The only problem with it being a 'human interaction LEGO system' is that the rules are constant. They are determined by the programmer(s) and can be rightfully called arbitrary. The user has no control over these arbitrary variables.
For example, in the article it mentions that a sim *must* have extended social contact with others in order to be happy. Now, I will agree that social interaction is vital to human emotional health, however we all require and/or desire it in different degrees. These variables are beyond our control; they are amongst the arbitrary variables set down by the programmer.
Another factor is that of the most recent slam against TSOL, which is that McDonalds is going to have a corporate presence, and consuming McDonald's food increases a Sim's 'fun' and 'fed' levels. Personally, I don't have fun eating McDonald's food (and I avoid it at all costs, which is to say, always), and it doesn't do much more than make me feel unwell, albeit fed. In a less-specific sense, I can imagine vegetarians *really* do not like (most if not all) McDonald's food!
However... insofar as we are working with arbitrary variables *that are still valid for a nontrivial subset of the population* then TSOL can be pretty intriguing, even to non-sociologists. I'm not a Sims fan either, but I'm going to watch this, to see if we get things like online protests, boycotts, demonstrations, meetings, town halls, etc. We've already seen from MU*s that there are people who are amused by, and go out of their way, to ruin enjoyment for others, and out-and-out destroy what others have created. The MU* communities have adopted a number of measures to take against anti-social people such as that; it'll be interesting to see what measures the residents of TSOL take, and in addition what they'll be doing to address other issues. (At least they won't have to worry about PKing....)
Look at "Version 4," the tenth picture. The one talking about how he fit the Dell power supply into the HP case.
How did he do it? He removed the cover to the power supply and mounted it flush to the bottom of the case. That power supply is nekkid in the case. This is going to be his KIDS GAMING COMPUTER. The plexi cover is hinged so that, presumably, the kids can fix the interior components themselves.
Holy $#!^, this is a BAD THING. Kids will be kids, they haven't had basic electrical engineering yet. Opening up a power supply is *always* a bad idea, there are capacitors in there that'll take a dangerously indefinite "while" to discharge when the system is unplugged. I can't stress enough that a naked power supply is a high-amperage electric shock waiting to happen.
Miles, dude, if you're reading this, DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT POWER SUPPLY!
To throw a interesting spin on things, the person who certified NT4 as C2 compliant (sans networking, as has been pointed out) refused to certify Win2K as such.
The 3D modelling/rendering package Maya already has something akin to a radial menu, not only as a shortcut to the menu bar (when you hit SPACE) but also other options with the right mouse button. In theory, you can do *everything* with the mouse, without hitting more than the space bar now and then. Radial menus also help reduce wear and tear on those sensitive carpals.
This is an interesting development, and it'll be good to see how it develops. I think it just might take off, especially with TheSims and NWN both using radial menus.
Most high-speed drives seem to not take into account the stresses placed upon CDs. A 56x drive imposes a HUGE amount of momentum on the disc. This is something to be of concern about. Even more so, when you consider the amount of HEAT being generated. Not only by the laser, but by the drive's motor itself.
The situation is worsened when you consider the write-laser, which imparts much more heat onto the disc than the read-laser. Be very aware of this! The faster the drive, the more heat and stress being put onto the disk. Bad Things Can Happen.
I had the displeasure of having a disc EXPLODE in my CD-ROM drive last week, because of heat and stress placed upon it. I'm lucky I didn't have the thing at neck-level since pieces of disk flew across the room.
I'm going to come off as a Luddite here, but so here goes....
Personally, I think there was TOO MUCH CGI in Ep 2. Too much? Why, yes. Backgrounds, scenery, characters... it was prevailant. Unfortunately, that left very little for the actors to interact with. I'd say a good 80% of the film was done with actors in greenscreen stages, and/or interacting directly with computer-generated characters. This resulted in wooden performances. (Well, that and the fact that George Lucas can't write a love story.) The actors had nobody to act *with*, or they had no scenery to help them "get into" a scene.
If anything, shooting it digitally excaberated the situation. Okay, quick lesson: one foot of 75mm film -- about 12 frames, half a second at standard 24fps -- can run for US$1000. Film gets expensive quickly! Shooting digital means you can reuse the media for dailies, and it's releatively cheap, too. And when you get to editing, you can use all sorts of super-nifty non-linear editing techniques.
But there's a reason why editing and sound mastering is an art form and neccessarilly difficult. A good editor can make a good movie *great*, or can even make a poor movie tolerable. There are reasons why mastering and editing are done in expensive rooms that look like movie theaters that have multiple, hundred-channel consoles mounted elegently in them. It's as much an art form as directing is. I think something is lost when you move away from physical film as your editing medium.
Another point: Again, maybe I'm a traditionalist, but digital will never be able to compare to 24 frames/second, siver halide film. Any 'pixelation' is, frankly, microscopic, and the halides have an infinite range of color matching. You aren't limited by the picture format, by the compression format, by the number of bits per pixel used. It's natural color.Citizen Kane would have not nearly the impact that it did if it was filmed and edited digitally.
The computer animation student in me was thrilled and ecstatic, overwhelmed and overawed by the amount of CGI in the film. (And the miligeek in me was enthralled by the big battle.) Taco's right, CGI has come a LONG way, between Final Fantasy and Episode 2. The traditionalist in me, though, was dismayed and appalled by the way the CGI simply drowned out the actors.
This is generally good advice, and I would normally not advise anyone against spending time in the military. It really does build character and expose you to a variety of situations and people.
There is, however, one thing to make note of and this can be a hell of a hammer to be hit with:
You belong to the military when you join. Your body and mind, at least, and that part of your mind that stores vocational skills. There's a little catch called "Needs of the service" which means the military -- any service, any branch -- can and WILL put you where THEY need you the most. You have some say in the matter, but when you get right down to it, the military can shove you into Administrative Clerk or Photographer's Mate or PBI (Poor Bluidy Infantry) if they need you somewhere.
There is also something else to be concerned about, though in four years it's debatable if it'll be a problem or not. That concern is "Stop-loss" orders. If the military needs you and 1,000 of your bestest buddies to stay in the service for whatever reason, it can issue a 'Stop-loss order.' You canot get out, you canot retire, you cannot escape. You remain in the service for as long as they need you. The Army and Air Force are doing this now.
So, be careful, and be aware for the costs and benefits.
Don't fool yourself: while a lot of people are down on getting a college education, in a lot of technical positions, what can make or break you is if you have any sort of college degree.
I have a friend who is a crackerjack programmer, but he had a hard time getting a job because he doesn't have a college degree. This guy could make a terabyte network drive sing. He can do protocol programming. But no college degree. Granted, you arent a programmer, but the reason why he didn't get any offers for a long time applies:
What a lot of hiring agencies and potential employers are doing is -- right or wrong -- putting all applicants into a spreadsheet, with columns for degree, years in college, etc. What they then do is sort for things they want, including college. Those nams that don't have anything in the 'college' filed get immediately dismissed and deleted.
Yes, it sounds like a drag. Yes, it's two, three, or four years of your life still spent in school.
It's worth it, though. You need the time to figure out what you really, honestly want to do with your life; even as it is, asking a kid at the age of 18, what they want to do with the rest of thir life is patently unfair. Use your college years to make yourself as marketable as possible. Broaden your horizons. Meet people, network, make contacts. Have a social life. You might even find something competely different to do before you graduate. Use this time, even if it's to get a degree from a community college. (Some community colleges aren't half bad.) You might not ever use your degree. (I haven't touched it since I graduate, but it helped to get me a commission in the Coast Guard.) But without it, you will have all that much harder a time getting a job.
I think that information like this can be potentially destructive. I would never condone someone using one of Hayduke's books, or the Anarchist's Cookbook, for harming another person; nor do I believe that books such as 'Making Your 30-03 Springfield Fully Automatic' really has any purpose in our civilization.
That being said, information such as this -- for picking locks, field-expedient ordnance, dirty tricks, even making ricin-DNSO -- is important to have. There may very well come a time when it is not only important but *neccessary* to conduct illegal activities for whatever reason. One thing that comes to mind is for a guerilla resistance movement in an occupied country. Information on how to fight the occupying army is at least important as food and ammunition to such groups. Yes, this information can be potentially devastating, but there exists the potential, real need for it.
Now, obviously, this information can be abused. I'm sure there are real-life anarchists out there who would jump at the chance to "stick it to the Man" and in the process kill a lot of people. There's no easy way to address this. There are two conflicting needs here, and unfortunately there's no way to be equitable about it: one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. How do you decide what information is kept free?
Exactly. The purpose of the military is to win wars. The trouble with implementing any new computer system in the military, however, is that, while you have people who know their jobs very well, they don't usually know more than their jobs, nor can they be expected to.
A good example is in the Coast Guard, and I know this applies to other services. The USCG was using an old Unisys BTOS/CTOS systems running over an X.25 network, approximately five-six years ago. We were making the transition to a Windows NT system.
Now, contrary to what one might think, every person in the Coast Guard has a job to do, and in order to even break even, the Coast Guard has to get at least eight hours of that person's work out of them a day (less weekends, usually, but not always; let's not even go into duty aboard cutters!)
Let's look into how implementing that new system works: you start with your TTs, the Telecom Techs, who tend to already be understaffed. You need to send them to training for *administrating* the new system even before you have them installing the new boxen. If nobody else in the service knows how to teach others how to run that system, your TTs/SysOps need to be sent to a civilian training center, or you need to somehow compensate them for taking a training course. Microsoft or Novell courses can run upwards of a couple thousand, easilly. (Keep in mind, that knowing how to administer a system is much, much different from knowing how to TEACH someone to administer a system.)
Now that you have taken a few weeks to send all your TTs to MCSA or MCSE courses and gotten them certified, and meanwhile the systems back at their commands going to hell and back, you can then make the big decision: implement the new system, or train your people in the new system? This is not an easy question, and just saying 'do both at the same time!' doesn't cut it, kemo sabe. Let's say you take some people off their current duties and send them to training before the new system comes in. You just lost the work of those people in their assigned specialty, and in some understaffed commands that is painful.
Now, say they come back and will help out the other users while the new system gets thrown in hurriedly. First off, your TTs are going to be working 24-hour days to get that new system in, they won't be able to help the users. The 'core group' of people you trained before the turnover will not only have to do their work on (very likely) a system experiencing teething pains, they'll have to nursemaid all the rest of the users in using the new system before they can be sent off to training as well. Now, this second batch of training can be spread out over the course of several months, and by then you might have people in the service who can teach them, so you don't have to go out to civilian agencies. However, chances are, these instructors will be full time instructors: they are more people on the service's payroll, either uniformed or DoD employee. Granted, their duties are to train, train, and train some more, but they are another expense, especially if you had to send them off into civilian world get trained as instructors, and even more so if you have to train someone to take over the work they were doing before becoming instructors.
Now, let's go back to your point about just changing the back end. In this case, that's not really an option. Sure, you could transfer all the servers to Linux boxen running some version of sendmail, but you still have to deal with Outlook and it's miserable foibles. And you still have to train your TTs in administrating *nixie-boxen and sendmail servers. Oh, and you might have to train them to be programmers too, because unless you shell out the bucks for a commercial sendmail implementation, there won't be any reliable support they can fall back on. (Insert off-topic rant about problems with open-source, non-commercial solutions HERE.) =) Or you could train up some TTs or hire some consultants to do your programming for you, which is MORE cost, MORE training, MORE mouths to feed. Maybe not as much as if the whole system was shifted over entirely to a new system, but still very much non-trivial. And then you'll have to do the rollover to the new system, which will mean more 24-hour days for your already haggard TTs. For The Good Of The Country notwithstanding, you have just made your TTs both very highly trained and very highly miserable, which means they will be very highly inclined to trade in their fatigues for business suits and a very stable and comfortable life for their families which doesn't mean moving to some new and exotic hellhole every four years.
The military does not have some magic source of funds that renews itself every pay cycle. That money has to come from somewhere. The growing trend these days is to do "more with less:" more work with less personnel. "More with less" means, actually, "more work with less trained personnel." These are people who have to be trained for their job; I would not expect a bosun's mate fresh out of BM school to be able to run the armory at a base, neither would I expect a gunny's mate to do the deckwork aboard a CG cutter. And that training is also a non-trivial expense, since you have dedicated training facilities, dedicated material, and dedicated instructors, PLUS you're still paying the student his regular wages, AND feeding everyone involved!
I don't know how it is for the combat arms, but for us REMFs and other non-combat personnel (marine inspector, in my case) you start kissing away any semblance of a stable life. Which is all well and good if you're risking your life for your country and achieving something that is worthwhile, but crawling through a double-bottomed tanker at 2AM with a 'Dear John' letter waiting for you at home just so the tanker inspection can be done that night, and so you can do the same thing but *twice* the next day.... Well, let's just say that it wears on you. I'm sure those TT's whom you have just consigned to Military Server Room Hell for a couple of weeks are going to start thinking that "more with less" sucks rocks. =)
This is why you will not see a turn-over to a new system more than maybe once a decade or two: that is, enough time for the people in charge to forget how expensive, time-consuming, problem-ridden the last one was, and for the newer technology to be glitzy and sparkly enough. The Air Force (and the other services) have already devoted gobs of manpower, time, and money into moving over to the new Windows systems. They're not going to say 'This was a bad idea,' and adopt penguin-boxen all around, or any other kindof system. They're going to tough throuh with what they have as best as they can, because they've already put in a lot of effort into training and hardware (and software, too, considering MS's pricing schemes.)
It's much more akin to the monomyth, where Flynn, the flawed hero, must go into the Underworld and retrieve the elixer to bring life back to the kingdom.
In this case, to get the evidence to smackdown on Dillinger. (No nookie for Flynn, though, "Atomic John" Sheridan already got his squeeze. =)
Thank you! I'm very glad to hear that, actually. Even if we can't build the Saturn V anymore, there's significant historical interest in those documents.
And, yes. Copious popups. My screen was half red courtesy of SpyBlocker. =6 An interesting article, though. =)
Unfortunately, you won't be able to. At least for the Saturn V.
Y'see, the blueprints and engineering docs for the Saturn V were stored on microfilm. Time passed and, unfortunately, the ability to build the Saturn V was lost -- financial reasons, mostly. The aerospace industry had been given the financial equivalent of 100cc's of adrenaline with JFK's "space race." By the time the Apollo program ended, we were already unable to build the Saturn V. (This is why NASA moved on to cheaper, unmanned launches and the Space Shuttle.)
If you really want them, though, I think we can work something out. Supposedly I live a few miles from the Saturn V's plans' final resting place. Legend has it that they are located somewhere in the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, New York City. This is probably incorrect, though. More likely, they were incinerated.
Look, a lot of y'all are ragging on TellarHK for bringing up his troubles with Smoothwall's Richard. I'd just like to point out a couple of things:
o TellarHK already said -- a lot of times -- that there were things he could have done better. That's cool, that's reasonable. I don't hear Richard saying the same thing. Hell, all I've heard about Richard is him saying how if you don't pay the cash your tech support equals nothing.
o The tech support available to admins in this industry is bad enough. When I was still wrangling networks, it could take forever to get support, with some very rare exceptions. Any company that gives shoddy support, or is rude to potential customers, has NO CONCEPT of what it means to deal with people. Nothing pisses off an admin than shoddy support for an otherwise good product. And being told 'pay the money for it!' is all well and good, but if the person's been rude to you and your server room crew, what's the garauntee that they'll be nice and polite after you dump nnn dollars into their account?
o Quick lesson in marketing: how do you get your foot in the door of a potential customer? You respect them. I threw out more unsolicited junk mail when I was a netadmin than I care to remember. But when I was evaluating software for implementation, I got more from a reasonably courteous, polite tech-guy or sales-guy than anything else. I just would not want to deal with a company who would put rude, obnoxious people on their phones to talk with me. (And before you ask, yes, I *was* polite to them through and through, even when they were being less than polite.) Now, compare it to what Smoothwall has: the *author* of the software and one of the top honchos at the company is mouthing off potential users. The hell?! This just is not done in the real world, people. At least, it's not done if the company wants to attract any customers. At the very least, I'd expect any employee who has a vested interest in that company to get Richard OFF of IRC and OFF the phones and OUT of the public eye. Put someone who can deal with people on the front lines.
o That brings me to this point: open source software is on a tightrope as it is. It's bad enough that OSS has no marketing budget to go against commercial closed-source software producers. The only thing that OSS has to go on get accepted is that it's free, and the support you get from the software authors. I am all for commercial OSS projects. But actions like Richard's ruin the reputation of all OSS projects. If Smoothwall was the first OSS implementation a company made, and Richard was even half as rude as he is to most people, then I garauntee you, that company will NOT ever implement anything open-source ever again. Why? Because there is no tech support for a commercial, closed-source product that will be rude to a customer, or even to a potential customer.
o "Oh, but TellarHK shouldn't have pushed it! It'd tax my patience, too!" Oh, wah. If you can't handle the heat of doing tech-support and answering sometimes-oddball tech questions, get off the phone or uninstall your IRC client. It's part and parcel of doing tech support. Okay, maybe Richard has answered too many questions, and maybe he's pulling hundred-hour weeks (quite a feat, that, actually) and if he really is and it's all for this product, fine, I'm happy for him, he's to be commended for that much. But if he's using that as his excuse for being rude and demeaning and obnoxious to potential *paying* users, then he's got to lay off dealing with people outside the company and delegate that to someone else, someone who can deal with *people.* I don't care if Richard could hack the Linux kernel to make it self-aware, write up a VWM that's easier than frickin' *Aqua* to use, and by lunch write the killer Linux office suite. If he can't deal with people, *all* people, then he shouldn't be trying to run a commercial enterprise.
o Sales of a software product is all about dealing with other people and convincing them to use your product instead of a competetor's, so that they will pay you and give you their money and you can pay your employees' salaries and have enough to pay the rent yourself. You don't get more customers by routinely alienating them. You don't get people wanting to pay for support if you're rude to them first.
TellarHK didn't do anything to warrant the verbal fusilade from Richard, let alone anything to warrant getting harrassed. Instead of getting TellarHK to say (again!) that he could have handled it better, why can't anyone expend this much effort to get Richard to admit that he's got to chill out and relax and not alienate more of his potential user base?
I just went to his site and checked out Thomas Timberwolf. I haven't laughed so hard at toons in a long time! It's slapstick and silly, and it's classic Chuck Jones. I wish I'd found them sooner! Thank you for the link!
I worked in the tech industry for four years with three different shops: two years doing systems admin and help desk, one year doing system admin and helpdesk, and another year doing systems and network admin and helpdesk.
Offhand, I'd say that all three jobs generally sucked rocks.
There were good things. I had some good managers/bosses in my first job. But the hard part in that job was dealing with the implementation of a new order fulfillment system. When you get rollouts or implementations, the best advice I can give is RUN. They're unpleasant at best, because you have not only your IT department working on it, but EVERY OTHER DEPARTMENT working on it. And it's never a matter of your own department taking up the reins and saying 'We'll handle it!' Oh, no, nobody wants that. Finance, Marketing, Operations, EVERYBODY wants a say in the new system. It's like feeding time at the shark tank! And guess who's the halibut....
I can't say I've been very happy with any tech job I've been in. Most have had very depressing instances, frustrations, and the like. You have to be a very special kind of person to enjoy working in IT. (And if you are one of those people who say, "I thrive on stress!" I'd like to see you after two years of doing helpdesk and answering the phone with, 'How may I help you?' and discovering that it's ANOTHER person who can't print or turn on their computer.)
Ironically, I was glad I was downsized from my latest job; nothing like a kick in the keister to go and do what you feel more comfortable doing, what you WANT to do. Of course, it's sink or swim, but you have to always believe that it's worth it.
I am one of the many tech-workers who was slammed by the dot-bomb/tech-crash/whatever. Basically, I was told one Friday morning before the holidays, that I was supernumerary to the needs of the firm and had to be laid off.
A lot of people have taken the opportunity of the slump in the tech-market and loosing their jobs to take a good serious look at themselves and what they're doing with their lives. Sure, they were making six-figure salaries, were getting company cars, on top of the world, and now, they're flipping burgers or something else in a much lower income bracket.
But think about it. With everything going on in the world, after the September 11th attacks (yes, someone was going to bring it up eventually, it might as well be me) a lot of people have been looking back on those 'salad days' and asking themselves if this was really what they wanted.
For four years I've been involved with IT work, and as you can tell from my (still-unchanged) sig, it was wearing on me greatly. Then there was September 11th, and then I got laid off, and the economy went to hell.... Well, we all know the state of things now. But I took a look at what I was doing, and instead of looking for another help desk/net admin/sysad job which would rip my mind out through my nose even more, I'm taking what I've saved, going for a loan, and changing careers to something I *like* doing.
Loosing your job can be bad, really bad, but if you're financially careful, it can be the kick in the keister you need to get out of a job you don't like and into a career that you're better equipped, emotionally and psychologically, for.
anon.penet.fi was primarilly shut down as part of the incidents involving a critic of Scientology. Said critic used the anonymous service to post the OTVII materia to alt.religion.scientology, and the Co$ prodded and hounded the guy who ran anon.penent.fi to produce the name of the person responsible. He refused.
The incidents of spammers and child porn allegations (none of which were ever proven) were just nails in the coffin. It would not suprise me if the fellow was subjected to the policy of "fair game" to be set up, battered, and eventually run into the ground.
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The only problem with it being a 'human interaction LEGO system' is that the rules are constant. They are determined by the programmer(s) and can be rightfully called arbitrary. The user has no control over these arbitrary variables.
For example, in the article it mentions that a sim *must* have extended social contact with others in order to be happy. Now, I will agree that social interaction is vital to human emotional health, however we all require and/or desire it in different degrees. These variables are beyond our control; they are amongst the arbitrary variables set down by the programmer.
Another factor is that of the most recent slam against TSOL, which is that McDonalds is going to have a corporate presence, and consuming McDonald's food increases a Sim's 'fun' and 'fed' levels. Personally, I don't have fun eating McDonald's food (and I avoid it at all costs, which is to say, always), and it doesn't do much more than make me feel unwell, albeit fed. In a less-specific sense, I can imagine vegetarians *really* do not like (most if not all) McDonald's food!
However... insofar as we are working with arbitrary variables *that are still valid for a nontrivial subset of the population* then TSOL can be pretty intriguing, even to non-sociologists. I'm not a Sims fan either, but I'm going to watch this, to see if we get things like online protests, boycotts, demonstrations, meetings, town halls, etc. We've already seen from MU*s that there are people who are amused by, and go out of their way, to ruin enjoyment for others, and out-and-out destroy what others have created. The MU* communities have adopted a number of measures to take against anti-social people such as that; it'll be interesting to see what measures the residents of TSOL take, and in addition what they'll be doing to address other issues. (At least they won't have to worry about PKing....)
Look at "Version 4," the tenth picture. The one talking about how he fit the Dell power supply into the HP case.
How did he do it? He removed the cover to the power supply and mounted it flush to the bottom of the case. That power supply is nekkid in the case. This is going to be his KIDS GAMING COMPUTER. The plexi cover is hinged so that, presumably, the kids can fix the interior components themselves.
Holy $#!^, this is a BAD THING. Kids will be kids, they haven't had basic electrical engineering yet. Opening up a power supply is *always* a bad idea, there are capacitors in there that'll take a dangerously indefinite "while" to discharge when the system is unplugged. I can't stress enough that a naked power supply is a high-amperage electric shock waiting to happen.
Miles, dude, if you're reading this, DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT POWER SUPPLY!
I wonder if he's any relation to the famous Jack Foley, of whome 'foley stages' and 'foley artists' get their name?
To throw a interesting spin on things, the person who certified NT4 as C2 compliant (sans networking, as has been pointed out) refused to certify Win2K as such.
The 3D modelling/rendering package Maya already has something akin to a radial menu, not only as a shortcut to the menu bar (when you hit SPACE) but also other options with the right mouse button. In theory, you can do *everything* with the mouse, without hitting more than the space bar now and then. Radial menus also help reduce wear and tear on those sensitive carpals.
This is an interesting development, and it'll be good to see how it develops. I think it just might take off, especially with TheSims and NWN both using radial menus.
Most high-speed drives seem to not take into account the stresses placed upon CDs. A 56x drive imposes a HUGE amount of momentum on the disc. This is something to be of concern about. Even more so, when you consider the amount of HEAT being generated. Not only by the laser, but by the drive's motor itself.
The situation is worsened when you consider the write-laser, which imparts much more heat onto the disc than the read-laser. Be very aware of this! The faster the drive, the more heat and stress being put onto the disk. Bad Things Can Happen.
I had the displeasure of having a disc EXPLODE in my CD-ROM drive last week, because of heat and stress placed upon it. I'm lucky I didn't have the thing at neck-level since pieces of disk flew across the room.
I'm waiting for LUDICROUS MR!
Pass me those plaid HDD lights for my case....
I'm going to come off as a Luddite here, but so here goes....
Personally, I think there was TOO MUCH CGI in Ep 2. Too much? Why, yes. Backgrounds, scenery, characters... it was prevailant. Unfortunately, that left very little for the actors to interact with. I'd say a good 80% of the film was done with actors in greenscreen stages, and/or interacting directly with computer-generated characters. This resulted in wooden performances. (Well, that and the fact that George Lucas can't write a love story.) The actors had nobody to act *with*, or they had no scenery to help them "get into" a scene.
If anything, shooting it digitally excaberated the situation. Okay, quick lesson: one foot of 75mm film -- about 12 frames, half a second at standard 24fps -- can run for US$1000. Film gets expensive quickly! Shooting digital means you can reuse the media for dailies, and it's releatively cheap, too. And when you get to editing, you can use all sorts of super-nifty non-linear editing techniques.
But there's a reason why editing and sound mastering is an art form and neccessarilly difficult. A good editor can make a good movie *great*, or can even make a poor movie tolerable. There are reasons why mastering and editing are done in expensive rooms that look like movie theaters that have multiple, hundred-channel consoles mounted elegently in them. It's as much an art form as directing is. I think something is lost when you move away from physical film as your editing medium.
Another point: Again, maybe I'm a traditionalist, but digital will never be able to compare to 24 frames/second, siver halide film. Any 'pixelation' is, frankly, microscopic, and the halides have an infinite range of color matching. You aren't limited by the picture format, by the compression format, by the number of bits per pixel used. It's natural color. Citizen Kane would have not nearly the impact that it did if it was filmed and edited digitally.
The computer animation student in me was thrilled and ecstatic, overwhelmed and overawed by the amount of CGI in the film. (And the miligeek in me was enthralled by the big battle.) Taco's right, CGI has come a LONG way, between Final Fantasy and Episode 2. The traditionalist in me, though, was dismayed and appalled by the way the CGI simply drowned out the actors.
This is generally good advice, and I would normally not advise anyone against spending time in the military. It really does build character and expose you to a variety of situations and people.
There is, however, one thing to make note of and this can be a hell of a hammer to be hit with:
You belong to the military when you join. Your body and mind, at least, and that part of your mind that stores vocational skills. There's a little catch called "Needs of the service" which means the military -- any service, any branch -- can and WILL put you where THEY need you the most. You have some say in the matter, but when you get right down to it, the military can shove you into Administrative Clerk or Photographer's Mate or PBI (Poor Bluidy Infantry) if they need you somewhere.
There is also something else to be concerned about, though in four years it's debatable if it'll be a problem or not. That concern is "Stop-loss" orders. If the military needs you and 1,000 of your bestest buddies to stay in the service for whatever reason, it can issue a 'Stop-loss order.' You canot get out, you canot retire, you cannot escape. You remain in the service for as long as they need you. The Army and Air Force are doing this now.
So, be careful, and be aware for the costs and benefits.
Don't fool yourself: while a lot of people are down on getting a college education, in a lot of technical positions, what can make or break you is if you have any sort of college degree.
I have a friend who is a crackerjack programmer, but he had a hard time getting a job because he doesn't have a college degree. This guy could make a terabyte network drive sing. He can do protocol programming. But no college degree. Granted, you arent a programmer, but the reason why he didn't get any offers for a long time applies:
What a lot of hiring agencies and potential employers are doing is -- right or wrong -- putting all applicants into a spreadsheet, with columns for degree, years in college, etc. What they then do is sort for things they want, including college. Those nams that don't have anything in the 'college' filed get immediately dismissed and deleted.
Yes, it sounds like a drag. Yes, it's two, three, or four years of your life still spent in school.
It's worth it, though. You need the time to figure out what you really, honestly want to do with your life; even as it is, asking a kid at the age of 18, what they want to do with the rest of thir life is patently unfair. Use your college years to make yourself as marketable as possible. Broaden your horizons. Meet people, network, make contacts. Have a social life. You might even find something competely different to do before you graduate. Use this time, even if it's to get a degree from a community college. (Some community colleges aren't half bad.) You might not ever use your degree. (I haven't touched it since I graduate, but it helped to get me a commission in the Coast Guard.) But without it, you will have all that much harder a time getting a job.
What is Bill Gates smoking? and why isn't he sharing?
Oh, right, this is Microspliff. It's probably some sort of proprietary smack.
I think that information like this can be potentially destructive. I would never condone someone using one of Hayduke's books, or the Anarchist's Cookbook, for harming another person; nor do I believe that books such as 'Making Your 30-03 Springfield Fully Automatic' really has any purpose in our civilization.
That being said, information such as this -- for picking locks, field-expedient ordnance, dirty tricks, even making ricin-DNSO -- is important to have. There may very well come a time when it is not only important but *neccessary* to conduct illegal activities for whatever reason. One thing that comes to mind is for a guerilla resistance movement in an occupied country. Information on how to fight the occupying army is at least important as food and ammunition to such groups. Yes, this information can be potentially devastating, but there exists the potential, real need for it.
Now, obviously, this information can be abused. I'm sure there are real-life anarchists out there who would jump at the chance to "stick it to the Man" and in the process kill a lot of people. There's no easy way to address this. There are two conflicting needs here, and unfortunately there's no way to be equitable about it: one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. How do you decide what information is kept free?
For you anime fans out there, this might be amusing.
In my last IT job, we had four new servers. I thought about what things of four I could name them, knowing full well that the situation could change.
I ended up naming them suzaku, seiryu, genbu, and byakko.
The firewall was -- of course -- tasuki. =) REKKA SHINEN those script kiddies....
Exactly. The purpose of the military is to win wars. The trouble with implementing any new computer system in the military, however, is that, while you have people who know their jobs very well, they don't usually know more than their jobs, nor can they be expected to.
A good example is in the Coast Guard, and I know this applies to other services. The USCG was using an old Unisys BTOS/CTOS systems running over an X.25 network, approximately five-six years ago. We were making the transition to a Windows NT system.
Now, contrary to what one might think, every person in the Coast Guard has a job to do, and in order to even break even, the Coast Guard has to get at least eight hours of that person's work out of them a day (less weekends, usually, but not always; let's not even go into duty aboard cutters!)
Let's look into how implementing that new system works: you start with your TTs, the Telecom Techs, who tend to already be understaffed. You need to send them to training for *administrating* the new system even before you have them installing the new boxen. If nobody else in the service knows how to teach others how to run that system, your TTs/SysOps need to be sent to a civilian training center, or you need to somehow compensate them for taking a training course. Microsoft or Novell courses can run upwards of a couple thousand, easilly.
(Keep in mind, that knowing how to administer a system is much, much different from knowing how to TEACH someone to administer a system.)
Now that you have taken a few weeks to send all your TTs to MCSA or MCSE courses and gotten them certified, and meanwhile the systems back at their commands going to hell and back, you can then make the big decision: implement the new system, or train your people in the new system? This is not an easy question, and just saying 'do both at the same time!' doesn't cut it, kemo sabe. Let's say you take some people off their current duties and send them to training before the new system comes in. You just lost the work of those people in their assigned specialty, and in some understaffed commands that is painful.
Now, say they come back and will help out the other users while the new system gets thrown in hurriedly. First off, your TTs are going to be working 24-hour days to get that new system in, they won't be able to help the users. The 'core group' of people you trained before the turnover will not only have to do their work on (very likely) a system experiencing teething pains, they'll have to nursemaid all the rest of the users in using the new system before they can be sent off to training as well. Now, this second batch of training can be spread out over the course of several months, and by then you might have people in the service who can teach them, so you don't have to go out to civilian agencies. However, chances are, these instructors will be full time instructors: they are more people on the service's payroll, either uniformed or DoD employee. Granted, their duties are to train, train, and train some more, but they are another expense, especially if you had to send them off into civilian world get trained as instructors, and even more so if you have to train someone to take over the work they were doing before becoming instructors.
Now, let's go back to your point about just changing the back end. In this case, that's not really an option. Sure, you could transfer all the servers to Linux boxen running some version of sendmail, but you still have to deal with Outlook and it's miserable foibles. And you still have to train your TTs in administrating *nixie-boxen and sendmail servers. Oh, and you might have to train them to be programmers too, because unless you shell out the bucks for a commercial sendmail implementation, there won't be any reliable support they can fall back on. (Insert off-topic rant about problems with open-source, non-commercial solutions HERE.) =) Or you could train up some TTs or hire some consultants to do your programming for you, which is MORE cost, MORE training, MORE mouths to feed. Maybe not as much as if the whole system was shifted over entirely to a new system, but still very much non-trivial. And then you'll have to do the rollover to the new system, which will mean more 24-hour days for your already haggard TTs. For The Good Of The Country notwithstanding, you have just made your TTs both very highly trained and very highly miserable, which means they will be very highly inclined to trade in their fatigues for business suits and a very stable and comfortable life for their families which doesn't mean moving to some new and exotic hellhole every four years.
The military does not have some magic source of funds that renews itself every pay cycle. That money has to come from somewhere. The growing trend these days is to do "more with less:" more work with less personnel. "More with less" means, actually, "more work with less trained personnel." These are people who have to be trained for their job; I would not expect a bosun's mate fresh out of BM school to be able to run the armory at a base, neither would I expect a gunny's mate to do the deckwork aboard a CG cutter. And that training is also a non-trivial expense, since you have dedicated training facilities, dedicated material, and dedicated instructors, PLUS you're still paying the student his regular wages, AND feeding everyone involved!
I don't know how it is for the combat arms, but for us REMFs and other non-combat personnel (marine inspector, in my case) you start kissing away any semblance of a stable life. Which is all well and good if you're risking your life for your country and achieving something that is worthwhile, but crawling through a double-bottomed tanker at 2AM with a 'Dear John' letter waiting for you at home just so the tanker inspection can be done that night, and so you can do the same thing but *twice* the next day.... Well, let's just say that it wears on you. I'm sure those TT's whom you have just consigned to Military Server Room Hell for a couple of weeks are going to start thinking that "more with less" sucks rocks. =)
This is why you will not see a turn-over to a new system more than maybe once a decade or two: that is, enough time for the people in charge to forget how expensive, time-consuming, problem-ridden the last one was, and for the newer technology to be glitzy and sparkly enough. The Air Force (and the other services) have already devoted gobs of manpower, time, and money into moving over to the new Windows systems. They're not going to say 'This was a bad idea,' and adopt penguin-boxen all around, or any other kindof system. They're going to tough throuh with what they have as best as they can, because they've already put in a lot of effort into training and hardware (and software, too, considering MS's pricing schemes.)
It's much more akin to the monomyth, where Flynn, the flawed hero, must go into the Underworld and retrieve the elixer to bring life back to the kingdom.
In this case, to get the evidence to smackdown on Dillinger. (No nookie for Flynn, though, "Atomic John" Sheridan already got his squeeze. =)
Indeed. Little do people know that the movies TRON and THE MATRIX occur in the same universe.
Isn't it obvious? After all... the Matrix must be the Tron game-world using a GeForceXXVI.
Thank you! I'm very glad to hear that, actually. Even if we can't build the Saturn V anymore, there's significant historical interest in those documents.
And, yes. Copious popups. My screen was half red courtesy of SpyBlocker. =6 An interesting article, though. =)
Terrifyingly enough, Ron Jeremy is up there. In fact, he tends to beat out Kevin Bacon.
It's because Ron was in Reindeer Games and Ronin. I think those two movies had more "big name" actors than any other (recent) movie.
Unfortunately, you won't be able to. At least for the Saturn V.
Y'see, the blueprints and engineering docs for the Saturn V were stored on microfilm. Time passed and, unfortunately, the ability to build the Saturn V was lost -- financial reasons, mostly. The aerospace industry had been given the financial equivalent of 100cc's of adrenaline with JFK's "space race." By the time the Apollo program ended, we were already unable to build the Saturn V. (This is why NASA moved on to cheaper, unmanned launches and the Space Shuttle.)
If you really want them, though, I think we can work something out. Supposedly I live a few miles from the Saturn V's plans' final resting place. Legend has it that they are located somewhere in the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, New York City. This is probably incorrect, though. More likely, they were incinerated.
Look, a lot of y'all are ragging on TellarHK for bringing up his troubles with Smoothwall's Richard. I'd just like to point out a couple of things:
o TellarHK already said -- a lot of times -- that there were things he could have done better. That's cool, that's reasonable. I don't hear Richard saying the same thing. Hell, all I've heard about Richard is him saying how if you don't pay the cash your tech support equals nothing.
o The tech support available to admins in this industry is bad enough. When I was still wrangling networks, it could take forever to get support, with some very rare exceptions. Any company that gives shoddy support, or is rude to potential customers, has NO CONCEPT of what it means to deal with people. Nothing pisses off an admin than shoddy support for an otherwise good product. And being told 'pay the money for it!' is all well and good, but if the person's been rude to you and your server room crew, what's the garauntee that they'll be nice and polite after you dump nnn dollars into their account?
o Quick lesson in marketing: how do you get your foot in the door of a potential customer? You respect them. I threw out more unsolicited junk mail when I was a netadmin than I care to remember. But when I was evaluating software for implementation, I got more from a reasonably courteous, polite tech-guy or sales-guy than anything else. I just would not want to deal with a company who would put rude, obnoxious people on their phones to talk with me. (And before you ask, yes, I *was* polite to them through and through, even when they were being less than polite.) Now, compare it to what Smoothwall has: the *author* of the software and one of the top honchos at the company is mouthing off potential users. The hell?! This just is not done in the real world, people. At least, it's not done if the company wants to attract any customers. At the very least, I'd expect any employee who has a vested interest in that company to get Richard OFF of IRC and OFF the phones and OUT of the public eye. Put someone who can deal with people on the front lines.
o That brings me to this point: open source software is on a tightrope as it is. It's bad enough that OSS has no marketing budget to go against commercial closed-source software producers. The only thing that OSS has to go on get accepted is that it's free, and the support you get from the software authors. I am all for commercial OSS projects. But actions like Richard's ruin the reputation of all OSS projects. If Smoothwall was the first OSS implementation a company made, and Richard was even half as rude as he is to most people, then I garauntee you, that company will NOT ever implement anything open-source ever again. Why? Because there is no tech support for a commercial, closed-source product that will be rude to a customer, or even to a potential customer.
o "Oh, but TellarHK shouldn't have pushed it! It'd tax my patience, too!" Oh, wah. If you can't handle the heat of doing tech-support and answering sometimes-oddball tech questions, get off the phone or uninstall your IRC client. It's part and parcel of doing tech support. Okay, maybe Richard has answered too many questions, and maybe he's pulling hundred-hour weeks (quite a feat, that, actually) and if he really is and it's all for this product, fine, I'm happy for him, he's to be commended for that much. But if he's using that as his excuse for being rude and demeaning and obnoxious to potential *paying* users, then he's got to lay off dealing with people outside the company and delegate that to someone else, someone who can deal with *people.* I don't care if Richard could hack the Linux kernel to make it self-aware, write up a VWM that's easier than frickin' *Aqua* to use, and by lunch write the killer Linux office suite. If he can't deal with people, *all* people, then he shouldn't be trying to run a commercial enterprise.
o Sales of a software product is all about dealing with other people and convincing them to use your product instead of a competetor's, so that they will pay you and give you their money and you can pay your employees' salaries and have enough to pay the rent yourself. You don't get more customers by routinely alienating them. You don't get people wanting to pay for support if you're rude to them first.
TellarHK didn't do anything to warrant the verbal fusilade from Richard, let alone anything to warrant getting harrassed. Instead of getting TellarHK to say (again!) that he could have handled it better, why can't anyone expend this much effort to get Richard to admit that he's got to chill out and relax and not alienate more of his potential user base?
I just went to his site and checked out Thomas Timberwolf. I haven't laughed so hard at toons in a long time! It's slapstick and silly, and it's classic Chuck Jones. I wish I'd found them sooner! Thank you for the link!
Yes... Chuck will be missed greatly.
I worked in the tech industry for four years with three different shops: two years doing systems admin and help desk, one year doing system admin and helpdesk, and another year doing systems and network admin and helpdesk.
Offhand, I'd say that all three jobs generally sucked rocks.
There were good things. I had some good managers/bosses in my first job. But the hard part in that job was dealing with the implementation of a new order fulfillment system. When you get rollouts or implementations, the best advice I can give is RUN. They're unpleasant at best, because you have not only your IT department working on it, but EVERY OTHER DEPARTMENT working on it. And it's never a matter of your own department taking up the reins and saying 'We'll handle it!' Oh, no, nobody wants that. Finance, Marketing, Operations, EVERYBODY wants a say in the new system. It's like feeding time at the shark tank! And guess who's the halibut....
I can't say I've been very happy with any tech job I've been in. Most have had very depressing instances, frustrations, and the like. You have to be a very special kind of person to enjoy working in IT. (And if you are one of those people who say, "I thrive on stress!" I'd like to see you after two years of doing helpdesk and answering the phone with, 'How may I help you?' and discovering that it's ANOTHER person who can't print or turn on their computer.)
Ironically, I was glad I was downsized from my latest job; nothing like a kick in the keister to go and do what you feel more comfortable doing, what you WANT to do. Of course, it's sink or swim, but you have to always believe that it's worth it.
I am one of the many tech-workers who was slammed by the dot-bomb/tech-crash/whatever. Basically, I was told one Friday morning before the holidays, that I was supernumerary to the needs of the firm and had to be laid off.
A lot of people have taken the opportunity of the slump in the tech-market and loosing their jobs to take a good serious look at themselves and what they're doing with their lives. Sure, they were making six-figure salaries, were getting company cars, on top of the world, and now, they're flipping burgers or something else in a much lower income bracket.
But think about it. With everything going on in the world, after the September 11th attacks (yes, someone was going to bring it up eventually, it might as well be me) a lot of people have been looking back on those 'salad days' and asking themselves if this was really what they wanted.
For four years I've been involved with IT work, and as you can tell from my (still-unchanged) sig, it was wearing on me greatly. Then there was September 11th, and then I got laid off, and the economy went to hell.... Well, we all know the state of things now. But I took a look at what I was doing, and instead of looking for another help desk/net admin/sysad job which would rip my mind out through my nose even more, I'm taking what I've saved, going for a loan, and changing careers to something I *like* doing.
Loosing your job can be bad, really bad, but if you're financially careful, it can be the kick in the keister you need to get out of a job you don't like and into a career that you're better equipped, emotionally and psychologically, for.
anon.penet.fi was primarilly shut down as part of the incidents involving a critic of Scientology. Said critic used the anonymous service to post the OTVII materia to alt.religion.scientology, and the Co$ prodded and hounded the guy who ran anon.penent.fi to produce the name of the person responsible. He refused.
The incidents of spammers and child porn allegations (none of which were ever proven) were just nails in the coffin. It would not suprise me if the fellow was subjected to the policy of "fair game" to be set up, battered, and eventually run into the ground.
Wow. Was this a ZDNet article... or a /. post? =)