*sigh* I know, I know. I was aiming for the whole "brevity is the soul of wit" thing.
Almost all artists are revisionists to some degree. Many painters recycled canvases. Georgia O'Keeffe burned most of her early work at one point. But once a piece is in the wild, it becomes part of the public consciousness. (The extent depends on how many people notice the piece and develop an emotional connection with it, obviously.)
I just can't understand the mentality that prevents the man from accepting that these films have taken on a life of their own, and that any regrets or unfulfilled wishes he has with respect to them would more productively and more maturely be addressed by taking what he has learned and trying to create something entirely new with it.
Hindsight is, unfortunately, NOT always 20/20.
P.S. I specifically chose Picasso because he was a painter who had enough success is his relatively long life to have his work shown in major galleries and museums during his life.
P.P.S. I also use the word "artist" rather liberally when referring to Lucas....
Uh, assuming businesses actually respect the DNC list, in theory you should only be getting calls from places with whom you've had prior business and non-profits. Now, if you have prior business relationships with 22.9 million businesses....
No, maybe it's not "fair" but it's still progress.
The company-specific do not call rules apply to all telemarketing calls, including calls from companies with which you have done business and telemarketing calls on behalf of charities.
Company-specific meaning when you tell the telemarketer on the phone to remove your number from their lists.
I set up wreq and its predecessor at a couple places. One job I made massive mods to tailor wreq for archive and restore requests, adapting it to the rather complicated process they had been doing by paper (really!) The original code isn't object-oriented, and it's not always beautiful, but it was less scary than bugzilla's.
But it's all in perl and the interface is all CGI (except for a somewhat crude command line version) so it was perfect for a place that had people on at least 4 different software platforms.
I don't see why request tracking and bug tracking need completely different implementations, as long as it's done well. I have not had happy experiences with bugzilla, but at my last job we used it as a catch-all for several groups (software engineers, sysadmin, etc.), although we did have to make a few mods, which means we were loathe to upgrade.
The spin-off is called trainwreq, but I never used it.
I admit that I'm pretty soft on animals, even though I think PETA perhaps goes too far sometimes. Live penguins in cages, I mean, it would have been funnier and more PC (in a good way) and still apropos if they had had two guys in penguin suits doing the tricks. Think about it. Even Microsoft doesn't bring their caged rats, er, I mean, programmers to shows. Just the free-range ones.
I said, "Cool!" and followed the link but amazon.com says the book is now on backorder, and what's more, they don't know when to expect a reprint! As in, "You're SOL."
When I was a teenager, one of my favorite books was The White Plague by Frank Herbert. (The only book of his I've read -- I was never into hardcore sci-fi reading.) It's about a biochemist whose family is killed in a terrorist bombing in Ireland. He kind of loses it, and blames the English and Irish so much for perputating this violent society that he holes up with a lot of hardware and bioengineers a virus that kills only women, and releases it in Ireland, England and Libya (for their role in training IRA terrorists). (No, I never felt the novel was inherently misogynist, and I'm even one of those fortunate people lacking a Y chromosome.)
I guess I liked the book because it had a pretty compelling view of grief and the breakdown of society, since, of course, the disease wasn't going to remain inside the borders of the target countries.
This book was written back in the mid 80s, I believe. I haven't read it since I was a teenager, but it was kind of frightening in that "one man wreaks biological warfare" kind of way.
I have to work with SGIs, so while I think it's a good thing for linux to be getting additional exposure/support/platforms, it makes me a little uneasy. Because if they're focusing on linux and thus probably taking away some Irix specialists, Irix is just going to get worse.... It's got enough problems as it is. And companies like mine with R4K, R10K, and (soon?) R12K machines will still need Irix.
As for the "What can SGI add" question. Hello! I've worked in several CGI (that's ``Computer-Generated Images'') houses and they all have used SGI hardware almost exclusively. That's where high-end graphics and animation get done. And considering that, in the past, it hasn't been low prices or excellent support that have drawn customers to SGI (because neither prices nor support has been exemplary), you better believe that there are other reasons for the investments.
I definitely agree with the concern that the early deaths of people like Diana and JFK Jr. somehow cause people to strip them of all dimensionality and turn them into saints. That would probably bother me to some degree were I to think about it more, but because there's nothing I can do about it and it doesn't really have an impact on my life, I don't.
However, I think I should point out that the obsession over tragedies, especially tragedies that somehow seem small and confined, is not a mere product of the Internet age. Yes, mass media makes it possible, but when the Hindenberg exploded over New Jersey, that was major big news. They were "lucky" enough to have a camera shooting there and the footage ended up in every newsreel and is still a common sight today if you watch the History Channel too much, like I do. And I don't believe there was even anyone "famous" on board, and the casualties were not that great.
One time when I was in high school, my chemistry teacher told the class that re-reading the text wasn't always the best way to study for a test, because your eyes/mind tend to gravitate toward the things you already know and understand more than the things you don't. Your brain tries to hook on to the small bits that are comprehensible. Our minds are, among other things, filled with pattern matches and defense mechanisms. We latch onto the crash of a plane with the son of a famous person on it sometimes because that's a small tragedy, something we can understand, something that probably won't even affect our lives in the long run, because we didn't know these people personally, and so it's over and done with in one sense, although not in the sense that the media is going to leave it alone. If we try to think about people starving to death all over the world, our brains try to make us stop, because there's nothing we can really do about it. It's always there. And if we become obsessed with that, there's something wrong in our heads, along the lines of depression. It's something that seems inescapable, because in some sense, it is.
While few people here wouldn't like to see Microsoft get a come-uppance, this sounds like the most incredibly juvenile, wise-ass way to do it. While these twits never mention preferring Linux to Windows, maybe someone should forward them the advocacy FAQ anyway.
"Excuse me, but you realize, of course, that you're just helping to make Windows `better' in the long run?"
Has anyone ever heard of a major user or someone in a business setting abandoning Windows mainly over security/virus fears?
You might not die after taking the whole package, but you very likely *could* (especially with acetaminophen) fry your liver, leaving it to fail In The Very Near Future.
I think it's far more likely that they will be ODing on this stuff while carrying the guns to school, but their hands will be shaking so much they couldn't hit the broad side of the gym.
Twinkie defense, Marilyn Manson defense, Basketball Diaries defense, we've heard it all before.
I was doing that job search thing just a couple of months ago (looking for a sysadmin-type position on UNIX, with the lion's share of my experience being specifically SGI). I'm glad I found a "permanent" position (I end up working in the entertainment industry, and you just can't tell...), because the whole drove me nuts.
First off, I simply did not have access to Word. *All* the accounts I use, both at home (Linux box), at work (SGIs), and elsewhere are UNIX based. I told people I could either email them text or fax a formatted document (nobody seems to know what to do with.dvi files. *cough* as if...)
I put my resume up on monster.com, because, although I thought I was checking carefully, I didn't think it would be viewable by people unless I had specifically submitted it to them. But I got cold calls off it, which wouldn't have been so bad, except...
The number of headhunter agencies in Southern California must have quadrupled in the last year. My last job was a 6-month contract I got in October. Between that and the number of places hounding me this time, there was a noticeable increase in volume and an unfortunate correlation in cluelessness.
Funny incidents: One recruiter asked me "How many UNIX commands do you know?" "Uh, well, there's cat, echo, cd, ls...."
Geez.
Another recruiter, with a thick, unplaceable foreign accent called me, saying he had a great job in Alameda. "But I live in Southern California, and I don't want to relocate." Him: "No, that wouldn't be a long commute at all!" Me: "No, it's too far." Him: "No, it's a great job. Not far at all." Me: "You said Alameda, right? That's in the Bay Area, right?" Him: "Yes." Me: "No, that's too far." Him: "Where do you live?" Me: "I live in LA County. That's 400 miles!" Him: "No, not far at all!"
I finally convinced him I wasn't interested, although I don't think I managed to convince him it was a long commute.
Anyway, my recommendation to people would not be to plaster your resume all over the net. What happened with me is that the most promising position I saw was offered by what, from the looks of the office and the youth and, um, frat-boy, excessive aggressiveness of the employees, was a *very* new placement company. They sent me on an interview with this place, it looked like a great fit, but then I started getting stalling calls from the headhunter. Finally, the potential employer called me directly and said they were having trouble negotiation a fee with the placement agency. Apparently they were asking for 33% of my first year's salary! The headhunter hadn't mentioned that to me or apparently to the would-be employer. The headhunter said in special circumstances they could go down to 20%, but that's still a big chunk of money! He was just really jerking both me and the company around, being pushy and withholding information.
Anyway, the potential employer expressed regret that they had gotten my resume through this agency rather than directly or through a more reasonable place, and since the agency had gotten my resume off monster.com without my knowledge, they could have passed it on to any number of promising employers, probably without my knowledge, and thus *decrease* my chances of getting a good job when these companies balked at the fee!
Anyway, the story has a reasonably happy ending, but it was a very frustrating experience.
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Let's hope Ask Jeeves isn't the first one to offer a grammar checker.
(So shoot me for being a pedant....)
*sigh* I know, I know. I was aiming for the whole "brevity is the soul of wit" thing.
Almost all artists are revisionists to some degree. Many painters recycled canvases. Georgia O'Keeffe burned most of her early work at one point. But once a piece is in the wild, it becomes part of the public consciousness. (The extent depends on how many people notice the piece and develop an emotional connection with it, obviously.)
I just can't understand the mentality that prevents the man from accepting that these films have taken on a life of their own, and that any regrets or unfulfilled wishes he has with respect to them would more productively and more maturely be addressed by taking what he has learned and trying to create something entirely new with it.
Hindsight is, unfortunately, NOT always 20/20.
P.S. I specifically chose Picasso because he was a painter who had enough success is his relatively long life to have his work shown in major galleries and museums during his life.
P.P.S. I also use the word "artist" rather liberally when referring to Lucas....
I don't recall any stories about Picasso sneaking into museums with a paintbrush to touch up his old work....
Uh, assuming businesses actually respect the DNC list, in theory you should only be getting calls from places with whom you've had prior business and non-profits. Now, if you have prior business relationships with 22.9 million businesses....
No, maybe it's not "fair" but it's still progress.
The company-specific do not call rules apply to all telemarketing calls, including calls from companies with which you have done business and telemarketing calls on behalf of charities.
Company-specific meaning when you tell the telemarketer on the phone to remove your number from their lists.
Yes! Sometimes it's nastier to be nice.
Anyway, telling telemarketers not to call you is also enforceable in the U.S. Scroll down to "How can consumers limit telemarketing calls?"
I also keep meaning to have the phone company block my incoming calls if the caller is hiding their caller ID. That would get rid of huge numbers.
I set up wreq and its predecessor at a couple places. One job I made massive mods to tailor wreq for archive and restore requests, adapting it to the rather complicated process they had been doing by paper (really!) The original code isn't object-oriented, and it's not always beautiful, but it was less scary than bugzilla's. But it's all in perl and the interface is all CGI (except for a somewhat crude command line version) so it was perfect for a place that had people on at least 4 different software platforms. I don't see why request tracking and bug tracking need completely different implementations, as long as it's done well. I have not had happy experiences with bugzilla, but at my last job we used it as a catch-all for several groups (software engineers, sysadmin, etc.), although we did have to make a few mods, which means we were loathe to upgrade. The spin-off is called trainwreq, but I never used it.
I love the part where the Microsoft marketing director says, ``It's unfortunate they're putting user security at risk.'' That slays me.
I admit that I'm pretty soft on animals, even though I think PETA perhaps goes too far sometimes. Live penguins in cages, I mean, it would have been funnier and more PC (in a good way) and still apropos if they had had two guys in penguin suits doing the tricks. Think about it. Even Microsoft doesn't bring their caged rats, er, I mean, programmers to shows. Just the free-range ones.
I said, "Cool!" and followed the link but amazon.com says the book is now on backorder, and what's more, they don't know when to expect a reprint! As in, "You're SOL."
When I was a teenager, one of my favorite books was The White Plague by Frank Herbert. (The only book of his I've read -- I was never into hardcore sci-fi reading.) It's about a biochemist whose family is killed in a terrorist bombing in Ireland. He kind of loses it, and blames the English and Irish so much for perputating this violent society that he holes up with a lot of hardware and bioengineers a virus that kills only women, and releases it in Ireland, England and Libya (for their role in training IRA terrorists). (No, I never felt the novel was inherently misogynist, and I'm even one of those fortunate people lacking a Y chromosome.)
I guess I liked the book because it had a pretty compelling view of grief and the breakdown of society, since, of course, the disease wasn't going to remain inside the borders of the target countries.
This book was written back in the mid 80s, I believe. I haven't read it since I was a teenager, but it was kind of frightening in that "one man wreaks biological warfare" kind of way.
I have to work with SGIs, so while I think it's a good thing for linux to be getting additional exposure/support/platforms, it makes me a little uneasy. Because if they're focusing on linux and thus probably taking away some Irix specialists, Irix is just going to get worse.... It's got enough problems as it is. And companies like mine with R4K, R10K, and (soon?) R12K machines will still need Irix.
As for the "What can SGI add" question. Hello! I've worked in several CGI (that's ``Computer-Generated Images'') houses and they all have used SGI hardware almost exclusively. That's where high-end graphics and animation get done. And considering that, in the past, it hasn't been low prices or excellent support that have drawn customers to SGI (because neither prices nor support has been exemplary), you better believe that there are other reasons for the investments.
However, I think I should point out that the obsession over tragedies, especially tragedies that somehow seem small and confined, is not a mere product of the Internet age. Yes, mass media makes it possible, but when the Hindenberg exploded over New Jersey, that was major big news. They were "lucky" enough to have a camera shooting there and the footage ended up in every newsreel and is still a common sight today if you watch the History Channel too much, like I do. And I don't believe there was even anyone "famous" on board, and the casualties were not that great.
One time when I was in high school, my chemistry teacher told the class that re-reading the text wasn't always the best way to study for a test, because your eyes/mind tend to gravitate toward the things you already know and understand more than the things you don't. Your brain tries to hook on to the small bits that are comprehensible. Our minds are, among other things, filled with pattern matches and defense mechanisms. We latch onto the crash of a plane with the son of a famous person on it sometimes because that's a small tragedy, something we can understand, something that probably won't even affect our lives in the long run, because we didn't know these people personally, and so it's over and done with in one sense, although not in the sense that the media is going to leave it alone. If we try to think about people starving to death all over the world, our brains try to make us stop, because there's nothing we can really do about it. It's always there. And if we become obsessed with that, there's something wrong in our heads, along the lines of depression. It's something that seems inescapable, because in some sense, it is.
While few people here wouldn't like to see Microsoft get a come-uppance, this sounds like the most incredibly juvenile, wise-ass way to do it. While these twits never mention preferring Linux to Windows, maybe someone should forward them the advocacy FAQ anyway.
"Excuse me, but you realize, of course, that you're just helping to make Windows `better' in the long run?"
Has anyone ever heard of a major user or someone in a business setting abandoning Windows mainly over security/virus fears?
You might not die after taking the whole package, but you very likely *could* (especially with acetaminophen) fry your liver, leaving it to fail In The Very Near Future.
I think it's far more likely that they will be ODing on this stuff while carrying the guns to school, but their hands will be shaking so much they couldn't hit the broad side of the gym.
Twinkie defense, Marilyn Manson defense, Basketball Diaries defense, we've heard it all before.
I was doing that job search thing just a couple of months ago (looking for a sysadmin-type position on UNIX, with the lion's share of my experience being specifically SGI). I'm glad I found a "permanent" position (I end up working in the entertainment industry, and you just can't tell...), because the whole drove me nuts.
.dvi files. *cough* as if...)
First off, I simply did not have access to Word. *All* the accounts I use, both at home (Linux box), at work (SGIs), and elsewhere are UNIX based. I told people I could either email them text or fax a formatted document (nobody seems to know what to do with
I put my resume up on monster.com, because, although I thought I was checking carefully, I didn't think it would be viewable by people unless I had specifically submitted it to them. But I got cold calls off it, which wouldn't have been so bad, except...
The number of headhunter agencies in Southern California must have quadrupled in the last year. My last job was a 6-month contract I got in October. Between that and the number of places hounding me this time, there was a noticeable increase in volume and an unfortunate correlation in cluelessness.
Funny incidents:
One recruiter asked me "How many UNIX commands do you know?"
"Uh, well, there's cat, echo, cd, ls...."
Geez.
Another recruiter, with a thick, unplaceable foreign accent called me, saying he had a great job in Alameda. "But I live in Southern California, and I don't want to relocate."
Him: "No, that wouldn't be a long commute at all!"
Me: "No, it's too far."
Him: "No, it's a great job. Not far at all."
Me: "You said Alameda, right? That's in the Bay
Area, right?"
Him: "Yes."
Me: "No, that's too far."
Him: "Where do you live?"
Me: "I live in LA County. That's 400 miles!"
Him: "No, not far at all!"
I finally convinced him I wasn't interested, although I don't think I managed to convince him it was a long commute.
Anyway, my recommendation to people would not be to plaster your resume all over the net. What happened with me is that the most promising position I saw was offered by what, from the looks of the office and the youth and, um, frat-boy, excessive aggressiveness of the employees, was a *very* new placement company. They sent me on an interview with this place, it looked like a great fit, but then I started getting stalling calls from the headhunter. Finally, the potential employer called me directly and said they were having trouble negotiation a fee with the placement agency. Apparently they were asking for 33% of my first year's salary! The headhunter hadn't mentioned that to me or apparently to the would-be employer. The headhunter said in special circumstances they could go down to 20%, but that's still a big chunk of money! He was just really jerking both me and the company around, being pushy and withholding information.
Anyway, the potential employer expressed regret that they had gotten my resume through this agency rather than directly or through a more reasonable place, and since the agency had gotten my resume off monster.com without my knowledge, they could have passed it on to any number of promising employers, probably without my knowledge, and thus *decrease* my chances of getting a good job when these companies balked at the fee!
Anyway, the story has a reasonably happy ending, but it was a very frustrating experience.