One major point about cyberpunk; it exemplified the values of the 1980's because it was written by the generation of the eighties.
Faceless multinationals. Deracination. Computers everywhere. Depersonalisation. Marketing and neon signs and trademarks and brand names.
As much as anything else this was a cultural thing, signifying the arrival of a new generation of SF writers who came of age during the late 70's and early 80's. Each generation writes about what it knows and its cultural attitudes and expectations show through in its prose (except where someone makes a deliberate attempt to obscure the issue). This is why, for example, British new wave SF from the late sixties is so different from US new wave SF -- the cultural background of the writers was radically different.
The post-cyberpunk phenomenon is partly a symptom of the writers aging, partly a sign of the changing times... and partly a symptom of a new generation of writers emerging on the scene. Someone who was 25 in 1980 is now 44. Is it sane to expect them to be writing the same stuff today? Cyberpunk had to die, or mutate, or whatever. If it hadn't, it would be about as relevent today as E. E. "Doc" Smith's two-fisted engineer-heros would be in the middle of Woodstock or the summer of love.
Biologists have a special technical term for phenomena that stop changing. They call them "dead".
What's to stop the recipient -- or a third party who subpoenas the time-expired mail -- from simply setting their clock back?
Either this relies on security through proprietary software ("only our ACME special- purpose self-deleting email reader can decrypt this message!") or there would appear to be a flaw in it as wide as a --
JonKatz wrote: Real programmers are different from mortals, certainly from writers. They are a separate species. Programmers are precise, confident and look ahead. They have no doubt they can make technology come out right for them. Writers are imprecise, uncertain and backwards-looking. Their relationship with technology is uncertain, a means, never an end.
To which I feel compelled to reply: this is a load of bollocks. Complete bollocks. Flattering bollocks, if you happen to be a programmer, but nevertheless complete bollocks.
What qualifies me to say this? Well, I'm a writer. I've spent quite a few years as a tech author. I write a magazine column in one of the highest circulation computer magazines in the UK. I have been known to write and sell books. But I am also a programmer -- head perl wrangler at an e-commerce outfit, masters degree in comp. sci., and so on. (To say nothing about the penguin fetish.)
Jon seems to have succumbed to a desire to over-romanticize the programmer as hero. It makes a refreshing change from the pasty-faced geek stereotype, but in the long term, hagiography is just as damaging as demonisation. More to the point, he's succumbed to the urge to make wild over-generalisations.
There is a lot in common, experience-wise, between the sensation of writing a book and that of writing an application. Both activities revolve around symbolic manipulation of information, the creation of a structure that is not immediately obvious to the end user, and both activities require insight and diligence and expertise.
(The major difference between the two activities is that writers are trying to program a soft machine. Human language is far more flexible than anything we've yet figured out how to mechanize. Writers have to deal with ambiguity: there's precious little ambiguity in a compiler, though. (Your code works, or it throws a syntax error or goes off the deep end into some obscure runtime error.) Whatever: when code fails, the failure is obvious -- the success or failure of a book is a much more subjective phenomenon, one that depends on the reader as well as the writer.)
Anyway. I don't want to come down too hard on Katz -- he's got something valuable to contribute -- but I find his insistence that writers are imprecise, uncertain, and backwards- looking highly annoying, if only because some of us aren't. It's as if he's trying to work out some sort of personal sense of inferiority by externalising it on his fellow practitioners.
Sorry, but that cap doesn't fit.
Re:No, there *AREN'T* competing telcos
on
ISP War in the UK
·
· Score: 1
'Case you hadn't noticed, at the same time Oftel ordered BT to roll out ADSL, they also said something about "unbundling the local loop".
What this means is, J. Random Telco will have a mandatory right to enter BT's local exchanges and, in return for a nominal sum, splice your local loop (the twisted pair cable in the ground between your phone and the System X exchange) into their system.
This is exactly how the gas deregulation system works, and it's been very quietly mandated for telecoms. A bit late, I'll agree, but better late than never.
Re:Metered telephone calls suck so much
on
ISP War in the UK
·
· Score: 2
The cost of ISDN in the UK has traditionally been held high to prevent it from killing off BT's lucrative Kilostream service (64K leased lines). As BT controlled the local loop, they could charge excessive amounts for ISDN into the home.
To be fair, though, it's not just BT. When BT was privatised in 1983, Oftel (the Office of Telecommunications) was set up to police their activities; at that point BT was a monopoly and Oftel was charged with preventing them suppressing the embryonic competition.
As one of these moves, Oftel refused to give BT permission to provide free local calls. In 1983 this made eminent sense; if they hadn't, BT would be a monopoly to this day. Oftel also banned BT from cross-subsidizing business units, so that the ISDN roll-out (which would have been feasible in some areas as early as 1986) couldn't be subsidized by the profitable business and trunk sectors, forcing BT to develop it more slowly.
BT's strategic response was to massively upgrade their network bandwidth, so that they'd be ready for video on demand in the mid nineties. Then Oftel dropped the other shoe and ordered BT to stay out of the cable TV business -- to protect the then-growing cable industry. (The UK's cable infrastructure was only installed in the early 1990's; technologically it's a couple of generations more advanced than that of the US, but it has lower uptake.)
Today, however, circumstances have changed. There's a thriving cable industry, lots of competing telcos, 25% of the population have mobile phones (growing by something like 5% per year). The original Oftel objection to BT providing free local calls or VOD doesn't seem to stand any more, and it's writing BT a meal ticket by enabling them to keep line prices artificially high. They demonstrated this earlier this year; to protect their leased line business, when Oftel looked about to order them to roll out ADSL, BT cut the rental on a 64K leased line (with routers and IP traffic) from about 7000 pounds to 3000 pounds a year. If they can still break even at that price point, it suggests there are huge economies they can make elsewhere...
Here in the UK, that sort of behaviour is termed "Attempting to pervert the course of justice". It's very illegal, and if you try it and get caught you are liable to go to prison for rather a long time. In general judges have a bad attitude towards attempts to mislead or exert pressure upon them.
Is there an equivalent offense under US law, and have Microsoft committed it?
Actually, there are several problems with EPOC/32, the OS used by the Series 7 and Series 5 machines. (I say this as a long-term Psion fan -- I've been running their machines since 1991 and currently have a Series 5MX.)
We'll glide over the fact that EPOC/32 is a proprietary OS. There aren't really any free OS's in the palmtop field yet (unless you count ELKS), so I guess we'll have to let this slide. However, the real headache is the proprietary file formats. EPOC/32 stores data using some kind of object oriented stream store. The file formats are undocumented and Symbian's story is "use our SDK if you want to write apps that can read and write our files."
This wouldn't have been so bad if they'd provided file format translators as part of the OS -- but they didn't! Instead, translation between EPOC/32 file formats (such as Word and Sheet) is carried out inside the PsiWin link software, on a Windows box. In effect, the EPOC/32 system is turned into an obligate peripheral of a Windows machine because Psion didn't even provide rudimentary RTF or CSV file import/export capabilities for the built-in apps. (Which is a shame, because EPOC/32 is a much better OS than Windows;-).
To add insult to injury, the SDK was based on the GNU toolchain but requires a copy of Microsoft Visual C++ to run on. (My guess is that somebody at Psion swallowed too much Microsoft marketing literature back in 1994 and truly believed that Windows was going to conquer the universe, or at least the desktop. As a result, Psion didn't give other platforms the attention they required.)
Furthermore, Psion blundered quite badly over developer relations back in 1995. For a long time the SDK was also a commercial product which you had to pay an annual license fee for. Symbian realised that this was stupid and made it available for download last June, but this misguided policy had held up the development of a large body of third-party apps by the hobbyist community (which was always a strong point of the SIBO/Series 3 devices). (The result of the change of policy is already becoming visible in the form of a sudden wave of new EPOC/32 software, including native Word->RTF file translators, and all the other stuff that should have been in the OS from the beginning. Like decent ports of vi, perl, and nethack;-)
Anyway. I guess my beef with EPOC/32 is that it's a nice OS, let down by having been deployed as if it's a satellite of another platform, namely Windows. If they'd paid more attention to making the Series 5 a "real computer" in its own right with connectivity to peers running different OS's, it would have been a lot more useful.
For my part, I've come to terms with my Series 5MX and now find it absolutely invaluable, but I'm not really making full use of the built-in application suite because of the file conversion issues. Let this be a warning to you if you plan to buy one and, like me, live in a Windows-free zone!
A major issue with publishing online is how you encourage authors to write stuff worth reading. Book sales are tiny compared to, say, TV audiences or magazine sales; a midlist novel sells maybe 20-50,000 copies in the US. To make a living off this -- at the production rate of one or two books a year -- means the author really needs to see about US $0.3 to $1 per copy sold. If the author doesn't see that, they'll probably starve -- being a novelist isn't something you can do as a day job on a salary while creating cool stuff at night, the way much open-source software is effectively produced. The vast majority of full-time authors are already pretty pathetically paid compared to, say, a very junior sysadmin: I'm wondering what percentage cut of these e-books' cover price is going to the people who did the hard work of creating it? (Knowing the way new media companies work it's probably less than the usual 7.5-12.5%, when it should probably be a whole lot more.)
I'm not convinced anyone has yet come up with a sensible business model for selling novels on non-paper media; this may be a stab in the right direction, but in an age where the cost of copying information tends towards zero, authors are getting worried about how they're going to make a living.
(In the end it may not be possible for someone to earn a living as a novelist. I think we'll all be the poorer for it if that's where we end up, though.)
Slashdot Mirror
Faceless multinationals. Deracination. Computers everywhere. Depersonalisation. Marketing and neon signs and trademarks and brand names.
As much as anything else this was a cultural thing, signifying the arrival of a new generation of SF writers who came of age during the late 70's and early 80's. Each generation writes about what it knows and its cultural attitudes and expectations show through in its prose (except where someone makes a deliberate attempt to obscure the issue). This is why, for example, British new wave SF from the late sixties is so different from US new wave SF -- the cultural background of the writers was radically different.
The post-cyberpunk phenomenon is partly a symptom of the writers aging, partly a sign of the changing times ... and partly a symptom of a new generation of writers emerging on the scene. Someone who was 25 in 1980 is now 44. Is it sane to expect them to be writing the same stuff today? Cyberpunk had to die, or mutate, or whatever. If it hadn't, it would be about as relevent today as E. E. "Doc" Smith's two-fisted engineer-heros would be in the middle of Woodstock or the summer of love.
Biologists have a special technical term for phenomena that stop changing. They call them "dead".
Either this relies on security through proprietary software ("only our ACME special- purpose self-deleting email reader can decrypt this message!") or there would appear to be a flaw in it as wide as a --
To which I feel compelled to reply: this is a load of bollocks. Complete bollocks. Flattering bollocks, if you happen to be a programmer, but nevertheless complete bollocks.
What qualifies me to say this? Well, I'm a writer. I've spent quite a few years as a tech author. I write a magazine column in one of the highest circulation computer magazines in the UK. I have been known to write and sell books. But I am also a programmer -- head perl wrangler at an e-commerce outfit, masters degree in comp. sci., and so on. (To say nothing about the penguin fetish.)
Jon seems to have succumbed to a desire to over-romanticize the programmer as hero. It makes a refreshing change from the pasty-faced geek stereotype, but in the long term, hagiography is just as damaging as demonisation. More to the point, he's succumbed to the urge to make wild over-generalisations.
There is a lot in common, experience-wise, between the sensation of writing a book and that of writing an application. Both activities revolve around symbolic manipulation of information, the creation of a structure that is not immediately obvious to the end user, and both activities require insight and diligence and expertise.
(The major difference between the two activities is that writers are trying to program a soft machine. Human language is far more flexible than anything we've yet figured out how to mechanize. Writers have to deal with ambiguity: there's precious little ambiguity in a compiler, though. (Your code works, or it throws a syntax error or goes off the deep end into some obscure runtime error.) Whatever: when code fails, the failure is obvious -- the success or failure of a book is a much more subjective phenomenon, one that depends on the reader as well as the writer.)
Anyway. I don't want to come down too hard on Katz -- he's got something valuable to contribute -- but I find his insistence that writers are imprecise, uncertain, and backwards- looking highly annoying, if only because some of us aren't. It's as if he's trying to work out some sort of personal sense of inferiority by externalising it on his fellow practitioners.
Sorry, but that cap doesn't fit.
What this means is, J. Random Telco will have a mandatory right to enter BT's local exchanges and, in return for a nominal sum, splice your local loop (the twisted pair cable in the ground between your phone and the System X exchange) into their system.
This is exactly how the gas deregulation system works, and it's been very quietly mandated for telecoms. A bit late, I'll agree, but better late than never.
To be fair, though, it's not just BT. When BT was privatised in 1983, Oftel (the Office of Telecommunications) was set up to police their activities; at that point BT was a monopoly and Oftel was charged with preventing them suppressing the embryonic competition.
As one of these moves, Oftel refused to give BT permission to provide free local calls. In 1983 this made eminent sense; if they hadn't, BT would be a monopoly to this day. Oftel also banned BT from cross-subsidizing business units, so that the ISDN roll-out (which would have been feasible in some areas as early as 1986) couldn't be subsidized by the profitable business and trunk sectors, forcing BT to develop it more slowly.
BT's strategic response was to massively upgrade their network bandwidth, so that they'd be ready for video on demand in the mid nineties. Then Oftel dropped the other shoe and ordered BT to stay out of the cable TV business -- to protect the then-growing cable industry. (The UK's cable infrastructure was only installed in the early 1990's; technologically it's a couple of generations more advanced than that of the US, but it has lower uptake.)
Today, however, circumstances have changed. There's a thriving cable industry, lots of competing telcos, 25% of the population have mobile phones (growing by something like 5% per year). The original Oftel objection to BT providing free local calls or VOD doesn't seem to stand any more, and it's writing BT a meal ticket by enabling them to keep line prices artificially high. They demonstrated this earlier this year; to protect their leased line business, when Oftel looked about to order them to roll out ADSL, BT cut the rental on a 64K leased line (with routers and IP traffic) from about 7000 pounds to 3000 pounds a year. If they can still break even at that price point, it suggests there are huge economies they can make elsewhere ...
Is there an equivalent offense under US law, and have Microsoft committed it?
We'll glide over the fact that EPOC/32 is a proprietary OS. There aren't really any free OS's in the palmtop field yet (unless you count ELKS), so I guess we'll have to let this slide. However, the real headache is the proprietary file formats. EPOC/32 stores data using some kind of object oriented stream store. The file formats are undocumented and Symbian's story is "use our SDK if you want to write apps that can read and write our files."
This wouldn't have been so bad if they'd provided file format translators as part of the OS -- but they didn't! Instead, translation between EPOC/32 file formats (such as Word and Sheet) is carried out inside the PsiWin link software, on a Windows box. In effect, the EPOC/32 system is turned into an obligate peripheral of a Windows machine because Psion didn't even provide rudimentary RTF or CSV file import/export capabilities for the built-in apps. (Which is a shame, because EPOC/32 is a much better OS than Windows ;-).
To add insult to injury, the SDK was based on the GNU toolchain but requires a copy of Microsoft Visual C++ to run on. (My guess is that somebody at Psion swallowed too much Microsoft marketing literature back in 1994 and truly believed that Windows was going to conquer the universe, or at least the desktop. As a result, Psion didn't give other platforms the attention they required.)
Furthermore, Psion blundered quite badly over developer relations back in 1995. For a long time the SDK was also a commercial product which you had to pay an annual license fee for. Symbian realised that this was stupid and made it available for download last June, but this misguided policy had held up the development of a large body of third-party apps by the hobbyist community (which was always a strong point of the SIBO/Series 3 devices). (The result of the change of policy is already becoming visible in the form of a sudden wave of new EPOC/32 software, including native Word->RTF file translators, and all the other stuff that should have been in the OS from the beginning. Like decent ports of vi, perl, and nethack ;-)
Anyway. I guess my beef with EPOC/32 is that it's a nice OS, let down by having been deployed as if it's a satellite of another platform, namely Windows. If they'd paid more attention to making the Series 5 a "real computer" in its own right with connectivity to peers running different OS's, it would have been a lot more useful.
For my part, I've come to terms with my Series 5MX and now find it absolutely invaluable, but I'm not really making full use of the built-in application suite because of the file conversion issues. Let this be a warning to you if you plan to buy one and, like me, live in a Windows-free zone!
A major issue with publishing online is how you encourage authors to write stuff worth reading. Book sales are tiny compared to, say, TV audiences or magazine sales; a midlist novel sells maybe 20-50,000 copies in the US. To make a living off this -- at the production rate of one or two books a year -- means the author really needs to see about US $0.3 to $1 per copy sold. If the author doesn't see that, they'll probably starve -- being a novelist isn't something you can do as a day job on a salary while creating cool stuff at night, the way much open-source software is effectively produced. The vast majority of full-time authors are already pretty pathetically paid compared to, say, a very junior sysadmin: I'm wondering what percentage cut of these e-books' cover price is going to the people who did the hard work of creating it? (Knowing the way new media companies work it's probably less than the usual 7.5-12.5%, when it should probably be a whole lot more.)
I'm not convinced anyone has yet come up with a sensible business model for selling novels on non-paper media; this may be a stab in the right direction, but in an age where the cost of copying information tends towards zero, authors are getting worried about how they're going to make a living.
(In the end it may not be possible for someone to earn a living as a novelist. I think we'll all be the poorer for it if that's where we end up, though.)