Actually, the short which preceded Up was pretty dubious. As Wednesday Addams remarked, it was peurile and underdramatized with little demonstrable understanding of Aristotelean unities. Just a bunch of unremarkable incidents with one joke endlessly repeated. Ooh! Wait! Yes! Little black clouds have tantrums! I almost forgot. Ok, two jokes.
Warn them that the Earth is infested with a plague species (Homo sapiens Linn.) which wants to take over every habitable planet in the universuum, and thank them for demonstrating their technology.
Aside from a few obvious cultural hooks (bing cherries, Bing Crosby, bing bang bong, etc.) from Advertising Psychology 101, I can't see the attraction. To be honest, I haven't even tried it. More net worth in Google, which is my librarian in the intertubes.
Uhh... Didn't Einstein mention something called "spacetime"? When the principle of Occam's Razor slavishly adheres to common sensibility, the universe is no longer weird. But it is flat.
These were all genuine ADV.COM Easter eggs from Back In The Day. Very rare. Thanks to Mike Goetz, Dave Pratt, and others.
"From the darkness nearby comes the sound of shuffling feet. As you turn towards the sound, a nine-foot cyclops ambles into the light of your lamp. The cyclops is dressed in a three-piece suit of worsted wool, and is wearing a black silk top-hat and cowboy boots and is carrying an ebony walking-stick. It catches sight of you and stops, seeming frozen in its tracks, with its bloodshot eye bulging in amazement and its fang-filled jaw drooping with shock. After staring at you in incredulous disbelief for a few moments, it reaches into the pocket of its vest and pulls out a small plastic bag filled with a leafy green substance, and examines it carefully. "It must be worth eighty pazools an ounce after all" mumbles the cyclops, who casts one final look at you, shudders, and staggers away out of sight."
"From somewhere nearby come the sounds of sliding, stumbling feet. As you turn towards them, the beam of your lamp falls upon a tall, shambling figure approaching you out of the darkness. Standing no more than five feet tall, it cannot possibly weigh more than fifty pounds including the shroud and bandages in which it is wrapped; a musty reek like the scent of old, dead earth seeps from it and fills the air. As you cower back in disgust and horror, the figure halts, examines you through eyes resembling wet pebbles, and whispers "Peace, man!" in a voice like wind rustling through dead trees. It then turns and shambles away into the darkness."
"From somewhere nearby, there suddenly comes a sound of something mechanical in motion. As you turn towards it, an incredible figure rolls into the light of your lamp. It stands about five feet high on a wheeled metal pedestal, and has a globular light-filled head, accordion-pleated metal arms, and a cylindrical body the size of an oil drum with a plastic panel on the front. It rolls past without taking any notice of you, all the while waving its arms, flashing a light behind its front panel and bellowing "WARNING! WARNING! DANGER!" at the top of its not inconsiderable voice. It rolls on out of sight, and moments later there is an immense flash of light and a tremendous blast of sparks and smoke. When the air clears, you find that no trace remains of the strange apparition."
"With a sudden gust of air, a large cave bat flutters into view, flies around your head several times, squeaks with disgust, and flutters on out of sight."
"From somewhere in the distance, there comes a musical swirl of light, elvish laughter and the sounds of merriment."
Uh... real soccer players know how to fall. If another soccer player comes too close, drop, grab your knee and scream. Soccerbots will never be able to do that. No emo chips.
Maybe it's a dull book? Maybe it's a quick read? Maybe it's not advertised? Maybe it's NOT a best seller?
Book Publishing 101: Nobody makes money by publishing books that aren't bibles, yearbooks or church directories.
Nearly all the books that are published are vanity press editions that you paid to publish yourself, anyway. Some vanishingly small number of titles appear in the NYT RoB because you've already published a best seller, you're famous, you're infamous, you have no qualms about being exploited provided somebody ghostwrites "your book" for you. One in a billion people PER GENERATION are J. R. R. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman or J. K. Rowling. Or Agatha Christie, if that's your genre. Make up your own numbers.
Just because people pirate your book doesn't mean people read your book. Book pirates are the literary equivalent of beachcombers, beach bums and itinerant metal scanners. They don't read. They collect whatever intellectual flotsam washes up on their tiny shores, in hopes it might be good. Some of them organize that data into well-encrypted volumes, never to be reopened.
If a few people did buy your book, congratulations. You've beaten long, long odds. And presumably you meant your reader(s) to find utilitarian or derivative uses for whatever nuggets of hard-gleaned technical wisdom you passed on in your book. If noble information-sharing was not your intent, then your book should have remained a journal, a daybook, a diary, a log, a laboratory notebook — and you, member of the secret order of whatever guild you belong to, should be filing for a patent.
Shouldn't there be escape pods on that sucker? They wouldn't have to do re-entry or nuthin, just skip off the atmosphere once to burn off a little velocity, then maintain low orbit until the Rooskies come.
...for someone who paraphrased English translations of the Tao Te Ching as though Chinese was a dead language. Chill out, dudette. Who cares that the right hand of darkness doesn't know what the left hand is doing?
Experience is non-transferable outside your own cloth-covered cubicle. That is, reputation is largely a self-inflicted delusion, because your work experience is so tightly integrated to the company you're working for that only headhunters looking for you already will be impressed — and those guys are middlemen with an even harder sell to make that you could do on your own. Your own jobhunting efforts are hard enough, especially if non-disclosure agreements prevent you from demonstrating your contributions to major projects, but with a Master's you're heavily invested in yourself, when no one else really is. That makes your postgraduate degree a nifty credential that's hard to ignore (not impossible, but hard); and even if you impress no one but your family and yourself, that confidence casts a longer shadow than your student's resume ever will.
Ha! Anybody here remember "fixing" Apple///'s by swapping motherboards between two Apple///'s on the workbench? That was SOP at one highly regarded retailer I used to work for back in the '80s. Nobody actually got a new motherboard "straight from Apple" until they'd work themselves to the bottom of the dogpile and still had the nerve to complain. Then, eventually, "somebody" (count my bruises) would actually get the damn thing fixed. At least with Apple///'s that was kind of possible, until some even more obscure brands that were current back in the day. MORAL: Never buy Generation One of anything.
Let's charge enough to leave the homies ranting on the curbs, though. Seriously, I'd settle for just nationalizing rails infrastructure and charging cars and semis by the mile for rail system upkeep.
The industry changes too fast. No one can predict what (or whether) computers will be like in a decade and a half. The only thing likely to remain true is that Open Office.org will still run in emulation on some platform or other — software is expensive, hardware is cheap and evolving fast. So, although you may still have OOo around, your best friend may be a virtual robot on a television screen who types (in OOo as a retroid lark) whatever you dictate.
If you can remember about ten years ago, CDs appeared (especially from Kodak) with an expected storage life of several hundred years. The longevity (or lack thereof) was a function of the dyes used in the layer actually burned by laser. In theory, gold dye meant long life, green dye meant two or three years tops. This bit of folklore was followed up by greenish-gold dyes and a shift to DVD-R discs with over 4 gigabytes of storage and an unknown (or undocumented) shelf life. The holy grail of long term storage, the way it should be done using technology, was a throwaway moment in Forbidden Planet, i.e., Krell theremin tunes embedded in small crystals which had survived over 700,000 years.
However, there is another longterm information storage model, biological in origin: DNA embedded in diverse ecosystems which brook no deviation from competitive norms, but which in fact do drift over millions of years. So, what you need is a self-replicating, self-correcting mechanism for information transfer which is amenable to criticism by peers which are only indirectly related to the data in temporal transit toward unknown futures.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the short which preceded Up was pretty dubious. As Wednesday Addams remarked, it was peurile and underdramatized with little demonstrable understanding of Aristotelean unities. Just a bunch of unremarkable incidents with one joke endlessly repeated. Ooh! Wait! Yes! Little black clouds have tantrums! I almost forgot. Ok, two jokes.
Warn them that the Earth is infested with a plague species (Homo sapiens Linn.) which wants to take over every habitable planet in the universuum, and thank them for demonstrating their technology.
Same reason as always. If they know how you voted, they come and break your kneecaps. Secret prevents real mayhem, shame has nothing to do with it.
Aside from a few obvious cultural hooks (bing cherries, Bing Crosby, bing bang bong, etc.) from Advertising Psychology 101, I can't see the attraction. To be honest, I haven't even tried it. More net worth in Google, which is my librarian in the intertubes.
Uhh... Didn't Einstein mention something called "spacetime"? When the principle of Occam's Razor slavishly adheres to common sensibility, the universe is no longer weird. But it is flat.
It weren't nothing until Apple, Borland or Microsoft said so, back when IBM was still banking on Wylbur.
Yeah, pretty gratuitous. Musta slipped on a Nuka-Cola bottlecap getting out the shower this morning. Sorry, Steve!
He thinks if you work for him, your stuff is his.
I luv topdown designers. Leave the actual work to coder grunts.
These were all genuine ADV.COM Easter eggs from Back In The Day. Very rare. Thanks to Mike Goetz, Dave Pratt, and others.
"From the darkness nearby comes the sound of shuffling feet. As you turn towards the sound, a nine-foot cyclops ambles into the light of your lamp. The cyclops is dressed in a three-piece suit of worsted wool, and is wearing a black silk top-hat and cowboy boots and is carrying an ebony walking-stick. It catches sight of you and stops, seeming frozen in its tracks, with its bloodshot eye bulging in amazement and its fang-filled jaw drooping with shock. After staring at you in incredulous disbelief for a few moments, it reaches into the pocket of its vest and pulls out a small plastic bag filled with a leafy green substance, and examines it carefully. "It must be worth eighty pazools an ounce after all" mumbles the cyclops, who casts one final look at you, shudders, and staggers away out of sight."
"From somewhere nearby come the sounds of sliding, stumbling feet. As you turn towards them, the beam of your lamp falls upon a tall, shambling figure approaching you out of the darkness. Standing no more than five feet tall, it cannot possibly weigh more than fifty pounds including the shroud and bandages in which it is wrapped; a musty reek like the scent of old, dead earth seeps from it and fills the air. As you cower back in disgust and horror, the figure halts, examines you through eyes resembling wet pebbles, and whispers "Peace, man!" in a voice like wind rustling through dead trees. It then turns and shambles away into the darkness."
"From somewhere nearby, there suddenly comes a sound of something mechanical in motion. As you turn towards it, an incredible figure rolls into the light of your lamp. It stands about five feet high on a wheeled metal pedestal, and has a globular light-filled head, accordion-pleated metal arms, and a cylindrical body the size of an oil drum with a plastic panel on the front. It rolls past without taking any notice of you, all the while waving its arms, flashing a light behind its front panel and bellowing "WARNING! WARNING! DANGER!" at the top of its not inconsiderable voice. It rolls on out of sight, and moments later there is an immense flash of light and a tremendous blast of sparks and smoke. When the air clears, you find that no trace remains of the strange apparition."
"With a sudden gust of air, a large cave bat flutters into view, flies around your head several times, squeaks with disgust, and flutters on out of sight."
"From somewhere in the distance, there comes a musical swirl of light, elvish laughter and the sounds of merriment."
I'd mod this up for sanity, but I blew all my mod points on the Google-Japanese burakumin nutjobs.
The Wrong Way to Go
And the Army Way to Go!
Uh... real soccer players know how to fall. If another soccer player comes too close, drop, grab your knee and scream. Soccerbots will never be able to do that. No emo chips.
Maybe it's a dull book? Maybe it's a quick read? Maybe it's not advertised? Maybe it's NOT a best seller?
Book Publishing 101: Nobody makes money by publishing books that aren't bibles, yearbooks or church directories.
Nearly all the books that are published are vanity press editions that you paid to publish yourself, anyway. Some vanishingly small number of titles appear in the NYT RoB because you've already published a best seller, you're famous, you're infamous, you have no qualms about being exploited provided somebody ghostwrites "your book" for you. One in a billion people PER GENERATION are J. R. R. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman or J. K. Rowling. Or Agatha Christie, if that's your genre. Make up your own numbers.
Just because people pirate your book doesn't mean people read your book. Book pirates are the literary equivalent of beachcombers, beach bums and itinerant metal scanners. They don't read. They collect whatever intellectual flotsam washes up on their tiny shores, in hopes it might be good. Some of them organize that data into well-encrypted volumes, never to be reopened.
If a few people did buy your book, congratulations. You've beaten long, long odds. And presumably you meant your reader(s) to find utilitarian or derivative uses for whatever nuggets of hard-gleaned technical wisdom you passed on in your book. If noble information-sharing was not your intent, then your book should have remained a journal, a daybook, a diary, a log, a laboratory notebook — and you, member of the secret order of whatever guild you belong to, should be filing for a patent.
Shouldn't there be escape pods on that sucker? They wouldn't have to do re-entry or nuthin, just skip off the atmosphere once to burn off a little velocity, then maintain low orbit until the Rooskies come.
...for someone who paraphrased English translations of the Tao Te Ching as though Chinese was a dead language. Chill out, dudette. Who cares that the right hand of darkness doesn't know what the left hand is doing?
You'll have to explain it.
Experience is non-transferable outside your own cloth-covered cubicle. That is, reputation is largely a self-inflicted delusion, because your work experience is so tightly integrated to the company you're working for that only headhunters looking for you already will be impressed — and those guys are middlemen with an even harder sell to make that you could do on your own. Your own jobhunting efforts are hard enough, especially if non-disclosure agreements prevent you from demonstrating your contributions to major projects, but with a Master's you're heavily invested in yourself, when no one else really is. That makes your postgraduate degree a nifty credential that's hard to ignore (not impossible, but hard); and even if you impress no one but your family and yourself, that confidence casts a longer shadow than your student's resume ever will.
corroboration?
Oh! Never mind... :)
Ha! Anybody here remember "fixing" Apple ///'s by swapping motherboards between two Apple ///'s on the workbench? That was SOP at one highly regarded retailer I used to work for back in the '80s. Nobody actually got a new motherboard "straight from Apple" until they'd work themselves to the bottom of the dogpile and still had the nerve to complain. Then, eventually, "somebody" (count my bruises) would actually get the damn thing fixed. At least with Apple ///'s that was kind of possible, until some even more obscure brands that were current back in the day. MORAL: Never buy Generation One of anything.
Let's charge enough to leave the homies ranting on the curbs, though. Seriously, I'd settle for just nationalizing rails infrastructure and charging cars and semis by the mile for rail system upkeep.
The industry changes too fast. No one can predict what (or whether) computers will be like in a decade and a half. The only thing likely to remain true is that Open Office.org will still run in emulation on some platform or other — software is expensive, hardware is cheap and evolving fast. So, although you may still have OOo around, your best friend may be a virtual robot on a television screen who types (in OOo as a retroid lark) whatever you dictate.
"All your toilets are belong to us!"
If you can remember about ten years ago, CDs appeared (especially from Kodak) with an expected storage life of several hundred years. The longevity (or lack thereof) was a function of the dyes used in the layer actually burned by laser. In theory, gold dye meant long life, green dye meant two or three years tops. This bit of folklore was followed up by greenish-gold dyes and a shift to DVD-R discs with over 4 gigabytes of storage and an unknown (or undocumented) shelf life. The holy grail of long term storage, the way it should be done using technology, was a throwaway moment in Forbidden Planet, i.e., Krell theremin tunes embedded in small crystals which had survived over 700,000 years.
However, there is another longterm information storage model, biological in origin: DNA embedded in diverse ecosystems which brook no deviation from competitive norms, but which in fact do drift over millions of years. So, what you need is a self-replicating, self-correcting mechanism for information transfer which is amenable to criticism by peers which are only indirectly related to the data in temporal transit toward unknown futures.
Oral tradition, anyone?