Get thee VMWare. Build a virtual machine. Save a backup. Install rootkits and viruses in a contained environment till your heart's content, and you're completely Sporified. Tired? Toss the infected thing in the trash, make a copy of the nice clean backup, rinse, repeat.
I was thinking something along the same lines. 15 years of dedicated time to work on a project might result in a hell of a product. If he gets access to a laptop and plans it out carefully, in 15 years time he could walk out of prison and have jobs waiting for him. Hell, somebody as smart as Reiser could probably start up a business from inside jail.
I just left a job at a hospital of 3000 employees, which had an official IT staff of... wait for it..... 12. I was part of the big "departmental restructuring" where the IT staff went up to... 18! And of course they wanted us to be on call 24/7 and would refuse us vacation time because there wasn't anybody to cover for us. Needless to say, I resigned.
But yeah... 1:100 ratio is not unheard of at many hospitals. It's all because of outsourcing....
Or Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. Very difficult read, but exceedingly rewarding if you're bookish, academic, and into tabletop role playing games and character design. (i.e. metaphyisics, life history narrative construction, I-Ching, and so forth).
I totally agree. The trilogy really didn't pick up until the second book, and then it got really great. And I too went away wondering if I knew any accurate history after reading them.
You didn't get to the Confusion, where Jack sails around the world and gets all the gold. That's the heart of the story and where the plot really starts to pick up and get interesting. The Baroque Cycle is one of those rare trilogies where the second book is probably better than the first. And without doubt, Quicksilver is merely a setup so everybody can get to where they need to be.
You just didn't read enough into it.
p.s. There was soooo much going on in those first 500 pages that you have no idea about because you didn't finish the trilogy. If you get to System of the World, you'll be going back-and-forth between all three books, cross-referencing journal entries and passages, trying to figure out where all the gold is. I won't give spoilers, but there's a lot of hidden information in those first 500 pages, which is part of why it's so dry. Most encrypted messages require some additional material to obfuscate with.:)
That being said, Baroque Cycle is definitely his most sophisticated and challenging read. It may well be his War and Peace.
Obviously, you've never worked with MUMPS (aka, the "M" programming language). Grandparent post is actually being serious, and it's not a sample of a user having problems with a single program. *Every* program in MUMPS is like that. Most obfuscated messed-up programming language i've ever had the misfortune of having to support.
Okay, I'll amend my statement. If you're developing in.NET, and going to use log4net, just write to the EventVwr, where all the Windows System Admins of the world will be monitoring anyhow.
Mmm... well, I think there's a difference between local efficiencies and global efficiencies. What is best for the group isn't always necessarily what is best for the individual. And I think that's the crux of the problem with taxes and how they are spent.
Yes, you could absolutely spend the money you pay to taxes more efficiently on your own needs. But what about roads and highways and public services? Who pays for these things? And if you were left up to your own devices, would you truly think about things like sewage plants and highways and tracking mad cow disease and the zillion-and-one other things that the government does? You (or I) simply wouldn't have the time to do it all. Not as individuals. And that's where the efficiency comes in. The ability to complete large scale projects; the ability to be in a lot of different places at the same time; shared knowledge archives. A single person can't do these things by themselves. But a big organization can. A government can lay down roads, and track diseases, and negotiate with foreign countries, and you and I get to reap the benefits and efficiencies, such as driving on concrete rather than open terrain. But it takes somebody to spearhead the project and face the headwinds to get these projects started.
These efficiencies that I'm talking about are so subtle that we often don't even think about them. They're all infrastructural. And most individuals don't tend to think about infrastructure. Maybe you would. I don't know.
But just because you don't feel your taxes aren't being spent efficiently on your particular needs doesn't mean that they're not being spent on creating macro/global efficiencies for the entire population. Money does get spent on school systems, roads and highways, disease tracking, environmental regulation, and a zillion other things. Perhaps not at the particular levels that you or I would prefer. But you and I and everybody else do reap the benefits of these efficiencies, nonetheless.
And do you really stand behind that last statement of yours? Do you have multiple advanced degrees in these areas? Memberships in all the relevant societies and professional groups? Networks of contacts? Or do you mean you have as much right as anyone else to make these decisions?
I'm perfectly well aware that geese and ducks take turns leading the flock. They do it to maintain efficiency. And if a duck or geese doesn't keep with the flock, they're going to have a much rougher time. They won't be able to travel as far, will have more difficulty getting food, and may even die.
The point is, leadership is sometimes about somebody simply getting in front to deal with the headwind, and everybody else had better get into line or else they won't get the benefits of flock formation (i.e. can travel further, get to the next watering hole, etc). And this process of somebody getting in front to deal with a headwind doesn't require some political identity angst to explain it. Does that duck in front like dealing with the headwind? Possibly not. Does the head duck expect perfect obedience? Does it need to? Or do the benefits of group behavior justify themselves? I suppose you could apply the political identity argument to the ducks, although it seems to me like you don't need to. Systems are often created or adopted for efficiency purposes, and the added efficiency that a system provides is often justification enough for following the system.
And humans rotate leadership just like ducks do. At least in democracies. We just do it at a less frequent interval. Human affairs have headwinds that we have to deal with also... oil prices, global warming, economy. These are simply the headwinds that our leaders have to deal with.
I do agree that leaders are victimized by the system as much as the followers.
They say that a system applied to an ineffective process will simply magnify the ineffectiveness. Perhaps what we have in our government is simply an efficiency system being applied to ineffective solutions.
You're looking at leader/follower relationship with a peculiar modernistic cultural/anthro/sociological viewpoint.
What about the goose or the duck at the head of a flock? Or an ant that finds food and lays down pheremones on its way back to the colony and heads back out to gather more? Sometimes leadership/follower relationships don't require any social or political identity angst. Sometimes, it's simply a matter of efficiency, luck, or natural optimization (i.e. birds expend less energy when they fly in a flock formation, and one of the birds has to take the lead to get the aerodynamics going correctly)
I dunno. You're applying this political identity angst to a topic which often doesn't need it. Occams razor and all that.
Having spent many years as a Systems Administrator, I would argue that the most important part of logging is to make sure that it is in a format and location that other people can use. People won't use the logs if they don't know where they are. And, if you're developing for Windows, I would go further and say that the only place you should be considering logging data to is the EventVwr application. I'm not sure how the java stuff goes, but if you're developing in.NET, ditch the log4net application, and stick with the System.Diagnostic classes.
People have spent a lot of time and effort building logging systems and installing systems to monitor those logging systems. Don't try to reinvent that particular wheel.
I know you're just trolling for kicks, but the stuff on phylogenetics and cladistics turned out to be extremely useful, and I've wound up using it all the time since.
If you've ever worked with binary trees, file systems, or any other type of tree data structure, you're working with tree models, which cladistics is the study of. Phylogenetics is the study of how to take observations of things, markup meta data, and then organize those observations into tree structures. Think when you take a bunch of digital photographs, add meta data to the images when you upload them to your computer, and then try to figure out which pictures should be sorted into which directories. That's a phylogenetic process. Cladistics is figuring out which directories you should have in the first place, which ones should be the root directories, and so forth. ie. Should/home be located in the root directory, the/usr director, or somewhere else? Where should/share be located? Do we need an/opt directory, or can we just use/tmp? Those kinds of questions are cladistic questions, and I wind up using them all the time.
And then there's all the stuff about evolution, and learning about natural selection and mutation and extinction and stuff. I won't get into that.
But it was actually pretty useful stuff, and I've been surprised at the number of places that knowledge has come in useful. Particularly in the areas of data analysis, structure, and storage.
Did you see the photos? They weren't simply buried in each others' arms; they were placed in a really complex way with fingers intertwined and stuff. The mother and children site is really touching and sad to see. Whoever buried them wanted them to be together. If you take a look at the photos, you'll see what I mean. Somebody was wanting these three to be together, even though they were already dead.
That's compared to the other society, which buried their dead as if the dead were in burlap sacks. The other society was like 'oh, this person's dead; put them in a sack and toss them in a ditch and get rid of the body". Very different behavior.
I think you're pushing it a bit there. Kin group selection can account for care also. And spirituality can be aggressive, as was often the case with hunter societies. Belief in gods of hunt and war and the like.
Well, actually, posing a corpse is exactly what they're submitting as evidence of spiritual belief. Burial is a ritual practice that is generally tied into a concept of afterlife, which is a spiritual belief. Doesn't matter if you believe in a god or gods. What they're describing as spiritual, is a belief in the afterlife. And burial customs are a clue into whether or not you have beliefs about what happens after the grave. If you didn't believe in an afterlife, just leave the people to rot or toss them off in a bush. This find had way too much ritual involved to be that. So it had to have involved a burial ritual of some type.
well, it was probably "dinosr" or "dinosor" or some other variation, it was like 10 years ago. and i felt bad as soon as i wrote that anyhow, as it's a bit too much personal info. shouldn't have mentioned that. you're right about the 7 character limit, but wrong about the rest of the story being fictitious.
You know, it's kind of interesting.... paleobiologists tend to focus a lot on eating habits, because teeth are commonly found fossils, and they show you insight into diet and behavior. They totally devided the Kiffians and the Tenerians into a sort of carnivore/herbivore classification. Lacking other data, and going only by the fossil record, this is about the best they can do. Interesting viewpoint to approach archeaology from. Also, the Kiffians may simply not be much in the record. Dr. Sereno (and the University of Chicago in general) has a tendency to not be interested in a project unless it's completely ground breaking and opens up a new area of research. I would bet he wouldn't have gone back for the dig at all unless he did a fair bit of research and confirmed that not only was it green sahara, but that there was essentially nothing on the record about the Kiffians.
Not all of the Sahara. Only a portion of it; and the boundaries are rather vague and unknown. Plus, while there's plenty of speculation that the Sahara was green, things like migration and movement of people through the area is unknown. Until now. This gives a whole lot of information. Well, two really important data points, at least.
First of all, Paul Sereno is awesome. Modern day Indiana Jones, if there ever was one. I had the opportunity to work for him as a Research Assistant, doing fossil reconstruction of some of the other dinosaurs he dug up in Niger.
Interesting tidbits about the guy who led the research:
He left this particular site alone for three years before coming back to it with the appropriate team of people. He commonly does that... goes out in the field, finds something, and leaves it, only to return with the proper team and equipment. He doesn't like to mess up a find, and he'd rather be patient and do a thing right than go for a quick-win and run the risk of screwing something up. He knows how to follow through on super-complex projects better than almost anybody I've ever met before.
His dinosaur laboratory is located across the street from the site of Chicago Pile 1, where the first controlled release of atomic energy occurred, in the racketball court underneath the bleachers of Stagg Stadium. That building, across the street, now know as the Enrico Fermi Institute, holds all sorts of milling equipment, 50 ton hoists, and a "monster garage" that's three stories tall inside. It has all the right equipment to mill graphite into control rods, or hoist dinosaur skeletons onto their scaffolding. It once held the first cyclotron, and they now build dinosaurs and space satellites there. The dino lab is affectionally known as the "Atomic Dino Lab".
He also has a license plate that reads "dinosaur".
All in all, a super cool guy. His class on paleobiology was, hands down, one of the most educational classes I've ever had the opportunity to take. The class was all on phylogenetics and cladistics, with a lab in geostrata and mineral identifications. Who knew?
Something else in the environment? How about *everything* else in the environment. Or, more simply, the environment itself.
This is 150,000 years ago. These people had no electricity, no medicine, no civilization... basically, they had nothing. Average life expectancy was something around 30 years, if that. Break a leg, you're dead. Get the flu, good chance you're dead. Run into a saber tooth tiger, you're definitely dead. At this point of history that they're talking about, humans were *not* at the top of the food chain, there was no civilization where a person could seek shelter, there were no medications, diet was iffy. And there were plenty of nasty animals running around ready to eat a person!
Something else in the environment? I don't think you appreciate just how difficult it is to live off the land and survive out in the wilderness. Particularly when you're not at the top of the food chain.
I dunno. Some of the earlier Bond movies were kinda of out there, as the studios experimented with different ideas. Moonraker comes to mind as being kind of "out there" Plus, I was under the impression that Ford was signed up for 5 Indy movies, according to his original contract.
I wouldn't discount the possibility of the franchise going the way of Bond.
Actually, from what I understand, Ford signed up for 5 movies in his original contract. There was a massive delay between #3 and #4 because Lucas was insistent on doing one with aliens, and Ford kept balking at the script (justifiably so, imho). They finally found a script that was tolerable, considering the plot concept, and it got made. But Ford is still signed up for one more movie. So, regardless of people telling Lucas that he's good or not, there's one more movie to be made, according to the contracts.
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Get thee VMWare. Build a virtual machine. Save a backup. Install rootkits and viruses in a contained environment till your heart's content, and you're completely Sporified. Tired? Toss the infected thing in the trash, make a copy of the nice clean backup, rinse, repeat.
The scary thing is how well that actually maps onto organizational practices and behavior.
I wonder if working on open source projects could be counted as "performing community service"?
I was thinking something along the same lines. 15 years of dedicated time to work on a project might result in a hell of a product. If he gets access to a laptop and plans it out carefully, in 15 years time he could walk out of prison and have jobs waiting for him. Hell, somebody as smart as Reiser could probably start up a business from inside jail.
I just left a job at a hospital of 3000 employees, which had an official IT staff of... wait for it..... 12. I was part of the big "departmental restructuring" where the IT staff went up to... 18! And of course they wanted us to be on call 24/7 and would refuse us vacation time because there wasn't anybody to cover for us. Needless to say, I resigned.
But yeah... 1:100 ratio is not unheard of at many hospitals. It's all because of outsourcing....
Or Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. Very difficult read, but exceedingly rewarding if you're bookish, academic, and into tabletop role playing games and character design. (i.e. metaphyisics, life history narrative construction, I-Ching, and so forth).
I totally agree. The trilogy really didn't pick up until the second book, and then it got really great. And I too went away wondering if I knew any accurate history after reading them.
You didn't get to the Confusion, where Jack sails around the world and gets all the gold. That's the heart of the story and where the plot really starts to pick up and get interesting. The Baroque Cycle is one of those rare trilogies where the second book is probably better than the first. And without doubt, Quicksilver is merely a setup so everybody can get to where they need to be.
:)
You just didn't read enough into it.
p.s. There was soooo much going on in those first 500 pages that you have no idea about because you didn't finish the trilogy. If you get to System of the World, you'll be going back-and-forth between all three books, cross-referencing journal entries and passages, trying to figure out where all the gold is. I won't give spoilers, but there's a lot of hidden information in those first 500 pages, which is part of why it's so dry. Most encrypted messages require some additional material to obfuscate with.
That being said, Baroque Cycle is definitely his most sophisticated and challenging read. It may well be his War and Peace.
Obviously, you've never worked with MUMPS (aka, the "M" programming language). Grandparent post is actually being serious, and it's not a sample of a user having problems with a single program. *Every* program in MUMPS is like that. Most obfuscated messed-up programming language i've ever had the misfortune of having to support.
Huh. Who knew?
.NET, and going to use log4net, just write to the EventVwr, where all the Windows System Admins of the world will be monitoring anyhow.
Okay, I'll amend my statement. If you're developing in
Mmm... well, I think there's a difference between local efficiencies and global efficiencies. What is best for the group isn't always necessarily what is best for the individual. And I think that's the crux of the problem with taxes and how they are spent.
Yes, you could absolutely spend the money you pay to taxes more efficiently on your own needs. But what about roads and highways and public services? Who pays for these things? And if you were left up to your own devices, would you truly think about things like sewage plants and highways and tracking mad cow disease and the zillion-and-one other things that the government does? You (or I) simply wouldn't have the time to do it all. Not as individuals. And that's where the efficiency comes in. The ability to complete large scale projects; the ability to be in a lot of different places at the same time; shared knowledge archives. A single person can't do these things by themselves. But a big organization can. A government can lay down roads, and track diseases, and negotiate with foreign countries, and you and I get to reap the benefits and efficiencies, such as driving on concrete rather than open terrain. But it takes somebody to spearhead the project and face the headwinds to get these projects started.
These efficiencies that I'm talking about are so subtle that we often don't even think about them. They're all infrastructural. And most individuals don't tend to think about infrastructure. Maybe you would. I don't know.
But just because you don't feel your taxes aren't being spent efficiently on your particular needs doesn't mean that they're not being spent on creating macro/global efficiencies for the entire population. Money does get spent on school systems, roads and highways, disease tracking, environmental regulation, and a zillion other things. Perhaps not at the particular levels that you or I would prefer. But you and I and everybody else do reap the benefits of these efficiencies, nonetheless.
And do you really stand behind that last statement of yours? Do you have multiple advanced degrees in these areas? Memberships in all the relevant societies and professional groups? Networks of contacts? Or do you mean you have as much right as anyone else to make these decisions?
I'm perfectly well aware that geese and ducks take turns leading the flock. They do it to maintain efficiency. And if a duck or geese doesn't keep with the flock, they're going to have a much rougher time. They won't be able to travel as far, will have more difficulty getting food, and may even die.
The point is, leadership is sometimes about somebody simply getting in front to deal with the headwind, and everybody else had better get into line or else they won't get the benefits of flock formation (i.e. can travel further, get to the next watering hole, etc). And this process of somebody getting in front to deal with a headwind doesn't require some political identity angst to explain it. Does that duck in front like dealing with the headwind? Possibly not. Does the head duck expect perfect obedience? Does it need to? Or do the benefits of group behavior justify themselves? I suppose you could apply the political identity argument to the ducks, although it seems to me like you don't need to. Systems are often created or adopted for efficiency purposes, and the added efficiency that a system provides is often justification enough for following the system.
And humans rotate leadership just like ducks do. At least in democracies. We just do it at a less frequent interval. Human affairs have headwinds that we have to deal with also... oil prices, global warming, economy. These are simply the headwinds that our leaders have to deal with.
I do agree that leaders are victimized by the system as much as the followers.
They say that a system applied to an ineffective process will simply magnify the ineffectiveness. Perhaps what we have in our government is simply an efficiency system being applied to ineffective solutions.
You're looking at leader/follower relationship with a peculiar modernistic cultural/anthro/sociological viewpoint.
What about the goose or the duck at the head of a flock? Or an ant that finds food and lays down pheremones on its way back to the colony and heads back out to gather more? Sometimes leadership/follower relationships don't require any social or political identity angst. Sometimes, it's simply a matter of efficiency, luck, or natural optimization (i.e. birds expend less energy when they fly in a flock formation, and one of the birds has to take the lead to get the aerodynamics going correctly)
I dunno. You're applying this political identity angst to a topic which often doesn't need it. Occams razor and all that.
Having spent many years as a Systems Administrator, I would argue that the most important part of logging is to make sure that it is in a format and location that other people can use. People won't use the logs if they don't know where they are. And, if you're developing for Windows, I would go further and say that the only place you should be considering logging data to is the EventVwr application. I'm not sure how the java stuff goes, but if you're developing in .NET, ditch the log4net application, and stick with the System.Diagnostic classes.
People have spent a lot of time and effort building logging systems and installing systems to monitor those logging systems. Don't try to reinvent that particular wheel.
I know you're just trolling for kicks, but the stuff on phylogenetics and cladistics turned out to be extremely useful, and I've wound up using it all the time since.
/home be located in the root directory, the /usr director, or somewhere else? Where should /share be located? Do we need an /opt directory, or can we just use /tmp? Those kinds of questions are cladistic questions, and I wind up using them all the time.
If you've ever worked with binary trees, file systems, or any other type of tree data structure, you're working with tree models, which cladistics is the study of. Phylogenetics is the study of how to take observations of things, markup meta data, and then organize those observations into tree structures. Think when you take a bunch of digital photographs, add meta data to the images when you upload them to your computer, and then try to figure out which pictures should be sorted into which directories. That's a phylogenetic process. Cladistics is figuring out which directories you should have in the first place, which ones should be the root directories, and so forth. ie. Should
And then there's all the stuff about evolution, and learning about natural selection and mutation and extinction and stuff. I won't get into that.
But it was actually pretty useful stuff, and I've been surprised at the number of places that knowledge has come in useful. Particularly in the areas of data analysis, structure, and storage.
Did you see the photos? They weren't simply buried in each others' arms; they were placed in a really complex way with fingers intertwined and stuff. The mother and children site is really touching and sad to see. Whoever buried them wanted them to be together. If you take a look at the photos, you'll see what I mean. Somebody was wanting these three to be together, even though they were already dead. That's compared to the other society, which buried their dead as if the dead were in burlap sacks. The other society was like 'oh, this person's dead; put them in a sack and toss them in a ditch and get rid of the body". Very different behavior.
I think you're pushing it a bit there. Kin group selection can account for care also. And spirituality can be aggressive, as was often the case with hunter societies. Belief in gods of hunt and war and the like.
Well, actually, posing a corpse is exactly what they're submitting as evidence of spiritual belief. Burial is a ritual practice that is generally tied into a concept of afterlife, which is a spiritual belief. Doesn't matter if you believe in a god or gods. What they're describing as spiritual, is a belief in the afterlife. And burial customs are a clue into whether or not you have beliefs about what happens after the grave. If you didn't believe in an afterlife, just leave the people to rot or toss them off in a bush. This find had way too much ritual involved to be that. So it had to have involved a burial ritual of some type.
well, it was probably "dinosr" or "dinosor" or some other variation, it was like 10 years ago. and i felt bad as soon as i wrote that anyhow, as it's a bit too much personal info. shouldn't have mentioned that. you're right about the 7 character limit, but wrong about the rest of the story being fictitious.
You know, it's kind of interesting.... paleobiologists tend to focus a lot on eating habits, because teeth are commonly found fossils, and they show you insight into diet and behavior. They totally devided the Kiffians and the Tenerians into a sort of carnivore/herbivore classification. Lacking other data, and going only by the fossil record, this is about the best they can do. Interesting viewpoint to approach archeaology from. Also, the Kiffians may simply not be much in the record. Dr. Sereno (and the University of Chicago in general) has a tendency to not be interested in a project unless it's completely ground breaking and opens up a new area of research. I would bet he wouldn't have gone back for the dig at all unless he did a fair bit of research and confirmed that not only was it green sahara, but that there was essentially nothing on the record about the Kiffians.
Not all of the Sahara. Only a portion of it; and the boundaries are rather vague and unknown. Plus, while there's plenty of speculation that the Sahara was green, things like migration and movement of people through the area is unknown. Until now. This gives a whole lot of information. Well, two really important data points, at least.
First of all, Paul Sereno is awesome. Modern day Indiana Jones, if there ever was one. I had the opportunity to work for him as a Research Assistant, doing fossil reconstruction of some of the other dinosaurs he dug up in Niger.
Interesting tidbits about the guy who led the research:
He left this particular site alone for three years before coming back to it with the appropriate team of people. He commonly does that... goes out in the field, finds something, and leaves it, only to return with the proper team and equipment. He doesn't like to mess up a find, and he'd rather be patient and do a thing right than go for a quick-win and run the risk of screwing something up. He knows how to follow through on super-complex projects better than almost anybody I've ever met before.
His dinosaur laboratory is located across the street from the site of Chicago Pile 1, where the first controlled release of atomic energy occurred, in the racketball court underneath the bleachers of Stagg Stadium. That building, across the street, now know as the Enrico Fermi Institute, holds all sorts of milling equipment, 50 ton hoists, and a "monster garage" that's three stories tall inside. It has all the right equipment to mill graphite into control rods, or hoist dinosaur skeletons onto their scaffolding. It once held the first cyclotron, and they now build dinosaurs and space satellites there. The dino lab is affectionally known as the "Atomic Dino Lab".
He also has a license plate that reads "dinosaur".
All in all, a super cool guy. His class on paleobiology was, hands down, one of the most educational classes I've ever had the opportunity to take. The class was all on phylogenetics and cladistics, with a lab in geostrata and mineral identifications. Who knew?
http://www.paulsereno.org/
http://www.projectexploration.org/
Something else in the environment? How about *everything* else in the environment. Or, more simply, the environment itself.
This is 150,000 years ago. These people had no electricity, no medicine, no civilization... basically, they had nothing. Average life expectancy was something around 30 years, if that. Break a leg, you're dead. Get the flu, good chance you're dead. Run into a saber tooth tiger, you're definitely dead. At this point of history that they're talking about, humans were *not* at the top of the food chain, there was no civilization where a person could seek shelter, there were no medications, diet was iffy. And there were plenty of nasty animals running around ready to eat a person!
Something else in the environment? I don't think you appreciate just how difficult it is to live off the land and survive out in the wilderness. Particularly when you're not at the top of the food chain.
I dunno. Some of the earlier Bond movies were kinda of out there, as the studios experimented with different ideas. Moonraker comes to mind as being kind of "out there" Plus, I was under the impression that Ford was signed up for 5 Indy movies, according to his original contract. I wouldn't discount the possibility of the franchise going the way of Bond.
Actually, from what I understand, Ford signed up for 5 movies in his original contract. There was a massive delay between #3 and #4 because Lucas was insistent on doing one with aliens, and Ford kept balking at the script (justifiably so, imho). They finally found a script that was tolerable, considering the plot concept, and it got made. But Ford is still signed up for one more movie. So, regardless of people telling Lucas that he's good or not, there's one more movie to be made, according to the contracts.