Well, we get AWESOME special effects in the movies becuase they're big budget. It's worth the price to see the Enterprise in the movies rather than the cheesy little model in the series. Granted, TNG had much better special effects than the original, but there's still something added in the movies. LIttle details, like watching the Borg stitch on the skin. IN an episode it would have been static makeup, in the movie you watched it spin like spider silk.
Ah give it up. Really. I followed that link knowing what I was going to find on the other end of it, just a bunch of freakish whining. It is the bane of our society that 'blogs are considered "art" or "news". I've yet to find one that is anything less than freakish bitching and moaning about how they "hurt" and how they've been "hurt" and how they "want to cry". Wheaton's 'blog isn't any different. The only thing I can say about what I've read of his is that it reflects the Wesley character extremely well, and a whiny bitch has no business on the enterprise.
Therefore he gets cut. Wesley wouldn't have made it thirty seconds under Kirk's command. FOr that matter, most of them wouldn't have.
To be real about it, we all have our "pain". I NEED my pain. I WANT my pain. It's what makes us individuals, it's what makes us do the things we do. Whining about it isn't going to change it. Just fucking get over it.
Pussy.
For the record, I am NOT posting this anonymously, because I stand behind what I say, and I live it.
Worse yet, doesn't TNG always feel like they're just barely on the verge of a group hug but they're holding it back?
Re:Wesley could have saved it with Open Source!
on
Critics Pan Nemesis
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· Score: 1
He would have installed Linux on the Borg Collective, and when they tried to install Interstellar Explorer, they'd set off a Blue Screen of Death and earth would have been safe!
This is actually sadly true, near as I can tell. In the NG episode Elementary, Dear Data, Geordi misspeaks a sentence and the computer creates a hologram capable of taking over the ship and destroying it. This proves that the Enterprise runs an advanced version of Windows and that Microsoft will never ever fix Windows.
Why won't Wesley ever be accepted into the fold again? Because he went into Free Software, thus defeating the idealism of Star Trek with its own idealism.
Disclaimer: I don't know that Wesley will never be accepted into the fold again, but I was happy to see him leave the show. His guest appearances were good, though, and refreshing. His character may have gotten better in the 3rd season, though, like most of them did (excepting Riker, of course).
So I take it that I'm not the only one who has repressed the horrible memory of seeing Star Trek V.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I happened to enjoy Star Trek V a lot. Each star trek movie (assuming you take 2 and 3 as the same movie) is a different story (until TNG, when each movie became just a long episode), even a different genre. VI was a whodunit, plain and simple. Star Trek I was a crapeater, and you can ignore the first half of the movie if you want to enjoy it (at least, I didn't enjoy the first half). Star Trek's II and III were your basic fight, nothing serious. Put them in battleships on the open sea and you wouldn't have to change much, if anything. In fact, you could probably keep most of the actual footage. IV was a bit of a comedy, but it was making fun of the 1980's more than anything else, and showing us the future guys in our present. But V was something special. It was its own satire, and it totally made fun of Star Trek in its complete entirety.
As a matter of fact, the only trek fans I've run into that like V are the ones that don't take themselves too seriously.
Wouldn't you rather have the Chinese to be working with the ISS partners rather than competing against them.
Considering that the competition between the US and the Soviet Union is what took us to the moon in 10-15 years, and competition between Nazi Germany and the rest of the world is what brought us rockets in the first place, I'd say some competition in the market could do us all some good.
Offhand I'd have to say that you could run the risk of the network itself being the single point of failure. Centralizing everything on the servers does wonders for administration, but what happens when the router melts?
That, of course, is one of the reasons servers get duplicated. When the clients fail to hit one, they can hit the other, transparently, and without stopping their work to call the help desk.
The obvious solution in a clustered environment, of course, is to have redundant connections to the cluster, but the cluster itself still needs to be duplicated. Clusters typically run with a few (or one) routers, and you don't want that router to be the single point of failure either.
SO, after running several network connections to each of your clusters, what are the advantages over the existing dual-proc setup?
Depends. First there's hardware cost. Figure that a single, cheap 450mhz processor can probably easily serve 3-5 users (maybe more, I'm assuming they will all be using the OpenOffice suite, which slows the box down considerably), then you'd need a cluster with 100 such processors to serve 300 users.
Now, my math is almost certainly flawed. I see no reason why the 450mhz processor (which you can't buy anymore anyway) can't serve 20 people or more. Furthermore, you can get 800mhz Durons for $50. That means you can probly go up to 100 people served by a single motherboard. Now how many users do you need to serve? Also keep in mind that you have to put each processor on a motherboard.
The article indicates that there are two dual-proc servers handling all the users. A two-mobo cluster will not outperform a single dual-proc mobo, assuming equal processors and memory. The reason is simple and probly obvious. The cluster has to do its load-balancing and other chores across the PCI bus and through a Gigabit ethernet card and router. The real savings happen when you start putting 4+ together. Furthermore, you could cluster dual-proc mobo's, but then that's what you've already purchased, right?
If Lago ever grows to a metropolis, they could easily turn their servers into clusters to handle the additional load. They can easily add networking components to speed up the network. They probably don't need a cluster, but if it ever happens, they can *scale* to a cluster cheaply.
Re:Basically it's a GOOD setup
on
Largo Loving Linux
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· Score: 2, Informative
Actually most MCSEs that work for decent companies are degree-holding, unlike the 14 year old sandal-wearing Linux h4X0rs that think they know everything but don't. I think you have the wrong side of the joke, pal.
Having formerly sold software to aid MCSE's to administer their networks, I'd have to say that your comment and my experience are contrary to one another. Friend.
Heh, some lady called at this place I used to work wanting to talk to "the boss". He wasn't there, so we gave her the Director of Technical Services. The first question she asked was something like "What accounting package do you use?". He, of course, answered "Well, we have Peachtree but it's a piece of crap." She responded with "Um, I am peachtree...."
heh. One of us is right. I don't know that the ends will be any different, though.:( There's only one way to find out, of course, and that's to continue moving forward, fighting every step of the way (they're not gonna take me without a fight).
Knowledge, and wisdom, are the needed fuel of a democracy
I ask you this, if you were gonna take over a democratic country, what one thing could you take away from the population that would give you the highest chance of success?
It doesn't take a paranoid conspiracy guy to see this stuff. I know because I'm not one (I used to be, so I can say I know the difference:) ). I don't know who's responsible. There's a chance it's just "happening" and we can actually stop it.
I don't think that's the case, though. My paranoia alarm (which has never been wrong so far) has been going off quite a bit lately over various government moves.
Now I"m going to bed 'cause I"m too tired to continue. If I keep this up, I will be a conspriacy guy by morning.:(
Well, let's see. How many of our "rights" listed in the "bill of rights" have we lost?
1st Amendment - Religion, Press, Right of Assembly, Speach, Right of Petition. All gone. Admittedly, we *can* have any religion we want, but there is preferred treatment from governments to religious groups. Press? Heh. Where did we rank in free journalism again? Right of Assembly. I recall that all the Mardi Gras rioting stories all amounted to "Everything was fine until the cops started causing trouble". Speach has been long gone, that one went before my great-great-great grandfather was born. Right of Petition has been well-preserved, but generally ignored, except in the case of protests.
Amendment 2. Weapons. How many edged weapons are illegal? Swords? Knives? Moving on to various firearms... The purpose of this amendment is to ensure that the citizenry can defend itself against any tyrannical government. This isn't limited to outside governments....
Amendments 4,5,6,8 were all essentially abolished with the Patriot Act. I won't go into detail here, you'll have to do your reading.
9 and 10 are both pretty ambiguous. 9 says that we have other rights that aren't specifically enumerated in the constitution that the government can't fuck with. 10 says the federal government only has the powers given to it in the constitution, the states have the rest. So, depending on which side of the fence you stand, either we've lost both of these or they've been preserved.
Worst case at this time (depending on your point of view) we've only got our 3rd amendment right left, which is quartering soldiers in private houses without the owner's permission (nothing for renters here). Best case we've still got 3,9,10.
There's not much left to lose, and plenty of room for them to tighten up what they've already taken.
I have to agree with you on that last sentence (and the rest, actually). The ends do not justify the means.
Problem is, I don't think it's misguided at all. I think they know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it.
Before things get better, they first have to get worse. How much of a bitchslap does the average american need before they slap back? There's a long and bloody civil war in our future, let's get it fought and won now so our kids don't have to fight it.
Time is an issue for me, since I'm already working on other projects.:( I will see what I can do, however, since I have already had to deal with compiling mozilla. One more problem, and this is significant, is that I do not have a windows box for the job. I run only GNU/Linux. if I remove the spam stuff from your posted email address on slashdot, is it still a real email address? (cuntbubble.com?)
How about just building a skin (or use the freely available IE lookalike skin), compile it from source (rather than using their binaries), rename it slightly (OpenCD's Mozilla, or OpenMozilla, or something like that), tell them if they need end-user support to get it from a certain mailing-list (OpenCD mailing list, assuming there is one) with a disclaimer that says "This binary is NOT provided by Mozilla.org, please do not attempt to get end-user support from them. However, if you find any bugs, report them to blahblahblah".
Also, I'd point out that I was going to check out this CD to distribute with christmas presents this year, but since I don't have a windows box I can't actually check it out. Heh.
So the internet, and all that comes with it isn't a relatively new problem that standard brick and mortar businesses have to deal with?
As a matter of fact, communication and information sharing and dispersal isn't anything new to business. Advertising and marketing are also nothing new to business. If the businesses hadn't spent so much time trying to make the internet "different" and instead applied the same rules and philosophies that have been known for hundreds of years to the internet, perhaps the dot com crash wouldn't have hurt as much? (I think it still would've happened, though)
Just because something appears new from the outside doesn't mean it is new. How long has the word "network" been in the english language, anyway? Anybody know?
there is no difference. Magic, by definition, is that which we do not understand scientifically. Science Fiction almost invariably contains elements that we do not understand scientifically, therefore the two genres are one and the same.
Reference Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber. There's magic, and spell-weaving and crap (mostly the spells show up in the second half, but they're there in the Corwin books). But the entire physical nature of the multiverse is explained scientifically, but still contains elements of mythology because the characters don't understand them scientifically.
I forgot to add that the reason I think Starship Troopers the movie was such a great movie is because even though it ignored certain parts of the book (can we say battle suit?), it retained the human story that drove the book. In spite of the vast inconsistencies and differences between the movie and the book, the basic story was kept, and the characters were unchanged. I might have pictured some of them with less clothes, for the most part, but the story remained.
I agree with you for the most part. In fact, we may completely agree.:)
Regardless of what genre you're reading, there are a few basic ingredients to a good story (I realize that good is a subjective word, but since the article is asking what I think is good, I'll go ahead and use it). Strong characters. Well, they don't have to actually be strong, just well-developed. Compelling plot. Finally, most importantly, the author can never forget that...
He is telling a human story. Regardless of what technology is present, what mystery is to be solved, who's sleeping with whom. No matter how many gratuitous sex scenes, or bloody violence, it must always tell a human story.
Case in point, my kids picked out two books from the store for me to read. Since neither of them can read, they based their picks solely on what was closest to them with a pretty picture. Neither of them were sci-fi, although that's primarily what I read. One of them was a cheesy romance book that I barely skimmed and put it down before puking. Too much undefined love, no real struggle, no real adversaries, and the characters weren't even skin deep. I thought asimov had trouble developing characters... The other was a lawyer book a la Perry Mason, and it rocked. It told a very compelling story, characters were well-developed. I laughed, I cried, I ate my lunch.
The point is, though, that the universe itself doesn't matter. We don't care who Kirk's enemies are, we only care what Kirk is up to. Even if he's just making a captain's log, because he is a compelling character, and the stories themselves are about human subjects.
The author's style doesn't matter. I can read Heinlein's technical novels and turn around and read Zelazny, who's one of the more ambiguous authors I've ever read.
The level of technology doesn't matter. Braveheart's story is at least as compelling a revolution (moreso in many ways) as Leia's Rebellion.
Finally, everybody's favorite book, 1984 is a compelling book because of the underlying love story. Sure, the totalitarian big brother is pretty damn terrifying, but Styx copied it for an album that failed to deliver characters we care about. Conversely, Queensryche gave us Operation: Mindcrime which has a very compelling story (but not really related to 1984).
Reference Mark Twain and Edgar Allen Poe among the so-called American Classics. Always always always about real people, sometimes in fantastic situations.
Science-fiction isn't any different than any other genre of--well, anything. It's just "fascinating".:)
wxWindows is a class library, that's all. It uses GTK on Unix platforms (or Motif, but that version's not maintained anymore) and winAPI on Windows. I don't know what it uses on the two mac flavors, but the idea is that you write code with the library, and it just compiles on the different platforms without any trouble. The comparison had more to do with the GTK limitation, and another poster pointed out that the problem *is* in GTK, in fact. So the similarity between the two projects, wxWindows and Mozilla, is just in the fact that they both use GTK on UNIX platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why we watch the movies, IMHO.
Therefore he gets cut. Wesley wouldn't have made it thirty seconds under Kirk's command. FOr that matter, most of them wouldn't have.
To be real about it, we all have our "pain". I NEED my pain. I WANT my pain. It's what makes us individuals, it's what makes us do the things we do. Whining about it isn't going to change it. Just fucking get over it.
Pussy.
For the record, I am NOT posting this anonymously, because I stand behind what I say, and I live it.
Worse yet, doesn't TNG always feel like they're just barely on the verge of a group hug but they're holding it back?
This is actually sadly true, near as I can tell. In the NG episode Elementary, Dear Data, Geordi misspeaks a sentence and the computer creates a hologram capable of taking over the ship and destroying it. This proves that the Enterprise runs an advanced version of Windows and that Microsoft will never ever fix Windows.
Why won't Wesley ever be accepted into the fold again? Because he went into Free Software, thus defeating the idealism of Star Trek with its own idealism.
Disclaimer: I don't know that Wesley will never be accepted into the fold again, but I was happy to see him leave the show. His guest appearances were good, though, and refreshing. His character may have gotten better in the 3rd season, though, like most of them did (excepting Riker, of course).
Maybe I'm crazy, but I happened to enjoy Star Trek V a lot. Each star trek movie (assuming you take 2 and 3 as the same movie) is a different story (until TNG, when each movie became just a long episode), even a different genre. VI was a whodunit, plain and simple. Star Trek I was a crapeater, and you can ignore the first half of the movie if you want to enjoy it (at least, I didn't enjoy the first half). Star Trek's II and III were your basic fight, nothing serious. Put them in battleships on the open sea and you wouldn't have to change much, if anything. In fact, you could probably keep most of the actual footage. IV was a bit of a comedy, but it was making fun of the 1980's more than anything else, and showing us the future guys in our present. But V was something special. It was its own satire, and it totally made fun of Star Trek in its complete entirety.
As a matter of fact, the only trek fans I've run into that like V are the ones that don't take themselves too seriously.
better yet, imagine taking your 400 lb wife up into space so you can finally get laid again!
Considering that the competition between the US and the Soviet Union is what took us to the moon in 10-15 years, and competition between Nazi Germany and the rest of the world is what brought us rockets in the first place, I'd say some competition in the market could do us all some good.
I am.
That, of course, is one of the reasons servers get duplicated. When the clients fail to hit one, they can hit the other, transparently, and without stopping their work to call the help desk.
The obvious solution in a clustered environment, of course, is to have redundant connections to the cluster, but the cluster itself still needs to be duplicated. Clusters typically run with a few (or one) routers, and you don't want that router to be the single point of failure either.
SO, after running several network connections to each of your clusters, what are the advantages over the existing dual-proc setup?
Depends. First there's hardware cost. Figure that a single, cheap 450mhz processor can probably easily serve 3-5 users (maybe more, I'm assuming they will all be using the OpenOffice suite, which slows the box down considerably), then you'd need a cluster with 100 such processors to serve 300 users.
Now, my math is almost certainly flawed. I see no reason why the 450mhz processor (which you can't buy anymore anyway) can't serve 20 people or more. Furthermore, you can get 800mhz Durons for $50. That means you can probly go up to 100 people served by a single motherboard. Now how many users do you need to serve? Also keep in mind that you have to put each processor on a motherboard.
The article indicates that there are two dual-proc servers handling all the users. A two-mobo cluster will not outperform a single dual-proc mobo, assuming equal processors and memory. The reason is simple and probly obvious. The cluster has to do its load-balancing and other chores across the PCI bus and through a Gigabit ethernet card and router. The real savings happen when you start putting 4+ together. Furthermore, you could cluster dual-proc mobo's, but then that's what you've already purchased, right?
If Lago ever grows to a metropolis, they could easily turn their servers into clusters to handle the additional load. They can easily add networking components to speed up the network. They probably don't need a cluster, but if it ever happens, they can *scale* to a cluster cheaply.
Having formerly sold software to aid MCSE's to administer their networks, I'd have to say that your comment and my experience are contrary to one another. Friend.
laughed my ass off over that one. :)
heh. One of us is right. I don't know that the ends will be any different, though. :( There's only one way to find out, of course, and that's to continue moving forward, fighting every step of the way (they're not gonna take me without a fight).
I ask you this, if you were gonna take over a democratic country, what one thing could you take away from the population that would give you the highest chance of success?
It doesn't take a paranoid conspiracy guy to see this stuff. I know because I'm not one (I used to be, so I can say I know the difference :) ). I don't know who's responsible. There's a chance it's just "happening" and we can actually stop it.
I don't think that's the case, though. My paranoia alarm (which has never been wrong so far) has been going off quite a bit lately over various government moves.
Now I"m going to bed 'cause I"m too tired to continue. If I keep this up, I will be a conspriacy guy by morning. :(
Worst case at this time (depending on your point of view) we've only got our 3rd amendment right left, which is quartering soldiers in private houses without the owner's permission (nothing for renters here). Best case we've still got 3,9,10.
There's not much left to lose, and plenty of room for them to tighten up what they've already taken.
Problem is, I don't think it's misguided at all. I think they know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it.
Before things get better, they first have to get worse. How much of a bitchslap does the average american need before they slap back? There's a long and bloody civil war in our future, let's get it fought and won now so our kids don't have to fight it.
Call me crazy, but if you do the right thing for the wrong reason, then you have *not* done the right thing. You just got lucky.
Time is an issue for me, since I'm already working on other projects. :( I will see what I can do, however, since I have already had to deal with compiling mozilla. One more problem, and this is significant, is that I do not have a windows box for the job. I run only GNU/Linux. if I remove the spam stuff from your posted email address on slashdot, is it still a real email address? (cuntbubble.com?)
Also, I'd point out that I was going to check out this CD to distribute with christmas presents this year, but since I don't have a windows box I can't actually check it out. Heh.
As a matter of fact, communication and information sharing and dispersal isn't anything new to business. Advertising and marketing are also nothing new to business. If the businesses hadn't spent so much time trying to make the internet "different" and instead applied the same rules and philosophies that have been known for hundreds of years to the internet, perhaps the dot com crash wouldn't have hurt as much? (I think it still would've happened, though)
Just because something appears new from the outside doesn't mean it is new. How long has the word "network" been in the english language, anyway? Anybody know?
Reference Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber. There's magic, and spell-weaving and crap (mostly the spells show up in the second half, but they're there in the Corwin books). But the entire physical nature of the multiverse is explained scientifically, but still contains elements of mythology because the characters don't understand them scientifically.
Can't you read? :)
I forgot to add that the reason I think Starship Troopers the movie was such a great movie is because even though it ignored certain parts of the book (can we say battle suit?), it retained the human story that drove the book. In spite of the vast inconsistencies and differences between the movie and the book, the basic story was kept, and the characters were unchanged. I might have pictured some of them with less clothes, for the most part, but the story remained.
Regardless of what genre you're reading, there are a few basic ingredients to a good story (I realize that good is a subjective word, but since the article is asking what I think is good, I'll go ahead and use it). Strong characters. Well, they don't have to actually be strong, just well-developed. Compelling plot. Finally, most importantly, the author can never forget that...
He is telling a human story. Regardless of what technology is present, what mystery is to be solved, who's sleeping with whom. No matter how many gratuitous sex scenes, or bloody violence, it must always tell a human story.
Case in point, my kids picked out two books from the store for me to read. Since neither of them can read, they based their picks solely on what was closest to them with a pretty picture. Neither of them were sci-fi, although that's primarily what I read. One of them was a cheesy romance book that I barely skimmed and put it down before puking. Too much undefined love, no real struggle, no real adversaries, and the characters weren't even skin deep. I thought asimov had trouble developing characters... The other was a lawyer book a la Perry Mason, and it rocked. It told a very compelling story, characters were well-developed. I laughed, I cried, I ate my lunch.
The point is, though, that the universe itself doesn't matter. We don't care who Kirk's enemies are, we only care what Kirk is up to. Even if he's just making a captain's log, because he is a compelling character, and the stories themselves are about human subjects.
The author's style doesn't matter. I can read Heinlein's technical novels and turn around and read Zelazny, who's one of the more ambiguous authors I've ever read.
The level of technology doesn't matter. Braveheart's story is at least as compelling a revolution (moreso in many ways) as Leia's Rebellion.
Finally, everybody's favorite book, 1984 is a compelling book because of the underlying love story. Sure, the totalitarian big brother is pretty damn terrifying, but Styx copied it for an album that failed to deliver characters we care about. Conversely, Queensryche gave us Operation: Mindcrime which has a very compelling story (but not really related to 1984).
Reference Mark Twain and Edgar Allen Poe among the so-called American Classics. Always always always about real people, sometimes in fantastic situations.
Science-fiction isn't any different than any other genre of--well, anything. It's just "fascinating". :)
red dwarf fuckin' rocks. Anyone that disagrees is a smeghead.
wxWindows is a class library, that's all. It uses GTK on Unix platforms (or Motif, but that version's not maintained anymore) and winAPI on Windows. I don't know what it uses on the two mac flavors, but the idea is that you write code with the library, and it just compiles on the different platforms without any trouble. The comparison had more to do with the GTK limitation, and another poster pointed out that the problem *is* in GTK, in fact. So the similarity between the two projects, wxWindows and Mozilla, is just in the fact that they both use GTK on UNIX platforms.