The stalker is the man who leads people into "the zone:" a place where time and space have been broken by a cataclismic event. The stalker leads the writer and the professor the way to a room where your greatest desire is fulfilled.
It's an intensely beautiful film. when I first saw it I dreamed about for a week
it's funny what mac users consider "hacking" such as:
"Altering the system's defaults via the command-line interface"
here is a fancy trick I learned at hacker school for all you mac lovers. double-click on your "command line interface" so it pops open, then type:
shutdown -r now
if your computer reboots you must have typed it wrong.
no worry, just try it again. trust me its worth it if you want to be a hacker!!!
these guys sure seem bent on contributing to military technology. great. just great guys. anything to keep the funding rolling in. To be fair, my impression is based on the article, not the actual research
There is a fundamental difference between LaTeX and HTML. LaTeX, a layout language, describes a document in terms of how it should be viewed. HTML describes a document in terms of a hierarchy which is interpretted by a browser. How many web sites outhere give a damn about hierarchy or the almighty goal of hypertext. The fact is HTML is usually used as a layout languag, and for that purpose it stinks.
It also stinks as a markup language, but it will be constantly improved and refined as time goes on..
XML is a language for describing a markup language, such as XHTML. XML is god at this. Last summer I worked on a project that involved creating an an XML defined lanuage for representing ancient music manuscripts. However, XML has little advantage over HTML in terms of layout. Layout is always in the hands of the interpreter.
when I saw American Pie a couple of summers ago I layed a HUGE FART right after the jock said "I love you" the the singer girl. everyone in the theatre started laughing. It was one of my proudest moments.
Information gathered from orbiters shows that surrounding the northern lowlands is an aparent shoreline of a coean that once covered most of the Northern hemisphere. The shoreline is a long similarly textured area that has relatively the same altitude. The only spots along the assumed shoreline that have an anomolous altitude are 2 regions that display evidence of abundant vulcanism.
Also there is a type of impact crater on Mars charicterized by what is called "flow ejecta," meaning that the material ejected from the crater flows like a liquid. This is believed to occur when there is subsurface water (liquid or solid). Some believ that subsurface liquid water still exists on mars.
There are also countless indications water erosion, from ground water sepage leading to the collapse of the ground above (like whats happening in mexico city. In some places the ground is sinking by 30 centimeters a year), to massive flows carrying huge ammounts of sediment.
on the other hand, this may be the first time this sort of evidence has been gathered. But the conclusions are not exciting. Now hearing that there was NO water on Mars, that would be freaky.
On many occasions Bush has shown signs of being a not terribly intelligent man, and few signs that he is. Is he just the kind of guy who comes across as a fool but is actually smart?
I doubt it. I can hardly believe this goofball was elected. I am curious to hear what people living outside the USA think of George W.
Do think think he is:
A. just another dumb american
B. dumb, even for an american
C. so dumb that I can't believe even a bunch of dumb americans would elect him
D. I don't care what happens to you dumb americans
McCarthyism: n, a mid 20th century political attitude characterized by chiefly by opposition to elements held to be subversive and by the use of tactics involving personal attacks on individuals by means of widely publicized indiscriminate allegations esp. on the basis of unsubstantiated charges-
(webster's ninth)
try mid-20th century and still kicking. the politics of fear is coming back into style. The ignorance of the people is being used against them.
Hackers threaten the corporate power structure even when they don't break the law, just like communists. Hell, they are a bigger threat, on an indivual level, than communists ever were. The government and corporation would turn the masses against the hacker elite by conguring images mass histeria induced by angry teenagers.
This scenario is easy to imagine. In fact it has clearly already begun. Last week someone made a phony espn.go.com page at go.to.espn (or something like that). Newspapers called him a hacker. Computer savvy is associated, by most people, with destructive, anti-social behavior. It is the fear of the unknown.
Is it any wonder slashdot readers are paranoid? they really are out to get us.
I just woke up, hungover, and here is my naive hopefull thought of the week:
I would like to see a lawless alternative to the internet- totally unregulated, chaotic, repulsive, but free. There has to be a solution- or a series of solutions, since whenever the anti-internet(s), as I would call them, became widespread they would be standardized or challeged by a biased legal system and, thus, destroyed.
I liked your post. It shouldn't be flame bait or moderated down, just because you make fun of John Katz. Katz is a good guy, but a tad self-riteous and takes himself very seriously. I think the your post has a certain antithetical wisdom to it. What if someone was paraphrasing/.? it would read like your post, I say moderate it up, at least back to one. Besides, there IS galaxy eating tube worms working for Nazis or whatever.
kind of reminds me of the unlikely alliances in Snow Crash- religious fanatics versus the hackers. I think I'll start learning some kendo and hanging out with mobsters. There are plenty of mobsters in Providence, RI. Hell the Mayor here resembles Uncle Enzo (he was elected from prison after burning his wife's lover with a hot poker, or something like that). Does Bill Gates own an aircraft carrier yet. Probably not, he's more of a submarine kind of guy.
Here is the best desktop video site on the web: videoguys
It is often the only site that has certain hard tio find items in stock. DV raptor has the best codecs of all the pc firewire cards. And you can it with the full version of premier 5.1 for $500. The competeting cards had to drop their prices is to $400 to compete, but I think the DV raptor is worth it.
The sony digital 8 camera's are not the best, but they are the cheapest digital cams out there, and better than every low-price (Sub $1000)mini-DV cam I've seen. If you are poor, digital 8 is the best choice.if you are rich, the canon XL1 is the best cam I've ever seen.
scsi hard drives are unnecessary. get the biggest IDE you can afford. DV is 4.5 minutes per gigabyte. There is hardware and software for converting DV to mpeg1 and 2, like Terran Media Cleaner Pro. Terran Media Cleaner Pro or pinnacle DC100
I also have a 160+ IQ. In high school I was the captain of the football and wrestling teams and I am still very sexy and cool. I am the cream of society, even more than you. Maybe we should make a list of slashdot users with the highest IQ's,like "technos," give them lots of extra karma. John Katz can show the list to Pinkerton so they will know who is smartest. For the record, I think "technos" is probably the smartest of them all, except maybe thehot grits guy.
...you are dealing with online fiction that strives both be popular and distinguish itself from print fiction in some significant way. Summaries of books don't work the same as summaries of news paper articles. the importance of form and content is vastly different in the two genres.
a summar of an article may cover the essential facts of an event but leave out responses of those involved statistics etc. it still funtions independently from the complete article.
but what good is the summary of a story? or even excerpts? It is usefull for deciding if you want to buy the rest of the book. Its like a 45 second mp3 of a 4 minute song. It has a commercial significance but mostly it is annoying.
I think what Jon is wondering is when will a large publishing company attempt to publish fiction on the web that could not exist in book form. books are generally more convenient for most people's reading habits that a monitor. But what if a particular work could ONLY exist in an electronic medium? texts that include images, sounds or video (a broad definition of text is "source of information or authority" websters ninth).
texts such as these already exist (see my post "hypertext" further down this page) but many of these experimental works are self-reflexise, confusing and, yes, pretentious to the point that they will never have a large readership. I believe that formal innovation precludes a large readerhsip. How can a work of fiction be necessarily electronic without driving away readers?
attitude.
I'm sure somebody will come up with a way of incorporating some streaming media and pattern of links into a basically linear mimetic piece of fiction. It won't be horribly original or innovative, rather, it will only appear to be so. Like MTV. it will have attitude and nothing else.
plot is temporal and linear. something happens, then something else happens, then something else.
a story does not have to be this way. it can jump between eras, characters, locations,EVEN BETWEEN PLOTS (e.g. "If On A Winter's Night a Travler" by Italo Calvino.)
If all you read is stephen king you may not know this.
the word eBook is stupid. it implies linearity. But electronic fiction begs formal innovation. and it is being done(altx.com, grammatron.com).
the problem with a formally innovative work is that is takes more effort to read. It doesn't make money whether kit's printed or on the web.
and by the way, when I say formal innovation I don't mean choose your own god damn adventure.
has anybody here heard of Robert Coover? ahh forget it nobody is listenning.
people are already writing innovative electronic based fiction, but I don't think anybody her wants to read it. You all want Snow Crash2, revenge of Raven.
michael joyce, suart mouthrop and shelly jackson are three other hypertext fiction writers of some significance. Mouthrop has done stuff with a 360 degree virtual space that is nifty, but I don't think his writing is anything great. Shelly jackson wrote a very interesting piece called patchwork girl that based on frankenstein. I don't know the links to these authros off the top of my head. The best electronic piece I've seen was Spy vs. Spy by Jay Dilemuth (I'm not sure how to spell his name) It was done with macromedia director, but you would never guess. It's a poem with all kinds of crazy moving and fading text with an audio track. both the text and the audio changes as you click on the text. It's not on the web, though because it is simply to big. (Jay also worked to develop cosmoplayer, a vrml plug-in). Bandwidth is a limiting factor in electronic, multimedia writing, at least in terms of distribution
Anyone interested in a good electronic literature site check out
altx.com grammatron.com sunshine69.com
If you do, you will realize that innovative electronic writing has no place as a mainstream money making product. Hell, NO INNOVATIVE WRITING MAKES MONEY.
At the same time Cute flashy presentation doen't make good fiction.
A new medium generally leads to self reflexive narrative, which is generally not imminently readable. How many of you have read Donald Barthelme? John Barth? Jorge Luis Borges? Italo Calvino? probably a few but not most. I think everyone will agree that even the most widely commended experimental texts don't gain a wide readership. The publishing industry knows this.
Publishing giants don't invest big money in innovative print writing, why would they do so for electronic writing?
electronic mediums offer new possibilities for formal innovation in fiction, but formal innovation is possible in print fiction as well. In mainstream fiction, formal innovation is all but nonexistent. If you ask popular writers to write for they web how can you expect them to produce uniquely structured work? It isn't their thing.
Writers who concentrate on formal innovation will not draw a large audience. The do not have recognizeable names. They are confusing-sometimes on purpose.
significant formal innovation, opposed to fancy tinkering and "attitude," can not be reconciled with popular writing. Originality is confusing. Stephen King is not confusing.
Those of you interested in theory of electronic writing should check out George Landow's "Hypertext" or "hyper/text/theory" also edited by Landow.
the oscars are a pain in my ass. If I could turn off the topic "Oscars" in my preferences I would. Winning an Oscar isn't an acheivement, its an insult. If there was an Oscar for best operating system it would go to Bill Gates because Oscars are for rich tasteless fools that prey upon the ignorant.
If/when a similar law ends up in congress in my State, I'm sure as hell going to yell and scream. I am a student at a university that has a large and active socialist group. I am not a socialist but I have long been impressed with their tactics and devotion to their cause. As a unified political force/. mebers would wield a mighty stick. It is a shame/. members tend to view the political process with exagerated paranoia or as a mere shideshow. There are times when faces and bodies (e.g. the folks protesting the WTO) can pay huge dividends. Maybe/. needs an unofficial political wing. A meeting-place to organize tradtitional protests and campaigns against tyrants. I hope everyone in Virginia writes/calls and voices his/her anger.
Slashdot Mirror
I love to drive.
or anything else by the great Russian Director.
The stalker is the man who leads people into "the zone:" a place where time and space have been broken by a cataclismic event. The stalker leads the writer and the professor the way to a room where your greatest desire is fulfilled.
It's an intensely beautiful film. when I first saw it I dreamed about for a week
There are a few sites I visit daily where I get constant pop-up windows that are adds for verizon. Who are they to complain about unwanted adds.
I forgot line breaks and it didn't make sense so I am submitting this again because it is important for the developement of our fine society:
it's funny what mac users consider "hacking" such as:
"Altering the system's defaults via the command-line interface"
here is a fancy trick I learned at hacker school for all you mac lovers. double-click on your "command line interface" so it pops open, then type:
shutdown -r now
if your computer reboots you must have typed it wrong.
no worry, just try it again. trust me its worth it if you want to be a hacker!!!
it's funny what mac users consider "hacking" such as: "Altering the system's defaults via the command-line interface" here is a fancy trick I learned at hacker school for all you mac lovers. double-click on your "command line interface" so it pops open, then type: shutdown -r now if your computer reboots you must have typed it wrong. no worry, just try it again. trust me its worth it if you want to be a hacker!!!
these guys sure seem bent on contributing to military technology. great. just great guys. anything to keep the funding rolling in. To be fair, my impression is based on the article, not the actual research
There is a fundamental difference between LaTeX and HTML. LaTeX, a layout language, describes a document in terms of how it should be viewed. HTML describes a document in terms of a hierarchy which is interpretted by a browser. How many web sites outhere give a damn about hierarchy or the almighty goal of hypertext. The fact is HTML is usually used as a layout languag, and for that purpose it stinks.
It also stinks as a markup language, but it will be constantly improved and refined as time goes on..
XML is a language for describing a markup language, such as XHTML. XML is god at this. Last summer I worked on a project that involved creating an an XML defined lanuage for representing ancient music manuscripts. However, XML has little advantage over HTML in terms of layout. Layout is always in the hands of the interpreter.
when I saw American Pie a couple of summers ago I layed a HUGE FART right after the jock said "I love you" the the singer girl. everyone in the theatre started laughing. It was one of my proudest moments.
Information gathered from orbiters shows that surrounding the northern lowlands is an aparent shoreline of a coean that once covered most of the Northern hemisphere. The shoreline is a long similarly textured area that has relatively the same altitude. The only spots along the assumed shoreline that have an anomolous altitude are 2 regions that display evidence of abundant vulcanism.
Also there is a type of impact crater on Mars charicterized by what is called "flow ejecta," meaning that the material ejected from the crater flows like a liquid. This is believed to occur when there is subsurface water (liquid or solid). Some believ that subsurface liquid water still exists on mars.
There are also countless indications water erosion, from ground water sepage leading to the collapse of the ground above (like whats happening in mexico city. In some places the ground is sinking by 30 centimeters a year), to massive flows carrying huge ammounts of sediment.
on the other hand, this may be the first time this sort of evidence has been gathered. But the conclusions are not exciting. Now hearing that there was NO water on Mars, that would be freaky.
On many occasions Bush has shown signs of being a not terribly intelligent man, and few signs that he is. Is he just the kind of guy who comes across as a fool but is actually smart?
I doubt it. I can hardly believe this goofball was elected. I am curious to hear what people living outside the USA think of George W.
Do think think he is:
A. just another dumb american
B. dumb, even for an american
C. so dumb that I can't believe even a bunch of dumb americans would elect him
D. I don't care what happens to you dumb americans
McCarthyism: n, a mid 20th century political attitude characterized by chiefly by opposition to elements held to be subversive and by the use of tactics involving personal attacks on individuals by means of widely publicized indiscriminate allegations esp. on the basis of unsubstantiated charges-
(webster's ninth)
try mid-20th century and still kicking. the politics of fear is coming back into style. The ignorance of the people is being used against them.
Hackers threaten the corporate power structure even when they don't break the law, just like communists. Hell, they are a bigger threat, on an indivual level, than communists ever were. The government and corporation would turn the masses against the hacker elite by conguring images mass histeria induced by angry teenagers.
This scenario is easy to imagine. In fact it has clearly already begun. Last week someone made a phony espn.go.com page at go.to.espn (or something like that). Newspapers called him a hacker. Computer savvy is associated, by most people, with destructive, anti-social behavior. It is the fear of the unknown.
Is it any wonder slashdot readers are paranoid? they really are out to get us.
I just woke up, hungover, and here is my naive hopefull thought of the week:
I would like to see a lawless alternative to the internet- totally unregulated, chaotic, repulsive, but free. There has to be a solution- or a series of solutions, since whenever the anti-internet(s), as I would call them, became widespread they would be standardized or challeged by a biased legal system and, thus, destroyed.
is this like Napster? sort of.
oops. I'm waking up...the hope is gone
I liked your post. It shouldn't be flame bait or moderated down, just because you make fun of John Katz. Katz is a good guy, but a tad self-riteous and takes himself very seriously. I think the your post has a certain antithetical wisdom to it. What if someone was paraphrasing /.? it would read like your post, I say moderate it up, at least back to one. Besides, there IS galaxy eating tube worms working for Nazis or whatever.
kind of reminds me of the unlikely alliances in Snow Crash- religious fanatics versus the hackers. I think I'll start learning some kendo and hanging out with mobsters. There are plenty of mobsters in Providence, RI. Hell the Mayor here resembles Uncle Enzo (he was elected from prison after burning his wife's lover with a hot poker, or something like that). Does Bill Gates own an aircraft carrier yet. Probably not, he's more of a submarine kind of guy.
Here is the best desktop video site on the web: videoguys
It is often the only site that has certain hard tio find items in stock. DV raptor has the best codecs of all the pc firewire cards. And you can it with the full version of premier 5.1 for $500. The competeting cards had to drop their prices is to $400 to compete, but I think the DV raptor is worth it.
The sony digital 8 camera's are not the best, but they are the cheapest digital cams out there, and better than every low-price (Sub $1000)mini-DV cam I've seen. If you are poor, digital 8 is the best choice.if you are rich, the canon XL1 is the best cam I've ever seen.
scsi hard drives are unnecessary. get the biggest IDE you can afford. DV is 4.5 minutes per gigabyte. There is hardware and software for converting DV to mpeg1 and 2, like Terran Media Cleaner Pro. Terran Media Cleaner Pro or pinnacle DC100
I also have a 160+ IQ. In high school I was the captain of the football and wrestling teams and I am still very sexy and cool. I am the cream of society, even more than you. Maybe we should make a list of slashdot users with the highest IQ's,like "technos," give them lots of extra karma. John Katz can show the list to Pinkerton so they will know who is smartest. For the record, I think "technos" is probably the smartest of them all, except maybe thehot grits guy.
...you are dealing with online fiction that strives both be popular and distinguish itself from print fiction in some significant way. Summaries of books don't work the same as summaries of news paper articles. the importance of form and content is vastly different in the two genres.
a summar of an article may cover the essential facts of an event but leave out responses of those involved statistics etc. it still funtions independently from the complete article.
but what good is the summary of a story? or even excerpts? It is usefull for deciding if you want to buy the rest of the book. Its like a 45 second mp3 of a 4 minute song. It has a commercial significance but mostly it is annoying.
I think what Jon is wondering is when will a large publishing company attempt to publish fiction on the web that could not exist in book form. books are generally more convenient for most people's reading habits that a monitor. But what if a particular work could ONLY exist in an electronic medium? texts that include images, sounds or video (a broad definition of text is "source of information or authority" websters ninth).
texts such as these already exist (see my post "hypertext" further down this page) but many of these experimental works are self-reflexise, confusing and, yes, pretentious to the point that they will never have a large readership. I believe that formal innovation precludes a large readerhsip. How can a work of fiction be necessarily electronic without driving away readers?
attitude.
I'm sure somebody will come up with a way of incorporating some streaming media and pattern of links into a basically linear mimetic piece of fiction. It won't be horribly original or innovative, rather, it will only appear to be so. Like MTV. it will have attitude and nothing else.
I for one don't give a damn if I ever see it
mine came up david mcrenolds... guess I'm a commie
plot is temporal and linear. something happens, then something else happens, then something else.
a story does not have to be this way. it can jump between eras, characters, locations,EVEN BETWEEN PLOTS (e.g. "If On A Winter's Night a Travler" by Italo Calvino.)
If all you read is stephen king you may not know this.
the word eBook is stupid. it implies linearity. But electronic fiction begs formal innovation. and it is being done(altx.com, grammatron.com).
the problem with a formally innovative work is that is takes more effort to read. It doesn't make money whether kit's printed or on the web.
and by the way, when I say formal innovation I don't mean choose your own god damn adventure.
has anybody here heard of Robert Coover? ahh forget it nobody is listenning.
people are already writing innovative electronic based fiction, but I don't think anybody her wants to read it. You all want Snow Crash2, revenge of Raven.
michael joyce, suart mouthrop and shelly jackson are three other hypertext fiction writers of some significance. Mouthrop has done stuff with a 360 degree virtual space that is nifty, but I don't think his writing is anything great. Shelly jackson wrote a very interesting piece called patchwork girl that based on frankenstein. I don't know the links to these authros off the top of my head. The best electronic piece I've seen was Spy vs. Spy by Jay Dilemuth (I'm not sure how to spell his name) It was done with macromedia director, but you would never guess. It's a poem with all kinds of crazy moving and fading text with an audio track. both the text and the audio changes as you click on the text. It's not on the web, though because it is simply to big. (Jay also worked to develop cosmoplayer, a vrml plug-in). Bandwidth is a limiting factor in electronic, multimedia writing, at least in terms of distribution
Anyone interested in a good electronic literature site check out
altx.com
grammatron.com
sunshine69.com
If you do, you will realize that innovative electronic writing has no place as a mainstream money making product. Hell, NO INNOVATIVE WRITING MAKES MONEY.
At the same time Cute flashy presentation doen't make good fiction.
A new medium generally leads to self reflexive narrative, which is generally not imminently readable. How many of you have read Donald Barthelme? John Barth? Jorge Luis Borges? Italo Calvino? probably a few but not most. I think everyone will agree that even the most widely commended experimental texts don't gain a wide readership. The publishing industry knows this.
Publishing giants don't invest big money in innovative print writing, why would they do so for electronic writing?
electronic mediums offer new possibilities for formal innovation in fiction, but formal innovation is possible in print fiction as well. In mainstream fiction, formal innovation is all but nonexistent. If you ask popular writers to write for they web how can you expect them to produce uniquely structured work? It isn't their thing.
Writers who concentrate on formal innovation will not draw a large audience. The do not have recognizeable names. They are confusing-sometimes on purpose.
significant formal innovation, opposed to fancy tinkering and "attitude," can not be reconciled with popular writing. Originality is confusing. Stephen King is not confusing.
Those of you interested in theory of electronic writing should check out George Landow's "Hypertext" or "hyper/text/theory" also edited by Landow.
the oscars are a pain in my ass. If I could turn off the topic "Oscars" in my preferences I would. Winning an Oscar isn't an acheivement, its an insult. If there was an Oscar for best operating system it would go to Bill Gates because Oscars are for rich tasteless fools that prey upon the ignorant.
The reason is to make you buy a MD deck as well. You don't have much of a choice do you? The decks sound way better than the portables anyway.
If/when a similar law ends up in congress in my State, I'm sure as hell going to yell and scream. I am a student at a university that has a large and active socialist group. I am not a socialist but I have long been impressed with their tactics and devotion to their cause. As a unified political force /. mebers would wield a mighty stick. It is a shame /. members tend to view the political process with exagerated paranoia or as a mere shideshow. There are times when faces and bodies (e.g. the folks protesting the WTO) can pay huge dividends. Maybe /. needs an unofficial political wing. A meeting-place to organize tradtitional protests and campaigns against tyrants. I hope everyone in Virginia writes/calls and voices his/her anger.
I apologize for the parent comment. The IBM press release is interesting. The LA Times article borders on moronic.