For geopolitical reasons the Eisenhower administration wanted the USSR to be first to orbit a satellite -- because it would set a precedent for free orbital flight over any territory, thus allowing the USA to orbit the Corona spy satellites without the USSR being legally free to pop off ASAT weapons at them.
In practice, Von Braun was ordered to ballast Thor IRBM tests with concrete to prevent them "accidentally" making orbit prematurely.
The Sharp Mobilon was also sold as the Vadem Clio.
I owned one, back in the day.
I assure you, the claimed 10-16 hour battery life is a ludicrous exaggeration. In reality, it was good for 4.5-6 hours on a charge.
(Battery life claims are a lot more conservative these days; I remember the first-gen Apple Powerbooks, where the PB100's claimed life of "two and a half hours" was closer to 40 minutes -- and they were by no means the worst of the bunch!)
Also: the thing was near-as-dammit unusable due to crappy design decisions. For example, WinCE 2.11 had the window "close" button right next to the "Maximize" button -- and the pen digitizer was inaccurate enough that if you didn't calibrate the screen very carefully you'd end up hitting "close" instead of "maximize" about 50% of the time!
I've used it on and off for about eight years now.
SoftMaker office isn't really a decent replacement for OO.o on Linux. But there is one place where it's indispensible -- if you have a WinCE or Windows Mobile PDA/smartphone, it's miles better than the Pocket version of Microsoft Office. It actually makes my old HP iPaq 214 useful for writing.
... However, as I remember from back when I worked at SCO (years before the name and some assets were sold to the lunatics from Utah), Xenix filesystem and partition table support was rolled into SCO UNIX SVR3.2/386. And Open Desktop. And ODT came with a proper working TCP/IP stack.
It's probably overkill, but once you've tried using uucp to get the files off the BBS, you might want to pull the ST506 drive (presumably an MFM-encoded one, not RLL-encoded) and stick it into a shiny new 386 with, say, 4Mb of RAM and a 40Mb disk with SCO UNIX installed. That should enable you to mount the filesystems and export them via NFS. It's a lot of work, though.
One fundamental point that tends to get overlooked is that unlike CDs or cassette tapes before them, books traditionally came with built-in DRM, insofar as copying them (via scan/OCR/proofread) was a really tedious process.
Whereas it's relatively easy to crack the DRM on, for example, MobiPocket or Microsoft Reader books (and probably ePub by now). So the DRM'd formats are easier to pirate than the previous "analog"-analog format.
What this portends for the future remains to be seen, but wearing my full-time novelist hat, I'm a bit worried. The music industry has efficiently trained people to grab files without throwing money at the artists, by bringing the role of publishers into disrepute. Now we're all set to repeat the experience, and unlike a rock band, most authors don't perform well on stage.
Note that any sales figure a major English language publishing house discloses will be inflated by between 50% and 300%. This is standard practice -- everybody does it, so if you don't do it, everybody will assume that you're exaggerating your sales anyway and discount the figure accordingly. Stupid, but that's the way the business works.
Even if you assume the 6.5 million worldwide sales figures is exaggerated by a factor of three, that's hugely impressive -- an SF novel that sells 10,000 hardcover and 50,000 paperback in the US is doing really well (and you can triple that figure to get an estimate of the worldwide sales).
Terry Pratchett's total career sales track is around 66 million books.
Steven King sold somewhere upwards of 100 million, total.
J. K. Rowling is around the 70-120 million mark, worldwide.
I call bullshit, by at least one (and probably two) orders of magnitude.
The most obviously moral/practical solution in my opinion would be to order the text used from Amazon and then read the pirated electronic version.
Disagree. The author gets not a single bent penny from second-hand sales. (Neither does the publisher.)
The best move is to grab the pirated electronic copy, then buy a new copy of the author's latest book. That way, they get paid and their publisher receives a price signal that this author is popular.
The International Monetary Fund just announced that the sub-prime crisis has tipped the USA into the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. During recessions, the first thing to get cut back on is unnecessary infrastructure replacement -- and PCs have been marketed on the basis of planned obsolescence for around a decade now. So the PC replacement cycle will be hit, hard.
Vista is a resource hog, Ubuntu is just about coming up to mass market usability, and a lot of places are going to stop replacing their PCs annually or bi-annually in the next couple of years. Unless Windows 7 is as comparatively lightweight as XP, it's going to crash in the "upgrade your OS" market -- only new PCs will ship with it. So Microsoft will have two poor sellers in a row -- which is enough, in the mind of the fickle public, to establish a trend, and with Apple chowing down on 25% of the high-end laptop market already, they're in danger of being squeezed between a high-end competitor and a low-end one.
But.
Windows is so big, with such a huge established base, that its decline will resemble that of the old IBM mainframe environment -- which is still doing fine, decades after the death of the mainframe was predicted. This ain't going to happen overnight.
The best green-screen creative writing environment is Vim. Which comes free with every Mac, already, if you've the wit to open a terminal window. (Although I'll give you a free pass if you prefer Emacs.)
WriteRoom stinks to me of an attempt to sell a reinvented wheel to folks who don't know any better.
Back in 1993, when I was teaching myself Perl in my spare time (while working for a -- cough -- UNIX company called The Santa Cruz Operation -- no relation to the current Utah asshats of that name), I was practicing by working on a spider. Now, back then SCO's Watford engineering centre was connected to the internet by a humongous 64kbps leased line. And I was working with a variety of sources on robots, and it just so happened that because I was doing a deterministic depth-first traversal of the web (hey, back then you could subscribe to the NCSA "what's new on the web" bulletin and visit all the interesting new websites every day before your coffee cooled), I kept hitting on Martin Kjoster's website. And Martin's then employers (who were doing something esoteric and X.509 oriented, IIRC) only had a 14.4kbps leased line. (Yes, you read that right: a couple of years later we all had faster modems, but this was the stone age.)
Eventually Martin figured out that I was the bozo who kept leeching all his bandwidth, and contacted me. Throttling and QoS stuff was all in the future back then, so he went for a simpler solution: "Look for a text file called/robots.txt. It has a list of stuff you are not to pull in. Obey it, or I yell at your sysadmins." And so, I guess, my first attempt at a spider was also the first spider to obey the embryonic robot exclusion protocol. Which Martin subsequently generalized and which got turned into a standard.
So if you're wondering why robots.txt is rather simplistic and brain-dead, it's because it was written to keep this rather simplistic and brain-dead perl n00b from pillaging Martin's bandwidth.
Ah, the good old days when you could accidentally make someone invent a new protocol before breakfast...
SFWA is an organization of writers (as in, a herd of semi-feral cats). It's not a distribution cartel like the MPAA or RIAA, and it has not, in point of fact, got very much real-world clout at all.
SFWA is, however, a representative democracy. And the current elected executive officers appear to have decided to take this (in my opinion, bone-headed and incompetent) action on their own initiative.
There is currently a flame war raging inside SFWA over these DMCA takedown notices, with some authors supporting them and others calling for the resignation of the board. I'm not going to name names or tell tales out of school, but please don't assume that this is indicative of some borg-like organization of copyright totalitarians taking aim at your liberties: it's more a symptom of incompetence.
(Meanwhile, some of us are maintaining our SFWA membership specifically to fight this kind of stupidity from within.)
You got that one from Larry Niven in the 1970s, didn't you?:-/
There's some recent research that shows most biologically active enzymes require hydrogen bonds to proximate water molecules in order to work. Some can be modified to work with minimal H2O, but in general most of 'em don't.
This suggests that freezing or vitrefying intracellular mechanisms may have the additional undesirable effect of not only making a mess of membranes, but of denaturing most of the enzymic machinery that the cell will need when you try to reboot it.
I'd like to note that I'm not saying space colonization is impossible per se... but that (a) it is really really difficult without breakthroughs in a number of key technologies (that we can't be certain will happen), (b) we're not going to see any economic return on investment from it, and (c) the motivations for it are essentially quasi-religious and ideological in nature.
Using "the high frontier" and appeals to settler gumption and heroic individualism isn't the right paradigm; if it's going to happen we need to abandon certain cherished illusions (dwelt on at length) and start doing some hard thinking about what we really want.
If you need stability, Neooffice is pretty solid. (It's based on the OOo codebase but using OS/X's Java to provide the UI; it's nicer than the X11 version on OS/X, but relatively slow on pre-intel kit. I've written -- and sold -- a couple of novels using NeoOffice, although I'm currently Switching to Linux (again)...)
Let us imagine that one night you wake up and discover that your house is on fire.
You dial 999 (or 911, if you're American) and ask for help: the nice despatcher tells you that the police department were watching your house and they're pretty sure there was no arsonist.
Do you think, "oh, it's not an arson attack," and go back to bed?
(Or do you evacuate the burning building anyway, and wait for the fire service to get there?)
Here's the point: the house is on fire. It doesn't matter why it's on fire, in the first instance; the fire is an emergency situation and needs to be dealt with regardless of the cause.
And by analogy, it doesn't matter whether the observations of climactic change are attributable to anthropogenic warming or to some other cause, or to a mixture of causes -- if we don't take action we're going to be in deep shit.
... in the UK, at least, is huge. To put it in perspective; in the fantasy field, only J. K. Rowling out-sells him -- I'm not certain, but I think he may be ahead of Stephen King, and responsible for a visible percentage of all UK fiction sales.
This suggests to me that, like Rowling, he now probably has enough clout to prevent his work being butchered by the studios.
By way of illustrating this point, he tells an amusing story about the first time round the Hollywood block. Someone had optioned "Reaper Man", and was actually putting some money into scriptwriting, preliminary planning, focus groups, and that kind of thing. One evening, he got a phone call from a studio executive. Who began like this: "hi, Terry! Great to talk to you, we here at XXXXX studios really like Reaper Man, and we're looking forward to making it a great movie. However, we'd like to make a few changes. We ran the outline past a focus group in rural Iowa, and they weren't very positive about this 'Death' character. If we just replace him with Tom Cruise..."
This is how Hollywood typically deals with SF/F fiction properties.
And that's why you didn't see a big-budget production of "Reaper Man" (probably re-titled "Die Hard 4: Reap Hard") during the mid-nineties.
Just in case you were wanting to read the first chapter of "Accelerando" without downloading the entire novel, I'd like to point out that Lobsters (as mentioned in the preceding post) is effectively the first draft of Chapter One.
Yup, you can print the book out. It'll cost you as much as buying the hardcover and the result will be less pleasant to read, but you can do it.
You can give copies to other folks. The hitch is: you aren't allowed to sell it. Neither can the people you give it to. If you violate that part of the license, publishers' lawyers will come after you.
Again: you're only granted these rights for the book, as a book. You can't edit or remix it, or make a movie based on it, without asking me for permission. (Clue: I'm not hard to get in touch with.)
If you strip the internet out of the equation, basically you've got roughly equivalent rights to my book that you'd have to a book you borrowed from the public library -- except nobody's going to fine you if you're late returning it. Which is the whole idea of the exercise.
Considering that Cory is employed as the tech evangelist for The EFF in Europe, and is currently leading their campaign to block the broadcast flag for DRM in hi-def TV, you might want to re-think your idea that he's anti-DRM purely for pose value.
The "fine print" in each book is a standard creative commons license.
In the case of my own, I've picked no-derivs no-commercial; as long as you're not redistributing the book for profit or creating new works derived from it, I don't mind what you do.
Slashdot Mirror
For geopolitical reasons the Eisenhower administration wanted the USSR to be first to orbit a satellite -- because it would set a precedent for free orbital flight over any territory, thus allowing the USA to orbit the Corona spy satellites without the USSR being legally free to pop off ASAT weapons at them.
In practice, Von Braun was ordered to ballast Thor IRBM tests with concrete to prevent them "accidentally" making orbit prematurely.
I owned one, back in the day.
I assure you, the claimed 10-16 hour battery life is a ludicrous exaggeration. In reality, it was good for 4.5-6 hours on a charge.
(Battery life claims are a lot more conservative these days; I remember the first-gen Apple Powerbooks, where the PB100's claimed life of "two and a half hours" was closer to 40 minutes -- and they were by no means the worst of the bunch!)
Also: the thing was near-as-dammit unusable due to crappy design decisions. For example, WinCE 2.11 had the window "close" button right next to the "Maximize" button -- and the pen digitizer was inaccurate enough that if you didn't calibrate the screen very carefully you'd end up hitting "close" instead of "maximize" about 50% of the time!
SoftMaker office isn't really a decent replacement for OO.o on Linux. But there is one place where it's indispensible -- if you have a WinCE or Windows Mobile PDA/smartphone, it's miles better than the Pocket version of Microsoft Office. It actually makes my old HP iPaq 214 useful for writing.
... However, as I remember from back when I worked at SCO (years before the name and some assets were sold to the lunatics from Utah), Xenix filesystem and partition table support was rolled into SCO UNIX SVR3.2/386. And Open Desktop. And ODT came with a proper working TCP/IP stack. It's probably overkill, but once you've tried using uucp to get the files off the BBS, you might want to pull the ST506 drive (presumably an MFM-encoded one, not RLL-encoded) and stick it into a shiny new 386 with, say, 4Mb of RAM and a 40Mb disk with SCO UNIX installed. That should enable you to mount the filesystems and export them via NFS. It's a lot of work, though.
One fundamental point that tends to get overlooked is that unlike CDs or cassette tapes before them, books traditionally came with built-in DRM, insofar as copying them (via scan/OCR/proofread) was a really tedious process. Whereas it's relatively easy to crack the DRM on, for example, MobiPocket or Microsoft Reader books (and probably ePub by now). So the DRM'd formats are easier to pirate than the previous "analog"-analog format. What this portends for the future remains to be seen, but wearing my full-time novelist hat, I'm a bit worried. The music industry has efficiently trained people to grab files without throwing money at the artists, by bringing the role of publishers into disrepute. Now we're all set to repeat the experience, and unlike a rock band, most authors don't perform well on stage.
Note that any sales figure a major English language publishing house discloses will be inflated by between 50% and 300%. This is standard practice -- everybody does it, so if you don't do it, everybody will assume that you're exaggerating your sales anyway and discount the figure accordingly. Stupid, but that's the way the business works. Even if you assume the 6.5 million worldwide sales figures is exaggerated by a factor of three, that's hugely impressive -- an SF novel that sells 10,000 hardcover and 50,000 paperback in the US is doing really well (and you can triple that figure to get an estimate of the worldwide sales).
Terry Pratchett's total career sales track is around 66 million books. Steven King sold somewhere upwards of 100 million, total. J. K. Rowling is around the 70-120 million mark, worldwide. I call bullshit, by at least one (and probably two) orders of magnitude.
The most obviously moral/practical solution in my opinion would be to order the text used from Amazon and then read the pirated electronic version.
Disagree. The author gets not a single bent penny from second-hand sales. (Neither does the publisher.)
The best move is to grab the pirated electronic copy, then buy a new copy of the author's latest book. That way, they get paid and their publisher receives a price signal that this author is popular.
Of course Windows is going to decline.
The International Monetary Fund just announced that the sub-prime crisis has tipped the USA into the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. During recessions, the first thing to get cut back on is unnecessary infrastructure replacement -- and PCs have been marketed on the basis of planned obsolescence for around a decade now. So the PC replacement cycle will be hit, hard.
Vista is a resource hog, Ubuntu is just about coming up to mass market usability, and a lot of places are going to stop replacing their PCs annually or bi-annually in the next couple of years. Unless Windows 7 is as comparatively lightweight as XP, it's going to crash in the "upgrade your OS" market -- only new PCs will ship with it. So Microsoft will have two poor sellers in a row -- which is enough, in the mind of the fickle public, to establish a trend, and with Apple chowing down on 25% of the high-end laptop market already, they're in danger of being squeezed between a high-end competitor and a low-end one.
But.
Windows is so big, with such a huge established base, that its decline will resemble that of the old IBM mainframe environment -- which is still doing fine, decades after the death of the mainframe was predicted. This ain't going to happen overnight.
The best green-screen creative writing environment is Vim. Which comes free with every Mac, already, if you've the wit to open a terminal window. (Although I'll give you a free pass if you prefer Emacs.) WriteRoom stinks to me of an attempt to sell a reinvented wheel to folks who don't know any better.
My one lasting legacy on the web ...
/robots.txt. It has a list of stuff you are not to pull in. Obey it, or I yell at your sysadmins." And so, I guess, my first attempt at a spider was also the first spider to obey the embryonic robot exclusion protocol. Which Martin subsequently generalized and which got turned into a standard.
...
Back in 1993, when I was teaching myself Perl in my spare time (while working for a -- cough -- UNIX company called The Santa Cruz Operation -- no relation to the current Utah asshats of that name), I was practicing by working on a spider. Now, back then SCO's Watford engineering centre was connected to the internet by a humongous 64kbps leased line. And I was working with a variety of sources on robots, and it just so happened that because I was doing a deterministic depth-first traversal of the web (hey, back then you could subscribe to the NCSA "what's new on the web" bulletin and visit all the interesting new websites every day before your coffee cooled), I kept hitting on Martin Kjoster's website. And Martin's then employers (who were doing something esoteric and X.509 oriented, IIRC) only had a 14.4kbps leased line. (Yes, you read that right: a couple of years later we all had faster modems, but this was the stone age.)
Eventually Martin figured out that I was the bozo who kept leeching all his bandwidth, and contacted me. Throttling and QoS stuff was all in the future back then, so he went for a simpler solution: "Look for a text file called
So if you're wondering why robots.txt is rather simplistic and brain-dead, it's because it was written to keep this rather simplistic and brain-dead perl n00b from pillaging Martin's bandwidth.
Ah, the good old days when you could accidentally make someone invent a new protocol before breakfast
This may surprise you, but some of us have been trying to get rid of the nutters for some time.
Suggestions like yours are flogging a horse that's already going as fast as it can; beware, lest you flog it to death.
I am an SFWA member.
SFWA is an organization of writers (as in, a herd of semi-feral cats). It's not a distribution cartel like the MPAA or RIAA, and it has not, in point of fact, got very much real-world clout at all.
SFWA is, however, a representative democracy. And the current elected executive officers appear to have decided to take this (in my opinion, bone-headed and incompetent) action on their own initiative.
There is currently a flame war raging inside SFWA over these DMCA takedown notices, with some authors supporting them and others calling for the resignation of the board. I'm not going to name names or tell tales out of school, but please don't assume that this is indicative of some borg-like organization of copyright totalitarians taking aim at your liberties: it's more a symptom of incompetence.
(Meanwhile, some of us are maintaining our SFWA membership specifically to fight this kind of stupidity from within.)
You got that one from Larry Niven in the 1970s, didn't you? :-/
There's some recent research that shows most biologically active enzymes require hydrogen bonds to proximate water molecules in order to work. Some can be modified to work with minimal H2O, but in general most of 'em don't.
This suggests that freezing or vitrefying intracellular mechanisms may have the additional undesirable effect of not only making a mess of membranes, but of denaturing most of the enzymic machinery that the cell will need when you try to reboot it.
Using "the high frontier" and appeals to settler gumption and heroic individualism isn't the right paradigm; if it's going to happen we need to abandon certain cherished illusions (dwelt on at length) and start doing some hard thinking about what we really want.
If you need stability, Neooffice is pretty solid. (It's based on the OOo codebase but using OS/X's Java to provide the UI; it's nicer than the X11 version on OS/X, but relatively slow on pre-intel kit. I've written -- and sold -- a couple of novels using NeoOffice, although I'm currently Switching to Linux (again) ...)
s/roughly/of the same order of magnitude/g
Let us imagine that one night you wake up and discover that your house is on fire.
You dial 999 (or 911, if you're American) and ask for help: the nice despatcher tells you that the police department were watching your house and they're pretty sure there was no arsonist.
Do you think, "oh, it's not an arson attack," and go back to bed?
(Or do you evacuate the burning building anyway, and wait for the fire service to get there?)
Here's the point: the house is on fire. It doesn't matter why it's on fire, in the first instance; the fire is an emergency situation and needs to be dealt with regardless of the cause.
And by analogy, it doesn't matter whether the observations of climactic change are attributable to anthropogenic warming or to some other cause, or to a mixture of causes -- if we don't take action we're going to be in deep shit.
It's been around for over 20 years. What's new is that the Aussies appear to be commercialising it.
This suggests to me that, like Rowling, he now probably has enough clout to prevent his work being butchered by the studios.
By way of illustrating this point, he tells an amusing story about the first time round the Hollywood block. Someone had optioned "Reaper Man", and was actually putting some money into scriptwriting, preliminary planning, focus groups, and that kind of thing. One evening, he got a phone call from a studio executive. Who began like this: "hi, Terry! Great to talk to you, we here at XXXXX studios really like Reaper Man, and we're looking forward to making it a great movie. However, we'd like to make a few changes. We ran the outline past a focus group in rural Iowa, and they weren't very positive about this 'Death' character. If we just replace him with Tom Cruise ..."
This is how Hollywood typically deals with SF/F fiction properties.
And that's why you didn't see a big-budget production of "Reaper Man" (probably re-titled "Die Hard 4: Reap Hard") during the mid-nineties.
Just in case you were wanting to read the first chapter of "Accelerando" without downloading the entire novel, I'd like to point out that Lobsters (as mentioned in the preceding post) is effectively the first draft of Chapter One.
Yup, you can print the book out. It'll cost you as much as buying the hardcover and the result will be less pleasant to read, but you can do it.
You can give copies to other folks. The hitch is: you aren't allowed to sell it. Neither can the people you give it to. If you violate that part of the license, publishers' lawyers will come after you.
Again: you're only granted these rights for the book, as a book. You can't edit or remix it, or make a movie based on it, without asking me for permission. (Clue: I'm not hard to get in touch with.)
If you strip the internet out of the equation, basically you've got roughly equivalent rights to my book that you'd have to a book you borrowed from the public library -- except nobody's going to fine you if you're late returning it. Which is the whole idea of the exercise.
Considering that Cory is employed as the tech evangelist for The EFF in Europe, and is currently leading their campaign to block the broadcast flag for DRM in hi-def TV, you might want to re-think your idea that he's anti-DRM purely for pose value.
The "fine print" in each book is a standard creative commons license.
In the case of my own, I've picked no-derivs no-commercial; as long as you're not redistributing the book for profit or creating new works derived from it, I don't mind what you do.
Guess again -- I'm 'charlie' on slashdot. This should tell you how long I've been hanging out here. (Just discovered this thread. Late as always ...)