I don't work for that company anymore. They were a 3-year-old data center company, and I hired on in a new location that wasn't profitable yet. I left for a more secure company, and last I heard that data center company was shutting some locations down but selling my old location off, so I guess it was near being profitable.
But it was fun and enjoyable. It didn't pay as much as I wanted, but the people were cool and you could do pretty much what you wanted as long as you took care of business.
Among my coworkers, some regularly surfed porn, some played games, and one left p2p software running all shift, which is cool when you have 10Mbit bandwidtch to the internet. (For the NOC; the whole center had much more of course. We were setting up gigabit internet set up for one customer.) My coworkers and I would gather at an exceptional example of porn, but I never surfed it myself. To me, porn and work don't mix. Why do I want to be horny at work? Especially on the weekends by myself for 12 hours. That would be a bad habit to start!
We did more than just monitor, though; we were remote hands for the customers, we racked equipment and cabled for new customers, we gave data center tours for potential customers, etc.. And we were encouraged to develop new ideas for services to offer customers and services to improve our network.
I spent my idle time soaking up all the new info...I hadn't worked that closely with that much network equipment before and I was a kid in a candy store. I miss it except for the insecurity and low pay.:-)
No reading printed material at your workstation? WTF? All of our alerts had loud sounds, emails and pages in addition to the screen flashing. Our more serious alerts (e.g. main switch problem) had the Star Trek red alert sound. Syslog entries from the routers made a "thunk" sound, and we had comprehensive monitoring system that spoke the location and nature of the problem. (Well, the sounds were configurable and we used AT&T's online voice synthesizer to create alerts.) Anything in the data center moving or behaving in a noteworthy fashion made an audible and visual alert, and anything that definitely needed immediate attention would page and email, too. And of course we'd periodically audit and test the alert system.
The drinking and eating rules are actually kinda smart, but we ate and drank at our stations, anyway, although there were at least 5 other usable stations if I fried mine.
We mixed our music into the alert speakers for loud entertainment. Plus we had DSS satellite on one of our many monitors.
I don't recall a dress code, but I usually wore khakis and a patterned button-up cotton blend shirt.
We couldn't leave the building empty, but we could leave if there were coworkers working. (I worked weekend 12-hour shifts and was by myself the whole time so I couldn't leave.)
I only brought my personal computer in the weekend before my last day. But that was because our data center hosted WWII Online and it had just released and I wanted to try it, and mucking with a NOC workstation was not something I wanted to do. Plus, how often do you get a chance to play a MMOG with ping times under 20ms?
Sleeping: We weren't supposed to do that, and I didn't, but I think the midnight guy did. He was the only one who repeadedly had problems like "the phone never rang...I was making a walkthrough check of the building and the phone must've lost connection" when the same phone always rang for everyone else all the time no matter where they were in the building.
Propping feet up: not a problem.
But if customers were around we were supposed to have the NOC looking net, of course. We had a fishbowl-type NOC with a glass wall between us and the entry way (cool because the receptionist was gorgeous) and large windows into the data center floor.
For those tempted to say that our 'slacker' practices are why the company got in trouble, I don't think
That seems to be the consensus, but the guy had so little screen time and his face was upside-down relative to the audience at the end that I didn't recognize him...I just saw an upside-down goatee and thought "Cypher", but I'm bad with names and faces anyway.
I recall his previous two scenes, although I'm not sure he was trying to kill Neo. We were obviously supposed to believe that for tension build-up, but either he changed his mind at the last second or was trying to get his blood on Neo (perhaps a human virus or, as a usenet poster suggested, program Neo with brain-chemical-altering-stuff; but he did seem to get a little blood on his uncut hand and then shake Neo's) or was just being curious about pain and then Neo.
And now that I think about it, if this were a different iteration of the Matrix than the first move then Neo & co wouldn't know Smith, because he appears to be freed in his own way and as I understand the Matrix universe would not be erased or reset when the Matrix reloads, and if he were freed in a previous load then Neo wouldn't know him.
If they can avoid breaking their own rules in Matrix Revolutions and avoid anything lame like "it's all a dream" or "it's all meaningless" then the last movie will be really kick-ass.
Why does Slashdot insist on posting anything "PPC" under the Apple category?
Well, to be annoyingly picky, it's in the Hardware Topic Category. It is in the apple Section, but there doesn't seem to be a PPC section or RS/6000 section or anything closer to appropriate than the Apple section.
Besides, a lot of geeks seem, like me, to be looking for a commodity PPC platform on which to play with LinuxPPC and OS X via MOL. (Yeah, yeah, licensing...tell me you never have anything unlicensed on your systems even temporarily. And some would willingly buy OS X for MOL for 'permanent' use and call it fair use.)
I guess they could've put it in the BSD section, but Books, Ask Slashdot, Developers, Features, Games, Interviews, Radio, Science and YRO seem less appropriate than Apple.
Don't hold your breath for an x86 OS X that will run on commodity hardware, but that would be cool.
After OS X came out I reasearched the slowest cheapest PPC it would run on--even considering MOL for non Apple platforms--and hunted for good deals on eBay. Old PPC equipment that can possibly run OS X or Linux ain't cheap!! I thought I found a decent deal on some RS/6000 PPC's, but the chip and architecture of that model (I forget which) made it unable to run Linux...only NetBSD and AIX would run on it. Plus it was missing some RAM that turns out to be orders of magnitude more expensive than their PC counterparts, even on eBay.
PPC stuff just isn't commodity hardware; it's expensive, even the old stuff. I just haven't yet been able to justify spending that kind of money on Apple when I see what it can buy in x86.
(I'm speaking for personal use purposes, so none of that "comparable hardware" stuff applies here. Two weeks ago my cheap power supply went out so I ran to the store and picked up another for $45. Not what you want for a production environment, but fine for home.)
... last evening myself and a few friends were discussing how the rock genre is in the process of dying and that an inevitable void that will occur when bands such as the Rolling Stones finally disapear for good.
I don't have the answers, but I wonder if this is just evolution of entertainment.
Before transistor radios in the 1950s, there was a much smaller 'bandwitdh', if you will, for music and other aural entertainment to reach people. Since then there's been a phenomenon of the technology creating more and more bandwidth for less and less money, so it was possible to get more types of music out to people. Now it's possile for an artist to create music and make it available at no incremental cost. (Although fairly high front-end costs on an average Earthman's budget.)
50 years later, maybe we've covered it all. I mean how many new songs sound like old songs, and look how many covers are done these days. Music as an aural art may have many possible future forms, but how many forms can fit into the Rock'n'Roll genre and be widely appealing?
I had the same understanding about the foreward ambush force being wiped out, but there were scenes showing one or two Squiddie Sentinels in a place that looked a hell of a lot like a dark Zion when they were rapidly switching scenes.
The guy at the end: It didn't show him long enough, but for a while after the movie I thought it was Cypher which was a total mindf***, but obviously Trinity would've recognized him.
Then again, perhas this iteration of the Matrix is different than the first movie. I don't recall any explanation of what happened after the first movie when he called someone and told them "I'm going to show these people a new world, a world without you. Where we go from there is up to you." (or something like that) I took it to mean a massive instantaneous Matrix-wide change, but we're led to believe they've just been yanking people out at a faster pace for 6 months.
New idea for me: perhaps 'the machines' are trying to determine all possible 'outputs' from a human given the input, and they're close since the Oracle can predict the future, but they're not quite there yet because Neo and the gang still do unexpected stuff. Perhaps the computers fail to realize the futility of controlling/predicting a human, or perhaps we fail to realize how preprogrammed we are.
I think Smith gave him something...Smith took over one of the freedmen and returned to 'the real world'; was it not that same guy who later cut his hand, got a little blood on the other and shook hands with Neo? That was important, but I just haven't figured out how yet.
There's obviously more to Smith than we know. Could he have given ---holy crap, I just remembered he gave Neo his earpiece. Perhaps that gave Neo a better hook into controlling/stopping the Squiddies. Also, that was Neo's closest encounter with a Squiddie...they didn't get that close to him in the first movie.
And there was another bleeding hand reference while fighting the dudes just after springing the keymaker. I have a feeling they tie together somehow, but maybe not.
... but if you take morpheus's statment about how they have been fighting the machiines for 100 years and there have been 6 ones before then it could only be 700 years old.
Several people have commented about the 100 years as if it were and absolute Matrix cycle time. In fact the reason the first Matrix failed was due to its reliance on perfect mathmatic formulae.
The architect spoke of increasing probability that the system would fail, so I expect the life cycle of the Matrix/The One would be variable. This cycle was roughly 100 years long, but perhaps others were 10 years or 2000 years long.
Morpheus told one of his superiors that they've freed more people in the past 6 months than the previous 6 years. If the Matrix error and probability of failure increases it would make sense to me that it would increase exponentially, and the dramatic increase is what is ends the cycle. One question might be whether the emergence of a powerful/anomolic dude like Neo was an effect or cause of the end of the cycle, or if Neo-types happen all the time and are dealt with in another manner by the control programs when it's too soon. Hell, maybe Neo-types are programatically enhanced to become "The One" when the other anomolies become too high. chown neo/var/human/powers/super and ln -s/var/human/powers/super ~neo/README?
I'm really trying to wrap my head around the possibilities of where/what Zion is and what the "real" situation is. There are so many directions to go. They didn't disappoint me in this sequel, so maybe they won't in the next sequel, either.
Another thing: if Neo visiting the architect was a planned event then was the pursuit of the keymaker by "the twins" and two agents just for show? Or are the programs not in on the scheme? How could they not be?
She had to break into this private secure office building before she even began hacking.
Oh, is that what happened? I didn't see the break-in part as I was watching her skin-tight leather too closely.
Her leather wasn't in the shot when they showed the screen, so I noticed the ssh connection and thought it was cool, but it went off before I noticed nmap.
Cool! I never have the time to read those pesky EULAs line-by-line, I just spot-check them, so I don't have to worry about lawsuits because they duped me into it!
If SCO were really concerned about losing IP, they could have discreetly contacted the parties in question, demonstrated their case, and maybe worked out some kind of licensing agreement.
Weren't they the ones that offered UNIX licenses for US$99 to Linux users after first making the claim? I think they did try to 'work out some kind of licensing', but they didn't offer any proof of why end users should do it.
Speaking of which, everyone running any version of Microsoft Windows can send me US$99 and I won't sue you if I ever decide to sue everyone because they uh, might have some infringing code, yeah, that's the ticket.:-)
BTW, in a worst case scenario I wonder how practical it would be for an end user to quit using the Linux kernel and insert the FreeBSD kernel with the Linux environment add-ins until the alleged "infringing code" would be removed.
My occasional popups come from the new york times. Not sure how they get through.
I'm in a curious mood today and reading up on several techie topics, so I looked for this issue, too. A bit of Googling turned up this posting that offers a suggestion to set user_pref("dom.disable_open_click_delay", 1000); to successfully thwart the NYT. Presumably that goes in user.js IIRC or whatever the user prefs file is.
Another unanswered query said he'd heard it was a timing thing, so apparently they increase or decrease a delay to fool Mozilla, but I'm not ubergeek enough to know exactly how yet.
Re:Wouldn't the problem with bit torrent be
on
BitTorrent Guide
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· Score: 1
You're comparing BitTorrent to web pages. I compared it to other p2p programs, and I think The ISPs would prefer this to the alternatives:
Kazaa & Gnutella: While this is open your entire shared folder is available for browsing and uploading to others, and some people might leave it on all the time.
Freenet Project: Similar to above, and if you're a permanent node then you're trafficking packets that aren't even to or from your published FreeSites.
BiTTorrent's beauty to me--and I suspsect the ISPs--is that the user picks one file to download and share rather than a slew of files. I suspect that generates less traffic for the client than jumping on another p2p for a while to find and grab your target file. If you're running a tracker your ISP might not like it, though.
Real zion-born people seemed to hold more social status then the copper-tops who were once part of the matrix...
Well, in Matrix 1 Tank was proud of being Zion-born, but other than that I didn't see an indication of superiority in either movie. And many people are proud of where they're from, and it could also be a sign of a minor victory over the machines that humans procreate outside the Matrix.
In fact in Matrix Reloaded the head council guy was from the Matrix; he said he spent the first 11 years of his life sleeping, an obvious indication he was from the Matrix. I thought I remember seeing his Matrix interface holes, but now I'm not sure.
---SPOILER--- . . . . .
If the architect was right, then that means the council are the people who were chosen to 'restart' Zion after the last massacre? The architect said there were so many men and so many women...I need to go back and count those council members.
The more I think about this the more what he said seems to fit into it. He might've known what Neo's purpose was and was preparing him for it. But then he seemed uncertain of what Neo's purpose was, or perhaps he did and was seeding the idea that the machines couldn't wipe humans out completely because they need us; perhaps he regrets that they helped the architect by choosing the seeds last time and hopes Neo won't cooperate and sees what happens.
By the way, I left the movie when the credits started but later read thre was a "surprise" after the credits. What did I miss? Thanks.
You don't need to add an extension for that. Type "about:config" in your Firebird browser, scroll down to browser.tabs.autohide, right-click to modify and type "false". I just learned that the other day. Whee, I'm a uber geek now.
I first tried Firebird (then Phoenix) at work because I wanted Mozilla's browsing features but used my corporate standard mail client.
If you install the Mozilla binary distributions you can't make the mailto: links open a third-party mail client; conversely you can't make the http:// links in Mozilla Mail open third party browsers, so I started using Firebird at home because I'm going to switch to Thunderbird mail soon because I'm pissed off at Mozilla's password manager. I want it to remember my mail passwords but never remember anything on the web, and it ain't doing it for me.
I guess I should've added at the end, but I thought the references to Saudi Arabia and China as democratic and free of human rights abuses were sufficient.
No, it wasn't about any of that. The fact is the American president himself stated it was about one purpose: To oust Saddam Hussein on the knowledge he had WMDs. I can find the speech, if you'd like.
I agree with you that that is the official purpose, but I was never fully convinced that was the real reason, nor was I convinced that oil/money was the real reason as many claim (but I thought the Iraqi first war was because of that). Something just never quite added up for me; there's more than meets the eyes here. But I'm not saying it's necessarily bad in the big general sense from the US point of view. Perhaps we have/had intelligence of something really sinister there that couldn't (and can't yet) be publicly disclosed due to implications of 'friendly' allies. Perhaps we're treading carefully around information that could spark a large scale conflict between Israelis and Arabs.
Furthermore from the start I've thought that North Korea is a more imminent threat. AFAIK they don't have as much to loose by going nuts with nukes or Seoul-bound artillery. Saddam at least had a decent infrastructure and tons of money even with the sanctions.
Heads up to any other countries: Gifts from the US come with strings attached. Don't take their Trojan Horses.
I have to agree on that one for now. Since WWII our diplomacy and military been far more focused on containing communism and promoting US business interests than in the general welfare of humanity. I'm not saying we should be the green, tree-hugging love-everyone country, but we're way way too focused on promoting American businesses when the free market should be making the decisions, and I think US Government interference sometimes weakens our free market positions by stifling innovation in favor of protecting the 'old guard' companies that aren't adapting to market changes. It bothers me that in the US laws (copyright law and DMCA are examples) seem to be passed to legislatively maintain business models that are becoming technologically obsolete. In the early 1900's were there laws to require car purchasers to buy buggy whips too?
JPEG, GIF, PNG, didn't imitate each other, nor did they try to imitate their predecessors like ".bmp" ".tiff" ".xpm", and others.
But those were all de facto standards and rose to prominence because prominent applications supported them espeically in the case of JPEG and GIF on the early WWW. Ogg Vorbis had an uphill battle for acceptance (in proprietary OSes with bundled- or standardly-downloaded audio players) from the start becaues mp3, wma and ra were already duking it out to try to be the de facto standard. Perhaps Ogg Vorbis is more prevalent now than last I checked; I know it's in Winamp and every open source player, but is it natively in Windows Media Player and the bundled Apple player yet? Or RealOne? Then again, another poster made the point that Winamp is widely installed as the default player due to teenagers.
Vorbis isn't MP3... It shouldn't try to imitate MP3. It's good, and gradually, people will remember the filename, and what that extention means.
But AFAIK Vorbis still isn't in any portable player, and that's mainly where I'm coming from. The MP3 imitation is my little 'marketing' idea, although I'm a geek and not a marketer. Some extra hype and interest for Vorbis might make it more likely to be included in future hardware decoders for portable players and CD/DVD reader-players. I really really want Ogg Vorbis playable from my car CD player--and at the same price as the lower-end MP3 car players. Then I'll shut up for a while.:-)
---------------
It's the same old problem as the other open source stuff. Geeks think it's cool, and it's like the secret society handshake to know details such as the difference between Ogg and Vorbis, but some of us want it to be accepted more widely (for personal gain, of course--in my case cheap geeky entertainment) and wish for better marketing, but marketing and open source are almost antithetical. To market the product frequently diminishes the producer somehow, in many cases in pride or purpose because to market and be commercially popular was not the ultimate goal. Although in Xiph's case I think they do want commercial popularity.
I was a half-assed recycler when I lived in an area with curbside pickup or recycle pickup at an apartment, but in Plainfield, Indiana my apartment doesn't have recycle bins. After a few months of throwing away my plastics and aluminum I felt a little guilty and investigated recycling. The nearest recycling dropoff is 15 miles away. Screw 'em, I'm tossing them until it's more convenient.
Here is a description of recycling pressed CDs, but it says this process is patented. I recall reading somewhere that CDR's and CDRW's data layers cannot be recycled, but they chip up the discs and the data layer flakes or otherwise separates, but I can't find a link to that info right now. (Too lazy.)
My "dvd recycle | recycling" Google search (without quotes) brought FlexPlays link up as the first listing and nothing that looks like a process on page one.
I know that Hussein had to be stopped, but really, it was just a convenient excuse that had the distinct advantage of being genuinely applicable to the situation.
In my other reply I forgot to add the old saying: "The first casualty of war is the truth." The Iraqi freedom thing was propoganda BS but also a normal and expected part of war, just like Baghdad Bob insisting that the US is being slaughtered as A10's fly overhead and Fox News is broadcasting live from the palace, although I was confused by Baghdad Bob's persistence that late in the game. I was glued to the set hoping US soldiers would walk on camera while he was on the air.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't work for that company anymore. They were a 3-year-old data center company, and I hired on in a new location that wasn't profitable yet. I left for a more secure company, and last I heard that data center company was shutting some locations down but selling my old location off, so I guess it was near being profitable.
:-)
But it was fun and enjoyable. It didn't pay as much as I wanted, but the people were cool and you could do pretty much what you wanted as long as you took care of business.
Among my coworkers, some regularly surfed porn, some played games, and one left p2p software running all shift, which is cool when you have 10Mbit bandwidtch to the internet. (For the NOC; the whole center had much more of course. We were setting up gigabit internet set up for one customer.) My coworkers and I would gather at an exceptional example of porn, but I never surfed it myself. To me, porn and work don't mix. Why do I want to be horny at work? Especially on the weekends by myself for 12 hours. That would be a bad habit to start!
We did more than just monitor, though; we were remote hands for the customers, we racked equipment and cabled for new customers, we gave data center tours for potential customers, etc.. And we were encouraged to develop new ideas for services to offer customers and services to improve our network.
I spent my idle time soaking up all the new info...I hadn't worked that closely with that much network equipment before and I was a kid in a candy store. I miss it except for the insecurity and low pay.
No reading printed material at your workstation? WTF? All of our alerts had loud sounds, emails and pages in addition to the screen flashing. Our more serious alerts (e.g. main switch problem) had the Star Trek red alert sound. Syslog entries from the routers made a "thunk" sound, and we had comprehensive monitoring system that spoke the location and nature of the problem. (Well, the sounds were configurable and we used AT&T's online voice synthesizer to create alerts.) Anything in the data center moving or behaving in a noteworthy fashion made an audible and visual alert, and anything that definitely needed immediate attention would page and email, too. And of course we'd periodically audit and test the alert system.
The drinking and eating rules are actually kinda smart, but we ate and drank at our stations, anyway, although there were at least 5 other usable stations if I fried mine.
We mixed our music into the alert speakers for loud entertainment. Plus we had DSS satellite on one of our many monitors.
I don't recall a dress code, but I usually wore khakis and a patterned button-up cotton blend shirt.
We couldn't leave the building empty, but we could leave if there were coworkers working. (I worked weekend 12-hour shifts and was by myself the whole time so I couldn't leave.)
I only brought my personal computer in the weekend before my last day. But that was because our data center hosted WWII Online and it had just released and I wanted to try it, and mucking with a NOC workstation was not something I wanted to do. Plus, how often do you get a chance to play a MMOG with ping times under 20ms?
Sleeping: We weren't supposed to do that, and I didn't, but I think the midnight guy did. He was the only one who repeadedly had problems like "the phone never rang...I was making a walkthrough check of the building and the phone must've lost connection" when the same phone always rang for everyone else all the time no matter where they were in the building.
Propping feet up: not a problem.
But if customers were around we were supposed to have the NOC looking net, of course. We had a fishbowl-type NOC with a glass wall between us and the entry way (cool because the receptionist was gorgeous) and large windows into the data center floor.
For those tempted to say that our 'slacker' practices are why the company got in trouble, I don't think
Bah, I demand an entire arcade installed next to the NOC!
We got a foosball table in our NOC after securing a large client account when I worked at a data center company.
Geeks make great foosball players!
That seems to be the consensus, but the guy had so little screen time and his face was upside-down relative to the audience at the end that I didn't recognize him...I just saw an upside-down goatee and thought "Cypher", but I'm bad with names and faces anyway.
I recall his previous two scenes, although I'm not sure he was trying to kill Neo. We were obviously supposed to believe that for tension build-up, but either he changed his mind at the last second or was trying to get his blood on Neo (perhaps a human virus or, as a usenet poster suggested, program Neo with brain-chemical-altering-stuff; but he did seem to get a little blood on his uncut hand and then shake Neo's) or was just being curious about pain and then Neo.
And now that I think about it, if this were a different iteration of the Matrix than the first move then Neo & co wouldn't know Smith, because he appears to be freed in his own way and as I understand the Matrix universe would not be erased or reset when the Matrix reloads, and if he were freed in a previous load then Neo wouldn't know him.
If they can avoid breaking their own rules in Matrix Revolutions and avoid anything lame like "it's all a dream" or "it's all meaningless" then the last movie will be really kick-ass.
Why does Slashdot insist on posting anything "PPC" under the Apple category?
Well, to be annoyingly picky, it's in the Hardware Topic Category. It is in the apple Section, but there doesn't seem to be a PPC section or RS/6000 section or anything closer to appropriate than the Apple section.
Besides, a lot of geeks seem, like me, to be looking for a commodity PPC platform on which to play with LinuxPPC and OS X via MOL. (Yeah, yeah, licensing...tell me you never have anything unlicensed on your systems even temporarily. And some would willingly buy OS X for MOL for 'permanent' use and call it fair use.)
I guess they could've put it in the BSD section, but Books, Ask Slashdot, Developers, Features, Games, Interviews, Radio, Science and YRO seem less appropriate than Apple.
Here is a list of how Linux works on various RS/6000 models.
I found this through penguinppc.org/.
I was looking for a cheap (hahahhha) PPC machine for PPC Linux and/or OS X a while back but it cost too much.
Don't hold your breath for an x86 OS X that will run on commodity hardware, but that would be cool.
After OS X came out I reasearched the slowest cheapest PPC it would run on--even considering MOL for non Apple platforms--and hunted for good deals on eBay. Old PPC equipment that can possibly run OS X or Linux ain't cheap!! I thought I found a decent deal on some RS/6000 PPC's, but the chip and architecture of that model (I forget which) made it unable to run Linux...only NetBSD and AIX would run on it. Plus it was missing some RAM that turns out to be orders of magnitude more expensive than their PC counterparts, even on eBay.
PPC stuff just isn't commodity hardware; it's expensive, even the old stuff. I just haven't yet been able to justify spending that kind of money on Apple when I see what it can buy in x86.
(I'm speaking for personal use purposes, so none of that "comparable hardware" stuff applies here. Two weeks ago my cheap power supply went out so I ran to the store and picked up another for $45. Not what you want for a production environment, but fine for home.)
... last evening myself and a few friends were discussing how the rock genre is in the process of dying and that an inevitable void that will occur when bands such as the Rolling Stones finally disapear for good.
I don't have the answers, but I wonder if this is just evolution of entertainment.
Before transistor radios in the 1950s, there was a much smaller 'bandwitdh', if you will, for music and other aural entertainment to reach people. Since then there's been a phenomenon of the technology creating more and more bandwidth for less and less money, so it was possible to get more types of music out to people. Now it's possile for an artist to create music and make it available at no incremental cost. (Although fairly high front-end costs on an average Earthman's budget.)
50 years later, maybe we've covered it all. I mean how many new songs sound like old songs, and look how many covers are done these days. Music as an aural art may have many possible future forms, but how many forms can fit into the Rock'n'Roll genre and be widely appealing?
Damnit, now I'm going to get a woody every time I get hacked!
I had the same understanding about the foreward ambush force being wiped out, but there were scenes showing one or two Squiddie Sentinels in a place that looked a hell of a lot like a dark Zion when they were rapidly switching scenes.
The guy at the end: It didn't show him long enough, but for a while after the movie I thought it was Cypher which was a total mindf***, but obviously Trinity would've recognized him.
Then again, perhas this iteration of the Matrix is different than the first movie. I don't recall any explanation of what happened after the first movie when he called someone and told them "I'm going to show these people a new world, a world without you. Where we go from there is up to you." (or something like that) I took it to mean a massive instantaneous Matrix-wide change, but we're led to believe they've just been yanking people out at a faster pace for 6 months.
New idea for me: perhaps 'the machines' are trying to determine all possible 'outputs' from a human given the input, and they're close since the Oracle can predict the future, but they're not quite there yet because Neo and the gang still do unexpected stuff. Perhaps the computers fail to realize the futility of controlling/predicting a human, or perhaps we fail to realize how preprogrammed we are.
I think Smith gave him something...Smith took over one of the freedmen and returned to 'the real world'; was it not that same guy who later cut his hand, got a little blood on the other and shook hands with Neo? That was important, but I just haven't figured out how yet.
There's obviously more to Smith than we know. Could he have given ---holy crap, I just remembered he gave Neo his earpiece. Perhaps that gave Neo a better hook into controlling/stopping the Squiddies. Also, that was Neo's closest encounter with a Squiddie...they didn't get that close to him in the first movie.
And there was another bleeding hand reference while fighting the dudes just after springing the keymaker. I have a feeling they tie together somehow, but maybe not.
The architect spoke of increasing probability that the system would fail, so I expect the life cycle of the Matrix/The One would be variable. This cycle was roughly 100 years long, but perhaps others were 10 years or 2000 years long.
Morpheus told one of his superiors that they've freed more people in the past 6 months than the previous 6 years. If the Matrix error and probability of failure increases it would make sense to me that it would increase exponentially, and the dramatic increase is what is ends the cycle. One question might be whether the emergence of a powerful/anomolic dude like Neo was an effect or cause of the end of the cycle, or if Neo-types happen all the time and are dealt with in another manner by the control programs when it's too soon. Hell, maybe Neo-types are programatically enhanced to become "The One" when the other anomolies become too high. chown neo
I'm really trying to wrap my head around the possibilities of where/what Zion is and what the "real" situation is. There are so many directions to go. They didn't disappoint me in this sequel, so maybe they won't in the next sequel, either.
Another thing: if Neo visiting the architect was a planned event then was the pursuit of the keymaker by "the twins" and two agents just for show? Or are the programs not in on the scheme? How could they not be?
Cool movie.
Her leather wasn't in the shot when they showed the screen, so I noticed the ssh connection and thought it was cool, but it went off before I noticed nmap.
Cool! I never have the time to read those pesky EULAs line-by-line, I just spot-check them, so I don't have to worry about lawsuits because they duped me into it!
Speaking of which, everyone running any version of Microsoft Windows can send me US$99 and I won't sue you if I ever decide to sue everyone because they uh, might have some infringing code, yeah, that's the ticket.
BTW, in a worst case scenario I wonder how practical it would be for an end user to quit using the Linux kernel and insert the FreeBSD kernel with the Linux environment add-ins until the alleged "infringing code" would be removed.
Another unanswered query said he'd heard it was a timing thing, so apparently they increase or decrease a delay to fool Mozilla, but I'm not ubergeek enough to know exactly how yet.
You're comparing BitTorrent to web pages. I compared it to other p2p programs, and I think The ISPs would prefer this to the alternatives:
Kazaa & Gnutella: While this is open your entire shared folder is available for browsing and uploading to others, and some people might leave it on all the time.
Freenet Project: Similar to above, and if you're a permanent node then you're trafficking packets that aren't even to or from your published FreeSites.
BiTTorrent's beauty to me--and I suspsect the ISPs--is that the user picks one file to download and share rather than a slew of files. I suspect that generates less traffic for the client than jumping on another p2p for a while to find and grab your target file. If you're running a tracker your ISP might not like it, though.
Well, in Matrix 1 Tank was proud of being Zion-born, but other than that I didn't see an indication of superiority in either movie. And many people are proud of where they're from, and it could also be a sign of a minor victory over the machines that humans procreate outside the Matrix.
In fact in Matrix Reloaded the head council guy was from the Matrix; he said he spent the first 11 years of his life sleeping, an obvious indication he was from the Matrix. I thought I remember seeing his Matrix interface holes, but now I'm not sure.
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If the architect was right, then that means the council are the people who were chosen to 'restart' Zion after the last massacre? The architect said there were so many men and so many women...I need to go back and count those council members.
The more I think about this the more what he said seems to fit into it. He might've known what Neo's purpose was and was preparing him for it. But then he seemed uncertain of what Neo's purpose was, or perhaps he did and was seeding the idea that the machines couldn't wipe humans out completely because they need us; perhaps he regrets that they helped the architect by choosing the seeds last time and hopes Neo won't cooperate and sees what happens.
By the way, I left the movie when the credits started but later read thre was a "surprise" after the credits. What did I miss? Thanks.
You don't need to add an extension for that. Type "about:config" in your Firebird browser, scroll down to browser.tabs.autohide, right-click to modify and type "false". I just learned that the other day. Whee, I'm a uber geek now.
I first tried Firebird (then Phoenix) at work because I wanted Mozilla's browsing features but used my corporate standard mail client.
If you install the Mozilla binary distributions you can't make the mailto: links open a third-party mail client; conversely you can't make the http:// links in Mozilla Mail open third party browsers, so I started using Firebird at home because I'm going to switch to Thunderbird mail soon because I'm pissed off at Mozilla's password manager. I want it to remember my mail passwords but never remember anything on the web, and it ain't doing it for me.
I didn't realize there was an age limit. They didn't card me and I'm well over 21...
I agree with you that that is the official purpose, but I was never fully convinced that was the real reason, nor was I convinced that oil/money was the real reason as many claim (but I thought the Iraqi first war was because of that). Something just never quite added up for me; there's more than meets the eyes here. But I'm not saying it's necessarily bad in the big general sense from the US point of view. Perhaps we have/had intelligence of something really sinister there that couldn't (and can't yet) be publicly disclosed due to implications of 'friendly' allies. Perhaps we're treading carefully around information that could spark a large scale conflict between Israelis and Arabs.
Furthermore from the start I've thought that North Korea is a more imminent threat. AFAIK they don't have as much to loose by going nuts with nukes or Seoul-bound artillery. Saddam at least had a decent infrastructure and tons of money even with the sanctions.
I have to agree on that one for now. Since WWII our diplomacy and military been far more focused on containing communism and promoting US business interests than in the general welfare of humanity. I'm not saying we should be the green, tree-hugging love-everyone country, but we're way way too focused on promoting American businesses when the free market should be making the decisions, and I think US Government interference sometimes weakens our free market positions by stifling innovation in favor of protecting the 'old guard' companies that aren't adapting to market changes. It bothers me that in the US laws (copyright law and DMCA are examples) seem to be passed to legislatively maintain business models that are becoming technologically obsolete. In the early 1900's were there laws to require car purchasers to buy buggy whips too?
But those were all de facto standards and rose to prominence because prominent applications supported them espeically in the case of JPEG and GIF on the early WWW. Ogg Vorbis had an uphill battle for acceptance (in proprietary OSes with bundled- or standardly-downloaded audio players) from the start becaues mp3, wma and ra were already duking it out to try to be the de facto standard. Perhaps Ogg Vorbis is more prevalent now than last I checked; I know it's in Winamp and every open source player, but is it natively in Windows Media Player and the bundled Apple player yet? Or RealOne? Then again, another poster made the point that Winamp is widely installed as the default player due to teenagers.
But AFAIK Vorbis still isn't in any portable player, and that's mainly where I'm coming from. The MP3 imitation is my little 'marketing' idea, although I'm a geek and not a marketer. Some extra hype and interest for Vorbis might make it more likely to be included in future hardware decoders for portable players and CD/DVD reader-players. I really really want Ogg Vorbis playable from my car CD player--and at the same price as the lower-end MP3 car players. Then I'll shut up for a while.
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It's the same old problem as the other open source stuff. Geeks think it's cool, and it's like the secret society handshake to know details such as the difference between Ogg and Vorbis, but some of us want it to be accepted more widely (for personal gain, of course--in my case cheap geeky entertainment) and wish for better marketing, but marketing and open source are almost antithetical. To market the product frequently diminishes the producer somehow, in many cases in pride or purpose because to market and be commercially popular was not the ultimate goal. Although in Xiph's case I think they do want commercial popularity.
In the link you provided they refer recycling to the GreenDisk company without linking to them. I looked them up.
I haven't found DVD recycling yet, but for CD, floppy disk and video tape recycling it says:
I was a half-assed recycler when I lived in an area with curbside pickup or recycle pickup at an apartment, but in Plainfield, Indiana my apartment doesn't have recycle bins. After a few months of throwing away my plastics and aluminum I felt a little guilty and investigated recycling. The nearest recycling dropoff is 15 miles away. Screw 'em, I'm tossing them until it's more convenient.
Here is a description of recycling pressed CDs, but it says this process is patented. I recall reading somewhere that CDR's and CDRW's data layers cannot be recycled, but they chip up the discs and the data layer flakes or otherwise separates, but I can't find a link to that info right now. (Too lazy.)
My "dvd recycle | recycling" Google search (without quotes) brought FlexPlays link up as the first listing and nothing that looks like a process on page one.
I know that Hussein had to be stopped, but really, it was just a convenient excuse that had the distinct advantage of being genuinely applicable to the situation.
In my other reply I forgot to add the old saying: "The first casualty of war is the truth." The Iraqi freedom thing was propoganda BS but also a normal and expected part of war, just like Baghdad Bob insisting that the US is being slaughtered as A10's fly overhead and Fox News is broadcasting live from the palace, although I was confused by Baghdad Bob's persistence that late in the game. I was glued to the set hoping US soldiers would walk on camera while he was on the air.