Having actually read the entire series, I can't imagine that any movie studio would be interested in making the whole thing...As you get farther and farther in, things get more and more abstruse.
I can imagine some of the later books made into movies, but I can't imagine actually wanting to watch them.
I won't use anything but ASUS motherboards. Once you get used to the feature set on a good motherboard, the crap you get from the big computer manufacturers is just intolerable.
Most of them skimp on the motherboard because most consumers don't understand the difference between a fast processor on a good motherboard, and a fast processor on a terrible motherboard. They just look at mhz and ram, and ignore bus speed/bandwidth.
Meh. Tom "I'm not an engineer" Clancy wrote a book with one of the main premises being a man taking out the Capitol building by crashing a large plane into it...About a decade before 9/11.
It's not an original idea, though I agree with you in regards to the people who think it was something besides jet fuel. Most people have no idea about the amount of energy contained in a jetliner.
Did you get that link from the bit in the summary where it says "This the second time in just a few months that engineers have been likened to terrorists" or did you just remember it?
I hate these articles, but I can't decide if I hate them because they're intellectual snobbery (not only are we better than physicists, mathematicians, chemists, etc, we're also superlative terrorists!) or I hate them because they're anti-intellectual (Engineers are all smart and anti-social, therefore they're basically the unabomber).
Basically anyone who is methodical and knowledgeable would make a good X, where X is something that needs a methodical knowledgeable person. Engineers are required to be methodical and knowledgeable, so QED.
I don't know why they're so damn fixated on engineers though. Doesn't take an engineer to slam a plane into a building, and that's about the most successful piece of terrorism to date.
Hate to use management terminology, but they're not "agile" enough to pull off that sort of application. Putting aside their ability to do it, even if they did make it work the resulting product would be too expensive for anything other than a gimmick market.
I have a full version of Windows 95 lying around, and it has saved me quite a penny over the years.
It's definitely a scam; there is no reason why the "upgrade" should cost less, since it is identical to the full version and you can "upgrade" using an original disk that wasn't used to install the OS that's currently on the machine.
The problem with people in an "IT shop" managing all their own junk is that most of them won't be people who normally set up machines and fix hardware problems. My big hobby is computer crap; I go home and set up obscure networking services at my house, just because I'm interested in it.
My day job is mostly programming, however, and I am by far the most hardware/networking capable programmer. Most of the other guys have no clue, same as the guys who normally deal with the OS/Hardware problems have no idea about programming.
But you get a lot of arrogant people in IT, who decide that since they make more money than the setup guys, they should have the ability to setup all their own junk. Turns out they don't always do it well.
There is a lot to be said for leaving specialist work to the specialists. I can do all the hardware stuff, but the hardware guys do it better, and my time is more expensive than theirs.
It's very easy to say this sort of thing when you only have to support your own silly decisions. When you have to support 100+ users, then you'll be pissed off every time they turn the goddamn box ON.
Well, I've been admining and maintaining my own systems for a decade (I do work in IT), but if I could buy whatever I thought I needed to do my job, I'd have 10,000 dollars more hardware on my desk, another 80k in the server room, and the software budget would be 6 figures.
I've always had more problem with knowledgeable loose cannons than with otherwise incompetent people who were non-the-less afraid to mess with the magic box.
If you let them install whatever they want, then you almost always have more services running; most users won't install IIS, for example, on their windows machine, but the IT masta will, on a whim, but then he'll stop using (and patching) it and it'll get exploited a year later. This kinda stuff happens a lot.
Then there is the whole "standardization" thing. Unless your people don't have to work together at all, it really helps to have a somewhat standardized environment.
*Pause for the sound of 10,000 alpha geeks freaking out about their needs*
In the real world, if every worker has his own personalized machine and someone's machine goes down, they're screwed. They have access to none of their apps, none of their highly personalized tools. They can't just jump on someone else's machine, they have to fix their own. Likewise if they get canned, then no one can use their machine without wiping it and reinstalling everything. Even if you just rip the harddrive and replace it with a cloned one, the new guy still can't do anything for a week while he's compiling binaries for his most commonly used perl modules.
If someone runs into a problem that they can't solve, no one can really help them...It's a pain.
The MWR people are all crying because no one told them that it was a test...Apparently, in their minds, there is no need to test an army organizations response to someone falsifying announcements in their name.
Sounds like the test went off swimmingly. I can't count the number of times I've thought about doing the same sort of thing to people I work with. A few good solid scares will tighten up their security policy.
That's fine, but the massive text and the site name stacking crap annoy me to bits, as does the fact that it stores even more useless crap than the old version did.
I think they could make everyone happy by just allowing some damn customization...I seriously don't need site names in my history, and it clutters up the damn dropdown.
Well, since it's pretty obvious that what he was doing was un-crippling software that they had intentionally broken, I think it's understandable that they're pissed.
On the other hand, I wonder how this is going to affect their reputation? Creative has always been a bunch of jackasses, but this thing caused a lot of problems for Microsoft, and I imagine they don't have much of a sense of humor about that right now.
I don't honestly think there will be any evolutionary pressure, simply because there is no vehicle for it. In the case of livestock viruses, those viruses are passed around the animal populations for huge amounts of time before one manages to jump the divide. We live in close proximity to the livestock, so there is a good chance, given enough time, that a virus will mutate in just the right way, and that that mutation will happen in the right time and place to find a suitable host.
None of that applies to a theoretical martian virus that's got no growth vector and no suitable host animal that it's evolved to live in, that we like to hang out with. It would have to have us nailed the first time, no tests, no practice. That's pretty damn unlikely.
The asteroid thing is of course possible, but again pretty unlikely. In that scenario, it'd be more likely that we've already been infected with martian bacteria and have built up immunity than it is that our whole ecosystem is parallel to theirs, and their theoretical hostile bacteria are out there now, waiting.
Yes and no. Yes, you'll get a more accurate answer, as far as the machine is concerned, but no, in that the answer will be the lowest common denominator of attractiveness.
When you put enough numbers together, all you really get is the sort of bland result that is acceptable to the largest number of people. The female equivalent of McDonald's food, top 40 music, and white bread...No real room in there for the beauty that can occasionally startle you, stop you in your tracks, that we all look for and seldom find on television.
Even beyond the very real problems listed above, I'm not aware of any actual empirical standard of beauty. All you can point to is a general average of perceptions of attractiveness, and even that is far from foolproof as evidenced by the thousands of women who actively try to personify that average, and end up looking subtly hideous (a la Anna Nicole Smith).
In the end, it all comes down to individual perception. Sit ten guys down with thirty pictures, and you're going to get 10 different #1's. Maybe you can teach a program to be able to say who it thinks is hot, whatever use that is. Or you could write a program that would allow a person to rate a hundred or so pictures, so that you could run a dating service that automatically pairs you up with people it thinks you'll find attractive...That's the only use I can come up with.
You've been watching too much sci-fi...It's unlikely that something from such a wildly different evolutionary line would even be infectious to us. It's still pretty rare that diseases jump species here and everything on Earth is pretty closely related, genetically speaking.
The odds of finding a living, viable, martian disease that likes people are about the same as finding a herd of giraffes roaming around up there.
Wasn't until I clicked your link that I realized the crappy address bar font explosion I've been idly trying to find a way to disable is a new FEATURE. It's fricking hideous!
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Having actually read the entire series, I can't imagine that any movie studio would be interested in making the whole thing...As you get farther and farther in, things get more and more abstruse.
I can imagine some of the later books made into movies, but I can't imagine actually wanting to watch them.
The book is near-impossible to transfer accurately to film; there is waaaay too much internal dialogue and extremely dry politic-ing.
Any movie that is actually going to be worth watching is going to have to hack out big chunks of that stuff.
I won't use anything but ASUS motherboards. Once you get used to the feature set on a good motherboard, the crap you get from the big computer manufacturers is just intolerable.
Most of them skimp on the motherboard because most consumers don't understand the difference between a fast processor on a good motherboard, and a fast processor on a terrible motherboard. They just look at mhz and ram, and ignore bus speed/bandwidth.
Meh. Tom "I'm not an engineer" Clancy wrote a book with one of the main premises being a man taking out the Capitol building by crashing a large plane into it...About a decade before 9/11.
It's not an original idea, though I agree with you in regards to the people who think it was something besides jet fuel. Most people have no idea about the amount of energy contained in a jetliner.
Did you get that link from the bit in the summary where it says "This the second time in just a few months that engineers have been likened to terrorists" or did you just remember it?
I hate these articles, but I can't decide if I hate them because they're intellectual snobbery (not only are we better than physicists, mathematicians, chemists, etc, we're also superlative terrorists!) or I hate them because they're anti-intellectual (Engineers are all smart and anti-social, therefore they're basically the unabomber).
Basically anyone who is methodical and knowledgeable would make a good X, where X is something that needs a methodical knowledgeable person. Engineers are required to be methodical and knowledgeable, so QED.
I don't know why they're so damn fixated on engineers though. Doesn't take an engineer to slam a plane into a building, and that's about the most successful piece of terrorism to date.
Hate to use management terminology, but they're not "agile" enough to pull off that sort of application. Putting aside their ability to do it, even if they did make it work the resulting product would be too expensive for anything other than a gimmick market.
Try looking at the big star that's visible every day.
I have a full version of Windows 95 lying around, and it has saved me quite a penny over the years.
It's definitely a scam; there is no reason why the "upgrade" should cost less, since it is identical to the full version and you can "upgrade" using an original disk that wasn't used to install the OS that's currently on the machine.
The problem with people in an "IT shop" managing all their own junk is that most of them won't be people who normally set up machines and fix hardware problems. My big hobby is computer crap; I go home and set up obscure networking services at my house, just because I'm interested in it.
My day job is mostly programming, however, and I am by far the most hardware/networking capable programmer. Most of the other guys have no clue, same as the guys who normally deal with the OS/Hardware problems have no idea about programming.
But you get a lot of arrogant people in IT, who decide that since they make more money than the setup guys, they should have the ability to setup all their own junk. Turns out they don't always do it well.
There is a lot to be said for leaving specialist work to the specialists. I can do all the hardware stuff, but the hardware guys do it better, and my time is more expensive than theirs.
It's very easy to say this sort of thing when you only have to support your own silly decisions. When you have to support 100+ users, then you'll be pissed off every time they turn the goddamn box ON.
Well, I've been admining and maintaining my own systems for a decade (I do work in IT), but if I could buy whatever I thought I needed to do my job, I'd have 10,000 dollars more hardware on my desk, another 80k in the server room, and the software budget would be 6 figures.
Hey, testing and development is hard!
I've always had more problem with knowledgeable loose cannons than with otherwise incompetent people who were non-the-less afraid to mess with the magic box.
If you let them install whatever they want, then you almost always have more services running; most users won't install IIS, for example, on their windows machine, but the IT masta will, on a whim, but then he'll stop using (and patching) it and it'll get exploited a year later. This kinda stuff happens a lot.
Then there is the whole "standardization" thing. Unless your people don't have to work together at all, it really helps to have a somewhat standardized environment.
*Pause for the sound of 10,000 alpha geeks freaking out about their needs*
In the real world, if every worker has his own personalized machine and someone's machine goes down, they're screwed. They have access to none of their apps, none of their highly personalized tools. They can't just jump on someone else's machine, they have to fix their own. Likewise if they get canned, then no one can use their machine without wiping it and reinstalling everything. Even if you just rip the harddrive and replace it with a cloned one, the new guy still can't do anything for a week while he's compiling binaries for his most commonly used perl modules.
If someone runs into a problem that they can't solve, no one can really help them...It's a pain.
The MWR people are all crying because no one told them that it was a test...Apparently, in their minds, there is no need to test an army organizations response to someone falsifying announcements in their name.
Sounds like the test went off swimmingly. I can't count the number of times I've thought about doing the same sort of thing to people I work with. A few good solid scares will tighten up their security policy.
That's fine, but the massive text and the site name stacking crap annoy me to bits, as does the fact that it stores even more useless crap than the old version did.
I think they could make everyone happy by just allowing some damn customization...I seriously don't need site names in my history, and it clutters up the damn dropdown.
Well, since it's pretty obvious that what he was doing was un-crippling software that they had intentionally broken, I think it's understandable that they're pissed.
On the other hand, I wonder how this is going to affect their reputation? Creative has always been a bunch of jackasses, but this thing caused a lot of problems for Microsoft, and I imagine they don't have much of a sense of humor about that right now.
You just described something out of the x-files...Want to try again?
Well, no doubt most asymmetrical people have trouble dating, so yea, I can see that.
Joking aside, most people already are symmetrical, so it would definitely stand out for people who aren't.
I don't honestly think there will be any evolutionary pressure, simply because there is no vehicle for it. In the case of livestock viruses, those viruses are passed around the animal populations for huge amounts of time before one manages to jump the divide. We live in close proximity to the livestock, so there is a good chance, given enough time, that a virus will mutate in just the right way, and that that mutation will happen in the right time and place to find a suitable host.
None of that applies to a theoretical martian virus that's got no growth vector and no suitable host animal that it's evolved to live in, that we like to hang out with. It would have to have us nailed the first time, no tests, no practice. That's pretty damn unlikely.
The asteroid thing is of course possible, but again pretty unlikely. In that scenario, it'd be more likely that we've already been infected with martian bacteria and have built up immunity than it is that our whole ecosystem is parallel to theirs, and their theoretical hostile bacteria are out there now, waiting.
Not me, but that's pretty much my point. You thought she was beautiful and I didn't, and neither of us is objectively right or wrong.
Yes and no. Yes, you'll get a more accurate answer, as far as the machine is concerned, but no, in that the answer will be the lowest common denominator of attractiveness.
When you put enough numbers together, all you really get is the sort of bland result that is acceptable to the largest number of people. The female equivalent of McDonald's food, top 40 music, and white bread...No real room in there for the beauty that can occasionally startle you, stop you in your tracks, that we all look for and seldom find on television.
I'd actually though about that when I first heard of the website...That's a lot of interesting data being collected.
Still, the lack of any demographic information on the reviewers makes the rest of the data much less useful.
Even beyond the very real problems listed above, I'm not aware of any actual empirical standard of beauty. All you can point to is a general average of perceptions of attractiveness, and even that is far from foolproof as evidenced by the thousands of women who actively try to personify that average, and end up looking subtly hideous (a la Anna Nicole Smith).
In the end, it all comes down to individual perception. Sit ten guys down with thirty pictures, and you're going to get 10 different #1's. Maybe you can teach a program to be able to say who it thinks is hot, whatever use that is. Or you could write a program that would allow a person to rate a hundred or so pictures, so that you could run a dating service that automatically pairs you up with people it thinks you'll find attractive...That's the only use I can come up with.
You've been watching too much sci-fi...It's unlikely that something from such a wildly different evolutionary line would even be infectious to us. It's still pretty rare that diseases jump species here and everything on Earth is pretty closely related, genetically speaking.
The odds of finding a living, viable, martian disease that likes people are about the same as finding a herd of giraffes roaming around up there.
Wasn't until I clicked your link that I realized the crappy address bar font explosion I've been idly trying to find a way to disable is a new FEATURE. It's fricking hideous!