Well, Jon katz offered to let Slashdot readers decide his te in this poll, but instead, here he is pretending to be a movie critic again (much as he pretends to be a journalist). Why? Because someone's been manipulating the poll to drop anti-Katz votes. They were leading a couple of weeks ago, then some 1500 anti-Katz votes magically disappeared. I mean, it's not even a particularly subtle manipulation either. Even on the current poll the percentages don't even add up to 100%!
For one reason why some computer users (including a lot of Mac heads) find Hiawatha Bray so irritating, take a look at this:
Meanwhile, there's Apple, with its closed, secretive software design and its relatively toylike point-and-click interface. No self-respecting open-source geek would touch these products with a barge pole.
Now people have known that BSD was going to be the core of OS X for at least three years. To create this false "Apple vs. Open Source" strawman merely to knock it down is lazy writing, and this late in the game it's actively insulting for anyone even remotely familiar with BSD or OS X. This is "Look at me! Look at me!" writing that needlessly draws attention to itself, something real writers don't need to do.
Indeed, this paragraph mars what is otherwise a reasonably adequate column. But at least it's not as irritating as the average Jon Katz column. Speaking of which, I see that more votes have been dropped from the dump Katz poll. The numbers don't even add up anymore...
Over the years, many complaints about Microsoft's monopoly power have revolved around the use of hidden/undocumented APIs and features in the source code of Windows and other programs to give Microsoft an unfair competitive advantage. One of the suggested penalties for Microsoft should they violate any future antitrust settlement yet again ("This time for sure!") is release of this source code.
My questions are:
Under what conditions would you support the release of Microsoft source code?
Which programs would you support the release of source code for? Windows XP? All currently shipping versions of Windows? Explorer? Office? Back Office? Or every single product Microsoft sells?
How would you ensure compliance for the release of Microsoft source code?
Would other programmers/companies/geeks etc. be able to use Microsoft source code for their own projects, or would they only be able to use it engineer backwards compatability with their own programs?
Would computer manufacturers be able to compile and load their own version of Windows NT/XP/Whatever on machines without paying Microsoft?
What sort of license would Microsoft source code be released under? GPL? BSD? GNU? Something else?
Tuesday, December 4, when I looked at the "Dump Katz" poll page at http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=98/11/16/184223 &mode=thread, the "Dump Katz" were winning with something like 2800 votes to 2100 (round numbers because, oddly enough, I didn't feel a need to write down the results). But today, when I looked at the results, more than 1500 anti-Katz votes had mysteriously disappeared. The current numbers are Dump Katz (1178), Keep Katz (2098). I'm not making this up, and notice that I'm not posting as an AC.
Sayeth Katz [everything sic, bad formatting artifacts and all]: "Still, I?ve come to trust interactivity and believe in it. A big difference between this culture and the old one is that ideas have to stand the test. And I?d rather write about other things. So I suggested to the Commander that we move this discussion forward by sticking a poll box next to this column, and make me the topic. Let the geeks speak for themselves...Vote to dump the jerk or keep him."
While it could be a glitch, it's hard to imagine a glitch that just loses the anti-Katz votes. It seems like someone doesn't want to let us "speak for ourselves". As Stalin once said, "those who cast the votes determine nothing. Those who count the votes determine everything."
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Apple Computer's pioneering working on making their computers usable for the disabled. Apple was doing something about this problem back in the mid-1980s, long before Microsoft even thought of it, much less before they produced even a usable version of Windows. (Some would say they never produced a usable version of Windows, but I digress...) For example, Easy Access was an INIT which offered a small but useful assortment of "handicap friendly" utilities and system modifications (like really long "double click" times, etc.).
While Windows has largely caught up, OS X still has a number of disabled-friendly options to it, and since OS X is (all together now) based on UNIX, that means [the completion of this sentence is left as an exercise to all Slashdot readers with an IQ over that of an electric can opener, which probably excludes some...]
Is it just my inbox, or does the spam (mostly foreign language) originating from APNIC-area domains outweigh all the other spam being created combined?
With the exception of @home (are they finally dead yet?), it seems that all the major spam domains are now located in Asia, including:
Kornet.net
Dreamx.net/cjdream.net/thrunet.net
Chinanet.net
Hinet.net (though they MIGHT be improving; I haven't seen anything in my box in almost a week)
Moreover, it always seems to be impossible to reach someone in these domains (we're talking 50 or more LARTs to every valid contact address I can find), and sometimes the contact addresses in APNIC's database have been invalid for weeks, if not months.
It's good to see that Ice Cube's decision to turn himself into a neutrino detector is finally bringing recognition to the vital role rappers have played in cutting edge astrophysics over the last few years. But where are the equally important mentions of:
Ice T's decision to turn himself into phased sub-boson colission chamber?
Snoop Doggy Dog's work as a superstring detector?
The Beastie Boys' turning themselves into a distributed gamma ray burster radio observatory?
The Notorious BIG's role as a high energy muon accelerator that ultimately resulted in his untimely death?
And needless to say, what Slashdot reader could be ignorant of the tremendous theoretical work that MC Hawking has done?
It's high time these rapper/physicist's contributions to society were recognized!
Well, they're trying, they're really trying, to capture the spirit of the original comic book. They don't have the right mix yet, and they're trying to do it on the cheap, which won't work. But they're trying. Patrick Warburton, the actor playing The Tick, is doing a good job, but they're directing and scripting him with a bit too much pomposity and a bit too little naive enthusiasm. I can see what they're trying for in the set design, but it's not working yet. There needs to be more cool stuff and jokes in the background (though they get points for the "We Serve Superheroes" sign). The direction needs to be much snappier. The secondary characters are too much one-note jokes right now. The antennas are a nice touch.
Grade: B-. It actually sucked less than I expected it to, though it wasn't in the same league as, say, Mystery Men. It's definitely not like anything else on TV. I give it six episodes before Fox pulls the plug. Catch it while you can.
Here are three non-SF works by living writers I would bet a considerable sum will still be read 50 years from now:
1. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (aka The Great American Novel)
2. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller (aka The Great Funny American Novel)
3. The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Very possibly the most important non-fiction work of the 20th century. There are many important works documenting the Nazi holocaust, but this brilliantly written work must stand as the first, best, and most comprehensive work to document the Soviet holocaust (which Solzhenitsyn estimated killed some 68 million people) by one who lived through it.)
Lovecraft, on the other hand, has been dead for well over 50 years and is already regarded as a classic horror writer, and his works have been in print almost continiously since the founding of Arkham House in 1939.
Since the original question asked for LIVING authors, your choices don't fit the criteria.
Honorable mention: Stephen Baxter, Pat Cadigan, Ian McDonald, Rober Reed, Brian Stableford, Walter Jon Williams.
Note: This list really only deals with writers who acheived prominance in the last 20 years or so. There's really little point in listing living legends like Fred Pohl, Arthur C. Clarke, or Harlan Ellison, who pretty much everyone agrees will still be remembered then. (For one thing, they've all won Hugos, and Hugo-winners tend to be reprinted.)
I've stuck to science fiction writers, so Stephen King, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Sean Stewart and Joe R. Lansdale are all missing from this list, though I expect some of their work to still be read 50 years from now as well.
Another interesting question is which even newer writers do you expect to see make the cut. Some of my predictions: Patrick O'Leary, Mary Doria Russell, Linda Nagata, Ted Chiang.
Remember, science fiction is a genre with a good institutional memory. It's quite possible that one or two works from all the above will still be read, they way that people like Eric Frank Russell, C. M. Kornbluth and Frederic Brown have all had large reprint collections of their short fiction published in the last five years.
One of the best science fictional examples of this are Henry Kuttner (as Lewis Padgett's) Gallagher stories (collected in Robots Have No Tails), about a guy who's a genius inventor, but only when he's completely drunk! He gets sloshed, builds something, passes out, and when he comes to, he had no idea what it was he built! Funny stuff, and highly politically incorrect today. Anyway,even Kuttner knew that Gallagher couldn't work in a corporate environment (even one extropalated from the 1940s!), so he has him as a consultant.
Though somewhat dated now, there's a great section from one of the stories ("Ex Machina," 1948) which could have been written today: "The social trend always lags behind the technological one...moreover, an electronic duplicator could infringe not only on patents but on property right, and attroneys prepared volumious breifs on such issues as whether "rarity rights" are real property...the world, slightly punch-drunk on technology, was trying desperately to walk a straight line...It was all perfectly clear to the technicians, but they were much too impractical to be consulted; they were apt to remark "So my gadget unstabilizes property rights? Well-why have property rights then?"
Not bad for half a century before Napster...
Bruce Sterling on What Gaming SHOULD Be
on
The Future of Gaming
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· Score: 3, Informative
This is the text of a speech Bruce Sterling gave at the Computer Game Developers Conference in 1991 that I subsequently published in Nova Express. Despite the intervening decade, I think the general principles addressed still stand up quite well...
There was once a time when anonymous remailers served a purpose on the net, and where the people using them were as or more likely to contribute something to the online community as any others.
Sadly, I think that time has now passed.
On most of the Usenet groups I frequent (which, of course, is merely the tiniest fraction of those available), the people using anonymous remailers seem to be overwhelmingly: A.) Spammers, B.) Jerks who contribute nothing to the group and who cower behind anonymity for the sole purpose of flaming others free of consequences, and C.) People who not not only pirate intellectual property, but who spam newsgroups with it to show everyone how big their virtual Warezzz penis is. For example, a couple of months ago, someone spammed rec.arts.sf.written with hundreds of badly OCRed SF novels and stories, including some by people who are by no means rich.
Frankly, the people with the most urgent need for legitimate use of anonymous remailers (i.e., those in communist or otherwise oppressive countries where there is no freedom of the press) are the ones who either can't get to them anyway, or whose governments have so much of the system tapped that it would be easy to track them down.
While there are still some legitimate uses for anonymous remailers (Scientology whistle-blowers, for example), the jerks and spammers seem to outweigh legitimate uses about 100 to 1. Thus I see no real cause to mourn their passing. I wish that it were otherwise, but we must deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it were.
Well, maybe they're finally right. Fusion has been ten years away from commercial use for the last 50 years, the same way that Unix has been the operating system of the future since 1969. Now, with Linux and OS X, the latter might finally be true, so why not the former?;-)
"LATEST NEWS: A United Airlines plane has crashed into Camp David, according to CBS, and a jet has crashed 80 miles south of Pittsburgh. Broadcast reports say several planes are missing. Acting Governor Jane Swift has moved her operations to the state emergency management bunker in Framingham in reaction to the apparent terrorist attacks."
Other attacks: Part of the Pentagon has collapsed following the crash, and a car bomb has exploded outside the State department.
The Times of India was reporting a third plane hitting the base of the World Trade Center, but that's been unconfirmed.
Hoyle's most famous novel was probably The Black Cloud. Though not one of my favorite SF novels (though it is a favorite of my father's), it's a solid "hard SF" work about a sentient cloud of interstellar gas enetering our solar system and attempts to communicate with it before it blocks out the sun and extinguishes all life on earth. One summer in college I had a roomate who wasn't the brightest bulb in the strip and didn't read much, but he picked up The Black Cloud and read it all the way through, saying it was one of the few novels he could really get into. It's a book still worth reading even today. (Since it's not in print, you may want to go to http://dogbert.abebooks.com/abep/il.dll to look for a used copy.)
In Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, the universal anthrapamorphic principle is thrown out the window, as it postulates that the universal constants in other parts of the galaxy aren't the same as they are around here. In fact, outside "the slow zone" (where we currently reside) it is possible to travel faster than the speed of light...
I tend to use the Advance Search feature at www.alltheweb.com, as it brings up more hits than Google.
Of course, Google is now the only player in town for Usenet Searches since they bought Deja (and if they're reading this, I want them to bring back Deja's hierarchical nesting features...)
Leggy Starlitz vs. Jerry Cornelius:True. Further..
on
Zeitgeist
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· Score: 2
Not only did Bruce intend this intentionally, but Don Webb wrote a story that had both Leggy Starlitz and Jerry Cornelius in it: "Even the Night" in Michael Moorcock's Pawn of Chaos: Tales of the Eternal Champion (edited by Ed Kramer, Borealis/White Wolf -- ISBN 1-56504-933-0 -- Trade -- US $14.99/Can $19.99). Not one of Don's best, but of interest to both Sterling and Moorcock fans.
What very few people without an in-depth knowledge of the region realize is that the Taliban are entirely a creation of the Pakistani ISI (the Interservices Intelligence, i.e., their equivilant of the KGB).
The ISI was the primary conduit for western aid to the mujahadeen in their war against the Soviet invasion force of the late 1980s. (It should also be remembered that the Soviet invasion killed over 1 million Afghanis.)
After the Soviets left Afghanistan with their tail between their legs, Pakistan funded and trained the Taliban, and in some cases Pakistani regulars even lead them in battle. Taliban is also made up of ethnic Pashtunies, which are a minority group in Afghanistan, but are heavily represented in the Pakistani military.
The extent to which Pakistan is still pulling the Taliban's strings is unclear. Some feel the Taliban have slipped Islamabad's control.
The rteason none of thiis rarely (if ever) reported in the press is that: A.) Most western readers don't give a rat's ass about Afghanistan; and B.) Since it was a big egg on the face of the Clinton-era CIA, since Pakistan is still officially an American allie and the CIA worked closely with the ISI to arm the mujahadeen. Another problem is the lack of reliable, unbiased news from the region, as various news outletss (Afghan opposition groups, official media in India, Iran, etc.) who have reported the ISI connection all have their own agendas to push.
>Think of the really close-to-the-book movies you've seen.
>Tend to suck, don't they?
Uh, no, not necessarily. Certainly no more so than the average number of movies that suck. Counter-examples to your proposal are easy to find:
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Exorcist
The Shawshank Redemption
The Green Mile
Psycho
There are many books that need to be changed to be made into an adequate movie (and several others that shouldn't even be attempted), but there are others which convert over rather well.
Dune, the original novel, was a brilliant, groundbreaking piece of science fiction and complete unto itself. Dune Messiah, on the other hand, just plain sucked. Children of Dune sucked much less than Dune Messiah, but still sucked pretty hard in comparison to the original Dune. And God-Emperor of Dune sucked the farts out of dead cats. A truly awful book in almost every way. I stopped there.
So, gentle Slashdot reader, if you've never read any of the Dune books, read the original and then stop. You'll be glad you did.
Slashdot Mirror
Now people have known that BSD was going to be the core of OS X for at least three years. To create this false "Apple vs. Open Source" strawman merely to knock it down is lazy writing, and this late in the game it's actively insulting for anyone even remotely familiar with BSD or OS X. This is "Look at me! Look at me!" writing that needlessly draws attention to itself, something real writers don't need to do.
Indeed, this paragraph mars what is otherwise a reasonably adequate column. But at least it's not as irritating as the average Jon Katz column. Speaking of which, I see that more votes have been dropped from the dump Katz poll. The numbers don't even add up anymore...
My questions are:
Under what conditions would you support the release of Microsoft source code?
Which programs would you support the release of source code for? Windows XP? All currently shipping versions of Windows? Explorer? Office? Back Office? Or every single product Microsoft sells?
How would you ensure compliance for the release of Microsoft source code?
Would other programmers/companies/geeks etc. be able to use Microsoft source code for their own projects, or would they only be able to use it engineer backwards compatability with their own programs?
Would computer manufacturers be able to compile and load their own version of Windows NT/XP/Whatever on machines without paying Microsoft?
What sort of license would Microsoft source code be released under? GPL? BSD? GNU? Something else?
Sayeth Katz [everything sic, bad formatting artifacts and all]: "Still, I?ve come to trust interactivity and believe in it. A big difference between this culture and the old one is that ideas have to stand the test. And I?d rather write about other things. So I suggested to the Commander that we move this discussion forward by sticking a poll box next to this column, and make me the topic. Let the geeks speak for themselves...Vote to dump the jerk or keep him."
While it could be a glitch, it's hard to imagine a glitch that just loses the anti-Katz votes. It seems like someone doesn't want to let us "speak for ourselves". As Stalin once said, "those who cast the votes determine nothing. Those who count the votes determine everything."
What happened to more than 1500 anti-Katz votes?
While Windows has largely caught up, OS X still has a number of disabled-friendly options to it, and since OS X is (all together now) based on UNIX, that means [the completion of this sentence is left as an exercise to all Slashdot readers with an IQ over that of an electric can opener, which probably excludes some...]
With the exception of @home (are they finally dead yet?), it seems that all the major spam domains are now located in Asia, including:
Kornet.net
Dreamx.net/cjdream.net/thrunet.net
Chinanet.net
Hinet.net (though they MIGHT be improving; I haven't seen anything in my box in almost a week)
Moreover, it always seems to be impossible to reach someone in these domains (we're talking 50 or more LARTs to every valid contact address I can find), and sometimes the contact addresses in APNIC's database have been invalid for weeks, if not months.
Anyone else have these problems?
Ice T's decision to turn himself into phased sub-boson colission chamber?
Snoop Doggy Dog's work as a superstring detector?
The Beastie Boys' turning themselves into a distributed gamma ray burster radio observatory?
The Notorious BIG's role as a high energy muon accelerator that ultimately resulted in his untimely death?
And needless to say, what Slashdot reader could be ignorant of the tremendous theoretical work that MC Hawking has done?
It's high time these rapper/physicist's contributions to society were recognized!
Grade: B-. It actually sucked less than I expected it to, though it wasn't in the same league as, say, Mystery Men. It's definitely not like anything else on TV. I give it six episodes before Fox pulls the plug. Catch it while you can.
1. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (aka The Great American Novel)
2. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller (aka The Great Funny American Novel)
3. The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Very possibly the most important non-fiction work of the 20th century. There are many important works documenting the Nazi holocaust, but this brilliantly written work must stand as the first, best, and most comprehensive work to document the Soviet holocaust (which Solzhenitsyn estimated killed some 68 million people) by one who lived through it.)
Lovecraft, on the other hand, has been dead for well over 50 years and is already regarded as a classic horror writer, and his works have been in print almost continiously since the founding of Arkham House in 1939.
Since the original question asked for LIVING authors, your choices don't fit the criteria.
1. Greg Egan
2. Gene Wolfe
3. Bruce Sterling
4. Greg Bear
5. William Gibson
6. Vernor Vinge
7. Dan Simmons
8. Octavia Butler
9. Neal Stephenson
10.Howard Waldrop
Honorable mention: Stephen Baxter, Pat Cadigan, Ian McDonald, Rober Reed, Brian Stableford, Walter Jon Williams. Note: This list really only deals with writers who acheived prominance in the last 20 years or so. There's really little point in listing living legends like Fred Pohl, Arthur C. Clarke, or Harlan Ellison, who pretty much everyone agrees will still be remembered then. (For one thing, they've all won Hugos, and Hugo-winners tend to be reprinted.)
I've stuck to science fiction writers, so Stephen King, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Sean Stewart and Joe R. Lansdale are all missing from this list, though I expect some of their work to still be read 50 years from now as well.
Another interesting question is which even newer writers do you expect to see make the cut. Some of my predictions: Patrick O'Leary, Mary Doria Russell, Linda Nagata, Ted Chiang.
Remember, science fiction is a genre with a good institutional memory. It's quite possible that one or two works from all the above will still be read, they way that people like Eric Frank Russell, C. M. Kornbluth and Frederic Brown have all had large reprint collections of their short fiction published in the last five years.
Though somewhat dated now, there's a great section from one of the stories ("Ex Machina," 1948) which could have been written today: "The social trend always lags behind the technological one...moreover, an electronic duplicator could infringe not only on patents but on property right, and attroneys prepared volumious breifs on such issues as whether "rarity rights" are real property...the world, slightly punch-drunk on technology, was trying desperately to walk a straight line...It was all perfectly clear to the technicians, but they were much too impractical to be consulted; they were apt to remark "So my gadget unstabilizes property rights? Well-why have property rights then?"
Not bad for half a century before Napster...
http://www.sflit.com/novaexpress/13/embraceyourwei rd.html
There was once a time when anonymous remailers served a purpose on the net, and where the people using them were as or more likely to contribute something to the online community as any others.
Sadly, I think that time has now passed.
On most of the Usenet groups I frequent (which, of course, is merely the tiniest fraction of those available), the people using anonymous remailers seem to be overwhelmingly: A.) Spammers, B.) Jerks who contribute nothing to the group and who cower behind anonymity for the sole purpose of flaming others free of consequences, and C.) People who not not only pirate intellectual property, but who spam newsgroups with it to show everyone how big their virtual Warezzz penis is. For example, a couple of months ago, someone spammed rec.arts.sf.written with hundreds of badly OCRed SF novels and stories, including some by people who are by no means rich.
Frankly, the people with the most urgent need for legitimate use of anonymous remailers (i.e., those in communist or otherwise oppressive countries where there is no freedom of the press) are the ones who either can't get to them anyway, or whose governments have so much of the system tapped that it would be easy to track them down.
While there are still some legitimate uses for anonymous remailers (Scientology whistle-blowers, for example), the jerks and spammers seem to outweigh legitimate uses about 100 to 1. Thus I see no real cause to mourn their passing. I wish that it were otherwise, but we must deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it were.
(ducks rocks tossed by the faithful)
- Lawrence Person
"LATEST NEWS: A United Airlines plane has crashed into Camp David, according to CBS, and a jet has crashed 80 miles south of Pittsburgh. Broadcast reports say several planes are missing. Acting Governor Jane Swift has moved her operations to the state emergency management bunker in Framingham in reaction to the apparent terrorist attacks."
Other attacks: Part of the Pentagon has collapsed following the crash, and a car bomb has exploded outside the State department.
The Times of India was reporting a third plane hitting the base of the World Trade Center, but that's been unconfirmed.
Of course, Google is now the only player in town for Usenet Searches since they bought Deja (and if they're reading this, I want them to bring back Deja's hierarchical nesting features...)
Locus Online.
No Truce With Kings...
The ISI was the primary conduit for western aid to the mujahadeen in their war against the Soviet invasion force of the late 1980s. (It should also be remembered that the Soviet invasion killed over 1 million Afghanis.)
After the Soviets left Afghanistan with their tail between their legs, Pakistan funded and trained the Taliban, and in some cases Pakistani regulars even lead them in battle. Taliban is also made up of ethnic Pashtunies, which are a minority group in Afghanistan, but are heavily represented in the Pakistani military.
The extent to which Pakistan is still pulling the Taliban's strings is unclear. Some feel the Taliban have slipped Islamabad's control.
The rteason none of thiis rarely (if ever) reported in the press is that: A.) Most western readers don't give a rat's ass about Afghanistan; and B.) Since it was a big egg on the face of the Clinton-era CIA, since Pakistan is still officially an American allie and the CIA worked closely with the ISI to arm the mujahadeen. Another problem is the lack of reliable, unbiased news from the region, as various news outletss (Afghan opposition groups, official media in India, Iran, etc.) who have reported the ISI connection all have their own agendas to push.
>Tend to suck, don't they?
Uh, no, not necessarily. Certainly no more so than the average number of movies that suck. Counter-examples to your proposal are easy to find:
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Exorcist
The Shawshank Redemption
The Green Mile
Psycho
There are many books that need to be changed to be made into an adequate movie (and several others that shouldn't even be attempted), but there are others which convert over rather well.
So, gentle Slashdot reader, if you've never read any of the Dune books, read the original and then stop. You'll be glad you did.