A lot of it quite honestly comes down to psychology rather than rationality. There are enough developers who enjoy being Mac users that they want to develop for the Mac as well. A case in point is the game industry, where developers very much want to make Mac games even though the company's support for them is imperfect at best (even though there are big problems now, mainly in Apple's level of secrecy, it's a lot better than back in the day when Apple actively dicouraged game development because they didn't want companies to think of the Mac as a toy).
Another reason is the same reason that anyone supports niche markets--there's good money to be made. Microsoft's Mac Office products give them huge profits. The Apple userbase is a pretty nice subsection of computer users: loyal, affluent, experimental. Apple users generally reward quality products.
You wondered why people spend so much time doing mac ports instead of *bsd and linux ports. There's a lot more money to be made, especially in the consumer arena, porting to mac instead of the freenixes. The freenixes may be awesome, but they have a much smaller share of the consumer market and people who use them are less likely to pay for software than the average mac user.
My suspicion is that there's more porting of server-type software (see IBM, SGI, etc.) to Linux than there is to Mac. The audiences are different.
That said, Apple has had and still has problems getting developers because of their size (or lack of it). Apple's all-in-one hardware+software package is both its greatest benefit and biggest problem for developers. The transition to OS X will definitely be a very interesting test, as a successful transition is very much dependent on developer support.
Another way of looking at it is not that the lawmakers are trying to pass unconstitutional laws, but that the majority of the American public wants unconstitutional laws to be passed. The average American citizen probably couldn't see why search warrants are so important (after all, we shouldn't coddle drug dealers!) or why anyone should be allowed to link to drug-making information (my kids are in danger!), etc., etc.
If we don't want our federal legislators to engage in horse shit, the American public needs to be educated.
Also, contacting your representatives does make a big difference. I interned for a senator once; all messages are read, and interesting and insightful ones are read by the senior advisors. In other words, they have their own moderation systems. The +3,+4's are read and make a difference.
Who knows; your arguments might be used on the House or Senate floor.
The system has serious flaws, but it is a reflection of the warring desires and needs of the American populace. For example, most people these days trust big business to make the right decisions; so why shouldn't the government?
This might not be the answer you're looking for, but if you're dealing with programs big enough for it to be a pain to track hashes, you should probably make your hashes into objects and privatize all the variables, so the hash/package/object is only usable through its methods, which will clean up your code and assist Perl's debugging dramatically.
This is all said with a grain of salt because I find OOPerl to be something of a pain in the ass, probably just because my brain isn't large enough.
I know it's gratuitous, but it's not offtopic. I have to agree that this Anonymous Coward succinctly captures my feeling on this issue. Katz can churn out the intelligent seeming piece, and has his heart in the right place, but he really is an ignorant slut, especially in the sense that he's a reporter, and only slides over the surface of that which he covers. It's the eternal curse of the generalist and the press, but really, it's damn annoying.
Listen to this: "Plaintiffs won the case, and for that reason alone have some entitlement to a remedy of their choice."
In other words: "Listen up, you weeny techies. YOU LOST!"
"These officials are by reason of office obliged and expected to consider - and to act in - the public interest; Microsoft is not."
I.e. "You really expect me to believe that breaking you up would harm the consumer? It would harm your monopoly, bitch-weasels."
It really seems like Gates has been able to coast this long by being smart and nasty; but The Honorable PJ is bitch-slapping him, finally. Gates is someone who never learned to play nice. Now he's having to learn that you can't bully Lady Liberty.
Your belief that Prohibition is a Government-led decision is common, but entirely mistaken. In fact, it's quite interesting that you stated that while using suffrage as an opposite example. Prohibition and suffrage were closely tied together.
A short take on the social history of the period is this: Industrial Revolution causes massive shift from rural/craftman/self-sufficient society to urban/factory/consumer society. People living in rural and small-town America lose their means of independence. They turn to alcohol, and alcohol abuse becomes a scourge of formerly stable communities as the young and able-bodied leave for the cities. Alcohol abuse also arises in the cities. The only people left to maintain the social fabric are the women, who mobilize to fight all the problems caused by the transition: poverty, orphanages, debtors, child labor, alcohol abuse, prosititution (the suffragettes more often defend the prostitutes and attack the system) and fight for unionization, suffrage, and prohibition. People also fight against immigration and for protectionism.
We've made it through the transition from pre- and post-industrial society, and thus have difficulty seeing how Prohibition could even have been possible. But it's a natural result of industrialization.
Interestingly, this transition is occuring in India, which has many dry states (where social, political, and religious policies are closely tied). Prohibition is largely a grassroots effort. For a good (though intensely anti-internationalization/industrialization) perspective on this and other grassroots attempts to moderate the effects of the internationalization of India, read Jeremy Seabrook's Notes from Another India.
Just to complete that thought, here's the original quotation: It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.
That was my attempt to get subject into concise form. Yeah, Epic games will probably continue to be ported, since they're pretty much guaranteed A-level titles, with enough guaranteed sales on the "lesser" OS's to be worth the effort of finding a porting house. Note also that Epic is big enough to have built the necessary relationships with porting shops. But will their engine be ported?
The HUGE and CRUSHING disaster of Epic's decision is in the effective death of many, many other ports. Take a look at the list of games being made on the UT and Q3A engines for the PC. A majority of those games are being ported to Mac (and Linux? I don't follow Linux ports, just Mac ports). Why? Because the engines are cross-platform.
This is GREAT for pretty much all users, but Mac & Linux users especially.
The games based on the earlier iD and Epic engines that weren't cross-platform weren't ported nearly as often.
That's the real reason for despair and gnashing of teeth. Epic is both a game maker AND an engine producer. They feel responsible enough to ensure that their games get ported, but do they care to ensure that the engine will be?
If Epic makes a Direct3D based engine, but hires a company like Westlake to make a Mac version of the engine, and not simply the Epic game based on the engine, (and likewise for Linux), then we'll have reason to calm down. Otherwise, it's time to be revolting!
I didn't know LAME existed before reading this post.
Nor did I know GOGO existed.
So WE DON'T ALL KNOW THAT GOGO IS THE FASTEST.
YOU knew that, but not everyone else did.
Mentioning GOGO is an example of topic drift, but it certainly isn't off-topic. The mention of GOGO was interesting and useful to me, and helped me understand LAME better by providing more context.
It's a mistake to GOGO OT. Advocating GOGO was not "off topic crap".
That was a good call, comparing BeOS to NeXT. Other than the comparison mentioned in the topic, there's a bunch of others. Let's see... 1) Both started by ex-Applers. 2) Both designed to be legacy-free, "beautiful" OS's 3) Both started with their own hardware, with names referring to a hexahedral shape 4) Both OS's were considered for the job of being Apple's next OS. (NeXT won.) 5) And they both have the same goofy-looking CaPS SeQUEnCE.
Hey, is BeOS is following in NeXT's footsteps, maybe Microsoft will buy up BeOS (though I'd suspect it more likely that say, Sony would for "PlayStation O") and make it into their next generation OS, though I have no idea what they could call it with their nomenclature. They'd probably call it Windows 40,000, and it could run on a PC, a handheld, or a Predator Annihilator Tank.
You're conflating books with the contents of the Library of Congress. If you ignore the inflammatory presentation of Billington's plans, you'll notice that he says, in effect, that the Library of Congress intends to put all of its unique content online.
In other words, if it was something that you had to go to DC to get access to, it would be online.
He personally doesn't see going to a local library to be big enough of an imposition to outweigh the social benefits of the act, and that's what everyone is harping on.
It's still cheaper than buying a modem and a computer to go to a local library.
If we eliminate public libraries in favor of the Internet, many people will be harmed. His language (which may be taken out of context--note the use of many very short excerpts in the article) doesn't make that point well, but that's what he's thinking.
The Internet is not an intrinsically democratizing institution, though it has great capacity to be.
Unsurprisingly, nearly all of the discussion is emphasizing where we disagree with Billington than where we agree.
He's clearly misguided in his belief that reading a physical book is necessarily better than reading an online book. I'd agree with him that when reading for enjoyment, a physical book beats online text every time. There is something different about flipping pages than scrolling. He discusses the advantages of having a physical book over having digitized text in this article. He doesn't discuss the disadvantages. That doesn't necessarily mean that he doesn't know of the disadvantages, as many/.ers assert.
It is certainly true that reading a physical book is a more reverent action than digitized text, because a physical book is an entity unto itself. To read part of a book one must pick up the entire book.
The context of reading digitized text read on a computer is much less "reverent" because it is not as a separate entity, but as a mutable part of a larger whole. That which we can change, edit and control is not that which we will have reverence towards. (Unless, perhaps, the process of change is highly formalized, as in Torah study.)
The controllable nature of digitized text, while under certain particular circumstances can be thought of as a disadvantage (the circumstances which Bellington considers in his arguments), is also its great advantage. One can do word analysis of Shakespeare vs. the Bible vs. Chaucer and come to new understandings of language, etc. etc.
That said, let's look at the parts of the article where he talks not about philosophy about action. He says that the Library of Congress will digitize the rare items (pamphlets, maps, etc.) of its collection instead of the books which can be gotten at local libraries.
Wait a second! That makes perfect sense. The Library of Congress has finite resources, and they should be certainly allocated to that which it can uniquely do. Anybody can start digitizing freely available texts, and people are doing so (see the Bartleby project). Only the Library of Congress has the capability to digitize the stuff that only it has a copy of.
Also, he thinks that libraries should be founts of uncensored information. I know that a bunch of you are thinking (because that's what you said) "He's asserting two irrationally opposing viewpoints!" And to a degree, I agree. However, if we look at his arguments, you can see his conceptualization of the issues is consistent (though incomplete).
Here is a (rather incomplete and interpretational) list of his asserted beliefs: a) someone else can digitize books b) the Library of Congress has a mission to preserve the "sacred" nature of the printed word. c) free and uncensored libraries are an absolutely necessary component to the American democracy d) television promotes social decay e) the Internet has the power to promote social decay f) if the same information can be gleaned from the Internet and a public library, Billington (and thus the LoC) would encourage the use of the library
Implicit in these stated beliefs are: a) the physical and discrete nature of books adds intrinsic value to text b) the Internet can behave like television c) participation in democratic institutions builds societal values d) the Library of Congress has a mission to promote the American democracy e) community is necessary to a functioning democracy f) people having a sense of personal humility, in respect to history, is necessary to a functioning democracy g) the act of going to a library builds community h) the act of dealing with physical books builds a sense of personal humility in respect to history
From a), b) and f) of his asserted beliefs he concludes the Library of Congress should not digitize books. A perfectly reasonable syllogism.
A basic problem with the article is that it concentrates on the debatable (to/.) parts of his assertions, and not the parts we'd agree with. For example, the article describes what he thinks the problems with the Internet are, but not what he thinks the benefits of the Internet are. We can attempt to infer what he thinks the Internet is good for from his statements, but there's no way of knowing that we'd be right. Obviously he doesn't think that it's not good for anything, though that's the tone of many/. posts.
I believe the basic flaw in his beliefs comes from this: he thinks that the LoC has a responsibility to protect the sanctity of books and the mission of public libraries, and the digitizing of books freely available at libraries is antithetical to that responsibility. I don't think it's antithetical, and I hope it's clear what my position is (see PP's 3-5).
However, his fears are realized on/. when people argue "Going to a library is more difficult than looking something up on the Web; therefore, there's no value in going to a library."
That argument is deeply flawed--if you can't immediately see it, let me replace some of the words: "Installing Linux is more difficult than buying a computer with Windows installed; therefore, there's no value in installing Linux."
Dissing libraries is just as reactionary as dissing the Internet.
See the above post for that kind of dismissive argument (asserting that libraries are "isolating" and cause "ignorance" and "non-disclosure" is utterly misguided). Libraries and books shouldn't be attacked, they should be celebrated, just as the Internet should be celebrated.
So don't be a hypocrite: don't be as reactionary as Billington. Mindless futurism is just as bad as mindless romanticism.
When Billington celebrates libraries and denigrates the Internet, don't denigrate libraries in response: celebrate them both, and show him and people like him how to do both.
Oh no, it had cities. It's true that countries were somewhat gone, but it would be better to say that countries were on the same playing field as businesses (sound like today?)
The average joe didn't live in the city, and Hiro was a citizen of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, but he lived in a storage box in the city. There was even a little spiel about how the players still lived in the city, while everyone else retreated to the burbs.
The Metaverse, in fact, was especially a city. Most big cities are just one main street filled with banner ads with porn--until Disney comes along; then the banner ads sell mouse merchandise.
The reason that there was empty roundness on the Metaverse wasn't that it was sparsely populated, but that it had vastly greater surface area than the earth, and nearly everyone was just in the central "city
When Stephenson began working on Snow Crash, he intended it to be a video game (super-interactive novel). Unfortunately, we're only getting to the point where that would be a plausibility. Or is that fortunately? If Ion Storm can succeed at Deus Ex, someone can succeed at Snow Crash...though Juanita's avatar tech is still a ways away (see Pixar's advances in this realm!)
Speaking of Pixar, it's always easier to fake tech in a movie; you get to pre-render everything. Snow Crash would make a great movie without too much trouble, because of its many high-octane visual elements. Also: the political/social satire that runs rampant is surprisingly easy to do visually: just show the Uncle Nunzio Pizza billboard and you're done.
Of course the movie would be radically different from the book, but it wouldn't be an insane adaptation like LotR--you just cut out the boring stuff, and you've got a whole bunch of cool action sequences. Stephenson's namshub mumbo-jumbo barely makes sense anyway (though it _nearly_ fits together quite neatly); the book could do with the bit of narrative tightening a movie would provide.
Snow Crash is hobbled by the importance of Juanita to the outcome of the book, and her near-complete absence from the book. A rewrite that dealt with the narrative problems caused by her would be welcome. My suspicion is the whole rewrite issue is what's killing this project: the book, while amazingly cool and smart and readable and one of my all-time favorite books, is seriously flawed by its tenuously connected plot threads.
Visually, the movie would be great in so many ways: the avatar world could be done anime-style, the Sumerian backstory (if it even entered) could be covered in a killer animation sequence like that from Todd McFarlane's Do the Evolution video, etc.
Stephenson deliberately drew on pop-culture ideas and imagery for the book, and took a lot from movies. Snow Crash could make a very good movie.
It probably would make a better computer game, but I'm not convinced we really have the tech for it.
Other great fantasy (Brust, Blaylock, Pullman...)
on
The Truth
·
· Score: 3
Thank you for writing a real review. The review posted had a certain lack of anything but "Discworld is kewl".
It's fun surveying the field of intelligent, post-modernist fantasy, which has a sense of humor that ranges from the low parody and groaner (Aspirin's Myth books), through Pratchett's prototypical British comedies, to the delicate sarcasm leavened with moments of slapstick that mark Stephen Brust's Phoenix Guards (light) and Taltos series (dark), to the truly dark and nihilist humor of authors like Jonathan Lethem.
All modern fantasies are necessarily referential; they harken back to our extended common history of myth, folk tale, and legend. And any reference is a potential source of humor. Even Tolkien's works contain jokes, though they happen to be of the extremely subtle linguistic and etymological variety. But Fritz Lieber's Swords of Lankhmar series is probably the first great series which combined a classic heroic style with many elements of humor, from the subtle to the surprisingly silly.
Fantasy is such a rich field for humor, in all its varieties, including Douglas Adams's absurdist works, and the modern American fabulists, like Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock (I just checked on Amazon, and surprise surprise! People who buy Blaylock buy Tim Powers), whose books point the way for fantasy to take place in the modern world, without descending into self-serious allegory or just relying on the tired "lonely grad student/librarian/RPG player/fantasy reader analogue finds a dimensional portal/gets caught in a spell/tornado/satanic plot and finds himself in a fantasy world in which he/she is a master wizard" trope.
Going out on a limb, some other unusual and brilliant fantastic authors and books include Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden: or a Low Comedy, which really falls into the SF camp, but is a child of both the best fantasy and SF. But it's a very weird and complicated book; I don't know what my reaction to it would have been if I were younger. But anyone who thinks Douglas Adams is funny, and knows at least who Dante and Marx were, and what Europe went through during the World Wars, will probably find this book an entrancing tale. At its heart it's a classic story of adolescence and lost innocence.
For a more straightforward take on the same themes, Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" series is miles and miles better than the other currently popular young adult British schoolchild wizardry and adolescence series, starring a certain Hogwarts student. Please read these, as these are near-perfect moving, exciting, and deeply affecting books that can inspire the young and allow the old to remember what it was like to be young. I could be wrong, but I suspect this series is the kind which adults overestimate the minimum age to appreciate these books--kids who can read Potter and Dahl and Narnia and Tolkien can read these. Also, the only reason people think these are kid's books is that the author made his name as a children's author. These are no more and no less kids books than the Lord of the Rings or Discworld or the Foundation Series.
Finally, for Pullman meets Powers and Zelazny, check out Tom De Haven's Chronicles of the King's Tramp.
I read TBG before Neverness; fortunately, I read the two a few years apart so that TBG didn't ruin Neverness for me. Both are very good. I haven't finished the series yet; they're hard books to find.
Other SF authors in the same vein, writing literate SF, are the aforementioned Ia in Banks (make sure you consider this website), the well-known Ste phen R. Donaldson and Dan Simmons (in particular his Hyperion series). Iain Banks writes non-genre fiction as Iain M. Banks and is hugely popular in the UK. Donaldson, lambasted and praised for his Unbeliever Chronicles, also wrote The Gap Series, a dark DF space opera based on the Ring Cycle. Simmons writes a lot of horror and other dark fiction.
Another fine but relatively obscure author is the powerful writer George Alec Effinger. Lordy lordy, is this man good. If I'm not mistaken, he's also worked on comix with Neil Gaiman and wrote for the supercool SF cartoon Galaxy Rangers, along with another great author, Tom De Haven.
More old-school authors who wrote very post-modern SF include the amazing Avram Davidson (check out the great Treasury) who wrote primarily short stories, and the odd and great Polish author Stanislaw Lem (whose career began in 1951 and continues to this day). Starting from Lem, you get into the great European (including S. America) "fantastic philosophers"Borges and Calvino. And if you like them, then you're sure to like Pynchon, and so on to David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, who all write SF-tinged fiction.
I essentially parroted your response in a similar vein a few responses below. I think the worst crime is that Katz is a literate individual with a clear writing style and writes blitheringly wrong statements, mixed in with some good points.
I strongly get the impression Katz didn't really read the findings. If he did, then he really missed the point--maybe he has no historical knowledge of antitrust. Whatever the case, some major blunders. At least he didn't start a land war in Asia.
Katz writes: Net commerce works in very different ways, yet anti-trust law hasn't evolved. Microsoft didn't become a monopoly by jacking up prices, but by using practically the opposite tactic - in effect giving products away to obtain staggering market share. Gate's big idea was to make sure his company's software and operating systems were distributed so freely and aggressively they were on every desktop.
NO! Companies have NEVER become monopolies by jacking up prices. The Net hasn't changed the laws of supply and demand. Companies jack up prices after they have a monopoly (which is illegal). And Jackson found that M$ did just that. Nothing new there. Companies have always become monopolies by undercutting competition (which isn't illegal). They have also always leveraged monopolies in one area to gain monopolies in others (which IS illegal). How do you leverage a monopoly? In pretty much all the ways Microsoft has used: lowering prices to kill competition (Netscape), strongarming distributors to protect and extend monopolies (Dell, Gateway, IBM, Intel, etc.), threatening other companies to gain concessions (Apple), paying companies with money and concessions (AOL, Dell, etc.) to stifle new competition (Netscape, Real, Intel).
This IS NOT NEW.
This IS NOT "NET LAW."
This is classic antitrust. The parallels to Standard Oil are amazing. Read the Pulitzer Prize-winning Prize by Daniel Yergin for a great account of the history of Standard Oil and the full sweep of the Petroleum Age.
Katz is right that the average Joe thinks M$ is cool. But he's wrong when he thinks this is all about online commerce. Jackson's findings of fact demonstrate quite clearly that new distribution models like downloading, pre-installations, and CD's are perfectly understandable in traditional terms, and aren't "unique to the Net," as Katz claims.
Here's a clue for Jonathan: Judge Jackson isn't "definitely plowing new ground." New industries, from oil to railroads to telephony to automobiles to radio to television exploded from the gates "far from regulators, bureaucrats, lawyers and politicians" -- which was good but not surprising -- but when the dust settled, the new industries were part of the same old capitalism engine, and benefited from regulation and oversight. Henry Ford himself admitted that government regulation was the only reason cars got safer in the first 20 years of the automotive revolution.
I must have missed the point at which this happened: "it's possible to be enormously rich and successful and still rapidly become marginal, even insignificant. This seems to be Microsoft's curious fate." Funny how M$ doesn't seem too marginal; they're pretty safely the dominant force on the desktop for the foreseeable future.
Finally, the rise of the PC and the rise of networked computing are surprisingly disconnected. You should check out Nerds 2.0.1, a pretty good (and thus one of the best available) history of the Internet, drawn from interviews for the PBS special of the same name, to see what I mean. Basically, the PC is a 80's phenomenon, and networked computing a 90's phenomenon. There's a lot more in the article to take issue with (the Blair Witch Project a Net phenomenon? The BWP marketed the website, not the other way around).
AAPL is at all-time highs, too. It hit 91 before subsiding to 90 1/4...
Note what's happening: Microsoft isn't really being hurt, but it's competition is doing better. Funny how that's what antitrust law is intended to do. And institutional investors recognize that.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of it quite honestly comes down to psychology rather than rationality. There are enough developers who enjoy being Mac users that they want to develop for the Mac as well. A case in point is the game industry, where developers very much want to make Mac games even though the company's support for them is imperfect at best (even though there are big problems now, mainly in Apple's level of secrecy, it's a lot better than back in the day when Apple actively dicouraged game development because they didn't want companies to think of the Mac as a toy).
Another reason is the same reason that anyone supports niche markets--there's good money to be made. Microsoft's Mac Office products give them huge profits. The Apple userbase is a pretty nice subsection of computer users: loyal, affluent, experimental. Apple users generally reward quality products.
You wondered why people spend so much time doing mac ports instead of *bsd and linux ports. There's a lot more money to be made, especially in the consumer arena, porting to mac instead of the freenixes. The freenixes may be awesome, but they have a much smaller share of the consumer market and people who use them are less likely to pay for software than the average mac user.
My suspicion is that there's more porting of server-type software (see IBM, SGI, etc.) to Linux than there is to Mac. The audiences are different.
That said, Apple has had and still has problems getting developers because of their size (or lack of it). Apple's all-in-one hardware+software package is both its greatest benefit and biggest problem for developers. The transition to OS X will definitely be a very interesting test, as a successful transition is very much dependent on developer support.
Another way of looking at it is not that the lawmakers are trying to pass unconstitutional laws, but that the majority of the American public wants unconstitutional laws to be passed. The average American citizen probably couldn't see why search warrants are so important (after all, we shouldn't coddle drug dealers!) or why anyone should be allowed to link to drug-making information (my kids are in danger!), etc., etc.
If we don't want our federal legislators to engage in horse shit, the American public needs to be educated.
Also, contacting your representatives does make a big difference. I interned for a senator once; all messages are read, and interesting and insightful ones are read by the senior advisors. In other words, they have their own moderation systems. The +3,+4's are read and make a difference.
Who knows; your arguments might be used on the House or Senate floor.
The system has serious flaws, but it is a reflection of the warring desires and needs of the American populace. For example, most people these days trust big business to make the right decisions; so why shouldn't the government?
This might not be the answer you're looking for, but if you're dealing with programs big enough for it to be a pain to track hashes, you should probably make your hashes into objects and privatize all the variables, so the hash/package/object is only usable through its methods, which will clean up your code and assist Perl's debugging dramatically.
This is all said with a grain of salt because I find OOPerl to be something of a pain in the ass, probably just because my brain isn't large enough.
We don't know that it's xbox-only yet.
We only have that logical suspicion.
I want to know who's leaving and who's staying..that'll help us get a better picture.
I know it's gratuitous, but it's not offtopic. I have to agree that this Anonymous Coward succinctly captures my feeling on this issue. Katz can churn out the intelligent seeming piece, and has his heart in the right place, but he really is an ignorant slut, especially in the sense that he's a reporter, and only slides over the surface of that which he covers. It's the eternal curse of the generalist and the press, but really, it's damn annoying.
Listen to this:
"Plaintiffs won the case, and for that reason alone have some entitlement to a remedy of their choice."
In other words: "Listen up, you weeny techies. YOU LOST!"
"These officials are by reason of office obliged and expected to consider - and to act in - the public interest; Microsoft is not."
I.e. "You really expect me to believe that breaking you up would harm the consumer? It would harm your monopoly, bitch-weasels."
It really seems like Gates has been able to coast this long by being smart and nasty; but The Honorable PJ is bitch-slapping him, finally. Gates is someone who never learned to play nice. Now he's having to learn that you can't bully Lady Liberty.
Your belief that Prohibition is a Government-led decision is common, but entirely mistaken. In fact, it's quite interesting that you stated that while using suffrage as an opposite example. Prohibition and suffrage were closely tied together.
A short take on the social history of the period is this: Industrial Revolution causes massive shift from rural/craftman/self-sufficient society to urban/factory/consumer society. People living in rural and small-town America lose their means of independence. They turn to alcohol, and alcohol abuse becomes a scourge of formerly stable communities as the young and able-bodied leave for the cities. Alcohol abuse also arises in the cities. The only people left to maintain the social fabric are the women, who mobilize to fight all the problems caused by the transition: poverty, orphanages, debtors, child labor, alcohol abuse, prosititution (the suffragettes more often defend the prostitutes and attack the system) and fight for unionization, suffrage, and prohibition. People also fight against immigration and for protectionism.
We've made it through the transition from pre- and post-industrial society, and thus have difficulty seeing how Prohibition could even have been possible. But it's a natural result of industrialization.
Interestingly, this transition is occuring in India, which has many dry states (where social, political, and religious policies are closely tied). Prohibition is largely a grassroots effort. For a good (though intensely anti-internationalization/industrialization) perspective on this and other grassroots attempts to moderate the effects of the internationalization of India, read Jeremy Seabrook's Notes from Another India.
Just to complete that thought, here's the original quotation:
It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.
Here's the famed Bake Sale poster, with the lovely kids-on-fullerene-contraption art. It's the slogan of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
There hasn't been a single archived Slashdot article on GOGO. Nearly all of the searchable Slashdot comments on GOGO are in this thread.
The above information is not readily available on the site.
Half-Life.
That was my attempt to get subject into concise form. Yeah, Epic games will probably continue to be ported, since they're pretty much guaranteed A-level titles, with enough guaranteed sales on the "lesser" OS's to be worth the effort of finding a porting house. Note also that Epic is big enough to have built the necessary relationships with porting shops. But will their engine be ported?
The HUGE and CRUSHING disaster of Epic's decision is in the effective death of many, many other ports. Take a look at the list of games being made on the UT and Q3A engines for the PC. A majority of those games are being ported to Mac (and Linux? I don't follow Linux ports, just Mac ports). Why? Because the engines are cross-platform.
This is GREAT for pretty much all users, but Mac & Linux users especially.
The games based on the earlier iD and Epic engines that weren't cross-platform weren't ported nearly as often.
That's the real reason for despair and gnashing of teeth. Epic is both a game maker AND an engine producer. They feel responsible enough to ensure that their games get ported, but do they care to ensure that the engine will be?
If Epic makes a Direct3D based engine, but hires a company like Westlake to make a Mac version of the engine, and not simply the Epic game based on the engine, (and likewise for Linux), then we'll have reason to calm down. Otherwise, it's time to be revolting!
I really hope so.
I fear that it wasn't.
I didn't know LAME existed before reading this post.
Nor did I know GOGO existed.
So WE DON'T ALL KNOW THAT GOGO IS THE FASTEST.
YOU knew that, but not everyone else did.
Mentioning GOGO is an example of topic drift, but it certainly isn't off-topic. The mention of GOGO was interesting and useful to me, and helped me understand LAME better by providing more context.
It's a mistake to GOGO OT. Advocating GOGO was not "off topic crap".
That was a good call, comparing BeOS to NeXT. Other than the comparison mentioned in the topic, there's a bunch of others.
Let's see...
1) Both started by ex-Applers.
2) Both designed to be legacy-free, "beautiful" OS's
3) Both started with their own hardware, with names referring to a hexahedral shape
4) Both OS's were considered for the job of being Apple's next OS. (NeXT won.)
5) And they both have the same goofy-looking
CaPS SeQUEnCE.
Hey, is BeOS is following in NeXT's footsteps, maybe Microsoft will buy up BeOS (though I'd suspect it more likely that say, Sony would for "PlayStation O") and make it into their next generation OS, though I have no idea what they could call it with their nomenclature. They'd probably call it Windows 40,000, and it could run on a PC, a handheld, or a Predator Annihilator Tank.
You're conflating books with the contents of the Library of Congress. If you ignore the inflammatory presentation of Billington's plans, you'll notice that he says, in effect, that the Library of Congress intends to put all of its unique content online.
In other words, if it was something that you had to go to DC to get access to, it would be online.
He personally doesn't see going to a local library to be big enough of an imposition to outweigh the social benefits of the act, and that's what everyone is harping on.
It's still cheaper than buying a modem and a computer to go to a local library.
If we eliminate public libraries in favor of the Internet, many people will be harmed. His language (which may be taken out of context--note the use of many very short excerpts in the article) doesn't make that point well, but that's what he's thinking.
The Internet is not an intrinsically democratizing institution, though it has great capacity to be.
Unsurprisingly, nearly all of the discussion is emphasizing where we disagree with Billington than where we agree.
/.ers assert.
/.) parts of his assertions, and not the parts we'd agree with. For example, the article describes what he thinks the problems with the Internet are, but not what he thinks the benefits of the Internet are. We can attempt to infer what he thinks the Internet is good for from his statements, but there's no way of knowing that we'd be right. Obviously he doesn't think that it's not good for anything, though that's the tone of many /. posts.
/. when people argue "Going to a library is more difficult than looking something up on the Web; therefore, there's no value in going to a library."
He's clearly misguided in his belief that reading a physical book is necessarily better than reading an online book. I'd agree with him that when reading for enjoyment, a physical book beats online text every time. There is something different about flipping pages than scrolling. He discusses the advantages of having a physical book over having digitized text in this article. He doesn't discuss the disadvantages. That doesn't necessarily mean that he doesn't know of the disadvantages, as many
It is certainly true that reading a physical book is a more reverent action than digitized text, because a physical book is an entity unto itself. To read part of a book one must pick up the entire book.
The context of reading digitized text read on a computer is much less "reverent" because it is not as a separate entity, but as a mutable part of a larger whole. That which we can change, edit and control is not that which we will have reverence towards. (Unless, perhaps, the process of change is highly formalized, as in Torah study.)
The controllable nature of digitized text, while under certain particular circumstances can be thought of as a disadvantage (the circumstances which Bellington considers in his arguments), is also its great advantage. One can do word analysis of Shakespeare vs. the Bible vs. Chaucer and come to new understandings of language, etc. etc.
That said, let's look at the parts of the article where he talks not about philosophy about action. He says that the Library of Congress will digitize the rare items (pamphlets, maps, etc.) of its collection instead of the books which can be gotten at local libraries.
Wait a second! That makes perfect sense. The Library of Congress has finite resources, and they should be certainly allocated to that which it can uniquely do. Anybody can start digitizing freely available texts, and people are doing so (see the Bartleby project). Only the Library of Congress has the capability to digitize the stuff that only it has a copy of.
Also, he thinks that libraries should be founts of uncensored information. I know that a bunch of you are thinking (because that's what you said) "He's asserting two irrationally opposing viewpoints!" And to a degree, I agree. However, if we look at his arguments, you can see his conceptualization of the issues is consistent (though incomplete).
Here is a (rather incomplete and interpretational) list of his asserted beliefs:
a) someone else can digitize books
b) the Library of Congress has a mission to preserve the "sacred" nature of the printed word.
c) free and uncensored libraries are an absolutely necessary component to the American democracy
d) television promotes social decay
e) the Internet has the power to promote social decay
f) if the same information can be gleaned from the Internet and a public library, Billington (and thus the LoC) would encourage the use of the library
Implicit in these stated beliefs are:
a) the physical and discrete nature of books adds intrinsic value to text
b) the Internet can behave like television
c) participation in democratic institutions builds societal values
d) the Library of Congress has a mission to promote the American democracy
e) community is necessary to a functioning democracy
f) people having a sense of personal humility, in respect to history, is necessary to a functioning democracy
g) the act of going to a library builds community
h) the act of dealing with physical books builds a sense of personal humility in respect to history
From a), b) and f) of his asserted beliefs he concludes the Library of Congress should not digitize books. A perfectly reasonable syllogism.
A basic problem with the article is that it concentrates on the debatable (to
I believe the basic flaw in his beliefs comes from this: he thinks that the LoC has a responsibility to protect the sanctity of books and the mission of public libraries, and the digitizing of books freely available at libraries is antithetical to that responsibility. I don't think it's antithetical, and I hope it's clear what my position is (see PP's 3-5).
However, his fears are realized on
That argument is deeply flawed--if you can't immediately see it, let me replace some of the words:
"Installing Linux is more difficult than buying a computer with Windows installed; therefore, there's no value in installing Linux."
Dissing libraries is just as reactionary as dissing the Internet.
See the above post for that kind of dismissive argument (asserting that libraries are "isolating" and cause "ignorance" and "non-disclosure" is utterly misguided). Libraries and books shouldn't be attacked, they should be celebrated, just as the Internet should be celebrated.
So don't be a hypocrite: don't be as reactionary as Billington. Mindless futurism is just as bad as mindless romanticism.
When Billington celebrates libraries and denigrates the Internet, don't denigrate libraries in response: celebrate them both, and show him and people like him how to do both.
Oh no, it had cities. It's true that countries were somewhat gone, but it would be better to say that countries were on the same playing field as businesses (sound like today?)
The average joe didn't live in the city, and Hiro was a citizen of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, but he lived in a storage box in the city. There was even a little spiel about how the players still lived in the city, while everyone else retreated to the burbs.
The Metaverse, in fact, was especially a city. Most big cities are just one main street filled with banner ads with porn--until Disney comes along; then the banner ads sell mouse merchandise.
The reason that there was empty roundness on the Metaverse wasn't that it was sparsely populated, but that it had vastly greater surface area than the earth, and nearly everyone was just in the central "city
When Stephenson began working on Snow Crash, he intended it to be a video game (super-interactive novel). Unfortunately, we're only getting to the point where that would be a plausibility. Or is that fortunately? If Ion Storm can succeed at Deus Ex, someone can succeed at Snow Crash...though Juanita's avatar tech is still a ways away (see Pixar's advances in this realm!)
Speaking of Pixar, it's always easier to fake tech in a movie; you get to pre-render everything. Snow Crash would make a great movie without too much trouble, because of its many high-octane visual elements. Also: the political/social satire that runs rampant is surprisingly easy to do visually: just show the Uncle Nunzio Pizza billboard and you're done.
Of course the movie would be radically different from the book, but it wouldn't be an insane adaptation like LotR--you just cut out the boring stuff, and you've got a whole bunch of cool action sequences. Stephenson's namshub mumbo-jumbo barely makes sense anyway (though it _nearly_ fits together quite neatly); the book could do with the bit of narrative tightening a movie would provide.
Snow Crash is hobbled by the importance of Juanita to the outcome of the book, and her near-complete absence from the book. A rewrite that dealt with the narrative problems caused by her would be welcome. My suspicion is the whole rewrite issue is what's killing this project: the book, while amazingly cool and smart and readable and one of my all-time favorite books, is seriously flawed by its tenuously connected plot threads.
Visually, the movie would be great in so many ways: the avatar world could be done anime-style, the Sumerian backstory (if it even entered) could be covered in a killer animation sequence like that from Todd McFarlane's Do the Evolution video, etc.
Stephenson deliberately drew on pop-culture ideas and imagery for the book, and took a lot from movies. Snow Crash could make a very good movie.
It probably would make a better computer game, but I'm not convinced we really have the tech for it.
Hmmm...I wonder if the law is different in Washington?
Because it's been slashdotted.
It's fun surveying the field of intelligent, post-modernist fantasy, which has a sense of humor that ranges from the low parody and groaner (Aspirin's Myth books), through Pratchett's prototypical British comedies, to the delicate sarcasm leavened with moments of slapstick that mark Stephen Brust's Phoenix Guards (light) and Taltos series (dark), to the truly dark and nihilist humor of authors like Jonathan Lethem.
All modern fantasies are necessarily referential; they harken back to our extended common history of myth, folk tale, and legend. And any reference is a potential source of humor. Even Tolkien's works contain jokes, though they happen to be of the extremely subtle linguistic and etymological variety. But Fritz Lieber's Swords of Lankhmar series is probably the first great series which combined a classic heroic style with many elements of humor, from the subtle to the surprisingly silly.
Fantasy is such a rich field for humor, in all its varieties, including Douglas Adams's absurdist works, and the modern American fabulists, like Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock (I just checked on Amazon, and surprise surprise! People who buy Blaylock buy Tim Powers), whose books point the way for fantasy to take place in the modern world, without descending into self-serious allegory or just relying on the tired "lonely grad student/librarian/RPG player/fantasy reader analogue finds a dimensional portal/gets caught in a spell/tornado/satanic plot and finds himself in a fantasy world in which he/she is a master wizard" trope.
Going out on a limb, some other unusual and brilliant fantastic authors and books include Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden: or a Low Comedy, which really falls into the SF camp, but is a child of both the best fantasy and SF. But it's a very weird and complicated book; I don't know what my reaction to it would have been if I were younger. But anyone who thinks Douglas Adams is funny, and knows at least who Dante and Marx were, and what Europe went through during the World Wars, will probably find this book an entrancing tale. At its heart it's a classic story of adolescence and lost innocence.
For a more straightforward take on the same themes, Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" series is miles and miles better than the other currently popular young adult British schoolchild wizardry and adolescence series, starring a certain Hogwarts student. Please read these, as these are near-perfect moving, exciting, and deeply affecting books that can inspire the young and allow the old to remember what it was like to be young. I could be wrong, but I suspect this series is the kind which adults overestimate the minimum age to appreciate these books--kids who can read Potter and Dahl and Narnia and Tolkien can read these. Also, the only reason people think these are kid's books is that the author made his name as a children's author. These are no more and no less kids books than the Lord of the Rings or Discworld or the Foundation Series.
Finally, for Pullman meets Powers and Zelazny, check out Tom De Haven's Chronicles of the King's Tramp.
--
I read TBG before Neverness; fortunately, I read the two a few years apart so that TBG didn't ruin Neverness for me. Both are very good. I haven't finished the series yet; they're hard books to find.
Other SF authors in the same vein, writing literate SF, are the aforementioned Ia in Banks (make sure you consider this website), the well-known Ste phen R. Donaldson and Dan Simmons (in particular his Hyperion series). Iain Banks writes non-genre fiction as Iain M. Banks and is hugely popular in the UK. Donaldson, lambasted and praised for his Unbeliever Chronicles, also wrote The Gap Series, a dark DF space opera based on the Ring Cycle. Simmons writes a lot of horror and other dark fiction.
Another author in the vein is Steven Brust (whose Taltos series is his masterwork), as well as the other members of his writing circle, the Pre-Joycean Fellowship, including Emma Bull.
Another fine but relatively obscure author is the powerful writer George Alec Effinger. Lordy lordy, is this man good. If I'm not mistaken, he's also worked on comix with Neil Gaiman and wrote for the supercool SF cartoon Galaxy Rangers, along with another great author, Tom De Haven.
More old-school authors who wrote very post-modern SF include the amazing Avram Davidson (check out the great Treasury) who wrote primarily short stories, and the odd and great Polish author Stanislaw Lem (whose career began in 1951 and continues to this day). Starting from Lem, you get into the great European (including S. America) "fantastic philosophers" Borges and Calvino. And if you like them, then you're sure to like Pynchon, and so on to David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, who all write SF-tinged fiction.
And the list goes on.
I essentially parroted your response in a similar vein a few responses below. I think the worst crime is that Katz is a literate individual with a clear writing style and writes blitheringly wrong statements, mixed in with some good points.
I strongly get the impression Katz didn't really read the findings. If he did, then he really missed the point--maybe he has no historical knowledge of antitrust. Whatever the case, some major blunders. At least he didn't start a land war in Asia.
Katz writes:
Net commerce works in very different ways, yet anti-trust law hasn't evolved. Microsoft didn't become a monopoly by jacking up prices, but by using practically the opposite tactic - in effect giving products away to obtain staggering market share. Gate's big idea was to make sure his company's software and operating systems were distributed so freely and aggressively they were on every desktop.
NO! Companies have NEVER become monopolies by jacking up prices. The Net hasn't changed the laws of supply and demand. Companies jack up prices after they have a monopoly (which is illegal). And Jackson found that M$ did just that. Nothing new there. Companies have always become monopolies by undercutting competition (which isn't illegal). They have also always leveraged monopolies in one area to gain monopolies in others (which IS illegal). How do you leverage a monopoly? In pretty much all the ways Microsoft has used: lowering prices to kill competition (Netscape), strongarming distributors to protect and extend monopolies (Dell, Gateway, IBM, Intel, etc.), threatening other companies to gain concessions (Apple), paying companies with money and concessions (AOL, Dell, etc.) to stifle new competition (Netscape, Real, Intel).
This IS NOT NEW.
This IS NOT "NET LAW."
This is classic antitrust. The parallels to Standard Oil are amazing. Read the Pulitzer Prize-winning Prize by Daniel Yergin for a great account of the history of Standard Oil and the full sweep of the Petroleum Age.
Katz is right that the average Joe thinks M$ is cool. But he's wrong when he thinks this is all about online commerce. Jackson's findings of fact demonstrate quite clearly that new distribution models like downloading, pre-installations, and CD's are perfectly understandable in traditional terms, and aren't "unique to the Net," as Katz claims.
Here's a clue for Jonathan: Judge Jackson isn't "definitely plowing new ground." New industries, from oil to railroads to telephony to automobiles to radio to television exploded from the gates "far from regulators, bureaucrats, lawyers and politicians" -- which was good but not surprising -- but when the dust settled, the new industries were part of the same old capitalism engine, and benefited from regulation and oversight. Henry Ford himself admitted that government regulation was the only reason cars got safer in the first 20 years of the automotive revolution.
I must have missed the point at which this happened: "it's possible to be enormously rich and successful and still rapidly become marginal, even insignificant. This seems to be Microsoft's curious fate." Funny how M$ doesn't seem too marginal; they're pretty safely the dominant force on the desktop for the foreseeable future.
Finally, the rise of the PC and the rise of networked computing are surprisingly disconnected. You should check out Nerds 2.0.1, a pretty good (and thus one of the best available) history of the Internet, drawn from interviews for the PBS special of the same name, to see what I mean. Basically, the PC is a 80's phenomenon, and networked computing a 90's phenomenon. There's a lot more in the article to take issue with (the Blair Witch Project a Net phenomenon? The BWP marketed the website, not the other way around).
AAPL is at all-time highs, too. It hit 91 before subsiding to 90 1/4...
Note what's happening: Microsoft isn't really being hurt, but it's competition is doing better. Funny how that's what antitrust law is intended to do. And institutional investors recognize that.