While I've only seen a small fraction of what they've done, I think their work on RahXephon and Voices of a Distant Star ranged from very good to excellent.
So, you can throw out a crappy PC and buy a new one for $400 every year, OR you can buy a MacMini for $500, and use it for at least three years.
And frankly, if you're spending $400 on a PC, the GPU is not going to be able to run many cutting-edge games anyway. So it's hard to see what a MacMini couldn't do for the average home user that a $400 POS Wintel box could...
Since 1996! Ten years from now, I expect them to still be the future of computing. Also, by then we'll only be 10 years from real AI, and 20 years from practical fusion...
It's part of that vast flyover territory between New York and LA know alternately as "Red State America" or "Jesusland." The experience of a place where the locals watch NASCAR, go to church, and believe in patriotism, and where you can't find seared ahi tuna or a decent pesto sauce on a Sunday night is so alien to their life experience that it might as well be in another country. After all, some of the people in places like Missouri actually voted for Bush, something that seems unfathomable to many who work at the NYTimes, since none of their friends did...
GeorgeBot: Don't toy with me, MarthaBot. I don't remember. MarthaBot: You laughed your ass off the last time. 1337 H@x0r: God, you old people are really boring! Can't you, like, kill some zombies or something?
For Books, Bookfinder.com
on
Shopping Online
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· Score: 2, Informative
For books, http://www.bookfinder.com/ searches all the major listing sites )TomFolio, ABEBooks, Alibris), as well as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Almost any English-language book in existence can be found there, and there are many foreign bookstores there as well.
By "Serious," I take it to mean "Microsoft will launch a VOIP service with much fanfare, will quickly grab 20-30% of the market, will then let the division languish through incompetence and lack of direction, and 10 years from now the service will still be hanging around without making a profit."
>Ellison "prickly"? You must be using some meaning of the word "prickly" that I wasn't previously familiar with.
"Prickly" as in "Every single science fiction writer older than myself I know can tell you a story about how Harlan Ellison was a complete asshat to them at one time or another." Most also have a story about how Harlan went out of his way to do something nice for them as well.
There are legions of Harlan Ellison stories in science fiction. Like the time he flew across the country to punch out Charles Platt. (Like I said, he has great taste in enemies.) Or the job he did on Andy Porter (IIRC) in Short Form. Or check out Christopher Priest's the Last Deadloss Visions (AKA The Book on the Edge of Forever.)
Make no mistake about: At the top of his game, Ellison was probably the best short story writer in the field, and I fully expect "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" to be read 100 years from now. But in no way, shape or form is he a saint.
Not many people know that Harlan "discovered" Bruce. He attended a very early Turkey City Writer's Workshop, bought Bruce's first novel (Involution Ocean), and then paid Bruce's way to the Clarion Writer's Workshop. Harlan is a prickly character, but he does have a fine eye for talent (and a gift for making the right enemies).
Bruce has "paid it forward" by helping a number of new writers (myself included) with their careers by subjecting them to the bracing fire of a Sterling critique...
I'm thinking of maybe getting a job as a pundit so I can get paid for this and have people respect me as an expert. Any suggestions where I should send my resume?
Send it to whoever publishes Rob Enderle's "columns." In fact, just this list alone shows more insight than Enderle has shown in his entire career...
"Say, you like to get galactic, you know what I'm sayin? Man, I got The Skiffy to set you up, man. I got some ssensa-wonder, I got some hard SF if yo hardcore. I even got that bad-ass Postcyberpunk they all be talkin' about. Hey man, I'll set you..."
Or does being a science fiction bookseller count as being a pusher? "Yo man, if ya hardcore, I got some Gene Wolfe and Philip K. Dick to set you up man. Unless you're totally freaky, and then I've got some R. A. Lafferty...
I would be most interested in how they'll set up the experiment to verify the theory...
"OK, McFly, here's the gun. If you can kill your own father and thus erase yourself from existence, we'll know the theory was wrong."
"A cesspool of viruses, trojans, dialers, malware"
on
Another Dot-com Boom?
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· Score: 1
"To many people, the internet is no longer a new and exciting place to explore , but instead a cesspool of viruses, trojans, dialers, loggers and malware."
Yes, and we know whose those "many people" are: Windows users.
Resolved: NeXTStep was More Advanced than BeOS...
on
Zeta Goes Gold
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· Score: 4, Insightful
...when Apple made the decision to buy NeXT instead of BeOS. Discuss. Please provide sources and examples for all points, This will count 10% of your grade.
(My take: It doesn't matter. The NeXT purchase brought back Steve Jobs, who has been worth, at the very least, as much to Shareholders as OS X (I can't believe Jean Louise-Gasse (sp?) would have been nearly as influential, nor would he (or whoever followed Gil Amelio) would come up with the iPod or iMac). A very conservative estimate would be that the presence of Jobs added $2 billion to Apple stockholder value.)
I must admit, I was highly amused when Darth Vader threw back his head and yelled "NOOOOOOOOO!" at the Intel announcement. However, I was surprised, since I'd always pegged him as a Windows user (you know, one Eil Empire deserves another...)
...of Taiwan's importance to the Gloval High tech economy. Even more important are the roles of Taiwan semiconductor foundry houses like TSMC and UMC. Taiwan dominates the foundry business (IBM and Singapore's Chartered have significantly lower volumes), and with more and more chip design firms going fabless, an ever-greater percentage of cutting-edge chip designs flow through Taiwan. Indeed, it would be hard to find a computer or MP3 player sold today which didn't have a part fabbed in Taiwan.
Now, imagine what would happen to America's high tech industry if Communist China invaded...
Obviously the submitter hasn't read any of the many stories about various libraries around the country being hit for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of rare book thefts. And that's for libraries with regular checkout and ID procedures. Now you want to hand anyone with $20 in their pocket the chance to steal the most expensive book in the library without any way to trace them merely to assuage your own paranoia?
...so they, you know, made sense? And maybe had better acting for Anakin? And better direction? And no Jar-Jar? I mean, Lucas has tinkered with the earlier films, and they needed it a hell of a lot less.
Slashdot Mirror
And frankly, if you're spending $400 on a PC, the GPU is not going to be able to run many cutting-edge games anyway. So it's hard to see what a MacMini couldn't do for the average home user that a $400 POS Wintel box could...
"And I would buy this why?"
"Well, since I'm in marketing, I'm assuming it's because people are stupid!"
"Well, if I were surrounded by that much stupidity, I'd think people were stupid too."
MILAN, July 7 (Reuters) - A previously unknown group claimed responsibility in the name of al Qaeda for a series of blasts in London that killed at least two people and wounded 185, the Italian news agency ANSA reported on Thursday. The "Secret Group of al Qaeda's Jihad in Europe" claimed the attack in a Web site posting and warned Italy and Denmark to withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, ANSA said. The claim could not be verified and did not appear on any of the Web sites normally used by al Qaeda.
One War, Many Fronts.
GeorgeBot: Don't toy with me, MarthaBot. I don't remember.
MarthaBot: You laughed your ass off the last time.
1337 H@x0r: God, you old people are really boring! Can't you, like, kill some zombies or something?
For books, http://www.bookfinder.com/ searches all the major listing sites )TomFolio, ABEBooks, Alibris), as well as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Almost any English-language book in existence can be found there, and there are many foreign bookstores there as well.
See also:
Hotmail
WebTV
X-Box
MSN
MSNBC
Etc.
"Prickly" as in "Every single science fiction writer older than myself I know can tell you a story about how Harlan Ellison was a complete asshat to them at one time or another." Most also have a story about how Harlan went out of his way to do something nice for them as well.
There are legions of Harlan Ellison stories in science fiction. Like the time he flew across the country to punch out Charles Platt. (Like I said, he has great taste in enemies.) Or the job he did on Andy Porter (IIRC) in Short Form. Or check out Christopher Priest's the Last Deadloss Visions (AKA The Book on the Edge of Forever.)
Make no mistake about: At the top of his game, Ellison was probably the best short story writer in the field, and I fully expect "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" to be read 100 years from now. But in no way, shape or form is he a saint.
Bruce has "paid it forward" by helping a number of new writers (myself included) with their careers by subjecting them to the bracing fire of a Sterling critique...
April 30, 2007: First RSS-Related Security Hole Exploit Announced
Send it to whoever publishes Rob Enderle's "columns." In fact, just this list alone shows more insight than Enderle has shown in his entire career...
Or does being a science fiction bookseller count as being a pusher? "Yo man, if ya hardcore, I got some Gene Wolfe and Philip K. Dick to set you up man. Unless you're totally freaky, and then I've got some R. A. Lafferty...
"OK, McFly, here's the gun. If you can kill your own father and thus erase yourself from existence, we'll know the theory was wrong."
Yes, and we know whose those "many people" are: Windows users.
(My take: It doesn't matter. The NeXT purchase brought back Steve Jobs, who has been worth, at the very least, as much to Shareholders as OS X (I can't believe Jean Louise-Gasse (sp?) would have been nearly as influential, nor would he (or whoever followed Gil Amelio) would come up with the iPod or iMac). A very conservative estimate would be that the presence of Jobs added $2 billion to Apple stockholder value.)
Now, imagine what would happen to America's high tech industry if Communist China invaded...
Interesting how The Light in the Piazza won more Tonys, but not Best Musical.
They could call the program "Cellular Automata."
Anyway, I thought ROTS was good, but not great. My full review can be found here.