We agree that progress is good. No-one regrets the passing of days when we hand-coded interface languages because XML had not been invented.
But you make the mistake of many people, namely to assume that change is equal to progress.
Change is only part of the cycle. The other part of the cycle is the refinement of techniques and maturation of knowledge that lets you exploit change to the fullest.
Imagine if every three years we had to discard languages like HTML and XML and start with new, incompatible concepts. The market would never get into a state where mature concepts could be built: it takes 2-3 years at the least before businesses understand and trust technical platforms well enough to use them effectively.
Yet this is the basic premise of Microsoft's marketing strategy: saturate the market with new development platforms, capture the pioneer developers and keep the customer base forever unstable and tottering in Microsoft's direction.
Agreed that many vendors try this: "if you're going to base your business critical application on an untested platform, at least use ours". But Microsoft's scale and marketing push make it a much more serious issue.
Change is not progress. Change mixed with periods of maturation can be progress.
The Microsoft bashing is definitely present, and I would argue well-deserved, but it is not mindless. Microsoft are easily the world leader in the invention of new software development platforms that provoke huge investment in time and work by millions of developers, and which are then discarded after 2-4 years. Sun produced a couple of versions of Java. IBM... some C++ platforms, and then websphere. Oracle? OK, a bunch of platforms but mainly just Developer and Designer, over about 10 years, and pretty backwards compatible.
Microsoft? Dozens, maybe as many as fifty huge platforms produced, promoted, sold, and then abandoned in the last ten years. Visual Basic. C++. Office. ASP. COM..NET. SQLServer. Access... ad nauseam. And every single version of every platform incompatible with the last.
OpenSource? I'm building my applications using Linux (standard POSIX), using MySQL (very standard SQL), gcc (standard ANSI C compiler), HTTP (standard protocol), HTML (standard UI language), and XML (you get the picture).
Do we really need more technologies in their infancy? Is it not one of the biggest problem in this industry that we keep inventing new ways of doing the same stuff, throwing out entire generations of products and developers each time?
We need ways to make existing good code last longer, not new frameworks to waste time on.
But... sigh... I don't expect that kind of attitude from Microsoft. One more reason to avoid such platforms like the pest.
Whoever moderated the parent as a troll needs their head examined.
It's an excellent point. OOorg on Windows opens the way for later Linux migration (this is what happened in our company), since it is very easy to move someone from Windows to Linux if they are using the same applications.
And since Solitaire is one of the most used applications on Windows, it would make sense to provide it up front on Linux distros.
Being a product of my time, my proposal is simply a mix of what I already see and know. Presumably what will actually happen is going to be totally different.
But here goes anyhow:
- First, treat viruses and worms and trojans as natural phenomena rather than the consequence of directed human activity. Assume that there will always be a new, smarter, more capable virus able to get around whatever locks we put into place.
- Second, assume that all data passing into a computer system is suspect, and must be discarded unless it can be accepted. Apply this paranoia at all levels from individual packets up to the contents of web forms.
- Third, use the techniques of genetic programming to evolve filters that work at each of these levels. Allow them to evolve rules for identifying valid and invalid data, and run them on live data mirrored from many places on the Internet. Use honeypot systems to attract parasitical software, and integrity checks to see how well filters perform, and to cull those that do worst.
In the final goal, every computer has a slightly different set of filters, inherited from other computers, recombined and improved over time.
Not just more variation in the landscape, but total variation, to the point where viruses will have to actively work to crack each individual computer (for this is the logical next step: if defences are built using the techniques of evolution, so will the parasites).
Using a biological model lets me predict some more effects:
- filters that find ways to co-opt parasitical software into the defense system
- computers having sex:) (but not geeks, oh no!)
- plagues
I get about 3-4 junk faxes per week. But the global fax system obeys different rules from email and the Internet in general:
- point-to-point operations where the sending party can be identified
- high costs for working from outside the controlled network, i.e. international faxes
After the war on drugs, the wars on poverty, the war on terror... no the war on spam?
You cannot legislate away structural problems. Spam is the direct consequence of having an unprotected communications ecosystem. Communications represent a resource and spammers exploit weaknesses in protocols, interfaces, and operating systems to steal this resource from others.
This law will simply harden the existing bonds between spammers, criminals, and virus writers. Expect the fight to escalate, and your inbox to get fuller of junk.
Legislating against spammers will simply mean that spamming will become a criminal activity. Since some of the largest and most profitable and fastest growing businesses in the world are criminal (drugs, weapons, slavery, stolen antiques & art), what government can be so naive as to hope that this can succeed?
There is only one answer and I've bored Slashdotters with this often enough. Understand that the Internet acts like an organic ecosystem, where parasites evolve according to basic and unalterable rules that govern all ecosystems, natural or artificial. Understand that there are also ways to combat such parasites, based on variation, mutation, and recombination. Explore and develop these techniques.
It is the sign of an amateur to accept to produce second-rate work just to pay the bills.
The norm is that most of what makes the world tick is the 10% of quality that has survived the brutalities of the "real world", and this slice of quality sustains the remaining 90% of junk.
It's true in every domain of human activity. We all know that it takes more effort and skill to write a really good song, or cook a really good meal, or design a really good program. But please don't reduce this to: "build junk, let your customers suffer, and pay the bills". That is just sad.
BTW, I'm not a "good software designer", I'm one of the best programmers ever born (and forgive my immodesty but I've had a long time to come to this conclusion), and part of what makes me so good is that I simply do not comprimise on the quality of the design. If it's not perfect, I stop, start again, and make it so. My products rarely fail, my businesses do not go bankrupt, and we still use and maintain code that we (my team and I) wrote as far back as 15 years ago.
This is incidental.
You can comprimise on quality when you're making an accounting system for the corner grocer. You cannot when you are making software that entire industries will rely on.
This is the basic difference between Unix and Windows. Unix strives to find and select the very best possible solution to every problem faced. Windows strives to provide the maximum functionality without regard for quality or sustainability. No surprise that most Windows developers throw away their work every 2-4 years, while most Unix applications are built on old, reliable, cheap code that is as tough as nails and as solid as hard concrete.
Whenever I see someone assert how some company cancelled a project and lost a bazillion dollars because these technologies "don't work" I get a bit worked up.
This is very true, I have seen numerous large projects fail for many reasons, from unclear business requirements, to sabotage, bad management, over-ambition, stupidity, and so on. But over-complex and untested technical platforms are a recurrent underlying theme. Too often. People take vendors at their word, seek to rely on untested functionality rather than build their own, and it becomes a matter of project faith that such-and-such an architecture can and must work when in fact it's unworkable. I've seen this in perhaps 3/4 of the large failures I've watched happening, over 20 years. It happens shamefully often.
My business is designing software architectures, and frankly I find Microsoft's view of the world, and the view they sell to developers, to be... I'll be polite... inelegant and inefficient. It may be the result of solving problems by brute force and money rather than through good design, but it is also clear that Microsoft started as a company that placed marketing before technical quality, and this mentality has never really been eliminated.
There really appears to be a sad but generally accurate rule in IT. When marketing is more important than design, the result is technically poor but the company prospers. When design is more important than marketing, the result can be technically excellent, but the company will eventually die.
Keeping little stories to ourselves would kind of ruin the whole point of Slashdot, no?
Cold hard facts:
- very large bank spending large amount of money
- web application built on COM+, MSMQ, and MS clustering
- application failed because of incompatibility in MS's own software layers
- assistance from Redmond failed to solve problem
- project eventually deemed unworkable and killed
Now, you may be right that there was, somewhere, a solution to this, perhaps even an obvious one. However it escaped the people at the time, all competent, all professional.
My story may even be false, it's possible. IT is so complex that the real story is often hard to uncover.
But the conclusion that MS products are heavily vertical and often interoperable only within tight margins (specific OS, specific SP) remains, and is well-known to anyone who has developed for Windows.
Attacking my credentials is not a response. Showing me the well-defined Microsoft APIs that have been used by Microsoft's own application development teams without compromise... now that would be a worthy response.
Yes, you guessed correctly, it was a clustering environment.
It was a _huge_ project, trying to deliver a web-based front-end to an existing system. The ticket was around 150m Euro.
The architecture basically fell apart about 75% through the project. I guess around the time they stopped making use cases and actually tried to scale the prototypes up to work on their clusters. The support calls to Microsoft went very high and it was an engineer from the bank who finally discovered the real problem, apparently. The COM+ developers and the MSMQ developers knew their own products very well but were unable to figure out what was happening between the two.
The project was cancelled and I believe it was not redesigned - the economic crisis meant that the company had to cut back.
Needless to say this kind of experience made the company somewhat cautious about using MS products for anything serious after that. I don't know whether they tried an alternative, most of the business runs very successfully on the classic mainframe model (COBOL, CICS, MVS, etc.)
It is that Microsoft's own development teams have always programmed with inside knowledge of the OS, able to bypass the official API whenever necessary.
This was explained to me by the director of a large bank in Brussels that abandoned a huge Windows-based project after finding that COM+ and MSMQ could not talk to each other, and this after spending time with the actual developers at Microsoft to resolve the issues.
Each Microsoft application is written "to the metal", reimplementing huge pieces of code that should be abstracted into layers.
Many of the security issues in Windows software stem from this design model: a typical Linux security issue can be fixed by a single patch in one layer, but typical Windows security issues reappear in application after application.
And this is where the Unix model is strong: it is all about layers, formal documented interfaces, and clean separation. When Microsoft decided to add MSIE to the operating system, they were not just screwing their competitors, they were setting themselves up for a fall.
Good software must be built in layers, with formal and definite separation between layers. Microsoft is learning this now, mainly because it simply cannot make its current designs secure.
But this is the beauty ofthe movie. It sets up the audience to sympathize with the main characters, and then eliminates them all, one by one, in the name of the "greater good".
It is too well done to be without intentional irony. The imperial palace is huge, dark, forbidding, the imperial troops are faceless and without character, and we feel nothing for them at all. Only the King tries to justify his motives and he is like a lonely Macbeth in his castle, his statements are so insincere that although he is speaking the "party line", it's obvious he does not believe it for a second. He is a bloodthirsty tyrant, through and through, and all the talk about "greater good" is just a facade, a way to buy time before he brings down his fist.
That the movie manages to convey all this ambiguity, and do it while being funded by Beijing, is quite an achievement. Without the little voiceover at the end ("and the great kind unified China, built the wall, and kept the northern hordes out"), we'd be left with a very dark movie indeed.
It is a far more potent message than any simplistic story of rebellion.
Encourage people to bring their PCs and have them installed/configured with various FOSS stuff like OOorg.
Combine this with a programme to train young people in IT and you have your enthusiastic staff.
Use the library as the place where these two meet.
Turn it into a para-religious experience: "Born Again Penguins", as people dip the parasite-ridden carcinogenic carcasses of their old WinXP boxes into the holy water of Linux and come back home with a brand new box.
Mix it with booze and music.
Move it from the library to a spacious converted warehouse.
Add a coffee bar and wireless hotspot.... now you're talking!
Which I saw last night, since I still live in the Free World (aka Oceania).
The movie is a telling of an old Chinese story. If you ever read Chinese mythology, you will know that they are mixed from generous helpings of love, drama, treason, duty, battle, beauty and tragedy, set in landscapes of stunning mountains and gorges, and generally featuring the epic plotlines Tolkien was inspired by when he wrote LoTR and the Hobbit.
Hero is no different. The movie is visually stunning, a tapestry of color and force. It paints an overlapping series of stories, and the five main characters get more and more complex as the film progresses through intense red, blue, white, and green.
The Kung Fu scenes are dreamlike and truly beautiful. Only the slightest sense of repetition spoils a few of the scenes, but it is easily compensated for by the sensuality of the filming. Yes, it is ridiculous to see people running on water or across tree tops, but this is the story of a person recounting his version o a myth. Some poetry is in order, and Hero delivers.
The ending - which I won't divulge - is downbeat and not what I would have proposed, but this is true to the style of ancient Chinese stories, which do not - like many Western myths - celebrate the survival of the individual in the face of adversity. Rather, they tell stories of how intense personal tragedy and suffering can be placed into a greater context. A few dramatic deaths serve to highlight the lesson.
Don't go to Hero expecting to see amazing fight scenes. It's a movie to relax with, a film to see twice, one to take your girlfriend to and to hold her when the lovers die, in true Romeo and Juliet fashion, alone on a mountain top.
What I liked most about this film - apart from the visuals, the sound, the scenery, and the subtle plot - was its ability to portray all the characters as sympathetic, from the tyranical king, alone in his citadel of a palace, to the assassins and killers, each shown at the end to be Heroes. There are no villains in this film.
After sitting through one too many PowerPoint presentations, in which the supplier actually spent fifteen minutes (out of a total of 90 or so) explaining the organigram of his company to an audience that had been stunned into sleep by boredom and darkness, I came to the decision that PowerPoint was actually harmful and it has now been banned in our company.
Basically, our rule is to use the screen for pictures and images, but not text. If the speaker wants bulleted notes, fine. But the audience has to watch the speaker, not the screen.
If a woman aborts her first pregnancy, she has a 1 in 9 risk of breast cancer, elevated from 1 in 50.
This proves only a relationship, not a cause and effect. Women having children (including full term and lactation) have a lower breast cancer risk. Women aborting their first pregnancy have children later, possibly never.
A valid study would compare age at first prenancy/lactation with breast cancer. I suspect there are other factors that appear to link even more strongly with breast cancer than abortion:
- career (since working women have children later)
- fertility (since fertile women have children earlier)
- look&feel (since ugly women have children earlier)
- education (since women with more education have children later).
So, you should be against educating women, allowing them to work, allowing them to protect themselves against STDs that can lower their fertility,...
Slashdot Mirror
We agree that progress is good. No-one regrets the passing of days when we hand-coded interface languages because XML had not been invented.
But you make the mistake of many people, namely to assume that change is equal to progress.
Change is only part of the cycle. The other part of the cycle is the refinement of techniques and maturation of knowledge that lets you exploit change to the fullest.
Imagine if every three years we had to discard languages like HTML and XML and start with new, incompatible concepts. The market would never get into a state where mature concepts could be built: it takes 2-3 years at the least before businesses understand and trust technical platforms well enough to use them effectively.
Yet this is the basic premise of Microsoft's marketing strategy: saturate the market with new development platforms, capture the pioneer developers and keep the customer base forever unstable and tottering in Microsoft's direction.
Agreed that many vendors try this: "if you're going to base your business critical application on an untested platform, at least use ours". But Microsoft's scale and marketing push make it a much more serious issue.
Change is not progress. Change mixed with periods of maturation can be progress.
Indeed.
I agree about many software vendors.
.NET. SQLServer. Access... ad nauseam. And every single version of every platform incompatible with the last.
The Microsoft bashing is definitely present, and I would argue well-deserved, but it is not mindless. Microsoft are easily the world leader in the invention of new software development platforms that provoke huge investment in time and work by millions of developers, and which are then discarded after 2-4 years. Sun produced a couple of versions of Java. IBM... some C++ platforms, and then websphere. Oracle? OK, a bunch of platforms but mainly just Developer and Designer, over about 10 years, and pretty backwards compatible.
Microsoft? Dozens, maybe as many as fifty huge platforms produced, promoted, sold, and then abandoned in the last ten years. Visual Basic. C++. Office. ASP. COM.
OpenSource? I'm building my applications using Linux (standard POSIX), using MySQL (very standard SQL), gcc (standard ANSI C compiler), HTTP (standard protocol), HTML (standard UI language), and XML (you get the picture).
My bashing is not mindless.
Do we really need more technologies in their infancy? Is it not one of the biggest problem in this industry that we keep inventing new ways of doing the same stuff, throwing out entire generations of products and developers each time?
We need ways to make existing good code last longer, not new frameworks to waste time on.
But... sigh... I don't expect that kind of attitude from Microsoft. One more reason to avoid such platforms like the pest.
Whoever moderated the parent as a troll needs their head examined.
It's an excellent point. OOorg on Windows opens the way for later Linux migration (this is what happened in our company), since it is very easy to move someone from Windows to Linux if they are using the same applications.
And since Solitaire is one of the most used applications on Windows, it would make sense to provide it up front on Linux distros.
Please mod parent back up decently.
In my journal...
The whole point of Internet email is to allow people whom you've never heard of to get in touch with you.
Yes, people who you have never heard of, but people who you have provided your email address to in one way or another.
The fix... OK.
:) (but not geeks, oh no!)
Being a product of my time, my proposal is simply a mix of what I already see and know. Presumably what will actually happen is going to be totally different.
But here goes anyhow:
- First, treat viruses and worms and trojans as natural phenomena rather than the consequence of directed human activity. Assume that there will always be a new, smarter, more capable virus able to get around whatever locks we put into place.
- Second, assume that all data passing into a computer system is suspect, and must be discarded unless it can be accepted. Apply this paranoia at all levels from individual packets up to the contents of web forms.
- Third, use the techniques of genetic programming to evolve filters that work at each of these levels. Allow them to evolve rules for identifying valid and invalid data, and run them on live data mirrored from many places on the Internet. Use honeypot systems to attract parasitical software, and integrity checks to see how well filters perform, and to cull those that do worst.
In the final goal, every computer has a slightly different set of filters, inherited from other computers, recombined and improved over time.
Not just more variation in the landscape, but total variation, to the point where viruses will have to actively work to crack each individual computer (for this is the logical next step: if defences are built using the techniques of evolution, so will the parasites).
Using a biological model lets me predict some more effects:
- filters that find ways to co-opt parasitical software into the defense system
- computers having sex
- plagues
I get about 3-4 junk faxes per week. But the global fax system obeys different rules from email and the Internet in general:
- point-to-point operations where the sending party can be identified
- high costs for working from outside the controlled network, i.e. international faxes
What is your point, anyhow?
After the war on drugs, the wars on poverty, the war on terror... no the war on spam?
You cannot legislate away structural problems. Spam is the direct consequence of having an unprotected communications ecosystem. Communications represent a resource and spammers exploit weaknesses in protocols, interfaces, and operating systems to steal this resource from others.
This law will simply harden the existing bonds between spammers, criminals, and virus writers. Expect the fight to escalate, and your inbox to get fuller of junk.
Legislating against spammers will simply mean that spamming will become a criminal activity. Since some of the largest and most profitable and fastest growing businesses in the world are criminal (drugs, weapons, slavery, stolen antiques & art), what government can be so naive as to hope that this can succeed?
There is only one answer and I've bored Slashdotters with this often enough. Understand that the Internet acts like an organic ecosystem, where parasites evolve according to basic and unalterable rules that govern all ecosystems, natural or artificial. Understand that there are also ways to combat such parasites, based on variation, mutation, and recombination. Explore and develop these techniques.
"geek talents"?
"geek talents"??
It is the sign of an amateur to accept to produce second-rate work just to pay the bills.
The norm is that most of what makes the world tick is the 10% of quality that has survived the brutalities of the "real world", and this slice of quality sustains the remaining 90% of junk.
It's true in every domain of human activity. We all know that it takes more effort and skill to write a really good song, or cook a really good meal, or design a really good program. But please don't reduce this to: "build junk, let your customers suffer, and pay the bills". That is just sad.
BTW, I'm not a "good software designer", I'm one of the best programmers ever born (and forgive my immodesty but I've had a long time to come to this conclusion), and part of what makes me so good is that I simply do not comprimise on the quality of the design. If it's not perfect, I stop, start again, and make it so. My products rarely fail, my businesses do not go bankrupt, and we still use and maintain code that we (my team and I) wrote as far back as 15 years ago.
This is incidental.
You can comprimise on quality when you're making an accounting system for the corner grocer. You cannot when you are making software that entire industries will rely on.
This is the basic difference between Unix and Windows. Unix strives to find and select the very best possible solution to every problem faced. Windows strives to provide the maximum functionality without regard for quality or sustainability. No surprise that most Windows developers throw away their work every 2-4 years, while most Unix applications are built on old, reliable, cheap code that is as tough as nails and as solid as hard concrete.
Whenever I see someone assert how some company cancelled a project and lost a bazillion dollars because these technologies "don't work" I get a bit worked up.
This is very true, I have seen numerous large projects fail for many reasons, from unclear business requirements, to sabotage, bad management, over-ambition, stupidity, and so on. But over-complex and untested technical platforms are a recurrent underlying theme. Too often. People take vendors at their word, seek to rely on untested functionality rather than build their own, and it becomes a matter of project faith that such-and-such an architecture can and must work when in fact it's unworkable. I've seen this in perhaps 3/4 of the large failures I've watched happening, over 20 years. It happens shamefully often.
My business is designing software architectures, and frankly I find Microsoft's view of the world, and the view they sell to developers, to be... I'll be polite... inelegant and inefficient. It may be the result of solving problems by brute force and money rather than through good design, but it is also clear that Microsoft started as a company that placed marketing before technical quality, and this mentality has never really been eliminated.
There really appears to be a sad but generally accurate rule in IT. When marketing is more important than design, the result is technically poor but the company prospers. When design is more important than marketing, the result can be technically excellent, but the company will eventually die.
Very, very few businesses get both these right.
POSIX
Keeping little stories to ourselves would kind of ruin the whole point of Slashdot, no?
Cold hard facts:
- very large bank spending large amount of money
- web application built on COM+, MSMQ, and MS clustering
- application failed because of incompatibility in MS's own software layers
- assistance from Redmond failed to solve problem
- project eventually deemed unworkable and killed
Now, you may be right that there was, somewhere, a solution to this, perhaps even an obvious one. However it escaped the people at the time, all competent, all professional.
My story may even be false, it's possible. IT is so complex that the real story is often hard to uncover.
But the conclusion that MS products are heavily vertical and often interoperable only within tight margins (specific OS, specific SP) remains, and is well-known to anyone who has developed for Windows.
Attacking my credentials is not a response. Showing me the well-defined Microsoft APIs that have been used by Microsoft's own application development teams without compromise... now that would be a worthy response.
The original which I wrote is here:
7 33 593
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=89437&cid=7
Yes, you guessed correctly, it was a clustering environment.
It was a _huge_ project, trying to deliver a web-based front-end to an existing system. The ticket was around 150m Euro.
The architecture basically fell apart about 75% through the project. I guess around the time they stopped making use cases and actually tried to scale the prototypes up to work on their clusters. The support calls to Microsoft went very high and it was an engineer from the bank who finally discovered the real problem, apparently. The COM+ developers and the MSMQ developers knew their own products very well but were unable to figure out what was happening between the two.
The project was cancelled and I believe it was not redesigned - the economic crisis meant that the company had to cut back.
Needless to say this kind of experience made the company somewhat cautious about using MS products for anything serious after that. I don't know whether they tried an alternative, most of the business runs very successfully on the classic mainframe model (COBOL, CICS, MVS, etc.)
Excellent dupe, dudes.
Joel's column is worth reading, and worth mentioning twice on Slashdot.
But I reckon you're going to get mightily flamed for this one!
Is not about the command line or GUI.
It is that Microsoft's own development teams have always programmed with inside knowledge of the OS, able to bypass the official API whenever necessary.
This was explained to me by the director of a large bank in Brussels that abandoned a huge Windows-based project after finding that COM+ and MSMQ could not talk to each other, and this after spending time with the actual developers at Microsoft to resolve the issues.
Each Microsoft application is written "to the metal", reimplementing huge pieces of code that should be abstracted into layers.
Many of the security issues in Windows software stem from this design model: a typical Linux security issue can be fixed by a single patch in one layer, but typical Windows security issues reappear in application after application.
And this is where the Unix model is strong: it is all about layers, formal documented interfaces, and clean separation. When Microsoft decided to add MSIE to the operating system, they were not just screwing their competitors, they were setting themselves up for a fall.
Good software must be built in layers, with formal and definite separation between layers. Microsoft is learning this now, mainly because it simply cannot make its current designs secure.
But this is the beauty ofthe movie. It sets up the audience to sympathize with the main characters, and then eliminates them all, one by one, in the name of the "greater good".
It is too well done to be without intentional irony. The imperial palace is huge, dark, forbidding, the imperial troops are faceless and without character, and we feel nothing for them at all. Only the King tries to justify his motives and he is like a lonely Macbeth in his castle, his statements are so insincere that although he is speaking the "party line", it's obvious he does not believe it for a second. He is a bloodthirsty tyrant, through and through, and all the talk about "greater good" is just a facade, a way to buy time before he brings down his fist.
That the movie manages to convey all this ambiguity, and do it while being funded by Beijing, is quite an achievement. Without the little voiceover at the end ("and the great kind unified China, built the wall, and kept the northern hordes out"), we'd be left with a very dark movie indeed.
It is a far more potent message than any simplistic story of rebellion.
Create an Event out of it.
... now you're talking!
Encourage people to bring their PCs and have them installed/configured with various FOSS stuff like OOorg.
Combine this with a programme to train young people in IT and you have your enthusiastic staff.
Use the library as the place where these two meet.
Turn it into a para-religious experience: "Born Again Penguins", as people dip the parasite-ridden carcinogenic carcasses of their old WinXP boxes into the holy water of Linux and come back home with a brand new box.
Mix it with booze and music.
Move it from the library to a spacious converted warehouse.
Add a coffee bar and wireless hotspot.
Which I saw last night, since I still live in the Free World (aka Oceania).
The movie is a telling of an old Chinese story. If you ever read Chinese mythology, you will know that they are mixed from generous helpings of love, drama, treason, duty, battle, beauty and tragedy, set in landscapes of stunning mountains and gorges, and generally featuring the epic plotlines Tolkien was inspired by when he wrote LoTR and the Hobbit.
Hero is no different. The movie is visually stunning, a tapestry of color and force. It paints an overlapping series of stories, and the five main characters get more and more complex as the film progresses through intense red, blue, white, and green.
The Kung Fu scenes are dreamlike and truly beautiful. Only the slightest sense of repetition spoils a few of the scenes, but it is easily compensated for by the sensuality of the filming. Yes, it is ridiculous to see people running on water or across tree tops, but this is the story of a person recounting his version o a myth. Some poetry is in order, and Hero delivers.
The ending - which I won't divulge - is downbeat and not what I would have proposed, but this is true to the style of ancient Chinese stories, which do not - like many Western myths - celebrate the survival of the individual in the face of adversity. Rather, they tell stories of how intense personal tragedy and suffering can be placed into a greater context. A few dramatic deaths serve to highlight the lesson.
Don't go to Hero expecting to see amazing fight scenes. It's a movie to relax with, a film to see twice, one to take your girlfriend to and to hold her when the lovers die, in true Romeo and Juliet fashion, alone on a mountain top.
What I liked most about this film - apart from the visuals, the sound, the scenery, and the subtle plot - was its ability to portray all the characters as sympathetic, from the tyranical king, alone in his citadel of a palace, to the assassins and killers, each shown at the end to be Heroes. There are no villains in this film.
After sitting through one too many PowerPoint presentations, in which the supplier actually spent fifteen minutes (out of a total of 90 or so) explaining the organigram of his company to an audience that had been stunned into sleep by boredom and darkness, I came to the decision that PowerPoint was actually harmful and it has now been banned in our company.
Basically, our rule is to use the screen for pictures and images, but not text. If the speaker wants bulleted notes, fine. But the audience has to watch the speaker, not the screen.
Your preferred new name for LindowsOS would be:
1. Winux
Don't complain about the lack of choices, this is Slashdot, not a democracy.
Comments:
Your poll sux! I want to call it Lindux!
I flame your troll and raise you five goats
WARNING! GOAT LINK IN PREVIOUS COMMENT!
Oh like the zillionth metatroll today!
If a woman aborts her first pregnancy, she has a 1 in 9 risk of breast cancer, elevated from 1 in 50.
This proves only a relationship, not a cause and effect. Women having children (including full term and lactation) have a lower breast cancer risk. Women aborting their first pregnancy have children later, possibly never.
A valid study would compare age at first prenancy/lactation with breast cancer. I suspect there are other factors that appear to link even more strongly with breast cancer than abortion:
- career (since working women have children later)
- fertility (since fertile women have children earlier)
- look&feel (since ugly women have children earlier)
- education (since women with more education have children later).
So, you should be against educating women, allowing them to work, allowing them to protect themselves against STDs that can lower their fertility,...
Come to think of it, you probably are.