Absolutely! I love how GRRM creates these wonderful multidimensional characters, makes you love them, and then kills them off. Cruel perhaps, but it's far more gripping when characters get into trouble - they're doing a high-wire act without the safety net of some contrived resurrection.
Actually, if this is going to be the end for WoT - Sanderson can kill off ALL the characters:-P
MYTHBUSTERS, of course! Although Adam and Jamie might run overbudget testing this one out. I'm guessing the odds are 10e24 to 1 that Adam giggles at the term "panspermia."
Heh, I just remembered a code review years ago where someone had used trigraphs:
Reviewer: "Why are there all these question marks in your code?" Programmer, with straight face: "Because I don't know what I'm doing"
[cue laugh track]
...about 1/17500th of the cumulative sum of human knowledge stored on any media (including paper, film, HD, etc.) - presuming 12EB in 1999 with a growth rate of 1.5EB/year since then.
I liked some of the thought-provoking imagery - musing on what could have been going on in the minds of the Easter Islanders as they cut down the last tree on the island? With the added consequence that that tree represented the last possible chance to build a canoe for any of them to escape the devastation they'd wrought. Also the image of failed societies' increasingly desperate attempts to survive after they lost resources fundamental to their existance.
Like it or not, oil is fundamental to sustaining our existance today. If it disappeared or became an expensive rarity, life would go on, but not as we know it, unless we can scale up alternative energy sources. Just imagine this scenario - if NYC had to revert to having its food supply delivered by horse-drawn wagons and sailing ships, would it be capable of sustaining a population of 12 million? Add the other nearby metropolii of Boston, Philly, Washington, Baltimore - is there even enough food grown within a horse's reach to feed all those people? Who'd feed urbanized Japan?
A doomsday scenario we'll hopefully avoid. But not if we stick our collective head in the sand and simply trust that we'll always be able to find more oil. Those Easter Islanders probably had a similar misbegotten trust in their deities, before their doom came.
"I work in a world where a variation of the PowerPC drives a business. From iSeries (AS/400 new name) to xSeries and eventually the pSeries. The processor and the technology behind it are simply amazing. We went from 48bit to 64bit computing in the late 90s without recompiling. "
Actually, the processor change in the iSeries was even more radical than just 40 bit to 64 bit addressing; it also involved a change from a CISC processor to RISC. The operating system automagically retranslated everything to the new processor architecture when you restored your old software on the new hardware.
People are curious creatures. No amount of lawmaking nor policing can suppress that basic element of humanity which fuels our inventiveness as a species. This is, after all, the same people whose ancestors brought such history-changing inventions in communications as the printing press, and paper itself.
As more and more Chinese people come online, they're going to wonder why entire websites suddenly disappear for weeks and reappear. They're going to find ways to defeat filters and internet cops to satisfy their curiosity about forbidden knowledge. They're going to find clever ways to encrypt and disguise their communications with each other and the outside world. They're going to remember that information is power. It is inevitable and unstoppable.
IMHO, the real problem with the prequels is the awful, peurile dialogue in the screenplay.
Think about it. The story line and SW Universe is still pretty good and compelling. On paper, there are a good bunch of actors (who appear horrible with the dumb lines in the script), and of course the effects are great.
Just imagine if the dialogue was rewritten, sans all the "whiny"-ness from Anakin. Even (_shudder_) Jar-Jar might have been tolerable with decent lines and without the idiotic "mee-sa" patois. They would still never measure up to the expectations from the ground-breaking originals, but these flix might actually be pretty good.
Actually, I would imagine IT projects being far worse than non-IT projects.
Here's why:
Imagine doing a civil engineering project where advances in material science are accelerated 1000x faster than they are today; where geological changes to the landscape are accelerated to 10 million times faster than they are today. It becomes a lot harder to build that bridge when the landscape you're building on and the materials you're building with are constantly changing.
That's what it's like with any large-scale IT project - the business needs and the tools you're building with are constantly changing.
I recall a case at a major Canadian brewery (think it was Molson, but it might've been Labatt's):
The sysoperator ran a batch process to reconcile inventory databases. Seeing that nothing was happening, he submitted the batch process again, with the deleterious result being two conflicting processes corrupting the database.
Half the beer shipments in Canada were put on hold for a few hours while they sorted the mess out.
...sounds more like a bunch of more-or-less benignly corrupted files which have been unwittingly user-propagated, rather than self-propagating virii.
I guess the Sims cops need to be modded to keep the SimVille neighbourhood from going to the dogs, or else they'll be as useless as an Indian policeman enforcing cyber-law.
Slashdot Mirror
Woohoo!
Absolutely! I love how GRRM creates these wonderful multidimensional characters, makes you love them, and then kills them off. Cruel perhaps, but it's far more gripping when characters get into trouble - they're doing a high-wire act without the safety net of some contrived resurrection.
:-P
Actually, if this is going to be the end for WoT - Sanderson can kill off ALL the characters
MYTHBUSTERS, of course! Although Adam and Jamie might run overbudget testing this one out. I'm guessing the odds are 10e24 to 1 that Adam giggles at the term "panspermia."
Hello, RoboCop!
Reviewer: "Why are there all these question marks in your code?"
Programmer, with straight face: "Because I don't know what I'm doing"
[cue laugh track]
[ducks]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exabyte
I liked some of the thought-provoking imagery - musing on what could have been going on in the minds of the Easter Islanders as they cut down the last tree on the island? With the added consequence that that tree represented the last possible chance to build a canoe for any of them to escape the devastation they'd wrought. Also the image of failed societies' increasingly desperate attempts to survive after they lost resources fundamental to their existance.
Like it or not, oil is fundamental to sustaining our existance today. If it disappeared or became an expensive rarity, life would go on, but not as we know it, unless we can scale up alternative energy sources. Just imagine this scenario - if NYC had to revert to having its food supply delivered by horse-drawn wagons and sailing ships, would it be capable of sustaining a population of 12 million? Add the other nearby metropolii of Boston, Philly, Washington, Baltimore - is there even enough food grown within a horse's reach to feed all those people? Who'd feed urbanized Japan?
A doomsday scenario we'll hopefully avoid. But not if we stick our collective head in the sand and simply trust that we'll always be able to find more oil. Those Easter Islanders probably had a similar misbegotten trust in their deities, before their doom came.
Actually, the processor change in the iSeries was even more radical than just 40 bit to 64 bit addressing; it also involved a change from a CISC processor to RISC. The operating system automagically retranslated everything to the new processor architecture when you restored your old software on the new hardware.
As more and more Chinese people come online, they're going to wonder why entire websites suddenly disappear for weeks and reappear. They're going to find ways to defeat filters and internet cops to satisfy their curiosity about forbidden knowledge. They're going to find clever ways to encrypt and disguise their communications with each other and the outside world. They're going to remember that information is power. It is inevitable and unstoppable.
Man, that was funny! Sure cheered me up.
I wonder what they're crunching in the Eastern Townships... calculating the costs of separation from Canada? :-p
Now that position sounds like it has job security! Although the penalty for retiring early must be a b*tch.
IMHO, the real problem with the prequels is the awful, peurile dialogue in the screenplay.
Think about it. The story line and SW Universe is still pretty good and compelling. On paper, there are a good bunch of actors (who appear horrible with the dumb lines in the script), and of course the effects are great.
Just imagine if the dialogue was rewritten, sans all the "whiny"-ness from Anakin. Even (_shudder_) Jar-Jar might have been tolerable with decent lines and without the idiotic "mee-sa" patois. They would still never measure up to the expectations from the ground-breaking originals, but these flix might actually be pretty good.
Actually, I would imagine IT projects being far worse than non-IT projects.
Here's why:
Imagine doing a civil engineering project where advances in material science are accelerated 1000x faster than they are today; where geological changes to the landscape are accelerated to 10 million times faster than they are today. It becomes a lot harder to build that bridge when the landscape you're building on and the materials you're building with are constantly changing.
That's what it's like with any large-scale IT project - the business needs and the tools you're building with are constantly changing.
I recall a case at a major Canadian brewery (think it was Molson, but it might've been Labatt's):
The sysoperator ran a batch process to reconcile inventory databases. Seeing that nothing was happening, he submitted the batch process again, with the deleterious result being two conflicting processes corrupting the database.
Half the beer shipments in Canada were put on hold for a few hours while they sorted the mess out.
...sounds more like a bunch of more-or-less benignly corrupted files which have been unwittingly user-propagated, rather than self-propagating virii. I guess the Sims cops need to be modded to keep the SimVille neighbourhood from going to the dogs, or else they'll be as useless as an Indian policeman enforcing cyber-law.