That idiot ruined "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" so badly he should be banned from ever doing broadcast TV or movie science fiction ever again.
Companies expecting to do mission critical work over the Net need dedicated lines, dedicated machines, and somebody from THEIR company overseeing the system.
Relying on other people is a sure route to disaster. It's hard enough relying on your OWN people.
The Net is NOT fault-tolerant - unless YOU make it so.
That's YOUR job to figure out, not mine. I got my own business model to figure out.
But I can tell you the future for publishing in any form - music, movies, TV - is one where free copies of everything are everywhere. And there's nothing you or anyone else can do about that except adapt.
To expand: My collection is mostly for reference, although I do have a few fiction ebooks. Since I don't own an ebook reader, most of the fiction is either in text or HTML or PDF format, since I can't read or translate into another format a lot of the ebook reader formats (although I have software to translate a couple.)
As a computer tech, I need a reference library of books on hardware, applications, database, networking, Web design, etc. This would cost me probably $40 each on average. At my income, building a reference library at that rate would take years and the stuff would be obsolete before I got it. Of course, a lot of info can be quickly looked up on Google, but sometimes you need more in-depth coverage of a topic.
As for college textbooks, the last time I was in college, some of those damn books cost over $100. For a Windows Server 2003 textbook!
Back in the '70's, when I was in college at that time, I had a friend who owned one of those big gray microfilm cameras you used to see in libraries. I would buy my textbooks from the college store, give them to him to microfilm, get back some sheets of microfilm, then sell the textbooks back to the college store. I had a small handheld microfilm reader which cost about $70 at the time to read the microfilm. But I would get odd looks from teachers when they tell the class to open their books, and I whipped out a sheet of plastic and what looked like a small microscope!
Yes, publishers will eventually go the way of the movie and music industries - as in out of business. Authors will write and put their stuff up for online delivery on the Net. Ways will be found to monetize that so they can make a living. Even if they don't, they will still publish, and make their money in other ways. Fiction isn't going away from human endeavor - until humans go away, which basically will be by the end of this century anyway, so who cares? The same applies to every other industry based on intellectual property. Intellectual property is an oxymoron and will be made obsolete by technology, like it or not.
In other words, like most IT organizations, they have recovery backups and archival backups.
Which, however, doesn't explain the panic when all of Echo's backups were destroyed. If they had archivals, they wouldn't care.
So they really didn't have offsite backup - which is really stupid. Especially since they have twenty Dollhouses all over the world and the easy solution would be for each Dollhouse to hold backups of one or more of the other Dollhouses.
Not that it matters now - the show has such bad ratings that it has zero chance of being renewed for a second season. Bye-bye all those hot girls every week! Too bad.
Go to Usenet, get just about everything you could want. Build up a personal library of hundreds of texts that would match a (small town) library.
The book publishing industry will go the way of the music and movie industries, just a bit slower since reading text on a monitor is still not quite as easy as a real book.
This reminds me of the scene in the current "Crank 2 - High Voltage" movie where the action stops at one point and we're treated to a replay of a video of Chev Chelios as a young boy being brought on a TV show because he's such a rotter even at that age.
The Chinese have a new broadband connection technology that allows them to download "terabytes" of data - while the brilliant Pentagon cybersecurity sleuths don't notice ANY spike in bandwidth!
Right.
When is that technology coming to the States, please?
We see on the TV shows FBI agents looking up all sorts of crap on their computers that even Google couldn't find, whereas in reality these idiots barely even have a filing system, let alone any kind of sensible database.
They can't even find files actually stored in their branch offices! DUH! Most corporations would go out of business if they couldn't do that!
And this is what, after several multi-hundred million dollar attempts to upgrade their management information systems?
Your tax dollars at work.
That, and the fact that most of the time the FBI really doesn't want to release any information for their own reasons.
Considering the wide range they cover on that show, you're basically telling me that YOU KNOW without a doubt that absolutely nothing they discuss has anything whatever to do with science because your expertise covers as wide a range as Walter Bishop's.
Right.
I'll just toss that right in the bit bucket, thank you.
apparently don't realize that it has at times hit sixteen million viewers and is very like to get a season two.
And the morons here who don't know what the word "fringe" means and are expecting hard science in every episode - well, you're morons.
The characters are likable - in fact, Anna Torv is the nicest FBI agent I've ever seen, she makes Scully look like "Dr.Evil" - and that really is unrealistic, since real FBI agents are invariably assholes - the episode plots are complicated and interesting, and the overall story arc is moving very nicely in each episode, especially in the last several episodes. The writing and dialog are actually pretty good. I can fully understand why the show is a success. It's a glitzier version of the "X-Files" and fills that void nicely. Compared to the last "X-Files" film which sucked big time, it's far better.
Dollhouse is a harder call. The first four episodes have moved quickly to lay the groundwork for future interesting reveals. They've also seriously overemphasized half-naked females. Not that half naked females bother me, but it seems that either Joss or Fox apparently felt they needed to hook the nerds early. Since Eliza Dushku said that Fox messed with the first six episodes, I guess we should blame Fox for overemphasizing the "stroke" aspects of the show. The episodes have been uneven in quality so far, but the last episode was good, and most of them have some good points.
Terminator is a disaster as my earlier post indicated. That show is doomed, unless the Sci-Fi Channel picks it up. Rumor is Warner Brothers wants to sell the show for cheap to keep it on the air, presumably to drum up interest in the new T-4 movie. And rumor has it that the Sci-Fi Channel is interested, as long as the ratings don't collapse any further. So we'll see.
The smart thing would be for the Sci-Fi Channel to buy the show and then dump Josh Friedman as the showrunner.
As for DVRs, go look at the TV By The Numbers Web site. DVRs DO NOT COUNT! The networks know that no more than 40% of the DVR viewers watch ads and therefore they can't sell their advertisers shows with good DVR numbers. They need LIVE viewers. While this is unfortunate given how many people use DVRs, Hulu, downloads, etc., these days, the Neilsen ratings of live viewers are the only system the networks have to measure show value to the advertisers. Therefore if you DVR your favorite show, you are CANCELING YOUR FAVORITE SHOW! We may not like that, but that's how it works.
Also, in the case of Terminator, if you are a "fanboy" and always applaud what the idiot showrunners are doing on your show, no matter how much the ratings drop and the wider audience is dumping your favorite show, YOU are killing your favorite show again. You have to be critical and pressure the showrunners to change the show if it's not working.
Producers of shows are not paid to produce shows that please the fans, honor the franchise, or write "cool", arty scripts. They're paid to produce a show that stays on the air and produces ad revenue for the network for as long as it does stay on the air. All those other things I mentioned are how you GET to stay on the air. They are not the goal. Producers like Josh Friedman who forget that end up getting canceled and their reputations damaged.
So if you like a show, watch it live (which I can't because I don't have a TV, I have to download) and be critical and vocal about where the show is going wrong if it is.
You haven't missed any "key episodes" of Terminator.
There have BEEN NO "key episodes" of Terminator except last week when Cameron put a bomb in her head and gave John the kill switch - thus setting up the last five episodes to totally suck as Josh Friedman fucks with the character even more than he has all season.
I personally asked Summer Glau at WonderCon a week ago Sunday whether she liked where Cameron ends up at season's end. After speaking mostly to Josh who was sitting next to her, babbling her usual stock answer about having "mixed feelings", her shoulders slumped and she turned back to me and said "I don't know" - then made a "happy face" with her hands which spoke volumes.
Josh has screwed up every character on that show with the possible exceptions of Catherine Weaver (since he likes Shirley Manson, and as a first time actress, he can't pressure her too much in the role) and Cromartie. And there's no sign that it's going to get better in the last five episodes.
This week everybody blames Cameron for killing Riley - when it should be obvious that something else is going on that they need to investigate. Thus damaging the characters once again by implying that they're all idiots. This sort of crap has been going on all season.
The show is great in terms of writing, acting, directing, effects, etc. - just about everything - except VISION. Josh's wallowing in "Crazy Sarah's" psychology is what doomed the show, not the night it's on.
I saw Summer Glau in person at WonderCon a week ago.
Trust me - you're wrong.
And everybody who has ever met her has said that, too. It's not even so much her looks - she really isn't the best looking woman on TV. It's just who she IS as a person. The litany of positive adjectives just goes on and on.
TSCC is my favorite show of the four I watch at all - although "Leverage" on TNT is a close number two.
The problem with Terminator can be summed up with two words: Josh Friedman.
Friedman took the Terminator franchise - a set of sci-fi action movies with high action and special effects content - and turned into a slow-moving glacier of psychoanalysis and family drama.
This is NOT the Terminator anybody knows from the movies. And the comments on all the TV blogs say so.
Season one started out pretty well, with nine episodes cut short by the writer's strike. But the pace was fairly good, the hints dropped of future reveals very interesting, the character exploration was excellent, the writing was generally excellent, the acting was excellent, everything was good.
Then Josh threw it all away in season two.
He went overboard on wallowing in Sarah Connor's psychology, turning a smart, capable super-heroine into a hallucinating, sullen, paranoid nutcase. He turned the smart, edgy Edward Furlong John Connor and turned him into a sullen, withdrawn, bratty, emo boy. He turned the hottest female Terminator ever created into a permanently defective pit bull and comic relief and then sidelined her on top of it.
The audience left in droves.
It had nothing to do with being put on Mondays against Monday Night Football and Dancing With The Stars. Fox put it there BECAUSE it was TERMINATOR! The one show virtually guaranteed a chance to survive on Monday nights - until Josh got through with it. Moving it to Fridays and pairing it with Dollhouse was a last ditch effort by Fox to try to save the show - and it crashed horribly. The first three episodes of the supposedly "better" "back nine" dragged interminably through more "Crazy Sarah" antics.
Only in last week's episode did the story arc begin to move forward again - and how? The Terminator is now considered to be permanently defective, so much so that it puts a BOMB IN ITS OWN HEAD and gives John Connor the "kill trigger"!
Why not just shoot all the characters and be done with it?
The ratings at this point are a disaster. TV By the Numbers Web site predicts cogently that the show cannot and will not be picked up for a third season. And the odds of it moving to the Sci-Fi Channel depend on it not falling much more from the point it's at now.
Next is Release Candidate - ONE - then Release To Manufacturing.
Which means just as I feared, Windows 7 is going to be rushed to market by Christmas with INADEQUATE TESTING - a known Microsoft problem - just like Vista and XP were.
No, folks, your pain has not yet ended.
When I read the initial reviews of Windows 7, I thought MAYBE Microsoft wasn't going to fuck this one up beyond all recognition like they did Vista.
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Emma Watson?
OK.
Eat Your Spinach Guillotines.
You have thirty seconds to finish your serving of spinach before the guillotine drops.
That idiot ruined "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" so badly he should be banned from ever doing broadcast TV or movie science fiction ever again.
Companies expecting to do mission critical work over the Net need dedicated lines, dedicated machines, and somebody from THEIR company overseeing the system.
Relying on other people is a sure route to disaster. It's hard enough relying on your OWN people.
The Net is NOT fault-tolerant - unless YOU make it so.
What model would that be?
That's YOUR job to figure out, not mine. I got my own business model to figure out.
But I can tell you the future for publishing in any form - music, movies, TV - is one where free copies of everything are everywhere. And there's nothing you or anyone else can do about that except adapt.
To expand: My collection is mostly for reference, although I do have a few fiction ebooks. Since I don't own an ebook reader, most of the fiction is either in text or HTML or PDF format, since I can't read or translate into another format a lot of the ebook reader formats (although I have software to translate a couple.)
As a computer tech, I need a reference library of books on hardware, applications, database, networking, Web design, etc. This would cost me probably $40 each on average. At my income, building a reference library at that rate would take years and the stuff would be obsolete before I got it. Of course, a lot of info can be quickly looked up on Google, but sometimes you need more in-depth coverage of a topic.
As for college textbooks, the last time I was in college, some of those damn books cost over $100. For a Windows Server 2003 textbook!
Back in the '70's, when I was in college at that time, I had a friend who owned one of those big gray microfilm cameras you used to see in libraries. I would buy my textbooks from the college store, give them to him to microfilm, get back some sheets of microfilm, then sell the textbooks back to the college store. I had a small handheld microfilm reader which cost about $70 at the time to read the microfilm. But I would get odd looks from teachers when they tell the class to open their books, and I whipped out a sheet of plastic and what looked like a small microscope!
Yes, publishers will eventually go the way of the movie and music industries - as in out of business. Authors will write and put their stuff up for online delivery on the Net. Ways will be found to monetize that so they can make a living. Even if they don't, they will still publish, and make their money in other ways. Fiction isn't going away from human endeavor - until humans go away, which basically will be by the end of this century anyway, so who cares? The same applies to every other industry based on intellectual property. Intellectual property is an oxymoron and will be made obsolete by technology, like it or not.
In other words, like most IT organizations, they have recovery backups and archival backups.
Which, however, doesn't explain the panic when all of Echo's backups were destroyed. If they had archivals, they wouldn't care.
So they really didn't have offsite backup - which is really stupid. Especially since they have twenty Dollhouses all over the world and the easy solution would be for each Dollhouse to hold backups of one or more of the other Dollhouses.
Not that it matters now - the show has such bad ratings that it has zero chance of being renewed for a second season. Bye-bye all those hot girls every week! Too bad.
Go to Usenet, get just about everything you could want. Build up a personal library of hundreds of texts that would match a (small town) library.
The book publishing industry will go the way of the music and movie industries, just a bit slower since reading text on a monitor is still not quite as easy as a real book.
Anything the state does is not to your benefit.
Who writes these BOHICA articles? Mind letting ME shove it up your butt while you're are it?
The monkeys are gonna bitch about this - and then they're going to try to do something about it - and then they're gonna get their asses kicked.
It ain't gonne be like Star Trek where Kirk goes crazy and convinces the superintelligence to kill itself.
It's gonna be more like the superintelligence blows Kirk to atoms and goes about its business.
Fuck the monkeys.
I just hope at some point in the process we get to see robots that look like this:
http://celeborama.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/53519-summer-glau-terminator-sarah-connor-chronicl.jpg
http://www.raygunx.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/s2_wallpaper_61.jpg
and guess what? He's an asshole now.
This reminds me of the scene in the current "Crank 2 - High Voltage" movie where the action stops at one point and we're treated to a replay of a video of Chev Chelios as a young boy being brought on a TV show because he's such a rotter even at that age.
Really?
The Chinese have a new broadband connection technology that allows them to download "terabytes" of data - while the brilliant Pentagon cybersecurity sleuths don't notice ANY spike in bandwidth!
Right.
When is that technology coming to the States, please?
the ones to build Skynet, I mean.
Don't do evil indeed!
These guys are on a par with James Ellison - too dumb to live!
Send Cameron after the Google founders! Let her bounce them off every piece of hard furniture in the room.
I TOLD Sarah not to waste time with those fucking three dots!
I'll start:
Make me actuate, make me actuate!
Actually, no, give me Joanna's phone number...
I smell a "New Coke" moment coming.
We see on the TV shows FBI agents looking up all sorts of crap on their computers that even Google couldn't find, whereas in reality these idiots barely even have a filing system, let alone any kind of sensible database.
They can't even find files actually stored in their branch offices! DUH! Most corporations would go out of business if they couldn't do that!
And this is what, after several multi-hundred million dollar attempts to upgrade their management information systems?
Your tax dollars at work.
That, and the fact that most of the time the FBI really doesn't want to release any information for their own reasons.
DHS calls on Microsoft for computer security.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!
Considering the wide range they cover on that show, you're basically telling me that YOU KNOW without a doubt that absolutely nothing they discuss has anything whatever to do with science because your expertise covers as wide a range as Walter Bishop's.
Right.
I'll just toss that right in the bit bucket, thank you.
apparently don't realize that it has at times hit sixteen million viewers and is very like to get a season two.
And the morons here who don't know what the word "fringe" means and are expecting hard science in every episode - well, you're morons.
The characters are likable - in fact, Anna Torv is the nicest FBI agent I've ever seen, she makes Scully look like "Dr.Evil" - and that really is unrealistic, since real FBI agents are invariably assholes - the episode plots are complicated and interesting, and the overall story arc is moving very nicely in each episode, especially in the last several episodes. The writing and dialog are actually pretty good. I can fully understand why the show is a success. It's a glitzier version of the "X-Files" and fills that void nicely. Compared to the last "X-Files" film which sucked big time, it's far better.
Dollhouse is a harder call. The first four episodes have moved quickly to lay the groundwork for future interesting reveals. They've also seriously overemphasized half-naked females. Not that half naked females bother me, but it seems that either Joss or Fox apparently felt they needed to hook the nerds early. Since Eliza Dushku said that Fox messed with the first six episodes, I guess we should blame Fox for overemphasizing the "stroke" aspects of the show. The episodes have been uneven in quality so far, but the last episode was good, and most of them have some good points.
Terminator is a disaster as my earlier post indicated. That show is doomed, unless the Sci-Fi Channel picks it up. Rumor is Warner Brothers wants to sell the show for cheap to keep it on the air, presumably to drum up interest in the new T-4 movie. And rumor has it that the Sci-Fi Channel is interested, as long as the ratings don't collapse any further. So we'll see.
The smart thing would be for the Sci-Fi Channel to buy the show and then dump Josh Friedman as the showrunner.
As for DVRs, go look at the TV By The Numbers Web site. DVRs DO NOT COUNT! The networks know that no more than 40% of the DVR viewers watch ads and therefore they can't sell their advertisers shows with good DVR numbers. They need LIVE viewers. While this is unfortunate given how many people use DVRs, Hulu, downloads, etc., these days, the Neilsen ratings of live viewers are the only system the networks have to measure show value to the advertisers. Therefore if you DVR your favorite show, you are CANCELING YOUR FAVORITE SHOW! We may not like that, but that's how it works.
Also, in the case of Terminator, if you are a "fanboy" and always applaud what the idiot showrunners are doing on your show, no matter how much the ratings drop and the wider audience is dumping your favorite show, YOU are killing your favorite show again. You have to be critical and pressure the showrunners to change the show if it's not working.
Producers of shows are not paid to produce shows that please the fans, honor the franchise, or write "cool", arty scripts. They're paid to produce a show that stays on the air and produces ad revenue for the network for as long as it does stay on the air. All those other things I mentioned are how you GET to stay on the air. They are not the goal. Producers like Josh Friedman who forget that end up getting canceled and their reputations damaged.
So if you like a show, watch it live (which I can't because I don't have a TV, I have to download) and be critical and vocal about where the show is going wrong if it is.
What part of the word "Fringe" don't you get?
You haven't missed any "key episodes" of Terminator.
There have BEEN NO "key episodes" of Terminator except last week when Cameron put a bomb in her head and gave John the kill switch - thus setting up the last five episodes to totally suck as Josh Friedman fucks with the character even more than he has all season.
I personally asked Summer Glau at WonderCon a week ago Sunday whether she liked where Cameron ends up at season's end. After speaking mostly to Josh who was sitting next to her, babbling her usual stock answer about having "mixed feelings", her shoulders slumped and she turned back to me and said "I don't know" - then made a "happy face" with her hands which spoke volumes.
Josh has screwed up every character on that show with the possible exceptions of Catherine Weaver (since he likes Shirley Manson, and as a first time actress, he can't pressure her too much in the role) and Cromartie. And there's no sign that it's going to get better in the last five episodes.
This week everybody blames Cameron for killing Riley - when it should be obvious that something else is going on that they need to investigate. Thus damaging the characters once again by implying that they're all idiots. This sort of crap has been going on all season.
The show is great in terms of writing, acting, directing, effects, etc. - just about everything - except VISION. Josh's wallowing in "Crazy Sarah's" psychology is what doomed the show, not the night it's on.
I saw Summer Glau in person at WonderCon a week ago.
Trust me - you're wrong.
And everybody who has ever met her has said that, too. It's not even so much her looks - she really isn't the best looking woman on TV. It's just who she IS as a person. The litany of positive adjectives just goes on and on.
TSCC is my favorite show of the four I watch at all - although "Leverage" on TNT is a close number two.
The problem with Terminator can be summed up with two words: Josh Friedman.
Friedman took the Terminator franchise - a set of sci-fi action movies with high action and special effects content - and turned into a slow-moving glacier of psychoanalysis and family drama.
This is NOT the Terminator anybody knows from the movies. And the comments on all the TV blogs say so.
Season one started out pretty well, with nine episodes cut short by the writer's strike. But the pace was fairly good, the hints dropped of future reveals very interesting, the character exploration was excellent, the writing was generally excellent, the acting was excellent, everything was good.
Then Josh threw it all away in season two.
He went overboard on wallowing in Sarah Connor's psychology, turning a smart, capable super-heroine into a hallucinating, sullen, paranoid nutcase. He turned the smart, edgy Edward Furlong John Connor and turned him into a sullen, withdrawn, bratty, emo boy. He turned the hottest female Terminator ever created into a permanently defective pit bull and comic relief and then sidelined her on top of it.
The audience left in droves.
It had nothing to do with being put on Mondays against Monday Night Football and Dancing With The Stars. Fox put it there BECAUSE it was TERMINATOR! The one show virtually guaranteed a chance to survive on Monday nights - until Josh got through with it. Moving it to Fridays and pairing it with Dollhouse was a last ditch effort by Fox to try to save the show - and it crashed horribly. The first three episodes of the supposedly "better" "back nine" dragged interminably through more "Crazy Sarah" antics.
Only in last week's episode did the story arc begin to move forward again - and how? The Terminator is now considered to be permanently defective, so much so that it puts a BOMB IN ITS OWN HEAD and gives John Connor the "kill trigger"!
Why not just shoot all the characters and be done with it?
The ratings at this point are a disaster. TV By the Numbers Web site predicts cogently that the show cannot and will not be picked up for a third season. And the odds of it moving to the Sci-Fi Channel depend on it not falling much more from the point it's at now.
How the HELL do you screw up TERMINATOR?!
Josh Friedman can tell you.
Next is Release Candidate - ONE - then Release To Manufacturing.
Which means just as I feared, Windows 7 is going to be rushed to market by Christmas with INADEQUATE TESTING - a known Microsoft problem - just like Vista and XP were.
No, folks, your pain has not yet ended.
When I read the initial reviews of Windows 7, I thought MAYBE Microsoft wasn't going to fuck this one up beyond all recognition like they did Vista.
Now I see I was completely too optimistic.