All review of fiction is inherently the personal view of the reviewer. The point is to write what he thinks of the book and not merely that which he believes you will consent to agree with. Thinking a book sucks and saying so is not a personal insult to those that like it. Taking it as such is a display of incredible personal insecurity in one's own opinions.
"I'd give you my honest opinion of this book, but I don't trust you to have the maturity to deal with it, so I'll just spout some pleasant lies and go about my business."
This particular reviewer has deigned to give you a full dose of himself. You are not compelled to agree. Indeed your own criticism of his criticism is the same sort of opinion as that which you criticise in it.
Since the base function of review is to give you an idea of whether or not you wish to read a particular book a reviewer with whom you disagree on all points would be a perfect reviewer for you.
I don't really want to burst anybody's bubble here, but it ain't gonna happen.
We are not living the same political age as when Jack sent us to the moon, nor is Bush in the same position of political power that Jack was when he sent us to the moon.
Bush can say anything he wants, but it's going to go through the same political process as anything else he suggests at the moment.
Need I point out that his stock is a bit low at thet moment and this looks like an obvious ploy to to parlay patriotism into personal support?
The problem being that in 1957 we were blindsided by an outside "enemy" nation and clamored to regain a feeling of national supremecy.
Hey, your family has your tradition and my family has its own. We really didn't see the point in wasting good lamb's blood sausage and didn't figure his Lordship was really going to perform a DNA test on the fly infested gore smears anyway. We were right. We were never much into eating bitter herb either.
On the other hand if sales overall continue to decrease, including CDs, then they just might have to aknowledge that they're just plain promoting crap most people don't want.
I don't download music, but I haven't bought anything for a few years either, and when last I did it was true alternative stuff from the catalog (Tom Waits, It's a Beautiful Day, Silly Wizard). In future I'll be buying independant productions direct.
Oops, I didn't buy Britney again.
Claiming a reduction of "piracy" could prove to be a double edged sword to the PR machine.
And did I miss the frogs or something? The Reg didn't mention anything about them.
KFG
Re:What were you expecting?
on
Online! The Book
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And I was using modems before Prodigy, GEnie and their ilk existed. I could still hack AT codes if I had to.
The fact that one no longer necessarily (although occasion can still crop up)has to understand how a modem works sometimes people just like to know how things work. See the popularity of How Things Work in print and on the web.
Criticizing a book for explaining how things work is just gratuitous anti-intellectualism. People who couldn't care less can skip it and those that do have it available to them.
If it comes to that most people don't have any real reason to know how their car works either, and most of them don't.
Perhaps you mean that dial up usage is declining. I suspect that such is not the case, but even if it were that would still leave tens of millions of users the book is directly aimed at using dial up modems. Not to mention the vast majority of users outside the books target market.
Surely you can't be suggesting that most home users (to whom the book is aimed) simply plug an RJ-45 cable directly into their NIC without a modualtion/demodulation device acting as an intermediary to the raw signal?
http://www.cable-modems.org/tutorial/07.htm
I have not read the book myself. Do you have any particular reason to suspect/know that the chapter on modems isn't inclusive to cable modems and DSL transcievers?
KFG
Re:What were you expecting?
on
Online! The Book
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have a wonderful book by Reader's Digest (go figure)that explains how an automobile works better than any popular book on the subject I have ever seen.
Should I continue to recommend it or send a note to Reader's Digest that the 1890s called and want their book back?
Speaking of good and holy it is also against the tenets of certain religions to submit in any even trifling way to anything but God.
On the other hand ENTER has definate sexual overtones.
OK is an endorsment of party politics (Old Kinderhook- Martin Van Buren. Some people still feel an intense dislike for the Jacksonian era and we shouldn't infringe upon their feelings in such a manner).
Nope, I'm sorry, but once we enter the swimmy waters of liguistic sympathetic magic no word is really safe.
L.A. has more on its hand than it might suspect though. The term master/slave is well spread outside the computer industry as well.
I hearby propose alternative terms for master/slave relationships not rooted in politically sensitive jargon and as example, ummm. . . submit, this sentence overheard down at the county garage for your approval:
"Yeah, it's the brakes. The Ass Fucking cylinder is leaking so the Bitches are only sucking air."
Hmm, though I do not know of a state called either Jewishia or Nazilvania. ..
As I do not know of a state called Communistania or Humanrightsviolationsania. My examples are historical and directly comparable to your own squeamishness over Chinese science/engineering.
Feel free to be skeptical of the the Theory of Relativity or the Saturn V if you wish, but there is no such thing as sympathetic magic.
As for "fully embracing" please note that my original post was full of "ifs."
(I hereby pointedly ignore your "move there" strawman)
And once again I ask, what are the politics of the binomial theorem?
Everyone who is anyone, knows money is worth more than bodies.
Do not make the mistake of thinking of China in western terms. They do not apply. Bodies are labor. Labor is money. The Chinese do not labor in a free economy.
Nor is it in any way correct to think of China as a third world nation. Poor? Perhaps, in western terms. Sleeping? Perhaps, but ah! The dragon stirs.
Tell me, would you also eschew "Jewish" Physics or "Nazi" rocket engineering? Do you avoid the use of Gnome because Mexico is a sham democracy, or Python because the Dutch are a bunch of stoned hookers? Does Euclidean geometry own slaves?
Tell me, what are the politics of the binomial theorem?
I covered noodles already. Ramen is just the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese ideograms for Lo Mein. It baffles me why Chinese peasant food is looked down on in America as cheap and low grade stuff for college students but the equivilent Thai meal (Pad Thai) is sold as an expensive entree and highly revered. The market is funny sometimes.
Warner Oland (Johan Verner Olund) is the most famous portrayer of Charlie Chan. He was an academic expert on Chinese culture, fluent in more than one Chinese language, and his portrayal of Chan, although comedic, was rooted in incredibly deep understanding of the character he portrayed. His tortured English was an accurate portrayal of a man thinking in Chinese and speaking in English.
Opium comes from Greece. It was imported into China by Europeans for political/economic reasons to maintain European dominance in China, sucking their economy dry while devastating the poplulace and culture. The Chinese government went to ware with England to try to keep it out.
The Chinese were perfectly happy with tea, which is what England wanted from them, and were willing to destroy a nation to get it.
Yeah, the domestic Chinese market is only 1/4 the world market, or 4 times larger than the American domestic market.
How on earth do they expect this to fly with a highly patriotic and semi captive market of only a billion or so people?
It's madness.
And certainly no one here on Slashdot would feel inclined to adopt the standard if the Chinese choose to make it competitive by releasing it as an open standard ala the CD.
We just love attempts to "DVDize" the Compact Disc.
What would be wrong about taking the format out of the hands of the MPAA and DVD Consortium? Just the fact that it comes from China?
Like the compass, silk, lacquer, gunpowder and noodles?
A good idea is a good idea. I think an open video format is a good idea. If that's what the Chinese are up to I'll go at least one round of The East is Red with them.
Yes, MySQL is small, light and fast and I use it as my general light duty DBMS, but I'm not religous about it. When the going gets tough I switch to something tougher.
Looks, it's not because you can't do things with MySQL. It's how you have to go about doing them. That lightness and speed comes at a price, it's an engineering tradeoff. There's no such thing as a free lunch and all that.
What it gives up is intergrety constraints. If you don't spend the cycles to insure data integrity you can be smaller and faster.
So let me ask you, how fast do you want your data munged?
If you don't want your data munged at all and you're using MySQL you need to pass off integrity issues to your app. Well, there you are using cycles again. The DBMS is faster, but now your app is slower (yes, you're still saving a bit of disk access time, which can add up. That's a flaw in SQL itself. There are alternatives.). More importantly you're using your time as a developer to reinvent the integrity constraint wheel in every app. Coding time goes up. Bugs go up. Support issues go up. All to accomplish something that is a logical function of the DBMS. That's why we call them a DBMS in the first place. It has been argued that MySQL doesn't even meet the definition of a DBMS.
Once I had data My DBMS munged it But damn it was fast!
Again, don't get me wrong, I use MySQL, but I use it in full knowledge of what it does and does not do and what it does not do is guaruntee the consistency and integrity of my data.
And I have better things to do with my time than recoding DBMS functions into my apps. I use MySQL where data integrity isn't a critical issue.
It all boils down to this: do you want to spend your time in a historical admiration of other people's work? Or do you want to learn about their ideas in the most efficient manner possible, so that you can build on their ideas and make your own contributions to the history of ideas?
Yes.
I don't find these ideas to be mutually exclusive. In fact I find them to be complimentary.
Even in doing this I've still found time to learn to play the banjo, tie my own trout flies and build my own furniture and bicycle frames.
Life is short. It's longer if you don't waste it on idiocies.
It is only about being a geek in the context of Slashdot and the post to which I responded.
De-evolution even in the realm of the technogeeks themselves, which ought to be an oxymoron, becoming more and more interested in (and thinking of it as evolution) things like pretty colored widgets and not only ignoring, but outright deriding, the historical culture of scientific and technolgical evolution and thinking.
Once you're outside of those metro areas though you can find something older and livable for $50,000 or so. I recently bought a lovely old Tudor house on land with bearing fruit trees, major river frontage and a 1000 square foot garage for $100k. You can even find a job, although not often at the same salary.
Money is what you can buy with it though, not an absolute number, and I turned down work in Manhatten at $60,000/yr because that would give me a lower standard of living than $20,000/yr here upstate (3 hours farther out of the city than you in what Koch called the land of "Gingham dresses and pickup trucks." I can't recall ever seeing a gingham dress 'round these here parts, but I've seen any number of pickup trucks in Manhatten).
If you take the country as a whole into consideration, Iowa and the like, I'd hazard a guess that you might find at least a larger percentage of houses available at $40,000 than you expect. Whether you want to live in Iowa is another question, as is what you think about the idea of being a farmhand for a living.
Slashdot Mirror
All review of fiction is inherently the personal view of the reviewer. The point is to write what he thinks of the book and not merely that which he believes you will consent to agree with. Thinking a book sucks and saying so is not a personal insult to those that like it. Taking it as such is a display of incredible personal insecurity in one's own opinions.
"I'd give you my honest opinion of this book, but I don't trust you to have the maturity to deal with it, so I'll just spout some pleasant lies and go about my business."
This particular reviewer has deigned to give you a full dose of himself. You are not compelled to agree. Indeed your own criticism of his criticism is the same sort of opinion as that which you criticise in it.
Since the base function of review is to give you an idea of whether or not you wish to read a particular book a reviewer with whom you disagree on all points would be a perfect reviewer for you.
KFG
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but you couldn't market it for shit.
A computer mouse doesn't look like a mouse. It looks like a rat.
The one that gets me are "scallops" that are actually punched out of skate wings. That isn't just marketing speak, it's fradulant.
KFG
I don't really want to burst anybody's bubble here, but it ain't gonna happen.
We are not living the same political age as when Jack sent us to the moon, nor is Bush in the same position of political power that Jack was when he sent us to the moon.
Bush can say anything he wants, but it's going to go through the same political process as anything else he suggests at the moment.
Need I point out that his stock is a bit low at thet moment and this looks like an obvious ploy to to parlay patriotism into personal support?
The problem being that in 1957 we were blindsided by an outside "enemy" nation and clamored to regain a feeling of national supremecy.
Bush has blindsided himself.
This rocket ain't gonna fly.
KFG
I don't think Tom Waits has released anything for a while. . .
I'm afraid you're wrong.
. . . and if he did, I doubt the RIAA would concern itself.
Exactly. See above. The labels only promote certain artists and titles.
The money at issue is coming from the 12-year olds. . .
Who are actually a pretty good bet for thinking that Tom Waits is pretty cool, if I can go by my experience of introducing him to young people.
"He's got a girlfriend. She's Puerto Rican. And I hear she has a wooden leg."
They seem to love that stuff.
And, for the most part, no way of even knowing it exists.
Not much of a way to run an entire entertainment industry.
KFG
Besides, we're not talking about being passed over by one of his Lordship's plagues here. We're talking about the RIAA.
I said pig. I meant pig. Pig is appropriate.
KFG
Hey, your family has your tradition and my family has its own. We really didn't see the point in wasting good lamb's blood sausage and didn't figure his Lordship was really going to perform a DNA test on the fly infested gore smears anyway. We were right. We were never much into eating bitter herb either.
KFG
On the other hand if sales overall continue to decrease, including CDs, then they just might have to aknowledge that they're just plain promoting crap most people don't want.
I don't download music, but I haven't bought anything for a few years either, and when last I did it was true alternative stuff from the catalog (Tom Waits, It's a Beautiful Day, Silly Wizard). In future I'll be buying independant productions direct.
Oops, I didn't buy Britney again.
Claiming a reduction of "piracy" could prove to be a double edged sword to the PR machine.
KFG
I hear a little pig's blood works wonders.
And did I miss the frogs or something? The Reg didn't mention anything about them.
KFG
And I was using modems before Prodigy, GEnie and their ilk existed. I could still hack AT codes if I had to.
The fact that one no longer necessarily (although occasion can still crop up)has to understand how a modem works sometimes people just like to know how things work. See the popularity of How Things Work in print and on the web.
Criticizing a book for explaining how things work is just gratuitous anti-intellectualism. People who couldn't care less can skip it and those that do have it available to them.
If it comes to that most people don't have any real reason to know how their car works either, and most of them don't.
KFG
Perhaps you mean that dial up usage is declining. I suspect that such is not the case, but even if it were that would still leave tens of millions of users the book is directly aimed at using dial up modems. Not to mention the vast majority of users outside the books target market.
Surely you can't be suggesting that most home users (to whom the book is aimed) simply plug an RJ-45 cable directly into their NIC without a modualtion/demodulation device acting as an intermediary to the raw signal?
http://www.cable-modems.org/tutorial/07.htm
I have not read the book myself. Do you have any particular reason to suspect/know that the chapter on modems isn't inclusive to cable modems and DSL transcievers?
KFG
I have a wonderful book by Reader's Digest (go figure)that explains how an automobile works better than any popular book on the subject I have ever seen.
Should I continue to recommend it or send a note to Reader's Digest that the 1890s called and want their book back?
KFG
Where are they now?
Argentina?
It may no longer be a blue world, Max, but Big Blue is still likely to kick some SCO butt.
KFG
Speaking of good and holy it is also against the tenets of certain religions to submit in any even trifling way to anything but God.
On the other hand ENTER has definate sexual overtones.
OK is an endorsment of party politics (Old Kinderhook- Martin Van Buren. Some people still feel an intense dislike for the Jacksonian era and we shouldn't infringe upon their feelings in such a manner).
Nope, I'm sorry, but once we enter the swimmy waters of liguistic sympathetic magic no word is really safe.
L.A. has more on its hand than it might suspect though. The term master/slave is well spread outside the computer industry as well.
I hearby propose alternative terms for master/slave relationships not rooted in politically sensitive jargon and as example, ummm. . . submit, this sentence overheard down at the county garage for your approval:
"Yeah, it's the brakes. The Ass Fucking cylinder is leaking so the Bitches are only sucking air."
KFG
Mandrake/KDE with all the geekier stuff left out.
Is there some controversy over this or something? It's pretty straightforward to set up a "grandma box" these days.
KFG
Hmm, though I do not know of a state called either Jewishia or Nazilvania. . .
As I do not know of a state called Communistania or Humanrightsviolationsania. My examples are historical and directly comparable to your own squeamishness over Chinese science/engineering.
Feel free to be skeptical of the the Theory of Relativity or the Saturn V if you wish, but there is no such thing as sympathetic magic.
As for "fully embracing" please note that my original post was full of "ifs."
(I hereby pointedly ignore your "move there" strawman)
And once again I ask, what are the politics of the binomial theorem?
KFG
Everyone who is anyone, knows money is worth more than bodies.
Do not make the mistake of thinking of China in western terms. They do not apply. Bodies are labor. Labor is money. The Chinese do not labor in a free economy.
Nor is it in any way correct to think of China as a third world nation. Poor? Perhaps, in western terms. Sleeping? Perhaps, but ah! The dragon stirs.
Beware.
KFG
Tell me, would you also eschew "Jewish" Physics or "Nazi" rocket engineering? Do you avoid the use of Gnome because Mexico is a sham democracy, or Python because the Dutch are a bunch of stoned hookers? Does Euclidean geometry own slaves?
Tell me, what are the politics of the binomial theorem?
KFG
Certainly, and that's what you do when you denormalize.
It's just as poor a practice as not trapping any error conditions in C++ code.
KFG
I covered noodles already. Ramen is just the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese ideograms for Lo Mein. It baffles me why Chinese peasant food is looked down on in America as cheap and low grade stuff for college students but the equivilent Thai meal (Pad Thai) is sold as an expensive entree and highly revered. The market is funny sometimes.
Warner Oland (Johan Verner Olund) is the most famous portrayer of Charlie Chan. He was an academic expert on Chinese culture, fluent in more than one Chinese language, and his portrayal of Chan, although comedic, was rooted in incredibly deep understanding of the character he portrayed. His tortured English was an accurate portrayal of a man thinking in Chinese and speaking in English.
Opium comes from Greece. It was imported into China by Europeans for political/economic reasons to maintain European dominance in China, sucking their economy dry while devastating the poplulace and culture. The Chinese government went to ware with England to try to keep it out.
The Chinese were perfectly happy with tea, which is what England wanted from them, and were willing to destroy a nation to get it.
KFG
Yeah, the domestic Chinese market is only 1/4 the world market, or 4 times larger than the American domestic market.
How on earth do they expect this to fly with a highly patriotic and semi captive market of only a billion or so people?
It's madness.
And certainly no one here on Slashdot would feel inclined to adopt the standard if the Chinese choose to make it competitive by releasing it as an open standard ala the CD.
We just love attempts to "DVDize" the Compact Disc.
What would be wrong about taking the format out of the hands of the MPAA and DVD Consortium? Just the fact that it comes from China?
Like the compass, silk, lacquer, gunpowder and noodles?
A good idea is a good idea. I think an open video format is a good idea. If that's what the Chinese are up to I'll go at least one round of The East is Red with them.
KFG
Yes, MySQL is small, light and fast and I use it as my general light duty DBMS, but I'm not religous about it. When the going gets tough I switch to something tougher.
Looks, it's not because you can't do things with MySQL. It's how you have to go about doing them. That lightness and speed comes at a price, it's an engineering tradeoff. There's no such thing as a free lunch and all that.
What it gives up is intergrety constraints. If you don't spend the cycles to insure data integrity you can be smaller and faster.
So let me ask you, how fast do you want your data munged?
If you don't want your data munged at all and you're using MySQL you need to pass off integrity issues to your app. Well, there you are using cycles again. The DBMS is faster, but now your app is slower (yes, you're still saving a bit of disk access time, which can add up. That's a flaw in SQL itself. There are alternatives.). More importantly you're using your time as a developer to reinvent the integrity constraint wheel in every app. Coding time goes up. Bugs go up. Support issues go up. All to accomplish something that is a logical function of the DBMS. That's why we call them a DBMS in the first place. It has been argued that MySQL doesn't even meet the definition of a DBMS.
Once I had data
My DBMS munged it
But damn it was fast!
Again, don't get me wrong, I use MySQL, but I use it in full knowledge of what it does and does not do and what it does not do is guaruntee the consistency and integrity of my data.
And I have better things to do with my time than recoding DBMS functions into my apps. I use MySQL where data integrity isn't a critical issue.
KFG
It all boils down to this: do you want to spend your time in a historical admiration of other people's work? Or do you want to learn about their ideas in the most efficient manner possible, so that you can build on their ideas and make your own contributions to the history of ideas?
Yes.
I don't find these ideas to be mutually exclusive. In fact I find them to be complimentary.
Even in doing this I've still found time to learn to play the banjo, tie my own trout flies and build my own furniture and bicycle frames.
Life is short. It's longer if you don't waste it on idiocies.
KFG
. . . nobody gives a flying fuck about liberty, freedom, rights, or the general well-being of the population anymore.
Well shit no. Where the hell is the profit in that?
KFG
It is about retrogression.
It is only about being a geek in the context of Slashdot and the post to which I responded.
De-evolution even in the realm of the technogeeks themselves, which ought to be an oxymoron, becoming more and more interested in (and thinking of it as evolution) things like pretty colored widgets and not only ignoring, but outright deriding, the historical culture of scientific and technolgical evolution and thinking.
KFG
Once you're outside of those metro areas though you can find something older and livable for $50,000 or so. I recently bought a lovely old Tudor house on land with bearing fruit trees, major river frontage and a 1000 square foot garage for $100k. You can even find a job, although not often at the same salary.
Money is what you can buy with it though, not an absolute number, and I turned down work in Manhatten at $60,000/yr because that would give me a lower standard of living than $20,000/yr here upstate (3 hours farther out of the city than you in what Koch called the land of "Gingham dresses and pickup trucks." I can't recall ever seeing a gingham dress 'round these here parts, but I've seen any number of pickup trucks in Manhatten).
If you take the country as a whole into consideration, Iowa and the like, I'd hazard a guess that you might find at least a larger percentage of houses available at $40,000 than you expect. Whether you want to live in Iowa is another question, as is what you think about the idea of being a farmhand for a living.
KFG