Yes, it sounds like the author had an axe to grind. Being in the Bay Area, he's got to be aware of activists trying to shut down the wind farms near Stockton because they're killing birds. And I remember reading that the manufacture of photovoltaic cells uses some of the same processes that are already poisoning the groundwater in Silicon Valley.
These types of articles usually give raw numbers instead of percentages because it sounds more impressive if you don't put it in perspective. A few minutes on google and a few seconds with a hand calculator (if you went to public schools) shows what a tiny, tiny fraction of total usage this would be.
Once again, the obvious solution is to forbid developers from working too cheaply. I mean, how can I demand a high price for my complex, quirky app when someone else has the audacity to produce a better app for 99 cents? Sowing "you get what you pay for" FUD only works so far.
I'm thinking a software developers union. The union bosses would set prices, and consumers would be forbidden from using non-union-approved apps, on penalty of high fines or, you know, getting your kneecaps busted. In no time prices would soar, and we'd all get the full benefit of our efforts. Minus union dues and other applicable fees, of course.
And another thing. Software development tools have become way too cheap. When any pimple-faced geek can download a complete development environment for free, it gives them the impression that anyone can write useful programs. Compilers, debuggers and editors should be expensive, dammit, just like they were in the old days. And have fiddly license requirements. Software development should hurt so everyone knows why we're getting paid top dollar to do it.
Consumers? Hell, if they can't afford $79.95 for a fuel efficiency calculator, they can jolly well do without. They should be happy that their phone works as a phone.
> Too late - in Britain, it is a crime to refuse to turn-over your encryption key to the police when requested (no 5th amendment rights).
Seems to me that steganography could come to the rescue here. Imagine an encrypted file which, when decrypted using one key, spits out the kind of stuff normal people want to keep encrypted -- personal information, their own credit cards, web passwords... what the police would expect from the keypass database of an upstanding citizen. But when decrypted using a different, perhaps much longer key, disgorges the real payload.
Or, I like the idea of the "fake" payload being a bunch of "Page 3" photos, to keep the officers distracted.
The first thing that occurs to me is that any appliance easy enough for a beat cop to use couldn't be very high-grade forensics. If there is a standard set of techniques used by the appliance, there will almost immediately (as soon as one is stolen) be a standard set of work-arounds. After which, only the profoundly stupid and/or set-up will ever be caught.
On the other hand, it occurs to me that the authorities only need the occasional high-profile arrest to keep funding going, so maybe it's a win-win for all -- the gov'ment gets credit for "cracking down on porn" and the hard cores have a known set of procedures to keep their stuff under cover.
I disagree. I didn't miss the point, I fundamentally disagree with that particular point. You don't portray "what goes around comes around" by buying all your gowns off the rack at Saks. There are much more subtle ways of getting that point across, but they require thought and ingenuity.
I'm familiar enough with allegory and parable. We saw Wall-E last night, which has more problems with the plot than I can enumerate here. But it was clear from the beginning that the story was intended to be a parable, not to be taken seriously in detail. So although I didn't get particularly drawn in, I could still enjoy the film for what it was. Battlestar clearly wanted you to get drawn in deeply, but they didn't have the wit or energy to create a believable framework in which to achieve that. What they ended up with is a classic soap opera with expensive special effects. With Caprica, it looks like they think it's the soap opera that's the real appeal, and that there must be a market for another nighttime soap without all those expensive sets and rendering farms. Watch -- it'll look exactly like 90210 (because expensive mansions are just a few blocks away from the studio, which makes location shooting cheap) except they'll keep calling it "Caprica" instead of "west Hollywood". I wish them luck.
It does seem like XP has an aggressive tendency to swap out minimized or quiescent programs. If you're doing a few things it's not noticeable, but if you're doing a lot of tasks and switching between several large applications, (my usual workflow) it's very noticeable. With 4 Gbytes memory, and task manager showing only 900 megs in use, I shouldn't be swapping at all. Nevertheless, every time I maximize something it's grind... grind... grind... before the window responds. It's like the XP swapping algorithm is based on minimum ram requirements and doesn't understand that ram is cheap now and you have eight times the minimum amount of memory installed. Swapping behavior should change with the amount of physical memory. Or it should at least be adjustable by a knowledgeable person.
I understand about disk cache, but if you're swapping unnecessarily in a misguided attempt to free up excessive amounts of disk cache, you still end up with a lot of thrashing.
> [...]hand it over to a recording industry entity that promises to distribute the proceeds fairly. [...]
"Fairly" meaning the Warner division that tracks this windfall will get most of it, and the rest will go directly to the parent company's bottom line. Because what's good for Warner is good for the artists, right?
Be that as it may, I think where they jumped the shark is in thinking that more angst, and painfully complex interaction, combined with people making stupid, unrealistic mistakes to fuel maudlin conflict, is what makes a good story. It's the degree to which the story is contrived for the purpose of jerking you around emotionally that makes it a soap opera. If the plausibility of the framework isn't important to you, and all you're really interested in is the conflict, watch Days Of Our Lives. Or, apparently, Caprica when it comes out.
Agreed, cool explosions don't make a series either. Having an interesting framework and compelling characters and a story worth telling is what makes a series. Galactica was weak in all of these areas.
That comes around to a problem I had with the series all along -- it's not clear what the framework is supposed to be. Galactica (the ship) is old -- like, WWII old -- I get that -- but higher tech than anything we could aspire to for another 100 years or so. Ok, so it's in the future, at least Star Trek future, probably further.
But the weapons were strictly 20th century (that is not a typo -- we have better stuff now than what they have in the show) and the clothes were right out of Men's Warehouse circa 1999. The question I'd have is, what kind of society would not have developed treatments of cancer we currently have, but *would* develop the blue-and-white diagonally striped necktie that was current last Wednesday, tied in an independently developed Windsor knot. What are the chances. I mean you can get in your car and DRIVE to places that have substantially different clothing than what was worn in the courtroom scenes. Do you really expect to travel hundreds of light years, visit an alien culture, and see the exact same clothes you'd see in the L.A. financial district, a whopping 7 miles from the studio?
So, maybe Galactica is not an independently developed culture, but is in our far future, there was a breakdown, technology was lost, and they're building back up. This would explain the erratic technology, high tech in the bridge but low tech in sick bay, but would not explain why they're still using a dry erase board commonly available at Target for $19.99 in the President's cabin, and you'd still have to postulate that the culture would have inexplicably decided to revive fashions hundreds of years old, like we all suddenly decided to dress up in Renaissance gear. (Ok, with this audience that's probably a bad example.) The whole framework of the show was a hodge-podge of technologies that wouldn't fit together in any reasonable premise. This kept drawing me out of the experience.
Parenthetically, as silly as the clothes were in the old series (dig those crazy capes) they were at least plausible for an independently developed culture. Well, a culture with really bad taste that had independently developed 1970's disco fabrics, but nevertheless.
I suspect that the producers used off-the-rack clothes and props in the remake because it was cheaper and they thought nobody would notice. This is just one example of the inattention to detail that makes the difference between a memorable experience, and a jarring and unsatisfactory experience.
Oh, that, and it was a stinkin' SOAP OPERA. "Oooh Starbuck, Let meee express my feeeeelings." Retch.
Even worse, if you read the synopsis, it doesn't even have spaceships. The entire thing takes place on one planet. Must save in production costs. It's about the struggle between two competing families in the time leading up to the cylon war or somesuch. You can see the zany possibilities immediately. There is a literary necessity for there to be a boy from one family, and a girl from t'other...
Personally, I was having trouble staying interested in the soap opera that was the main series. This spinoff sounds like all the things I hated about Battlestar Galactica without, you know, the cool stuff.
Oh well, I didn't need any more TV to watch anyway.
I see your point, but I think that's a slight oversimplification. Just because one's knees are starting to creak doesn't automatically mean one is stubborn and set in one's ways. And you've never met an excruciatingly stubborn person in their twenties?
I suspect that as people age they just become more of what they already are. I also suspect there's a little ageism at work also -- that "confident" and "headstrong" becomes "stubborn" and "arrogant" as the wrinkles become visible.
I look back at how I was straight out of college and am a little embarrassed. If anyone over 30 isn't a little contrite about how they acted fresh out of college, they probably need some introspection time. It all depends on where you work, of course, but a moderately successful, fairly young company will have already investigated those methodologies and either made them work -- rather than just marks on the chalkboard -- or already dumped them as this year's Shiny Object. Or last year's. Or last decade's, depending on what school you went to. Schools aren't always up to date either.
So the last thing we need is some young buck with no experience making a lot of noise about a process that we've already tried, of which we've already enumerated the weakness, and either dumped or heavily modified.
Mind you, fresh ideas are very important, but just because you recently graduated doesn't necessarily make your ideas fresh, and you probably haven't yet learned enough social skills to present them in a way that people can find acceptable. In other words, you kids get offa my lawn. Use the sidewalk, ring the door bell, be polite, and we'll talk. You might be surprised at how little you know. Or, you might surprise me. Let's find out together.
Incidentally, my high-school-aged daughter is 40 years younger than I (we started late) and she's perpetually annoyed that I can do her algebra problems in my head faster than she can do them on the calculator. Sigh. Schools today...
But back to the original question. I think that brains atrophy just like any other organ you don't use. I've been a little lucky in that my career has included jobs that required the ability to describe a process using calculus. I use algebra and trig (admittedly high-school level) on a daily basis. Also, I submit that anyone in IT who isn't working for the government or a utility needs to scramble to keep up on current technology, and I think that also helps exercise the brain. Now if I could only remember people's names...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it sounds like the author had an axe to grind. Being in the Bay Area, he's got to be aware of activists trying to shut down the wind farms near Stockton because they're killing birds. And I remember reading that the manufacture of photovoltaic cells uses some of the same processes that are already poisoning the groundwater in Silicon Valley.
These types of articles usually give raw numbers instead of percentages because it sounds more impressive if you don't put it in perspective. A few minutes on google and a few seconds with a hand calculator (if you went to public schools) shows what a tiny, tiny fraction of total usage this would be.
Once again, the obvious solution is to forbid developers from working too cheaply. I mean, how can I demand a high price for my complex, quirky app when someone else has the audacity to produce a better app for 99 cents? Sowing "you get what you pay for" FUD only works so far.
I'm thinking a software developers union. The union bosses would set prices, and consumers would be forbidden from using non-union-approved apps, on penalty of high fines or, you know, getting your kneecaps busted. In no time prices would soar, and we'd all get the full benefit of our efforts. Minus union dues and other applicable fees, of course.
And another thing. Software development tools have become way too cheap. When any pimple-faced geek can download a complete development environment for free, it gives them the impression that anyone can write useful programs. Compilers, debuggers and editors should be expensive, dammit, just like they were in the old days. And have fiddly license requirements. Software development should hurt so everyone knows why we're getting paid top dollar to do it.
Consumers? Hell, if they can't afford $79.95 for a fuel efficiency calculator, they can jolly well do without. They should be happy that their phone works as a phone.
> Too late - in Britain, it is a crime to refuse to turn-over your encryption key to the police when requested (no 5th amendment rights).
Seems to me that steganography could come to the rescue here. Imagine an encrypted file which, when decrypted using one key, spits out the kind of stuff normal people want to keep encrypted -- personal information, their own credit cards, web passwords... what the police would expect from the keypass database of an upstanding citizen. But when decrypted using a different, perhaps much longer key, disgorges the real payload.
Or, I like the idea of the "fake" payload being a bunch of "Page 3" photos, to keep the officers distracted.
The first thing that occurs to me is that any appliance easy enough for a beat cop to use couldn't be very high-grade forensics. If there is a standard set of techniques used by the appliance, there will almost immediately (as soon as one is stolen) be a standard set of work-arounds. After which, only the profoundly stupid and/or set-up will ever be caught.
On the other hand, it occurs to me that the authorities only need the occasional high-profile arrest to keep funding going, so maybe it's a win-win for all -- the gov'ment gets credit for "cracking down on porn" and the hard cores have a known set of procedures to keep their stuff under cover.
I disagree. I didn't miss the point, I fundamentally disagree with that particular point. You don't portray "what goes around comes around" by buying all your gowns off the rack at Saks. There are much more subtle ways of getting that point across, but they require thought and ingenuity.
I'm familiar enough with allegory and parable. We saw Wall-E last night, which has more problems with the plot than I can enumerate here. But it was clear from the beginning that the story was intended to be a parable, not to be taken seriously in detail. So although I didn't get particularly drawn in, I could still enjoy the film for what it was. Battlestar clearly wanted you to get drawn in deeply, but they didn't have the wit or energy to create a believable framework in which to achieve that. What they ended up with is a classic soap opera with expensive special effects. With Caprica, it looks like they think it's the soap opera that's the real appeal, and that there must be a market for another nighttime soap without all those expensive sets and rendering farms. Watch -- it'll look exactly like 90210 (because expensive mansions are just a few blocks away from the studio, which makes location shooting cheap) except they'll keep calling it "Caprica" instead of "west Hollywood". I wish them luck.
It does seem like XP has an aggressive tendency to swap out minimized or quiescent programs. If you're doing a few things it's not noticeable, but if you're doing a lot of tasks and switching between several large applications, (my usual workflow) it's very noticeable. With 4 Gbytes memory, and task manager showing only 900 megs in use, I shouldn't be swapping at all. Nevertheless, every time I maximize something it's grind... grind... grind... before the window responds. It's like the XP swapping algorithm is based on minimum ram requirements and doesn't understand that ram is cheap now and you have eight times the minimum amount of memory installed. Swapping behavior should change with the amount of physical memory. Or it should at least be adjustable by a knowledgeable person.
I understand about disk cache, but if you're swapping unnecessarily in a misguided attempt to free up excessive amounts of disk cache, you still end up with a lot of thrashing.
> The lack of a Linux or Solaris release is a notable absence.
Aaaaand this is cross-platform how? Does "cross-platform" now mean it'll run on Vista Home and Vista Ultimate?
> [...]hand it over to a recording industry entity that promises to distribute the proceeds fairly. [...]
"Fairly" meaning the Warner division that tracks this windfall will get most of it, and the rest will go directly to the parent company's bottom line. Because what's good for Warner is good for the artists, right?
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Be that as it may, I think where they jumped the shark is in thinking that more angst, and painfully complex interaction, combined with people making stupid, unrealistic mistakes to fuel maudlin conflict, is what makes a good story. It's the degree to which the story is contrived for the purpose of jerking you around emotionally that makes it a soap opera. If the plausibility of the framework isn't important to you, and all you're really interested in is the conflict, watch Days Of Our Lives. Or, apparently, Caprica when it comes out.
Agreed, cool explosions don't make a series either. Having an interesting framework and compelling characters and a story worth telling is what makes a series. Galactica was weak in all of these areas.
That comes around to a problem I had with the series all along -- it's not clear what the framework is supposed to be. Galactica (the ship) is old -- like, WWII old -- I get that -- but higher tech than anything we could aspire to for another 100 years or so. Ok, so it's in the future, at least Star Trek future, probably further.
But the weapons were strictly 20th century (that is not a typo -- we have better stuff now than what they have in the show) and the clothes were right out of Men's Warehouse circa 1999. The question I'd have is, what kind of society would not have developed treatments of cancer we currently have, but *would* develop the blue-and-white diagonally striped necktie that was current last Wednesday, tied in an independently developed Windsor knot. What are the chances. I mean you can get in your car and DRIVE to places that have substantially different clothing than what was worn in the courtroom scenes. Do you really expect to travel hundreds of light years, visit an alien culture, and see the exact same clothes you'd see in the L.A. financial district, a whopping 7 miles from the studio?
So, maybe Galactica is not an independently developed culture, but is in our far future, there was a breakdown, technology was lost, and they're building back up. This would explain the erratic technology, high tech in the bridge but low tech in sick bay, but would not explain why they're still using a dry erase board commonly available at Target for $19.99 in the President's cabin, and you'd still have to postulate that the culture would have inexplicably decided to revive fashions hundreds of years old, like we all suddenly decided to dress up in Renaissance gear. (Ok, with this audience that's probably a bad example.) The whole framework of the show was a hodge-podge of technologies that wouldn't fit together in any reasonable premise. This kept drawing me out of the experience.
Parenthetically, as silly as the clothes were in the old series (dig those crazy capes) they were at least plausible for an independently developed culture. Well, a culture with really bad taste that had independently developed 1970's disco fabrics, but nevertheless.
I suspect that the producers used off-the-rack clothes and props in the remake because it was cheaper and they thought nobody would notice. This is just one example of the inattention to detail that makes the difference between a memorable experience, and a jarring and unsatisfactory experience.
Oh, that, and it was a stinkin' SOAP OPERA. "Oooh Starbuck, Let meee express my feeeeelings." Retch.
> If you want really high ratings, use a girl from one family and a girl from the other...
Copy that. 'S the only reason I would watch it. Did I say that out loud?
Ooooh ooooh ooooh... maybe it's them, and they're coming back for the rest of us!
Or maybe, what they're measuring is that there really are ghosts, and they're common.
Even worse, if you read the synopsis, it doesn't even have spaceships. The entire thing takes place on one planet. Must save in production costs. It's about the struggle between two competing families in the time leading up to the cylon war or somesuch. You can see the zany possibilities immediately. There is a literary necessity for there to be a boy from one family, and a girl from t'other...
Personally, I was having trouble staying interested in the soap opera that was the main series. This spinoff sounds like all the things I hated about Battlestar Galactica without, you know, the cool stuff.
Oh well, I didn't need any more TV to watch anyway.
Couldn't possibly be worse.
Isn't this, like, the same thing... only cheaper?
I see your point, but I think that's a slight oversimplification. Just because one's knees are starting to creak doesn't automatically mean one is stubborn and set in one's ways. And you've never met an excruciatingly stubborn person in their twenties?
I suspect that as people age they just become more of what they already are. I also suspect there's a little ageism at work also -- that "confident" and "headstrong" becomes "stubborn" and "arrogant" as the wrinkles become visible.
I look back at how I was straight out of college and am a little embarrassed. If anyone over 30 isn't a little contrite about how they acted fresh out of college, they probably need some introspection time. It all depends on where you work, of course, but a moderately successful, fairly young company will have already investigated those methodologies and either made them work -- rather than just marks on the chalkboard -- or already dumped them as this year's Shiny Object. Or last year's. Or last decade's, depending on what school you went to. Schools aren't always up to date either.
So the last thing we need is some young buck with no experience making a lot of noise about a process that we've already tried, of which we've already enumerated the weakness, and either dumped or heavily modified.
Mind you, fresh ideas are very important, but just because you recently graduated doesn't necessarily make your ideas fresh, and you probably haven't yet learned enough social skills to present them in a way that people can find acceptable. In other words, you kids get offa my lawn. Use the sidewalk, ring the door bell, be polite, and we'll talk. You might be surprised at how little you know. Or, you might surprise me. Let's find out together.
Incidentally, my high-school-aged daughter is 40 years younger than I (we started late) and she's perpetually annoyed that I can do her algebra problems in my head faster than she can do them on the calculator. Sigh. Schools today...
But back to the original question. I think that brains atrophy just like any other organ you don't use. I've been a little lucky in that my career has included jobs that required the ability to describe a process using calculus. I use algebra and trig (admittedly high-school level) on a daily basis. Also, I submit that anyone in IT who isn't working for the government or a utility needs to scramble to keep up on current technology, and I think that also helps exercise the brain. Now if I could only remember people's names...
And for certain narrow definitions of "faster".
Let's pursue this a little further. If I wrote a competing product and charged an equivalent price, that would be ok?
So you're saying, if someone writes a commercial product to do something, I should be forbidden to write a free program that does the same thing?
A law forbidding developers from coding for free.
Haven't we done enough damage without slowing down the earth's oceans?
This is the readability police. Step AWAY from the thesaurus.