USD100,000's). If you're a smaller company or don't have a system that requires such blunderbuss tactics for content, this rocks the house.
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The four forces, in order from weakest to strongest, are
Sex. death and guilt were unified early in the 1800's. Gravity remains ununified.
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I mislike Razorfish. Some might say I have a personal vendetta against them, but thats not really true. I know some very talented and generally decent and cool people who work there. And they own a very nice guest house in the Twin Peaks neighborhood of San Francisco.
But I still think they're borderline evil.
I'm done ranting. For now.
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My exeperiences with Razorfish haven't been the best. Their "product" as I've seen it is usually overdesigned and under-engineered. They also tend to have the attitude of "we're Razorfish, we're cooler than you, it's a privelege for you to work with us." While they may have an impressive pedigree, that's still a bad attitude to take when you're supposed to be doing things for a client.
They were also the only company I've ever talked to that actually said to me (after making me a laughably poor job offer) "we like to think that working here is it's own reward." And they wonder why they have to acquire companies to get developers.
Sadly, this also seems to be the norm in the web-site/systems integrator market. One that I'm currently working with, who unfortunately I can't mention cuz I'm under NDA (and even if I posted anon they'd probably still be able to figure it out) is about 3 months behind the launch date for the new site they're supposed to deliver, and we haven't even seen a single deliverable yet. This is a few million dollars already spent. Sure, my company has it coming for being buttheaded about the contract and not noticing loopholes and all that, but c'mon - three months, millions of dollars, and nothing?
Until these firms get a good shock of cold water and realize they're supposed to be working with their clients and not just "doing stuff with their client's logo on it" we're probably going to see a lot more of these types of lawsuits.
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I don't know the significance of this, but it's an interesting observation nonetheless.
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Truth is often stranger than fiction.
A while back a lab had grown several mice with luciferase/luciferin genes spliced into certain pigment-producing cells.
Glow-in-the-dark mice. Some had glowing tails, others had glowing spots.
Imagine having your own bioluminescent tatoos? (Glow sticks at raves would be a thing of the past, for one thing) Granted, you'd have to have had those spliced in at conception, but maybe you've had forethinking parents. Or maybe technology will overcome that sort of problem with some sort of vector that can be safely used in a tatoo ink.
I just want a glow-in-the-dark mouse. Must be hell on their nocturnal cycles, though.
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Sadly, neither Nature, Biochemistry, nor The Cell have a "Forum" section.
"Dear Biochemistry Forum: I never thought this would happen to me. But I was in the lab one night and I spilled acrylomide all down the front of my lab coat. Luckily the new lab assistant was there to run the thermocycler for me while I decontaminated..."
Hm. It's just not the same.
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If napster had been used for nothing but sharing underground or indie bands, RIAA woulda cared less. But toss one file from a big 5...er...4 now...label up there and they get their shorts in a wad.
The majors and RIAA are exceptionally paranoid. Meanwhile a lot of the good independent labels are doing it right and hopping on the digital music bandwagon early. 4AD distributs rarities and the like online through atomicpop, Beggar's Banquet is doing something similar. Nettwerk has digital downloads of some tracks...they understadn that it's an opportunity and not a threat.
They already killed Consumer DAT, tried to kill cassettes, and they keep CD prices artifically high (if it costs $.50 to make a CD in the quantities the majors do, and the artist gets maybe a buck or two off the sale, where does the other $12 go?). Someday a backlash is inevitable.
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Even if the bandwidth was significantly less, this opens a huge door for "smart" homes and appliances. The "average" consumers are more likely to buy a fridge that doesn't require an ethernet cable snaking around their home. I can't see my dad wiring cat5 in his house, but I can see him plugging in a home monitoring system that knows when he left the oven on.
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Ahh, it's funny cuz it's true.
It's unfortunate that the self-annointed spokespeople for geek culture are often not members of it themselves.
I also find it interesting that the best summaries of the hacker mindset have appeared in fiction. While people reading Hamlet on the Halfshell or whatever it's called get very broad "ooh the future is cool and the net is the future" concepts, someone who reads Cryptonomicon will have a much better understanding of why the average geek would be more likely to have 10-year-old-hardware littering his/her apartment floor.
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It's impressive that Costa Rica is going with this, since AFAIK they're the first latin-American nation to do this. Regardless of any other issues they might have implementing it, you gotta admit it's a pretty bold initiative.
So what other countries offer this sort of thing? I know Iceland national telecom has plans (if they haven't already) to offer free net to every citizen (all 278,000 of them - I admit to being an islenskaphile) and Finland has something along those lines too...anybody else?
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