So do we need to start sending up Mabel the Scratch SpaceMonkey until NASA gets its networking sorted out?
I think this shows how it is a good thing to isolate certain systems from one another, and to take the next person that says you need total interconnectivity and kick him right in the ass. "But we need the shuttle communications system on-line to the personnel database's dial-up system! Otherwise how will teleworking personnel administrators be able to compute billable hours for the astronauts?" Feh.
Star Wars wasn't dumb to adults when it came out because it changed everything. It created--or at least revolutionized--an entire genre, and in doing so became a franchise.
TPM did not do this. It could not--after twenty years with Star Wars firmly engrained in our collective consciousness, TPM's impact on us compared to the original's is like the Miracle of Fatima versus the Ascention of Christ. It's an echo, no matter who wrote it.
Go back and look at some other cultural mini-revolutions. Go watch The French Connection, for example. You'll think the entire thing is a cliche. But it isn't--it created whole categories of concepts that were so powerful that they were imitated by hundreds of followers. Go read Raymond Chandler. You'll think he's a hack, until you realize that he's the original that everyone's duplicated since. Find some old black-man-on-a-porch Delta Blues and every lick will sound like famlilar, because you're listening to what the Yard Birds, the Stones, and Zeppelin grew up dreaming they could play. Go listen to Kraftwerk's stuff from the 1970s, then tell me about house music. Watch a couple of Charlie Chaplin films to find out why The Birdcage had a houseboy doing pratfalls with a tray of dishes.
That's genius--when you do something that not only blows everyone away, but seems obvious in retrospect. This it will become ubiquitous. No, TPM is no Star Wars. If you insist on watching Star Wars with a jaded Y2K mindset, you're going to miss a lot, because what you're watching is part of that mindset. It's a part of you now, because you're part of the culture that it defined.
Enough sermonizing. Jar-Jar sucked. If he's supposed to evolve over the course of Episodes I-III the way Luke did from IV-VI, he's got a lot of catching up to do.
Maybe Don Knotts will join the series, and he becomes Boba Fett instead of Jar Jar! He has to wear that costume with the mask and voice disguiser because without it he wasn't a very intimidating bounty hunter--every time he tried to be menacing people just started giggling and saying things like "You better go ask Andy for your bullet there, Barn!"
Well, as long as everything is computer animated anyway, why not make a quantum leap past Ewoks and go straight to Smurfs? Surely Lucas can afford to license them.
Differentiating ordinary background noises from Very Bad Noises is a tricky task for an active filter to handle, and Very Bad Noises are something you absolutely must be able to hear.
Passive devices like earplugs or cans are good at reducing noise levels uniformly, which lets you stay attuned to changes in overall noise level and transient sounds. There are some sophisticated custom-fitted models that can be worn for extended periods of time, but for the most part, eight to twelve hours is the limit before you start risking infection. This period is longer for cans, but bacteria-friendly moisture can still build up inside them.
In any case the steady roar of overly noisy air handlers could mask out all sorts of Very Bad Noises, such as the futile clicking of a relay trying to latch open, if you can't hear that, you can't tell that the relay is about to fail and take with it something you need in order to live. It's always nice to fix the problem before all the pretty red lights start flashing.
But as Ig0r pointed out above, the real problem isn't Zvezda but the temporary equipment Zvezda will replace.
Last I heard there were still some serious concerns about noise levels onboard. I wish I could cite the CNN article discussing this, but I failed to search it up successfully. Here's the gist, though: The noise levels in the powered-up module exceed OSHA's levels for two hours of intermittent daily exposure. It's as loud as a running vacuum cleaner, yet the module is intended to be inhabited for weeks or months at a time. The concerns are that (a) long term exposure could result in permanent hearing damage to astronauts, and (b) earplugs are not an option.
Does anyone have something further on this? I'm sure some AC can respond, but for unfortunate reasons I've been reading this thread at threshold=1.
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Re:Hint #265 that your boss might be a con man...
on
The Great Internet Con
·
· Score: 1
No kidding. How can you take anybody with that haircut seriously enough to give them money? He looks like the guitar player from Hall and Oates, or some goddamned Firebird-driving Mecklenberg used car salesman. Never trust a man with a perm and a skinny necktie. If he has a moustache to go with, don't let him near the high school, either.
Dropping the religion and dropping the trappings of the religion are two different things. As contemptible as people like the Bakkers were, who dropped the religion but kept up the act, there are still folks like Billy Graham out there.
Oh good--yet another closed-source hack of dubious reliability you have to wedge in to an MS product to add a desperately needed bit of functionality that has been a standard part of Unix since the 1970s.
So this is what happens when your brain says "It's not spelled Amoeba. Don't be a smartass. Go back and change it. Just delete the o and change the b to a g." Truly, debugging introduces more bugs than getting it right the first time.
You know, all these press releases would be a whole lot more interesting if something actually happened between them.
The Amega was fantastic. A new generation expanding on the old one's philosophy could be fantastic. In the meantime, though, if I don't see something in the way of at least a feature list or better yet a press release announcing the signing of fab contracts, then I have to write Amega II off as yet another brilliant piece of vapourware and go find an actual existing platform on which to do some non-hypothetical work.
I don't think that issues of legacy code compatibility matter less and less these days, at least in regards to processor instruction sets. Why? HLL compilers and operating systems.
The x86 ISA has been closely married to the fate of a single operating system for quite some time now. After the shift from CLI to GUI, most of the compatibility issues in software have been WRT how to talk to the OS, not anything underlying. Nobody talks to the hard drive or keyboard directly--you talk to the driver. Likewise, the only programs that generally need to understand the underlying architecture are compilers.
There is so much standardization at levels above the processor instruction set that particular CPU architectures matter only while writing compilers and operating systems. Open source software distribution is making architectural irrelevancy even more thorough.
I will freely admit that there are applications which need good familiarity with the underlying hardware; most of these, however are drivers. The rest are heavily optimized scientific computing tools that need to bum every single instruction out of a loop because the loop is going to run sixty-nine trillion times.
As for the rest of the world, though, nearly transparant portability of operating systems and applications suites across architectures is a reality that lags only a few hours or days after the compiler is written. I'll offer two examples: Unix and Java.
When does compatibility with prehistoric applications become a reality? In places other than the x86 architecture. I do DBA work for an RBOC, and yes, we have ancient COBOL and FORTRAN applications that first ran in the 1960s. For those groups, Y2K was a genuine nightmare. But all those apps run on MVS and other mainframe environments--not exactly the x86's stomping grounds. As for other, pre-x86 micro architectures, well, I can run all my old Atari 400 apps under an emulator on my Pentium 200, because I have cycles to spare even to a badly written emulator.
So, no, the x86 isn't obsolete. The newer generations have some obsolete components, though.
Yeah, but what's the fun of just walking into the side of the Hancock building when you can fly a Cessna into it at 200mph? If you just walk into the Hancock building, you wind up in the lobby, take the escalator up to the mezzanine and order a Coke. I can do that in real life, eh? Who's gonna buy simGoBuyACoke? simFlyIntoABuilding is much more exciting, and I still didn't have to shoot anybody.
If they start drug testing in the computer industry, the U.S. economy will collapse in four days.
I propose a dignity fee, and I'm going to start issuing this challenge to prospective employers: you may test my urine for the presence of drugs once per month on one condition: if the drug test returns a negative result, I shall be awarded a dignity fee of one thousand dollars and two days paid vacation.
The only drug policies I have ever worked under stated that the company could only test me if they had "reasonable suspicion" that I was abusing drugs, and that said abuse was adversely affecting my job performance or work environment. Even in such a "permissive" environment I have seen managers use drug testing as a humiliation/coercion tactic to keep uppity employees in line. Having a dignity fee policy in place would help prevent such things from happening in the future.
Reporting damaging information about a person you are supposed to investigate, which information is provably not true is prima facie evidence of negligence in conducting the investigation.
I worked for the Georgia Division of Public Health for six years as a database developer. The state of Georgia has strong constitutional protections of individual privacy. When we started putting together our statewide immunization registry, we ran into numerous problems identifying individual clients. Among them:
There are two thousand people named John Smith in the state.
A name like "Loquansha" can be spelled twenty different ways, not just by the data entry clerk, but by Laquansa's mother or Leqansia herself.
A person's race is whatever they tell you it is; if Padraic O'Limrick comes in and tells you he's Hispanic, he's Hispanic.
Lakwantzaa may get sick of her old name and change it to Cathy.
Kathy doesn't have to give you her Social Security Number, and she probably won't remember her Immunization Record Code.
Cathie's SSN may be entered incorrectly, or may have been used by someone else (accidentally or not).
If you make Kathie's SSN a required field, and she can't/refuses to give it, the clerk will put in nine nines, thereby matching everybody else who refused to give their SSN to that clerk.
In other words, human beings don't have unique identifiers, and many of the things you might expect to be a unique identifier can change, be misentered, forgotten, lost or stolen.
And if you try to force someone to have a unique identifier assigned by you, you are overstepping your bounds in a way people accustimed to at least the illusion of personal freedom and privacy (e.g. Americans) will react badly to. You are also setting up an abusable system.
So it's a mess because the real world is a mess. It's very easy to forget that people are human beings, not tuples in a database.
There are gonna be search errors. A woman in North Carolina recently got thrown in jail for three days because her driver's license number matched the SSN of a fugitive in New Jersey. The fact that she's white, female and in her fifties did nothing to deter the arresting officers from mistaking her with a 22 year old Latino male, so she's suing for wrongful imprisonment. Gonna win, too, I hope.
It's the first song Tom Servo sang when his voice got "retuned" prior to MST3K episode 201 ("Rocket Ship X-M").
--
Re:Horse Buggies, Inc. vs. Ford Motor Co.
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 1
Ah. Thank you for the clarification. I remember it was some form of extortion involving advertising, but I couldn't remember the particulars.
On the other hand, the name Metallica is trademarked, and the titles of their albums constitute intellectual property, so the label could try to "protect from unauthorized use" or some crap.
--
New Model == Old Alternative Model
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 2
From the article:
The record industry can give you a Britney Spears, an 'N Sync or the Monkees. The real thing markets itself. And news of quality spreads fastest by word of mouth.
-- John Perry Barlow, Greatful Dead lyricist and road manager, fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University
Anybody out here a former taper for the Grateful Dead? If you don't know what I'm talking about, anybody could go into one of a Dead show and record it and distribute the tape without paying a fee of any kind to the band, and their shows always sold out, and their albums sold like crazy.
Phish has been doing the same thing, to great success. Phish concerts are online within hours after their shows, yet their live two-volume CD A Live One still sells very well. I have a friend who has over a thousand hours of Phish concerts on CD, all off the net. He still goes to shows. If he and his wife see them four times a year that's two hundred bucks to Phish, record label be damned.
Barlow's right: the "artists" most at risk from Napster are manufactured contrivances like the New Kids on the Block, designed by actuaries and focus group reports to have a high statistical likelihood of appealing to fourteen year olds. Real art, however, does not need to be rammed down your throat. When you find it, you'll know it. The way to find something that really turns you on is when a friend e-mails you that first.mp3 with a note saying "Let me know what you think of these guys. They'll be in town in a couple of weeks."
--
Horse Buggies, Inc. vs. Ford Motor Co.
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 4
The "Recording Industry" is more accurately called the recording distribution industry. When you buy a CD for $17 at a store, the store gets $2; the shipper gets $0.50; the manufacturer gets $0.50; the copyright holder gets $2 (which may or may not ever get to the artist--just ask John Fogerty how much he makes off of Fortunate Son); and the label gets all the rest. Recording and production costs are amortized over the production run of the album and are artificially inflated by the industry itself.
The "Industry" just controls distribution, and boy do they ever control it. You'll have a hard time finding a record store that carries used CDs and major label new releases, because if the store is found out, the label will stop distributing new CDs to them or refuse to allow them to advertise they have those new releases in stock.
So now there's an entirely new way of distributing music. And the current distributors are scared. They are terrified of their own obsolescence, and they are swaddling their greed in a rhetoric of justice. They don't care about music, or artistic integrity, or artists' rights. They care about their money, and absolutely nothing else in the world. The new reality is that the link between artist and performer is the music itself, not the industry's permission to distribute it.
We need Columbia Records for music the way we need buggy whips to drive a car. They're just not part of the equation anymore.
Not to mention the use of "synchronized" in reference to the audio and image.
On Telemundo, a Spanish-language cable network we get in Atlanta, there are a couple of soap operas where the actors' lips clearly are flapping in Spanish, but for some reason, the dialogue is dubbed--into Spanish. My best guess is that the soaps came from, say, Argentina, and that the accent is as incomprehensible to a Puerto Rican as a thick Edinburgh brogue is to a Texan. For weeks now I've been torn between the fact that I am actually picking up a little Spanish watching these things, and the fact that by picking up a little Spanish I'm enjoying them less. See, the great thing about Telemundo soaps is that you can still tell what's basically going on, because it's a soap, and there's always a bitch, and there's always a sweet young thing, and there's always a matron, and there's always a rich bastard, and there's always a rich but sincere guy, and...well. Also, the women are extremely hot.
The whole reason I bring this up is that there were a couple of occasions where the dialogue sync was so far off that I started zoning out and thinking about the muchachas calientes instead of giant Rastafarian motherfuckers stomping around in their oversized novelty ski gloves and prosthetic foreheads. Believe me, a preoccupation with simpering Latinas is probably the best thing you can bring into the theater with you. That and a half pint of Wild Turkey so you can mix it with your four dollar Coke then drink it then hurl the bottle at the screen about seventy minutes in. Screaming "what the fuck's going on here?" every few minutes doesn't hurt, either. Nobody seems to mind--they're all wondering the same thing and wish you'd brought enough whiskey for everybody.
Anyhoo, Battlefield Earth sucked wet farts out of a dead pigeon's ass. Every time I try to say different, I sound like Clinton explaining why a hummer from an intern doesn't count as sexual relations.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this shows how it is a good thing to isolate certain systems from one another, and to take the next person that says you need total interconnectivity and kick him right in the ass. "But we need the shuttle communications system on-line to the personnel database's dial-up system! Otherwise how will teleworking personnel administrators be able to compute billable hours for the astronauts?" Feh.
--
TPM did not do this. It could not--after twenty years with Star Wars firmly engrained in our collective consciousness, TPM's impact on us compared to the original's is like the Miracle of Fatima versus the Ascention of Christ. It's an echo, no matter who wrote it.
Go back and look at some other cultural mini-revolutions. Go watch The French Connection, for example. You'll think the entire thing is a cliche. But it isn't--it created whole categories of concepts that were so powerful that they were imitated by hundreds of followers. Go read Raymond Chandler. You'll think he's a hack, until you realize that he's the original that everyone's duplicated since. Find some old black-man-on-a-porch Delta Blues and every lick will sound like famlilar, because you're listening to what the Yard Birds, the Stones, and Zeppelin grew up dreaming they could play. Go listen to Kraftwerk's stuff from the 1970s, then tell me about house music. Watch a couple of Charlie Chaplin films to find out why The Birdcage had a houseboy doing pratfalls with a tray of dishes.
That's genius--when you do something that not only blows everyone away, but seems obvious in retrospect. This it will become ubiquitous. No, TPM is no Star Wars. If you insist on watching Star Wars with a jaded Y2K mindset, you're going to miss a lot, because what you're watching is part of that mindset. It's a part of you now, because you're part of the culture that it defined.
Enough sermonizing. Jar-Jar sucked. If he's supposed to evolve over the course of Episodes I-III the way Luke did from IV-VI, he's got a lot of catching up to do.
--
Maybe Don Knotts will join the series, and he becomes Boba Fett instead of Jar Jar! He has to wear that costume with the mask and voice disguiser because without it he wasn't a very intimidating bounty hunter--every time he tried to be menacing people just started giggling and saying things like "You better go ask Andy for your bullet there, Barn!"
--
Jar minus Jar == zero, so all you have is the constant. I love discarding terms.
--
And Gargamel could be the next Sith Lord! Yay!
--
Passive devices like earplugs or cans are good at reducing noise levels uniformly, which lets you stay attuned to changes in overall noise level and transient sounds. There are some sophisticated custom-fitted models that can be worn for extended periods of time, but for the most part, eight to twelve hours is the limit before you start risking infection. This period is longer for cans, but bacteria-friendly moisture can still build up inside them.
In any case the steady roar of overly noisy air handlers could mask out all sorts of Very Bad Noises, such as the futile clicking of a relay trying to latch open, if you can't hear that, you can't tell that the relay is about to fail and take with it something you need in order to live. It's always nice to fix the problem before all the pretty red lights start flashing.
But as Ig0r pointed out above, the real problem isn't Zvezda but the temporary equipment Zvezda will replace.
--
Does anyone have something further on this? I'm sure some AC can respond, but for unfortunate reasons I've been reading this thread at threshold=1.
--
No kidding. How can you take anybody with that haircut seriously enough to give them money? He looks like the guitar player from Hall and Oates, or some goddamned Firebird-driving Mecklenberg used car salesman. Never trust a man with a perm and a skinny necktie. If he has a moustache to go with, don't let him near the high school, either.
--
Dropping the religion and dropping the trappings of the religion are two different things. As contemptible as people like the Bakkers were, who dropped the religion but kept up the act, there are still folks like Billy Graham out there.
--
They're speed holes! They make the car go faster!
--
Oh good--yet another closed-source hack of dubious reliability you have to wedge in to an MS product to add a desperately needed bit of functionality that has been a standard part of Unix since the 1970s.
--
So this is what happens when your brain says "It's not spelled Amoeba. Don't be a smartass. Go back and change it. Just delete the o and change the b to a g." Truly, debugging introduces more bugs than getting it right the first time.
--
The Amega was fantastic. A new generation expanding on the old one's philosophy could be fantastic. In the meantime, though, if I don't see something in the way of at least a feature list or better yet a press release announcing the signing of fab contracts, then I have to write Amega II off as yet another brilliant piece of vapourware and go find an actual existing platform on which to do some non-hypothetical work.
--
The x86 ISA has been closely married to the fate of a single operating system for quite some time now. After the shift from CLI to GUI, most of the compatibility issues in software have been WRT how to talk to the OS, not anything underlying. Nobody talks to the hard drive or keyboard directly--you talk to the driver. Likewise, the only programs that generally need to understand the underlying architecture are compilers.
There is so much standardization at levels above the processor instruction set that particular CPU architectures matter only while writing compilers and operating systems. Open source software distribution is making architectural irrelevancy even more thorough.
I will freely admit that there are applications which need good familiarity with the underlying hardware; most of these, however are drivers. The rest are heavily optimized scientific computing tools that need to bum every single instruction out of a loop because the loop is going to run sixty-nine trillion times.
As for the rest of the world, though, nearly transparant portability of operating systems and applications suites across architectures is a reality that lags only a few hours or days after the compiler is written. I'll offer two examples: Unix and Java.
When does compatibility with prehistoric applications become a reality? In places other than the x86 architecture. I do DBA work for an RBOC, and yes, we have ancient COBOL and FORTRAN applications that first ran in the 1960s. For those groups, Y2K was a genuine nightmare. But all those apps run on MVS and other mainframe environments--not exactly the x86's stomping grounds. As for other, pre-x86 micro architectures, well, I can run all my old Atari 400 apps under an emulator on my Pentium 200, because I have cycles to spare even to a badly written emulator.
So, no, the x86 isn't obsolete. The newer generations have some obsolete components, though.
--
Yeah, but what's the fun of just walking into the side of the Hancock building when you can fly a Cessna into it at 200mph? If you just walk into the Hancock building, you wind up in the lobby, take the escalator up to the mezzanine and order a Coke. I can do that in real life, eh? Who's gonna buy simGoBuyACoke? simFlyIntoABuilding is much more exciting, and I still didn't have to shoot anybody.
--
You forgot poker. You can make a poker game truly memorable with the simple additions of quite a bit of whiskey and a firearm.
--
I propose a dignity fee, and I'm going to start issuing this challenge to prospective employers: you may test my urine for the presence of drugs once per month on one condition: if the drug test returns a negative result, I shall be awarded a dignity fee of one thousand dollars and two days paid vacation.
The only drug policies I have ever worked under stated that the company could only test me if they had "reasonable suspicion" that I was abusing drugs, and that said abuse was adversely affecting my job performance or work environment. Even in such a "permissive" environment I have seen managers use drug testing as a humiliation/coercion tactic to keep uppity employees in line. Having a dignity fee policy in place would help prevent such things from happening in the future.
--
Reporting damaging information about a person you are supposed to investigate, which information is provably not true is prima facie evidence of negligence in conducting the investigation.
--
In other words, human beings don't have unique identifiers, and many of the things you might expect to be a unique identifier can change, be misentered, forgotten, lost or stolen.
And if you try to force someone to have a unique identifier assigned by you, you are overstepping your bounds in a way people accustimed to at least the illusion of personal freedom and privacy (e.g. Americans) will react badly to. You are also setting up an abusable system.
So it's a mess because the real world is a mess. It's very easy to forget that people are human beings, not tuples in a database.
There are gonna be search errors. A woman in North Carolina recently got thrown in jail for three days because her driver's license number matched the SSN of a fugitive in New Jersey. The fact that she's white, female and in her fifties did nothing to deter the arresting officers from mistaking her with a 22 year old Latino male, so she's suing for wrongful imprisonment. Gonna win, too, I hope.
--
--
It's the first song Tom Servo sang when his voice got "retuned" prior to MST3K episode 201 ("Rocket Ship X-M").
--
On the other hand, the name Metallica is trademarked, and the titles of their albums constitute intellectual property, so the label could try to "protect from unauthorized use" or some crap.
--
Anybody out here a former taper for the Grateful Dead? If you don't know what I'm talking about, anybody could go into one of a Dead show and record it and distribute the tape without paying a fee of any kind to the band, and their shows always sold out, and their albums sold like crazy.
Phish has been doing the same thing, to great success. Phish concerts are online within hours after their shows, yet their live two-volume CD A Live One still sells very well. I have a friend who has over a thousand hours of Phish concerts on CD, all off the net. He still goes to shows. If he and his wife see them four times a year that's two hundred bucks to Phish, record label be damned.
Barlow's right: the "artists" most at risk from Napster are manufactured contrivances like the New Kids on the Block, designed by actuaries and focus group reports to have a high statistical likelihood of appealing to fourteen year olds. Real art, however, does not need to be rammed down your throat. When you find it, you'll know it. The way to find something that really turns you on is when a friend e-mails you that first .mp3 with a note saying "Let me know what you think of these guys. They'll be in town in a couple of weeks."
--
The "Industry" just controls distribution, and boy do they ever control it. You'll have a hard time finding a record store that carries used CDs and major label new releases, because if the store is found out, the label will stop distributing new CDs to them or refuse to allow them to advertise they have those new releases in stock.
So now there's an entirely new way of distributing music. And the current distributors are scared. They are terrified of their own obsolescence, and they are swaddling their greed in a rhetoric of justice. They don't care about music, or artistic integrity, or artists' rights. They care about their money, and absolutely nothing else in the world. The new reality is that the link between artist and performer is the music itself, not the industry's permission to distribute it.
We need Columbia Records for music the way we need buggy whips to drive a car. They're just not part of the equation anymore.
--
On Telemundo, a Spanish-language cable network we get in Atlanta, there are a couple of soap operas where the actors' lips clearly are flapping in Spanish, but for some reason, the dialogue is dubbed--into Spanish. My best guess is that the soaps came from, say, Argentina, and that the accent is as incomprehensible to a Puerto Rican as a thick Edinburgh brogue is to a Texan. For weeks now I've been torn between the fact that I am actually picking up a little Spanish watching these things, and the fact that by picking up a little Spanish I'm enjoying them less. See, the great thing about Telemundo soaps is that you can still tell what's basically going on, because it's a soap, and there's always a bitch, and there's always a sweet young thing, and there's always a matron, and there's always a rich bastard, and there's always a rich but sincere guy, and...well. Also, the women are extremely hot.
The whole reason I bring this up is that there were a couple of occasions where the dialogue sync was so far off that I started zoning out and thinking about the muchachas calientes instead of giant Rastafarian motherfuckers stomping around in their oversized novelty ski gloves and prosthetic foreheads. Believe me, a preoccupation with simpering Latinas is probably the best thing you can bring into the theater with you. That and a half pint of Wild Turkey so you can mix it with your four dollar Coke then drink it then hurl the bottle at the screen about seventy minutes in. Screaming "what the fuck's going on here?" every few minutes doesn't hurt, either. Nobody seems to mind--they're all wondering the same thing and wish you'd brought enough whiskey for everybody.
Anyhoo, Battlefield Earth sucked wet farts out of a dead pigeon's ass. Every time I try to say different, I sound like Clinton explaining why a hummer from an intern doesn't count as sexual relations.
--