I think they really missed the Han Solo type of character in the new stuff. Han Solo showed you can be kickass without the force. The new movies relegated everyone without the force to cannon fodder. While watching force power fights are fun they don't really make good story as they have a lot of power.
And now they have a Force Unleashed game coming out where they amp up the Force powers until it's like frickin' Dragonball Z. All that's missing is Vegeta screaming "HIS POWER LEVELS ARE 9000??!!!" Crazy-stupid boosting of character powers for drama's sake, it's like their script was something 13-year old boys were furiously masturbating over. All that remains is for Anakin to scream out "I AM THE BEST JEDI EVER! AND THAT IS TRUE ULTIMATE POWER!"
I'm a total Star Wars nerd. Not quite a Star Wars dork -- that implies cosplaying at cons, themed weddings, and other acts of fan mortification. But I am a nerd. I grew up on these movies, I watched them over and over and know them inside and out. I would get excited every time I heard the 20th Century Fox fanfare and be disappointed when the movie wasn't Star Wars. I am 100% Lucas' prime demographic. I can obsess over the original trilogy like a Kevin Smith character, though I do differ with him on the matter of Hobbit badassery.
But I digress.
Lucas has managed to snuff my love affair with Star Wars. I saw Phantom Menace with great anticipation and came out inert. I torrented Clones and congratulated myself on saving the money. I only saw the last one in the theater because a gaggle of friends were going and I didn't want to be the wet blanket.
I watched the trailer for this one. Crappy, soulless CGI. How does it differ from the nuTrilogy? I think the characters here looked slightly more lifelike here. There is not a twinge of anticipation, not even a twitch. I'll rewatch the originals (not the re-releases) but even my enjoyment of what came before has been harmed now by what has come after. George Lucas has beat this dead horse until it's nothing more than a thin, red paste. Scrape what's left into a hole and fucking bury it, man. It's done.
COD4 gave my cousin flashbacks.... we're already there
I take it he served in Iraq? My dad would get funny if Vietnam movies were on and he wasn't even in a combat posting, just worked motor pool in the Marine Corps. The damned thing about that war is that there was no such thing as "friendly lines." The whole country was the warzone and so you had the constant boredom/terror cycle even when you were at a major base. Snipers, enemy mortars dropping at night, never knowing if the mamasan on the cleaning detail is feeding info back to the NVA. And there's always the lovely occurrence of ammo dumps going off. A good ammo dump fire can go on for days and you're stuck under whatever cover you can find until the explosives stop cooking off.
From everything I've read, Iraq is the same way. What a mess.
"it's not idle speculation, I think we'll certainly hit it within the next decade, depending on just how far developers try to push the envelope."
I'm pretty sure that's spot on, and I really wished that there was a mandatory requirement for politicians to serve a tour of duty on the front line.
It's kind of funny how essential violence is to human nature. We war for profit, we make play war for entertainment. The original Olympic games were all directly descended from practical martial exercises. The Romans used gladiatorial violence for sport, the hardcore porn of violent entertainment. We use simulated violence with no deaths, the cheesy softcore-porn-where-no-dicks-are-shown of violent entertainment.
I do think violence is a natural part of human nature and it's best dealt with in ways that redirect the urge. Sporting events can whip up and exhaust the violent tendencies and martial fervor without leaving thousands dead on the battlefield. (well, assuming British hooligans aren't involved.) Some people can use violent video games as a way of letting off steam but there's always the couple of broken ones where it ends up egging them on instead. It's not exactly an indictment of video games in general; you get guys who don't find sex a calming experience, instead of relaxing and calming they just get angry and wanting more and it ends up in a bad spot of violence.
, the perks of being a fighter pilot, the status and career path that conveys, are not things they're going to surrender willingly....which is why mounted knights maintained their position and status when firearms made their favorite mode of battle obsolete, right?
Oh, wait.
But it takes a serious way to clear out that cruft usually. The airplane came about so soon before WWI that there wasn't a lot of talk built up one way or the other concerning it. Before WWII, there was an understanding of the importance of bombers but navies were unconvinced about the effectiveness of aviation in naval combat. Even the Japanese, happy proponents of naval aviation, were astounded at just how successful their aircraft were. The particular instance I'm thinking of was the sinking of two British cruisers right at the start of the war, the pilots made their bomb runs, shot away on the deck, then turned around to take a look at the target to see what sort of second attack should be called in. "Where's the ship? Sunk already? Damn."
It took a lot of bloodletting to get over the whole cult of the knight. It took multiple rounds of extermination before the French nobility gave up on the concept. WWII was necessary for carrier admirals to get the trump card over battleship admirals.
I do agree that drones should be put under Army/Marine control, especially the ones intended for use in a close-air support role. Let the Air Force dick around with deep interdiction, battlefield surveillance, etc, but let the Army control their own air assets. The Marines make a point of having their pilots go through the same combat training as the grunts and there's a better understanding of what's required, closer integration between air and ground, and generally less screwups.
That was a good point made above, the drone pilot is not at risk and so can risk the survival of the drone to make sure he's selected the right target instead of flying in fear of his life and accidentally killing friendlies.
As the personal cost of war for a country decreases the willingness to go to war goes up.
From what I've read elsewhere the other day it seems though that drones have a 'hidden cost' attached to them, the people that control the drones get to see the result of their actions and they are having serious psychological issues as a result of that.
Never you fear. One of the next flight software upgrades will be putting those little fuzzy digital blurs over the maimed bodies, keep the battlefield nice and tidy.
Have you watched any of the gun camera footage? Just the stuff that makes it onto Youtube is pretty frightening. Resolution will only improve with time and the lowlight images will be able to give you picture qualities with exquisite detail. It's bad enough when you can tell that moving blur is a human and those little puffs around him are 30mm chaingun rounds and those new blotches on the ground are now what's left of him, it'll be worse when you no longer have to imagine what that looked like because you'll be able to see it all in zoom.
This is something I'm wondering about with shooters. It was cool to see the gore in Wolfenstein and Doom because it was laughable pixels. Mortal Kombat was a cartoon. But when this stuff gets photorealistic, when do we cross the line from cool to blech? It's not idle speculation, I think we'll certainly hit it within the next decade, depending on just how far developers try to push the envelope.
So an "unmanned drone" is a truly purposeless thing. Of course, they're heading there anyhow: their penises get ripped off during sexual intercourse, after which they die.
In human relationships, this is called "marriage," but we only die on the inside.
What bothers me about this is that you take away risk to persons from war, and those persons are more willing to wage war...which leads to more war.
Probably the only thing that has saved us since WWII is the fact that the leadership realised that they were personally no longer safe in the context of nuclear weapons - so to save their own skins, they strenously avoided world war 3.
Iraq was a dangerous country run by an insane dictator who was a threat to his neighbors. He also didn't have nuclear weapons. Kick the door down and drag him out into the street by his hair!
North Korea is a dangerous country run by an insane dictator who was a threat to his neighbors. They do have nuclear weapons, or at least there's an uncomfortable uncertainty about it. We negotiated with them and arrived ad a peaceful settlement all parties were happy with.
Moral of the story: nuclear weapons keep your ass safe. This is a terrible message to send but only a fool could miss it.
Which leads me to this question...why is the cloud not doing backups? The cloud provider should be backing up the data within the cloud. I had assumed (wrongfully it turns out) that one of the benefits of using a cloud was that your data was backed up in some distributed fashion. It turns out that doesn't seem to be the case.
That is what's happening, when the cloud is working properly. Google has a zillion servers for running Docs. Any one server dies, I don't even know about it because another steps in seamlessly.
But what happens if the whole damn cloud dies? What happens if Google goes tits up, changes terms of service, whatever?
At least for Docs, I still have the local viewer and can export from there.
I'm thinking that the best concept for cloud computing in practical terms would be the route Google is going, a mix between smart and dumb terminals. The cloud is there to host the apps but if something breaks, work can still be performed on the local. Right now, if I lose internet access I can still work in my Docs but can only view on the spreadsheets. If these were shared docs, there's still sync issues. When everyone is online, individual edits are synced every few seconds so it's difficult to screw something up. With offline edits, two different people can edit the same segment and we end up with 'last change wins' rules. This is not so bad if it's not a shared document.
Where this could become more problematic is if we're talking about database-heavy apps like say a CRM or accounting app. Naturally, it would be evil to try to cache everything locally. It would take smart programming to only cache what a person typically deals with. ACT had a laptop docking model where the laptop user could check out certain accounts which remained locked on the server and when the sales rep returned to the office, he could sync it back up. Even at that, ACT databases weren't ugly huge. Serious enterprise databases can get very large.
Well, I suppose these are problems that businesses have been struggling with for ages. It sounds stupid to say you can't do any work because the internet went out but 20 years ago people were using dumb terminal apps over frame relay and they couldn't do anything when their line went down.
There, fixed that for you. Backups aren't worth a damn if the building is blown up.
Yeah, I already thought of that. *smug* I have a script that backs up all my files from our servers in WTC1 to our servers in WTC2. What are the odds we could lose both sets of servers?
This must explain conservatives. Keep trying the same failed policies time after time, each iteration expecting a different result. (Not a troll, just statement of fact. Look at the neocons trying to get us into a war over Georgia.) And let us not forget our pending war with Iran.
Son, did you read what I wrote? I said it ain't a troll, don't go modding it as such.
This must explain conservatives. Keep trying the same failed policies time after time, each iteration expecting a different result. (Not a troll, just statement of fact. Look at the neocons trying to get us into a war over Georgia.) And let us not forget our pending war with Iran.
Ok, according to this source they say that not all the older ones held up but the newer buildings certainly fared worse than expected.
DUJIANGYAN, China -- Modern apartment buildings and schools crumbled, smoothly paved highways buckled and bridges collapsed -- their flimsy construction no match for the awesome forces of nature.
As the death toll soars from the powerful earthquake that ravaged central China's Sichuan province, the scale of the devastation is raising questions about the quality of China's recent construction boom.
"This building is just a piece of junk," one newly homeless resident of Dujiangyan yelled Wednesday, her body quivering with rage. Her family salvaged clothing and mementos from their wrecked apartment, built when their older home was razed 10 years ago.
"The government tricked us. It told us this building was well constructed. But look at the homes all around us, they're still standing," said the woman, who would give only her surname, Chen.
I really have to wonder, who's buying cars so often that they actually have a chance to get to know a salesman? Me, I'm still on my first car, but I can't imagine buying a car more often than once every three years or so (and probably much less than that), so there would be no way we'd still know each other. I guess there are people out there with money who really like to have new cars, but it's such a strange idea.
Rich, rich assholes. This guy worked at major luxury dealerships. New car every other year, they never wanted to let that new car smell wear off. Yeah, made no sense to me either.
It really all boils down to what you can get away with. As was mentioned previously, hair stylists will tend to take their customers with them when they go to a new salon. This is also common when talking about stock brokers and investment advisers, "taking their book with them." Very competent car salesmen will also walk with their clients. I would have no compunction switching vendors when a salesman changes jobs if the business is such that I know he has a very strong influence in the quality of service I receive.
At the same time, business owners tend to think of these customers as "theirs" and use any number of anti-competitive ruses to crush their employees. I worked at a midrange shop where the boss hosed one of his sales reps on a deal: he gave the guy a figure to offer for a deal and the rep had no latitude to change the offer, it being the boss' money and all. When the customer hemmed and hawed over it, the boss called them back and offered a better price, then put the sale on his board, not the other rep's! The rep walked, naturally, and a better case of killing a goose that laid golden eggs could not be found. The guy tried taking his book with him and the boss pulled out the non-compete signed many moons ago. They wasted a lot of money in court and the judge eventually decided against him.
A very common and legal scam in service-related industries is the lawn service con. When someone buys a lawn service, they're not buying the equipment so much as the customer base. The equipment costs are negligible compared to the effort of gathering all those customers in the first place. Ah, but what does the wily lawnmower man do? After he sells his business, he contacts all of his customers and lets them know he's going to be doing business as a different name. Those customers, happy with his service, will switch companies and the new owner of the old company will find himself with no work. Anyone buying a service business like this must must must stipulate a non-compete in the contract.
There's no right or wrong in this kind of dispute, there's only what you can get away with and what you can be nailed with in court.
The sixty million surplus boys will give their rifle female names. If you live in Siberia, get out now. China has an insatiable appetite for natural resources. They share a 4000 mile border with a country with oodles of said natural resources, and a population with the lowest fertility rate on Earth.
A generation from now, China will annex all of Russia east of the Urals.
Russia has nukes and will continue to maintain them for the foreseeable future. It took a while for me to wrap my head around this as a kid since it seemed like China and the USSR should be buddy-buddy since they're both communist. It was hard to understand that the USSR looked at China with as much suspicion as they looked at NATO. Many nuclear scenarios for WWIII saw the Soviets shooting both east and west.
The Soviet bluff was that they believed they could survive a nuclear war. Now I say bluff, I think they were trying to scare us. But hell, maybe they really did think it would be winnable. We already know the Chinese philosophy concerning nuclear war: "So we lose a few million." (This offhand comment was made during the Korean War when MacArthur was demanding we go nuclear.) Honestly, I think the Chinese government would probably see a nuclear attack as doing them a favor. I do not relish the thought of a general war with China. I've got images of Japanese banzai charges but hundreds of times larger.
We're looking at a future of scarcity and resource wars. The only way to truly avoid any number of uncomfortable scenarios is to grow the pie, provide more resources or use existing resources more efficiently so that everyone can have a seat at the table. Unfortunately, human nature says "Why should I work to double the milkshake supply when I can drink yours instead?" And there's Cheney with a straw.
Chinese officials to citizens: We can move heaven and earth when we deem it sufficiently important; foreigners will enjoy proper breathing conditions. Once they are gone, you'll go back to sucking down the equivalent of a cigarette drag every time you breathe outdoors. STFU, coolies, and get back to work.
Everybody is talking about how this will be the Chinese century, rah-rah, all is grand. History doesn't always go along with the popular consensus. The communist revolution was supposed to occur in advanced, capitalist countries, not a semi-feudal backwards backwater like Imperial Russia. Everyone was convinced the Shah's Iran was a model of western influence in the region and a shining bulwark against religious radicals. Hardly anybody saw the Iranian revolution coming.
I'm not saying it will go one way or the other, I'm just proposing a scenario on how China could fail in a couple of broad brushstrokes.
1. Eroding faith in government. We already saw how bad their construction was after that recent quake. 20 year old buildings stood up to the shaking, more recent buildings fell down. Government regulation and enforcement has failed.
2. Shitty infrastructure. A lot of reports talk about how the Chinese are building a bunch of stuff but the quality has been poor. This is not infrastructure that will last for decades, this is just slapping stuff together as quickly as possible, Haliburton style. We already know Three Gorges Dam has a lot of problems, what happens when it fails during a quake? Go back to point 1, eroding faith in government.
3. The pollution is freaking out of control. What kind of collapses and failures environmentally can they look forward to? The Gobi is expanding rapidly. What happens if they have famine?
4. Economics. Right now they are holding an incredible amount of American debt but to what end? Is this an economic cudgel to use against us? What if they misjudge and the weapon turns out to do them more harm than us? If the US defaults on the loan, what next? Who are they going to sell their cheap shit to? Are their domestic markets ready to create demand and wealth?
5. Disproportionate share of prosperity. The oligarchs are making out fine, what about the rest of the people? Will class resentment grow too powerful?
6. Population time bomb. One Child per Family means there's a lot of boys and not many girls to go around. What are they going to do for wives when they grow up? And what of families who have lost their only sons in disasters like the quake. The Chinese put a huge premium on family, carrying on the line, etc. Could there be massive popular resentment against these policies when such disasters wipe out entire families such as we've seen?
It seems like the current Chinese leadership has learned from the errors of their predecessors -- isolationist thinking in a violent world makes China a conquered country. They're now going to be actively engaged on the world stage. It will remain conflict to be sure, but how much will be diplomatic, how much economic, and will military be resorted to when the other two have failed? Will China get itself involved in wars it cannot win? Could a major loss see the fall of the party? What would the successor states be like? Would we see a return to the warring states period?
Lots and lots of questions. I just think the whole "This is China's century" narrative is only one of several possible outcomes.
Does anyone know if the footage we saw on NBC (of the whole ceremony) was from an International common video feed or did NBC have their own cameras there? I ask because at large International events like this, there is often a common video feed and the commentators simple talk about what they see on their screen (which is the same thing we see, minus the fancy NBC info graphics and overlays.)
It was a pool feed and NBC got to edit it and put in inane color commentary by our idiot talking heads. I watched the NBC feed "live" and downloaded the BBC coverage. BBC was much better, less stupid and less commercial interruptions. The opening ceremony was half commercials!
Maybe this is why there is so much 'bad IT' in businesses and institutions. Managers are hiring far too many business consultants to do their technology work instead of technology geeks.
From what I've seen, consultants are useful only up to a point. You really need to have someone on-staff working for you who knows what's going on. He may not be an Exchange guru but he can handle the server on a day to day basis. Something big comes up? Call in the Exchange expert but at least your man on staff can mind what's going on and make sure the work is done right. Without this kind of oversight, the work can get botched and you're SOL. The consultant has a number of customers he's trying to keep happy, the staff IT guy only has one customer.
There's always going to be the case of duffers on the job. Some are IT guys who don't want to answer the phone, some are guys playing the union game of minimum work for minimum effort, but for every union guy you complain about you'll also have your share of management weasels just running down the clock for huge bonuses. You can't really blanket condemn one group and praise another, they've all got their mix of stinkers and roses.
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Are you suggesting that Jupiters migrate?
I suppose. Can't imagine where a swallow would grip it.
I guess wii Bukakke didn't quite catch on as well as the other Japanese classics did.
I swear, I thought the box said Buck Cake!
Feel free.
I think they really missed the Han Solo type of character in the new stuff. Han Solo showed you can be kickass without the force. The new movies relegated everyone without the force to cannon fodder. While watching force power fights are fun they don't really make good story as they have a lot of power.
And now they have a Force Unleashed game coming out where they amp up the Force powers until it's like frickin' Dragonball Z. All that's missing is Vegeta screaming "HIS POWER LEVELS ARE 9000??!!!" Crazy-stupid boosting of character powers for drama's sake, it's like their script was something 13-year old boys were furiously masturbating over. All that remains is for Anakin to scream out "I AM THE BEST JEDI EVER! AND THAT IS TRUE ULTIMATE POWER!"
I'm a total Star Wars nerd. Not quite a Star Wars dork -- that implies cosplaying at cons, themed weddings, and other acts of fan mortification. But I am a nerd. I grew up on these movies, I watched them over and over and know them inside and out. I would get excited every time I heard the 20th Century Fox fanfare and be disappointed when the movie wasn't Star Wars. I am 100% Lucas' prime demographic. I can obsess over the original trilogy like a Kevin Smith character, though I do differ with him on the matter of Hobbit badassery.
But I digress.
Lucas has managed to snuff my love affair with Star Wars. I saw Phantom Menace with great anticipation and came out inert. I torrented Clones and congratulated myself on saving the money. I only saw the last one in the theater because a gaggle of friends were going and I didn't want to be the wet blanket.
I watched the trailer for this one. Crappy, soulless CGI. How does it differ from the nuTrilogy? I think the characters here looked slightly more lifelike here. There is not a twinge of anticipation, not even a twitch. I'll rewatch the originals (not the re-releases) but even my enjoyment of what came before has been harmed now by what has come after. George Lucas has beat this dead horse until it's nothing more than a thin, red paste. Scrape what's left into a hole and fucking bury it, man. It's done.
It helps that we cooked veggies too.
I mean, what is a burger without pickles, grilled onions, grilled mushrooms, and bread?
.
Meatloaf.
That's Salisbury steak to you, buddy.
COD4 gave my cousin flashbacks.... we're already there
I take it he served in Iraq? My dad would get funny if Vietnam movies were on and he wasn't even in a combat posting, just worked motor pool in the Marine Corps. The damned thing about that war is that there was no such thing as "friendly lines." The whole country was the warzone and so you had the constant boredom/terror cycle even when you were at a major base. Snipers, enemy mortars dropping at night, never knowing if the mamasan on the cleaning detail is feeding info back to the NVA. And there's always the lovely occurrence of ammo dumps going off. A good ammo dump fire can go on for days and you're stuck under whatever cover you can find until the explosives stop cooking off.
From everything I've read, Iraq is the same way. What a mess.
"it's not idle speculation, I think we'll certainly hit it within the next decade, depending on just how far developers try to push the envelope."
I'm pretty sure that's spot on, and I really wished that there was a mandatory requirement for politicians to serve a tour of duty on the front line.
It's kind of funny how essential violence is to human nature. We war for profit, we make play war for entertainment. The original Olympic games were all directly descended from practical martial exercises. The Romans used gladiatorial violence for sport, the hardcore porn of violent entertainment. We use simulated violence with no deaths, the cheesy softcore-porn-where-no-dicks-are-shown of violent entertainment.
I do think violence is a natural part of human nature and it's best dealt with in ways that redirect the urge. Sporting events can whip up and exhaust the violent tendencies and martial fervor without leaving thousands dead on the battlefield. (well, assuming British hooligans aren't involved.) Some people can use violent video games as a way of letting off steam but there's always the couple of broken ones where it ends up egging them on instead. It's not exactly an indictment of video games in general; you get guys who don't find sex a calming experience, instead of relaxing and calming they just get angry and wanting more and it ends up in a bad spot of violence.
, the perks of being a fighter pilot, the status and career path that conveys, are not things they're going to surrender willingly. ...which is why mounted knights maintained their position and status when firearms made their favorite mode of battle obsolete, right?
Oh, wait.
But it takes a serious way to clear out that cruft usually. The airplane came about so soon before WWI that there wasn't a lot of talk built up one way or the other concerning it. Before WWII, there was an understanding of the importance of bombers but navies were unconvinced about the effectiveness of aviation in naval combat. Even the Japanese, happy proponents of naval aviation, were astounded at just how successful their aircraft were. The particular instance I'm thinking of was the sinking of two British cruisers right at the start of the war, the pilots made their bomb runs, shot away on the deck, then turned around to take a look at the target to see what sort of second attack should be called in. "Where's the ship? Sunk already? Damn."
It took a lot of bloodletting to get over the whole cult of the knight. It took multiple rounds of extermination before the French nobility gave up on the concept. WWII was necessary for carrier admirals to get the trump card over battleship admirals.
I do agree that drones should be put under Army/Marine control, especially the ones intended for use in a close-air support role. Let the Air Force dick around with deep interdiction, battlefield surveillance, etc, but let the Army control their own air assets. The Marines make a point of having their pilots go through the same combat training as the grunts and there's a better understanding of what's required, closer integration between air and ground, and generally less screwups.
That was a good point made above, the drone pilot is not at risk and so can risk the survival of the drone to make sure he's selected the right target instead of flying in fear of his life and accidentally killing friendlies.
As the personal cost of war for a country decreases the willingness to go to war goes up.
From what I've read elsewhere the other day it seems though that drones have a 'hidden cost' attached to them, the people that control the drones get to see the result of their actions and they are having serious psychological issues as a result of that.
Never you fear. One of the next flight software upgrades will be putting those little fuzzy digital blurs over the maimed bodies, keep the battlefield nice and tidy.
Have you watched any of the gun camera footage? Just the stuff that makes it onto Youtube is pretty frightening. Resolution will only improve with time and the lowlight images will be able to give you picture qualities with exquisite detail. It's bad enough when you can tell that moving blur is a human and those little puffs around him are 30mm chaingun rounds and those new blotches on the ground are now what's left of him, it'll be worse when you no longer have to imagine what that looked like because you'll be able to see it all in zoom.
This is something I'm wondering about with shooters. It was cool to see the gore in Wolfenstein and Doom because it was laughable pixels. Mortal Kombat was a cartoon. But when this stuff gets photorealistic, when do we cross the line from cool to blech? It's not idle speculation, I think we'll certainly hit it within the next decade, depending on just how far developers try to push the envelope.
So an "unmanned drone" is a truly purposeless thing. Of course, they're heading there anyhow: their penises get ripped off during sexual intercourse, after which they die.
In human relationships, this is called "marriage," but we only die on the inside.
What bothers me about this is that you take away risk to persons from war, and those persons are more willing to wage war...which leads to more war.
Probably the only thing that has saved us since WWII is the fact that the leadership realised that they were personally no longer safe in the context of nuclear weapons - so to save their own skins, they strenously avoided world war 3.
Iraq was a dangerous country run by an insane dictator who was a threat to his neighbors. He also didn't have nuclear weapons. Kick the door down and drag him out into the street by his hair!
North Korea is a dangerous country run by an insane dictator who was a threat to his neighbors. They do have nuclear weapons, or at least there's an uncomfortable uncertainty about it. We negotiated with them and arrived ad a peaceful settlement all parties were happy with.
Moral of the story: nuclear weapons keep your ass safe. This is a terrible message to send but only a fool could miss it.
Just turn the machine through 180 degrees, and viola!
It becomes a controller for Stradivarius Hero?
Which leads me to this question...why is the cloud not doing backups? The cloud provider should be backing up the data within the cloud. I had assumed (wrongfully it turns out) that one of the benefits of using a cloud was that your data was backed up in some distributed fashion. It turns out that doesn't seem to be the case.
That is what's happening, when the cloud is working properly. Google has a zillion servers for running Docs. Any one server dies, I don't even know about it because another steps in seamlessly.
But what happens if the whole damn cloud dies? What happens if Google goes tits up, changes terms of service, whatever?
At least for Docs, I still have the local viewer and can export from there.
I'm thinking that the best concept for cloud computing in practical terms would be the route Google is going, a mix between smart and dumb terminals. The cloud is there to host the apps but if something breaks, work can still be performed on the local. Right now, if I lose internet access I can still work in my Docs but can only view on the spreadsheets. If these were shared docs, there's still sync issues. When everyone is online, individual edits are synced every few seconds so it's difficult to screw something up. With offline edits, two different people can edit the same segment and we end up with 'last change wins' rules. This is not so bad if it's not a shared document.
Where this could become more problematic is if we're talking about database-heavy apps like say a CRM or accounting app. Naturally, it would be evil to try to cache everything locally. It would take smart programming to only cache what a person typically deals with. ACT had a laptop docking model where the laptop user could check out certain accounts which remained locked on the server and when the sales rep returned to the office, he could sync it back up. Even at that, ACT databases weren't ugly huge. Serious enterprise databases can get very large.
Well, I suppose these are problems that businesses have been struggling with for ages. It sounds stupid to say you can't do any work because the internet went out but 20 years ago people were using dumb terminal apps over frame relay and they couldn't do anything when their line went down.
There, fixed that for you. Backups aren't worth a damn if the building is blown up.
Yeah, I already thought of that. *smug* I have a script that backs up all my files from our servers in WTC1 to our servers in WTC2. What are the odds we could lose both sets of servers?
This must explain conservatives. Keep trying the same failed policies time after time, each iteration expecting a different result. (Not a troll, just statement of fact. Look at the neocons trying to get us into a war over Georgia.) And let us not forget our pending war with Iran.
Son, did you read what I wrote? I said it ain't a troll, don't go modding it as such.
This must explain conservatives. Keep trying the same failed policies time after time, each iteration expecting a different result. (Not a troll, just statement of fact. Look at the neocons trying to get us into a war over Georgia.) And let us not forget our pending war with Iran.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2008-05-14-3651640224_x.htm
Ok, according to this source they say that not all the older ones held up but the newer buildings certainly fared worse than expected.
DUJIANGYAN, China -- Modern apartment buildings and schools crumbled, smoothly paved highways buckled and bridges collapsed -- their flimsy construction no match for the awesome forces of nature.
As the death toll soars from the powerful earthquake that ravaged central China's Sichuan province, the scale of the devastation is raising questions about the quality of China's recent construction boom.
"This building is just a piece of junk," one newly homeless resident of Dujiangyan yelled Wednesday, her body quivering with rage. Her family salvaged clothing and mementos from their wrecked apartment, built when their older home was razed 10 years ago.
"The government tricked us. It told us this building was well constructed. But look at the homes all around us, they're still standing," said the woman, who would give only her surname, Chen.
I really have to wonder, who's buying cars so often that they actually have a chance to get to know a salesman? Me, I'm still on my first car, but I can't imagine buying a car more often than once every three years or so (and probably much less than that), so there would be no way we'd still know each other. I guess there are people out there with money who really like to have new cars, but it's such a strange idea.
Rich, rich assholes. This guy worked at major luxury dealerships. New car every other year, they never wanted to let that new car smell wear off. Yeah, made no sense to me either.
It really all boils down to what you can get away with. As was mentioned previously, hair stylists will tend to take their customers with them when they go to a new salon. This is also common when talking about stock brokers and investment advisers, "taking their book with them." Very competent car salesmen will also walk with their clients. I would have no compunction switching vendors when a salesman changes jobs if the business is such that I know he has a very strong influence in the quality of service I receive.
At the same time, business owners tend to think of these customers as "theirs" and use any number of anti-competitive ruses to crush their employees. I worked at a midrange shop where the boss hosed one of his sales reps on a deal: he gave the guy a figure to offer for a deal and the rep had no latitude to change the offer, it being the boss' money and all. When the customer hemmed and hawed over it, the boss called them back and offered a better price, then put the sale on his board, not the other rep's! The rep walked, naturally, and a better case of killing a goose that laid golden eggs could not be found. The guy tried taking his book with him and the boss pulled out the non-compete signed many moons ago. They wasted a lot of money in court and the judge eventually decided against him.
A very common and legal scam in service-related industries is the lawn service con. When someone buys a lawn service, they're not buying the equipment so much as the customer base. The equipment costs are negligible compared to the effort of gathering all those customers in the first place. Ah, but what does the wily lawnmower man do? After he sells his business, he contacts all of his customers and lets them know he's going to be doing business as a different name. Those customers, happy with his service, will switch companies and the new owner of the old company will find himself with no work. Anyone buying a service business like this must must must stipulate a non-compete in the contract.
There's no right or wrong in this kind of dispute, there's only what you can get away with and what you can be nailed with in court.
The sixty million surplus boys will give their rifle female names. If you live in Siberia, get out now. China has an insatiable appetite for natural resources. They share a 4000 mile border with a country with oodles of said natural resources, and a population with the lowest fertility rate on Earth.
A generation from now, China will annex all of Russia east of the Urals.
Russia has nukes and will continue to maintain them for the foreseeable future. It took a while for me to wrap my head around this as a kid since it seemed like China and the USSR should be buddy-buddy since they're both communist. It was hard to understand that the USSR looked at China with as much suspicion as they looked at NATO. Many nuclear scenarios for WWIII saw the Soviets shooting both east and west.
The Soviet bluff was that they believed they could survive a nuclear war. Now I say bluff, I think they were trying to scare us. But hell, maybe they really did think it would be winnable. We already know the Chinese philosophy concerning nuclear war: "So we lose a few million." (This offhand comment was made during the Korean War when MacArthur was demanding we go nuclear.) Honestly, I think the Chinese government would probably see a nuclear attack as doing them a favor. I do not relish the thought of a general war with China. I've got images of Japanese banzai charges but hundreds of times larger.
We're looking at a future of scarcity and resource wars. The only way to truly avoid any number of uncomfortable scenarios is to grow the pie, provide more resources or use existing resources more efficiently so that everyone can have a seat at the table. Unfortunately, human nature says "Why should I work to double the milkshake supply when I can drink yours instead?" And there's Cheney with a straw.
Chinese officials to citizens: We can move heaven and earth when we deem it sufficiently important; foreigners will enjoy proper breathing conditions. Once they are gone, you'll go back to sucking down the equivalent of a cigarette drag every time you breathe outdoors. STFU, coolies, and get back to work.
Everybody is talking about how this will be the Chinese century, rah-rah, all is grand. History doesn't always go along with the popular consensus. The communist revolution was supposed to occur in advanced, capitalist countries, not a semi-feudal backwards backwater like Imperial Russia. Everyone was convinced the Shah's Iran was a model of western influence in the region and a shining bulwark against religious radicals. Hardly anybody saw the Iranian revolution coming.
I'm not saying it will go one way or the other, I'm just proposing a scenario on how China could fail in a couple of broad brushstrokes.
1. Eroding faith in government. We already saw how bad their construction was after that recent quake. 20 year old buildings stood up to the shaking, more recent buildings fell down. Government regulation and enforcement has failed.
2. Shitty infrastructure. A lot of reports talk about how the Chinese are building a bunch of stuff but the quality has been poor. This is not infrastructure that will last for decades, this is just slapping stuff together as quickly as possible, Haliburton style. We already know Three Gorges Dam has a lot of problems, what happens when it fails during a quake? Go back to point 1, eroding faith in government.
3. The pollution is freaking out of control. What kind of collapses and failures environmentally can they look forward to? The Gobi is expanding rapidly. What happens if they have famine?
4. Economics. Right now they are holding an incredible amount of American debt but to what end? Is this an economic cudgel to use against us? What if they misjudge and the weapon turns out to do them more harm than us? If the US defaults on the loan, what next? Who are they going to sell their cheap shit to? Are their domestic markets ready to create demand and wealth?
5. Disproportionate share of prosperity. The oligarchs are making out fine, what about the rest of the people? Will class resentment grow too powerful?
6. Population time bomb. One Child per Family means there's a lot of boys and not many girls to go around. What are they going to do for wives when they grow up? And what of families who have lost their only sons in disasters like the quake. The Chinese put a huge premium on family, carrying on the line, etc. Could there be massive popular resentment against these policies when such disasters wipe out entire families such as we've seen?
It seems like the current Chinese leadership has learned from the errors of their predecessors -- isolationist thinking in a violent world makes China a conquered country. They're now going to be actively engaged on the world stage. It will remain conflict to be sure, but how much will be diplomatic, how much economic, and will military be resorted to when the other two have failed? Will China get itself involved in wars it cannot win? Could a major loss see the fall of the party? What would the successor states be like? Would we see a return to the warring states period?
Lots and lots of questions. I just think the whole "This is China's century" narrative is only one of several possible outcomes.
Does anyone know if the footage we saw on NBC (of the whole ceremony) was from an International common video feed or did NBC have their own cameras there? I ask because at large International events like this, there is often a common video feed and the commentators simple talk about what they see on their screen (which is the same thing we see, minus the fancy NBC info graphics and overlays.)
It was a pool feed and NBC got to edit it and put in inane color commentary by our idiot talking heads. I watched the NBC feed "live" and downloaded the BBC coverage. BBC was much better, less stupid and less commercial interruptions. The opening ceremony was half commercials!
Killing a person changes you? killing ANYTHING changes you a lot.
Remember the first animal you killed? not accidentally, but determined and calculated, you took aim and pulled the trigger to kill it.
We're talking about slashdot here.
Maybe this is why there is so much 'bad IT' in businesses and institutions. Managers are hiring far too many business consultants to do their technology work instead of technology geeks.
From what I've seen, consultants are useful only up to a point. You really need to have someone on-staff working for you who knows what's going on. He may not be an Exchange guru but he can handle the server on a day to day basis. Something big comes up? Call in the Exchange expert but at least your man on staff can mind what's going on and make sure the work is done right. Without this kind of oversight, the work can get botched and you're SOL. The consultant has a number of customers he's trying to keep happy, the staff IT guy only has one customer.
There's always going to be the case of duffers on the job. Some are IT guys who don't want to answer the phone, some are guys playing the union game of minimum work for minimum effort, but for every union guy you complain about you'll also have your share of management weasels just running down the clock for huge bonuses. You can't really blanket condemn one group and praise another, they've all got their mix of stinkers and roses.