Eps I and II are sterile. They're like what Spock would do if he was a director. (God save me, did I actually just say that??) Everyone looks perfect on their perfect sets reciting their perfect (though horrendous) lines. But it's unemotional, and lacking in human depth.
IMO, there was way too much time and money spent on making everything look just so, and in delivering this huge story arc, and in the end I don't give a damn because it seems practically none of it is about the characters -- they're just there as vehicles to convey Lucas's Story As Myth concept. And it seems the actors know it -- they mostly don't even seem to bother trying to act most of the time. The ones that do stand out are Liam Neeson, Christopher Lee, and Ian McDiarmid. Oh, and Ray Park delivered a great performance as Darth Maul.
That isn't to say I think Episodes 4-6 are fantastic. Frankly, they aren't great, as movies. Campy dialogue, rather stereotypical characters, and the acting left something to be desired there too, but there was some real creativity in there and I actually give a damn about the characters and what happens to them. Even now as an old 30-something year old, having seen them many times as a kid (and now enjoying my own son watching them).
Heavy metals, petrolium distilates, and other exotic chemicals are still the greatest threat to landfill leaching.
No. It's the diapers. I really feel sorry for 30th century archaelogists as they dig through mountains of partially-decomposed diapers. And what will they think?....
Yeah, and don't get upset when your kid can only regurgitate all the information he's read whereas mine can explain what he's read, in his own words, because he has taken the time to understand it.
I still sometimes miss the thrill of the hunt, as it were, flipping through cards organized by subject, title, and author, searching for just the right book.
Yes, I miss that too. I can remember the thrill of adventure, going to the card catalog and finding things that were related to what I was looking for but which I wouldn't have thought to look for. Or just getting distracted and exploring. Or browsing the shelves, picking up whatever caught my eye. I read voraciously (and often indiscriminately, although I had my favorite subjects), and as a result can follow (or carry on) a conversation about nearly any topic without getting lost or sounding like a 3rd-grader. Err, I mean 'n00b'.
And it's not so much about getting all the latest, most detailed, most accurate info. Basic concepts are the most important thing, and those are pretty much unchanging. (With radical advances coming every once in a while.)
Anyway, you can bet safely that my son is gonna spend lots of time in the library as he grows up.
When I wrote code for the 8086 (yes, the 4.77Mhz CPU), it made sense to drop down into assembly on a regular basis so I could extract every cycle of performance out of a bit of code. This was roughly a.33 MIPS chip with 29,000 transistors. Shaving 10 cycles off a loop that executed 100,000 times saved 1,000,000 cycles -- close to a quarter of a second.
Today's desktop CPU's are approaching 10,000 MIPS, running at 4Ghz. In simplistic terms, this is about 30,000 times the performance of an 8086. If I did my math right, saving those 1 million cycles now improves performance of that loop by.00025 seconds.
There are still applications which are compute-bound. But for typical applications, the type of performance optimizations that used to make sense are a waste of time today.
Those of you who have written distributed applications/code know what a bitch it can be to debug something when multiple processes are involved.
Those of you who have written multi-threaded applications know what a bitch it can be to debug something when multiple threads are involved.
Those of you who have written timing-sensitive code know what a bitch it can be to debug something that is timing-related.
Now, put all three of those into a pot and stir it around. That's what I and a co-worker have been working on the past four days.
We sent four or five debug versions of the code to the customer for them to run in their production test environment over the past several days with various information printed to the console. With the dials turned way up, the problem usually manifested after a few hours (as opposed to a day or more, when operating under normal conditions). Each time, we'd get back a multi-megabyte log file which we would pore over to see if we had found the root cause of the problem. (Yes, grep was our dear, dear companion -- we're taking it out for drinks as soon as we've verified the problem has been fixed.)
The problem was caused by a specific set of conditions -- the right things happening at the right time, in the right sequence, with a particular timing. To "trap" those conditions would require running both the client and server under a tracing debugger that recorded the time and "event" (e.g. method call, assignment, exception) of everything the system did and then allowed complex queries on the data produced. E.g. "How times per minute was update() called prior to isDead() returning true, on this instance?"
The data could perhaps be recorded using AOP. Next time we run into a scenario like this, it might be worthwhile to break out AspectJ or AspectWorkz. But analysing it will be tricky.
Slashdot headlines aren't known for being "layman-oriented" in nature, but I think this one sets a new standard with its incredible density of TLA's, product/company names, and industry terms. All I can say is, way to go Slashdot. This is the kind of standard setting (and breaking!) I've come to expect from the premier "geek news" site on the Internet.
And it's good to see a standard set that Slashdot can be proud of, after holding previous records so long for "duplicate submissions" and "spelling mistakes in submissions".
I'm a total amateur too, and I don't think it's at all odd that the galaxies got "slapped together" so quickly. 400-800 million years sounds quite reasonable to me because these galaxies are more primitive-looking.
In short, I think my amateur, uninformed opinion trumps yours.
(For the humor-impaired: Remember, folks, this is Slashdot....)
The article on three clicks suggests to me that web users have become so accustomed to the horrible "navigation" on so many websites that they are willing to put up with a lot of frustration.
I think a better study would ask at what point does a user's frustration level increase beyond what they consider acceptable. In other words, what is their patience level.
It's pretty much what I did when I bought my new system a few months ago (Barton 2500+, 8RDA+ mobo). Their recommendations match the experience I had. I used (and deleted, stupid stupid me) a spreadsheet to track my changes as I stepped through FSB, multiplier, voltage and memory settings until I found my maximum performance.
Then I backed off by about 10%. I'm more interested in overall reliability and longevity than maximum performance, since I want this system to last for at least three years as my primary.
I'd like to draw your attention to the Empire State Building because it was completed in 1931, decades before most of these other buildings were even thought of, decades before "modern" skyscraper architecture and engineering. It still ranks as one of the tallest (and most famous) buildings in the world over 70 years later.
I voted for Evolution, the Gimp, and OpenOffice. I picked them for the marketing potential. These three products have mass-market potential, and COMDEX is a good way to get them in front of people who would otherwise perhaps never know there are alternatives to Exchange/Outlook and MSOffice.
I've decided that Darl McBride is pulling the most elaborate corporate prank ever conceived. I have found no other rational explanation -- and I refuse to believe the only other rational alternative (that the man is insane).
I've done the same thing -- and I too grew up with books (and magazines).
Part of it for me is a desire to be on the bleeding edge -- I like knowing that what I'm getting is the most up-to-date. But I have to admit that most of it is purely a matter of convenience. It is quite a lot easier to search Google than to make time to go to the library and search the card catalog or peruse the periodicals.
Last but not least, I'm an information addict. The Internet satisfies my craving delightfully.
What's most interesting to me about this story is that both the engineers and the managers were making the best decision based on their perspectives. The engineer's perspective is based on hard facts, information, and analysis. The manager's perspective is based on people issues: money, resource management, risk management, project deadlines, etc.
It's easy in retrospect to criticize managers who didn't want to be a "Chicken Little" or who, upon getting feedback from upper management, called it a "dead issue". But if they had gone ahead with the imaging, and the photos showed no damage and the shuttle had landed safely with no (or insignificant) damage to the wing, their reputation would have suffered. They would have been faulted for allocating valuable resources on something that turned out not to be an issue.
Part of a manager's job includes risk management and resource allocation. This means properly assessing the likelihood and impact of a risk. In this case, I would suggest that management considered the 'cost' of pursuing further investigation to be higher than the 'likelihood * impact' factor of doing nothing. They have probably made the same decision many times before, successfully, which would encourage them to make the same decision again. Only this time, they were wrong -- the statistics caught up with them.
I love the language portability of.NET (it's not perfect, but then, neither is Java's platform portability)....
Since Sun doesn't officially stand behind any languages besides Java, I agree with your statement from a business perspective. Technically, Java does have language portability as well however (if I understand your usage) -- see Jython for example, but other languages can be compiled to Java bytecode as well.
On a related note, one of the most confusing things about Java IMO is the three completely different things that are described by the Java name: the language, the virtual machine, and the libraries.
I agree. Just as there are laws regulating traffic on public roads, there should be laws regulating traffic on the Internet. You don't get to drive on public roads before taking a driving test, and any vehicle on public roads must pass a minimal safety inspection once a year. There is no such equivalent for computers and the Internet.
Of course, it needs to be done reasonably. We don't expect drivers to explain how an automatic transmission works; we shouldn't require users to explain how DNS works. But a basic understanding of how to drive safely on the information highway (there, that's my bad pun for the day) and how to practice "safe computing" isn't unreasonable.
The main reason advertising works on TV is because of the number of viewers reached per spot and the captive nature of the medium. Yes, a 30-second spot will cost the advertiser quite a bit, but it's literally like spam: when you get millions of eyeballs, it doesn't take much of a return rate to make it profitable.
Raise your hand if you have a Tivo and watch commercials... okay, you can both put down your hands. Point made?
That said, I think advertising will continue to play its part in funding online content providers, where the target market is large enough and/or captive.
"The W3C has announced that XForms is now a Proposed Recommendation, after certification of one full implementation (open source Java XSmiles from Finland) and two more implementations of each feature (the Internet Explorer plug-in FormsPlayer and the Java standalone Novell xPlorer). XForms is the next generation of forms for the Web, and uses an XML-based three-layer model: data model, data, and user interface. XForms uses CSS for device independencence and is designed for integration into XHTML 2, SVG, and other XML-based markup languages. A host of other implementations are available or in progress, but my pick for most interesting is DENG, which is an XForms to Flash compiler written in Flash. DENG supports XForms, SVG, RSS, XHTML, and CSS. XForms is in consideration for other standards as diverse as Universal Remote Controls and the UK Government Interoperability Framework, and was developed with the participation of IBM, Oracle, Xerox, Adobe, Novell, SAP, Cardiff, PureEdge, and a host of other companies, universities, and invididuals."
Wow... is there an XSLT that will convert that link-and-acronym-infested paragraph to English?:)
Quote: "When stuff gets too `polished' i think it loses too much of it's `soul' and becomes a little too mechanical. I don't expect everyone to agree with me on this, though, so to each thier own."
I for one do agree. This is the same thing I hate about the new Star Wars movies. Every frame looks like an artist's rendering. It's not alive.
Slashdot Mirror
Eps I and II are sterile. They're like what Spock would do if he was a director. (God save me, did I actually just say that??) Everyone looks perfect on their perfect sets reciting their perfect (though horrendous) lines. But it's unemotional, and lacking in human depth.
IMO, there was way too much time and money spent on making everything look just so, and in delivering this huge story arc, and in the end I don't give a damn because it seems practically none of it is about the characters -- they're just there as vehicles to convey Lucas's Story As Myth concept. And it seems the actors know it -- they mostly don't even seem to bother trying to act most of the time. The ones that do stand out are Liam Neeson, Christopher Lee, and Ian McDiarmid. Oh, and Ray Park delivered a great performance as Darth Maul.
That isn't to say I think Episodes 4-6 are fantastic. Frankly, they aren't great, as movies. Campy dialogue, rather stereotypical characters, and the acting left something to be desired there too, but there was some real creativity in there and I actually give a damn about the characters and what happens to them. Even now as an old 30-something year old, having seen them many times as a kid (and now enjoying my own son watching them).
No. It's the diapers. I really feel sorry for 30th century archaelogists as they dig through mountains of partially-decomposed diapers. And what will they think? ....
-Thomas
Yes, I miss that too. I can remember the thrill of adventure, going to the card catalog and finding things that were related to what I was looking for but which I wouldn't have thought to look for. Or just getting distracted and exploring. Or browsing the shelves, picking up whatever caught my eye. I read voraciously (and often indiscriminately, although I had my favorite subjects), and as a result can follow (or carry on) a conversation about nearly any topic without getting lost or sounding like a 3rd-grader. Err, I mean 'n00b'.
And it's not so much about getting all the latest, most detailed, most accurate info. Basic concepts are the most important thing, and those are pretty much unchanging. (With radical advances coming every once in a while.)
Anyway, you can bet safely that my son is gonna spend lots of time in the library as he grows up.
-Thomas
Nice. Here are a few more entries to bring you down to the origins of the x86 line:
.: 29000
Jun 1978 8086 . .
Feb 1982 80286 . . : 134000
Oct 1985 386DX . . : 275000
When I wrote code for the 8086 (yes, the 4.77Mhz CPU), it made sense to drop down into assembly on a regular basis so I could extract every cycle of performance out of a bit of code. This was roughly a .33 MIPS chip with 29,000 transistors. Shaving 10 cycles off a loop that executed 100,000 times saved 1,000,000 cycles -- close to a quarter of a second.
.00025 seconds.
Today's desktop CPU's are approaching 10,000 MIPS, running at 4Ghz. In simplistic terms, this is about 30,000 times the performance of an 8086. If I did my math right, saving those 1 million cycles now improves performance of that loop by
There are still applications which are compute-bound. But for typical applications, the type of performance optimizations that used to make sense are a waste of time today.
Those of you who have written distributed applications/code know what a bitch it can be to debug something when multiple processes are involved.
Those of you who have written multi-threaded applications know what a bitch it can be to debug something when multiple threads are involved.
Those of you who have written timing-sensitive code know what a bitch it can be to debug something that is timing-related.
Now, put all three of those into a pot and stir it around. That's what I and a co-worker have been working on the past four days.
We sent four or five debug versions of the code to the customer for them to run in their production test environment over the past several days with various information printed to the console. With the dials turned way up, the problem usually manifested after a few hours (as opposed to a day or more, when operating under normal conditions). Each time, we'd get back a multi-megabyte log file which we would pore over to see if we had found the root cause of the problem. (Yes, grep was our dear, dear companion -- we're taking it out for drinks as soon as we've verified the problem has been fixed.)
The problem was caused by a specific set of conditions -- the right things happening at the right time, in the right sequence, with a particular timing. To "trap" those conditions would require running both the client and server under a tracing debugger that recorded the time and "event" (e.g. method call, assignment, exception) of everything the system did and then allowed complex queries on the data produced. E.g. "How times per minute was update() called prior to isDead() returning true, on this instance?"
The data could perhaps be recorded using AOP. Next time we run into a scenario like this, it might be worthwhile to break out AspectJ or AspectWorkz. But analysing it will be tricky.
Slashdot headlines aren't known for being "layman-oriented" in nature, but I think this one sets a new standard with its incredible density of TLA's, product/company names, and industry terms. All I can say is, way to go Slashdot. This is the kind of standard setting (and breaking!) I've come to expect from the premier "geek news" site on the Internet.
And it's good to see a standard set that Slashdot can be proud of, after holding previous records so long for "duplicate submissions" and "spelling mistakes in submissions".
Yes... the Twilight Zone. (Everybody groan in unison now....)
Image size: 6200x6200 pixels.
:)
I want an LCD panel that will let me view this without scaling or cropping. At 300dpi, this would be a 21" screen size. I could live with that.
-Thomas
I'm a total amateur too, and I don't think it's at all odd that the galaxies got "slapped together" so quickly. 400-800 million years sounds quite reasonable to me because these galaxies are more primitive-looking.
In short, I think my amateur, uninformed opinion trumps yours.
(For the humor-impaired: Remember, folks, this is Slashdot....)
-Thomas
The article on three clicks suggests to me that web users have become so accustomed to the horrible "navigation" on so many websites that they are willing to put up with a lot of frustration.
I think a better study would ask at what point does a user's frustration level increase beyond what they consider acceptable. In other words, what is their patience level.
-Thomas
It's pretty much what I did when I bought my new system a few months ago (Barton 2500+, 8RDA+ mobo). Their recommendations match the experience I had. I used (and deleted, stupid stupid me) a spreadsheet to track my changes as I stepped through FSB, multiplier, voltage and memory settings until I found my maximum performance.
Then I backed off by about 10%. I'm more interested in overall reliability and longevity than maximum performance, since I want this system to last for at least three years as my primary.
-Thomas
I'd like to draw your attention to the Empire State Building because it was completed in 1931, decades before most of these other buildings were even thought of, decades before "modern" skyscraper architecture and engineering. It still ranks as one of the tallest (and most famous) buildings in the world over 70 years later.
-Thomas
I voted for Evolution, the Gimp, and OpenOffice. I picked them for the marketing potential. These three products have mass-market potential, and COMDEX is a good way to get them in front of people who would otherwise perhaps never know there are alternatives to Exchange/Outlook and MSOffice.
I've decided that Darl McBride is pulling the most elaborate corporate prank ever conceived. I have found no other rational explanation -- and I refuse to believe the only other rational alternative (that the man is insane).
-Thomas
I've done the same thing -- and I too grew up with books (and magazines).
Part of it for me is a desire to be on the bleeding edge -- I like knowing that what I'm getting is the most up-to-date. But I have to admit that most of it is purely a matter of convenience. It is quite a lot easier to search Google than to make time to go to the library and search the card catalog or peruse the periodicals.
Last but not least, I'm an information addict. The Internet satisfies my craving delightfully.
-Thomas
Yeah, being in a Great Depression will do that to ya.
(More seriously, it's only been post-WWII that people have regularly smiled for photos. It's a cultural thing.)
What's most interesting to me about this story is that both the engineers and the managers were making the best decision based on their perspectives. The engineer's perspective is based on hard facts, information, and analysis. The manager's perspective is based on people issues: money, resource management, risk management, project deadlines, etc.
It's easy in retrospect to criticize managers who didn't want to be a "Chicken Little" or who, upon getting feedback from upper management, called it a "dead issue". But if they had gone ahead with the imaging, and the photos showed no damage and the shuttle had landed safely with no (or insignificant) damage to the wing, their reputation would have suffered. They would have been faulted for allocating valuable resources on something that turned out not to be an issue.
Part of a manager's job includes risk management and resource allocation. This means properly assessing the likelihood and impact of a risk. In this case, I would suggest that management considered the 'cost' of pursuing further investigation to be higher than the 'likelihood * impact' factor of doing nothing. They have probably made the same decision many times before, successfully, which would encourage them to make the same decision again. Only this time, they were wrong -- the statistics caught up with them.
-Thomas
California, here I come!
Since Sun doesn't officially stand behind any languages besides Java, I agree with your statement from a business perspective. Technically, Java does have language portability as well however (if I understand your usage) -- see Jython for example, but other languages can be compiled to Java bytecode as well.
On a related note, one of the most confusing things about Java IMO is the three completely different things that are described by the Java name: the language, the virtual machine, and the libraries.
-Thomas
I agree. Just as there are laws regulating traffic on public roads, there should be laws regulating traffic on the Internet. You don't get to drive on public roads before taking a driving test, and any vehicle on public roads must pass a minimal safety inspection once a year. There is no such equivalent for computers and the Internet.
Of course, it needs to be done reasonably. We don't expect drivers to explain how an automatic transmission works; we shouldn't require users to explain how DNS works. But a basic understanding of how to drive safely on the information highway (there, that's my bad pun for the day) and how to practice "safe computing" isn't unreasonable.
-Thomas
The main reason advertising works on TV is because of the number of viewers reached per spot and the captive nature of the medium. Yes, a 30-second spot will cost the advertiser quite a bit, but it's literally like spam: when you get millions of eyeballs, it doesn't take much of a return rate to make it profitable.
Raise your hand if you have a Tivo and watch commercials... okay, you can both put down your hands. Point made?
That said, I think advertising will continue to play its part in funding online content providers, where the target market is large enough and/or captive.
-Thomas
"The W3C has announced that XForms is now a Proposed Recommendation, after certification of one full implementation (open source Java XSmiles from Finland) and two more implementations of each feature (the Internet Explorer plug-in FormsPlayer and the Java standalone Novell xPlorer). XForms is the next generation of forms for the Web, and uses an XML-based three-layer model: data model, data, and user interface. XForms uses CSS for device independencence and is designed for integration into XHTML 2, SVG, and other XML-based markup languages. A host of other implementations are available or in progress, but my pick for most interesting is DENG, which is an XForms to Flash compiler written in Flash. DENG supports XForms, SVG, RSS, XHTML, and CSS. XForms is in consideration for other standards as diverse as Universal Remote Controls and the UK Government Interoperability Framework, and was developed with the participation of IBM, Oracle, Xerox, Adobe, Novell, SAP, Cardiff, PureEdge, and a host of other companies, universities, and invididuals."
:)
Wow... is there an XSLT that will convert that link-and-acronym-infested paragraph to English?
-Thomas
Quote: "When stuff gets too `polished' i think it loses too much of it's `soul' and becomes a little too mechanical. I don't expect everyone to agree with me on this, though, so to each thier own."
I for one do agree. This is the same thing I hate about the new Star Wars movies. Every frame looks like an artist's rendering. It's not alive.
-Thomas