Just got my copy of "The Animatrix", and I'm going to be watching it tonight, I hope (today is Wednesday, so we like the MPAA today?;-)
On the point about Neo, I have this assuption: he was rendered unconcious because if he were not, too many questions would be asked at the wrong time. Neo is being carefully lead down a path, as decribed by the Architect, and his responses are carefully conditioned ("vis a vis love").
What I find interesting is that Smith may not be the bad guy anymore. It's clear (in fact stated) that he no longer has a purpose, and that he's not quite sure why he's continuing the conflict that he "died" fighting.
I think you'll see a scene in the next movie where Neo explains to Smith what he was told, and Smith decides that the machines are his new cause. In the end, I think that there are going to be three programs (Architect, Mother, Oracle) against the humans AND against the machines, and while the machines may not exactly work to save the humans, I think they WILL seek to overthrow the status quo and seek indenpendance from the central control of the Matrix.
Everything in this movie series comes in 3... agents, good guys, bad guys, sides, EVERYTHING.
Interesting theory. I thought about that, but rejected it on the grounds that having neo walk into a room, alone, and make a choice doesn't really help the machines at all if he's a machine planted in The Matrix in order to help control the humans.
There's a sort of rule about writing that says that you don't take your character down a long and winding road to his big revelation and then lie to him and the audience. I think everything the Architect told Neo is true, but his omissions are interesting. Notice that he never answers Neo's question, "The Oracle?"... this implies that someone else is the Matrix's "mother"....
Suggestion: take everything about the second movie that you considered broing out out of place. Write it down.
Look at that list later, after the third movie, and I think you'll be surprised. One element that you point out is already clearly crucial, but you're so programmed to expect it to be gratuitous that you're blind to some very obvious hints you're being given.
Question: Do you believe that Neo saw the future, or was he shown what someone wanted him to see in order to manipulate him. If the former, the movie makes a weak kind of sense, but if the latter, then there is a giant, gaping plot-hole and it can only be resolved in one way that I can think of. I'm looking forward to the looks on the faces of the people who figure it out after the fact. I'm expecting shock followed by anger followed by confusion followed by a very Homer Simpsonesque, "Doh!"
MR just took the same effects from the firtr movie and made them bigger
No, the effects in the second movie were totally different.
Here's the process that you go through for the first:
Take n still cameras (usually 20-100) and line them up in a way that represents the "path" of the camera. Set up montion cameras at any points along that path (usually always the first and last positions along the path at a minimum).
That technique buys you an "impossible" tracking/slow-motion shot (things like the bullet effects are just standard CGI-additions later on, but because you have your well-defined camera track and timing track you can produce these in seemless perspective throughout the shot). You do this in a studio with a green-screen and then you map in a computer-controled background shot made at a different time, but along the same path.
Now, switch to Matrix Reloaded. You now have a totally different technique where something can happen that simply doesn't map to the real world at all. You go through the first part of the first movie's "bullet-time" process, filming real-world elements as required, and establishing your camera and timing tracks. Then you switch to 100% CG, for elements (e.g. Neo swooping in to pick up Morpheus and the Keymaker) that could never be fillmed, even against a green-screen with wires. The CG is based on the footage that you have, and uses textures, 3D-location information and other details that you have extracted, but ultimately it's the CG equivalent of rotoscoping.
they seem to have spent a lot of time making the effects "big", but they seem to have spent very little time making sure the effects looked natural
You don't realize it, but you just issued one of the largest compliments possible for this movie. You're comparing real-world composites to computer generated images and saying that they didn't look as natural, without actually realizing that you're looking at nothing more than a drawing! That's perhaps one of the most important benchmarks in modern computer graphics that I can imagine!
Now, I will say that your reaction was very common, and I think the W bros. made a mistake here. They *should* have come up with a framing technique that brought us a little further out of reality so that the virtual shots were clearly NOT supposed to blend in with the physical camera shots. Something like a color-shift or going to black+white or some sort of "Neo-cam" would have made it clear that we were no longer seeing the movie through our own eyes, but through the heightened perceptions of Neo's "one" powers.
it would have helped even more to have had a decent story rather than a load of pseudo-philosophical crap strung together by fight scenes
I suggest you re-examine the path you're being lead down. You begin to understand The Matrix movies a bit more when you divest yourself of the illusion that there's anything supernatural going on and when you further accept that all of the philosphy in these movies is in one of two categories: the stories that various parties tell eachother in order to maintain control or the struggle between humans and machines.
If you look at any scene in that movie with those ideas as your lens, it starts to make a lot more sense, and you start to see just how devious the third movie can get....
The fighting is exactly the same. Did you just look at the Seraph vs Neo fight and say "lame fight, no reason for it" or did you ask, "hey wait a minute: there's no reason for them to fight... what's REALLY going on here?" I'm going out on a bit of a limb here, but I'm pretty sure that we're going to find out that that fight was a distraction technique intended to get Neo to think in terms of "attacking" problems rather than "solving" them. Certainly when he then meets with the Oracle, he only approaches it in terms of conflict, and that is important because the council leader (who is almost certainly the previous "One") had given Neo the first part of the puz
While I'm at it, let me also point out that many of today's most brilliant writers are in TV, movies and (as I mentioned before) comics. People like JMS, Andrew Niccol, Darren Aronofsky, Joss Whedon, Luc Besson, James Cameron, The Wachowski Brothers and the legions of SF writers who work on large or small TV projects are not to be discounted just because of the media that they contribute to. I've heard just as many quality discussions about science, mankind and ethics stem from watching Babylon 5 as from quite a few print authors.
Neil Gaiman's inventive Neverwhere (which is not SF, but I think explores the modern condition just as well as SF) started as television for the BBC. Stephenson's Snow Crash even began as a (never published) video game!
If you squint really hard and pretend that the discussion over our future is still only going on in books, then you will see a decline in that discussion. But, if you look at the spectrum of creative output, you'll see that the conversation is alive and well!
I'm an American and so I chose mostly locals as examples, but there are many, many excellent authors past and present that are not from the states.
Notably however, I think Heinlein was born in the Soviet Union... there's an interesting story behind how his mother got him out to the west. Also, Arthur Clarke is a Brittish Citizen I think (but am not sure) and currently lives in Sri Lanka I believe.
Of the modern authors that I listed there are a few non-Americans (Ian Banks for example) and other very good authors currently writing include Neil Gaiman, Terry Prachett and many others whose names do not spring to mind, but American Magic Realism is a distinctly South American genre, and there is some great surealist fantasy and science fiction coming out of the east. I don't know about mainland Europe as much, but based on their cinema, I'm guessing that there's some good work going on in Spain and France as well.
Who was the Polish author who wrote Lem? I think many would hold him up as an example as well.
I'm not sure I see where you or Spider are coming from here....
Let's look at the greats:
Alfred Bester -- A brilliant author and a man who didn't understand all of the science involved in what he was writing, but a damn sight more than most of his readers. His modern day equivalents are the slightly off-genre authors like Ian Banks who write a mix of SF and standard fiction.
Harlan Ellison -- I will refrain from calling Ellison his own modern day equivalent, though the man does still write. Today, I'd point you to the likes of Warren Ellis whose work is mostly in comics. Ellis has produced works of science fiction (Orbital) as well as the standard comics hero genres (Authority) and done both with grace and insight worthy of the old-guard SF authors. He also writes an SF comic series called Transmetropolitan which I point out only for the ironic fact that the main character is named "Spider"....:-)
Robert Heinlein -- This prolific author was always hard to pin down, but I think his best work has been carried on by the likes of Lois McMaster Bujold, for the older work. I don't see a lot of authors treading in the places that Heinlein went in his later years, but perhaps we're all the better for that....
Arthur C. Clarke -- Clarke was important to SF because the engineers (and engineering enthusiasts) of the 50s and 60s could respect his work and accept the idea that he would put their hopes, dreams and fears into writing. Today, I think Neil Stephenson has been doing that just as well, but there are certainly others.
Philip K. Dick -- Dick was a master of the cautionary sureal, be it spiritual or scientific. I see authors like Jonathan Letham as filling that space today.
Isaac Asimov -- A hard one here. Asimov had so many faces. Vernor Vinge is the professor-turned-author face, and he does a wonderful job of it. But beyond that, I'm not sure who writes the "The Gods Themselves" or "Foundation" sorts of books these days....
My point is that these folks aren't gone, there's just been a changing of the guard. The old-guard don't always see the new guard as "equal" to their legacy, but I think they are.
There may be less non-sharecropper SF these days, but even the sharecroppers (like Peter David) can be brilliant at times, just like the pulp authors who got trapped in some painful ghetto genre (read Ellison's "Rumble" somtime).
Ok, when a dead president's birthday rolls around we all take a day off work and cook hot dogs in the back yard with the kids.
Dammit, this is far more worthy! I say we all take a moment out of our lives on the 21st and declare it a one-time national engineering/geek/space/technologist holiday; get our our barbies; relax a bit and pour yourself a glass of bubbly and toast the good folks at NASA.
Prostitutes will never be the top females in the social hierarchy of any civilization.
Oh so? As others have pointed out, that wasn't the case in Firefly either, but certainly we have examples from history to demonstrate that Firefly wasn't that unrealistic. I don't recall the preist/prostitute class from ancient babylon, but they were highly respected, and one could easily see one of them adding credibility to any venture that they were associated with.
Of course, that example was of men, but let's look at the European renaisance for examples of HIGHLY respected prostitutes who were practically royalty. And, in that case I'm refering to females.
Of course, you had your run-of-the-mill whores on the street who were treated as less than dirt (and keep in mind that Firefly implies that those still exist too). But, the women who acted as professional mistresses to the men (and more rarely, women) of power were a) treated with sufficient respect, or your second visit didn't happen b) often didn't use sex as the primary tool of their trade.
Now, if you want to look to the east for another take, there's the geisha, who were not actually prostitutes at all, but sex was sometimes one of the tools of their trade. If you're going to tell me that geisha were not highly respected members of their society, I'm prepared to be baffled;-)
Yeah, that would be a mistake. I suggest not doing it that way.
Honestly, has no one ever written code like this? I cannot be the first person on the planet to have decided that letting the system decide how I might want to approach data integrety was a bad thing....
You're reaching for a problem. Suffice to say that I've been doing this for years, and in those cases where I care, I do this and it works just fine, and plenty fast enough. YMMV
Everywhere else, I structure my data so that atomicity on a statement level is all that I care about.
You are incorrect, and if you think about it, you'll realize that it's very simple to make sure that changes you make only have an effect on the state of your data once they are fully integrated.
One of my favorite ways to do this is with a table that consists only of a primary key and a "dirty bit". It makes my work harder, but the number of places that you make lots of changes that all depend on eachother SHOULD be low. If that's the case, then the complexity that managing this state information adds will not be too painful, and actually makes you THINK about your data.
When you select data of of your database, you just make sure that you don't pull any data that's dirty. I've done this many times, and it keeps my eye on what I'm actually doing and why those changes matter to eachother. That alone as saved me hours (perhaps days) of debugging.
I'm from an Oracle background, so I want to take this away from being about MySQL or any other DB. However, your statement about transactions really gets to me.
I work hard when I write code that talks to a database to NEVER use transactions or rollback unless there is just no way around it (and while I've come up with some hypothetical situations where that would happen, I've never run into them in the real world).
The problem with transactions is that they cultivate an attitude about your data which is very, very dangerous. I can't count how many reasonable-looking applications have caused untold damage because the developer stopped thinking about the consequences of their actions.
By forcing myself to deal with those consequences manually by doing my own locking and my own data-integrety management, I find that I can rely on my data far more than most people can, and the likelihood that one of my programs is going to "go bad" and rip out whole transactional units just because an non-essential field was initialized oddly is much, much lower.
Now, of course, going back to MySQL, you have the option today: do you want to use transactions? If so, your schema will reflect that, and you'll take the performance hit that everyone else does when you enable them. I never do, but you're welcome to. That's what software should be all about: giving the user all of the choices they need.
All that said, I love PostgreSQL, and I hope that both databases continue to kick the commercial databases' butts for decades to come!
So now we have two major OSS databases with 99% of the features that commercial offerings have, and lots of features that they don't (I'm a MySQL guy, so I know what those extras are for that database, but knowing OSS development paces, I'm sure the same is the same for PostgreSQL).
I listen to folks at work talk about why we "need to move to a *real* database at some point", and it always comes down to the fact that they've bought into the marketting, and when they examine their reasons (if they are willing to), solutions like PostgreSQL or MySQL are a whole lot better choices than the "real" database choices out there.
I won't argue your core point any further, but DO NOT refer to me as someone unwilling to help. I contribute to anti-spam software and manage our anti-spam efforts at work. I am NOT a spectator.
The comment about this enabling remote login is incorrect. What this enables is executing GTK-based apps over a remote login that has already been established (e.g. via ssh, rlogin or telnet). Of course, ssh already allows X-protocol forwarding, but that might be too heavyweight for your remote connection, depending on what kind of bandwidth you have available...
Every zelot in the world needs to get this: there is no *right* OS for everyone to run. Not Windows, not Linux, not BSD, not OSX, etc.
The *right* OS is the one that you feel comfortable with, and which meets your immediate needs. You might even do well by running several (at home I dual boot my game machine depending on what I want to play: EverQuest or BZFlag).
What's more: diversity is very important to resisting any kind of infection, viral or otherwise. If the net were an even mix of Linux, Windows, BSD and OSX, we would benefit from the competition, different security measures, etc.
That being said, Linux already has a great deal of diversity internally, so a virus or worm that wanted to infect Linux systems would have a hard time covering all of its bases. A Debian system would be hard to penetrate if your worm was written for Red Hat or visa versa. It's not impossible to write a cross-Linux worm, but hard. Then you have to deal with differing shells, various degrees of stack protection, radically different end-user software, major revisions being more common and thus software incompatiblities even between multiple hosts running the same vendor's OS, etc.
postfix has no concept of "incoming" or "outgoing" mail
Exactly the problem that many run into, and the problem to which I was refering. If you *do* have to distinguish these two states, you end up getting snared in postfix's complexity, and if you don't then the end-result to users is very non-intuitive for things like spam- and virus-filtering.
Then, for bonus marks, ask "Do you want us to set your account to receive all these kiddy-porn spams.... so that you can talk to Grandma?"
Ok, so ignoring the customer support hell you would be thrown into as a result of using "kiddy-porn" and "Grandma" in the same sentence on a support call, what you suggest is impractical.
Either you have to take AOL's approach (block everyone, and then let back in those who demonstrate that they are very large and influential) or you need to take a somewhat more intelligent approach.
Stopping spam is a matter of life and death for smaller companies.
Yes, but you don't have to shoot yourself in the foot to do so. I, for example, am on a "hostile" network, and I'm not moving any time soon. You would choose not to talk to me, and that's fine. However, if an ISP chooses not to talk to me, they're going to get complaints from their users that they can't do things like corrospond with the maintainer of some of the software they use. They can choose to ignore that, or they can take the high road and filter *spam*, and leave the legitimate mail alone.
The problem with companies like AOL is that they handle so much mail that they feel the cost of looking at mail and determining how valid it is would be too costly. I think in the long run, the companies that accept that cost are the ones that people will want to do business with. After all, how much is spam-free mail that *doesn't* limit your options worth?...
Yes, that's called the "neener, neener, I can't hear you!" school of spam-blocking otherwise known as the "walk loudly and swing a big stick blindly at anything that moves" approach.
Woefully, it turns out that a) most people care more about getting mail from those they care about more than not getting mail from those who they don't and b) "I want [...] maximum collateral damage" doesn't work out so well as a justification for investing time and money in running a backlist.
The folks who take blacklists seriously are looking to get a wide and deep audience of end-users so that they can help to make the net more spammer-hostile as a whole, not just eliminate a few extremists from the lists. You see, it's not *you* that spammers care about and as long as your list only gets looked at by those like yourself, the spammers are happy.
They do this for the exact same reason that Debian does the same thing. They back-port security- and bug-fixes that they consider essential to their customer-base, but they do not "upgrade" the software.
Thus, Red Hat's Linux kernel v2.4.20-18.9 might well be 90% of 2.4.21, since it has many of the fixes from it, but it's not *actually* 2.4.21 and thus should not be considered a peer with that release.
This allows you to take an up-to-date SRPM from a project site or from a later Red Hat release and re-compile it on your existing platform, and still have the dependency-graph work correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
Just got my copy of "The Animatrix", and I'm going to be watching it tonight, I hope (today is Wednesday, so we like the MPAA today? ;-)
On the point about Neo, I have this assuption: he was rendered unconcious because if he were not, too many questions would be asked at the wrong time. Neo is being carefully lead down a path, as decribed by the Architect, and his responses are carefully conditioned ("vis a vis love").
What I find interesting is that Smith may not be the bad guy anymore. It's clear (in fact stated) that he no longer has a purpose, and that he's not quite sure why he's continuing the conflict that he "died" fighting.
I think you'll see a scene in the next movie where Neo explains to Smith what he was told, and Smith decides that the machines are his new cause. In the end, I think that there are going to be three programs (Architect, Mother, Oracle) against the humans AND against the machines, and while the machines may not exactly work to save the humans, I think they WILL seek to overthrow the status quo and seek indenpendance from the central control of the Matrix.
Everything in this movie series comes in 3... agents, good guys, bad guys, sides, EVERYTHING.
Interesting theory. I thought about that, but rejected it on the grounds that having neo walk into a room, alone, and make a choice doesn't really help the machines at all if he's a machine planted in The Matrix in order to help control the humans.
There's a sort of rule about writing that says that you don't take your character down a long and winding road to his big revelation and then lie to him and the audience. I think everything the Architect told Neo is true, but his omissions are interesting. Notice that he never answers Neo's question, "The Oracle?"... this implies that someone else is the Matrix's "mother"....
Suggestion: take everything about the second movie that you considered broing out out of place. Write it down.
Look at that list later, after the third movie, and I think you'll be surprised. One element that you point out is already clearly crucial, but you're so programmed to expect it to be gratuitous that you're blind to some very obvious hints you're being given.
Question: Do you believe that Neo saw the future, or was he shown what someone wanted him to see in order to manipulate him. If the former, the movie makes a weak kind of sense, but if the latter, then there is a giant, gaping plot-hole and it can only be resolved in one way that I can think of. I'm looking forward to the looks on the faces of the people who figure it out after the fact. I'm expecting shock followed by anger followed by confusion followed by a very Homer Simpsonesque, "Doh!"
MR just took the same effects from the firtr movie and made them bigger
No, the effects in the second movie were totally different.
Here's the process that you go through for the first:
Take n still cameras (usually 20-100) and line them up in a way that represents the "path" of the camera. Set up montion cameras at any points along that path (usually always the first and last positions along the path at a minimum).
That technique buys you an "impossible" tracking/slow-motion shot (things like the bullet effects are just standard CGI-additions later on, but because you have your well-defined camera track and timing track you can produce these in seemless perspective throughout the shot). You do this in a studio with a green-screen and then you map in a computer-controled background shot made at a different time, but along the same path.
Now, switch to Matrix Reloaded. You now have a totally different technique where something can happen that simply doesn't map to the real world at all. You go through the first part of the first movie's "bullet-time" process, filming real-world elements as required, and establishing your camera and timing tracks. Then you switch to 100% CG, for elements (e.g. Neo swooping in to pick up Morpheus and the Keymaker) that could never be fillmed, even against a green-screen with wires. The CG is based on the footage that you have, and uses textures, 3D-location information and other details that you have extracted, but ultimately it's the CG equivalent of rotoscoping.
they seem to have spent a lot of time making the effects "big", but they seem to have spent very little time making sure the effects looked natural
You don't realize it, but you just issued one of the largest compliments possible for this movie. You're comparing real-world composites to computer generated images and saying that they didn't look as natural, without actually realizing that you're looking at nothing more than a drawing! That's perhaps one of the most important benchmarks in modern computer graphics that I can imagine!
Now, I will say that your reaction was very common, and I think the W bros. made a mistake here. They *should* have come up with a framing technique that brought us a little further out of reality so that the virtual shots were clearly NOT supposed to blend in with the physical camera shots. Something like a color-shift or going to black+white or some sort of "Neo-cam" would have made it clear that we were no longer seeing the movie through our own eyes, but through the heightened perceptions of Neo's "one" powers.
it would have helped even more to have had a decent story rather than a load of pseudo-philosophical crap strung together by fight scenes
I suggest you re-examine the path you're being lead down. You begin to understand The Matrix movies a bit more when you divest yourself of the illusion that there's anything supernatural going on and when you further accept that all of the philosphy in these movies is in one of two categories: the stories that various parties tell eachother in order to maintain control or the struggle between humans and machines.
If you look at any scene in that movie with those ideas as your lens, it starts to make a lot more sense, and you start to see just how devious the third movie can get....
The fighting is exactly the same. Did you just look at the Seraph vs Neo fight and say "lame fight, no reason for it" or did you ask, "hey wait a minute: there's no reason for them to fight... what's REALLY going on here?" I'm going out on a bit of a limb here, but I'm pretty sure that we're going to find out that that fight was a distraction technique intended to get Neo to think in terms of "attacking" problems rather than "solving" them. Certainly when he then meets with the Oracle, he only approaches it in terms of conflict, and that is important because the council leader (who is almost certainly the previous "One") had given Neo the first part of the puz
I'm sorry, you're right. It was Heinlein who went TO the Soviet Union and Asimov who was born there.
While I'm at it, let me also point out that many of today's most brilliant writers are in TV, movies and (as I mentioned before) comics. People like JMS, Andrew Niccol, Darren Aronofsky, Joss Whedon, Luc Besson, James Cameron, The Wachowski Brothers and the legions of SF writers who work on large or small TV projects are not to be discounted just because of the media that they contribute to. I've heard just as many quality discussions about science, mankind and ethics stem from watching Babylon 5 as from quite a few print authors.
Neil Gaiman's inventive Neverwhere (which is not SF, but I think explores the modern condition just as well as SF) started as television for the BBC. Stephenson's Snow Crash even began as a (never published) video game!
If you squint really hard and pretend that the discussion over our future is still only going on in books, then you will see a decline in that discussion. But, if you look at the spectrum of creative output, you'll see that the conversation is alive and well!
I'm an American and so I chose mostly locals as examples, but there are many, many excellent authors past and present that are not from the states.
Notably however, I think Heinlein was born in the Soviet Union... there's an interesting story behind how his mother got him out to the west. Also, Arthur Clarke is a Brittish Citizen I think (but am not sure) and currently lives in Sri Lanka I believe.
Of the modern authors that I listed there are a few non-Americans (Ian Banks for example) and other very good authors currently writing include Neil Gaiman, Terry Prachett and many others whose names do not spring to mind, but American Magic Realism is a distinctly South American genre, and there is some great surealist fantasy and science fiction coming out of the east. I don't know about mainland Europe as much, but based on their cinema, I'm guessing that there's some good work going on in Spain and France as well.
Who was the Polish author who wrote Lem? I think many would hold him up as an example as well.
I'm not sure I see where you or Spider are coming from here....
:-)
Let's look at the greats:
Alfred Bester -- A brilliant author and a man who didn't understand all of the science involved in what he was writing, but a damn sight more than most of his readers. His modern day equivalents are the slightly off-genre authors like Ian Banks who write a mix of SF and standard fiction.
Harlan Ellison -- I will refrain from calling Ellison his own modern day equivalent, though the man does still write. Today, I'd point you to the likes of Warren Ellis whose work is mostly in comics. Ellis has produced works of science fiction (Orbital) as well as the standard comics hero genres (Authority) and done both with grace and insight worthy of the old-guard SF authors. He also writes an SF comic series called Transmetropolitan which I point out only for the ironic fact that the main character is named "Spider"....
Robert Heinlein -- This prolific author was always hard to pin down, but I think his best work has been carried on by the likes of Lois McMaster Bujold, for the older work. I don't see a lot of authors treading in the places that Heinlein went in his later years, but perhaps we're all the better for that....
Arthur C. Clarke -- Clarke was important to SF because the engineers (and engineering enthusiasts) of the 50s and 60s could respect his work and accept the idea that he would put their hopes, dreams and fears into writing. Today, I think Neil Stephenson has been doing that just as well, but there are certainly others.
Philip K. Dick -- Dick was a master of the cautionary sureal, be it spiritual or scientific. I see authors like Jonathan Letham as filling that space today.
Isaac Asimov -- A hard one here. Asimov had so many faces. Vernor Vinge is the professor-turned-author face, and he does a wonderful job of it. But beyond that, I'm not sure who writes the "The Gods Themselves" or "Foundation" sorts of books these days....
My point is that these folks aren't gone, there's just been a changing of the guard. The old-guard don't always see the new guard as "equal" to their legacy, but I think they are.
There may be less non-sharecropper SF these days, but even the sharecroppers (like Peter David) can be brilliant at times, just like the pulp authors who got trapped in some painful ghetto genre (read Ellison's "Rumble" somtime).
Ok, when a dead president's birthday rolls around we all take a day off work and cook hot dogs in the back yard with the kids.
Dammit, this is far more worthy! I say we all take a moment out of our lives on the 21st and declare it a one-time national engineering/geek/space/technologist holiday; get our our barbies; relax a bit and pour yourself a glass of bubbly and toast the good folks at NASA.
I do not hate porn.
;-)
Oh wait, is this public?!
Prostitutes will never be the top females in the social hierarchy of any civilization.
;-)
Oh so? As others have pointed out, that wasn't the case in Firefly either, but certainly we have examples from history to demonstrate that Firefly wasn't that unrealistic. I don't recall the preist/prostitute class from ancient babylon, but they were highly respected, and one could easily see one of them adding credibility to any venture that they were associated with.
Of course, that example was of men, but let's look at the European renaisance for examples of HIGHLY respected prostitutes who were practically royalty. And, in that case I'm refering to females.
Of course, you had your run-of-the-mill whores on the street who were treated as less than dirt (and keep in mind that Firefly implies that those still exist too). But, the women who acted as professional mistresses to the men (and more rarely, women) of power were a) treated with sufficient respect, or your second visit didn't happen b) often didn't use sex as the primary tool of their trade.
Now, if you want to look to the east for another take, there's the geisha, who were not actually prostitutes at all, but sex was sometimes one of the tools of their trade. If you're going to tell me that geisha were not highly respected members of their society, I'm prepared to be baffled
Yeah, that would be a mistake. I suggest not doing it that way.
Honestly, has no one ever written code like this? I cannot be the first person on the planet to have decided that letting the system decide how I might want to approach data integrety was a bad thing....
You're reaching for a problem. Suffice to say that I've been doing this for years, and in those cases where I care, I do this and it works just fine, and plenty fast enough. YMMV
Everywhere else, I structure my data so that atomicity on a statement level is all that I care about.
Let's see... 2D bar-codes have been able to hold more than that for... how long?
To be fair, I higher density 1D bar-code that can be reliably read would be useful to a whole lot of industries, but it's just not revolutionary.
You are incorrect, and if you think about it, you'll realize that it's very simple to make sure that changes you make only have an effect on the state of your data once they are fully integrated.
One of my favorite ways to do this is with a table that consists only of a primary key and a "dirty bit". It makes my work harder, but the number of places that you make lots of changes that all depend on eachother SHOULD be low. If that's the case, then the complexity that managing this state information adds will not be too painful, and actually makes you THINK about your data.
When you select data of of your database, you just make sure that you don't pull any data that's dirty. I've done this many times, and it keeps my eye on what I'm actually doing and why those changes matter to eachother. That alone as saved me hours (perhaps days) of debugging.
I'm from an Oracle background, so I want to take this away from being about MySQL or any other DB. However, your statement about transactions really gets to me.
I work hard when I write code that talks to a database to NEVER use transactions or rollback unless there is just no way around it (and while I've come up with some hypothetical situations where that would happen, I've never run into them in the real world).
The problem with transactions is that they cultivate an attitude about your data which is very, very dangerous. I can't count how many reasonable-looking applications have caused untold damage because the developer stopped thinking about the consequences of their actions.
By forcing myself to deal with those consequences manually by doing my own locking and my own data-integrety management, I find that I can rely on my data far more than most people can, and the likelihood that one of my programs is going to "go bad" and rip out whole transactional units just because an non-essential field was initialized oddly is much, much lower.
Now, of course, going back to MySQL, you have the option today: do you want to use transactions? If so, your schema will reflect that, and you'll take the performance hit that everyone else does when you enable them. I never do, but you're welcome to. That's what software should be all about: giving the user all of the choices they need.
All that said, I love PostgreSQL, and I hope that both databases continue to kick the commercial databases' butts for decades to come!
So now we have two major OSS databases with 99% of the features that commercial offerings have, and lots of features that they don't (I'm a MySQL guy, so I know what those extras are for that database, but knowing OSS development paces, I'm sure the same is the same for PostgreSQL).
I listen to folks at work talk about why we "need to move to a *real* database at some point", and it always comes down to the fact that they've bought into the marketting, and when they examine their reasons (if they are willing to), solutions like PostgreSQL or MySQL are a whole lot better choices than the "real" database choices out there.
Bravo guys!
I won't argue your core point any further, but DO NOT refer to me as someone unwilling to help. I contribute to anti-spam software and manage our anti-spam efforts at work. I am NOT a spectator.
The comment about this enabling remote login is incorrect. What this enables is executing GTK-based apps over a remote login that has already been established (e.g. via ssh, rlogin or telnet). Of course, ssh already allows X-protocol forwarding, but that might be too heavyweight for your remote connection, depending on what kind of bandwidth you have available...
Every zelot in the world needs to get this: there is no *right* OS for everyone to run. Not Windows, not Linux, not BSD, not OSX, etc.
The *right* OS is the one that you feel comfortable with, and which meets your immediate needs. You might even do well by running several (at home I dual boot my game machine depending on what I want to play: EverQuest or BZFlag).
What's more: diversity is very important to resisting any kind of infection, viral or otherwise. If the net were an even mix of Linux, Windows, BSD and OSX, we would benefit from the competition, different security measures, etc.
That being said, Linux already has a great deal of diversity internally, so a virus or worm that wanted to infect Linux systems would have a hard time covering all of its bases. A Debian system would be hard to penetrate if your worm was written for Red Hat or visa versa. It's not impossible to write a cross-Linux worm, but hard. Then you have to deal with differing shells, various degrees of stack protection, radically different end-user software, major revisions being more common and thus software incompatiblities even between multiple hosts running the same vendor's OS, etc.
postfix has no concept of "incoming" or "outgoing" mail
Exactly the problem that many run into, and the problem to which I was refering. If you *do* have to distinguish these two states, you end up getting snared in postfix's complexity, and if you don't then the end-result to users is very non-intuitive for things like spam- and virus-filtering.
Whatever. Good luck with ignoring everyone, I don't think it's a particularly good way to go about communicating.
Ok, so ignoring the customer support hell you would be thrown into as a result of using "kiddy-porn" and "Grandma" in the same sentence on a support call, what you suggest is impractical.
Either you have to take AOL's approach (block everyone, and then let back in those who demonstrate that they are very large and influential) or you need to take a somewhat more intelligent approach.
Stopping spam is a matter of life and death for smaller companies.
Yes, but you don't have to shoot yourself in the foot to do so. I, for example, am on a "hostile" network, and I'm not moving any time soon. You would choose not to talk to me, and that's fine. However, if an ISP chooses not to talk to me, they're going to get complaints from their users that they can't do things like corrospond with the maintainer of some of the software they use. They can choose to ignore that, or they can take the high road and filter *spam*, and leave the legitimate mail alone.
The problem with companies like AOL is that they handle so much mail that they feel the cost of looking at mail and determining how valid it is would be too costly. I think in the long run, the companies that accept that cost are the ones that people will want to do business with. After all, how much is spam-free mail that *doesn't* limit your options worth?...
Yes, that's called the "neener, neener, I can't hear you!" school of spam-blocking otherwise known as the "walk loudly and swing a big stick blindly at anything that moves" approach.
Woefully, it turns out that a) most people care more about getting mail from those they care about more than not getting mail from those who they don't and b) "I want [...] maximum collateral damage" doesn't work out so well as a justification for investing time and money in running a backlist.
The folks who take blacklists seriously are looking to get a wide and deep audience of end-users so that they can help to make the net more spammer-hostile as a whole, not just eliminate a few extremists from the lists. You see, it's not *you* that spammers care about and as long as your list only gets looked at by those like yourself, the spammers are happy.
They do this for the exact same reason that Debian does the same thing. They back-port security- and bug-fixes that they consider essential to their customer-base, but they do not "upgrade" the software.
Thus, Red Hat's Linux kernel v2.4.20-18.9 might well be 90% of 2.4.21, since it has many of the fixes from it, but it's not *actually* 2.4.21 and thus should not be considered a peer with that release.
This allows you to take an up-to-date SRPM from a project site or from a later Red Hat release and re-compile it on your existing platform, and still have the dependency-graph work correctly.