It's probably based on the rental records of the costuming company that last had it in inventory. These things have inventory numbers, often sewn into the garment. And the fact is, it's probably one of *several* that were either used or on standby during the filming of Star Wars, with no way to tell which one it was.
What a lot of these hardcore fans don't recognise is that there probably wasn't just ONE "Kenobi cloak" -- there probably were half a dozen, to allow for damage, cleaning, etc. (they can't stop the cameras for a week just because you spilled coffee on your costume -- they bring out another one, you change, and off you go again).
An item that's not yet in the costuming house's inventory is usually stitched together quick and dirty, so I'd be surprised if the probable-several-cloaks were more than a cursory match -- good enough for the camera at the time, if not for the nitpickers 3 decades later. And over the course of being rented out for later productions, these cloaks probably underwent minor alterations/repairs, too.
As I recall, there were at least 8 partial or full Darth Vader costumes from the first 3 films. So if anyone claims to have the One True Costume, they're delusional.:)
That sort of thing is typically owned by a prop or costuming house, not by the studio. Studios tell 'em "we need to rent NN-many cloaks of this description" and the costuming house brings them forth for the production, then hauls them away afterward, to be cleaned and stuffed back into storage until the next studio wants "NN-many cloaks of this description".
This is why these items ultimately wind up sold at auction, or in a used clothing shop (there are several in Hollywood that specialize in such stuff) some years later, rather than in a museum or as part of a studio attraction (like Universal's Tour).
Almost everything in the average Hollywood production that CAN be rented, IS most often rented, rather than owned. Costumes and props are no different.
And what about accounts split across multiple households? Frex, I know people who live in separate houses, but use the same dialup account. They can't be logged on at the same time, but since the account allows multiple usernames, and doesn't care where you log in FROM, there's no problem from the user's POV.
I am wondering what it would do to this case.
This is actually pretty common with AOL accounts, and there's no real reason it couldn't be done with any ISP that allows multiple usernames per account. The assigned IP address would NOT point at a particular phone number thus NOT at a certain address or human, right?
For that matter, it wouldn't be unusual for people using such a shared account to know each other's logins, and potentially to use them (accidentally or deliberately). What does that do to the proof that an IP address points at a specific computer, let alone at a specific human?!!
... I would often be assigned the same IP address multiple times, sometimes consistently for several days running. (I kept logs, and sometimes I'd check.) Might have been because I was in an area that had relatively few users. Also, I generally used a leased POP (not one owned by my ISP), so my IP address would come from the backbone's pool, not the ISP's own pool. AOL, Earthlink, Juno, NetZero, and a bunch of smaller ISPs all used these same leased POPs, and relied on the user's login prefix to tell which ISP the user belonged to. (Frex, an Earthlink user would log in as "ELN/username", not just "username".)
Dunno if that's useful info to you (and it's everything I know about it) but there ya go anyway.
Very good observations, and I believe you are entirely correct. This lack of time to "just be a kid" is destroying the stability of an entire generation.
I rant more about this is another post, where I decry the fact that between school and homework, many kids now do a 12 to 14 hour workday -- we don't even expect that of adults!!
Very important points. Pressure to succeed often misses the point entirely -- "success" is doing well at what YOU are good at, NOT just "being better than everyone else" or being a white-collar worker with a Mercedes and a mortgage.
The world needs farmers and woodworkers and locksmiths and machinists too, perhaps far more than it needs lawyers and stockbrokers and brain surgeons and rocket scientists. That we still have people who feel a calling to work the land or work with their hands is a GOOD thing, not a measure of "failure".
(And yes, I've had this argument with my own family, who took decades to recognise that I'd inherited the "Farmer gene", not the "Yuppie gene".)
1) Kid#1 works his ass off and still only gets C's and B's, cuz that's all he's capable of even at his best. Kid#2 barely works and gets A's and B's. Parent comes down on the hard worker because they only see the results, not the effort, and hold up Kid#2 as the Shining Example. So now Kid#1 feels like nothing he does is ever good enough, even tho he's doing his best.
2) Kid gets 6 A's and one B. Instead of praising the kid for getting mostly A's, they bitch at the kid, "What's with this lousy B? You need to work harder in that class!!" Which makes the kid feel like all his effort is wasted and nothing he does will ever be good enough -- especially if that happens to be the class he already has to work harder in because it's just not something his brain readily groks.
You might notice a pattern: parents often have expectations that kids cannot meet, so the kid winds up believing "nothing I do is ever good enough". It is a real and destructive problem, and probably the single largest cause of teen rebellion.
I graduated from high school in 1972. Speaking from the hoary perspective of that era -- you are absolutely correct in all points.
Homework used to be unheard-of in grade school, was introduced gradually in middle school, and amounted to at most two hours a day TOTAL in high school.
Then along came the horrors of the New Math and Whole Word Recognition, and that produced a generation of teachers who were never properly taught themselves, and don't know anything about actually *teaching*. Concurrently, drugs and illegal immigrants flooded many school districts. So now teachers try to reduce their students' failure rates by piling on the homework -- and when EVERY teacher does that, the hapless student winds up with 6 to 8 hours of schooling AND 6 hours of homework.
That totals up at a 12-to-14 HOUR WORKDAY. Most REAL JOBS don't expect that even of ADULTS; why on earth are we expecting it of CHILDREN, who aren't yet ready to deal with the fulltime work world?? (If they are, why are they still in school??)
On top of that, along came the soccer moms who feel like if they don't schedule every minute of their kids' day, they've failed as a parent.
This all fails to recognise that kids NEED time to "just be a kid", to chase grasshoppers and root in the dirt and just watch the clouds go by. It's a critical part of learning how the world works. And it's necessary to have some decompression time both for emotional health and for book learning to take proper root.
Because there are surviving languages that are closer to Roman-Latin than is modern Italian (church Latin is functionally archaic Italian with a funny accent). My high school Latin teacher got into this, with some examples from Romanian, which is supposedly the nearest living descendent of classical Latin.
Also, a lot of Latin words are descended from Greek words, and ancient Greek pronunciation is, to my understanding, somewhat "better preserved" in the language today, thus giving us clues what those words sounded like when migrated into Latin.
About a dozen have replied so far, which is probably a higher density of beekeepers than in the general populace. (And I count as half a beekeeper, since I worked for one for several years:)
Yellowjackets will kill and eat bees. In some areas beekeepers put a mesh gate over the hive entrance, cuz otherwise the yellowjackets will wipe out the whole colony.
Geez, it's a plague -- I used to work for a beekeeper:)
Now I'm out in the desert, in an area where honeybees are seldom seen, and the lack of garden pollinators is a distinct problem. -- There is a hive somewhere near my house, but it's apparently not much of a colony, and short on resources. They look better this winter, but last winter they were all pale, weak, and looked decidedly undergrown (I fed them all winter, which apparently helped). They follow me around every morning looking for water, but they're not at all aggressive -- unlike the seriously-nasty Africanized bees that have become predominant only 15 miles from here.
(For some reason they think the water that comes out of the kennel sprayer is much better than the other sources here, that would be easier to get to!)
Same thing happened in SoCal. Drought led to weakened trees, bark beetle infections, mass die-offs (about 80%) and finally, massive fires.
Selective logging would have prevented the problem, not only by removing diseased trees, but also by keeping the healthy trees thinned down to a level that the drought-reduced water levels could support. (If trees don't get enough water, their sap production is reduced, and it's sap that helps with mechanical prevention of bark and twig borers.)
Much as it pains me to see a living tree cut down, it's better to keep one healthy tree that has the resources to fight off disease, than to have five weakened trees that are all doomed.
I got the impression that he works within the program, but with considerable independence to do things his own way. Regardless, he sounds like he has his act together, and hopefully he'll be a good influence.
I agree about Tao. Whatever is wrong with the rest of the program, this guy obviously groks that "internet addiction" is a symptom of deeper issues, not an isolated syndrome in itself.
Imagine how horrifying the deterioration looks from my hoary perspective, of almost 52 years... and you're right, common sense has slid right into the wastebin over the past 20 years, with a sharp downward acceleration starting about 10 years ago.
In another discussion, someone mentioned how now there are "no running allowed" school playgrounds, because gods forbid some child might fall down, skin a knee, and (more to the point) generate a lawsuit. Yet we have parents who can't be arsed to turn off the TV if they don't want their kids seeing it.
But the real problem isn't TV or lawsuits or even bad parenting. It's that we've somehow become convinced that we're all so damned STUPID that we'll do any dumb stunt without a second thought.
When I was a kid, with plenty of time to "just be a kid", kids could tell the difference between fantasy and reality. We might sit in the car and PRETEND to drive it, but no halfway-normal kid would ever try to ACTUALLY drive it; that was what our tricycles and toy cars were for. We had real guns in the house, all quite accessable, but we knew they were not toys, and did NOT confuse them with our TOY guns. Etc, etc.
Occurs to me that a big cause of this loss of common-sense is the soccer-mom craze, where every minute of a kid's day is scheduled, and the average kid never has time to just goof off and observe the world, and learn how it really works (ie. time to "just be a kid"). Certainly you need book-learning too, but a lot of figuring out how to put everything together you have to do on your own, and that "on your own" time no longer exists.
And the first generation of soccer-mommy'd kids are now having kids of their own -- and these are parents who never had any experience at "just being a kid" -- so when their kid exercises his imagination, they don't know any way to interpret it other than "dangerous".
Hence this sort of overreaction.
Hmm. Given that, the article someone above linked from The Onion was sadly on-target, and not satire at all.:(
Tho what I ran into with the K6-2 vs Win95 was definitely a CPU bug (a friend got a confirm on that from an AMD engineer)... not all of 'em are affected, including some of the faster ones, but from the range of complaints I've heard, I think it probably affected more batches the one my friend got AMD to admit to. (More detail in another reply in this chain.)
OTOH I did run into a Win95 issue on this here 550MHz machine -- it ran fine ONCE after install, then the VxD would blow up; IIRC its problem was with the i440BX chipset. It didn't mind the 1GB of RAM, tho (neither does Win98), probably because it's a 4-slot motherboard.
It wasn't a uniform problem. In fact, I have clients with K6-2 450MHz systems and (unpatched) Win95 that had zero install issues, and have NEVER crashed.
However, there was a batch of these CPUs from Sept. 1998 that definitely had the aforementioned bug -- one of my clients (on Win95) experienced it, and a friend (who used linux) got bit by it too. I never did get AMD to replace the buggy CPU, but my friend persisted and eventually got to an engineer who knew about the problem, explained it in some detail, and sent him a new CPU, sans bug.
I've heard enough similar tales of woe to conclude that variants of this bug exist in other K6-2 production batches too; and since unpatched Win95 runs perfectly well on *some* of this CPU family, it's NOT *just* a Windows problem.
There are other such hardware-triggered issues. Two that I know of: 1) the Win9x 47-day rollover bug -- only about half the PCs out there are affected, so it probably requires a matching bug in the system timer to manifest. 2) The "Win98 won't run with more than 512mb of RAM" issue seems to be limited to motherboards with 3 DIMM slots, probably as a side effect of how 3 slots is really two overlapping pairs. Those with 2 or 4 slots are usually not affected. (Come to think of it, I'll bet this one tickles the "Win9x won't run on machines faster than nnGHz" problem, too.)
Sopme of those memory-expansion cards only knew an ancient version of EMS. I had such a card in my 286, and none of its 1990ish-vintage DOS apps would speak to the 2mb of EMS on the card. So I configured the entire 2mb as a RAMdisk, and that became the 286's workspace... which tripled system performance (such as it was!)
BTW I still have the 286 -- it wasn't retired for good until 2001.
Slashdot Mirror
It's probably based on the rental records of the costuming company that last had it in inventory. These things have inventory numbers, often sewn into the garment. And the fact is, it's probably one of *several* that were either used or on standby during the filming of Star Wars, with no way to tell which one it was.
What a lot of these hardcore fans don't recognise is that there probably wasn't just ONE "Kenobi cloak" -- there probably were half a dozen, to allow for damage, cleaning, etc. (they can't stop the cameras for a week just because you spilled coffee on your costume -- they bring out another one, you change, and off you go again).
:)
An item that's not yet in the costuming house's inventory is usually stitched together quick and dirty, so I'd be surprised if the probable-several-cloaks were more than a cursory match -- good enough for the camera at the time, if not for the nitpickers 3 decades later. And over the course of being rented out for later productions, these cloaks probably underwent minor alterations/repairs, too.
As I recall, there were at least 8 partial or full Darth Vader costumes from the first 3 films. So if anyone claims to have the One True Costume, they're delusional.
That sort of thing is typically owned by a prop or costuming house, not by the studio. Studios tell 'em "we need to rent NN-many cloaks of this description" and the costuming house brings them forth for the production, then hauls them away afterward, to be cleaned and stuffed back into storage until the next studio wants "NN-many cloaks of this description".
This is why these items ultimately wind up sold at auction, or in a used clothing shop (there are several in Hollywood that specialize in such stuff) some years later, rather than in a museum or as part of a studio attraction (like Universal's Tour).
Almost everything in the average Hollywood production that CAN be rented, IS most often rented, rather than owned. Costumes and props are no different.
Put a name (I suggest "RIAA") in the first slot, an IP address in the second slot, and click the first button you come to. Voila!!
Does dialup use a MAC address? I thought that was a network-card thing. (IANANetworkingDude.)
In line with the reply from Technician:
And what about accounts split across multiple households? Frex, I know people who live in separate houses, but use the same dialup account. They can't be logged on at the same time, but since the account allows multiple usernames, and doesn't care where you log in FROM, there's no problem from the user's POV.
I am wondering what it would do to this case.
This is actually pretty common with AOL accounts, and there's no real reason it couldn't be done with any ISP that allows multiple usernames per account. The assigned IP address would NOT point at a particular phone number thus NOT at a certain address or human, right?
For that matter, it wouldn't be unusual for people using such a shared account to know each other's logins, and potentially to use them (accidentally or deliberately). What does that do to the proof that an IP address points at a specific computer, let alone at a specific human?!!
... I would often be assigned the same IP address multiple times, sometimes consistently for several days running. (I kept logs, and sometimes I'd check.) Might have been because I was in an area that had relatively few users. Also, I generally used a leased POP (not one owned by my ISP), so my IP address would come from the backbone's pool, not the ISP's own pool. AOL, Earthlink, Juno, NetZero, and a bunch of smaller ISPs all used these same leased POPs, and relied on the user's login prefix to tell which ISP the user belonged to. (Frex, an Earthlink user would log in as "ELN/username", not just "username".)
Dunno if that's useful info to you (and it's everything I know about it) but there ya go anyway.
Very good observations, and I believe you are entirely correct. This lack of time to "just be a kid" is destroying the stability of an entire generation.
I rant more about this is another post, where I decry the fact that between school and homework, many kids now do a 12 to 14 hour workday -- we don't even expect that of adults!!
Very important points. Pressure to succeed often misses the point entirely -- "success" is doing well at what YOU are good at, NOT just "being better than everyone else" or being a white-collar worker with a Mercedes and a mortgage.
The world needs farmers and woodworkers and locksmiths and machinists too, perhaps far more than it needs lawyers and stockbrokers and brain surgeons and rocket scientists. That we still have people who feel a calling to work the land or work with their hands is a GOOD thing, not a measure of "failure".
(And yes, I've had this argument with my own family, who took decades to recognise that I'd inherited the "Farmer gene", not the "Yuppie gene".)
Parents typically exhibit two problems:
1) Kid#1 works his ass off and still only gets C's and B's, cuz that's all he's capable of even at his best. Kid#2 barely works and gets A's and B's. Parent comes down on the hard worker because they only see the results, not the effort, and hold up Kid#2 as the Shining Example. So now Kid#1 feels like nothing he does is ever good enough, even tho he's doing his best.
2) Kid gets 6 A's and one B. Instead of praising the kid for getting mostly A's, they bitch at the kid, "What's with this lousy B? You need to work harder in that class!!" Which makes the kid feel like all his effort is wasted and nothing he does will ever be good enough -- especially if that happens to be the class he already has to work harder in because it's just not something his brain readily groks.
You might notice a pattern: parents often have expectations that kids cannot meet, so the kid winds up believing "nothing I do is ever good enough". It is a real and destructive problem, and probably the single largest cause of teen rebellion.
I graduated from high school in 1972. Speaking from the hoary perspective of that era -- you are absolutely correct in all points.
Homework used to be unheard-of in grade school, was introduced gradually in middle school, and amounted to at most two hours a day TOTAL in high school.
Then along came the horrors of the New Math and Whole Word Recognition, and that produced a generation of teachers who were never properly taught themselves, and don't know anything about actually *teaching*. Concurrently, drugs and illegal immigrants flooded many school districts. So now teachers try to reduce their students' failure rates by piling on the homework -- and when EVERY teacher does that, the hapless student winds up with 6 to 8 hours of schooling AND 6 hours of homework.
That totals up at a 12-to-14 HOUR WORKDAY. Most REAL JOBS don't expect that even of ADULTS; why on earth are we expecting it of CHILDREN, who aren't yet ready to deal with the fulltime work world?? (If they are, why are they still in school??)
On top of that, along came the soccer moms who feel like if they don't schedule every minute of their kids' day, they've failed as a parent.
This all fails to recognise that kids NEED time to "just be a kid", to chase grasshoppers and root in the dirt and just watch the clouds go by. It's a critical part of learning how the world works. And it's necessary to have some decompression time both for emotional health and for book learning to take proper root.
Because there are surviving languages that are closer to Roman-Latin than is modern Italian (church Latin is functionally archaic Italian with a funny accent). My high school Latin teacher got into this, with some examples from Romanian, which is supposedly the nearest living descendent of classical Latin.
Also, a lot of Latin words are descended from Greek words, and ancient Greek pronunciation is, to my understanding, somewhat "better preserved" in the language today, thus giving us clues what those words sounded like when migrated into Latin.
Aside from that, someone up above makes an interesting point with respect to libraries, which fundamentally "make stuff available":
..??
What about when libraries lend *digital* materials, which by their very nature "make copies" as they are used by the library patron??
And what about when schoolkids share textbooks?? Will we hear cries of "Don't be a book pirate -- buy your own copy!"
ISTM the question is a lot larger than just its impact on the internet.
About a dozen have replied so far, which is probably a higher density of beekeepers than in the general populace. (And I count as half a beekeeper, since I worked for one for several years :)
Yellowjackets will kill and eat bees. In some areas beekeepers put a mesh gate over the hive entrance, cuz otherwise the yellowjackets will wipe out the whole colony.
Geez, it's a plague -- I used to work for a beekeeper :)
Now I'm out in the desert, in an area where honeybees are seldom seen, and the lack of garden pollinators is a distinct problem. -- There is a hive somewhere near my house, but it's apparently not much of a colony, and short on resources. They look better this winter, but last winter they were all pale, weak, and looked decidedly undergrown (I fed them all winter, which apparently helped). They follow me around every morning looking for water, but they're not at all aggressive -- unlike the seriously-nasty Africanized bees that have become predominant only 15 miles from here.
(For some reason they think the water that comes out of the kennel sprayer is much better than the other sources here, that would be easier to get to!)
Same thing happened in SoCal. Drought led to weakened trees, bark beetle infections, mass die-offs (about 80%) and finally, massive fires.
Selective logging would have prevented the problem, not only by removing diseased trees, but also by keeping the healthy trees thinned down to a level that the drought-reduced water levels could support. (If trees don't get enough water, their sap production is reduced, and it's sap that helps with mechanical prevention of bark and twig borers.)
Much as it pains me to see a living tree cut down, it's better to keep one healthy tree that has the resources to fight off disease, than to have five weakened trees that are all doomed.
Not so. Starlings can be easily confused with blackbirds.
I got the impression that he works within the program, but with considerable independence to do things his own way. Regardless, he sounds like he has his act together, and hopefully he'll be a good influence.
I agree about Tao. Whatever is wrong with the rest of the program, this guy obviously groks that "internet addiction" is a symptom of deeper issues, not an isolated syndrome in itself.
Always good to know someone is listening!
No idea about what models they sell where; I'm in the U.S.
Imagine how horrifying the deterioration looks from my hoary perspective, of almost 52 years ... and you're right, common sense has slid right into the wastebin over the past 20 years, with a sharp downward acceleration starting about 10 years ago.
:(
_ experts_call_for
In another discussion, someone mentioned how now there are "no running allowed" school playgrounds, because gods forbid some child might fall down, skin a knee, and (more to the point) generate a lawsuit. Yet we have parents who can't be arsed to turn off the TV if they don't want their kids seeing it.
But the real problem isn't TV or lawsuits or even bad parenting. It's that we've somehow become convinced that we're all so damned STUPID that we'll do any dumb stunt without a second thought.
When I was a kid, with plenty of time to "just be a kid", kids could tell the difference between fantasy and reality. We might sit in the car and PRETEND to drive it, but no halfway-normal kid would ever try to ACTUALLY drive it; that was what our tricycles and toy cars were for. We had real guns in the house, all quite accessable, but we knew they were not toys, and did NOT confuse them with our TOY guns. Etc, etc.
Occurs to me that a big cause of this loss of common-sense is the soccer-mom craze, where every minute of a kid's day is scheduled, and the average kid never has time to just goof off and observe the world, and learn how it really works (ie. time to "just be a kid"). Certainly you need book-learning too, but a lot of figuring out how to put everything together you have to do on your own, and that "on your own" time no longer exists.
And the first generation of soccer-mommy'd kids are now having kids of their own -- and these are parents who never had any experience at "just being a kid" -- so when their kid exercises his imagination, they don't know any way to interpret it other than "dangerous".
Hence this sort of overreaction.
Hmm. Given that, the article someone above linked from The Onion was sadly on-target, and not satire at all.
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/child_safety
Hey, there's a useful site, thanks for the link!
... not all of 'em are affected, including some of the faster ones, but from the range of complaints I've heard, I think it probably affected more batches the one my friend got AMD to admit to. (More detail in another reply in this chain.)
Tho what I ran into with the K6-2 vs Win95 was definitely a CPU bug (a friend got a confirm on that from an AMD engineer)
OTOH I did run into a Win95 issue on this here 550MHz machine -- it ran fine ONCE after install, then the VxD would blow up; IIRC its problem was with the i440BX chipset. It didn't mind the 1GB of RAM, tho (neither does Win98), probably because it's a 4-slot motherboard.
It wasn't a uniform problem. In fact, I have clients with K6-2 450MHz systems and (unpatched) Win95 that had zero install issues, and have NEVER crashed.
However, there was a batch of these CPUs from Sept. 1998 that definitely had the aforementioned bug -- one of my clients (on Win95) experienced it, and a friend (who used linux) got bit by it too. I never did get AMD to replace the buggy CPU, but my friend persisted and eventually got to an engineer who knew about the problem, explained it in some detail, and sent him a new CPU, sans bug.
I've heard enough similar tales of woe to conclude that variants of this bug exist in other K6-2 production batches too; and since unpatched Win95 runs perfectly well on *some* of this CPU family, it's NOT *just* a Windows problem.
There are other such hardware-triggered issues. Two that I know of: 1) the Win9x 47-day rollover bug -- only about half the PCs out there are affected, so it probably requires a matching bug in the system timer to manifest. 2) The "Win98 won't run with more than 512mb of RAM" issue seems to be limited to motherboards with 3 DIMM slots, probably as a side effect of how 3 slots is really two overlapping pairs. Those with 2 or 4 slots are usually not affected. (Come to think of it, I'll bet this one tickles the "Win9x won't run on machines faster than nnGHz" problem, too.)
Sopme of those memory-expansion cards only knew an ancient version of EMS. I had such a card in my 286, and none of its 1990ish-vintage DOS apps would speak to the 2mb of EMS on the card. So I configured the entire 2mb as a RAMdisk, and that became the 286's workspace... which tripled system performance (such as it was!)
BTW I still have the 286 -- it wasn't retired for good until 2001.