Now, I am tempted not to take this at face value, because there are good reasons why CCDs should essentially never have the dynamic range possible with film. (Essentially: film responds to light non-linearly, such that x photons hitting your camera does not equal the same amount of "brightness" on your image independent of how many previous photons have been registered. CCDs basiclaly are linear in response -- x photons equals x number of counts, modulo factors of gain, etc. -- up to the point where the number of photons registered is a significant fraction (like say 1/2) of the maximum well depth.
The image sensor in the 1Ds is a CMOS sensor, not a CCD. This may be merely a nitpick, since both sensors likely measure photons linearly, but there *is* a difference between CMOS sensors and CCDs.
Of course, you can always get your digital images printed to slides, if it's that important and use the digitally-created slides in an old-fashioned slide projector.
What kind of crack have you been smoking and where did you get it? Tell your dealer he's been selling you shit that makes you fucking stupid.
While it's clear that US foreign policy is most often driven by economic factors (the price of oil, the cost of clothing and electronics, etc.), the case against Iraq is unfortunately pretty clear cut. Yes, the US made Saddam the successful monster he is today. But that doesn't mean that the correct path to take today is to meekly withdraw from the world stage because of that mistake, no matter how egregious it was.
Saddam has been proven to be developing weapons of mass distruction. Those include, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. When the UNSCOM inspectors left Iraq, it was clear that they had found and destroyed a lot of equipment used to further those ends and they seized a lot of documentation proving that the equipment they destroyed was being used for those ends. However, UNSCOM inspectors knew they weren't seeing everything and it's been several years since UNSCOM withdrew.
Saddam Hussein is a man who will clearly stop at nothing to achieve the level of power he desires. Yes, it's largely the US's fault he is where he is today. That means it's the US's responsibility to do everything possible to strip him of his power or to force him out.
Would the US prefer to use peaceable means to force Saddam out? Absolutely? Does the US relish the thought of killing more Iraqis? Absolutely not.
By the way, Hitler killed Jews, homosexuals and intellectuals by the millions and he did it on purpose. While the US war against terror will most likely end up killing some civilians, the US is doing everything it can to minimize the number of innocent non-combatants who are killed in military actions. That's a huge difference. The US tries to avoid killing civilians. Hitler went out of his way to kill civilians. If you can't see the magnitude of difference there, then you must have suffered some brain damage from a bad hit of whatever shit it is you smoke.
If ever there was a network born to show BattleBots, it's TechTV. Something tells me the budgets wouldn't be as high, but that might be a good thing. There wouldn't be as much impetus to tart the show up so much just to draw in the viewers required to pay back the budget.
Personally, I liked the original Robot Wars UK show the best. I did think the house robots had a little too much direct impact on the outcome, but I liked the concept of having qualifying rounds where the bots had to overcome challenges, followed by the individual combat rounds.
Maybe what's needed is some new thinking, like team robot combat. Maybe a capture-the-flag sort of thing. You could have robots optimized for offense and defense, which might add some interesting twists to a show. The problem would be that the costs to assemble an entire team of robots would be drastically more than for an individual robot or two.
Sorry, I was talking about the discussion threads here, not the article itself. However, the article was far too short and superfluous to truly address the ethical and epidemiological repercussions.
The scary part about pig-to-human transplants is the possibility of humans contracting pig viruses through xenotransplants that could mutate and cause widespread disease. Transplant patients have to take medications that suppress their immune systems so their bodies won't reject their new organs. Thus, the possibility of cross-species disease propagation is very real and very scary.
Pigs being bred for transplantation are currently birthed by caesarian section directly into a bath of iodine and kept in a sterile environment from then on. But even so, it's unlikely that such animals are 100% free of pathogens. Anyone who receives a pig organ should understand that they will be considered as much of a disease threat as if they were HIV-positive for the rest of their lives. They are not to have unprotected sex and should not have children.
Excellent points. I haven't been out to hear as many local bands lately as I used to for a variety of reasons, but when I did, I routinely bought CDs from the bands I saw.
Of the music I've been surprised to discover I like, only a tiny percentage was discovered through radio. And that was before all the radio stations in my city became corporatized. These days, even the ones that aren't owned by ClearChannel all sound the same and generally suck.
Listening to live music in small clubs is a lot more fun than listening to radio or CDs, and I've gotten to see some pretty terrific bands that don't get played on the radio. Some of the bands I've seen in crummy clubs have even gone on to become huge radio stars before their record companies burned them out.
Record companies suck. They're killing themselves and taking radio with them.
The company where I work just implemented Cardiff Software'sLiquid Office online forms software, and it only runs on Tomcat. We've had some minor issues getting everything installed and getting Tomcat running, but once it's running, Tomcat has been fine. We've experienced no problems with Tomcat. We're running it on the same box as an IIS-based intranet, an IIS/MS-friendly content manager, and a web-based interface to our document imaging system.
The box I'm running all this on is a dual 933 MHz PIII box with 1.5GB of RAM and four 18GB 15K rpm HDs in a RAID 5 array, running Win2k Server. Performance is downright snappy. LiquidOffice is using LDAP-integration to authenticate users out ActiveDirectory, too.
Would I love to be running all this on Linux or Solaris or HP-UX or whatever, with some sort of high-quality LDAP-based directory instead of Win2k and ActiveDirectory? You're damn skippy I would. I hate Microsoft, but I have a lot of stuff I have to run that I don't get to choose and most of it doesn't yet run on anything except Microsoft.
Any time a company decides it needs to get ten times bigger, it's taking a huge risk. It's certainly possible they'll grow to ten times their current size, but it's not particularly likely in today's economic climate. Investors got drunk on 15-20% returns during the heyday of the Internet bubble, but what we've seen in the last 18 months is that those returns were illusory. Growth (and returns) in the 5-10% range are far more sustainable.
If they want to grow to ten times their current size, they'd better plan on taking at least 10 years to do it.
Go watch it and you'll see
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
what does this movie have to do with minorities?
Think of minorities in election results, not populations. To tell you any more would be spoilers. Are you incapable of going to see this movie?
Read the article at Salon. Micron is being investigated for anticompetitive practices. You don't have to be a monopoly to engage in those kinds of tactics. Coke can engage in anticompetitive practices against Pepsi.
BTW: Antitrust laws don't apply just to monopolies. They apply to any businesses that attempt to control markets in illegal ways. Oligopolies can violate antitrust laws just as well as monopolies. Specifically, they can do so by colluding to artificially raise prices or by agreeing not to compete in specific areas.
Car manufacturers represent an oligopoly. There are relatively few competitors in an industry with a high barrier to entry. If car manufacturers all agree to make some option standard on all cars and raise prices accordingly, that's a violation of antitrust laws. The same thing applies if they all agree to stop offering some feature or option at all.
They withdrew shortly after the standards were being seriously discussed, but (allegedly) not before suggesting certain methods of doing things... which as it turns out they have patents on.
Actually, to my knowledge, nobody has ever alleged that Rambus tried to steer JEDEC towards Rambus-patented technologies. Instead, Rambus remained silent while technologies were being discussed at JEDEC meetings that could infringe on its patents and even amended its patent applications to cover things being discussed at JEDEC meetings. In addition, Rambus didn't bail out of JEDEC until 1996, when its first SDRAM-applicable patents were finally issued.
At one point during a JEDEC meeting, Rambus was asked point-blank if it had any patents pertaining to "two-bank designs." Rambus's representative merely shook his head no. Rambus actually had patent applications pending regarding two-bank designs and the representative who was asked about it knew this. Rambus later attempted to defend its silence on the topic by saying it believed it only needed to disclose patents that had already been issued, not pending ones. JEDEC's president says that Rambus is the only JEDEC member ever to misinterpret the patent rules in this way.
For anybody looking to read the whole unseemly story of Rambus and its unparalleled greed, Fortune Magazine has the definitive article on the subject.
...tivo (in the UK at least) have decided that they, not you control what you record...
Oh, for Pete's sake!
Have you not bothered to read what actually happened with the UK TiVos? There is space on TiVos reserved for sponsored content. TiVo will record that sponsored content to the reserved space on your TiVo if and only if you have nothing else already scheduled to record during that time.
You can ignore the sponsored content quite easily and it goes away by itself after a few days. Honestly, if that's as intrusive as TiVo gets, it's a tradeoff I'm more than willing to make in order to get my PVR fix.
Hey, if you don't mind waiting years to get a show on DVD ("The Simpson's" first season was *just* released on DVD at the end of last year), be my guest. Yes, HBO is putting "Sex and the City," "Oz" and "The Sopranos" on DVD, but you can't get the third season of "The Sopranos" on DVD yet, and probably won't be able to until after the fourth season has aired.
TiVo makes watching TV enjoyable. I can watch what I want when I want. I can skip commercials, too. The Sheryl Crow, Lexus and Francis Ford Coppola stuff does *not* take user space on the TiVo, does *not* take precedence over user-selected source material and is currently *not* mandatory to watch.
If TiVo ever makes ad content mandatory to watch, I'll unplug the damn thing and find something else to do with my time and money. But TV will lose its utility, that's for damn sure.
Certifications are meaningful only in huge companies where the HR dept. sets arbitrary and useless standards. Some places might call you for an interview based on seeing certifications on your resume, but I've never hired anybody or failed to hire someone because of certifications or the lack thereof.
I'm looking for someone with some intelligence (not just book-learning), problem-solving ability, communications skills and when I can get it, experience.
As has been pointed out, it's a buyer's market right now. I posted an ad for an entry-level helpdesk position and got FIVE HUNDRED resumes in response. I'm not exaggerating. The exact number was 513, and that's after throwing out duplicates (some people faxed AND emailed, others responded to the ad twice).
If you're going to school for a CS/CIS/MIS degree or taking certification classes, the best thing you can you do for yourself is to take any IT-related job while you're still in school, even if it's an unpaid internship.
People who've been lured into multi-thousand $$$ training programs by the promise of high-paying IT jobs don't like to hear that advice, but the truth is that you have to start somewhere, and when you don't have experience or connections, you're going to start with a crappy, low-paying helpdesk job until you prove yourself.
Experience with your own home network and lab are a huge plus over the vast majority of people who don't have them, so put any credible experience you have with your home lab on your resume. However, keep in mind that home labs are almost never as screwed-up and difficult to keep running as real-world business networks.
Don't assume that because every upgrade you ever did on your home machines went smoothly that upgrades go smoothly on real-world machines. Hint: They don't. Employers know that people who haven't had their fingers burned with "simple" tasks in real-world IT situations are far more dangerous than those who have. People with experience never take anything for granted. Newbies take stuff for granted all the time. I know I did.
That is why virtually everybody prefers experience over certifications.
The 9th Circuit Court is based in San Francisco and has a reputation for making "surprising" decisions. Attorneys along the west coast routinely scratch their heads at 9th Circuit decisions.
That's not to say their decisions are overturned by the Supreme Court at a rate higher than those of other Circuit courts (I honestly don't know), nor is it to imply that this decision would surprise lawyers everywhere. I haven't even read the decision yet, so I haven't the foggiest notion. I'm just pointing out that if they're off base, this wouldn't be the first time the 9th Circuit Court pulled an inexplicable decision out from under their robes.
I thought Doohan had died a couple of years ago and that was why he'd been left out. Of course, DeForest Kelley is long gone and they still had a facsimile of him in the show.
I'm glad to hear Doohan is still alive, even if he is responsible for quite possibly the worst Scottish accent ever by an actor.
I guess if you flash some dollars and ask nicely the plans could be yours for a song.
Now that would be ironic. It turns out the reason the Buran looks so much like the Space Shuttle Orbiter isn't coincidence. The Russians used plans for NASA's orbiter as the basis for the Buran design.
The Russians are great at getting performance out of cheaper, simpler systems, but there are always tradeoffs. When the Soviets were worried that the A-12 (interceptor version of the SR-71) and the XB-70 (mach 3+ nuclear bomber) might actually go into production, they worked night and day to develop their own mach 3 interceptor.
The result was the MiG-25, which in some configurations can fly at mach 2.83. However, unlike the SR-71/A-12 which were designed to cruise at mach 3, the MiG-25 could only achieve its top speeds at tremendous cost to the aircraft. The plane would run out of fuel in a matter of minutes at that speed and the engines needed to be replaced after a flight reaching that speed.
Yes, the MiG-25 was much cheaper than the A-12, and it was even cheaper than the F-15, which was the USAF's response to the MiG-25, but it's not realistic to expect it to routinely achieve its maximum speed. The American aircraft it was designed to compete against can routinely achieve their top speeds.
Russian ingenuity is real, but there are very good reasons why American aerospace technology costs so much more. Frankly, the Russians aren't as worried about killing people.
Nimda laid waste to two sites on my dozen-site WAN. My employee in Indianapolis drove out to Cincinnati to clean up the Nimda mess and install better antivirus software, and before he was done there, the Indianapolis office got hit hard by Nimda.
We were in the process of converting company-wide from consumer-grade antivirus (bundled with most of our PCs by the manufacturer) to corporate-grade AV software that was centrally managed. The Nimda outbreak accelerated our move to the corporate AV suite. Now that I have that corporate AV suite and a virus-scanning email gateway that automatically blocks most executable attachments, I'm much more secure, but I'm far from completely immune.
My poor employee from Indianapolis pulled a 36 hour shift expunging Nimda and I have friends who also pulled multi-day shifts cleaning up Nimda.
Anybody who thinks Nimda was overhyped is a jackass.
Does anybody besides me have fond memories of another EA game for the C-64 called "Worms?"?
Up to six players could play. Essentially, the game was played on a hexagonal grid. Each player's "worm" would start out from the origin point at the center of the screen. When a worm encountered a new situation, it would pause and wait for the player to pick a direction for it to go. From then on, the worm would remember that command and repeat it.
At the beginning of a game, the worms are constantly pausing and waiting for instructions, but after a few runs through the order, the worms are self-guiding for a while. As worms travel through the points on the hex grid, the points turn into vertices. A worm claims a vertex by completing all the paths into and out of the vertex. A worm dies when it heads into a vertex and completes it without an out path, or when it collides with another worm at a vertex.
At the end of the game, when all the worms are dead, the player whose worm has claimed the most vertices wins.
I thought it was a pretty cool game and I've never encountered anything like it since.
The author of the article points out in great detail how similar Lucas's series is to that of E. E. "Doc" Smith's classic space opera Lensman series. However, he then states that while Lucas's dialogue was unpronounceable by his actors, Smith's words were unreadable.
Perhaps I need to go back and re-read the Lensman series again. I haven't read it in about 20 years, but the last time I read the series, I thought it was corny fun. It's truly cheesy in many ways, but it's completely unpretentious about its cheesiness, in spite of the grandiosity of the plot. A space opera even occurs within one of the books as a form of entertainment for the characters.
Regardless of the criticism of both series, I think both series represent good fun when they're at their best. Lucas's series definitely has more downs than ups so far, but the ups have been terrific.
I believe the article missed the real point in its attempt to expose Lucas's mythology pretensions. All great stories are simply retellings of the same seven basic plot types. It should come as no surprise that one can find parallels between Lucas's work and stories from mythology or from the recent dimestore pulp magazines and novels. Lucas is no great screenwriter, but Star Wars *does* borrow heavily from many other influences. If he stole from pulp, then he stole from mythology because pulp stole from mythology.
Shakespeare certainly didn't make up any of the stories he told. Virtually all of his plays were based on well-known stories of the time. His genius was in stripping the stories to their essential themes and then dressing them up again. Shakespeare's stuff is contemporary today for that reason.
The ancient Greek playwrights basically told the exact same stories over and over, yet we still regard Sophocles as one of the greats because his version of Oedipus Rex stood the test of time.
The greatness of Lucas's work isn't whether it's original or where it draws its influences. It's in how quickly the audience can immerse itself in the story and how enjoyable and memorable the storytelling ultimately is. SW:ANH, while clunky at times, is a remarkable piece of storytelling because it's fun and the audience can't help but be swept up in its infectious enthusiasm. SW:TESB is an even better piece of storytelling because it explores the characters in greater detail and allows for more gray area, rather than drawing the characters as pure archetypes. Lucas's other efforts to date have been decidedly second-rate compared to those two movies, but that shouldn't give critics carte blanche to savage his work wholesale.
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Now, I am tempted not to take this at face value, because there are good reasons why CCDs should essentially never have the dynamic range possible with film. (Essentially: film responds to light non-linearly, such that x photons hitting your camera does not equal the same amount of "brightness" on your image independent of how many previous photons have been registered. CCDs basiclaly are linear in response -- x photons equals x number of counts, modulo factors of gain, etc. -- up to the point where the number of photons registered is a significant fraction (like say 1/2) of the maximum well depth.
The image sensor in the 1Ds is a CMOS sensor, not a CCD. This may be merely a nitpick, since both sensors likely measure photons linearly, but there *is* a difference between CMOS sensors and CCDs.
Of course, you can always get your digital images printed to slides, if it's that important and use the digitally-created slides in an old-fashioned slide projector.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster...
Oh, never mind.
What kind of crack have you been smoking and where did you get it? Tell your dealer he's been selling you shit that makes you fucking stupid.
While it's clear that US foreign policy is most often driven by economic factors (the price of oil, the cost of clothing and electronics, etc.), the case against Iraq is unfortunately pretty clear cut. Yes, the US made Saddam the successful monster he is today. But that doesn't mean that the correct path to take today is to meekly withdraw from the world stage because of that mistake, no matter how egregious it was.
Saddam has been proven to be developing weapons of mass distruction. Those include, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. When the UNSCOM inspectors left Iraq, it was clear that they had found and destroyed a lot of equipment used to further those ends and they seized a lot of documentation proving that the equipment they destroyed was being used for those ends. However, UNSCOM inspectors knew they weren't seeing everything and it's been several years since UNSCOM withdrew.
Saddam Hussein is a man who will clearly stop at nothing to achieve the level of power he desires. Yes, it's largely the US's fault he is where he is today. That means it's the US's responsibility to do everything possible to strip him of his power or to force him out.
Would the US prefer to use peaceable means to force Saddam out? Absolutely? Does the US relish the thought of killing more Iraqis? Absolutely not.
By the way, Hitler killed Jews, homosexuals and intellectuals by the millions and he did it on purpose. While the US war against terror will most likely end up killing some civilians, the US is doing everything it can to minimize the number of innocent non-combatants who are killed in military actions. That's a huge difference. The US tries to avoid killing civilians. Hitler went out of his way to kill civilians. If you can't see the magnitude of difference there, then you must have suffered some brain damage from a bad hit of whatever shit it is you smoke.
If ever there was a network born to show BattleBots, it's TechTV. Something tells me the budgets wouldn't be as high, but that might be a good thing. There wouldn't be as much impetus to tart the show up so much just to draw in the viewers required to pay back the budget.
Personally, I liked the original Robot Wars UK show the best. I did think the house robots had a little too much direct impact on the outcome, but I liked the concept of having qualifying rounds where the bots had to overcome challenges, followed by the individual combat rounds.
Maybe what's needed is some new thinking, like team robot combat. Maybe a capture-the-flag sort of thing. You could have robots optimized for offense and defense, which might add some interesting twists to a show. The problem would be that the costs to assemble an entire team of robots would be drastically more than for an individual robot or two.
Mine worked okay with 65495,0 but 65497,0 blew it out of the water.
Sorry, I was talking about the discussion threads here, not the article itself. However, the article was far too short and superfluous to truly address the ethical and epidemiological repercussions.
Anybody who watches Frontline on PBS has already seen a lengthy and incredibly in-depth story about the future of xenotransplantation.
The scary part about pig-to-human transplants is the possibility of humans contracting pig viruses through xenotransplants that could mutate and cause widespread disease. Transplant patients have to take medications that suppress their immune systems so their bodies won't reject their new organs. Thus, the possibility of cross-species disease propagation is very real and very scary.
Pigs being bred for transplantation are currently birthed by caesarian section directly into a bath of iodine and kept in a sterile environment from then on. But even so, it's unlikely that such animals are 100% free of pathogens. Anyone who receives a pig organ should understand that they will be considered as much of a disease threat as if they were HIV-positive for the rest of their lives. They are not to have unprotected sex and should not have children.
It's scary stuff and not to be taken lightly.
Excellent points. I haven't been out to hear as many local bands lately as I used to for a variety of reasons, but when I did, I routinely bought CDs from the bands I saw.
Of the music I've been surprised to discover I like, only a tiny percentage was discovered through radio. And that was before all the radio stations in my city became corporatized. These days, even the ones that aren't owned by ClearChannel all sound the same and generally suck.
Listening to live music in small clubs is a lot more fun than listening to radio or CDs, and I've gotten to see some pretty terrific bands that don't get played on the radio. Some of the bands I've seen in crummy clubs have even gone on to become huge radio stars before their record companies burned them out.
Record companies suck. They're killing themselves and taking radio with them.
The company where I work just implemented Cardiff Software's Liquid Office online forms software, and it only runs on Tomcat. We've had some minor issues getting everything installed and getting Tomcat running, but once it's running, Tomcat has been fine. We've experienced no problems with Tomcat. We're running it on the same box as an IIS-based intranet, an IIS/MS-friendly content manager, and a web-based interface to our document imaging system.
The box I'm running all this on is a dual 933 MHz PIII box with 1.5GB of RAM and four 18GB 15K rpm HDs in a RAID 5 array, running Win2k Server. Performance is downright snappy. LiquidOffice is using LDAP-integration to authenticate users out ActiveDirectory, too.
Would I love to be running all this on Linux or Solaris or HP-UX or whatever, with some sort of high-quality LDAP-based directory instead of Win2k and ActiveDirectory? You're damn skippy I would. I hate Microsoft, but I have a lot of stuff I have to run that I don't get to choose and most of it doesn't yet run on anything except Microsoft.
Ten, tops.
Any time a company decides it needs to get ten times bigger, it's taking a huge risk. It's certainly possible they'll grow to ten times their current size, but it's not particularly likely in today's economic climate. Investors got drunk on 15-20% returns during the heyday of the Internet bubble, but what we've seen in the last 18 months is that those returns were illusory. Growth (and returns) in the 5-10% range are far more sustainable.
If they want to grow to ten times their current size, they'd better plan on taking at least 10 years to do it.
what does this movie have to do with minorities?
Think of minorities in election results, not populations. To tell you any more would be spoilers. Are you incapable of going to see this movie?
FWIW, I thought it was very good.
Read the article at Salon. Micron is being investigated for anticompetitive practices. You don't have to be a monopoly to engage in those kinds of tactics. Coke can engage in anticompetitive practices against Pepsi.
BTW: Antitrust laws don't apply just to monopolies. They apply to any businesses that attempt to control markets in illegal ways. Oligopolies can violate antitrust laws just as well as monopolies. Specifically, they can do so by colluding to artificially raise prices or by agreeing not to compete in specific areas.
Car manufacturers represent an oligopoly. There are relatively few competitors in an industry with a high barrier to entry. If car manufacturers all agree to make some option standard on all cars and raise prices accordingly, that's a violation of antitrust laws. The same thing applies if they all agree to stop offering some feature or option at all.
They withdrew shortly after the standards were being seriously discussed, but (allegedly) not before suggesting certain methods of doing things... which as it turns out they have patents on.
Actually, to my knowledge, nobody has ever alleged that Rambus tried to steer JEDEC towards Rambus-patented technologies. Instead, Rambus remained silent while technologies were being discussed at JEDEC meetings that could infringe on its patents and even amended its patent applications to cover things being discussed at JEDEC meetings. In addition, Rambus didn't bail out of JEDEC until 1996, when its first SDRAM-applicable patents were finally issued.
At one point during a JEDEC meeting, Rambus was asked point-blank if it had any patents pertaining to "two-bank designs." Rambus's representative merely shook his head no. Rambus actually had patent applications pending regarding two-bank designs and the representative who was asked about it knew this. Rambus later attempted to defend its silence on the topic by saying it believed it only needed to disclose patents that had already been issued, not pending ones. JEDEC's president says that Rambus is the only JEDEC member ever to misinterpret the patent rules in this way.
For anybody looking to read the whole unseemly story of Rambus and its unparalleled greed, Fortune Magazine has the definitive article on the subject.
Oh, for Pete's sake!
Have you not bothered to read what actually happened with the UK TiVos? There is space on TiVos reserved for sponsored content. TiVo will record that sponsored content to the reserved space on your TiVo if and only if you have nothing else already scheduled to record during that time.
You can ignore the sponsored content quite easily and it goes away by itself after a few days. Honestly, if that's as intrusive as TiVo gets, it's a tradeoff I'm more than willing to make in order to get my PVR fix.
Hey, if you don't mind waiting years to get a show on DVD ("The Simpson's" first season was *just* released on DVD at the end of last year), be my guest. Yes, HBO is putting "Sex and the City," "Oz" and "The Sopranos" on DVD, but you can't get the third season of "The Sopranos" on DVD yet, and probably won't be able to until after the fourth season has aired.
TiVo makes watching TV enjoyable. I can watch what I want when I want. I can skip commercials, too. The Sheryl Crow, Lexus and Francis Ford Coppola stuff does *not* take user space on the TiVo, does *not* take precedence over user-selected source material and is currently *not* mandatory to watch.
If TiVo ever makes ad content mandatory to watch, I'll unplug the damn thing and find something else to do with my time and money. But TV will lose its utility, that's for damn sure.
Certifications are meaningful only in huge companies where the HR dept. sets arbitrary and useless standards. Some places might call you for an interview based on seeing certifications on your resume, but I've never hired anybody or failed to hire someone because of certifications or the lack thereof.
I'm looking for someone with some intelligence (not just book-learning), problem-solving ability, communications skills and when I can get it, experience.
As has been pointed out, it's a buyer's market right now. I posted an ad for an entry-level helpdesk position and got FIVE HUNDRED resumes in response. I'm not exaggerating. The exact number was 513, and that's after throwing out duplicates (some people faxed AND emailed, others responded to the ad twice).
If you're going to school for a CS/CIS/MIS degree or taking certification classes, the best thing you can you do for yourself is to take any IT-related job while you're still in school, even if it's an unpaid internship.
People who've been lured into multi-thousand $$$ training programs by the promise of high-paying IT jobs don't like to hear that advice, but the truth is that you have to start somewhere, and when you don't have experience or connections, you're going to start with a crappy, low-paying helpdesk job until you prove yourself.
Experience with your own home network and lab are a huge plus over the vast majority of people who don't have them, so put any credible experience you have with your home lab on your resume. However, keep in mind that home labs are almost never as screwed-up and difficult to keep running as real-world business networks.
Don't assume that because every upgrade you ever did on your home machines went smoothly that upgrades go smoothly on real-world machines. Hint: They don't. Employers know that people who haven't had their fingers burned with "simple" tasks in real-world IT situations are far more dangerous than those who have. People with experience never take anything for granted. Newbies take stuff for granted all the time. I know I did.
That is why virtually everybody prefers experience over certifications.
<IANAL>
The 9th Circuit Court is based in San Francisco and has a reputation for making "surprising" decisions. Attorneys along the west coast routinely scratch their heads at 9th Circuit decisions.
That's not to say their decisions are overturned by the Supreme Court at a rate higher than those of other Circuit courts (I honestly don't know), nor is it to imply that this decision would surprise lawyers everywhere. I haven't even read the decision yet, so I haven't the foggiest notion. I'm just pointing out that if they're off base, this wouldn't be the first time the 9th Circuit Court pulled an inexplicable decision out from under their robes.
</IANAL>
I thought Doohan had died a couple of years ago and that was why he'd been left out. Of course, DeForest Kelley is long gone and they still had a facsimile of him in the show.
I'm glad to hear Doohan is still alive, even if he is responsible for quite possibly the worst Scottish accent ever by an actor.
I never liked Welshie.
I guess if you flash some dollars and ask nicely the plans could be yours for a song.
Now that would be ironic. It turns out the reason the Buran looks so much like the Space Shuttle Orbiter isn't coincidence. The Russians used plans for NASA's orbiter as the basis for the Buran design.
The Russians are great at getting performance out of cheaper, simpler systems, but there are always tradeoffs. When the Soviets were worried that the A-12 (interceptor version of the SR-71) and the XB-70 (mach 3+ nuclear bomber) might actually go into production, they worked night and day to develop their own mach 3 interceptor.
The result was the MiG-25, which in some configurations can fly at mach 2.83. However, unlike the SR-71/A-12 which were designed to cruise at mach 3, the MiG-25 could only achieve its top speeds at tremendous cost to the aircraft. The plane would run out of fuel in a matter of minutes at that speed and the engines needed to be replaced after a flight reaching that speed.
Yes, the MiG-25 was much cheaper than the A-12, and it was even cheaper than the F-15, which was the USAF's response to the MiG-25, but it's not realistic to expect it to routinely achieve its maximum speed. The American aircraft it was designed to compete against can routinely achieve their top speeds.
Russian ingenuity is real, but there are very good reasons why American aerospace technology costs so much more. Frankly, the Russians aren't as worried about killing people.
Nimda laid waste to two sites on my dozen-site WAN. My employee in Indianapolis drove out to Cincinnati to clean up the Nimda mess and install better antivirus software, and before he was done there, the Indianapolis office got hit hard by Nimda.
We were in the process of converting company-wide from consumer-grade antivirus (bundled with most of our PCs by the manufacturer) to corporate-grade AV software that was centrally managed. The Nimda outbreak accelerated our move to the corporate AV suite. Now that I have that corporate AV suite and a virus-scanning email gateway that automatically blocks most executable attachments, I'm much more secure, but I'm far from completely immune.
My poor employee from Indianapolis pulled a 36 hour shift expunging Nimda and I have friends who also pulled multi-day shifts cleaning up Nimda.
Anybody who thinks Nimda was overhyped is a jackass.
So what the hell is "Computer Space"? I'd never heard of it before I read the article that showed it debuted in 1971.
Does anybody besides me have fond memories of another EA game for the C-64 called "Worms?"?
Up to six players could play. Essentially, the game was played on a hexagonal grid. Each player's "worm" would start out from the origin point at the center of the screen. When a worm encountered a new situation, it would pause and wait for the player to pick a direction for it to go. From then on, the worm would remember that command and repeat it.
At the beginning of a game, the worms are constantly pausing and waiting for instructions, but after a few runs through the order, the worms are self-guiding for a while. As worms travel through the points on the hex grid, the points turn into vertices. A worm claims a vertex by completing all the paths into and out of the vertex. A worm dies when it heads into a vertex and completes it without an out path, or when it collides with another worm at a vertex.
At the end of the game, when all the worms are dead, the player whose worm has claimed the most vertices wins.
I thought it was a pretty cool game and I've never encountered anything like it since.
The author of the article points out in great detail how similar Lucas's series is to that of E. E. "Doc" Smith's classic space opera Lensman series. However, he then states that while Lucas's dialogue was unpronounceable by his actors, Smith's words were unreadable.
Perhaps I need to go back and re-read the Lensman series again. I haven't read it in about 20 years, but the last time I read the series, I thought it was corny fun. It's truly cheesy in many ways, but it's completely unpretentious about its cheesiness, in spite of the grandiosity of the plot. A space opera even occurs within one of the books as a form of entertainment for the characters.
Regardless of the criticism of both series, I think both series represent good fun when they're at their best. Lucas's series definitely has more downs than ups so far, but the ups have been terrific.
I believe the article missed the real point in its attempt to expose Lucas's mythology pretensions. All great stories are simply retellings of the same seven basic plot types. It should come as no surprise that one can find parallels between Lucas's work and stories from mythology or from the recent dimestore pulp magazines and novels. Lucas is no great screenwriter, but Star Wars *does* borrow heavily from many other influences. If he stole from pulp, then he stole from mythology because pulp stole from mythology.
Shakespeare certainly didn't make up any of the stories he told. Virtually all of his plays were based on well-known stories of the time. His genius was in stripping the stories to their essential themes and then dressing them up again. Shakespeare's stuff is contemporary today for that reason.
The ancient Greek playwrights basically told the exact same stories over and over, yet we still regard Sophocles as one of the greats because his version of Oedipus Rex stood the test of time.
The greatness of Lucas's work isn't whether it's original or where it draws its influences. It's in how quickly the audience can immerse itself in the story and how enjoyable and memorable the storytelling ultimately is. SW:ANH, while clunky at times, is a remarkable piece of storytelling because it's fun and the audience can't help but be swept up in its infectious enthusiasm. SW:TESB is an even better piece of storytelling because it explores the characters in greater detail and allows for more gray area, rather than drawing the characters as pure archetypes. Lucas's other efforts to date have been decidedly second-rate compared to those two movies, but that shouldn't give critics carte blanche to savage his work wholesale.
Did anybody manage to mirror the screenshots before they got /.ed?