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I like it! Especially the image of seeing flashes and hearing bangs from people working nearby. Yellowing files would also be cool.

Your comment reminds me of the SF short story, "An Office Romance" by Terry Bisson. I can't verify this link because of my company's internet filtering software, but I think the story is located at:

http://www.sff.net/people/tbisson/officeromance.ht ml

The story is about office workers in the future laboring away in a virtual reality version of "Microserf Office".

Obviously at least the lungs must be pressurized, but what about the rest of the body ? There is some information on the consequences of such low pressure for the human body at this page (also some real cases discussed). Apparently some water vapor will evolve in the soft tissues and cause swelling of the body. This can be prevented by "a properly fitted elastic garment" at pressures as low as 20 millibar. It is not clear whether this would work at the 6 milibar on Mars.

Folks interested in nanotech run wild should check out Bloom, by Will McCarthy. His vision is far more complex and beautiful than mere "Grey Goo." Solar/heat powered nanites, or mycora in this context, floating in self organizing clouds around the inner planets with all sorts of emergant behaviors. An excellent read.

Folks interested in nanotech run wild should check out Bloom, by Will McCarthy. His vision is far more complex and beautiful than mere "Grey Goo." Solar/heat powered nanites, or mycora in this context, floating in self organizing clouds around the inner planets with all sorts of emergant behaviors. An excellent read.

The problem they have is with Amazon's marketing tactics. When someone searches for a new book, that they might otherwise buy, Amazon pops up a link to a used copy of the book as well. Which is a sort of encouragement to the person to buy the book used instead of new as they'd originally intended. i.e., Amazon seems like it's trying to talk people out of buying new books, and convince them to buy used books instead. This is what is driving the authors into a snit.

And I have to admit, I can see their point. As I said, used bookstores and libraries exist. They're factored into the equation already--that a certain amount of people will buy new; others will buy used; others will read in the library and not buy at all. But Amazon seems like it is trying to skew the equation, thus depriving those writers of their bread and butter.
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... then you need to read The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, a serious and fascinating discussion of the question of why our universe is the way it is; whether or not you agree with the authors' conclusions, it will at least give you the necessary tools to think further about it. Sort of like James Morrow does for Christian theology. Though not as funny.

Just read a short story last night in a collection. How We Lost the Moon... talks about the evacuation of lunar bases and how they saved the historic Apollo items - even digging out an Armstrong footprint. Nice read, IMHO.

Replying to my own post, I've found a web page with a list of stories on this theme.

There are considerable difficulties with the laser. For an interesting and detailed discussion, try this paper. (For people who don't know, the Dr. Forward they refer to is the same Robert L. Forward that writes sci-fi occasionally.)

Cheers,
Ben

For an example of this, look at the site that certain members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Association are putting together, the Storytellers' Bowl. The idea is that pre-completed works will be published serially, each new installment coming out free for all to read, download, copy, pass around on Gnutella, etc. as soon as would-be readers have kicked in enough money. They'll be using the PayPal person-to-person payment system for contributions. It's being discussed now on an SFFnet newsgroup.

I personally think this is a keen idea, and I'm all afire to support it, especially since it's likely to result in more stuff from the Deed of Paksenarrion universe by Elizabeth Moon.
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Along those lines, people may find Nomic interesting, a game where the participants make up the rules as they go along. You can find information here and here.

• The story was called "Examination Day" and was written by Henry Slesar.
• This episode first aired in November 1, 1985, in the first year of the new Twilight Zone series(it only survived 3 years).
• From here I found that it was based on his short story which appeared in the Feb '58 issue of Playboy.
• From here I found that the Playboy short story was written under his psuedonym of Sley Harson.

I read TBG before Neverness; fortunately, I read the two a few years apart so that TBG didn't ruin Neverness for me. Both are very good. I haven't finished the series yet; they're hard books to find.

Other SF authors in the same vein, writing literate SF, are the aforementioned Ia in Banks (make sure you consider this website), the well-known Ste phen R. Donaldson and Dan Simmons (in particular his Hyperion series). Iain Banks writes non-genre fiction as Iain M. Banks and is hugely popular in the UK. Donaldson, lambasted and praised for his Unbeliever Chronicles, also wrote The Gap Series, a dark DF space opera based on the Ring Cycle. Simmons writes a lot of horror and other dark fiction.

Another author in the vein is Steven Brust (whose Taltos series is his masterwork), as well as the other members of his writing circle, the Pre-Joycean Fellowship, including Emma Bull.

Another fine but relatively obscure author is the powerful writer George Alec Effinger. Lordy lordy, is this man good. If I'm not mistaken, he's also worked on comix with Neil Gaiman and wrote for the supercool SF cartoon Galaxy Rangers, along with another great author, Tom De Haven.

More old-school authors who wrote very post-modern SF include the amazing Avram Davidson (check out the great Treasury) who wrote primarily short stories, and the odd and great Polish author Stanislaw Lem (whose career began in 1951 and continues to this day). Starting from Lem, you get into the great European (including S. America) "fantastic philosophers" Borges and Calvino. And if you like them, then you're sure to like Pynchon, and so on to David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, who all write SF-tinged fiction.

And the list goes on.

Only I want to take it even further. First off, let me reference two previous posts on SlashDot: 'Its the API's Stupid!' and 'Again: Its the API's Stupid!'. In those posts I made the case for developing an API that was both an Open Source Component development/delivery/runtime system and a set of standard Components built with/for it. Quote from those posts:

"We need a fast, simple, powerful and complete Open Source solution for component based development. An API (preferably a cross platform one) that you can write code to in any of the most popular languages. And it must have a reference implementation that is open source with a GPL license. It should be highly Object Oriented and should provide base objects for every major Design Pattern. It should front-end the OS so completely that you can write a new OS which directly provided the relevant API's (making it a kind of Meta-OS). The API itself should be open and there should be a standards committee that isn't loaded with representatives from the big companies. Plus, no-one is penalized for producing a non-compatible version (other than the fact that compatible versions would probably receive a greater market share)."

Also Quote:

"I have been working on my own for some time to develop the beginings of such a standard. A kind of hobby for me. And I know there are plenty of people out there who will claim such a thing already exists in (choose one) PERL, Python, Smalltalk, Gnome or some flavor of the month. I don't think any of those things meet all the criteria of the environment I want to see, but I can state one thing rather confidently... Until we pull together a produce such a thing the Open Source movement will have a lot of difficulty competing against Sun and Microsoft in the Business Systems space. "

One person sent me a pointer to Bamboo, an Open Source project to develop a component runtime system (partially using Mozilla code, which is cool). Others have referred me to CORBA and even ZOPE. Personally I think all of these things are good (although CORBA may be too heavyweight). But none of them go as far as I would like.

Although I want to see real code as well, I think the process should start the way any good development process should start: With a good design. With an architecture. I am currently calling this the 'COA' or 'Common Object Architecture'...

In one of my design documents I describe it this way: "A shared set of class and interface specifications that may be implemented in any language and/or with any distributed object methodology. The COA is a Specification, a Platonic Ideal - any implementation of the architecture is coupled to the COA only to the extent to which it correctly exposes the interfaces of the architecture. The intent is to create a standard system workspace for programmers to use that transcends operating systems and programming languages. Furthermore the COA is intended to facilitate the creation of distributed applications where the objects may reside on any system on a network, but look like they are local to the calling application."

Then, once the design is complete, we throw it open for development. Much like a protocol, anyone can develop both open and closed source versions of the COA. Of course I expect the Open Source versions to get more use...

And these versions might be developed for any platform and in any language because one basic part of the COA would be a split of the class definitions into two types: Native and External. Native classes have standard method calls that may be directly implemented in whatever language/object environment is being used. External classes may only be accessed through a common messaging interface defined in the COA Messaging library.

This means that Native classes are generally 'synchronous'. They return control to the calling code immediately, allowing them to be implemented as 'In-Process' and 'In-Thread' with the calling code. In most cases Native classes will be fairly small grained 'tool' classes used as components in building larger, more functional, objects.

External classes are extremely large grained 'Actor' objects that expect 'prompts' and execute 'behaviors'. They operate asynchronously, the only way that calling code can know they have completed a requested function is when they return a message indicating this fact. Although an External class may actually be implemented to run in the same process space and even in the same thread space as the calling code they function as external servers where the calling code is the client. In many cases the calling code may only be connecting to a lightweight message interface class which front-ends an External class running on another machine entirely.

These two types of classes exist to provide an opportunity to "Have our cake and eat it too." The Native classes may be bound at compile time (for those implementations that support it) and will operate with the least possible amount of interface overhead. Plus they make it possible to create implementations of the COA in environments that do not provide for multi-threaded programming. Meanwhile the External classes allow for disconnected operation and execution across system boundaries with the least amount of overhead possible.

Sometime soon I expect to set up a discussion group on this topic. Anyone interested? Email me and let me know...

Jack

It should be http://www.sff.net/people/jac kb/openletter2hatch.html

Jack

Although many of us would like to see Microsoft brought down, we want it more as a measure of revenge than because it would be good for the industry. Lets face it, the Open Source movement and similar mutations in the software development status quo are already changing the face of the software industry. Do you really think these things would have had as much impetus to get going if there had not been the spectre of Microsoft looming over everything? It is a simple, and compelling, example of the law of supply and demand in operation.

The problem with regulation is that it affects everyone, not just Microsoft. We will all pay the price for it, and the only winners will be those companies with enough money to take advantage of the new regulations and use them to hold down the competition. In other words regulation will end up with the opposite result from what we want. There is plenty of historical examples of this.

But 'we have to do something', so breaking up the 'monopoly' is a seductive notion. I would argue it is an idea with its own long reaching consequences, many of which will affect everyone for the worst. Not to mention the fact that there is no precedent I know of for breaking up a software company...

I have been thinking about this subject for a long time, and have even written an essay on the subject; An Open Letter to Orrin Hatch. Subtitled "What I would say if I were asked to Testify at the 'Market Power and Structural Change in the Software Industry' Hearings..." I wrote this approximately two weeks before the hearings by the the Senate Judiciary Committee. At the time (as now, although they are evolving) I had strong feelings about the government interfering in the Software Industry in any way, including going after Microsoft for 'Anti-Comptitive Practices'.

Not that I am a Microsoft defender mind you. I worked there for two and half years (as a contractor) and have seen the place from the inside. It is both better, and worse, than its detractors imagine. I know more about them than I really want to. But I needed to make a statement from the point of view of the average software developer just trying to make a living and get the job done for the customer. And I don't think that government intervention will have a positive effect in that regard, any more than I really want to see Microsoft replaced by Sun/AOL, Oracle or even by a resurgent Apple.

Replaced by Linux? Hmm... Now that might just be different story! But, like I said, this is already happening. The software industry, like most complex systems, is healing itself. I say we should let the economics sort themselves out and the best competitor win. I also say the Microsoft is no longer a good competitor because the rules are changing against them, just as they changed (to Microsoft's favor) in 1983...

Jack

P.S. I am working on a new essay, "The Decline and Fall of the Redmondian Empire" which gives more detail on why I think Microsoft, and the other software giants, are becoming uncompetitive dinosaurs. The one thing that might save Microsoft? Either strong regulation, or breaking it up...