I've never looked at TRON as a "John the Baptist" figure, as there is no evidence to suggest that TRON expected a user to become incarnate as a program, while John the Baptist seemed to understand the nature of Jesus.
And I'm not quite sure of the panthestic nature of the users either... sure, there were many users, but the programs almost always refer to them being a collective... kind of the way Christians refer to God as being one, even though he is also a "Trinity."
I agree with your assesment however. I don't think that the storytellers were deliberately trying to push any particular religion on the viewer, but rather that they identified the fact the the "Christ Story" has nearly universal appeal (hence there are similar stories in many world religions and mythologies [Moses, Hercules, etc.])
You are quite right. It is a classic story, and one that appeals to the human psyche (ir)regardless of the exact method of it's telling or the factual details.
Right. RAM's exclamation resulted in his realization that Flynn was a user... moments later, RAM died.
But RAM was an Open Source program, and was integrated/resurrected into the TCP/IP stack for FreeBSD. That was fine and dandy... until Microsoft integrated the BSD TCP/IP stack into Win2k, and then RAM started wishing that he had died on the game grid.
Ahem. I'm not a flaming liberal. I'm a flaming libertarian, thank you. I was not whining about our representative republic, or the fact that Bush is president. I'd rather have Bush in the WH then Gore any day.
Don't blame me if the Gore/Bush demographic happens to follow the same basic borders as those who "get" technology and those who don't.
I live in Alabama, where few corporations understand technology to begin with. Down here, they don't care if you "love it", just as long as you have a degree or a certification.
Getting my MCSE got me a 20% raise (proving that you don't even need to use a Windows OS in order to pass the tests.)
Forever War vs Starship Troopers
on
The Forever War
·
· Score: 1
It's interesting that the reviewer brings up Starship Troopers. I read both of these books back to back so that I could compare the two, since they deal with such similar subject matter.
Starship Troopers is certainly written from a more conservative perspective. I remember an uncle of mine letting me borrow a copy when I was 10... he had hoped that I would read it and develop a degree of patriotism that would eventually lead me into the Marines or the Army. I didn't read the book back then because I could see right through him. I waited till my late 20s to read it, after having served 9 years in the Navy.
The Forever War is certainly more liberal, and the message of that book was that "War is Hell." and that blind obedience to the government resulted in centuries of unneeded bloodshed.
I like both books equally well. Both are well written, have powerful messages and are totally enjoyable.
The Starship Troopers movie, however, totally sucked and didn't really touch on the real subject of the book. The book was a political masterpiece expressing Heinlein's point of view. The movie was just about killing a lot of bugs.
Mandrake Update works fine (as of version 8.1) and automatically updates you with security and bug fixes whether you paid for Mandrake's product or just downloaded it from a mirror.
I have a feeling that Ximian is on the way out the door...
The major problem with most of the "voice recognition" solutions is that spoken English is fundamentally different from written English. I would almost venture that one (the written form) is more right-brain symbol oriented whereas the other (spoken) is more left-brain.
Point in case: My above statement sounds psuedo-scientific. I have an excellent grasp of written English, whereas my spoken English usually leaves people wondering how a moran like myself qualified for Mensa.
My suggestion: If you are expecting someone to read your completed work, you should take the extra time to type it manually. It will make your document easier to understand. If you don't believe me, just pick up a transcript from television and see how well the spoken word read from off a page. Yuck.
Bridges are the resulting outcome of construction work.
If two civil engineers wanted to exchange ideas about how to build a good bridge, exchanging plans and blueprints would probably be a good way of doing it.
If two programmers wanted to exchange ideas about how to display a bitmap, exchanging source code would probably be the way to do it.
Or, for those of you in Mensa who need more clarification:
blueprint is to bridge as source code is to object code.
It was the craziest thing...
Somehow, our linux server had crashed... and hard. I was at the end of a 36-hour non-stop debugging section when I was haunted by the Ghost of Operating Systems past.
The server rebooted spontaneously and when it came up... it was sitting at a prompt for PC-DOS 5.0... the first operating system that had ever been installed on this particular machine.
"What the hell?" I said. It was as if some mysterious force had forced the partition table to restore some old data... it was unexplainable. I staired at my can of Red Bull and wondered if drinking twenty of them in an hour might have/warped/ my senses.
It was warped all right... OS/2 Warp! The screen melted away to reveal the OS/2 Presentation Manager! I blew chunks.
When I finally pulled my head out of the trash can, I looked up to see that the screen was at the Windows NT 4.0 logon screen.
I screamed. My hair went white. This was the most frightening thing I had seen.
I ran from the server room... activating the Halon before my ass was out the door.
I never went back... I'll never go back! I CAN'T GO BACK TO WINDOWS!
It's hard to find info on a story as old as that one, but I have tried. Unfortunately, all that I have found are links to articles that no longer appear to be available. Here's one:
http://lwn.net/1999/0909/press.php3
I do not know if GM went ahead with this or not. I simply mentioned it as an example... I haven't been following it enough to know what ever became of it.
Please note:
I did not say that it _WAS_ a dumb question. My inclusion of a question mark indicates that I was asking _IF_ it was a dumb question.... that's up to you to decide.
And what is the world's largest installed base of Windows computers? This isn't an easily answered question for any operating system.
Tell the manager that finding a definitive answer to his question is beyond the scope of your abilities. It's an unanswerable question because there aren't licensing issues with Linux, so tracking that number by per-seat licenses as is done with Windows and other non-free operating systems is not possible.
Then answer his question with some of the many sucessful linux conversions that HAVE taken place. Burlington coat factory, General Motors, City Governments, China.
Talk about the NSA developing security for Linux.
You aren't going to win a numbers game because the free availability of Linux means that it can be installed many times over without a distributor being able to track the numbers.
I can download my favorite Linux distro and install it to hundreds of PCs without anyone outside the company knowing those figures. With MS products, they can track the licensing down to every copy in use at any business. Therefore, MS will always win the numbers game.
Defending our infrastructure.
on
A New Kind of War
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
One of the first things that the U.S. Government is going to need to do is to go on an offensive against individuals who are writing virus code and propogating it on the internet.
This type of act is, at it's core, a terrorist act and could contribute to the confusion surrounding other events.
Imagine if a particularly nasty computer virus had been released on September 11th... even if it had nothing to do with the actual attack, it would have contributed greatly to the feeling of helplessness that so many of us experienced that day.
It's not really that bad of a "dirty trick" since an 1Ghz Pentium Processor and a 1Ghz Athlon Processor are not exactly equal... but because they are both "1Ghz" they ARE equal in the minds of many consumers.
Benchmarks usually place the like-clockspeeded Athlon at slightly faster then it's Intel competitor... but it becomes hard to market that.
Hiding the clock speed from the BIOS though... going a bit too far.
I "E-book" technology had existed during Ben Franklin's time, do you really think that a library would have been possible?
How do build a library out of books that expire after the first reading?
I'm sorry... but the whole concept of the "ebook" just pisses me off. Adobe has reprints of PUBLIC DOMAIN books where they have had the nerve to add a license statement that says you can't even read the damn thing out loud!
Slashdot Mirror
You can tell how influential someone is by both the negative and the positive viewpoints that people have around that person.
Think of the first thing that comes to mind when you hear:
Bill Gates
RMS
ESR
That's three names that evoke a strong response (either negative or positive) and all three have a measure of influence.
I've never looked at TRON as a "John the Baptist" figure, as there is no evidence to suggest that TRON expected a user to become incarnate as a program, while John the Baptist seemed to understand the nature of Jesus.
And I'm not quite sure of the panthestic nature of the users either... sure, there were many users, but the programs almost always refer to them being a collective... kind of the way Christians refer to God as being one, even though he is also a "Trinity."
I agree with your assesment however. I don't think that the storytellers were deliberately trying to push any particular religion on the viewer, but rather that they identified the fact the the "Christ Story" has nearly universal appeal (hence there are similar stories in many world religions and mythologies [Moses, Hercules, etc.])
You are quite right. It is a classic story, and one that appeals to the human psyche (ir)regardless of the exact method of it's telling or the factual details.
Right. RAM's exclamation resulted in his realization that Flynn was a user... moments later, RAM died.
But RAM was an Open Source program, and was integrated/resurrected into the TCP/IP stack for FreeBSD. That was fine and dandy... until Microsoft integrated the BSD TCP/IP stack into Win2k, and then RAM started wishing that he had died on the game grid.
My reference of "Open Source / Free OS" had more to do with spyware in general then with Netscape. Take Microsoft's Windows Media Player for example.
Yeah. UI is about it. My preference for Konqueror vs Mozilla has a lot to do with the nice antialiased fonts.
Then my adoptive parent and my real parent are both asian protitutes?
Weird...
Just another reason to use Konqueror and an Open Source / Free OS.
Flynn=Jesus Christ
According to the New Testament, Jesus was God... then he became Human so that through his sacrifice, all mankind would be saved.
According to Tron, Flynn was a User... then he became a Program, and by his sacrifice, all the user-created Programs were "saved".
Was this parallel on deliberate, or simply coincidental?
The parent comment is not a troll.
In reference to your sig....
isn't it closer to 186,282 miles per second?
Ahem. I'm not a flaming liberal. I'm a flaming libertarian, thank you. I was not whining about our representative republic, or the fact that Bush is president. I'd rather have Bush in the WH then Gore any day.
Don't blame me if the Gore/Bush demographic happens to follow the same basic borders as those who "get" technology and those who don't.
It depends on your market.
I live in Alabama, where few corporations understand technology to begin with. Down here, they don't care if you "love it", just as long as you have a degree or a certification.
Getting my MCSE got me a 20% raise (proving that you don't even need to use a Windows OS in order to pass the tests.)
Sure, there are some companies that "get it." but in those parts of the country where most of the people voted for Bush, a degree is your #1 tool to making money.
It's interesting that the reviewer brings up Starship Troopers. I read both of these books back to back so that I could compare the two, since they deal with such similar subject matter.
Starship Troopers is certainly written from a more conservative perspective. I remember an uncle of mine letting me borrow a copy when I was 10... he had hoped that I would read it and develop a degree of patriotism that would eventually lead me into the Marines or the Army. I didn't read the book back then because I could see right through him. I waited till my late 20s to read it, after having served 9 years in the Navy.
The Forever War is certainly more liberal, and the message of that book was that "War is Hell." and that blind obedience to the government resulted in centuries of unneeded bloodshed.
I like both books equally well. Both are well written, have powerful messages and are totally enjoyable.
The Starship Troopers movie, however, totally sucked and didn't really touch on the real subject of the book. The book was a political masterpiece expressing Heinlein's point of view. The movie was just about killing a lot of bugs.
Mandrake Update works fine (as of version 8.1) and automatically updates you with security and bug fixes whether you paid for Mandrake's product or just downloaded it from a mirror.
I have a feeling that Ximian is on the way out the door...
The major problem with most of the "voice recognition" solutions is that spoken English is fundamentally different from written English. I would almost venture that one (the written form) is more right-brain symbol oriented whereas the other (spoken) is more left-brain.
Point in case: My above statement sounds psuedo-scientific. I have an excellent grasp of written English, whereas my spoken English usually leaves people wondering how a moran like myself qualified for Mensa.
My suggestion: If you are expecting someone to read your completed work, you should take the extra time to type it manually. It will make your document easier to understand. If you don't believe me, just pick up a transcript from television and see how well the spoken word read from off a page. Yuck.
Bridges are the resulting outcome of construction work.
If two civil engineers wanted to exchange ideas about how to build a good bridge, exchanging plans and blueprints would probably be a good way of doing it.
If two programmers wanted to exchange ideas about how to display a bitmap, exchanging source code would probably be the way to do it.
Or, for those of you in Mensa who need more clarification:
blueprint is to bridge as source code is to object code.
It was the craziest thing... /warped/ my senses.
Somehow, our linux server had crashed... and hard. I was at the end of a 36-hour non-stop debugging section when I was haunted by the Ghost of Operating Systems past.
The server rebooted spontaneously and when it came up... it was sitting at a prompt for PC-DOS 5.0... the first operating system that had ever been installed on this particular machine.
"What the hell?" I said. It was as if some mysterious force had forced the partition table to restore some old data... it was unexplainable. I staired at my can of Red Bull and wondered if drinking twenty of them in an hour might have
It was warped all right... OS/2 Warp! The screen melted away to reveal the OS/2 Presentation Manager! I blew chunks.
When I finally pulled my head out of the trash can, I looked up to see that the screen was at the Windows NT 4.0 logon screen.
I screamed. My hair went white. This was the most frightening thing I had seen.
I ran from the server room... activating the Halon before my ass was out the door.
I never went back... I'll never go back! I CAN'T GO BACK TO WINDOWS!
General Motors and Linux.
It's hard to find info on a story as old as that one, but I have tried. Unfortunately, all that I have found are links to articles that no longer appear to be available. Here's one:
http://lwn.net/1999/0909/press.php3
I do not know if GM went ahead with this or not. I simply mentioned it as an example... I haven't been following it enough to know what ever became of it.
Please note:
I did not say that it _WAS_ a dumb question. My inclusion of a question mark indicates that I was asking _IF_ it was a dumb question.... that's up to you to decide.
And what is the world's largest installed base of Windows computers? This isn't an easily answered question for any operating system.
Tell the manager that finding a definitive answer to his question is beyond the scope of your abilities. It's an unanswerable question because there aren't licensing issues with Linux, so tracking that number by per-seat licenses as is done with Windows and other non-free operating systems is not possible.
Then answer his question with some of the many sucessful linux conversions that HAVE taken place. Burlington coat factory, General Motors, City Governments, China.
Talk about the NSA developing security for Linux.
You aren't going to win a numbers game because the free availability of Linux means that it can be installed many times over without a distributor being able to track the numbers.
I can download my favorite Linux distro and install it to hundreds of PCs without anyone outside the company knowing those figures. With MS products, they can track the licensing down to every copy in use at any business. Therefore, MS will always win the numbers game.
Open Sourced Palantiri drivers would be a very bad idea.
Ahem.
Those things have already been done.
One of the first things that the U.S. Government is going to need to do is to go on an offensive against individuals who are writing virus code and propogating it on the internet.
This type of act is, at it's core, a terrorist act and could contribute to the confusion surrounding other events.
Imagine if a particularly nasty computer virus had been released on September 11th... even if it had nothing to do with the actual attack, it would have contributed greatly to the feeling of helplessness that so many of us experienced that day.
It's not really that bad of a "dirty trick" since an 1Ghz Pentium Processor and a 1Ghz Athlon Processor are not exactly equal... but because they are both "1Ghz" they ARE equal in the minds of many consumers.
Benchmarks usually place the like-clockspeeded Athlon at slightly faster then it's Intel competitor... but it becomes hard to market that.
Hiding the clock speed from the BIOS though... going a bit too far.
I "E-book" technology had existed during Ben Franklin's time, do you really think that a library would have been possible?
How do build a library out of books that expire after the first reading?
I'm sorry... but the whole concept of the "ebook" just pisses me off. Adobe has reprints of PUBLIC DOMAIN books where they have had the nerve to add a license statement that says you can't even read the damn thing out loud!