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Nebula Award Winners, Hugo Nominees Announced
CBNobi writes "The 2002 Nebula Award winners have been announced this weekend. The winner for best novel was American Gods by Neil Gaiman (reviewed here at Slashdot), and the winner for best script was LotR:The Fellowship of the Ring. The nominees for the 2003 Hugo Awards have also been announced; Episodes of Enterprise, Firefly, and Buffy are all nominated for best short form dramatic presentation, and LotR and Spirited Away are among the nominees for best long form presentation."
finally lotr's justified... unlike the stupid *ahem* academy people
FP??
my blog
I've always been a big science fiction fan, and when I heard the buzz about the English author Ian McLeod I though I would check out his work.
Well, I was appalled when I read Cosmonaut Keep. In case you haven't read this sophomoric Marxists drivel, I will give you a one paragraph summary.
Americans bad. Capitalism bad. Socialism good. Drugs good. High technology cool, but the best technology (computers and aerospace) is American. Don't ask us to reconcile that.
I'm glad to see the Nebula voters have voted for right-thinking, American-proud authors like Gaimain, and avoided socialist anti-American clap-trap like McLeod, it's almost enough to make me forgive them for awarding the commie-drug-perversion filled Gravity's Rainbow the best novel in 1974.
A. Rightmann
I finished Kiln People last week after a slow two weeks of slugging through it. Flat-out one of the most boring books I've ever read. Interresting ideas, but one boring book.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
You are all a bunch of fucking loser scifi geeks with no life. You consistantly confuse pop culture schlock as art. The rest of the world should get an award for not rounding you up and exterminating you.
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Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) If you want replies to your comments sent to you, consider logging in or creating an account.
One summer's day in the mid-1860's, a young French boy named Joseph Pujol
had a frightening experience at the seashore. Swimming out alone, he held
his breath and dove underwater. Suddenly an icy cold feeling penetrated his
gut. Frightened, he ran ashore, but then received a second shock when he
noticed seawater streaming from his anus. The experience so disturbed the
lad that his mother took him to a doctor to allay his fears. The doctor
complied.
The boy didn't know it at the time, but this unsettling rectal experience
at the beach not only indicated no illness, but it also foretold of a gift
that would later make him the toast of Paris and one of the most popular
and successful performers of his generation.
Joseph Pujol was born in Marseilles on June 1, 1857 to Francois Pujol and
Rose Demaury, a respected stonemason/sculptor and his wife, both of whom
had emigrated from Catalan. Young Joseph went to school until the age of
13, whereupon he apprenticed himself to a baker. Several years later, he
served in the French army.
While in the army, he mentioned his childhood sea-bathing experience to his
buddies. They immediately wanted to know if he could do it again, so on a
day's leave soon afterward he went out to the shore to swim and experiment.
He successfully reenacted the hydraulics of his childhood experience there
and even discovered that by contracting his abdomen muscles, he could
intentionally take up as much water as he liked and eject it in a powerful
stream. Demonstrating this ability back at the barracks later provided the
soldiers with no end of amusement, and soon Pujol started to practice with
air instead of water, giving him the ability to produce a variety of
sounds. This new development provided even more enjoyment for his buddies.
It was then and there, in the army, that Pujol invented a nickname for
himself that would later become a stage name synonymous throughout Europe
with helpless, hysterical laughter: "Le Petomane" (translation: "The
Fartiste").
After his stint in the army, Pujol returned to Marseille and to a bakeshop
his father set him up in, on a street that, today, proudly bears the name
"rue Pujol." At the age of 26 he married Elizabeth Henriette Oliver, the
20-year-old daughter of a local butcher. Pujol enjoyed performing, so in
the evenings he entertained at local music halls by singing, doing comedy
routines, and even playing his trombone backstage between numbers. He
continued amusing his friends privately with his "other" wind instrument,
but only at their suggestion and urging did he decide to turn this parlor
trick into a full-fledged act for public audiences.
Pujol worked up a Le Petomane routine, and with some friends he rented a
space in Marseille to perform it in. They promoted the show heavily
themselves through posters and handouts, but word-of-mouth soon took over
and they packed the house every night. Fin de siecle European audiences,
deeply repressed but newly prosperous and trying to be modern"-- the same
people Freud observed (Freud was one year older than Pujol)-- must have
found a man on stage building an entire act out of mock farting and other
forms of anal play considerably more shockingly funny than we would today.
Pujol's was a good act by any era's standards, but back then his scatology
hit a raw nerve, and hit it hard, at an especially vulnerable time. Like
Alfred Jarry, whose epoch-makingly scatological Ubu Roi actually post-dates
Pujol's Paris debut by several years, Pujol was a French Revolutionary of
the modern theater. Jarry gets the credit today because he was a "serious
playwright" and not a lowbrow cabaret performer, but Pujol clearly laid
some of the groundwork.
Word-of-mouth spread reports of the quality and uniqueness of Pujol's new
show, and soon people from all over Marseille were coming to see it.
After the hometown success, Pujol's friends urged him
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying