In my experience, the real limitation in terms of data storage isn't the media so much as it is the hardware.
When is the last time you saw a 5.25" disk drive? How easy is it to find a Jaz drive these days? WORM reader? Something that will read your old files stored on analog cassette tape? I could go on naming defunct storage media solutions for half the day.
The only real solution for long-term storage is to keep the files "live" on a system someplace. Under and other arrangement even if the *media* the bits are stored on doesn't go bad, there's a pretty good chance that the hardware to read that media will go the way of the dodo when you're not looking.
So, once again, good planning and systems administration proves to be the answer. Set up a reliable system in a RAID mirroring setup and cut backups on a regular basis.
This became a major concern to me once I switched over to all digital photography. I have a Linux fileserver running a RAID-1 setup that serves up all my important files. Once a month, I cut three sets of backups to DVD -- one gets stuck a CD tower in my apartment, one gets taken to work and the other one goes to a storage area I have (I figure if anything ever happens to take out all three at once, losing my data will be the least of my worries). I'm up to four DVD's to back up all my data now, thanks mostly to digital photos.
It's important to be able to rely on your media over a fairly reasonable term, but in any long-term situation live filesystems are the only way to fly.
Wonder how much juice you could generate if you were to mount a stirling engine at the end of this sucker. Seems like it'd be a lot cheaper/easier to implement than normal high efficiancy solar cells if you could work out a reasonable and reliable sun tracking system.
Beakman was entertaining, but the real difference between that show and Bill Nye is that, while Bill Nye is targeted towards kids, Beakman was targeted towards ADHD-afflicted kids with access to an unlimited supply of Jolt cola who don't get enough exercise.
I assume he's referring to Card's rantings against gay marriage, which aren't hard to find if you go hit Google.
I've got to admit, I'm a little torn about this myself. It tears me up a bit to think that my patronage of this man's works (I've bought a lot of his books) has enriched someone who uses his money and fame to soapbox out his (IMO) detestable position.
You can argue that the movie itself is not directly associated with his position, but that seems like a bit of a cop-out. It'd be like buying cookies when the proceeds go to benefit the Klan -- even if what you're doing is innocent, the cause it supports isn't any less vile.
Anyhow, I figure that this won't be a big deal since it sounds like the movie's going to suck.
That would be Emperor of San Francisco. Well, technically "His Imperial Majesty, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico", but I'm trying not to be too picky.
The Wisconsin government could theoretically shut down the local computer store, but it does not have the power to shut down out-of-state websites.
It does, however, have the power to regulate shipping companies who operate in the state.
For example, let's say I'm Wisconsin. I want to allow people in my state to purchase only from internet stores which report their sales to Wisconsin to me. So, I pass a regulation which fines UPS for delivering packages from internet merchants not certified by me. Voila!
Several states already control liquor sales this way. If you go wine tasting in California and want to ship some back home to Virginia or Michigan, you're out of luck.
Aside from that, hopefully those involved will learn a valuable life lesson from this:
If you can't play by the rules, you'd better
be able to run fast and catch, throw or hit a ball really well.
PS: I wonder if any prospective students were smart enough to just look at the admission
status of the *other* students... Now that would be showing the sort of sense you'd
need to get to the top of corporate America.
The real issue here is: "What appropriate vengence shall be visited upon the econ department?"
Now, given that they're all in the same building my usual 'board up the doors and set the place on fire' approach probably isn't the best remedy. Honestly, I have a bunch of ideas I could post, but most of them would open you (and possibly me) up to a great deal of liability. So here's one just to get you thinking in the right direction:
Pennies. Along with your 20 closest friends, learn how to penny a door shut. It's not that tough, but may take practice to be able to do quickly and on the first try. Now, in the morning before classes (those Econ types get up early for some reason), simultaniously penny shut each and every office door. EXTRA POINTS: Use some superglue on the pennies to make them tough to remove.
Other ideas involve things like foam fire extinguishers, B&E and property damage. But hey, you're engineers, you can work these out on your own.
The thing that kills me is I hear this line of "reasoning" a lot from people I talk up Galactica to: "Oh, they cancelled Farscape!". Yeah, look, I liked Farscape too. That's in the past. This argument is right up there with the folks who object "But Starbuck's a woman now!". Yeah, get over it.
If you're missing out on what is possibly the best Sci Fi series of our lives because you're still mad about the cancellation of a great show that was (and I say this as a huge Farscape fan) past it's prime, that's your problem.
Totally right about the parents and the school system.
Yeah, I'm totally for having to government replace parents and personal responsibility in general, too. I just don't know where I'd be today if I hadn't had Big Brother watching every move I made while I was in school.
It's amazing how quickly we've transformed from a country which at least claimed to value freedom, civil liberties and self-determination into one which pleads for the government to come in and run our lives, isn't it?
Furthermore: we should put a GPS tag on all cars that'll report you if you go over the speed limit. Speeding *kills* people. Oh, and we'll need to inspect it twice a year for illegal modifications to your ride. Cutting off the cats hurts the environment. BTW, the cops'll be around next Tuesday to check your house for illegal cable. And here, you need to install this program to check for illegal MP3s or movies on your computer. And you'll be registering all your guns once a year so the government can keep track of where they are...
Total Law Enforcement rules. And the trains run on time, too!
In my opinion, Star Trek as a franchise has pretty much run its course for two big reasons:
(a) The universe carries too much baggage. Okay, it's nice to have some history to play off of and create plots from, but it's also a major downer creatively to have too much of your fantastic futuristic world predefined. Star Trek carries a ton of that baggage -- the relations, technology, conventions and politics are all laid out there.
Example outside of Trek: When I was younger, I was into the Dragonlance books. The first few were damn decent in terms of starter fantasy, but as more and more came out they started suffering from this exact problem. The situations, characters and setting started to lose their edge and the attributes which made them attractive in the first place. "Oh, hey, it's Lord Soth, what a shocker that he'd show up..."
(b) It's a show for a different time. I'm not sure if this is cyclical, but today's audiences don't really want mildly disguised social commentary. If you look at the top shows right now, they tend to be about human drama. BSG is a great example. Farscape was (often) a good example. Deadwood, the Wire... The list goes on and on.
I'd add that it was overmerchandised, but George Lucas has proved to us all that you can whore something out to the hilt and people will still come pony up for it if the original was good enough.
At this point, rather than trying to patch up the Star Trek universe it seems like it would be better just to direct creative juices elsewhere.
If you want original shows, get HBO and tune into Carnivale. That's pretty original right there, unless there's another show about avatars, monsters and the dustbowl that I'm forgetting. Or Deadwood -- okay, there have been westerns before, but not anything like this one. Or watch The Wire. Again, cop shows in general are nothing new, but how many spend as much if not more time fleshing out the "bad guys" as they do the cops?
I'll grant you that the *networks* mostly aren't doing anything all that cutting-edge right now, but who wants to watch them anyhow here in the darkest days of Mike Powell's Moral TV Crusade?
I just noticed last week that Battlestar Galactica is on Friday nights, too (I have TiVO, so I didn't notice until I happened to be home when it started recording).
I don't get it -- why would SciFi put its best show on the worst night?
The thing about AICN is that they're complete and utter jibbering idiots.
They routinely give lousy movies glowing reviews ("Freddy vs Jason was top-notch fashizzle!"). Some of it I can understand -- these folks like movies and get excited about them, so they're more optomistic in their reviews. Fine, whatever, what still doesn't mean anyone should ever listen to one of their reviews. Ever,
The only usefulness I ever, *ever* get out of them is in determining which movies are at the absolute bottom of the heap. If AICN says that a movie's bad (or gives it "mixed reviews"), that generally means it's so god awful that St. Peter will keep me out of heaven when I die when he finds me carrying the ticket stub.
There was a lot of great advertising (and a lot of terrible, terrible ads, too)
back in like the summer of 2000. The ads were like a manifestation of how insanely
much cash was being thrown around back then. Having just moved to the Valley, it was
an absolutely intoxicating experience -- we had no *idea* about the level of smack that
was about to be laid down on us.
Anyhow, speaking of dot-com ads, I miss the "TechieGold.com" goldfish.
There were these stupid radio commercials that played every, oh,
fifteen seconds or on KSJO here in San Jose about a fish shilling for
this job site. The fish would
talk in a kinda-French accent about how he too could get a job
if only, alas, he were not only a fish. This is back when there were
still jobs in the Silicon Valley.
Then the jobs went away, the advertising dried up and I experimented with
extended bouts of abject fear related to my unemployment and KSJO got
bought by those motherless cocksuckers at ClearChannel and turned into a
spainish language format.
But still, here five years later my wife and I will occassionally slip
elements of this commercial into our conversations -- last time
we were at Ikea she made a comment about being "surrounded by
gravel and crude decor" that made my crack up in the store and
had the other proto-yuppies staring at us.
And no, I never did look at the site. Anyhow, this has been your
ten second dot-com nonsequitor; you may return to your business.
I assume from the lack of considering a legal option that the OP is talking about off-shore outsourcing (I know the outsourcing apologists in this thread have been busily suggesting it isn't off-shore... Sure, guys). Getting any satisfaction from an off-shore court is almost impossible.
My last company was the victim of out and out fraud on the part of a Chinese firm. When my company threatened legal action, they basically laughed at us. They were right to laugh -- essentially there was no above-board way to get any legal judgement against them. We were foreigners, plus we didn't know who to bribe (the Chinese legal system is incredibly arbitrary and corrupt).
We never saw a dime. When the investors found out we'd lost a huge amount of money *and* didn't have the scheduled release, they took over the company and liquidated it.
That's part of the reason I'm not too worried about offshoring as a long-term trend (as opposed to the fad it is now) -- you can't entrust anything critical overseas because you have zero recourse if you're screwed over or incur liability.
I can usually tell when outsourcing has gone bad. It's about the time my
boss calls me into his office on a Friday afternoon and explains that the
company needs to right-size their domestic staff and that, unfortunately,
my position has become redundant.
Replace Berman with "J. Michael Straczynski" and I would have continued reading.
Look, I enjoyed B5 somewhat, but honestly it was a deeply, deeply flawed series and it seems to me that a lot of the problems came directly from JMS.
He might be okay as a producer or concept man, but the details of the series and (especially) his dialog were just *terrible*. *Terrible*. Even suggesting that he could be the savior of something like Enterprise is just plain misguided.
Of course, I'm not fan of Berman, either (who is?).
Hm, first line of the article: Enterprise showrunner Manny Coto today
denied a rumour that crew members had already been told of the show's cancellation.
Note that's not actually a denial that the show is about to be cancelled, however,
so let's proceed assuming that it is on the chopping block.
Can't say I'd be too surprised by that -- once Enterprise got in the Friday night
timeslot-'o-doom, it was definately on the road to rerunville. Oh well. Ever since
I got my TiVO, I've come to view watching TV as having X amount of time each
week to sit and veg with the shows I like, and frankly I
can use the extra time to spend on more deserving shows.
Enterprise got quite a bit better the last two seasons, but it never
actually got very good. In a lot of ways, it's like watching a clumsy kid
playing sports
or President Bush giving a speech -- you know they're going to screw up,
so each minute that they don't is like a little victory. Given that, it's
hard for me to imagine that there are actually people looking to save the
series. I mean, why?
At least they waited until Battlestar Galactica
got started up -- now there's a show I actually look forward to.
Frankly, Enterprise only stayed on my viewing schedule into season 3 because
I was too lazy to remove the series record from my TiVO.
Slashdot Mirror
When is the last time you saw a 5.25" disk drive? How easy is it to find a Jaz drive these days? WORM reader? Something that will read your old files stored on analog cassette tape? I could go on naming defunct storage media solutions for half the day.
The only real solution for long-term storage is to keep the files "live" on a system someplace. Under and other arrangement even if the *media* the bits are stored on doesn't go bad, there's a pretty good chance that the hardware to read that media will go the way of the dodo when you're not looking.
So, once again, good planning and systems administration proves to be the answer. Set up a reliable system in a RAID mirroring setup and cut backups on a regular basis.
This became a major concern to me once I switched over to all digital photography. I have a Linux fileserver running a RAID-1 setup that serves up all my important files. Once a month, I cut three sets of backups to DVD -- one gets stuck a CD tower in my apartment, one gets taken to work and the other one goes to a storage area I have (I figure if anything ever happens to take out all three at once, losing my data will be the least of my worries). I'm up to four DVD's to back up all my data now, thanks mostly to digital photos.
It's important to be able to rely on your media over a fairly reasonable term, but in any long-term situation live filesystems are the only way to fly.
Wonder how much juice you could generate if you were to mount a stirling engine at the end of this sucker. Seems like it'd be a lot cheaper/easier to implement than normal high efficiancy solar cells if you could work out a reasonable and reliable sun tracking system.
Or, you know, bored drunk college students.
Yeah, the abstinence-only crowd apparently has more creativity than I would have assumed.
I've got to admit, I'm a little torn about this myself. It tears me up a bit to think that my patronage of this man's works (I've bought a lot of his books) has enriched someone who uses his money and fame to soapbox out his (IMO) detestable position.
You can argue that the movie itself is not directly associated with his position, but that seems like a bit of a cop-out. It'd be like buying cookies when the proceeds go to benefit the Klan -- even if what you're doing is innocent, the cause it supports isn't any less vile.
Anyhow, I figure that this won't be a big deal since it sounds like the movie's going to suck.
That would be Emperor of San Francisco. Well, technically "His Imperial Majesty, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico", but I'm trying not to be too picky.
It does, however, have the power to regulate shipping companies who operate in the state.
For example, let's say I'm Wisconsin. I want to allow people in my state to purchase only from internet stores which report their sales to Wisconsin to me. So, I pass a regulation which fines UPS for delivering packages from internet merchants not certified by me. Voila!
Several states already control liquor sales this way. If you go wine tasting in California and want to ship some back home to Virginia or Michigan, you're out of luck.
Test Prep Classes: $10,000
Donations to School by Parents: $5,000
Blowing your future because you can't wait a month: Priceless.
There are some levels of satisfaction that money can't buy, like watching 100+ snot-nosed future pointy hairs take it up the pooper from Harvard.
God knows that this sort of unethical behavior and borderline illegal practice is totally out of place in our business community. Obviously, these punks are only getting what they deserve.
Aside from that, hopefully those involved will learn a valuable life lesson from this: If you can't play by the rules, you'd better be able to run fast and catch, throw or hit a ball really well.
PS: I wonder if any prospective students were smart enough to just look at the admission status of the *other* students... Now that would be showing the sort of sense you'd need to get to the top of corporate America.
Now, given that they're all in the same building my usual 'board up the doors and set the place on fire' approach probably isn't the best remedy. Honestly, I have a bunch of ideas I could post, but most of them would open you (and possibly me) up to a great deal of liability. So here's one just to get you thinking in the right direction:
Pennies. Along with your 20 closest friends, learn how to penny a door shut. It's not that tough, but may take practice to be able to do quickly and on the first try. Now, in the morning before classes (those Econ types get up early for some reason), simultaniously penny shut each and every office door. EXTRA POINTS: Use some superglue on the pennies to make them tough to remove.
Other ideas involve things like foam fire extinguishers, B&E and property damage. But hey, you're engineers, you can work these out on your own.
# People wishing Starbuck was still a womanizer
Okay, now *there's* something worth fighting for. Quickly, someone get an online petition set up!
If you're missing out on what is possibly the best Sci Fi series of our lives because you're still mad about the cancellation of a great show that was (and I say this as a huge Farscape fan) past it's prime, that's your problem.
But let me say: You're missing out big.
Oh, so all I have to do to save two minutes at the start of class is submit to constant automated surveillance? Why didn't you say so!
No, I'm saying having the government watch every last movement I make is the absolute antithesis of the American way of life.
Yeah, I'm totally for having to government replace parents and personal responsibility in general, too. I just don't know where I'd be today if I hadn't had Big Brother watching every move I made while I was in school.
It's amazing how quickly we've transformed from a country which at least claimed to value freedom, civil liberties and self-determination into one which pleads for the government to come in and run our lives, isn't it?
Total Law Enforcement rules. And the trains run on time, too!
(a) The universe carries too much baggage. Okay, it's nice to have some history to play off of and create plots from, but it's also a major downer creatively to have too much of your fantastic futuristic world predefined. Star Trek carries a ton of that baggage -- the relations, technology, conventions and politics are all laid out there.
Example outside of Trek: When I was younger, I was into the Dragonlance books. The first few were damn decent in terms of starter fantasy, but as more and more came out they started suffering from this exact problem. The situations, characters and setting started to lose their edge and the attributes which made them attractive in the first place. "Oh, hey, it's Lord Soth, what a shocker that he'd show up..."
(b) It's a show for a different time. I'm not sure if this is cyclical, but today's audiences don't really want mildly disguised social commentary. If you look at the top shows right now, they tend to be about human drama. BSG is a great example. Farscape was (often) a good example. Deadwood, the Wire... The list goes on and on.
I'd add that it was overmerchandised, but George Lucas has proved to us all that you can whore something out to the hilt and people will still come pony up for it if the original was good enough.
At this point, rather than trying to patch up the Star Trek universe it seems like it would be better just to direct creative juices elsewhere.
If you want original shows, get HBO and tune into Carnivale. That's pretty original right there, unless there's another show about avatars, monsters and the dustbowl that I'm forgetting. Or Deadwood -- okay, there have been westerns before, but not anything like this one. Or watch The Wire. Again, cop shows in general are nothing new, but how many spend as much if not more time fleshing out the "bad guys" as they do the cops?
I'll grant you that the *networks* mostly aren't doing anything all that cutting-edge right now, but who wants to watch them anyhow here in the darkest days of Mike Powell's Moral TV Crusade?
I don't get it -- why would SciFi put its best show on the worst night?
They routinely give lousy movies glowing reviews ("Freddy vs Jason was top-notch fashizzle!"). Some of it I can understand -- these folks like movies and get excited about them, so they're more optomistic in their reviews. Fine, whatever, what still doesn't mean anyone should ever listen to one of their reviews. Ever,
The only usefulness I ever, *ever* get out of them is in determining which movies are at the absolute bottom of the heap. If AICN says that a movie's bad (or gives it "mixed reviews"), that generally means it's so god awful that St. Peter will keep me out of heaven when I die when he finds me carrying the ticket stub.
Anyhow, speaking of dot-com ads, I miss the "TechieGold.com" goldfish. There were these stupid radio commercials that played every, oh, fifteen seconds or on KSJO here in San Jose about a fish shilling for this job site. The fish would talk in a kinda-French accent about how he too could get a job if only, alas, he were not only a fish. This is back when there were still jobs in the Silicon Valley.
Then the jobs went away, the advertising dried up and I experimented with extended bouts of abject fear related to my unemployment and KSJO got bought by those motherless cocksuckers at ClearChannel and turned into a spainish language format. But still, here five years later my wife and I will occassionally slip elements of this commercial into our conversations -- last time we were at Ikea she made a comment about being "surrounded by gravel and crude decor" that made my crack up in the store and had the other proto-yuppies staring at us.
And no, I never did look at the site. Anyhow, this has been your ten second dot-com nonsequitor; you may return to your business.
I assume from the lack of considering a legal option that the OP is talking about off-shore outsourcing (I know the outsourcing apologists in this thread have been busily suggesting it isn't off-shore... Sure, guys). Getting any satisfaction from an off-shore court is almost impossible.
My last company was the victim of out and out fraud on the part of a Chinese firm. When my company threatened legal action, they basically laughed at us. They were right to laugh -- essentially there was no above-board way to get any legal judgement against them. We were foreigners, plus we didn't know who to bribe (the Chinese legal system is incredibly arbitrary and corrupt).
We never saw a dime. When the investors found out we'd lost a huge amount of money *and* didn't have the scheduled release, they took over the company and liquidated it.
That's part of the reason I'm not too worried about offshoring as a long-term trend (as opposed to the fad it is now) -- you can't entrust anything critical overseas because you have zero recourse if you're screwed over or incur liability.
I can usually tell when outsourcing has gone bad. It's about the time my boss calls me into his office on a Friday afternoon and explains that the company needs to right-size their domestic staff and that, unfortunately, my position has become redundant.
Look, I enjoyed B5 somewhat, but honestly it was a deeply, deeply flawed series and it seems to me that a lot of the problems came directly from JMS.
He might be okay as a producer or concept man, but the details of the series and (especially) his dialog were just *terrible*. *Terrible*. Even suggesting that he could be the savior of something like Enterprise is just plain misguided.
Of course, I'm not fan of Berman, either (who is?).
Note that's not actually a denial that the show is about to be cancelled, however, so let's proceed assuming that it is on the chopping block. Can't say I'd be too surprised by that -- once Enterprise got in the Friday night timeslot-'o-doom, it was definately on the road to rerunville. Oh well. Ever since I got my TiVO, I've come to view watching TV as having X amount of time each week to sit and veg with the shows I like, and frankly I can use the extra time to spend on more deserving shows.
Enterprise got quite a bit better the last two seasons, but it never actually got very good. In a lot of ways, it's like watching a clumsy kid playing sports or President Bush giving a speech -- you know they're going to screw up, so each minute that they don't is like a little victory. Given that, it's hard for me to imagine that there are actually people looking to save the series. I mean, why?
At least they waited until Battlestar Galactica got started up -- now there's a show I actually look forward to. Frankly, Enterprise only stayed on my viewing schedule into season 3 because I was too lazy to remove the series record from my TiVO.