Beginning of the End of Star Wars
on
Star Wars 3D And TV
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· Score: 3, Insightful
"Stars Wars" (SW) is quickly morphing into the sort of downward spiral that marked the end of "Star Trek" (ST). ST saturated the airwaves, and eventually the plots became so shallow that they lost most of their audience. One problem is that plots begin to repeat themselves.
Another problem is inconsistency.
The first sign of trouble is inconsistency in the storylines. An example is the fact that, in the original SW trilogy, the Force is available to anyone willing to commit herself to the ideals of the Jedi. Obi-wan Kenobi offers to teach Han Solo how to master the Force, but the swashbuckler declines, preferring a good pistol. Then, in the new trilogy, the Force is available only to those with the blood stocked with midichlorians.
By the way, epics come along only once in a great while. Trying to generate new and wonderful ideas each week for a TV series is extremely difficult; hence most shows (e.g. ST) end before about 7 seasons. Such a conclusion leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth, and once devoted fans permanently ignore the franchise.
SW will most assuredly meet such a fate -- unless George Lucas deflates his ego and terminates the television series before they even begin.
Folks, if the Californian government were serious about collecting tax revenue, state agents would have already raided the strip clubs. They are a haven of tax cheats. Most strippers do not pay taxes and use various techniques to launder the money.
Most strippers simply earn what are called "tips". It is pure cold cash. Strippers then give the accumulated money, at the end of the year, to a friend; that friend then gives the money back to the stripper, on record, as a gift. Gifts are not taxed.
Consider a typical club. It has 50 strippers, and each earns about $150,000. That amounts to a total revenue of $7.5 million. Of that amount, none goes to the state treasury.
$7.5 million equates to about $3 million in state and federal income taxes for one strip club alone. Considering the numerous strip clubs in the major cities of California, the total lost tax revenue easily surpasses $100 million.
Has anyone ever thought about why the government has never pursued tax cheats among strippers? The working poor pays taxes, so should strippers.
How do you think that strippers can afford those BMWs and 2-story houses in Sacramento?
As usual, Steve Jobs is arrogant about his capabilities. Perhaps, Jobs should also discuss his fortunate endowments that other people do not possess.
I am referring to physical good looks. The "Economist", a while back, reported on a study which indicated that height is important and seems to be correlated with financial success. So, too is good looks.
A good example is Pamela Anderson. She has little acting talent, but she managed to latch onto television role after television role.
Contrast her with Meryl Streep. Streep is less attractive but worked very hard to achieve what she accomplished.
Jobs, like Pamela Anderson, is blessed with good looks and a winning personality. Most of us have probably worked with people with such physical endowments. People with them have a much easier time in life than people without them.
Not surprisingly, the average height of a CEO is above the average American height. So is Jobs' height. Before he tells people how they should mimic him, he should first ask the people around him to forgive him for his arrogance.
Basically, the choice is between bloat and speed. OpenOffice does not give you all the functionality that Microsoft Office provides. However, the benefit is that OpenOffice runs faster and has fewer bugs. The "fewer bugs" part is due to the fact that more people use it, since it is free. More eyeballs means that more bugs are caught, and the volunteer developers can then fix the bugs.
Microsoft currently is facing a problem with Microsoft Office. It has reached market saturation in the developed markets like the USA. The package already has all the functions that most people need, and there is no need to buy an upgrade.
Worse, OpenOffice, even with its reduced functionality, has all the functions that most people need, and there is no need to buy Microsoft Office.
Unless Microsoft can venture into new products for new markets, Microsoft will soon notice a rapid shrinking of its revenue. Of course, Microsoft management is not sitting still. Notice the billions of dollars being poured into Microsoft Labs, and the entry into the game box market. Microsoft management is smart -- if unethical.
If the management of Apple really wanted to try something revolutionary, then the CEO would have selected the Cell processor currently being developed by IBM and a consortium of Japanese companies. Due to the huge economies of scale associated with the millions (billions?) of game units using the Cell, there will arise a large market of cheap computer components used to build the game units. Apple could then use the cheap components to build a computer that is as cheap as the cheapest IBM PC clone.
The risk is that the sales of the game units falter, and the market of cheap computer components used by the Cell processor never materializes. On the other hand, the benefit is that the future Apple Macintosh will provide a graphical experience that rivals the very best animation created by Industrial Light & Magic. Another benefit is that Apple retains its status as a rebel fighting the establishment.
However, Apple management chose the evolutionary establishment-approved route: x86. It is a safer bet than the Cell. The next generation Apples will hawk significant price reductions due to the use of all those cheap Chinese components manufactured in the Taiwanese-run factories and R&D facilities in China[1].
side note
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The Taiwanese voluntarily invested more than $100 billion into more than 50,000 businesses in mainland China. More than 1 million Taiwanese voluntarily emigrated to China to live and work. More than 50% of Taiwan's GDP is now dependent on commerce with China.
Last week, Apple announced the death of the PowerPC in the Macintosh. With the announcement of the death of the HP-PA, we see that so-called RISC processors have been become extinct in the desktop market.
In the server market, only 2 RISC chips remain. They are the PowerPC by IBM and SPARC64 by Fujitsu (not UltraSPARC)[1]. Unfortunately for both chips, they do not enjoy the economies of scale that x86 enjoys (especially with the lack of future PowerPC Macs in the future), and development costs will soon become too great to support them. PowerPC may, barely, survive because IBM sells enough highend systems to support PowerPC R&D.
At this juncture, looking back 16 years ago, we can see whether the RISC movement was really hype. Remember Hennessy and Patterson from Stanford and Berkeley, respectively? They were foreseeing the end of x86 because of this new RISC "technology".
Yet, RISC was more marketing than technology. Remember branch slot delays? Remember uniform instruction widths? Remember instruction scheduling for load slot delays? Remember, in particular, that sentence in their famed textbook, where they claim that computer architecture will move beyond mere art and enter the realm of a quantitive hard science?
Well, history has shown that computer architecture remains more art than science. There is science, but it is only at the level of arithmetic for calculating cycles per instruction (CPI).
The supporters of RISC point to the RISC engine underneath the translation machine in the Pentium III. Nonetheless, the point that Hennessy and Patterson repeatedly made was that the "bad" x86 instruction set requires the translation layer and that, therefore, the translation layer would severely damage performance. Well, have Hennessy and Patterson looked at the latest numbers for integer performance on a Pentium 4?
Not surprisingly, Patterson has moved onto a new marketing job as head (?) of the ACM. He is now arguing that we desperately need to open the gates to H-1B engineers because America has a desperate shortage of good programmers. (Professor Matloff aggressively countered this marketing by using hard statistics and called Patterson a liar on CNet.) As for Hennessy, he became president of Stanford University. That job is also focused on marketing. I congratulate them both on their success. They were able to parlay their previous job of marketing RISC into signficant career advancements.
sidenote
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[1] Not ironically, the only two surviving RISC chips in the server or desktop markets was designed by native engineers, not H-1B engineers. As a matter of policy, IBM does not hire H-1Bs unless they have a Ph.D. and a critical skill. Fujitsu just, flat, does not hire foreign engineers; like other Japanese companies, Fujitsu prefers native engineers.
Apple will achieve what IBM could not. Namely, Apple will put a free UNIX onto the desktop in a major way. The switch to the Intel platform will significantly lower the cost of the Apple desktop and notebook, and they will proliferate. Further, peripheral suppliers will soon sell special add-ons that will allow standard PC clones to run the Apple x86-based Mac OS.
These two paths will cause free UNIX to rival Windows.
Linux, however, will encounter trouble. The free UNIX movement will soon face the same issue that the commercial UNIX movement faced. Namely, there will soon be 2 dominant free variants of UNIX, and they will not be compatible with each other. The free UNIX market will be fractured in the same way that the commercial UNIX market was fractured.
The right thing to do is to merge freeBSD UNIX (on which Mac OS is based) and Linux and put the combined UNIX under the control of the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). The second best choice is simply to convince Apple to drop freeBSD UNIX and to base future Mac OSes on Linux. In exchange, Linus agrees to surrender control of Linux to the OSDL.
Either way, Apple becomes a ripe takeover target for IBM, which has been salivating at the possibility of putting Linux (or a free UNIX) on the desktop.
Star Wars is Philosophy & Star Trek is Tech
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The Science of Star Wars
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Star Trek is definitely a space saga that was created to conform as closely as possible to foreseeable technologies. A few decades ago, I read an article about how Gene Roddenberry would consult scientists to probe into the technologies of the future. Then, he adjusted the stories of Star Trek to conform as closely as possible.
Heck, the next-to-last episode of "Star Trek: Enterprise" actually had a zoomed-in camera shot of a Carl Sagan memorial on mars.
By contrast, the gem of "Stars Wars" is not the technology but, rather, is the philosophy: the battle between good and evil. One of the themes of that battle is that good will triumph if you stick to your ideals. In the original trilogy, the Force was available to all, and Obi Wan Kenobi even offered to teach the Force to Han Solo, but the swashbuckler was too arrogant to accept the offer.
Notice how "Star Wars" I and II rather sucked after Lucas tried to inject all that technology into the movies. First and foremost is that concept of midichlorians (which turned the notion of Jedi into some sort of snobbish club into which you are born -- if you inherit midichlorians in your blood). Then, Lucas packs every scene with speedsters (air-borne cars), special effects, etc. All that technology just smothered what little philosophy was there.
300 years from now, the original "Star Wars" trilogy will still be watched by our descendents. The philosophy of "Star Wars" has made it timeless.
I cannot say the same for "Star Trek" or the "Star Wars" prequels.
More pixels at ever lower cost is nice. My employer foisted an old CRT with blurry lines on me and refused to buy me an LCD monitor. However, since LCD monitors are now incredibly cheap (compared to even 5 years go), I bought my own LCD flatpanel and hooked it into my desktop at work.
When I purchased my monitor, I ensured that I bought it from only a local (i.e., not Internet fly-by-night operation) store with a return policy. My concern is that a small but not insignificant percentage of monitors suffer from dead pixels. If my monitor had dead pixels, then I would want to promptly get a refund on the monitor.
The computer companies have conspired to contruct a marketing solution, instead of an engineering solution, to the dead-pixel problem. They simply convinced a standards body to officially declare that having, say, 8 (?) or fewer pixels means that the monitor is operating normally. Some stores (especially, the Internet variety) refuse to give a refund on any monitor that is returned due to 8 or fewer dead pixels.
With all due respect to George Lucas, I would prefer that Lucas confine himself to developing the overall game plan. He suggests the big picture and the major points in the plot.
Then, Steven Spielberg concentrates on the details. He fleshes out the plot, and Harrison Ford throws in the ad lib.
In short, Lucas should be the inspiration, and Spielberg should be the perspiration. Star Wars I & II is sufficient reason to keep Lucas in check.
As for the plot, since Harrison Ford is much older now, the appropriate theme would be something in the 1960s because the prior Indy films were set in the 1940s. The great tyrrany in the 1960s is, of course, mainland China and the Chinese occupation of Tibet. We could have Dr. Jones trekking to Tibet to find some lost artifact after first consulting with the Dalai Lama. Spielberg could throw in some old footage of the Chinese waving their little red Mao books at the height of the cultural revolution. There is also some old footage of Chinese soldiers randomly shooting at Tibetans.
Since Ford is a Buddhist and an admirer of the Dalai Lama, he would likely support such a plot.
The quality of nutrition in our diets has improved over the past 100 years. We simply know more today about what we should eat, and people tend to eat better. Our foods are more nutritious. For example, there was once a time when our breads did not include the B-complex vitamins, but today all breads include them.
So, our bodies and especially our brains are in better shape to handle their tasks. Increasingly, the prime human age for technical and scientific breakthroughs will increase.
The flip side is that because we live longer, we must work longer. Everyone seems to be pursuing a longer life, but almost no one wants to work past the age of 65. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a free lunch. If you live longer, then you must work longer. That's the rub.
I applaud Lucas for maintaining the significant point of continuity with the amputated hand. In "Star Wars II" (SW II), Count Dooku sliced off the right hand of Anakin, and Anakin (in turn) sliced off Luke's right hand. This act was a nice point of literary continuity.
Howevever, many people (including Ebert) has overlooked a major inconsistency. It pertains to C3PO. In SW V, an imperial stormtrooper uses his phaser to blast C3PO on the city in the sky. His head is detached, and the power is off. Apparently, the power source (possibly the batteries) is located in the torso. Later, Chewbacca re-attaches the head, and it turns back on. Of course, C3PO continues his comedic monologue.
Now, in SW II, we see that C3PO loses his head again when an assembly tool knocks it off in the droid factory. However, the head continues to be powered and keeps talking.
Then, in the ensuing battle, R2D2 detaches the head from the droid to which it was accidentally attached. The head continues to be powered and to talk.
As an aside, there is also an annoying difference between C3PO's voice in the new trilogy and the voice in the original trilogy. The 2 voices are very similar, but they are sufficiently different that I can notice the difference. It is annoying because in my mind, I am trying to convince myself that they are the same. I want so much for the new trilogy to be in continuity with the original trilogy, but Lucas has so departed from the original themes (e.g. "the Force" being something that is available to anyone, not only folks with certain midichlorian) that I am somewhat disappointed.
After Lucas passes away (due to old age) and surrenders ownership of "Star Wars", let's petition the new owners to redo SW I & II. They are annoyingly stupid.
I do not understand the fixation with the Millenium Falcon and other trivial "Easter Eggs" in the "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith".
Other issues are more important. Although I generally consider the new movie to be excellent, I wish that Lucas would have un-did a major thematic flaw in the first 2 stories in this new trilogy. I am referring to the comment, in "Star Wars I", about the force being transferred from person to person via mitochondria (which is labeled "mito chlorians" by one of the characters.)
Note that in the original trilogy, episodes IV-VI of "Star Wars" (SW), Lucas alludes that anyone can be part of the force. Your participation depends solely on your commitment to open-mindedness and the good side of the force. With this force, you can transcend the difficulties that you currently face. That message is a wonderfully uplifting message for kids of past and present generations.
Then, in SW I, Lucas trashes that egalitarian view and says that Jedis are born, not created. Namely, you cannot be part of the good side of the force by your own choice. Jedis are some sort of elite, snobby group whose membership is determined by blood. Such a message, in my opinion, is atrocious and runs counter to the fundamental egalitarianism of Western society.
Was anyone bothered by this fundamental change in one of the themes of SW?
The proper viewing order is IV, V, VI, I, II, & III. The subplot between Leia and Han Solo in V and VI would be damaged if we inserted anything between V and VI. Do you remember Han's witty reply to Leia in V? She says, "I love you." Then he replies, "I know." A second later, he is frozen in carbonite.
In VI, Han says, "I love you." Then, Leia responds, "I know."
Admittedly, I am looking at the matter from the viewpoint of a person who appreciates "Macbeth" and "Romeo and Juliet" by William Shakespeare. Nonetheless, the subplot of Han's interaction with Leia is important. It is part of the chemistry among the characters in IV, V, and VI. That chemistry (and good acting) is sorely missing in I and II.
After watching IV, V, and VI, you will be prepared to stomach the lead-weighted disappointment of I and II. The grand finale will be III.
The most poignant moment in "Return of the Jedi" occurs when Luke looks at his right hand just after slicing off the mechanized right hand of Darth Vader. At that moment, he recalls Obi-wan Kenobi's warning: "Don't give into hate. That leads to the dark side." (Obi-wan Kenobi gave that warning in "The Empire Strikes Back".)
Luke immediately resolves to avoid the fate of Darth Vader and turns off his light saber.
Luke then looks at the emperor and refuses to join him.
Did George Lucas provide a scene (in "Revenge of the Sith") where Darth Vader's own right hand was sliced off? If the answer is "yes", then Lucas has remained true to the original trilogy.
"Such insight, you have. The first steps to Jedi Knight, you have taken." observers Yoda.
]AOL buying TW was the greatest travesty of the dot
]com boom.
That financial transaction was not the greatest travesty.
The greatest travesty was having a 401K plan where the provider designed it in such a way that mainly risky or high-tech (or usually both) mutual funds were available. Then, the unwitting American worker put his life's savings into these funds. After the dot com bust, the savings collapsed by 50% or more (typically).
The rub is that the provider received a kickback from the managers of these mutual funds that collapsed and hence tended to favor these risky funds.
Janus funds is an excellent example.
Even to this day, we still have no laws requiring 401K plan providers to provide only self-directed brokerage accounts that allow the plan participant to invest in any mutual fund (especially good ones).
No one seems to care about the life savings of folks in the American middle class. Certainly, the cowboy running this country does not care.
Try Sci-Lab. Its functionality is about 1 order of magnitude greater than that of Octave. Sci-Lab has an extensive library of signal processing functions that equal the capability of Matlab.
I use Sci-Lab regularly. With Sci-Lab, I have no need to dole out bucks for the commercial version: Matlab.
Now, this Matlab contest is positioned to lead to the same silly cries. So, allow me to present a link to Professor Matloff's excellent article to head off any silly speculations about the decline of American technical prowess.
The "Star Trek" saga, which has earned much less money than the "Star Wars" saga, became 5 televisions series and 2 sets of movies. Rest assured that "Star Wars" will continue as more widescreen movies in the future.
Hopefully, George Lucas will not destroy his own creation by cheapening it.
One of the principal problems with "Star Trek" is that there have been too many television shows and too many movies. After a while, the plots start to eerily repeat themselves. The novelty is gone, and "Star Trek" now just looks like another washed-up television show. If you saw last week's final episode of "Enterprise", you will understand what I mean.
Someone must slap some sense into George Lucas. He should immediately pull the plug on the new television shows. The rare gem (i.e. 6 movies with the "Star Wars" theme) is treasured. The commonplace grains (i.e. weekly episodes of "Star Wars") of sand is just banal crap. If Lucas wants to produce any more "Star Wars" film, then he should focus only on the movies.
"Right, you are. Young Slashdotter. A law, we need. At most 10 'Star Wars' movies per century, we should make!" Yoda concurs.
The lesson of DOS is that we should give credit where credit is due. For those who are not aware, the genesis of DOS began in deceipt and treachery. Gary Kildall had created CPM/86, and it was an outstanding product that incorporated modern techniques of operating systems. Unfortunately, Kildall was more a commited engineer and less a marketing snake, so he brushed off an IBM deal to license CPM/86.
William Gates was waiting in the wings, and he signed a deal to give IBM an operating system. Then, Gates bought PC-DOS from Seattle Computer Products. An engineer, Tim Paterson, at that company had stolen the ideas of CPM/86 and created a cheap clone of it. PC-DOS was that clone.
The rest is history. Kildall faded into oblivion, and most people have no idea that he is, in fact, the original inventor of the PC operating system. Meanwhile, billions of people instantly recognize Bill Gates as the "inventor" of the PC operating system. Gates got both the profits and the undeserved fame. Kildall got nothing and drowned in his own bitterness. In the later years of his life, he drank himself into alcoholism and eventually died in a bar.
The greatest insult was, ultimately, assigning the name "William H. Gates" to the Stanford Computer Science building. It should have been called the "Kildall Memorial Building".
I have the utmost respect for the volunteers in the open-source movement. I know that they will give credit where credit is due.
Rockets are similar to cars. The choice is between a car that is in the 4th year of its production run and a car that has been redesigned new from the ground up. Completely new cars tend to have numerous problems, which are fed back to the engineers who then make the necessary modifications for next year's production run.
Even Hondas suffer from this problem. If I must have the most reliable vehicle, I would choose a Civic model in its last year of production over a brand new, completely redesigned Civic.
Since the Titans have been in use for a long time, the engineers have already fixed any outstanding, serious problems. The Titan is a reliable workhorse and should be the delivery vehicle for a military payload. Such payloads are vital to the national security of the United States, and we absolutely must avoid mishaps, especially given the emerging threat from China.
From the article: "The project isn't fully developed, but the ultimate vision is to have the stuffed animal interact with a child, doing such things as playing games and reading stories. Because the bear is on a network, a parent could also use it to interact with a child remotely -- communicating or even taking snapshots through an embedded camera."
Anyone who thinks that a stuffed animal is a good substitute for the presence of a parent is bonkers. Imagine this scenario. The father is too obsessed with working at his startup company, so he buys one of these stuffed animals, say, a bear with network-control capability. He puts the bear in the kid's room and heads off to work. At the office, he activates his Web browser and remotely controls the bear with a Web form. Now, imagine the father acting in this way for a year.
Do you think that such behavior is good parenting?
Such parenting is probably the first step to child abuse.
Perhaps, I am the oddball in this forum. I think that technology should facilitate the human experience instead of replacing it.
Gary Kildall eventually died in a bar, but many (including myself) would say that Bill Gates drove Kildall toward suicidal drinking, which lead to him being killed in a bar with other drunks.
I have little sympathy for Tim Paterson. He stole another person's idea (i.e. CPM/86) and tried to make money off of it by selling the product (i.e. QDOS) to Bill Gates. Gates then signed an agreement with IBM to distribute a copy of MSDOS (renamed from QDOS) on each IBM PC. This agreement transformed Microsoft into a multi-billion company.
Gary Kildall missed the boat on this one. His lack of business acumen resulted in him losing the fame and fortune that Gates stole. IBM actually made an offer to Kildall, but Kildall dallied and finally refused the offer.
If history had accorded the fame to Gary Kildall but the riches to Bill Gates, Kildall would likely not have been so bitter and would likely still be alive today. Kildal deserved all the fame, for his ideas (which Paterson stole to build QDOS) became the basis of the modern PC operating system. Indeed, the computer science building at Stanford University should be called the "Kildall Building", not the "Gates Building".
A similar analogy could be made with Linus and Linux. The management of RedHat and other Linux distributors make all the money, and Linus just gets the fame. We all cheer Linus whenever we meet him. Even though Linus is not a billionaire, the warmth of us geeks acknowledging his brilliance is worth a million bucks.
By contrast, Kildall did not even get the fame, i.e. the recognition that he deserved. Ask any Windows/MS-DOS user who Kildall is, and she will scratch her head with ignorance. If I were in Kildall's shoes, I would have been bitter every day of my life and would have probably committed suicide too.
I am not one to believe in god or any afterlife, but if there were a hell, I hope that there is a special version of hell just for "bad" geeks. Both Gates and Paterson belong in it.
Sorry for the tirade, but I myself have been ripped off along the lines of what happened to Kildall. So, I can know how he felt on the day of his death. I hope that none of you is ever ripped off in the same way. The bitterness could kill you.
I agree in that we should have, at least, a 1-year break. It will create pent-up demand. Further, 1 year will give us time to find some good writers, directors, and actors.
Contrary to popular belief, the best actors and writers are not necessarily the veterans: Tom Cruise, James Woods, etc. You can find awesome writers and actors who are fresh out of acting school.
Let's pool all the money from this "save Star Trek" campaign. Then, the head of this campaign spends the next year in going to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. to hire some new graduates as writers and actors. They will be hungry for work.
Most of them will have some limited experience in the field, and I suspect that they will do a much better job than the current crew. I know of, at least, 2 actors who have had formal training from these top universities; the actors include Henry Winkler and Meryl Streep. They are relatively good at what they do.
To start things on the right track, I'll toss out an idea to explain away the "Enterprise" fiasco. The camera zooms in on a lieutenant, a new graduate of Star Fleet Academy. He is lying in bed. Suddenly, he awakes with a shiver. He has just had a nightmare.
He calls a friend on the mobile communicator and says, "I have just had the worst nightmare in which I lived a version of the ancient history taught at Star Fleet Academy. The entire universe was screwed up. Hand-held phasers are called 'phase pistols', and on-board phasers are called 'phase cannons'. Further, some incompetent moron was serving as Captain. Also, one of the engineers spoke Ebonics, which was eradicated from earth centuries ago. Also, there was this Vulcan with big breasts, and she tried to act sexy. Ugh. It just did not work. Bit breasts with a boyish haircut but without emotions just does not make "sexy". She looked horribly repulsive. It scared the living daylights out of me."
The voice out of the communicator says, "Don't worry. It was just a nightmare. Everyone knows that Vulcans do not have big breasts. <laughter> Go back to bed, James."
The lieutenant answers, "You have a wry sense humor. It will serve you well in medical school."
The voice out of the communicator says, "Thanks for the encouragement. I want to be called 'Doctor McCoy' some day."
Wait about a year, and Hewlett Packard (HP) will join Lexmark in using the court system to earn money on their printers and print cartridges. Lexmark is a printer company, and HP is mostly a printer company plus some side interests that barely earn any money.
How can I be so sure?
Next time that you visit your local electronics store, walk on over to the section selling computer printers. Find the print cartridges. You will notice that print cartridges from Canon are now about 1/3 the cost of a print cartridge from either Lexmark or HP. No. I am not in error. The Canon cartridges are now super cheap and are as low as $8.
By the end of the year, you will notice a downward motion on HP stock.
Slashdot Mirror
Another problem is inconsistency.
The first sign of trouble is inconsistency in the storylines. An example is the fact that, in the original SW trilogy, the Force is available to anyone willing to commit herself to the ideals of the Jedi. Obi-wan Kenobi offers to teach Han Solo how to master the Force, but the swashbuckler declines, preferring a good pistol. Then, in the new trilogy, the Force is available only to those with the blood stocked with midichlorians.
By the way, epics come along only once in a great while. Trying to generate new and wonderful ideas each week for a TV series is extremely difficult; hence most shows (e.g. ST) end before about 7 seasons. Such a conclusion leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth, and once devoted fans permanently ignore the franchise.
SW will most assuredly meet such a fate -- unless George Lucas deflates his ego and terminates the television series before they even begin.
Most strippers simply earn what are called "tips". It is pure cold cash. Strippers then give the accumulated money, at the end of the year, to a friend; that friend then gives the money back to the stripper, on record, as a gift. Gifts are not taxed.
Consider a typical club. It has 50 strippers, and each earns about $150,000. That amounts to a total revenue of $7.5 million. Of that amount, none goes to the state treasury.
$7.5 million equates to about $3 million in state and federal income taxes for one strip club alone. Considering the numerous strip clubs in the major cities of California, the total lost tax revenue easily surpasses $100 million.
Has anyone ever thought about why the government has never pursued tax cheats among strippers? The working poor pays taxes, so should strippers.
How do you think that strippers can afford those BMWs and 2-story houses in Sacramento?
I am referring to physical good looks. The "Economist", a while back, reported on a study which indicated that height is important and seems to be correlated with financial success. So, too is good looks.
A good example is Pamela Anderson. She has little acting talent, but she managed to latch onto television role after television role.
Contrast her with Meryl Streep. Streep is less attractive but worked very hard to achieve what she accomplished.
Jobs, like Pamela Anderson, is blessed with good looks and a winning personality. Most of us have probably worked with people with such physical endowments. People with them have a much easier time in life than people without them.
Not surprisingly, the average height of a CEO is above the average American height. So is Jobs' height. Before he tells people how they should mimic him, he should first ask the people around him to forgive him for his arrogance.
Microsoft currently is facing a problem with Microsoft Office. It has reached market saturation in the developed markets like the USA. The package already has all the functions that most people need, and there is no need to buy an upgrade.
Worse, OpenOffice, even with its reduced functionality, has all the functions that most people need, and there is no need to buy Microsoft Office.
Unless Microsoft can venture into new products for new markets, Microsoft will soon notice a rapid shrinking of its revenue. Of course, Microsoft management is not sitting still. Notice the billions of dollars being poured into Microsoft Labs, and the entry into the game box market. Microsoft management is smart -- if unethical.
The risk is that the sales of the game units falter, and the market of cheap computer components used by the Cell processor never materializes. On the other hand, the benefit is that the future Apple Macintosh will provide a graphical experience that rivals the very best animation created by Industrial Light & Magic. Another benefit is that Apple retains its status as a rebel fighting the establishment.
However, Apple management chose the evolutionary establishment-approved route: x86. It is a safer bet than the Cell. The next generation Apples will hawk significant price reductions due to the use of all those cheap Chinese components manufactured in the Taiwanese-run factories and R&D facilities in China[1].
side note
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The Taiwanese voluntarily invested more than $100 billion into more than 50,000 businesses in mainland China. More than 1 million Taiwanese voluntarily emigrated to China to live and work. More than 50% of Taiwan's GDP is now dependent on commerce with China.
In the server market, only 2 RISC chips remain. They are the PowerPC by IBM and SPARC64 by Fujitsu (not UltraSPARC)[1]. Unfortunately for both chips, they do not enjoy the economies of scale that x86 enjoys (especially with the lack of future PowerPC Macs in the future), and development costs will soon become too great to support them. PowerPC may, barely, survive because IBM sells enough highend systems to support PowerPC R&D.
At this juncture, looking back 16 years ago, we can see whether the RISC movement was really hype. Remember Hennessy and Patterson from Stanford and Berkeley, respectively? They were foreseeing the end of x86 because of this new RISC "technology".
Yet, RISC was more marketing than technology. Remember branch slot delays? Remember uniform instruction widths? Remember instruction scheduling for load slot delays? Remember, in particular, that sentence in their famed textbook, where they claim that computer architecture will move beyond mere art and enter the realm of a quantitive hard science?
Well, history has shown that computer architecture remains more art than science. There is science, but it is only at the level of arithmetic for calculating cycles per instruction (CPI).
The supporters of RISC point to the RISC engine underneath the translation machine in the Pentium III. Nonetheless, the point that Hennessy and Patterson repeatedly made was that the "bad" x86 instruction set requires the translation layer and that, therefore, the translation layer would severely damage performance. Well, have Hennessy and Patterson looked at the latest numbers for integer performance on a Pentium 4?
Not surprisingly, Patterson has moved onto a new marketing job as head (?) of the ACM. He is now arguing that we desperately need to open the gates to H-1B engineers because America has a desperate shortage of good programmers. (Professor Matloff aggressively countered this marketing by using hard statistics and called Patterson a liar on CNet.) As for Hennessy, he became president of Stanford University. That job is also focused on marketing. I congratulate them both on their success. They were able to parlay their previous job of marketing RISC into signficant career advancements.
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[1] Not ironically, the only two surviving RISC chips in the server or desktop markets was designed by native engineers, not H-1B engineers. As a matter of policy, IBM does not hire H-1Bs unless they have a Ph.D. and a critical skill. Fujitsu just, flat, does not hire foreign engineers; like other Japanese companies, Fujitsu prefers native engineers.
These two paths will cause free UNIX to rival Windows.
Linux, however, will encounter trouble. The free UNIX movement will soon face the same issue that the commercial UNIX movement faced. Namely, there will soon be 2 dominant free variants of UNIX, and they will not be compatible with each other. The free UNIX market will be fractured in the same way that the commercial UNIX market was fractured.
The right thing to do is to merge freeBSD UNIX (on which Mac OS is based) and Linux and put the combined UNIX under the control of the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). The second best choice is simply to convince Apple to drop freeBSD UNIX and to base future Mac OSes on Linux. In exchange, Linus agrees to surrender control of Linux to the OSDL.
Either way, Apple becomes a ripe takeover target for IBM, which has been salivating at the possibility of putting Linux (or a free UNIX) on the desktop .
Heck, the next-to-last episode of "Star Trek: Enterprise" actually had a zoomed-in camera shot of a Carl Sagan memorial on mars.
By contrast, the gem of "Stars Wars" is not the technology but, rather, is the philosophy: the battle between good and evil. One of the themes of that battle is that good will triumph if you stick to your ideals. In the original trilogy, the Force was available to all, and Obi Wan Kenobi even offered to teach the Force to Han Solo, but the swashbuckler was too arrogant to accept the offer.
Notice how "Star Wars" I and II rather sucked after Lucas tried to inject all that technology into the movies. First and foremost is that concept of midichlorians (which turned the notion of Jedi into some sort of snobbish club into which you are born -- if you inherit midichlorians in your blood). Then, Lucas packs every scene with speedsters (air-borne cars), special effects, etc. All that technology just smothered what little philosophy was there.
300 years from now, the original "Star Wars" trilogy will still be watched by our descendents. The philosophy of "Star Wars" has made it timeless.
I cannot say the same for "Star Trek" or the "Star Wars" prequels.
When I purchased my monitor, I ensured that I bought it from only a local (i.e., not Internet fly-by-night operation) store with a return policy. My concern is that a small but not insignificant percentage of monitors suffer from dead pixels. If my monitor had dead pixels, then I would want to promptly get a refund on the monitor.
The computer companies have conspired to contruct a marketing solution, instead of an engineering solution, to the dead-pixel problem. They simply convinced a standards body to officially declare that having, say, 8 (?) or fewer pixels means that the monitor is operating normally. Some stores (especially, the Internet variety) refuse to give a refund on any monitor that is returned due to 8 or fewer dead pixels.
Then, Steven Spielberg concentrates on the details. He fleshes out the plot, and Harrison Ford throws in the ad lib.
In short, Lucas should be the inspiration, and Spielberg should be the perspiration. Star Wars I & II is sufficient reason to keep Lucas in check.
As for the plot, since Harrison Ford is much older now, the appropriate theme would be something in the 1960s because the prior Indy films were set in the 1940s. The great tyrrany in the 1960s is, of course, mainland China and the Chinese occupation of Tibet. We could have Dr. Jones trekking to Tibet to find some lost artifact after first consulting with the Dalai Lama. Spielberg could throw in some old footage of the Chinese waving their little red Mao books at the height of the cultural revolution. There is also some old footage of Chinese soldiers randomly shooting at Tibetans.
Since Ford is a Buddhist and an admirer of the Dalai Lama, he would likely support such a plot.
So, our bodies and especially our brains are in better shape to handle their tasks. Increasingly, the prime human age for technical and scientific breakthroughs will increase.
The flip side is that because we live longer, we must work longer. Everyone seems to be pursuing a longer life, but almost no one wants to work past the age of 65. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a free lunch. If you live longer, then you must work longer. That's the rub.
Howevever, many people (including Ebert) has overlooked a major inconsistency. It pertains to C3PO. In SW V, an imperial stormtrooper uses his phaser to blast C3PO on the city in the sky. His head is detached, and the power is off. Apparently, the power source (possibly the batteries) is located in the torso. Later, Chewbacca re-attaches the head, and it turns back on. Of course, C3PO continues his comedic monologue.
Now, in SW II, we see that C3PO loses his head again when an assembly tool knocks it off in the droid factory. However, the head continues to be powered and keeps talking.
Then, in the ensuing battle, R2D2 detaches the head from the droid to which it was accidentally attached. The head continues to be powered and to talk.
As an aside, there is also an annoying difference between C3PO's voice in the new trilogy and the voice in the original trilogy. The 2 voices are very similar, but they are sufficiently different that I can notice the difference. It is annoying because in my mind, I am trying to convince myself that they are the same. I want so much for the new trilogy to be in continuity with the original trilogy, but Lucas has so departed from the original themes (e.g. "the Force" being something that is available to anyone, not only folks with certain midichlorian) that I am somewhat disappointed.
After Lucas passes away (due to old age) and surrenders ownership of "Star Wars", let's petition the new owners to redo SW I & II. They are annoyingly stupid.
Other issues are more important. Although I generally consider the new movie to be excellent, I wish that Lucas would have un-did a major thematic flaw in the first 2 stories in this new trilogy. I am referring to the comment, in "Star Wars I", about the force being transferred from person to person via mitochondria (which is labeled "mito chlorians" by one of the characters.)
Note that in the original trilogy, episodes IV-VI of "Star Wars" (SW), Lucas alludes that anyone can be part of the force. Your participation depends solely on your commitment to open-mindedness and the good side of the force. With this force, you can transcend the difficulties that you currently face. That message is a wonderfully uplifting message for kids of past and present generations.
Then, in SW I, Lucas trashes that egalitarian view and says that Jedis are born, not created. Namely, you cannot be part of the good side of the force by your own choice. Jedis are some sort of elite, snobby group whose membership is determined by blood. Such a message, in my opinion, is atrocious and runs counter to the fundamental egalitarianism of Western society.
Was anyone bothered by this fundamental change in one of the themes of SW?
In VI, Han says, "I love you." Then, Leia responds, "I know."
Admittedly, I am looking at the matter from the viewpoint of a person who appreciates "Macbeth" and "Romeo and Juliet" by William Shakespeare. Nonetheless, the subplot of Han's interaction with Leia is important. It is part of the chemistry among the characters in IV, V, and VI. That chemistry (and good acting) is sorely missing in I and II.
After watching IV, V, and VI, you will be prepared to stomach the lead-weighted disappointment of I and II. The grand finale will be III.
Luke immediately resolves to avoid the fate of Darth Vader and turns off his light saber. Luke then looks at the emperor and refuses to join him.
Did George Lucas provide a scene (in "Revenge of the Sith") where Darth Vader's own right hand was sliced off? If the answer is "yes", then Lucas has remained true to the original trilogy.
"Such insight, you have. The first steps to Jedi Knight, you have taken." observers Yoda.
That financial transaction was not the greatest travesty.
The greatest travesty was having a 401K plan where the provider designed it in such a way that mainly risky or high-tech (or usually both) mutual funds were available. Then, the unwitting American worker put his life's savings into these funds. After the dot com bust, the savings collapsed by 50% or more (typically).
The rub is that the provider received a kickback from the managers of these mutual funds that collapsed and hence tended to favor these risky funds.
Janus funds is an excellent example.
Even to this day, we still have no laws requiring 401K plan providers to provide only self-directed brokerage accounts that allow the plan participant to invest in any mutual fund (especially good ones).
No one seems to care about the life savings of folks in the American middle class. Certainly, the cowboy running this country does not care.
I use Sci-Lab regularly. With Sci-Lab, I have no need to dole out bucks for the commercial version: Matlab.
Now, this Matlab contest is positioned to lead to the same silly cries. So, allow me to present a link to Professor Matloff's excellent article to head off any silly speculations about the decline of American technical prowess.
Hopefully, George Lucas will not destroy his own creation by cheapening it.
One of the principal problems with "Star Trek" is that there have been too many television shows and too many movies. After a while, the plots start to eerily repeat themselves. The novelty is gone, and "Star Trek" now just looks like another washed-up television show. If you saw last week's final episode of "Enterprise", you will understand what I mean.
Someone must slap some sense into George Lucas. He should immediately pull the plug on the new television shows. The rare gem (i.e. 6 movies with the "Star Wars" theme) is treasured. The commonplace grains (i.e. weekly episodes of "Star Wars") of sand is just banal crap. If Lucas wants to produce any more "Star Wars" film, then he should focus only on the movies.
"Right, you are. Young Slashdotter. A law, we need. At most 10 'Star Wars' movies per century, we should make!" Yoda concurs.
William Gates was waiting in the wings, and he signed a deal to give IBM an operating system. Then, Gates bought PC-DOS from Seattle Computer Products. An engineer, Tim Paterson, at that company had stolen the ideas of CPM/86 and created a cheap clone of it. PC-DOS was that clone.
The rest is history. Kildall faded into oblivion, and most people have no idea that he is, in fact, the original inventor of the PC operating system. Meanwhile, billions of people instantly recognize Bill Gates as the "inventor" of the PC operating system. Gates got both the profits and the undeserved fame. Kildall got nothing and drowned in his own bitterness. In the later years of his life, he drank himself into alcoholism and eventually died in a bar.
The greatest insult was, ultimately, assigning the name "William H. Gates" to the Stanford Computer Science building. It should have been called the "Kildall Memorial Building".
I have the utmost respect for the volunteers in the open-source movement. I know that they will give credit where credit is due.
Even Hondas suffer from this problem. If I must have the most reliable vehicle, I would choose a Civic model in its last year of production over a brand new, completely redesigned Civic.
Since the Titans have been in use for a long time, the engineers have already fixed any outstanding, serious problems. The Titan is a reliable workhorse and should be the delivery vehicle for a military payload. Such payloads are vital to the national security of the United States, and we absolutely must avoid mishaps, especially given the emerging threat from China.
Anyone who thinks that a stuffed animal is a good substitute for the presence of a parent is bonkers. Imagine this scenario. The father is too obsessed with working at his startup company, so he buys one of these stuffed animals, say, a bear with network-control capability. He puts the bear in the kid's room and heads off to work. At the office, he activates his Web browser and remotely controls the bear with a Web form. Now, imagine the father acting in this way for a year.
Do you think that such behavior is good parenting? Such parenting is probably the first step to child abuse.
Perhaps, I am the oddball in this forum. I think that technology should facilitate the human experience instead of replacing it.
I have little sympathy for Tim Paterson. He stole another person's idea (i.e. CPM/86) and tried to make money off of it by selling the product (i.e. QDOS) to Bill Gates. Gates then signed an agreement with IBM to distribute a copy of MSDOS (renamed from QDOS) on each IBM PC. This agreement transformed Microsoft into a multi-billion company.
Gary Kildall missed the boat on this one. His lack of business acumen resulted in him losing the fame and fortune that Gates stole. IBM actually made an offer to Kildall, but Kildall dallied and finally refused the offer.
If history had accorded the fame to Gary Kildall but the riches to Bill Gates, Kildall would likely not have been so bitter and would likely still be alive today. Kildal deserved all the fame, for his ideas (which Paterson stole to build QDOS) became the basis of the modern PC operating system. Indeed, the computer science building at Stanford University should be called the "Kildall Building", not the "Gates Building".
A similar analogy could be made with Linus and Linux. The management of RedHat and other Linux distributors make all the money, and Linus just gets the fame. We all cheer Linus whenever we meet him. Even though Linus is not a billionaire, the warmth of us geeks acknowledging his brilliance is worth a million bucks.
By contrast, Kildall did not even get the fame, i.e. the recognition that he deserved. Ask any Windows/MS-DOS user who Kildall is, and she will scratch her head with ignorance. If I were in Kildall's shoes, I would have been bitter every day of my life and would have probably committed suicide too.
I am not one to believe in god or any afterlife, but if there were a hell, I hope that there is a special version of hell just for "bad" geeks. Both Gates and Paterson belong in it.
Sorry for the tirade, but I myself have been ripped off along the lines of what happened to Kildall. So, I can know how he felt on the day of his death. I hope that none of you is ever ripped off in the same way. The bitterness could kill you.
Contrary to popular belief, the best actors and writers are not necessarily the veterans: Tom Cruise, James Woods, etc. You can find awesome writers and actors who are fresh out of acting school.
Let's pool all the money from this "save Star Trek" campaign. Then, the head of this campaign spends the next year in going to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. to hire some new graduates as writers and actors. They will be hungry for work.
Most of them will have some limited experience in the field, and I suspect that they will do a much better job than the current crew. I know of, at least, 2 actors who have had formal training from these top universities; the actors include Henry Winkler and Meryl Streep. They are relatively good at what they do.
To start things on the right track, I'll toss out an idea to explain away the "Enterprise" fiasco. The camera zooms in on a lieutenant, a new graduate of Star Fleet Academy. He is lying in bed. Suddenly, he awakes with a shiver. He has just had a nightmare.
He calls a friend on the mobile communicator and says, "I have just had the worst nightmare in which I lived a version of the ancient history taught at Star Fleet Academy. The entire universe was screwed up. Hand-held phasers are called 'phase pistols', and on-board phasers are called 'phase cannons'. Further, some incompetent moron was serving as Captain. Also, one of the engineers spoke Ebonics, which was eradicated from earth centuries ago. Also, there was this Vulcan with big breasts, and she tried to act sexy. Ugh. It just did not work. Bit breasts with a boyish haircut but without emotions just does not make "sexy". She looked horribly repulsive. It scared the living daylights out of me."
The voice out of the communicator says, "Don't worry. It was just a nightmare. Everyone knows that Vulcans do not have big breasts. <laughter> Go back to bed, James."
The lieutenant answers, "You have a wry sense humor. It will serve you well in medical school."
The voice out of the communicator says, "Thanks for the encouragement. I want to be called 'Doctor McCoy' some day."
How can I be so sure?
Next time that you visit your local electronics store, walk on over to the section selling computer printers. Find the print cartridges. You will notice that print cartridges from Canon are now about 1/3 the cost of a print cartridge from either Lexmark or HP. No. I am not in error. The Canon cartridges are now super cheap and are as low as $8.
By the end of the year, you will notice a downward motion on HP stock.