Yep. Composting is wonderful. I've got a handy system right on my terrace. Drop me a line and I'll forward you a DBF (or tab-delimited file) of my links DB which contains, among other things, something like two hundred garden/green links and quite a few for composting. I'm working up to (probably) opensourcing the whole shebang but haven't gotten around to it yet. Anybody know a good overview of all the open source licences?
When MIT students internet enabled their soda machines in the early '90s it was an original idea.
No, it wasn't. Carnegie-Mellon students network-enabled *their* soda machines in the early eighties.
But your basic point is valid. Much puffery, little data. Rustin
It would be cool to see/. endorse a little friendly competition among readers to knock one of these together for the lowest cost, meeting minimum specifications, i.e. keeps food chilled or frozen, able to be called with minimal fuss. Cooks food.
Well, we sure as hell ain't slashdot but. .. I HEREBY ANNOUNCE THE REED AND WRIGHT NEW GEN APPLIANCE CONTEST!
This is a contest to build a combination refrigerator/oven that is remotely addressable, compact, and scriptable.
Submit entries to me, with specs, costs, pictures, explanation, and a one hundred word summary. Costs are judged on the basis of repeatability. "We happened to have a SubZero around so that was free" don't fly. Extra points for:
Using a heat exchanger to cool using outdoor air during winter time
Using readily available materials
Clarity and usability of instructions
High usable area/total area ratio
Energy efficiency
Providing a downloadable open source driver
Using readily available surplus parts, such as Palm OS or Newton PDAs
Using SMS or other low-bandwidth, high robustness signal means
Ease of cleaning
Ease of repair
Points will be deducted for:
Using Windows (duh!)
Excessive damage to the shell of the microwave
Requiring excessive complexity, let alone coding, by the user
Requiring hard to obtain tools
Pressure cooker, convection oven, and other heating system variants will be considered
Please put fridge contest in the subject line of your entry.
The winner will be featured on our site, have their proposal introduced to key environmental policymakers, and, if we can pull it off, get introductions to venture capitalists and/or possible manufacturing partners. The winner will also be helped, if they want, to either have the project open-sourced, or to create business plan to start making the things.
If we can swing it, there will also be a cash prize.
The deadline for entries is February 1st, 2004. Results will be announced on May 15th, 2004.
I'll put up a more detailed and final version by the end of the month in my journal and on Reedandwright.com. That will, *bleh!* probably be delayed by talking to *ech!* lawyers first as well as trying to track down co-sponsors and some prize money.
If coke started selling 12packs for $2.00 what would pepsi do?
Funny, I just bought two twelve packs of Coke yesterday for $4.99. Nobody looked all that freaked to me.
Capitalism is not some vast, all powerful rectifier of all things. The "invisible hand" is only one of many forces setting prices. After all, look at dear old M$.
Personally, I have been wondering this same thing for years and I've done no small bit of checking around, including talking with senior engineers at, in order, Radius (anybody else remember them?), Samsung, Panasonic, Apple, HP, and a few others (being in charge of purchasing for corporate departments has its perks) and none of them could ever give me a credible explanation for why this discrepancy should exist. After all, how many of us have dealt with the absurd phenomenon of a $1,500 laptop with a dead screen being told that a replacement screen would cost $1,100?
Something fishy is going on and if we still had a real FTC, I would wonder why they weren't investigating it.
Well, first of all, you posited a case where Another possibility is, we could be able to trade LAN admin skills for free rent, building-manager style. Apartment complexes might start building up their own hotspots and such, and they'll need someone to handle the tech support. Handymen at complexes get free rent, so does the super, why not the tech guy?
Hm. Handyman. Building Manager. If you really think that any position that can be compared to those will be free of luser bullshit then may I suggest an antidote.
"Can-do attitude?" If you really are so naive as to think that the right attitude is all that is needed to end up with a well architected system, then along with your ignorant, superior I Am A Real Geek, You Are A Mere Peon trash-talking, well, I'l take that as a big unambiguous "no" to my question. You clearly have no clue, let alone experience getting budget allocations, departmental approvals, and, hardest of all, the continuing support of people who see computers as magic boxes where anything that isn't what they want is YOUR FAULT.
"I erased my hard drive with Norton and now all my files are gone. Fix it."
"I installed unapproved, bootleg, security software, lost the manual, and forgot the password. Fix it."
"Somebody I don't like has a better computer then me. Fix it."
"We refused your budget allocations for five years running and now we can't use the current software or cool new web sites. Fix it. Oh, and don't spend any money or change any configurations or reduce any other existing capability to do it."
Silly?
Dime a dozen?
Arrogant and egotistical?
Fuck you and the government job you rode in on. I don't know quite how you turned a reasonable question asked with careful commentary on its sensitive nature into some penis measuring contest but, well, you clearly don't know shit about actual operations work, let alone operations management.
I ask you again, what experience do you have actually running a support department? How many users, let alone department heads have you ever had to report to re support? What is the largest organization or project supporting non-techies that you have ever been responsible for?
I don't want to hear about your filling in for a month or two once answering phone calls. Have you ever in your life been the senior person, the person at whose desk the buck stops, for any sort of operations? Any support of non-techies at all?
You actually think that your server would be some some sort of sanctum sanctorum? Whoever owned that building would most likely have keys, passwords, and overrides to everything you did. And when the owner chose a service provider whose bandwidth fell apart at key times you would get to kiss the ass of every influential tenant who felt like berating somebody. You actually think that, as an employee of the building, you could just give tenants "an information sheet" for wireless and then be free from blame when *they* fucked it up? Yeah, right.
Look, I don't know much about you as a programmer. You clearly don't know shit about me.[1] But you have made it mighty clear that you don't understand what a senior tech support job is. I made a point of specifying that I personally would not take that sort of job. Why you so emphatically are displaying a stick up your ass the size of the federal deficit doesn't even interest me very much.
You want to show me how wrong I am? Go for it, baby. There are plenty of buildings these days that include "digital services" in the rent. Find me people holding the sorts of jobs we're talking about and get *them* to agree that I'm building a strawman. Until then, well, when discussing a subject that's already been declared fraught, try not to get snippy with people who know far more then you do. Sometimes we bite back.
[1] I'll give you a big hint: there's a reason that I could take your exposed conduit proposal
Oh, without question, it has potential. But I have a rude question to ask. Have you ever run an IT department? Running infrastructure for non-techies reliably means, "You should put in X moronic thing. My fourteen year old nephew, who's really smart, saw it on television and he says that it's *much better* then what you're proposing."
How things *could* be bears only the most trivial resemblance to how they end up when every little budget item has to be approved by people who say that "the floppy on my hard drive must have a virus". I was making about the same amount that you were (>$60K) with great bennies and plenty of opportunity for advancement and I wouldn't go back to doing IT management without a commitment of $20K or more to be spent at my sole discretion per year and an assistant I would choose and train whose schedule was entirely mine to decide. Users are idiots. Or at least enough of them are to make a job like that look to me like the next closest thing to purgatory.
Another possibility is, we could be able to trade LAN admin skills for free rent, building-manager style. Apartment complexes might start building up their own hotspots and such, and they'll need someone to handle the tech support. Handymen at complexes get free rent, so does the super, why not the tech guy? So you spend some time keeping hackers out, and replacing broken cables, etc. Could be cool.
Funny you should mention that. I just finished rereading a cyberpunk novel where the main character makes her living doing just that for several years at an arts cooperative. Finding better printer drivers for the fabric printers, keeping out hackers, running the renderfarm. It's portrayed as a very comfy life with a deeply seamy underside (collecting obligatory data for the cops, living among but not of a community) in a way that rings true to me as a former tech support guy.
I agree. We should expect to see a lot more techs moving to less "business-y" jobs where they hold hands of clueless users in more widely spread aspects of their lives. This sounds likely. For most techs it may also be really miserable but better then leaving tech.
What do you think about the viability of programmers transitioning to less desktop computer/server work? Things like writing code to run automated sprinklers with AI tied into temperature and light sensors?
From where I stand, I'm seeing a huge market cropping up for all those devices with built-in intelligence that have been vaporware for years. The example above is something a horticulturalist would love to have, expecially if they could specify species and thereby what reflectance and temp data would esult on what water use. Other examples include sophisticated controllers for all those LED lighting systems just now in development, systems for salt water fish tanks, water treatment systems, vison/AI hybrids to watch animal behavior on farms, and the umpty-bazillion toys with mech/slectronics capabilities.
It looks to me like electronics to drive physical devices is about to experience a boom as big as or bigger than the dot-com boom. So I'm curious, how do you think C++ --> Labview --> White River looks?
I'm sitting here and remembering a conversation that I had a number of years back. Remember how I mentioned knowing the senior jobsite engineer for the restoration of the Statue of Liberty? Well, I was callow enough once to, in her presence, say something about building a permanent structure using stainless steel.
Now, she's a very dignified woman, so she didn't laugh in my face, much. But being Israeli and having known me since I was fourteen, she wasn't exactly respectful either.
Ya see, along with the statue, the same project also rebuilt the surrounding facilities and, of course, Ellis Island. And they had to spend quite a lot of time tearing out and replacing "stainless" steel that had been corroded by all those saltwater storms. She didn't exactly let me escape after a sentence or two either. So when I read somebody else making the same blithe, confident assumptions that I once did, well, that's not a mistake that I will ever make again.
It all comes down to good old high school chemistry. Remember how the different "stripes" on the periodic table correlate with different properties?[1] Iron is just a very happy go lucky element. It *likes* to bond. And even worse, it likes to two-time and then bond with something else.
Yes. That's right, folks. Iron is a slut.
So even when you get it into some great tight bond, well, tight is relative.
Think about the things that are found in nature. Elements do sometimes turn up in metallic form. In fact, as per this conversation, so do most classic building materials, in a general sense. Glass? Check. Wood? Of course. Thatch, mud, and so on? Yeah. But then you get to the metals. Now we all know that gold turns up in elemental form. Think of the forty-niners. And twisty little copper wads are not that rare. And, relevant to all of this, those hunks may well be older then civilization.
But there just isn't much history of iron or metallic iron compounds sitting out in the rain while the Babylonians were succeeded by the Romans were succeeded by the Europeans.[2]
Unattached iron is iron looking for a friend. And even iron with a friend is iron looking for a new friend. And oxygen will do just fine.
Now, as you had mentioned, there are a number of more specialized options. I *think* that you may have been thinking of Core-Ten steel when you talked about more high-end, corrosion-resistant options. And those certainly are better. And, like Core Ten, titanium and aluminum do indeed form a "shell" when subject to corrosion.
But part of what we're talking here is the great old game of engineering, how much does it cost to get what I want? There is a reason that engineers have been laughing about physicists and their spherical cows for decades. That old differnce between what is physically *possible* and what is likely.
Let's say that we find a very corrosion-resistant metal and we're comparing it to concrete. Then I have a simple question. With the practical exception of gold[3], everything is corroded by something. Including, of course, concrete. Well, I ask a simple question. How many gallons of reagent would it take to dissolve a two inch diameter hole in a typical concrete bunker?[4]
How many gallons for titanium?
If you really want to propose a house built, as one does with long-term use concrete, of fifteen solid inches of titantium, well, may the gods help you. But as for me, concrete is, *ahem* dirt cheap and even when things *do* go wrong, whomever is the current caretaker of the house should find it practical to repair the damage at reasonable cost.
Now, as I said above, I am not an engineer. Nor am I a physicist[5]. I don't even play one on T.V. But in my experience and from what I've looked at, I stick to my initial statement. In fact, I'll expand it. Iron compounds = BAD. Is this a universal statement? Well, look at what I said about the wood furniture in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. But I still say that anybody considering this should think about what bridge
Oh, certainly, each of the things that you mentioned make it better (In fact, I was talking about those coatings w/ bellus quies last night. Soft to touch but rip your skin off if you pull along it). But none of those techniques will make concrete, shall we say, archival.
Now, as it happens, I spent an hour in a cathedral today thinking about this topic (stuff like this is kinda on my mind) and looking at *truly* long-term solutions. Well, I've gotta admit that I spent part of this time looking at a five hundred year old piece of furniture and thinking that technically, according to my obsessive standards, this thing, made of *wood* for crying out loud, certainly cannot be considered entirely waterproof. And yet there it stands. Mocking me. But nonetheless, anything that adds steel to the interior of an object will eventually create weak spots in that object. You might be able to get something to one hundred and fifty years. But that's pretty paltry on the scale of the original question. Especially since you still have not addressed the temperature issues or the slight changes in tension as the concrete cures. And trust me folks, it takes a big hunk of concrete decades to finish curing.
Now, just in case there was any doubt at all, I am not an engineer. I'm certainly not a P.E. But I stand behind my statement. If you want concrete to last for centuries then do not add big hunks of metal to it. Not even small hunks. Leave it be.
Hey. It's cheating when the civil engineer in question is a/.er. Almost tempting the fates.
Hi, b.q. I wondered if you'ld see this entry. So, nothing to add?:-)
Rustin
Raised conduit will only look like a "cross between a prison cell and a boiler room" if you don't make an effort to make it otherwise.
Let's say that instead you put in an inch deep baseboard covering a two inch deep recessed channel. The baseboard, since it will be unusually visible, will be oak or other material chosen to look pretty and age well. A matched crown molding with tapered base fills it in. If a third horizontal is done in the form of a chair rail then there is plenty of room to run anything that we have reason to know to foresee.
Since many of the approaches mentioned here would work best with nine foot or taller ceilings, all of this should be nicely in proportion. If, as I suggest further down, window seats, shelving, and other such things are built in out of matching materials, then the room should actually look quite pretty.
A few things to keep in mind:
-All conduit should be attached with brass or other ornamental nuts and bolts. No nails, no hidden connections. This reduces the risk of some nitwit cutting into the baseboard or other conduit because they can't see that it was meant to be removable. Best case scenario would be to have a few small places in the house where vertical conduits have small glass windows so that people can see that stuff is running inside.
-Verticals could be made to look mock-tudor or some other style that typically has visible beams and supports.
-"Spiking" the inside of the surfacing with thin, long ceramic rods might be a good idea. This, again, is meant to reduce the odds of some ignorant future person just starting to slash away. Nothing like hitting industrial ceramic in what seems to be wood to get a person's attention.
- Color code the various types of things running through the conduit with lots of labels in more then one language.
I can't say that crazyphilman's approach is quite mine. But I can see the viability of it.
Steel reinforced concrete is not "far better" for long term use by any rational standpoint. It stretches, pulls, fractures from within. And that's if it is kept perfectly dry every single day that it exists.
But don't mind me. I was just discussing this exact subject with a civil engineer last night and framing that conversation around thoughts from ones I've had with authorities as varied as the senior job site engineer for rebuilding the Statue of Liberty and folks from the Millenium Clock Project at the MIT Media Lab.
Why, Diskworld, of course. You could google this, *or* Terry Pratchett, but why not search right here on/. for "Pratchett" and "Diskworld" with "Niven"? That'll setcha up jest fine.
Oh, most certainly. You take me back. Born in '66, myself.
I used to be really into video games back in the late seventies when Asteroids was considered very high tech.
There is just no way that the sort of arcades I went to could exist now. First of all, I went to ones on the edge of Times Square in New York City. Yeah, that Times Square. Pre-cleanup, with drug dealers and trannie hookers and all the stuff they've now made movies of. And I was a geeky little white boy waiting patiently (mostly) for my turn at whatever. Know what? I never once had a problem. Never had a quarter stolen or so much as a person jump me in line and get away with it.
Back in those days, hard though it must be for the youngun's to picture, video games were actually a little bit "gangsta". In sleazy neighborhoods, along whatever the local midway was, with the tough guys (and some girls) playing the harder pinball games and kids hanging out who were pretty much homeless and used arcades as a warm, relatively safe place to be indoors.
Around here video games were just a new form of pinball and pinball was a thing learned by people who spent their days in bars. A few steps down from pool because at least pool meant the bar was respectable enough to have room for a table. Pinball or Space Invaders would just be shoved in whatever corner they could fit it in. Or maybe they would get one of those fancy tables with a video game built in. Sit down with your drink, drop in a quarter and play Pong. Yeah, that's right. Pong.
I *loved* those games. But I also was there *because* I was a geeky white boy. Because there, of all places, I wasn't the "walking dictionary" or the person to push in the halls because I knew too many answers or didn't dress right.
I was just one more guy among the other guys, and as long as I was straight with them, they were straight with me. You could lean over the shoulder of a guy who was perhaps a few years from federal prison and comment on his Galaga technique or he might do the same with you. It was all cool.
Hang out at a place for a while and you were just you. They nodded at you at the counter in recognition when you came in to get your quarters, maybe slipped you an extra one or let you get away with being a bit short once in a while. It was a level of class ambiguity and allowed risk that seems as distant from how today's kids live at the Victorian Era.
Now, sure, I don't remember the name of a single person I used to exchange tips and comments with back in '78 or '79. And I'm sure that some of them are now dead and perhaps a few would even consider me mugging material if they were to see me in a dark alley some day. But it was still a wonderful and even important part of growing up for a lot of us. No higher frame rates or better motion capture will ever give back the old ways.
Think about it. For us, video games taught us socialization skills. Well, arcades, actually. How ironic. How hard, these days, to parse. Chuck E Cheese just ain't ever gonna provide the same sort of thing.
I'm glad that Terminator II and Lost Boys and War Games had the arcade scenes they did. It's not much, but at least it sealed for the record a tiny flavor of what that was like. Truth is, I think Pretty In Pink does a better job of capturing the wrong-side-of-the-tracks dynamic that underlaid it all.
*sigh*
Not much we can do to get that back, is there?
Maybe build more of those nickel arcades. Spread 'em around.
Very, very pretty.
I would have KILLED for one of those when I was fifteen.
*Please* say that you will make the top graphics plate swappable.
So, are you gonna sell these things or what?
Rustin
Ghettoization of Gaming Coverage & Ads
on
Lucky Wander Boy
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Ok, *now* I understand.
Yes. I agree. Pop culture has long since taken video games to heart, but the powers that be in Hollywood and the other centers of Big Media still don't get it.
Now, personally, I think that it's a generational thing. Oddly enough, given their core customers, media companies famously are run by guys (pretty much all guys) who are positively decrepit. And like Wall Street, the culture is so strong and pervasive that even if somebody isn't from that world, they ape its morés and behaviors to fit in.
Unitl the people running the studios and managing the papers/televison stations are of the generation that grew up with video games, and even for five or six years after that during the transitions in priorities and procedures, this will keep happening. If you look at magazine publishing, from GQ to TimeOut, they review video games just as they do movies, and have for years. So do pretty much all men's magazines (especially the "lad"-oriented ones), most of the hipper style magazines (Vice, not Vogue), as well as most nightlife guides.
Of course the weakness in this argument is that there is no reason that iD can't just write a check to ABC and have ads all over the screen by Monday morning. Why don't they? Dunno.
Me? I don't have a TV, stopped playing video games in the late eighties, and only keep an eye on this stuff as a media guy tracking buying and production.
When it comers to editorial policies, well, if you don't like the coverage, start your own news company.;-) But as for ads, bitch at iD or Blizzard, or Bungie, ILM, or these days the ever-newly-evil Micro$oft. They choose the ad pages. Until *they* decide to shift their media buys ain't nothin' doin.
Sure. This is yet another case of folks claiming a neglect or marginalization of gaming that just doesn't exist.
The truth is that post-Madonna, post-Reagan academia *loves* tropes like those in gaming, while as for transmission within pop culture itself, hmmm, how many early music videos used video game imagery? At least ten? Twenty?
How about movies? War Games anybody?
Well, moving on, lesse, clothing? Check. How many gen-Y kiddies bought their Atari or Pac Man t-shirts at Urban Outfitters who never even played Pac Man? Music? As you pointed out, songs about video games are just about a cliché.
I could go on but between us, I think the horse in not only dead but smushed into the sidewalk.
"Unseemly"? I would vote for clueless and self-involved but it's the same conclusion in either case.
There *used* to be a whole street of them along Canal, of which the kings were Canal Surplus, presided over by the friendly and way-overinformed Stan, and Space Metal.
Of the once mighty twenty or so, only Industrial Plastics, which isn't really surplus, is left. Down on Chambers ( few blocks south) there used to be Alexander's Hardware, largest, cheapest, and sometimes best of them all for mech gear.
Tell ya, though, I'm selling off everything I ever bought at those places this very month, from steppers to 1/4 horsepower to gears, to screws and bolts, to tiny Japanese demon faces. Anybody want to buy the stock of an entire prototyping lab cheap better contact me now. The drill press is already spoken for, as are the three milk crates of SCSI and monitor cables, the bags of glass tubes, the fine rod stock,...
Oh no, without doubt, you raise a valid point. Personally, my two favorite movies are Blade Runner, which completely warps beyond the book in ways that even the makers probably didn't intend, and Casablanca, where they were making it up as they went along.
As somebody who just had a rehearsal end in the next room two hours ago (actors! what a bunch of wierdos!), I have no doubt that moviemaking is far more unique a medium then we generally give it credit for. Our tendency to speak of movies as if they were made by three or four people and everybody else was an interchangable part just encourages that misunderstanding.
What makes it all even funnier is that authors aren't developing much credibility in understanding how to convert their own work. F. Scott Fitzgerald was eloquent on the subject decades ago and Anne Rice's statements about the disposable dreck made from her stuff show that not much has changed.
My counterexample, however, would be plays. Look at how many crisp, watchable movies have come from simple plays (A Few Good Men). Maybe we just need to get Sorkin to sit down and teach other people how to handle that transition.
Of course, part of the problem for blockbusters is that we're not allowed the leisure to watch the nonverbal stuff and figure it out for ourselves. Of all people, some of the actors from Friends are turning out to be good at that sort of thing . ..when we give them the uninterrupted screen time to do it. Look at Kudrow in The Opposite Of Sex. She does just fine. Look at Anniston do her perplexed-but-maintaining-her-dignity thing. Reaction shots aren't rocket science, but they do require a slower pacing then we allow these days. They also require audience attention to detail. Watch Temptation of A Monk and you'll see plenty of that sort of thing. Ironically, Chinese cinema, contrary to all of our old stereotypes of "inscrutible Chinese", is making a regular succession of movies that convey detailed thought just fine without dialogue, let alone Dune-style narration.
But then narration takes us back to Blade Runner as another nail in the coffin, so I'll leave it at that.
you mean you want elephants shooting guns?
As if movies always stick to an author's idea of an alien's appearance. Naw. I agree. The whole fun of the movie (mudbath brainstorms notwithstanding) is the launch and voyage of the Michael. Distant second would be the portrayal of the bad guy's ships and their culture.[1]
What I would *really* like to see is a movie version in which the sleazy "journalist" does indeed have the same career path he does in the book. No Hollywood studio would ever go along with Niven's version.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. Composting is wonderful. I've got a handy system right on my terrace.
Drop me a line and I'll forward you a DBF (or tab-delimited file) of my links DB which contains, among other things, something like two hundred garden/green links and quite a few for composting.
I'm working up to (probably) opensourcing the whole shebang but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Anybody know a good overview of all the open source licences?
Rustin
Tell us about that. Do you have any pictures?
When MIT students internet enabled their soda machines in the early '90s it was an original idea.
No, it wasn't. Carnegie-Mellon students network-enabled *their* soda machines in the early eighties.
But your basic point is valid. Much puffery, little data.
Rustin
Well, we sure as hell ain't slashdot but. .
I HEREBY ANNOUNCE THE REED AND WRIGHT NEW GEN APPLIANCE CONTEST!
This is a contest to build a combination refrigerator/oven that is remotely addressable, compact, and scriptable.
Submit entries to me, with specs, costs, pictures, explanation, and a one hundred word summary.
Costs are judged on the basis of repeatability. "We happened to have a SubZero around so that was free" don't fly.
Extra points for:
Using a heat exchanger to cool using outdoor air during winter time
Using readily available materials
Clarity and usability of instructions
High usable area/total area ratio
Energy efficiency
Providing a downloadable open source driver
Using readily available surplus parts, such as Palm OS or Newton PDAs
Using SMS or other low-bandwidth, high robustness signal means
Ease of cleaning
Ease of repair
Points will be deducted for:
Using Windows (duh!)
Excessive damage to the shell of the microwave
Requiring excessive complexity, let alone coding, by the user
Requiring hard to obtain tools
Pressure cooker, convection oven, and other heating system variants will be considered
Please put fridge contest in the subject line of your entry.
The winner will be featured on our site, have their proposal introduced to key environmental policymakers, and, if we can pull it off, get introductions to venture capitalists and/or possible manufacturing partners. The winner will also be helped, if they want, to either have the project open-sourced, or to create business plan to start making the things.
If we can swing it, there will also be a cash prize.
The deadline for entries is February 1st, 2004. Results will be announced on May 15th, 2004.
I'll put up a more detailed and final version by the end of the month in my journal and on Reedandwright.com. That will, *bleh!* probably be delayed by talking to *ech!* lawyers first as well as trying to track down co-sponsors and some prize money.
May the building begin!
Rustin
If coke started selling 12packs for $2.00 what would pepsi do?
Funny, I just bought two twelve packs of Coke yesterday for $4.99. Nobody looked all that freaked to me.
Capitalism is not some vast, all powerful rectifier of all things. The "invisible hand" is only one of many forces setting prices. After all, look at dear old M$.
Personally, I have been wondering this same thing for years and I've done no small bit of checking around, including talking with senior engineers at, in order, Radius (anybody else remember them?), Samsung, Panasonic, Apple, HP, and a few others (being in charge of purchasing for corporate departments has its perks) and none of them could ever give me a credible explanation for why this discrepancy should exist.
After all, how many of us have dealt with the absurd phenomenon of a $1,500 laptop with a dead screen being told that a replacement screen would cost $1,100?
Something fishy is going on and if we still had a real FTC, I would wonder why they weren't investigating it.
Rustin
LOL.
...." last line is the one that brings it home.
.
The "Oh,
Oh, the pain, the laughter, the laughter about the pain . .
Rustin
My. Testy, aren't we?
Well, first of all, you posited a case where Another possibility is, we could be able to trade LAN admin skills for free rent, building-manager style. Apartment complexes might start building up their own hotspots and such, and they'll need someone to handle the tech support. Handymen at complexes get free rent, so does the super, why not the tech guy?
Hm. Handyman. Building Manager. If you really think that any position that can be compared to those will be free of luser bullshit then may I suggest an antidote.
"Can-do attitude?" If you really are so naive as to think that the right attitude is all that is needed to end up with a well architected system, then along with your ignorant, superior I Am A Real Geek, You Are A Mere Peon trash-talking, well, I'l take that as a big unambiguous "no" to my question. You clearly have no clue, let alone experience getting budget allocations, departmental approvals, and, hardest of all, the continuing support of people who see computers as magic boxes where anything that isn't what they want is YOUR FAULT.
"I erased my hard drive with Norton and now all my files are gone. Fix it."
"I installed unapproved, bootleg, security software, lost the manual, and forgot the password. Fix it."
"Somebody I don't like has a better computer then me. Fix it."
"We refused your budget allocations for five years running and now we can't use the current software or cool new web sites. Fix it. Oh, and don't spend any money or change any configurations or reduce any other existing capability to do it."
Silly?
Dime a dozen?
Arrogant and egotistical?
Fuck you and the government job you rode in on. I don't know quite how you turned a reasonable question asked with careful commentary on its sensitive nature into some penis measuring contest but, well, you clearly don't know shit about actual operations work, let alone operations management.
I ask you again, what experience do you have actually running a support department? How many users, let alone department heads have you ever had to report to re support? What is the largest organization or project supporting non-techies that you have ever been responsible for?
I don't want to hear about your filling in for a month or two once answering phone calls. Have you ever in your life been the senior person, the person at whose desk the buck stops, for any sort of operations? Any support of non-techies at all?
You actually think that your server would be some some sort of sanctum sanctorum? Whoever owned that building would most likely have keys, passwords, and overrides to everything you did. And when the owner chose a service provider whose bandwidth fell apart at key times you would get to kiss the ass of every influential tenant who felt like berating somebody.
You actually think that, as an employee of the building, you could just give tenants "an information sheet" for wireless and then be free from blame when *they* fucked it up? Yeah, right.
Look, I don't know much about you as a programmer. You clearly don't know shit about me.[1] But you have made it mighty clear that you don't understand what a senior tech support job is. I made a point of specifying that I personally would not take that sort of job. Why you so emphatically are displaying a stick up your ass the size of the federal deficit doesn't even interest me very much.
You want to show me how wrong I am? Go for it, baby. There are plenty of buildings these days that include "digital services" in the rent. Find me people holding the sorts of jobs we're talking about and get *them* to agree that I'm building a strawman. Until then, well, when discussing a subject that's already been declared fraught, try not to get snippy with people who know far more then you do. Sometimes we bite back.
[1] I'll give you a big hint: there's a reason that I could take your exposed conduit proposal
Oh, without question, it has potential. But I have a rude question to ask. Have you ever run an IT department? Running infrastructure for non-techies reliably means, "You should put in X moronic thing. My fourteen year old nephew, who's really smart, saw it on television and he says that it's *much better* then what you're proposing."
How things *could* be bears only the most trivial resemblance to how they end up when every little budget item has to be approved by people who say that "the floppy on my hard drive must have a virus".
I was making about the same amount that you were (>$60K) with great bennies and plenty of opportunity for advancement and I wouldn't go back to doing IT management without a commitment of $20K or more to be spent at my sole discretion per year and an assistant I would choose and train whose schedule was entirely mine to decide. Users are idiots. Or at least enough of them are to make a job like that look to me like the next closest thing to purgatory.
Rustin
Another possibility is, we could be able to trade LAN admin skills for free rent, building-manager style. Apartment complexes might start building up their own hotspots and such, and they'll need someone to handle the tech support. Handymen at complexes get free rent, so does the super, why not the tech guy? So you spend some time keeping hackers out, and replacing broken cables, etc. Could be cool.
Funny you should mention that. I just finished rereading a cyberpunk novel where the main character makes her living doing just that for several years at an arts cooperative. Finding better printer drivers for the fabric printers, keeping out hackers, running the renderfarm. It's portrayed as a very comfy life with a deeply seamy underside (collecting obligatory data for the cops, living among but not of a community) in a way that rings true to me as a former tech support guy.
I agree. We should expect to see a lot more techs moving to less "business-y" jobs where they hold hands of clueless users in more widely spread aspects of their lives. This sounds likely. For most techs it may also be really miserable but better then leaving tech.
Well, I guess that we'll start seeing it soon.
Rustin
What do you think about the viability of programmers transitioning to less desktop computer/server work? Things like writing code to run automated sprinklers with AI tied into temperature and light sensors?
From where I stand, I'm seeing a huge market cropping up for all those devices with built-in intelligence that have been vaporware for years. The example above is something a horticulturalist would love to have, expecially if they could specify species and thereby what reflectance and temp data would esult on what water use. Other examples include sophisticated controllers for all those LED lighting systems just now in development, systems for salt water fish tanks, water treatment systems, vison/AI hybrids to watch animal behavior on farms, and the umpty-bazillion toys with mech/slectronics capabilities.
It looks to me like electronics to drive physical devices is about to experience a boom as big as or bigger than the dot-com boom. So I'm curious, how do you think C++ --> Labview --> White River looks?
Rustin
I'm sitting here and remembering a conversation that I had a number of years back. Remember how I mentioned knowing the senior jobsite engineer for the restoration of the Statue of Liberty? Well, I was callow enough once to, in her presence, say something about building a permanent structure using stainless steel.
Now, she's a very dignified woman, so she didn't laugh in my face, much. But being Israeli and having known me since I was fourteen, she wasn't exactly respectful either.
Ya see, along with the statue, the same project also rebuilt the surrounding facilities and, of course, Ellis Island. And they had to spend quite a lot of time tearing out and replacing "stainless" steel that had been corroded by all those saltwater storms. She didn't exactly let me escape after a sentence or two either. So when I read somebody else making the same blithe, confident assumptions that I once did, well, that's not a mistake that I will ever make again.
It all comes down to good old high school chemistry. Remember how the different "stripes" on the periodic table correlate with different properties?[1] Iron is just a very happy go lucky element. It *likes* to bond. And even worse, it likes to two-time and then bond with something else.
Yes. That's right, folks. Iron is a slut.
So even when you get it into some great tight bond, well, tight is relative.
Think about the things that are found in nature. Elements do sometimes turn up in metallic form. In fact, as per this conversation, so do most classic building materials, in a general sense. Glass? Check. Wood? Of course. Thatch, mud, and so on? Yeah.
But then you get to the metals. Now we all know that gold turns up in elemental form. Think of the forty-niners. And twisty little copper wads are not that rare. And, relevant to all of this, those hunks may well be older then civilization.
But there just isn't much history of iron or metallic iron compounds sitting out in the rain while the Babylonians were succeeded by the Romans were succeeded by the Europeans.[2]
Unattached iron is iron looking for a friend. And even iron with a friend is iron looking for a new friend. And oxygen will do just fine.
Now, as you had mentioned, there are a number of more specialized options. I *think* that you may have been thinking of Core-Ten steel when you talked about more high-end, corrosion-resistant options. And those certainly are better. And, like Core Ten, titanium and aluminum do indeed form a "shell" when subject to corrosion.
But part of what we're talking here is the great old game of engineering, how much does it cost to get what I want? There is a reason that engineers have been laughing about physicists and their spherical cows for decades. That old differnce between what is physically *possible* and what is likely.
Let's say that we find a very corrosion-resistant metal and we're comparing it to concrete. Then I have a simple question. With the practical exception of gold[3], everything is corroded by something. Including, of course, concrete. Well, I ask a simple question. How many gallons of reagent would it take to dissolve a two inch diameter hole in a typical concrete bunker?[4]
How many gallons for titanium?
If you really want to propose a house built, as one does with long-term use concrete, of fifteen solid inches of titantium, well, may the gods help you. But as for me, concrete is, *ahem* dirt cheap and even when things *do* go wrong, whomever is the current caretaker of the house should find it practical to repair the damage at reasonable cost.
Now, as I said above, I am not an engineer. Nor am I a physicist[5]. I don't even play one on T.V. But in my experience and from what I've looked at, I stick to my initial statement. In fact, I'll expand it. Iron compounds = BAD. Is this a universal statement? Well, look at what I said about the wood furniture in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. But I still say that anybody considering this should think about what bridge
Oops. My bad.
Sorry.
But I still think that, given the comments in the Niven interview, that such a richly slashottian (?) perspective deserves first dibs.
Rustin
Oh, certainly, each of the things that you mentioned make it better (In fact, I was talking about those coatings w/ bellus quies last night. Soft to touch but rip your skin off if you pull along it).
But none of those techniques will make concrete, shall we say, archival.
Now, as it happens, I spent an hour in a cathedral today thinking about this topic (stuff like this is kinda on my mind) and looking at *truly* long-term solutions. Well, I've gotta admit that I spent part of this time looking at a five hundred year old piece of furniture and thinking that technically, according to my obsessive standards, this thing, made of *wood* for crying out loud, certainly cannot be considered entirely waterproof. And yet there it stands. Mocking me.
But nonetheless, anything that adds steel to the interior of an object will eventually create weak spots in that object. You might be able to get something to one hundred and fifty years. But that's pretty paltry on the scale of the original question. Especially since you still have not addressed the temperature issues or the slight changes in tension as the concrete cures. And trust me folks, it takes a big hunk of concrete decades to finish curing.
Now, just in case there was any doubt at all, I am not an engineer. I'm certainly not a P.E. But I stand behind my statement. If you want concrete to last for centuries then do not add big hunks of metal to it. Not even small hunks. Leave it be.
btw tex, nice switch you did in the subject line.
Rustin
Hey. It's cheating when the civil engineer in question is a /.er. Almost tempting the fates.
Hi, b.q. I wondered if you'ld see this entry. So, nothing to add?:-)
Rustin
Raised conduit will only look like a "cross between a prison cell and a boiler room" if you don't make an effort to make it otherwise.
Let's say that instead you put in an inch deep baseboard covering a two inch deep recessed channel. The baseboard, since it will be unusually visible, will be oak or other material chosen to look pretty and age well. A matched crown molding with tapered base fills it in. If a third horizontal is done in the form of a chair rail then there is plenty of room to run anything that we have reason to know to foresee.
Since many of the approaches mentioned here would work best with nine foot or taller ceilings, all of this should be nicely in proportion. If, as I suggest further down, window seats, shelving, and other such things are built in out of matching materials, then the room should actually look quite pretty.
A few things to keep in mind:
-All conduit should be attached with brass or other ornamental nuts and bolts. No nails, no hidden connections. This reduces the risk of some nitwit cutting into the baseboard or other conduit because they can't see that it was meant to be removable. Best case scenario would be to have a few small places in the house where vertical conduits have small glass windows so that people can see that stuff is running inside.
-Verticals could be made to look mock-tudor or some other style that typically has visible beams and supports.
-"Spiking" the inside of the surfacing with thin, long ceramic rods might be a good idea. This, again, is meant to reduce the odds of some ignorant future person just starting to slash away. Nothing like hitting industrial ceramic in what seems to be wood to get a person's attention.
- Color code the various types of things running through the conduit with lots of labels in more then one language.
I can't say that crazyphilman's approach is quite mine. But I can see the viability of it.
Rustin
Steel reinforced concrete is not "far better" for long term use by any rational standpoint. It stretches, pulls, fractures from within. And that's if it is kept perfectly dry every single day that it exists.
But don't mind me. I was just discussing this exact subject with a civil engineer last night and framing that conversation around thoughts from ones I've had with authorities as varied as the senior job site engineer for rebuilding the Statue of Liberty and folks from the Millenium Clock Project at the MIT Media Lab.
Rustin
Why, Diskworld, of course. You could google this, *or* Terry Pratchett, but why not search right here on /. for "Pratchett" and "Diskworld" with "Niven"? That'll setcha up jest fine.
Rustin
Oh, most certainly. You take me back. Born in '66, myself.
I used to be really into video games back in the late seventies when Asteroids was considered very high tech.
There is just no way that the sort of arcades I went to could exist now. First of all, I went to ones on the edge of Times Square in New York City. Yeah, that Times Square. Pre-cleanup, with drug dealers and trannie hookers and all the stuff they've now made movies of. And I was a geeky little white boy waiting patiently (mostly) for my turn at whatever.
Know what? I never once had a problem. Never had a quarter stolen or so much as a person jump me in line and get away with it.
Back in those days, hard though it must be for the youngun's to picture, video games were actually a little bit "gangsta". In sleazy neighborhoods, along whatever the local midway was, with the tough guys (and some girls) playing the harder pinball games and kids hanging out who were pretty much homeless and used arcades as a warm, relatively safe place to be indoors.
Around here video games were just a new form of pinball and pinball was a thing learned by people who spent their days in bars. A few steps down from pool because at least pool meant the bar was respectable enough to have room for a table. Pinball or Space Invaders would just be shoved in whatever corner they could fit it in. Or maybe they would get one of those fancy tables with a video game built in. Sit down with your drink, drop in a quarter and play Pong. Yeah, that's right. Pong.
I *loved* those games. But I also was there *because* I was a geeky white boy. Because there, of all places, I wasn't the "walking dictionary" or the person to push in the halls because I knew too many answers or didn't dress right.
I was just one more guy among the other guys, and as long as I was straight with them, they were straight with me. You could lean over the shoulder of a guy who was perhaps a few years from federal prison and comment on his Galaga technique or he might do the same with you. It was all cool.
Hang out at a place for a while and you were just you. They nodded at you at the counter in recognition when you came in to get your quarters, maybe slipped you an extra one or let you get away with being a bit short once in a while. It was a level of class ambiguity and allowed risk that seems as distant from how today's kids live at the Victorian Era.
Now, sure, I don't remember the name of a single person I used to exchange tips and comments with back in '78 or '79. And I'm sure that some of them are now dead and perhaps a few would even consider me mugging material if they were to see me in a dark alley some day. But it was still a wonderful and even important part of growing up for a lot of us. No higher frame rates or better motion capture will ever give back the old ways.
Think about it. For us, video games taught us socialization skills. Well, arcades, actually. How ironic. How hard, these days, to parse. Chuck E Cheese just ain't ever gonna provide the same sort of thing.
I'm glad that Terminator II and Lost Boys and War Games had the arcade scenes they did. It's not much, but at least it sealed for the record a tiny flavor of what that was like. Truth is, I think Pretty In Pink does a better job of capturing the wrong-side-of-the-tracks dynamic that underlaid it all.
*sigh*
Not much we can do to get that back, is there?
Maybe build more of those nickel arcades.
Spread 'em around.
Guess we'll all do what we can.
Rustin
Well, that decides it then. I'm moving to Ohio.
Findlay, you say? Where is that exactly?
Rustin
Very, very pretty.
I would have KILLED for one of those when I was fifteen.
*Please* say that you will make the top graphics plate swappable.
So, are you gonna sell these things or what?
Rustin
Ok, *now* I understand.
Yes. I agree. Pop culture has long since taken video games to heart, but the powers that be in Hollywood and the other centers of Big Media still don't get it.
Now, personally, I think that it's a generational thing. Oddly enough, given their core customers, media companies famously are run by guys (pretty much all guys) who are positively decrepit. And like Wall Street, the culture is so strong and pervasive that even if somebody isn't from that world, they ape its morés and behaviors to fit in.
Unitl the people running the studios and managing the papers/televison stations are of the generation that grew up with video games, and even for five or six years after that during the transitions in priorities and procedures, this will keep happening. If you look at magazine publishing, from GQ to TimeOut, they review video games just as they do movies, and have for years. So do pretty much all men's magazines (especially the "lad"-oriented ones), most of the hipper style magazines (Vice, not Vogue), as well as most nightlife guides.
Of course the weakness in this argument is that there is no reason that iD can't just write a check to ABC and have ads all over the screen by Monday morning. Why don't they? Dunno.
Me? I don't have a TV, stopped playing video games in the late eighties, and only keep an eye on this stuff as a media guy tracking buying and production.
When it comers to editorial policies, well, if you don't like the coverage, start your own news company.;-) But as for ads, bitch at iD or Blizzard, or Bungie, ILM, or these days the ever-newly-evil Micro$oft. They choose the ad pages. Until *they* decide to shift their media buys ain't nothin' doin.
Rustin
Sure. This is yet another case of folks claiming a neglect or marginalization of gaming that just doesn't exist.
The truth is that post-Madonna, post-Reagan academia *loves* tropes like those in gaming, while as for transmission within pop culture itself, hmmm, how many early music videos used video game imagery? At least ten? Twenty?
How about movies? War Games anybody?
Well, moving on, lesse, clothing? Check. How many gen-Y kiddies bought their Atari or Pac Man t-shirts at Urban Outfitters who never even played Pac Man?
Music? As you pointed out, songs about video games are just about a cliché.
I could go on but between us, I think the horse in not only dead but smushed into the sidewalk.
"Unseemly"? I would vote for clueless and self-involved but it's the same conclusion in either case.
Rustin
There *used* to be a whole street of them along Canal, of which the kings were Canal Surplus, presided over by the friendly and way-overinformed Stan, and Space Metal. ...
Of the once mighty twenty or so, only Industrial Plastics, which isn't really surplus, is left. Down on Chambers ( few blocks south) there used to be Alexander's Hardware, largest, cheapest, and sometimes best of them all for mech gear.
Tell ya, though, I'm selling off everything I ever bought at those places this very month, from steppers to 1/4 horsepower to gears, to screws and bolts, to tiny Japanese demon faces. Anybody want to buy the stock of an entire prototyping lab cheap better contact me now. The drill press is already spoken for, as are the three milk crates of SCSI and monitor cables, the bags of glass tubes, the fine rod stock,
The times, they are a changin.
Rustin
Oh no, without doubt, you raise a valid point. Personally, my two favorite movies are Blade Runner, which completely warps beyond the book in ways that even the makers probably didn't intend, and Casablanca, where they were making it up as they went along.
.when we give them the uninterrupted screen time to do it. Look at Kudrow in The Opposite Of Sex. She does just fine. Look at Anniston do her perplexed-but-maintaining-her-dignity thing.
As somebody who just had a rehearsal end in the next room two hours ago (actors! what a bunch of wierdos!), I have no doubt that moviemaking is far more unique a medium then we generally give it credit for. Our tendency to speak of movies as if they were made by three or four people and everybody else was an interchangable part just encourages that misunderstanding.
What makes it all even funnier is that authors aren't developing much credibility in understanding how to convert their own work. F. Scott Fitzgerald was eloquent on the subject decades ago and Anne Rice's statements about the disposable dreck made from her stuff show that not much has changed.
My counterexample, however, would be plays. Look at how many crisp, watchable movies have come from simple plays (A Few Good Men). Maybe we just need to get Sorkin to sit down and teach other people how to handle that transition.
Of course, part of the problem for blockbusters is that we're not allowed the leisure to watch the nonverbal stuff and figure it out for ourselves. Of all people, some of the actors from Friends are turning out to be good at that sort of thing . .
Reaction shots aren't rocket science, but they do require a slower pacing then we allow these days. They also require audience attention to detail. Watch Temptation of A Monk and you'll see plenty of that sort of thing. Ironically, Chinese cinema, contrary to all of our old stereotypes of "inscrutible Chinese", is making a regular succession of movies that convey detailed thought just fine without dialogue, let alone Dune-style narration.
But then narration takes us back to Blade Runner as another nail in the coffin, so I'll leave it at that.
Rustin
you mean you want elephants shooting guns?
As if movies always stick to an author's idea of an alien's appearance.
Naw. I agree. The whole fun of the movie (mudbath brainstorms notwithstanding) is the launch and voyage of the Michael. Distant second would be the portrayal of the bad guy's ships and their culture.[1]
What I would *really* like to see is a movie version in which the sleazy "journalist" does indeed have the same career path he does in the book. No Hollywood studio would ever go along with Niven's version.
Rustin
[1] second time today on that subject.