That's an interesting idea, but I doubt it would happen. Peter Jackson will spend the rest of his life answering questions about LOTR and having the rest of his work compared to it. His filmmaking legacy is secure. I don't see why he'd want to take on another juggernaut like Star Wars and deal with the fans and the media and the hype again.
If there are any more SW films, Lucas will make them himself. By insisting on directing the prequel trilogy films despite critical and fan reactions, he's shown that he needs to keep that control. He's not going to give it up, especially to someone like Peter Jackson, who would impose his own vision on the project. And by his ability to get actual emotive performances out of his actors, Jackson would show the audience that he's clearly the better director. It's not bad for Lucas to be outdone in a separate film genre, but he won't let it happen in his own universe.
The management team that dragged Novell down in the mid-1990s is long gone. The current leadership has had the company on a solid footing and a clear path for the past few years. NetWare 6 and 6.5 have gotten great reviews, there is still a large install base of NetWare, and most importantly, I think they have learned from their past mistakes. I doubt we'll see Novell take on MS on the desktop next week or even next year.
Novell needs to position SuSE Linux primarily as a server OS and continue to market their products as a back-end solution vs. Windows Server 2003. They can save the desktop battle for another day. They stand a better chance of making desktop inroads once their server Linux product has gotten them good press and more customers.
I bought St. Anger just for the free music. I listened to the album once and wasn't too impressed, but the free music on the web site wasn't bad. It's three full concerts from 1994-1998, with the audio taken right from a mixing board. So you don't get the crowd noise (and you really miss it in songs like "Master of Puppets") but the sound quality isn't too bad. And since I paid $13 for the album and got three concerts of good songs thrown in, I think I spent my money well.
I was at Inner Harbor the Saturday night after Isabel blew through. Most of the shops and restaurants were open and there were plenty of people enjoying the late summer weather. The harbor and downtown areas were well lit and enough people were out that I would have felt comfortable but conspicuous using my laptop out in the open. (I've gotten funny looks while surfing wirelessly from parks in NYC, and we've had open wireless networks here for a long time now. Non-techies who don't know about wireless networks tend to stare at you while you check your e-mail.) My brother lives a few blocks north of the harbor and while he says that he wouldn't walk home alone from there at night, the crime isn't that bad.
I agree that it's important for the city to clean up its "quality of life" crimes, but the situation didn't look as bad to me as the original poster makes it sound.
Most of the time it's a temporary relationship, whether you're a hiring manager or just a candidate looking for work. Unless you work strictly as a contractor or manage the HR operations for a company with lots of constant turnover, you're only going to work with a headhunter when you need to change jobs or fill a vacancy. Hopefully, with this economy, you're not doing that too often. It's hard to build the kind of trust that a good relationship demands if you only work with a recruiter or agency every few years.
I've had good results working with one particular headhunter, who found me my current job and negotiated a good starting deal for me, but I haven't talked to him or anyone else from his company for at least two years (I've been employed here 3+ years). So I'm not sure I'd trust him or the agency to represent me another time, just because of the lack of familiarity. Although I hadn't met him before my previous job search, and he got me my kick-ass job. I suppose I'd give him a call, just to let him know I was available again. Before this job, a headhunter found me my previous job, but it turned out that he and my former boss were old buddies. Since I conducted my last job search on the sly, I couldn't trust that recruiter not to tell my boss what I was doing. These are the kinds of risks inherent in dealing with headhunters when you're looking for work.
1) you already have to pay to get a passport. In the US, it's around $50 (I'm too lazy to check right now). I'm sure they'll just increase the cost to cover the technology. And for those who complain about the cost, you also have to pay for your driver's license, so what's the difference? If there are countries out there where passports and driver's licenses are free, that's great, but eventually you'll be charged for this sort of thing. I see it as an acceptable cost of travel: if you want to go somewhere, you have to pay for your passport along with your tickets, hotel, rental car, and so on.
2) I have half a dozen ID and transit cards that use some sort of magnetic technology that isn't affected by strong electronic signals like cell phones or computers. I'm sure these chips will be designed the same way to resist tampering with magnets.
I like the idea of doing the work but looking for a new job, but when are you going to have the time to look, much less interview? And pissing and moaning to anyone is a bad idea. It just gets you the reputation of a complainer. Management, or at least your supervisor, is bound to realize that the development team is unhappy with the work arrangement and will face either mass departures or severe low morale during and after this project.
When I've been presented with schedules like this in the past, there's always been some compensation time involved (paid days off that don't count against your vacation days) and/or a serious bonus. But comp time isn't always an official policy, so sometimes you have to work out a deal with your supervisor and have him/her cover for you while you take the day off. Other times you get nothing but your regular paycheck.
It's only 4-6 weeks, and there's bound to be some flexibility in that schedule. People get sick, emergencies happen, so if you can "fake" it, you will get time off. If you have no choice but to do the work on the 12/7 schedule, do it, but as soon as the project is over, start your job search.
The trouble with your solution is office politics. Often, the manager with whom the staff has a problem is seen differently by the manager's boss. In my experience, the manager can turn the dissent around and make it look like the staff is the problem, not the manager. This tactic usually results in the staff leaving, often through firings or forcing people to leave by reassigning them to unpleasant duties. In my office, there's one manager who has a bad reputation among most of the staff. But his boss must have a great opinion of him, because the manager has been here for years and almost always gets his way. People who work under him who have issues with him end up leaving or assigned to other divisions. I'm just glad I don't work for him, and I'd think seriously about leaving if he became my boss.
I realize that the point of your meeting with the dept. head was the "he goes or we go" ultimatum. My point is that, like most of the other posters have mentioned, if you're going to try this tactic, you'd better be prepared right away to follow through on your threat. Have other opportunities lined up, have your personal finances in order, insurance ready, etc. Because you might find yourself out of a job before you're ready to be out on the street.
I just moved over the weekend from a tiny apartment to a much larger one in the same city. After spending two days trying to surf on someone else's broadband, I finally got my cable Internet hooked up tonight and reconnected my SMC wireless router. Now I can surf from my couch in front of the TV, from the bedroom, the kitchen, or from the spare bedroom/office. I don't have a pool, patio, veranda, or anyplace else, so my wireless network is an easy setup -- one access point. What I do have is a great place to live and a convenient way to surf from anywhere. And the wireless router was $80 used from my wife's last job, and it's configured through a web page. It's almost too easy to use.
I went to college from 1992 to 1996, so I was just a little early to the Internet party. My school didn't offer e-mail to all students until 1994; before then you had to pay $75/semester for access to the computer labs and a VAX e-mail account. To get access to Unix and the vastly superior PINE e-mail system, you had to fill out a special form and even then, it helped to have a buddy who worked in the lab grease the wheel for you. I was there for the early days of the Mosaic browser, but there wasn't much to see in 1994. Even by the time I graduated, most students were just discovering e-mail (and grappling with the dumbed-down interface the school gave them instead of full shell accounts). I can't remember a professor giving out an e-mail address on a syllabus. I didn't do any research for class projects on the Internet. There just wasn't enough out there yet.
My brother's college experience might better straddle the end of the old way and the beginning of the new, Internet-enabled way. He attended college from 1995-1999, so he would have been at school when the Internet really went mainstream. But he also went to a more technical school, so that might explain the easier entry of the Internet into the educational process.
You must be my exact double. I also used to use a Palm Vx exclusively until someone at work gave me an iPaq to try out. I've been using it for about six months and I'm impressed with it, aside from the occasional crash (it wouldn't be a Windows-based OS without crashes). I'm not a big Outlook user, but I do keep my contacts in Outlook at home, and it's great to know that the iPaq is always synched with the PC. I spent $100 on a 256 MB SD card and downloaded PocketMusic, so now I take the iPaq to the gym and listen to my music that way, instead of my old bulky CD player or a $400 iPod. And with the expansion pack, I get WiFi or GPRS modem Internet access, neither of which I could do with my Palm.
The add-on software selection is good too. For a while I ran SimCity on the iPaq, and someone pointed me to a version of Age of Empires for the iPaq. While I still think that the form factor is too small for large games like that, it's great that developers are releasing products like RTS games for handhelds.
I'd like to try the Sharp Zaurus. I'm intrigued by the idea of a Linux-based handheld. I'm also interested in switching my iPaq OS to Linux (there are a few versions out there) but I don't want to lose all the functionality I have now.
It's been a while since I went to college, but I don't know too many students who took the time to type their notes after class, either for review purposes, preservation of data, or legibility. I had all sorts of activities outside class, like work, rehearsals, social time with friends, so I used my study time to work on assignments, not review my notes. Although looking over my notes immediately after class might have been more useful than waiting until the end of the semester, while studying for the final exam. Many times I found that weeks of class went by where I dozed in class and left unintelligible scribbles on the page.
Non-hacker/non-sci-fi summer reads
on
A Good Summer Read?
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· Score: 2, Informative
I love science fiction and technological novels by authors like Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, but the past few years I've tried to mix up my reading and expand my literary knowledge. Over the past three summers I've read:
Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth. Excellent off-the-wall psychoanalysis of growing up Jewish in New York City. It's really wild in some places, and laugh out loud funny most of the time.
The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It's not light reading, but it's fascinating. A study of family relationships, life in tsarist Russia in the 1870s, religion, politics, everything.
Doctor Faustus, by Thomas Mann. It's dense German prose, even after the translation to English. But I'm a musician, and this book is all about music, art, the history of Germany, and Hitler's rise to power, all wound up in the biography of a composer who sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for musical success. It's one of the five best books I've ever read.
My big summer read for this year is Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. It's my wife's favorite novel and she identifies strongly with the lead female character. Since I've never read it, I figure it's about time I got to know something that she enjoyed so much.
I've also spent time reading the latest Dune novels by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, a few Star Wars novels, all the Harry Potter books, and I'm currently reading a history of the Pittsburgh Steelers. I think that as long as you spend your summer reading and keeping your mind in shape, it doesn't matter what you read. Just enjoy yourself.
Not only have I seen Spiderman 2 filming in NYC, I've seen Maguire on the set. They shot a scene in a pizza place in Greenwich Village, down the block from my apartment. I watched with about 20 other people as Maguire traded places with his stunt double and later as two production assistants escorted him to and from his trailer, parked down the street. So he's most definitely in this movie.
I think Neal Stephenson has been unfairly classified as a cyberpunk author. Snow Crash, with its descriptions of hackers, computer networks, and bleak future society reminded me of William Gibson's Neuromancer, a classic cyberpunk novel. But while Cryptonomicon deals with technology, I wouldn't say that it's any kind of cyberpunk. And the society in The Diamond Age is far too clean and developed to qualify as cyberpunk in my mind. I think if you approach Stephenson merely as a novelist who uses vastly different concepts of society and characters in his books, you'll gain a greater appreciation for his work. He's extremely creative. I can't wait to see what he does in his new book.
I agree with you that spam is more than just an irritation. But *I* don't think that the burden of spam prevention needs to be placed on my friends and family. I'd rather see anti-spam filters like the one in Mozilla Mail applied on a larger scale. I don't know what criteria Earthlink's Spaminator uses, since it misses at least 15-20% of the spam that I receive. But it's a good start.
I'll be interested to see how Earthlink promotes this new system to its subscribers, and how many of the non-technical ones decide to implement it. I'm concerned that it's going to be too awkward for everyday users to use.
I've been an Earthlink customer for six years. I'm not about to implement a system that makes others do additional work to e-mail me, even if they are legitimate correspondents. I use my Earthlink address extensively for mailing lists, shopping, communications with family and friends, etc. People have been using my address for a long time and I don't want to force them to jump through hoops to send mail to me, even if it's just a one-time step.
Instead, I'd rather keep this burden to myself. I've been using the Bayesian junk mail filter in Mozilla Mail for a few weeks now and it's made a significant reduction in the amount of spam I see in my mailbox. It's not perfect: some messages still get through, but no spam elimination system is. At my office, we've spent thousands of dollars on mail servers that are designed to reduce spam, yet many of our users complain that they still see the same amount of spam or more than they did before we installed the servers. We're back to giving people the same old response about spam in their mailbox: delete it and move on with your life.
Earthlink already does this "holding" of spam via their Brightmail "Spaminator" system. I've had it enabled for years and my Spaminator storage area is always filled to capacity with spam. I think it's the overflow from that system that gets into my mailbox.
So I don't see them adding another "holding" area, unless they drop Brightmail completely and go with another system.
I disagree. Tape is still more reliable and easier to use than disk-based backups. We used to have an optical drive jukebox for backups, running on a Sun workstation. Last year we replaced it with a tape library running on Windows NT. The major reason for the switch was that the backup software for the optical system was no longer supported by the manufacturer and there was no replacement that would work for all of our servers (Windows, Novell, HP-UX). I liked the speed of the optical system but the disks only held 5 GB each, and the jukebox only held 32 disks or some other small number. The library holds 120 tapes, and the sizes are 50 or 100 GB each. We dupe the tapes every day and send the copies offsite. Data restore speeds are slower than the optical disks, but not by much. And we have a smaller library at our DR site in case of emergency. We couldn't do the dupe process with the optical disks. And while we stored some disks offsite, the management of what was where was way too difficult. The tape library has been a big winner for us.
I was a longtime subscriber to the Washington Post when I lived in DC. I read most of the paper every day, especially the comics. When I moved to New York City four years ago, I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to read the comics anymore, and I was really upset at the idea. The NY Times doesn't have comics, and I don't want to read either of the tabloid papers (NY Post, NY Daily News) just for comics. Instead, I turned to the Washington Post's comics page online and I've never looked back. Every comic the Post carries is linked, either to the Post's own site or to the syndicate's web site. I even get some comics e-mailed to me each day from a syndicate's site, which lets me keep the ones I really like to show my wife or my friends. Any of the syndicate sites will be able to supply you with all the comics you will ever want. And I feel like I'm doing the environment a favor by not buying 60+ pages of disposable newsprint every day.
I'm sorry I already used up my mod points tonight on another thread; I'd mod your comment way up. Not only have you hit upon a great theory as to why the RIAA *really* cares about piracy lately, you've accurately described my MP3 collection and my attitude toward downloading music via P2P apps.
A few days ago I was thinking about the average person's lifespan and the number of times during their life that they will replace their existing recording and movie collections with updated media formats. For example, my father, who is in his fifties, has an extensive collection of classical recordings on vinyl, cassette, and even reel-to-reel tape. He's spent the past 15 years repurchasing many of these recordings on CD, mostly to listen to in his car. I've had a similar experience: in the late '80s and early '90s, I didn't own a CD player, so I bought all my recordings on cassette; I've spent the past 10 years collecting new music and rebuying old recordings on CD. It's possible that both my father and I could be made to repurchase our entire collections in yet another format (his fifth in some cases, and my third), assuming that the recording industry comes up with a new format to replace CDs. And assuming that said format provides enough of a benefit over CDs to provide an incentive to spend all that money another time. I'm not talking about SACD or DVD-Audio; I can't imagine that Dark Side of the Moon sounds that much better in 5.1 sound than it does in stereo. How much enhancement does an audiophile need? What scares the RIAA is that there is no great new format on the horizon. I'm much more likely to buy an MP3 jukebox for my stereo system than I am an SACD or DVD-A player.
Instead of harassing consumers with copy-protected CDs that don't sell, maybe the RIAA should work on a time machine that would let them go back and put the copy protection on the first CDs, so that this problem never happens. I doubt we'll ever see this kind of trouble with DVDs, since they've had encryption and copy-protection hassles from day one.
I bought a Compaq laptop for my wife at Best Buy four years ago. When they asked me about the extended warranty, I initially said no, thinking that you never get it unless you're a sucker. But then the sales guy told me that the extended warranty covered replacing the LCD screen, while Compaq's warranty didn't. Even that wouldn't have swayed me, except that I worked in an office where we had several Compaq laptops with LCDs that had gone bad. Under the corporate warranty, we replaced them for $100 each, instead of $1000.
It occurs to me now that I never read the terms of the Best Buy warranty, so I don't know if it would have actually covered a replacement LCD. But it did come in handy when the laptop fell on the floor one day and the power connection stopped working. I took the laptop and the warranty back to another Best Buy, and two months later (typical service center treatment all the way), picked up a fixed laptop.
Here's the problem with software release numbering today: the numbers are getting too high. Too many release numbers in a product's history, and I think consumers will start to wonder what's wrong with the product that they have to release a new version all the time.
It's all about marketing. Microsoft knew this years ago, when they switched from Windows 3.x to Windows 95, adopting a year-based numbering system, then the letters XP, etc. At heart it may be Windows NT 5.1, but XP makes it sound better and makes the average consumer think "I gotta get me some of that!" Apple is going to have a problem with upcoming releases of their OS. OS X was a great name, but where do you go from there? OS XI? OS X.2? They'll need a new marketing scheme.
Red Hat, Mandrake, and all the rest would do well to reconsider their numbering systems and switch to a year/month-based concept, especially since there are point releases of Linux distros so frequently. If they keep the same system for another ten years, we'll eventually have Red Hat 20, Mandrake 23.2, SuSE 19.5, etc. That just seems unworkable over the long term.
I think that the Academy wisely decided to ignore the CGI aspects of Sinise's performance. If they hadn't removed them digitally, the only alternative the producers had was to actually remove his legs. But that would have been quite an example of method acting.
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If there are any more SW films, Lucas will make them himself. By insisting on directing the prequel trilogy films despite critical and fan reactions, he's shown that he needs to keep that control. He's not going to give it up, especially to someone like Peter Jackson, who would impose his own vision on the project. And by his ability to get actual emotive performances out of his actors, Jackson would show the audience that he's clearly the better director. It's not bad for Lucas to be outdone in a separate film genre, but he won't let it happen in his own universe.
Novell needs to position SuSE Linux primarily as a server OS and continue to market their products as a back-end solution vs. Windows Server 2003. They can save the desktop battle for another day. They stand a better chance of making desktop inroads once their server Linux product has gotten them good press and more customers.
I bought St. Anger just for the free music. I listened to the album once and wasn't too impressed, but the free music on the web site wasn't bad. It's three full concerts from 1994-1998, with the audio taken right from a mixing board. So you don't get the crowd noise (and you really miss it in songs like "Master of Puppets") but the sound quality isn't too bad. And since I paid $13 for the album and got three concerts of good songs thrown in, I think I spent my money well.
I agree that it's important for the city to clean up its "quality of life" crimes, but the situation didn't look as bad to me as the original poster makes it sound.
I've had good results working with one particular headhunter, who found me my current job and negotiated a good starting deal for me, but I haven't talked to him or anyone else from his company for at least two years (I've been employed here 3+ years). So I'm not sure I'd trust him or the agency to represent me another time, just because of the lack of familiarity. Although I hadn't met him before my previous job search, and he got me my kick-ass job. I suppose I'd give him a call, just to let him know I was available again. Before this job, a headhunter found me my previous job, but it turned out that he and my former boss were old buddies. Since I conducted my last job search on the sly, I couldn't trust that recruiter not to tell my boss what I was doing. These are the kinds of risks inherent in dealing with headhunters when you're looking for work.
The Cubs win their division and make the playoffs, leading to cell phone outages in the US, power outages all over Italy, and more hurricanes are coming. Better get ready for the rapture!
2) I have half a dozen ID and transit cards that use some sort of magnetic technology that isn't affected by strong electronic signals like cell phones or computers. I'm sure these chips will be designed the same way to resist tampering with magnets.
When I've been presented with schedules like this in the past, there's always been some compensation time involved (paid days off that don't count against your vacation days) and/or a serious bonus. But comp time isn't always an official policy, so sometimes you have to work out a deal with your supervisor and have him/her cover for you while you take the day off. Other times you get nothing but your regular paycheck.
It's only 4-6 weeks, and there's bound to be some flexibility in that schedule. People get sick, emergencies happen, so if you can "fake" it, you will get time off. If you have no choice but to do the work on the 12/7 schedule, do it, but as soon as the project is over, start your job search.
I realize that the point of your meeting with the dept. head was the "he goes or we go" ultimatum. My point is that, like most of the other posters have mentioned, if you're going to try this tactic, you'd better be prepared right away to follow through on your threat. Have other opportunities lined up, have your personal finances in order, insurance ready, etc. Because you might find yourself out of a job before you're ready to be out on the street.
I just moved over the weekend from a tiny apartment to a much larger one in the same city. After spending two days trying to surf on someone else's broadband, I finally got my cable Internet hooked up tonight and reconnected my SMC wireless router. Now I can surf from my couch in front of the TV, from the bedroom, the kitchen, or from the spare bedroom/office. I don't have a pool, patio, veranda, or anyplace else, so my wireless network is an easy setup -- one access point. What I do have is a great place to live and a convenient way to surf from anywhere. And the wireless router was $80 used from my wife's last job, and it's configured through a web page. It's almost too easy to use.
My brother's college experience might better straddle the end of the old way and the beginning of the new, Internet-enabled way. He attended college from 1995-1999, so he would have been at school when the Internet really went mainstream. But he also went to a more technical school, so that might explain the easier entry of the Internet into the educational process.
The add-on software selection is good too. For a while I ran SimCity on the iPaq, and someone pointed me to a version of Age of Empires for the iPaq. While I still think that the form factor is too small for large games like that, it's great that developers are releasing products like RTS games for handhelds.
I'd like to try the Sharp Zaurus. I'm intrigued by the idea of a Linux-based handheld. I'm also interested in switching my iPaq OS to Linux (there are a few versions out there) but I don't want to lose all the functionality I have now.
Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth. Excellent off-the-wall psychoanalysis of growing up Jewish in New York City. It's really wild in some places, and laugh out loud funny most of the time.
The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It's not light reading, but it's fascinating. A study of family relationships, life in tsarist Russia in the 1870s, religion, politics, everything.
Doctor Faustus, by Thomas Mann. It's dense German prose, even after the translation to English. But I'm a musician, and this book is all about music, art, the history of Germany, and Hitler's rise to power, all wound up in the biography of a composer who sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for musical success. It's one of the five best books I've ever read.
My big summer read for this year is Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. It's my wife's favorite novel and she identifies strongly with the lead female character. Since I've never read it, I figure it's about time I got to know something that she enjoyed so much.
I've also spent time reading the latest Dune novels by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, a few Star Wars novels, all the Harry Potter books, and I'm currently reading a history of the Pittsburgh Steelers. I think that as long as you spend your summer reading and keeping your mind in shape, it doesn't matter what you read. Just enjoy yourself.
Not only have I seen Spiderman 2 filming in NYC, I've seen Maguire on the set. They shot a scene in a pizza place in Greenwich Village, down the block from my apartment. I watched with about 20 other people as Maguire traded places with his stunt double and later as two production assistants escorted him to and from his trailer, parked down the street. So he's most definitely in this movie.
I think Neal Stephenson has been unfairly classified as a cyberpunk author. Snow Crash, with its descriptions of hackers, computer networks, and bleak future society reminded me of William Gibson's Neuromancer, a classic cyberpunk novel. But while Cryptonomicon deals with technology, I wouldn't say that it's any kind of cyberpunk. And the society in The Diamond Age is far too clean and developed to qualify as cyberpunk in my mind. I think if you approach Stephenson merely as a novelist who uses vastly different concepts of society and characters in his books, you'll gain a greater appreciation for his work. He's extremely creative. I can't wait to see what he does in his new book.
I'll be interested to see how Earthlink promotes this new system to its subscribers, and how many of the non-technical ones decide to implement it. I'm concerned that it's going to be too awkward for everyday users to use.
Instead, I'd rather keep this burden to myself. I've been using the Bayesian junk mail filter in Mozilla Mail for a few weeks now and it's made a significant reduction in the amount of spam I see in my mailbox. It's not perfect: some messages still get through, but no spam elimination system is. At my office, we've spent thousands of dollars on mail servers that are designed to reduce spam, yet many of our users complain that they still see the same amount of spam or more than they did before we installed the servers. We're back to giving people the same old response about spam in their mailbox: delete it and move on with your life.
So I don't see them adding another "holding" area, unless they drop Brightmail completely and go with another system.
I disagree. Tape is still more reliable and easier to use than disk-based backups. We used to have an optical drive jukebox for backups, running on a Sun workstation. Last year we replaced it with a tape library running on Windows NT. The major reason for the switch was that the backup software for the optical system was no longer supported by the manufacturer and there was no replacement that would work for all of our servers (Windows, Novell, HP-UX). I liked the speed of the optical system but the disks only held 5 GB each, and the jukebox only held 32 disks or some other small number. The library holds 120 tapes, and the sizes are 50 or 100 GB each. We dupe the tapes every day and send the copies offsite. Data restore speeds are slower than the optical disks, but not by much. And we have a smaller library at our DR site in case of emergency. We couldn't do the dupe process with the optical disks. And while we stored some disks offsite, the management of what was where was way too difficult. The tape library has been a big winner for us.
I was a longtime subscriber to the Washington Post when I lived in DC. I read most of the paper every day, especially the comics. When I moved to New York City four years ago, I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to read the comics anymore, and I was really upset at the idea. The NY Times doesn't have comics, and I don't want to read either of the tabloid papers (NY Post, NY Daily News) just for comics. Instead, I turned to the Washington Post's comics page online and I've never looked back. Every comic the Post carries is linked, either to the Post's own site or to the syndicate's web site. I even get some comics e-mailed to me each day from a syndicate's site, which lets me keep the ones I really like to show my wife or my friends. Any of the syndicate sites will be able to supply you with all the comics you will ever want. And I feel like I'm doing the environment a favor by not buying 60+ pages of disposable newsprint every day.
A few days ago I was thinking about the average person's lifespan and the number of times during their life that they will replace their existing recording and movie collections with updated media formats. For example, my father, who is in his fifties, has an extensive collection of classical recordings on vinyl, cassette, and even reel-to-reel tape. He's spent the past 15 years repurchasing many of these recordings on CD, mostly to listen to in his car. I've had a similar experience: in the late '80s and early '90s, I didn't own a CD player, so I bought all my recordings on cassette; I've spent the past 10 years collecting new music and rebuying old recordings on CD. It's possible that both my father and I could be made to repurchase our entire collections in yet another format (his fifth in some cases, and my third), assuming that the recording industry comes up with a new format to replace CDs. And assuming that said format provides enough of a benefit over CDs to provide an incentive to spend all that money another time. I'm not talking about SACD or DVD-Audio; I can't imagine that Dark Side of the Moon sounds that much better in 5.1 sound than it does in stereo. How much enhancement does an audiophile need? What scares the RIAA is that there is no great new format on the horizon. I'm much more likely to buy an MP3 jukebox for my stereo system than I am an SACD or DVD-A player.
Instead of harassing consumers with copy-protected CDs that don't sell, maybe the RIAA should work on a time machine that would let them go back and put the copy protection on the first CDs, so that this problem never happens. I doubt we'll ever see this kind of trouble with DVDs, since they've had encryption and copy-protection hassles from day one.
It occurs to me now that I never read the terms of the Best Buy warranty, so I don't know if it would have actually covered a replacement LCD. But it did come in handy when the laptop fell on the floor one day and the power connection stopped working. I took the laptop and the warranty back to another Best Buy, and two months later (typical service center treatment all the way), picked up a fixed laptop.
Here's the problem with software release numbering today: the numbers are getting too high. Too many release numbers in a product's history, and I think consumers will start to wonder what's wrong with the product that they have to release a new version all the time. It's all about marketing. Microsoft knew this years ago, when they switched from Windows 3.x to Windows 95, adopting a year-based numbering system, then the letters XP, etc. At heart it may be Windows NT 5.1, but XP makes it sound better and makes the average consumer think "I gotta get me some of that!" Apple is going to have a problem with upcoming releases of their OS. OS X was a great name, but where do you go from there? OS XI? OS X.2? They'll need a new marketing scheme. Red Hat, Mandrake, and all the rest would do well to reconsider their numbering systems and switch to a year/month-based concept, especially since there are point releases of Linux distros so frequently. If they keep the same system for another ten years, we'll eventually have Red Hat 20, Mandrake 23.2, SuSE 19.5, etc. That just seems unworkable over the long term.
I think that the Academy wisely decided to ignore the CGI aspects of Sinise's performance. If they hadn't removed them digitally, the only alternative the producers had was to actually remove his legs. But that would have been quite an example of method acting.