I'm sorry, but Spielberg just doesn't do dark well enough.
Well, I thought AI and Minority Report were pretty dark, and Saving Private Ryan had it's share of grit, if not darkness. For that matter, the Brothers in Arms series is amazing.
I think that Spielberg would do wonders with something that's been around so long and has such a developed and understood environment as Star Wars.
I also think that Spielberg would LOVE to do the project, because if you take a look at some of the extra "behind the scenes" stuff on the Menace's DVD's, you see Spielberg taking a tour of one of the Lucas sets, and he's like a kid in a candy shop. While we probably only think of a movie in terms of the story and the images we see on screen, it was pretty obvious that Spielberg was drooling over the potential technical aspects from a director's point of view; story lines, visual effects, plot twists, casting, etc.
It'd be way cool if Spielberg would do a "well, if I did it I'd do it like this" version of any of the Star Wars episodes.
I compare it somewhat to Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita, where Spielberg's version of Star Wars would be like the original Nikita (full of atmosphere, story, depth, etc.) and Lucas's version would be more like the American, shot-for-shot remake of Nikita that was incredibly lame in comparison.
All in all, though, I commend Lucas for what he's done, but am frustrated in the potential of what it could be.
Alright, so... what am I missing here? You've got IBM behind your efforts. Whats the problem?
I've done work with IBM before, and it's not quite that simple. They are VERY strict in their scoping, and while they may have been willing to take on the responsibility of the individual workstations running Linux in this instance, that does not mean that they will do so for the whole package.
Now, that may not have been the case here, but on 2 separate engagements I've been involved with, IBM said flat out "that's your problem" when dealing with integration issues.
I was thinking about setting up a 1-900 number for forms that require a phone number. I'd charge them like $10/min or something similar, and that way I'd be more than happy to have the tele-marketer explain everything to me, in minute detail, twice.
Notice he doesn't mention "more secure"... probably a reason for that, huh? Of course, a lot of it is good old fashioned security through obscurity. How many 14-year-old kids have OS/360 / MVS / [insert your big iron poison here] experience?
Noooo kidding! I learned to compute/administrate on a VAX 11/780 back in the mid 80's, and it was funny how environments seemed to be way more solid and reliable back then. The more I thought about it though, I kept coming to the conclusion that this was probably because even the guys running them didn't really understand them all THAT well, and everybody was scared shitless to actually "hack" around with them. The only time you did anything was when you really HAD to.
These days, some (if not most) *nix admins think nothing of logging in as root and dicking around to try stuff out, all because they've got 4 different boxes at home running the same OS. That makes it much more familiar (dangerously so) to them.
All I know is that I didn't have an 11/780 at home in the garage to mess around with.
On a side note, I had a chance to pick one up a while ago, but the better half wouldn't let me get it, never mind power it up. Every time she asked "WHY!?" she wouldn't take "cuz it'd be cool" as an answer. *sigh*
Exactly.:) I was at a friends place last weekend doing some programming, and before I went over I asked if he had all the cabling I needed to "plug-in". He told me to "get with the 90's" and grab a wireless card as he was running a wireless network at his place. I figured it was about time to upgrade and get rid of some wires at my own place, so not only did I pick up a card, I also picked up a WAP.
Went over to his place, and things were going ducky, except occasionally the signal would drop from 90% to about 3%. When I asked him, he said that it happened occasionally, but he didn't know what was causing it.
Turns out that it was his 2.4 GHz phone... his wife (who ran an at-home business) would be using the phone without him knowing it. The thing that twigged me was that Linksys was plastering the "2.4GHz" label all over the packaging of the WAP I just bought.
We messed around a bit with phone base station and WAP placement, and eventually got rid off the problem when he dug out his old 900 MHz phone.
Besides, I would find it strange sitting with a bunch of friends watching a movie on the PC, or for the few with GF's, how the hell are you mean to curl up with her if your infront of a computer???
You may be interested to know that my new Powerbook G4 has, in addition to the digital video output, a SVHS output that the manual explicitly states is designed to be used to watch DVD's on your TV. It also works for DIVX and QuickTime stuff as well.
Let's face it, we're becoming over-saturated with marketing, and I think it's losing its effectiveness.
The companies that are placing ads on TV (which seem to take up 50% or more of any show's air time these days) are probably seeing a shitty return on their investment.
As a result, the ad companies are probably complaining that there aren't the same levels of profits, etc., and are complaining to the network execs. Those execs are probably in denial and are looking for a reason that would explain the drop in marketing response, and have become somewhat fixated on PVRs as their scapegoat. After all, it CAN'T be due to the quality of the programming or advertising, could it?
It amazes me that they put such incrediblely shitty programming on TV and yet expect the same returns as with quality programming. Look at adcritic and ifilms to see how quality stuff is entertaining and effective.
Oh, yeah, and I forgot to mention that my PVR is the ONLY reason why I don't ever watch the commercials on TNN... yeah, that's it... it's got nothing to do with the fact thay they have shitty programming and I don't watch ANYTHING on TNN, never mind the commercials.
QuickTime is a time-based architecture for working with objects and events. It's also an authoring environment. Nothing constricts QuickTime to working only with video, animation, or audio. It is not simply a 'movie' format. If you really believe this, I urge you to read some of the technical documentation on Apple's developer site.
If you want to learn even more, befriend the national Apple Quicktime rep/techie when they're doing their dog and pony shows across the country, and have him show you some of the stuff that isn't even IN the docs... it'll blow your mind!
I was at a QT developer's demo, and was talking to the guy after, and he started showing me some of the undocumented features... "well, this isn't documented, but you can do this..." and he'd write a 10 line, 20 second demo that was mind-boggling. By the way, one of the biggest mind-fucks was the fact that the demos were all TEXT FILES created in the notepad-de-jour.
Specifically, I was looking at doing "remote client control" via the QT plug-in. I was working for a record company, and we were making enhanced CD ROMs, and we hated them because they were a nightmare to (a) make work across multiple platforms and (b) support.
At the time, there was a company that was selling a $100k special server that would allow an end-user client to put an unenhanced CD into the CD drive of their machine, go to the artist's web site, and it would download an Active-X client that would then figure out what web page it was looking at and then play specific audio content from that artist's CD in the drive. It was pretty cool, but WAY too expensive.
I was talking to the QT guy, and was wondering if we could somehow implement the same kind of controls via the QT plug-in. He popped open simpletext and he wrote a 5 line demo right there that ejected the CD tray, demonstrating a pretty low level of control over the client box.
I wasn't really all that surprised that that feature, and others, weren't documented. I could just imagine what the Slashdot headlines would look like...:)
repeat after me: using computers in schools is not about teaching how to operate one. using computers in schools is not about teaching how to operate one. using computers in schools is not about teaching how to operate one. it's about math, history, language, biology. the OS should get out of the way asap, which is why so many schools prefer macs.
And here I thought it was because all the profs that used them were too, ahh, absent minded, to figure out how to use and maintain Windows!
I work in a genetics lab, and that seems to be the #1 reason why everyone uses Macs... they can't be bothered to figure out how to use and/or maintain Windows.
Oh hell, I thought it was so they could piss off a record company... Apple Records demanded they change the name, and They (jobs/woz/etc) said tough, the record company said "we'll sue", and then Jobs said "So sue me!", and as a result you get a little distinctive default sound in the Mac OS called "sosumi"(sp?) that was slipped in to piss off the record company every time they happened to do something on a Mac.
Anyone want to buy my TiBook 667? (Actually, I still like it just fine - but boy, is that DVI out sweet!)
I was almost going to say the same thing! You see, I placed an order last week for one of the new TiBooks, and was pretty depressed to see the kickass new specs and features on the new models that were released/announced today. So, with a heavy heart, trying to count my blessings, images of all the "it's old when you buy it" advertisements/jokes running through my brain, I went to the Apple on-line store to check the status of my order, and whaddayaknow, Christmas came early! They were kind enough to automatically cancel my old order and replace it with the new machine, all at the same price!
*sniff* Apple? I love you man! *sniff*
The only thing that REALLY sucks is the 10 days you have to wait to get the thing in your hands!
Since many mail administrators have simply blocked anything coming from the.cn TLD (as well as pretty much any other domain known to originate from China), who is the massive DDoS going to affect?
Ahhh, that just means that you don't see them showing up in your inbox. That email STILL goes through your ISP, into your bandwidth, into your mail system, and has to be processed and dealt with (/dev/nulled) by the mail servers themselves. That can still very effectively shut you down if you get enough of them, even though you don't get the annoying "offer of a lifetime" showing up in your inbox. For that matter, it also translates into a very real cost to you even though you don't see them.
Personally, I'd like to see the network traffic dropped as far upstream as possible so that it DOESN'T get far enough that it even has to be processed, but that's probably going too far or asking too much.
Oh, I totally agree! I even applaud you and commend you for taking the stand you did. Mind you, thanks in part to the detail you provided and the blatant stupidity of some people, I just KNOW that somebody somewhere is writing down the specifics and heading down to their drugstore to give it a shot for themselves.
It was a remark to those people more than anything else... and above all, it was meant to be an attempt at humour.:)
While it's true that Ecstacy can make you depressed, it's a bit unfair to say that depression is a side effect of the drug since there are steps one can take to prevent it.
Wow... and I thought taking LEGAL advice from Slashdot was bad!
...is that if I'm expected to spend that much time/effort/money for/on a toilet, there better be a button on that there control panel for "blow^h^h^h^h oral gratification".
It might also be interesting to note that large amounts of water could have been a factor in actually DESTROYING the building.
If you dump a large amount of water on a fire burning that hot, odds are that most of it would flash into steam almost instantaneously. Anyone remember high school chemistry for the resultant volume of a gallon of water that's been vapourized? Just think of ALL those thousands of gallons of water flashing to vapour in a matter of seconds... in a relatively confined space like that, I think it would have blown out major portions of the building.
I used to teach people how to run things called Recovery Boilers. Basically, these were large metal buildings, built like pressure cookers, that can stand 200 feet tall. They have a controlled, raging inferno inside them that you dump spent chemical sludge into in order to burn away the impurities, allowing you to recover the chemicals through controlled cooling; hence the name, "Recovery Boilers". These things are HOT... damn HOT! To keep them cool (so they don't melt themselves), the walls of a recovery boiler are lined with tubes through which PURE water runs (as pure as money could make it, anyway)... no contamination or buildup was allowed to happen within these tubes. Why, you ask? If one of the tubes had a build-up of sludge in it, and the resulting pressure increase caused the tube to burst, and liquid water was injected into this raging inferno, the resulting volume increase of the flashing water would blow the whole building up. That's why they are designed with special relief valves in them that let loose should something like that happen, so that it can be a rather controlled explosion instead of having pieces parts all over the place.
I've lived through one of these controlled explosions, and it wasn't fun. The 4 emergency relief valves acted like a monstrous pipe organ, only the frequencies were so low, and the force was so powerful, that it caused just about everyone in a 2 mile radius to feel sick to their stomachs due to the vibrations you could feel, but not hear. I have NEVER felt such a huge desire or instinct to "not be here" at any other time in my life.
Not much pisses me off more than people that put their entire list of "SPAM" (good or bad) email recipients in the CC or TO field instead of putting them in the BCC field.
Recently, my cousin was one of these abusers, and, being family, was totally fair game for some retribution. He was about 6 weeks away from leaving his job to go back to school, so he emailed his hotmail account a message, and CC'd that message to EVERYONE in his contact list at work, all so it was easier for him to import their addresses into Hotmail. There were over 350 people in this list. If this wasn't bad enough, he mis-spelled his hotmail address on the first message he sent out so he sent a SECOND message.
Well, that was the final straw.
Now, little known to Steve, me, being somewhat of a techie, had acquired his SteveLastname.com domain name as an upcoming birthday present. I proceded to send out an email to EVERYONE on his CC list, pointing out the totally innapropriate way in which Steve had used his email, and made a general call for embarrassing pics, stories, etc., that we could use to shame him.
Well, within 2 minutes, his dad sent in a Christmas pic of Steve when he was 7, his brother sent in his 1st date pic, and friends from work sent in pics and stories from the bar, etc. Each time something new came in, it was put up on his site and the email list was notified. It's interesting to note that the opt-out was included in the first response, and at the end of the day, only 2 guys had done so.
Now, let me fill you in a little bit on the scope of this little prank. You see, Steve was working at the largest investment bank in Canada, and probably 80% of the people on the list were his fellow workers. Well, word spread. Within an hour of the first notification, the site had been hit almost 1,000 times. At the end of a fun, 4 day run, the site had been hit almost 60,000 times (page views). To top it off, the top execs at the company (CEO, CTO, CIO, etc.) all made a field trip at the end of one of their exec meetings to come down and say good-bye to Steve in person. Now, Steve was a little terrified over this attention from the execs, but it was nicely relieved when they proceded to hand him a letter of reccommendation signed by all of them and they all had a good laugh about it.
All in all, it was pretty fun, and Steve was a good sport, but at the end of the day, email abusers still piss me off!
There are a lot of ISP's that can't afford James Earl Jones advertisements, can't afford to spam you with free cd's. There are a lot of them that consist of one or two people. If that one person is good, you're set. So do your homework, shop around, and leave phone service to the phone company.
I have to agree. I'm living in Vancouver, BC, and my dad is living in Toronto, Ontario. Let me try to be politic by saying that he is somewhat "technically challenged". When he first signed up for Internet connectivity, he called one of the baby bells and they proceded to do a good job of screwing up and causing a bunch of stress... for EVERYONE involved! (Believe me, there's a REASON why I moved halfway across the country, and I feel for the tech support guy)
All in all, dad was pretty turned off of this whole Internet thing because it wasn't working right, and I was getting a little frustrated being his tech support from across the country.
I proceded to make some calls and do some research, and came across a couple of small "mom and pop" type shops. I found one that was the consumate "local store" ISP. I explained the fact that my dad was "high maintenance" and "technically challenged", and they laughed and said "no problem". I got a good feeling from them, both socially and technically, and dad went ahead and switched over. The new ISP actually handled the switch-over for him. Things went well, and dad's on-line with the best of them.
Now when he's got a technical question or problem he calls them and they know him by name, seem to go out of their way to help him out, and everyone is happy. Dad's probably one of their best marketting tools, and he even helped them buy their last house (he's a real estate broker).
It's pretty refreshing to think that not all technology delivered to the masses has to be provided by some large corporate entity that treats you like crap, and that the "little guy" still has a place. If anything, I think there's a bigger need for the "little guy" now more than ever.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but Spielberg just doesn't do dark well enough.
Well, I thought AI and Minority Report were pretty dark, and Saving Private Ryan had it's share of grit, if not darkness. For that matter, the Brothers in Arms series is amazing.
I think that Spielberg would do wonders with something that's been around so long and has such a developed and understood environment as Star Wars.
I also think that Spielberg would LOVE to do the project, because if you take a look at some of the extra "behind the scenes" stuff on the Menace's DVD's, you see Spielberg taking a tour of one of the Lucas sets, and he's like a kid in a candy shop. While we probably only think of a movie in terms of the story and the images we see on screen, it was pretty obvious that Spielberg was drooling over the potential technical aspects from a director's point of view; story lines, visual effects, plot twists, casting, etc.
It'd be way cool if Spielberg would do a "well, if I did it I'd do it like this" version of any of the Star Wars episodes.
I compare it somewhat to Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita, where Spielberg's version of Star Wars would be like the original Nikita (full of atmosphere, story, depth, etc.) and Lucas's version would be more like the American, shot-for-shot remake of Nikita that was incredibly lame in comparison.
All in all, though, I commend Lucas for what he's done, but am frustrated in the potential of what it could be.
That's a load of crap; algae are responsible for the majority of carbon-dioxide recycling, and it's always been that way.
Which is PRECISELY why I haven't cleaned out my fridge in over 3 years... I'm just trying to do my part for the cause!
Alright, so... what am I missing here? You've got IBM behind your efforts. Whats the problem?
I've done work with IBM before, and it's not quite that simple. They are VERY strict in their scoping, and while they may have been willing to take on the responsibility of the individual workstations running Linux in this instance, that does not mean that they will do so for the whole package.
Now, that may not have been the case here, but on 2 separate engagements I've been involved with, IBM said flat out "that's your problem" when dealing with integration issues.
Again, I wasn't there, so I don't know.
I was thinking about setting up a 1-900 number for forms that require a phone number. I'd charge them like $10/min or something similar, and that way I'd be more than happy to have the tele-marketer explain everything to me, in minute detail, twice.
Notice he doesn't mention "more secure"... probably a reason for that, huh? Of course, a lot of it is good old fashioned security through obscurity. How many 14-year-old kids have OS/360 / MVS / [insert your big iron poison here] experience?
Noooo kidding! I learned to compute/administrate on a VAX 11/780 back in the mid 80's, and it was funny how environments seemed to be way more solid and reliable back then. The more I thought about it though, I kept coming to the conclusion that this was probably because even the guys running them didn't really understand them all THAT well, and everybody was scared shitless to actually "hack" around with them. The only time you did anything was when you really HAD to.
These days, some (if not most) *nix admins think nothing of logging in as root and dicking around to try stuff out, all because they've got 4 different boxes at home running the same OS. That makes it much more familiar (dangerously so) to them.
All I know is that I didn't have an 11/780 at home in the garage to mess around with.
On a side note, I had a chance to pick one up a while ago, but the better half wouldn't let me get it, never mind power it up. Every time she asked "WHY!?" she wouldn't take "cuz it'd be cool" as an answer. *sigh*
I hope no one has a 2.4GHz phone..
:) I was at a friends place last weekend doing some programming, and before I went over I asked if he had all the cabling I needed to "plug-in". He told me to "get with the 90's" and grab a wireless card as he was running a wireless network at his place. I figured it was about time to upgrade and get rid of some wires at my own place, so not only did I pick up a card, I also picked up a WAP.
Exactly.
Went over to his place, and things were going ducky, except occasionally the signal would drop from 90% to about 3%. When I asked him, he said that it happened occasionally, but he didn't know what was causing it.
Turns out that it was his 2.4 GHz phone... his wife (who ran an at-home business) would be using the phone without him knowing it. The thing that twigged me was that Linksys was plastering the "2.4GHz" label all over the packaging of the WAP I just bought.
We messed around a bit with phone base station and WAP placement, and eventually got rid off the problem when he dug out his old 900 MHz phone.
Besides, I would find it strange sitting with a bunch of friends watching a movie on the PC, or for the few with GF's, how the hell are you mean to curl up with her if your infront of a computer???
:)
You may be interested to know that my new Powerbook G4 has, in addition to the digital video output, a SVHS output that the manual explicitly states is designed to be used to watch DVD's on your TV. It also works for DIVX and QuickTime stuff as well.
I think that's kind of cool.
I felt some moderate shaking.
Don't worry... I've felt some shaky moderation myself.
Oh, wait...
I'm sorry, but we will have to charge you $0.03 (CDN) due to the exchange rate.
*sigh*
Please, it's painful enough as it is!
Let's face it, we're becoming over-saturated with marketing, and I think it's losing its effectiveness.
The companies that are placing ads on TV (which seem to take up 50% or more of any show's air time these days) are probably seeing a shitty return on their investment.
As a result, the ad companies are probably complaining that there aren't the same levels of profits, etc., and are complaining to the network execs. Those execs are probably in denial and are looking for a reason that would explain the drop in marketing response, and have become somewhat fixated on PVRs as their scapegoat. After all, it CAN'T be due to the quality of the programming or advertising, could it?
It amazes me that they put such incrediblely shitty programming on TV and yet expect the same returns as with quality programming. Look at adcritic and ifilms to see how quality stuff is entertaining and effective.
Oh, yeah, and I forgot to mention that my PVR is the ONLY reason why I don't ever watch the commercials on TNN... yeah, that's it... it's got nothing to do with the fact thay they have shitty programming and I don't watch ANYTHING on TNN, never mind the commercials.
QuickTime is a time-based architecture for working with objects and events. It's also an authoring environment. Nothing constricts QuickTime to working only with video, animation, or audio. It is not simply a 'movie' format. If you really believe this, I urge you to read some of the technical documentation on Apple's developer site.
:)
If you want to learn even more, befriend the national Apple Quicktime rep/techie when they're doing their dog and pony shows across the country, and have him show you some of the stuff that isn't even IN the docs... it'll blow your mind!
I was at a QT developer's demo, and was talking to the guy after, and he started showing me some of the undocumented features... "well, this isn't documented, but you can do this..." and he'd write a 10 line, 20 second demo that was mind-boggling. By the way, one of the biggest mind-fucks was the fact that the demos were all TEXT FILES created in the notepad-de-jour.
Specifically, I was looking at doing "remote client control" via the QT plug-in. I was working for a record company, and we were making enhanced CD ROMs, and we hated them because they were a nightmare to (a) make work across multiple platforms and (b) support.
At the time, there was a company that was selling a $100k special server that would allow an end-user client to put an unenhanced CD into the CD drive of their machine, go to the artist's web site, and it would download an Active-X client that would then figure out what web page it was looking at and then play specific audio content from that artist's CD in the drive. It was pretty cool, but WAY too expensive.
I was talking to the QT guy, and was wondering if we could somehow implement the same kind of controls via the QT plug-in. He popped open simpletext and he wrote a 5 line demo right there that ejected the CD tray, demonstrating a pretty low level of control over the client box.
I wasn't really all that surprised that that feature, and others, weren't documented. I could just imagine what the Slashdot headlines would look like...
repeat after me: using computers in schools is not about teaching how to operate one. using computers in schools is not about teaching how to operate one. using computers in schools is not about teaching how to operate one. it's about math, history, language, biology. the OS should get out of the way asap, which is why so many schools prefer macs.
And here I thought it was because all the profs that used them were too, ahh, absent minded, to figure out how to use and maintain Windows!
I work in a genetics lab, and that seems to be the #1 reason why everyone uses Macs... they can't be bothered to figure out how to use and/or maintain Windows.
(Why do you think they picked the name "Apple"?)
Oh hell, I thought it was so they could piss off a record company... Apple Records demanded they change the name, and They (jobs/woz/etc) said tough, the record company said "we'll sue", and then Jobs said "So sue me!", and as a result you get a little distinctive default sound in the Mac OS called "sosumi"(sp?) that was slipped in to piss off the record company every time they happened to do something on a Mac.
Anyone want to buy my TiBook 667?
(Actually, I still like it just fine - but boy, is that DVI out sweet!)
I was almost going to say the same thing! You see, I placed an order last week for one of the new TiBooks, and was pretty depressed to see the kickass new specs and features on the new models that were released/announced today. So, with a heavy heart, trying to count my blessings, images of all the "it's old when you buy it" advertisements/jokes running through my brain, I went to the Apple on-line store to check the status of my order, and whaddayaknow, Christmas came early! They were kind enough to automatically cancel my old order and replace it with the new machine, all at the same price!
*sniff* Apple? I love you man! *sniff*
The only thing that REALLY sucks is the 10 days you have to wait to get the thing in your hands!
Since many mail administrators have simply blocked anything coming from the .cn TLD (as well as pretty much any other domain known to originate from China), who is the massive DDoS going to affect?
Ahhh, that just means that you don't see them showing up in your inbox. That email STILL goes through your ISP, into your bandwidth, into your mail system, and has to be processed and dealt with (/dev/nulled) by the mail servers themselves. That can still very effectively shut you down if you get enough of them, even though you don't get the annoying "offer of a lifetime" showing up in your inbox. For that matter, it also translates into a very real cost to you even though you don't see them.
Personally, I'd like to see the network traffic dropped as far upstream as possible so that it DOESN'T get far enough that it even has to be processed, but that's probably going too far or asking too much.
Oh, I totally agree! I even applaud you and commend you for taking the stand you did. Mind you, thanks in part to the detail you provided and the blatant stupidity of some people, I just KNOW that somebody somewhere is writing down the specifics and heading down to their drugstore to give it a shot for themselves.
:)
It was a remark to those people more than anything else... and above all, it was meant to be an attempt at humour.
While it's true that Ecstacy can make you depressed, it's a bit unfair to say that depression is a side effect of the drug since there are steps one can take to prevent it.
Wow... and I thought taking LEGAL advice from Slashdot was bad!
...but as far as I'm concerned, it's Darwin in action.
- Self-cleaning
You or the toilet?
;)
Don't forget Japan is also the nation of porn comic books...
Hey now, let's not be crossing the line by making fun of porn comic books!
;)
...is that if I'm expected to spend that much time/effort/money for/on a toilet, there better be a button on that there control panel for "blow^h^h^h^h oral gratification".
It might also be interesting to note that large amounts of water could have been a factor in actually DESTROYING the building.
If you dump a large amount of water on a fire burning that hot, odds are that most of it would flash into steam almost instantaneously. Anyone remember high school chemistry for the resultant volume of a gallon of water that's been vapourized? Just think of ALL those thousands of gallons of water flashing to vapour in a matter of seconds... in a relatively confined space like that, I think it would have blown out major portions of the building.
I used to teach people how to run things called Recovery Boilers. Basically, these were large metal buildings, built like pressure cookers, that can stand 200 feet tall. They have a controlled, raging inferno inside them that you dump spent chemical sludge into in order to burn away the impurities, allowing you to recover the chemicals through controlled cooling; hence the name, "Recovery Boilers". These things are HOT... damn HOT! To keep them cool (so they don't melt themselves), the walls of a recovery boiler are lined with tubes through which PURE water runs (as pure as money could make it, anyway)... no contamination or buildup was allowed to happen within these tubes. Why, you ask? If one of the tubes had a build-up of sludge in it, and the resulting pressure increase caused the tube to burst, and liquid water was injected into this raging inferno, the resulting volume increase of the flashing water would blow the whole building up. That's why they are designed with special relief valves in them that let loose should something like that happen, so that it can be a rather controlled explosion instead of having pieces parts all over the place.
I've lived through one of these controlled explosions, and it wasn't fun. The 4 emergency relief valves acted like a monstrous pipe organ, only the frequencies were so low, and the force was so powerful, that it caused just about everyone in a 2 mile radius to feel sick to their stomachs due to the vibrations you could feel, but not hear. I have NEVER felt such a huge desire or instinct to "not be here" at any other time in my life.
Or how about because it pisses me off!
It's like a guy constantly tapping you on the shoulder... after a while, you want to turn around a deck him.
Not much pisses me off more than people that put their entire list of "SPAM" (good or bad) email recipients in the CC or TO field instead of putting them in the BCC field.
Recently, my cousin was one of these abusers, and, being family, was totally fair game for some retribution. He was about 6 weeks away from leaving his job to go back to school, so he emailed his hotmail account a message, and CC'd that message to EVERYONE in his contact list at work, all so it was easier for him to import their addresses into Hotmail. There were over 350 people in this list. If this wasn't bad enough, he mis-spelled his hotmail address on the first message he sent out so he sent a SECOND message.
Well, that was the final straw.
Now, little known to Steve, me, being somewhat of a techie, had acquired his SteveLastname.com domain name as an upcoming birthday present. I proceded to send out an email to EVERYONE on his CC list, pointing out the totally innapropriate way in which Steve had used his email, and made a general call for embarrassing pics, stories, etc., that we could use to shame him.
Well, within 2 minutes, his dad sent in a Christmas pic of Steve when he was 7, his brother sent in his 1st date pic, and friends from work sent in pics and stories from the bar, etc. Each time something new came in, it was put up on his site and the email list was notified. It's interesting to note that the opt-out was included in the first response, and at the end of the day, only 2 guys had done so.
Now, let me fill you in a little bit on the scope of this little prank. You see, Steve was working at the largest investment bank in Canada, and probably 80% of the people on the list were his fellow workers. Well, word spread. Within an hour of the first notification, the site had been hit almost 1,000 times. At the end of a fun, 4 day run, the site had been hit almost 60,000 times (page views). To top it off, the top execs at the company (CEO, CTO, CIO, etc.) all made a field trip at the end of one of their exec meetings to come down and say good-bye to Steve in person. Now, Steve was a little terrified over this attention from the execs, but it was nicely relieved when they proceded to hand him a letter of reccommendation signed by all of them and they all had a good laugh about it.
All in all, it was pretty fun, and Steve was a good sport, but at the end of the day, email abusers still piss me off!
There are a lot of ISP's that can't afford James Earl Jones advertisements, can't afford to spam you with free cd's. There are a lot of them that consist of one or two people. If that one person is good, you're set. So do your homework, shop around, and leave phone service to the phone company.
I have to agree. I'm living in Vancouver, BC, and my dad is living in Toronto, Ontario. Let me try to be politic by saying that he is somewhat "technically challenged". When he first signed up for Internet connectivity, he called one of the baby bells and they proceded to do a good job of screwing up and causing a bunch of stress... for EVERYONE involved! (Believe me, there's a REASON why I moved halfway across the country, and I feel for the tech support guy)
All in all, dad was pretty turned off of this whole Internet thing because it wasn't working right, and I was getting a little frustrated being his tech support from across the country.
I proceded to make some calls and do some research, and came across a couple of small "mom and pop" type shops. I found one that was the consumate "local store" ISP. I explained the fact that my dad was "high maintenance" and "technically challenged", and they laughed and said "no problem". I got a good feeling from them, both socially and technically, and dad went ahead and switched over. The new ISP actually handled the switch-over for him. Things went well, and dad's on-line with the best of them.
Now when he's got a technical question or problem he calls them and they know him by name, seem to go out of their way to help him out, and everyone is happy. Dad's probably one of their best marketting tools, and he even helped them buy their last house (he's a real estate broker).
It's pretty refreshing to think that not all technology delivered to the masses has to be provided by some large corporate entity that treats you like crap, and that the "little guy" still has a place. If anything, I think there's a bigger need for the "little guy" now more than ever.