Someone once said to me: "Different strokes for different folks." What is something worth writing a dozen whiny posts about to one person is indeed a great feature to others. Helluva concept, eh?
What about the simplest, cheapest, less feature-filled, and preferably smallest bluetooth phone? I want something about the size of a couple matchboxes stacked that has no speaker or mic, LCD, no buttons (other than power), nothing else other than a couple of LEDs showing network availability. I just want it to be a GRPS/cell network -> bluetooth bridge to be used with my PDA. I want it to sit in my pocket or bag, out of the way and out sof sight. I just want to be able to turn on my PDA and get net access through it, without having to invest in an expensive phone. Most phones with bluetooth are high-end ones- $200-$300 for the lot of them!
Buying a cell-equipped PDA is out of the question. I will not take a downgrade to some small-screened jobbie. Not for me. My PDA has an 800x480 screen and I will never go back to 240x320.:) But I do want net access anytime, anywhere.
Recently, a CF card that allows me to use T-mobile's $30/mo unlim data service has come out. But it's $250 and still pretty new. That might be what I'll use, but the opton I mentioned above would be good too.
The headline of this article is: "Macs Are Not Invulnerable; Windows Isn't the Only System With Serious Flaws." And this counts as news? Every OS- even OpenBSD, although not as many or as often- have series flaws. Big deal. Mac OS X and Linux certainly aren't as prone to as many exploits and viruses.
I can only remember a hologram myself, but it's been a long time- 6 months or so- since I've seen it. Vader kneels in front of the talking head hologram of the (fake) Emperor a few times, but never raps with him in person. Ian, you'll always be my Emperor. (*snickers*)
That's global capitalism for you. National or ethnic loyalties disapear in the interests of infinite growth. A stagnant business in a capitalist economy is a dead one; even if it is pulling in huge profits- if it isn't growing it's dead. Like a shark, which moves just to stay alive. More and more businesses will be pulling more and more off-shore stunts- after all, when they have a market saturated you have to find new profits, new growth somewhere.
Global capitalism and corporate wellfare are a very bad combo for everyone else but the stockholders.
I realize that that Winamp can play things other than music, but does anyone realy use it for that?
All I know is that when I double click almost any media type, WinAmp opens it. A lot of the ones it opens it doesn't play right; video but no sound, sound but no video- which doesn't make much since its using the same libraries.
Aside from when one forgets to not let Winamp associate with *everything* during the install?
Er. Nevermind.:)
Yes, iTunes is quite a bit better than WinAmp, especially for me, as a person who totally hates maintaining playlists. The player should have a happy little browse feature like iTunes. Which WinAmp does now in newer versions- but it still isn't quite as nice.
Anyone would wonder if Winamp and Netscape were just tools to help them get their way.
Why would they be anything but? If not just tools in some evil conspiracy to get what they want vis-a-vis Microsoft, then tools to get their way in the regular world. You know, that whole businesses-make-money thing.
Wait a sec... If white males are evil, then wouldn't it be people, not ideas, which are dangerous? And since when were republicans and conservatives not a part of the war on ideas that weren't there own? Conservatives turn a blind eye to the staggering moronism of fellow conservatives and republicans- just like democrats and other pseudo-liberal folk do the same for their own.
I don't know about you, but from where I sit (USA), it really looks like the conservatives are taking over. I suppose since its so obvious, it's not a very interesting conspiracy theory...
And besides, we all know white males are evil. Get with it, man.
Obviously playing a video games does not guarantee the player will become homicidal. Just like smoking one cigarette won't give the smoker cancer.
That's the worst attempt at an analogy. Ever. It would've been more accurate to say that "Obviously playing a video games [sic] does not guarantee the player will become homicidal. Just like seeing someone smoke on TV won't make you become a smoker yourself."
Yes, people did get beaten on for having the wrong skin colour or for being in the wrong clique, but they didn't die as a result of the beatings.
Bullshit. It isn't the kids that have changed, rather the media reporting on those kids.
There is an order of magnitude more coverage on this kind of stuff these days. Perhaps even more. The sensationalist media of today has no qualms about letting everyone in the world know about some poor kid who got beat to death after school. Before, this sort of thing was often kept hush; who wants everyone in the world to know that your child, your sibling, your friend, a fellow community member did such a thing?
You may not have killed anyone, and you may not know anyone who died as a result of getting their asses kicked back then, but it certainly doesn't mean it's never happened. I don't know anyone who has beat someone to the point they were even on the ground- but that doesn't prove people don't get their lives beat out of them sometimes.
Your words imply that you believe that it is somehow on the unlikely fringe that "pussy sport" would cause violence; indeed, the noble quest for pussy has been responsible for more violoence between two men than any other big-name sport. Ever.
I had a vaguely similar situation- I had used Newtons for a few years, but wanted a WinCE machine. Why would I want something like that when I had a near-perfect MP2100 already? I use a language/environment called Squeak Smalltalk for most of my programming, and as my operating environment when I am using a desktop or laptop. I really wanted to run Squeak on my PDA, for a nubmer of reasons. Squeak runs on WinCE, but not the NewtonOS. So I thought hey- why not give PocketPC a try, especailly because I could pick up an iPAQ 3150 for only $150 on eBay, when the color iPAQ 36xx were going for $500!
In any case, I didn't dislike the iPAQ as much, but I did end up moving back to the Newton for a spell. It was really awesome to have the same programming and operating environment that I used on my Linux file server and my OS X iBook, but at the end of the day the Newton was a ton more useful. WindowsCE is a very powerful OS, but for me, the form factor was a big part of it. A 240x320 screen is way too small for me, especially for web browsing. The physical size of the screen was a big cramped too- 3.5" as opposed to 5.5" (?) on the MP2x00. The small PocketPC screens really sucks for taking notes via HWR- I could only fit on word on each line!
CalliGrapher is very good, and it is faster than recognition is on the Newton. But the Newton OS integrated its HWR software far more than PocketPC or WinCE does, being a core part of the OS rather than an after thought. There was also the little annoyances- how CalliGrapher on WinCE only recognizes what you've written after you wait for a bit to start thinking; the Newton would be recognizing constantly as you wrote, "typing" what you wrote a few words back, scrolling down as you filled the page.
I can get a good 40-50 WPM with CalliGrapher or the NewtonOS HWR, although the NewtonOS is a lot more fun and a lot more hackable.
These days I primarily use a Sigmarion III, a badass WinCE box with a 5" 800x480 screen and a touch typable keyboard. Not a day goes by when I don't wish it was some new, better and faster Newton, but it is good enough that I gave my iBook to my girlfriend and taken the Sig3 on as my primary machine.
Not only does the Newton have sound output, there is also input, usually used for voice notes and the like, although I can't say that is all that exciting. What was even cooler, is that there was even a version of Dragon Naturally Speaking Voice Recognition for the Newton, although it was regrettably canned when it was in beta. The beta demo package has circulated for years, and it is a blast to play with. At the time you could do real handwriting recognition and voice recognition on the Newton, PalmOS devices were finally getting the big upgrade to a whopping 20 MHz!:)
Yes, it was a device before its time. The Newton does far more than PalmOS devices of the time, and still did more than any PalmOS time until pretty recently. I used my Newton pretty much as a main computer- I did my email, telnet/ssh, web browsing. I coded on it in a few differfent languages, including a TeX compiler, although a somewhat limited one, although it was good enough for most of my school papers. I did math on it with custom lisp code on an interpreter, word processing and printing from the device itself. Hell, I ran a web server. And not just a file server ala Apache w/o any fancy mods or CGI, but a really cool little app that served out my Names, Dates, and Notes, as a seamless web app. Slick as snot. I never even hooked it up to my desktop, there was never a need, I simply did it all over ethernet, and when a driver came out a couple years back, over wifi on a Orinoco WaveLAN gold.
In that sense, it really was a device ahead of its time- I did more on it than most folks do with their desktops.
Yeah, it was a great idea, but the idea wasn't all out bad. The HWR in Newton OS 1.x was bad, yes- but was vastly improved in Newton OS 2.0, even on a device with the same speed CPU. Much of the rest of Newton OS was tip top in many ways. In a lot of ways, it was and still is a hackers dream- there wasn't a part of the system you couldn't explore or modify. Objects all the way up and down, a solid and feature filled API without bloat, and an IDE on the level of Visual Basic 6 in its ease of use, but with a real language backing it up.
But it was also an expensive device. At the time, people didn't know what a PDA was or what it could do; not had software authors or manufacturers really explored the limits of what PDAs could do. People looked at is as spending $699 on a day book that didn't even work very well, which certainly isn't worth it.
A soul you say? Bleach, glad I quit when I did then! Last I read she was a result of the psychological programm adapting to Ender's lil' genius mind in super-general school...
Apparently, Jane was brought about by the Bugger Queen(s). They pulled some soul out of some sort of non-universe where souls (for Buggers, Piggies, Humans) come from. This realm is incidentally also how Jane manages to pull of FTL travel. You don't have to like it, but repeating the way you mis-remembered is won't make it true.
You're a lazy fanboy then.
Why am I fanboy? Because I enjoyed the books? Wow, you really must be in a bad mood. Or, is it because I remember what I read enough to have a discussion without resorting to calling silly names?
So, 3000 years, yeah, but I seem to remember that the hate came right away.
No. You are mixing your memories. There were two series (well, in a way). There was Ender's Game, and then two branches, one made up of Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and... another book whose name is escaping me. The other series was made up of Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, and Shadow Puppets. The first starts three thousand years after the incident. The second series is immediately after it- Ender is sent away from Earth to colonize a planet with his sister Valentine by his brother Peter. They don't talk about the public's attitude toward Ender all that much, but what they do say is that he is still a big hero, though he himself is out of the limelight because he left on the first colonization ship.
It may have been within a lifetime, but that information isn't given. All we know is that Ender was hated (called "Ender the Xenocide") after three thousand years- people may have hated him after 50 years or 2500- we have no way of knowing.
And hey, its been a while, gimme a break if I'm fuzy on the details. I read a lot of books, I don't bother memorising every little thing from the ones I don't like.
You're more than a little fuzzy, you've got your facts all wrong. You're under no obligation to remember them all, but it seems a bit absurd for you to start spouting off on something you have no idea about, and then freak out when someone points out your many errors...
They didn't fight with only knives. Sure, the crysknife is the traditional ritual weapon, and what any Fremen would use in a duel, but I recall reading about all sorts of whacky explosives they could make with their fancy-schmancy spice polymer refinement.
They didn't have to deal with the whole air power thing as they would've if they fought a long war. They were very, very underrated as an enemy and did a good job surprising them at the compound.
Michelle and Jane are VERY similar. Their spontaneous awakening, etc. If you like it so much, read Harsh Mistress and read it just after, you'll notice the similarities.
I didn't read books right after one another, but I did read Children of the Mind and the rest of the post-Ender's Game Ender Series of that line (didn't read the Shadow ones until now) and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in the same month, with very little time between them.
Yes, Mike and Jane are computer-based intelligences. They had some sort of spontaneous awakenings. At first, they had one good friend who kept them a secret. What else? And hell, what is unique about those things above? Pretty common in sci-fi books. Jane isn't even an "artificial" intelligence in some sense of the word; she has a soul, pulled from the same stuff that anyone else's is and created intentionally. Or did you miss that part too? Mike is a huge network of machines and perephrials, a big network. No one- including Mike- knows when he became alive.
He was a KID who was FORCED to destroy them out of SELF DEFENSE.
Yup, good job.
I'm afraid I don't see how that invalidates what I said, though. If your dad was in a drunken bar fight, and was lunging at some dude who shot him, fearing for his life, would you not be upset? Or would you just shrug it off saying: "well, it was self defense! He was forced to kill my paps!"
Ender did what he did because he had to. But he also didn't have to. This is why good science fiction can be so great- the kind of questions and considerations that come up. He had no choice but to do it, but he certainly feels remorse. Does that seem too unrealistic to you?
So, after the fact, it turns out that the space monsters that WERE coming to perform xenocide on us were doing it because they misunderstood us? [...] How many billions would they have slaughtered in search of our psychic-queens before they would have understood the concept of idividuality? No one ever considered that?
Ah, you're on a roll friend! Yes, they did. Again, this is what a good science fiction book should do- make you think. The story was crafted to bring these things out.
What would you prefer? Cut-and-dry one dimensional pap? Where there is a good guy and a bad guy? Not that there is anything wrong with that. But some folks like depth to what they read./me shrugs
SPOILER WARNING!!! INEFFECTIVE SPOILER WARNING
Oh c'mon, don't be a baby about it. What would you rather me do? rot13 my reply?
What was that other book he wrote.. [more whining, evidentally about some other OSC book]
He has written many books. A whole bunch of them, in fact! I've not read anything of his outside the Ender stuff, though.
He establishes these civilisation-wide concensus that basically pop up over night in an extreme paradigm shift...
Overnight? Three thousand years elapsed between Ender's game and the next book about him. If that is overnight to you, I'd be interested in whatever snake oil you have used to extend your life so. A lot can change in that amount of time. I think it is perfectly reasonable- bigger changes have happened over a decade in this civilization's history than everyone thinking Ender was a brash, violent jerk.
Dune isn't full of bad tactics... The original movie's portrayal of them were lame, but the mini-series and the book weren't bad. I mean, where can you go wrong when you've got an overwhelming force of badass ninja-beating Fremen that can whip the snot out of the Emperor's own Sardukar 3-to-1? And then have a force that is probably bigger than the number of Sardukar stationed there? I mean, simple tactics yes- nothing fancy- but if it were real life, the Fremen would still kick the mighty ass of justice.
Wow man, you must've only skimmed the Ender books, rather than actually reading them.
** SPOILERS - don't read this if you're reading the Ender series or considering it eventually. **
And I reccomend you to, whether you are a typical sci fi fan or not. The Ender series is a lot more in depth than that, using sci-fi as a platform for exploring a lot of other things than space ships and bug-like monsters...
Mike (from Moon) and Jane (Ender series) are the same to you? What, are those the only books you've read where there was some sort of human-like AI character that had a part? Very different characters in so many ways.
If you couldn't figure out why everyone hated Ender, then you didn't read too much. The Buggers were not just space monsters. What books did you read exactly? There are many, many pages where the whole not-just-some-one-dimensional-space-monster thing is gone into and in some depth.
Ender saved humanity by commiting xenocide, destroying all of the Buggers. He then goes to write a book based on his discussions with the surviving Bugger queen, a wee thing waiting to grown up. Ender learns of the beauty of their race, their misunderstanding of humanity, etc etc, portraying all of this in his book. This book becomes popular with humanity, and they don't know that Ender wrote this, instead believing it to be a piece of somewhat whimsical- but spot on work about the way the Buggers really were, rather than just evil insectoid meanies. This leads to sympathy (hate comes from a lack of understanding), and ends up with hating Ender, the person who destroyed all of the Buggers.
I don't know about you, but if someone destroyed the only other sentient race humanity has ever known in 3000 years of relativistic light-speed travel, over a misunderstanding, I'd be pissed to. Maybe not to the extent everyone hated Ender, but masses of people are dumb, and they didn't have anywhere near the whole story...
Space opera can be sci-fi, although a lot of space opera is more like fantasy-in-space. Star Wars is in that category. There are many space opera books which qualify as real sci-fi, and some of it is pretty hard stuff.
Oh, just go and read Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy, which includes The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, and The Naked God, each composed to a Part I and II, at least for the US paperback edition; if you're in the UK, you get both parts in one book.
What can I say- radical. 3600 pages of the best space opera I've ever read; the ending is a bit lame, but after drooling in post literary-orgasmic pleasure for so long, I didn't really care.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone once said to me: "Different strokes for different folks." What is something worth writing a dozen whiny posts about to one person is indeed a great feature to others. Helluva concept, eh?
What about the simplest, cheapest, less feature-filled, and preferably smallest bluetooth phone? I want something about the size of a couple matchboxes stacked that has no speaker or mic, LCD, no buttons (other than power), nothing else other than a couple of LEDs showing network availability. I just want it to be a GRPS/cell network -> bluetooth bridge to be used with my PDA. I want it to sit in my pocket or bag, out of the way and out sof sight. I just want to be able to turn on my PDA and get net access through it, without having to invest in an expensive phone. Most phones with bluetooth are high-end ones- $200-$300 for the lot of them!
:) But I do want net access anytime, anywhere.
Buying a cell-equipped PDA is out of the question. I will not take a downgrade to some small-screened jobbie. Not for me. My PDA has an 800x480 screen and I will never go back to 240x320.
Recently, a CF card that allows me to use T-mobile's $30/mo unlim data service has come out. But it's $250 and still pretty new. That might be what I'll use, but the opton I mentioned above would be good too.
The headline of this article is: "Macs Are Not Invulnerable; Windows Isn't the Only System With Serious Flaws." And this counts as news? Every OS- even OpenBSD, although not as many or as often- have series flaws. Big deal. Mac OS X and Linux certainly aren't as prone to as many exploits and viruses.
I can only remember a hologram myself, but it's been a long time- 6 months or so- since I've seen it. Vader kneels in front of the talking head hologram of the (fake) Emperor a few times, but never raps with him in person. Ian, you'll always be my Emperor. (*snickers*)
Though Ian didn't play the Emperor in the "The Empire Strikes Back." Like it matters; the Ep V Emperor sucks bad.
Don't let these assholes who killed J.R. Ruined it for me too.
That's global capitalism for you. National or ethnic loyalties disapear in the interests of infinite growth. A stagnant business in a capitalist economy is a dead one; even if it is pulling in huge profits- if it isn't growing it's dead. Like a shark, which moves just to stay alive. More and more businesses will be pulling more and more off-shore stunts- after all, when they have a market saturated you have to find new profits, new growth somewhere.
Global capitalism and corporate wellfare are a very bad combo for everyone else but the stockholders.
There has got to be a better way.
I realize that that Winamp can play things other than music, but does anyone realy use it for that?
:)
All I know is that when I double click almost any media type, WinAmp opens it. A lot of the ones it opens it doesn't play right; video but no sound, sound but no video- which doesn't make much since its using the same libraries.
Aside from when one forgets to not let Winamp associate with *everything* during the install?
Er. Nevermind.
Yes, iTunes is quite a bit better than WinAmp, especially for me, as a person who totally hates maintaining playlists. The player should have a happy little browse feature like iTunes. Which WinAmp does now in newer versions- but it still isn't quite as nice.
Anyone would wonder if Winamp and Netscape were just tools to help them get their way.
Why would they be anything but? If not just tools in some evil conspiracy to get what they want vis-a-vis Microsoft, then tools to get their way in the regular world. You know, that whole businesses-make-money thing.
Wait a sec... If white males are evil, then wouldn't it be people, not ideas, which are dangerous? And since when were republicans and conservatives not a part of the war on ideas that weren't there own? Conservatives turn a blind eye to the staggering moronism of fellow conservatives and republicans- just like democrats and other pseudo-liberal folk do the same for their own.
I don't know about you, but from where I sit (USA), it really looks like the conservatives are taking over. I suppose since its so obvious, it's not a very interesting conspiracy theory...
And besides, we all know white males are evil. Get with it, man.
Obviously playing a video games does not guarantee the player will become homicidal. Just like smoking one cigarette won't give the smoker cancer.
That's the worst attempt at an analogy. Ever. It would've been more accurate to say that "Obviously playing a video games [sic] does not guarantee the player will become homicidal. Just like seeing someone smoke on TV won't make you become a smoker yourself."
Yes, people did get beaten on for having the wrong skin colour or for being in the wrong clique, but they didn't die as a result of the beatings.
Bullshit. It isn't the kids that have changed, rather the media reporting on those kids.
There is an order of magnitude more coverage on this kind of stuff these days. Perhaps even more. The sensationalist media of today has no qualms about letting everyone in the world know about some poor kid who got beat to death after school. Before, this sort of thing was often kept hush; who wants everyone in the world to know that your child, your sibling, your friend, a fellow community member did such a thing?
You may not have killed anyone, and you may not know anyone who died as a result of getting their asses kicked back then, but it certainly doesn't mean it's never happened. I don't know anyone who has beat someone to the point they were even on the ground- but that doesn't prove people don't get their lives beat out of them sometimes.
Your words imply that you believe that it is somehow on the unlikely fringe that "pussy sport" would cause violence; indeed, the noble quest for pussy has been responsible for more violoence between two men than any other big-name sport. Ever.
Read an intelligent book like "The New Thought Police" or "The War Against Boys", and learn the TRUTH.
The TRUTH about WHAT?
I had a vaguely similar situation- I had used Newtons for a few years, but wanted a WinCE machine. Why would I want something like that when I had a near-perfect MP2100 already? I use a language/environment called Squeak Smalltalk for most of my programming, and as my operating environment when I am using a desktop or laptop. I really wanted to run Squeak on my PDA, for a nubmer of reasons. Squeak runs on WinCE, but not the NewtonOS. So I thought hey- why not give PocketPC a try, especailly because I could pick up an iPAQ 3150 for only $150 on eBay, when the color iPAQ 36xx were going for $500!
In any case, I didn't dislike the iPAQ as much, but I did end up moving back to the Newton for a spell. It was really awesome to have the same programming and operating environment that I used on my Linux file server and my OS X iBook, but at the end of the day the Newton was a ton more useful. WindowsCE is a very powerful OS, but for me, the form factor was a big part of it. A 240x320 screen is way too small for me, especially for web browsing. The physical size of the screen was a big cramped too- 3.5" as opposed to 5.5" (?) on the MP2x00. The small PocketPC screens really sucks for taking notes via HWR- I could only fit on word on each line!
CalliGrapher is very good, and it is faster than recognition is on the Newton. But the Newton OS integrated its HWR software far more than PocketPC or WinCE does, being a core part of the OS rather than an after thought. There was also the little annoyances- how CalliGrapher on WinCE only recognizes what you've written after you wait for a bit to start thinking; the Newton would be recognizing constantly as you wrote, "typing" what you wrote a few words back, scrolling down as you filled the page.
I can get a good 40-50 WPM with CalliGrapher or the NewtonOS HWR, although the NewtonOS is a lot more fun and a lot more hackable.
These days I primarily use a Sigmarion III, a badass WinCE box with a 5" 800x480 screen and a touch typable keyboard. Not a day goes by when I don't wish it was some new, better and faster Newton, but it is good enough that I gave my iBook to my girlfriend and taken the Sig3 on as my primary machine.
Not only does the Newton have sound output, there is also input, usually used for voice notes and the like, although I can't say that is all that exciting. What was even cooler, is that there was even a version of Dragon Naturally Speaking Voice Recognition for the Newton, although it was regrettably canned when it was in beta. The beta demo package has circulated for years, and it is a blast to play with. At the time you could do real handwriting recognition and voice recognition on the Newton, PalmOS devices were finally getting the big upgrade to a whopping 20 MHz! :)
Yes, it was a device before its time. The Newton does far more than PalmOS devices of the time, and still did more than any PalmOS time until pretty recently. I used my Newton pretty much as a main computer- I did my email, telnet/ssh, web browsing. I coded on it in a few differfent languages, including a TeX compiler, although a somewhat limited one, although it was good enough for most of my school papers. I did math on it with custom lisp code on an interpreter, word processing and printing from the device itself. Hell, I ran a web server. And not just a file server ala Apache w/o any fancy mods or CGI, but a really cool little app that served out my Names, Dates, and Notes, as a seamless web app. Slick as snot. I never even hooked it up to my desktop, there was never a need, I simply did it all over ethernet, and when a driver came out a couple years back, over wifi on a Orinoco WaveLAN gold.
In that sense, it really was a device ahead of its time- I did more on it than most folks do with their desktops.
Apple Newton - nice idea, bad implementation.
Yeah, it was a great idea, but the idea wasn't all out bad. The HWR in Newton OS 1.x was bad, yes- but was vastly improved in Newton OS 2.0, even on a device with the same speed CPU. Much of the rest of Newton OS was tip top in many ways. In a lot of ways, it was and still is a hackers dream- there wasn't a part of the system you couldn't explore or modify. Objects all the way up and down, a solid and feature filled API without bloat, and an IDE on the level of Visual Basic 6 in its ease of use, but with a real language backing it up.
But it was also an expensive device. At the time, people didn't know what a PDA was or what it could do; not had software authors or manufacturers really explored the limits of what PDAs could do. People looked at is as spending $699 on a day book that didn't even work very well, which certainly isn't worth it.
A soul you say? Bleach, glad I quit when I did then! Last I read she was a result of the psychological programm adapting to Ender's lil' genius mind in super-general school...
... another book whose name is escaping me. The other series was made up of Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, and Shadow Puppets. The first starts three thousand years after the incident. The second series is immediately after it- Ender is sent away from Earth to colonize a planet with his sister Valentine by his brother Peter. They don't talk about the public's attitude toward Ender all that much, but what they do say is that he is still a big hero, though he himself is out of the limelight because he left on the first colonization ship.
Apparently, Jane was brought about by the Bugger Queen(s). They pulled some soul out of some sort of non-universe where souls (for Buggers, Piggies, Humans) come from. This realm is incidentally also how Jane manages to pull of FTL travel. You don't have to like it, but repeating the way you mis-remembered is won't make it true.
You're a lazy fanboy then.
Why am I fanboy? Because I enjoyed the books? Wow, you really must be in a bad mood. Or, is it because I remember what I read enough to have a discussion without resorting to calling silly names?
So, 3000 years, yeah, but I seem to remember that the hate came right away.
No. You are mixing your memories. There were two series (well, in a way). There was Ender's Game, and then two branches, one made up of Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and
It may have been within a lifetime, but that information isn't given. All we know is that Ender was hated (called "Ender the Xenocide") after three thousand years- people may have hated him after 50 years or 2500- we have no way of knowing.
And hey, its been a while, gimme a break if I'm fuzy on the details. I read a lot of books, I don't bother memorising every little thing from the ones I don't like.
You're more than a little fuzzy, you've got your facts all wrong. You're under no obligation to remember them all, but it seems a bit absurd for you to start spouting off on something you have no idea about, and then freak out when someone points out your many errors...
They didn't fight with only knives. Sure, the crysknife is the traditional ritual weapon, and what any Fremen would use in a duel, but I recall reading about all sorts of whacky explosives they could make with their fancy-schmancy spice polymer refinement.
They didn't have to deal with the whole air power thing as they would've if they fought a long war. They were very, very underrated as an enemy and did a good job surprising them at the compound.
My, my- have a bad day at work?
/me shrugs
Michelle and Jane are VERY similar. Their spontaneous awakening, etc. If you like it so much, read Harsh Mistress and read it just after, you'll notice the similarities.
I didn't read books right after one another, but I did read Children of the Mind and the rest of the post-Ender's Game Ender Series of that line (didn't read the Shadow ones until now) and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in the same month, with very little time between them.
Yes, Mike and Jane are computer-based intelligences. They had some sort of spontaneous awakenings. At first, they had one good friend who kept them a secret. What else? And hell, what is unique about those things above? Pretty common in sci-fi books. Jane isn't even an "artificial" intelligence in some sense of the word; she has a soul, pulled from the same stuff that anyone else's is and created intentionally. Or did you miss that part too? Mike is a huge network of machines and perephrials, a big network. No one- including Mike- knows when he became alive.
He was a KID who was FORCED to destroy them out of SELF DEFENSE.
Yup, good job.
I'm afraid I don't see how that invalidates what I said, though. If your dad was in a drunken bar fight, and was lunging at some dude who shot him, fearing for his life, would you not be upset? Or would you just shrug it off saying: "well, it was self defense! He was forced to kill my paps!"
Ender did what he did because he had to. But he also didn't have to. This is why good science fiction can be so great- the kind of questions and considerations that come up. He had no choice but to do it, but he certainly feels remorse. Does that seem too unrealistic to you?
So, after the fact, it turns out that the space monsters that WERE coming to perform xenocide on us were doing it because they misunderstood us? [...] How many billions would they have slaughtered in search of our psychic-queens before they would have understood the concept of idividuality? No one ever considered that?
Ah, you're on a roll friend! Yes, they did. Again, this is what a good science fiction book should do- make you think. The story was crafted to bring these things out.
What would you prefer? Cut-and-dry one dimensional pap? Where there is a good guy and a bad guy? Not that there is anything wrong with that. But some folks like depth to what they read.
SPOILER WARNING!!! INEFFECTIVE SPOILER WARNING
Oh c'mon, don't be a baby about it. What would you rather me do? rot13 my reply?
What was that other book he wrote.. [more whining, evidentally about some other OSC book]
He has written many books. A whole bunch of them, in fact! I've not read anything of his outside the Ender stuff, though.
He establishes these civilisation-wide concensus that basically pop up over night in an extreme paradigm shift...
Overnight? Three thousand years elapsed between Ender's game and the next book about him. If that is overnight to you, I'd be interested in whatever snake oil you have used to extend your life so. A lot can change in that amount of time. I think it is perfectly reasonable- bigger changes have happened over a decade in this civilization's history than everyone thinking Ender was a brash, violent jerk.
Dune isn't full of bad tactics... The original movie's portrayal of them were lame, but the mini-series and the book weren't bad. I mean, where can you go wrong when you've got an overwhelming force of badass ninja-beating Fremen that can whip the snot out of the Emperor's own Sardukar 3-to-1? And then have a force that is probably bigger than the number of Sardukar stationed there? I mean, simple tactics yes- nothing fancy- but if it were real life, the Fremen would still kick the mighty ass of justice.
Don't forget the Shadows in B5- they're really nice guys too. You just have to look at them from the right perspective.
Er, uh, nevermind.
Wow man, you must've only skimmed the Ender books, rather than actually reading them.
** SPOILERS - don't read this if you're reading the Ender series or considering it eventually. **
And I reccomend you to, whether you are a typical sci fi fan or not. The Ender series is a lot more in depth than that, using sci-fi as a platform for exploring a lot of other things than space ships and bug-like monsters...
Mike (from Moon) and Jane (Ender series) are the same to you? What, are those the only books you've read where there was some sort of human-like AI character that had a part? Very different characters in so many ways.
If you couldn't figure out why everyone hated Ender, then you didn't read too much. The Buggers were not just space monsters. What books did you read exactly? There are many, many pages where the whole not-just-some-one-dimensional-space-monster thing is gone into and in some depth.
Ender saved humanity by commiting xenocide, destroying all of the Buggers. He then goes to write a book based on his discussions with the surviving Bugger queen, a wee thing waiting to grown up. Ender learns of the beauty of their race, their misunderstanding of humanity, etc etc, portraying all of this in his book. This book becomes popular with humanity, and they don't know that Ender wrote this, instead believing it to be a piece of somewhat whimsical- but spot on work about the way the Buggers really were, rather than just evil insectoid meanies. This leads to sympathy (hate comes from a lack of understanding), and ends up with hating Ender, the person who destroyed all of the Buggers.
I don't know about you, but if someone destroyed the only other sentient race humanity has ever known in 3000 years of relativistic light-speed travel, over a misunderstanding, I'd be pissed to. Maybe not to the extent everyone hated Ender, but masses of people are dumb, and they didn't have anywhere near the whole story...
Space opera can be sci-fi, although a lot of space opera is more like fantasy-in-space. Star Wars is in that category. There are many space opera books which qualify as real sci-fi, and some of it is pretty hard stuff.
Oh, just go and read Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy, which includes The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, and The Naked God, each composed to a Part I and II, at least for the US paperback edition; if you're in the UK, you get both parts in one book.
What can I say- radical. 3600 pages of the best space opera I've ever read; the ending is a bit lame, but after drooling in post literary-orgasmic pleasure for so long, I didn't really care.