Just think of it, being a merchant that has to tell his/her customers that they can not buy so many goods from them. After all ISP's are nothing but value added bit resellers...
So, what will happen ? Well, there are other merchants. Looks like these guys just shot themselves in the foot.
I have lots of other books on my shelf besides 'Das Kapital' and the 'little red book' (original editions, signed by the author), usually they are labelled as to what they contain, in other words if stuff is pure fiction, fantasy or a religious tretise the author - or his publisher - labels it as such. Card/his publisher do not and that's what I take issue with, it is NOT science fiction, it is just fiction, and religious fiction at that.
I'm probably going to be the last guy to read Harry Potter so I'll just pass on that, stranger in a strange land was very powerful stuff.
regarding pro life/pro killing:
I don't mind being labelled derisively, you just act as comes naturally I guess. I do have an opinion, but being of the wrong gender I recognise that it is not going to be an informed one.
I can however see good points in the arguments of lots of 'pro killing' people that do have an informed opinion (as in being female), and also some good points in those 'pro life' (females as well). For now my own personal view is that only those that are actively confronted with the situation have enough information to make the call and the rest should be as supportive of them as is possible WHATEVER THEY CHOOSE.
The people with the loudest voices in this debate are usually the ones that do NOT happen to be involved with the real issues.
Oh, and the torah isn't SF either, it is fiction pure and simple
As for Heinlein I think the man was way ahead of his time in many ways, and it will be years into the future that we will finally be able to appreciate just how far that was.
I think it's fine if he puts his views in his books, I just don't think they should be marketed as science fiction... there is reason why we have genres, and if I want to read religious opinions of whatever religion I skip a few rows in the bookstore and I can read all I want about them.
That's what I meant with false flag.
It would be like me writing a book that is extremely supportive of say evolution and then to market it as a religious commentary.
As some other poster already noted I do appreciate Card being up front about it, that at least makes it easier to see things for what they really are. Some other writers (notably Gentry Lee) have a way of slipping in their agenda that is a little less obvious (but even more irritating because of that).
In science-fiction I expect science as it is generally accepted today as a basis, otherwise we might as well call it just fiction... you *are* allowed to extrapolate into the future but you are not allowed to try to rewrite history to fit your personal beliefs.
I think those are fairly well established ground rules for the genre, and have been so since the 60's or so when SF really started to pick up steam, and Card stomps all over that and I think that's why he should not be labelling his stuff as SF.
For those that comment on me not liking books you are welcome to come and inspect my bookcases:)
it might be the SCIENCE bit in science fiction that keeps the religious hordes away:)
Seriously though, there are tons of scientists that are also religious, I know that and I have no problem with that (though I'm glad I don't have to reconcile an internal belief system like religion with an in depth knowledge of cold hard science).
Fact is that the SF audience usually prefers to read stories that make one (or maybe two or so) assumptions about the way the future could develop and that religion is mostly trying to find its roots in the past rather than the present. There is some SF set in the past but not much and it usually stays miles away from any interference with religious characters or times. (again, there are some exceptions here).
This alone precludes many would be religious people from writing SF because they would not be able or willing to solidly separate belief from assumption. If you can believe in an all powerful deity that creates whole universes in a couple of days and you and all your predecessors as an afterthought you probably don't need much more in the fiction department anyway.
A miracle is a very easy way out of any kind of situation, and the various religions have all kinds of history that testifies to their using just that in order to get themselves out of hairy stuff. (and persecution if that failed).
I stopped reading stuff associated with OSC because of his obvious creationist agenda, and his less than subtle hints about what is right and what is wrong in his view of things.
He is an amazing storyteller but:
I don't like it when SF is used as a platform for pro-life/creationist crap.
By choosing SF as a 'genre' I assume that I can stay clear from writers with agendas like that, and I think that this can be qualified as 'false flag' deployment.
Of course writers are free to do so but then I'd rather send my cash somewhere else to support writers that have their feet a little more on the ground.
Next thing we know there will be SF without evolution and SF with 7 day creation bits in it.
I have 3 million lines of C under my belt, possibly more since I don't usually count that stuff. And before that piles and piles of assembler, 6502, 6809, 68000, x86, you name it I have probably programmed it.
I also run a bunch of technology companies and would be more than happy to part with Windows on most of our office machines if I could find an alternative that REALLY works. So, every now and then when something promising pops up I give it a shot, but so far nothing came even close to being a competitor for the crap that gates puts out, which doesn't say much for the rest now does it ?
My point is, and just to make sure I don't draw any more crap like this:
Technology battles are not usually won in the media especially not in media like this, they are won by making things work and then promoting the hell out of them, the marketplace will take care of the rest. See MS vs IBM at some point in the past, and that was when nobody thought IBM could be unseated. Not by whining about the competition. Knoppix seems to be a step in the right direction, and with a little - not even that much - concerted effort we can make it a home run but whining is not going to solve it.
For personal reasons I have decided to stay away from open source myself (we have to eat you know...), but I presume there are many people like me out there that would be glad to make the switch given an alternative that really works and that does not require me to have either a double boot or two machines to be able to do my daily work.
kmail: toy (can't even handle my 5 years of archived mail without crashing, eudora does the same just fine) kword: toy (ANY word document I opened so far came out wrong, it shouldn't even be released from what I can see. The poster above seems to have had a lot more luck, but that doesn't help me does it ?)
and so on... better to have LESS packages that really work than lots of packages that are half-assed
1) businesses cancel deals all the time 2) for every deal like this that sinks ms will probably ink three more 3) there is NO way we are going to get the open source boat any further by talking about the supposed evil of the competition, it takes ACTION 4) the best way you can take action is probably by taking one of the toy applications that are currently available for the 'free' os's and turn it into something real, it's a level playingfield out there. 5) nobody stops you from attacking redmond on their own turf by say working all out on a competitor for office, which is much more of a stronghold than the os will ever be.
Case in point, I just downloaded knoppix, and the msword viewer/editor that comes with it can not even properly display the simplest word documents.
And in the past lack of openness from manufacturers was no deterrent to developing applications compatible with their products, reverse assembly is perfectly acceptable.
If we do *not* take care of the aids problem the world of the future is going to be populated solely by those who have built up a natural defense against the disease. This is more than likely to happen first in those countries that are right now at the front of the 'epidemic wave' (and it *is* an epidemic, make no mistake about that).
So, the best course of action seems to me to take the problem as one that affects all of us NOW instead of waiting for the future to catch up with us, if not we will be the ones to pay for it in our own good times.
Advocates of theories like yours are similar to people standing on the back of the Titanic while it is already sinking. You TOO have a problem.
Well, look at it this way: If Alan Turing et al would have published a 'scientific paper' spreading the knowledge about how to go about cracking cypher systems that would have been fine from a scientific point of view, but totally against the national interests of the day. It would have more than likely tipped of the Germans that their communications should no longer be considered secure and given them a tool they could use against the allies to boot.
And even if such a paper would have been circulated restricting access to it might have helped (but then again if it was realy widely published then I agree with you that would be useless).
There always will be information that is too sensitive for 'general' consumption, either because the posession of this information can cause harm in the wrong hands or because there is a choice between two 'bad' alternatives, where one of the two alternatives is worse and benefits from the suppression of the information.
Case in point, during WWII the British had knowledge ahead of time of the Germans plans for the bombing of certain towns in southern England. If they would have warned the locals of the impending attack they would have given away the fact that they had in fact breached the code that protected the high command's communications. So, they allowed the bombardments to continue without any kind of 'early' response in order not to tip their hands.
This knowledge has been kept secret until very recently...
There was a time when people put a lot of weight on a computer being able to play a high level of chess, but that was before the advent of a strategy that is best characterised as massive parallel brute force solution of a game with a very large tree of possible moves.
Nowadays, there really is very little point. You are comparing apples to oranges when you allow the one party a nearly infinite budget of cycles and power and allow the other party 18 cycles per second on a biological processor that is running on a couple of oranges for a whole games' worth of computation.
I we want to make this kind of competition interesting again I think there really should be limits on the power and cycle budget of the machine involved in order to get back to the essence of the whole game theory thing, which is not going flat out for the maximum number of ply you can look ahead but to try to quantify a strategic advantage.
Unfortunately that will not make for interesting press releases.
To me the current 'matches' look a little bit like sledgehammers being used to crack nuts. It does work, but there is no real output. All this stuff proves is that if you throw enough money at a problem you can force the outcome of something as trivial as a game of chess.
It does not advance the state of the art in computing at all.
it's an excellent idea ! you have a lot more reliability like that and you can incrementally increase your database capacity.
Nothing worse than having your one 'monster' database server go down on you...
Also there usually are limits as to how big that 'monster' server can get in practice, whereas by breaking it up and replicating you can scale as large as you want, and you also avoid trouble by slowing down that one machine when you do your backups.
(Simply replicate once more and have your tapedrive in a machine that you can take 'offline' without hurting your app). The replication mechanism will take care of bringing it back into synch once you are done making your backup.
If you don't want to have the db and the www server residing on the same box you can always break that up into pairs of machines, but I really have not yet found a need for that (and I have done quite a bit of *really* high volume web serving to back that up)
we serve up between 5 and 7 million pageviews daily to up to 100,000 individual IP's
Decent speed to me is one in which the server is no longer the bottleneck, in other words serving up dynamic content you should be able to saturate the pipe that you are connected to.
I have never replaced the power supply because of energy costs, it simply isn't a factor in the overal scheme of things (salaries, bandwidth, amortization of equipment)
500-700 Mhz machines are fine for most medium volume sites, I would only consider a really fast machine to break a bottleneck, and I'd have a second one on standby in case it burns up
1) use multiple machines / round robin DNS 2) use decent speed hardware but stay away from
'top of the line' stuff (fastest processor,
fastest drives) because they usually are not
more reliable 3) replicate your databases to all machines so
db access is always LOCAL 4) use a front end cache to make sure you use
as little database interaction as you can
get away with (say flush the cache once per
minute) 5) use decent switching hardware and routers, no
point in having a beast of a server hooked up
to a hub now is there...
that's it ! reasonable price and lots of performance
In theory, no. In practice: YES check out google on the myth of the good corporate citizen basically what it boils down to is that corporations in theory have less rights than a 'regular' citizen, but that in practice with all the legal power that they can buy they enjoy considerably more rights than ordinary people and that they are not ashamed (because of a lack of personal ethics) to abuse these rights
the dreamcast modem uses a DSP of its own rather than the main processor which makes it an embedded modem rather than a winmodem (even when it is running CE which it technically can but which most games do not use because of the overhead that would bring with it)
The dreamcast modem while not using a serial interface does not qualify as a 'win' modem because that implies the dreamcast is running windows, which it certainly doesn't...
Slashdot Mirror
Just think of it, being a merchant that has to tell his/her customers that they can not buy so many goods from them. After all ISP's are nothing but value added bit resellers...
So, what will happen ? Well, there are other merchants. Looks like these guys just shot themselves in the foot.
I have lots of other books on my shelf besides 'Das Kapital' and the 'little red book' (original editions, signed by the author), usually they are labelled as to what they contain, in other words if stuff is pure fiction, fantasy or a religious tretise the author - or his publisher - labels it as such. Card/his publisher do not and that's what I take issue with, it is NOT science fiction, it is just fiction, and religious fiction at that.
I'm probably going to be the last guy to read Harry Potter so I'll just pass on that, stranger in a strange land was very powerful stuff.
regarding pro life/pro killing:
I don't mind being labelled derisively, you just act as comes naturally I guess. I do have an opinion, but being of the wrong gender I recognise that it is not going to be an informed one.
I can however see good points in the arguments of lots of 'pro killing' people that do have an informed opinion (as in being female), and also some good points in those 'pro life' (females as well). For now my own personal view is that only those that are actively confronted with the situation have enough information to make the call and the rest should be as supportive of them as is possible WHATEVER THEY CHOOSE.
The people with the loudest voices in this debate are usually the ones that do NOT happen to be involved with the real issues.
Oh, and the torah isn't SF either, it is fiction pure and simple
As for Heinlein I think the man was way ahead of his time in many ways, and it will be years into the future that we will finally be able to appreciate just how far that was.
I think it's fine if he puts his views in his books, I just don't think they should be marketed as science fiction... there is reason why we have genres, and if I want to read religious opinions of whatever religion I skip a few rows in the bookstore and I can read all I want about them.
:)
That's what I meant with false flag.
It would be like me writing a book that is extremely supportive of say evolution and then to market it as a religious commentary.
As some other poster already noted I do appreciate Card being up front about it, that at least makes it easier to see things for what they really are. Some other writers (notably Gentry Lee) have a way of slipping in their agenda that is a little less obvious (but even more irritating because of that).
In science-fiction I expect science as it is generally accepted today as a basis, otherwise
we might as well call it just fiction... you
*are* allowed to extrapolate into the future but you are not allowed to try to rewrite history to fit your personal beliefs.
I think those are fairly well established ground rules for the genre, and have been so since the 60's or so when SF really started to pick up steam, and Card stomps all over that and I think that's why he should not be labelling his stuff as SF.
For those that comment on me not liking books you are welcome to come and inspect my bookcases
it might be the SCIENCE bit in science fiction that keeps the religious hordes away :)
Seriously though, there are tons of scientists that are also religious, I know that and I have no problem with that (though I'm glad I don't have to reconcile an internal belief system like religion with an in depth knowledge of cold hard science).
Fact is that the SF audience usually prefers to read stories that make one (or maybe two or so) assumptions about the way the future could develop and that religion is mostly trying to find its roots in the past rather than the present. There is some SF set in the past but not much and it usually stays miles away from any interference with religious characters or times.
(again, there are some exceptions here).
This alone precludes many would be religious people from writing SF because they would not be able or willing to solidly separate belief from assumption. If you can believe in an all powerful deity that creates whole universes in a couple of days and you and all your predecessors as an afterthought you probably don't need much more in the fiction department anyway.
A miracle is a very easy way out of any kind of situation, and the various religions have all kinds of history that testifies to their using just that in order to get themselves out of hairy stuff. (and persecution if that failed).
I stopped reading stuff associated with OSC because of his obvious creationist agenda, and his less than subtle hints about what is right and what is wrong in his view of things.
He is an amazing storyteller but:
I don't like it when SF is used as a platform for pro-life/creationist crap.
By choosing SF as a 'genre' I assume that I can stay clear from writers with agendas like that, and I think that this can be qualified as 'false flag' deployment.
Of course writers are free to do so but then I'd rather send my cash somewhere else to support writers that have their feet a little more on the ground.
Next thing we know there will be SF without evolution and SF with 7 day creation bits in it.
so, I'm not a programmer eh ?
I have 3 million lines of C under my belt, possibly more since I don't usually count that stuff. And before that piles and piles of assembler, 6502, 6809, 68000, x86, you name it I have probably programmed it.
I also run a bunch of technology companies and would be more than happy to part with Windows on
most of our office machines if I could find an alternative that REALLY works. So, every now and then when something promising pops up I give it a shot, but so far nothing came even close to being a competitor for the crap that gates puts out, which doesn't say much for the rest now does it ?
My point is, and just to make sure I don't draw any more crap like this:
Technology battles are not usually won in the media especially not in media like this, they are won by making things work and then promoting the hell out of them, the marketplace will take care of the rest. See MS vs IBM at some point in the past, and that was when nobody thought IBM could be unseated. Not by whining about the competition. Knoppix seems to be a step in the right direction, and with a little - not even that much - concerted effort we can make it a home run but whining is not going to solve it.
For personal reasons I have decided to stay away from open source myself (we have to eat you know...), but I presume there are many people like me out there that would be glad to make the switch given an alternative that really works and that does not require me to have either a double boot or two machines to be able to do my daily work.
kmail: toy (can't even handle my 5 years of archived mail without crashing, eudora does the same just fine)
kword: toy (ANY word document I opened so far came out wrong, it shouldn't even be released from what I can see. The poster above seems to have had a lot more luck, but that doesn't help me does it ?)
and so on... better to have LESS packages that really work than lots of packages that are half-assed
1) businesses cancel deals all the time
2) for every deal like this that sinks ms will probably ink three more
3) there is NO way we are going to get the open source boat any further by talking about the supposed evil of the competition, it takes ACTION
4) the best way you can take action is probably by taking one of the toy applications that are currently available for the 'free' os's and turn it into something real, it's a level playingfield out there.
5) nobody stops you from attacking redmond on their own turf by say working all out on a competitor for office, which is much more of a stronghold than the os will ever be.
Case in point, I just downloaded knoppix, and the msword viewer/editor that comes with it can not even properly display the simplest word documents.
And in the past lack of openness from manufacturers was no deterrent to developing applications compatible with their products, reverse assembly is perfectly acceptable.
So, stop whining and start working.
Something to think about:
If we do *not* take care of the aids problem the world of the future is going to be populated solely by those who have built up a natural defense against the disease. This is more than likely to happen first in those countries that are right now at the front of the 'epidemic wave' (and it *is* an epidemic, make no mistake about that).
So, the best course of action seems to me to take the problem as one that affects all of us NOW instead of waiting for the future to catch up with us, if not we will be the ones to pay for it in our own good times.
Advocates of theories like yours are similar to people standing on the back of the Titanic while it is already sinking. You TOO have a problem.
Well, look at it this way: If Alan Turing et al would have published a 'scientific paper' spreading the knowledge about how to go about cracking cypher systems that would have been fine from a scientific point of view, but totally against the national interests of the day. It would have more than likely tipped of the Germans that their communications should no longer be considered secure and given them a tool they could use against the allies to boot.
And even if such a paper would have been circulated restricting access to it might have helped (but then again if it was realy widely published then I agree with you that would be useless).
There always will be information that is too sensitive for 'general' consumption, either because the posession of this information can cause harm in the wrong hands or because there is a choice between two 'bad' alternatives, where one of the two alternatives is worse and benefits from the suppression of the information.
Case in point, during WWII the British had knowledge ahead of time of the Germans plans for the bombing of certain towns in southern England. If they would have warned the locals of the impending attack they would have given away the fact that they had in fact breached the code that protected the high command's communications. So, they allowed the bombardments to continue without any kind of 'early' response in order not to tip their hands.
This knowledge has been kept secret until very recently...
and what about that mortgage that I could have renewed due to lowered interest rates about a thousand times by now ?
There was a time when people put a lot of weight on a computer being able to play a high level of chess, but that was before the advent of a strategy that is best characterised as massive parallel brute force solution of a game with a very large tree of possible moves.
Nowadays, there really is very little point. You are comparing apples to oranges when you allow the one party a nearly infinite budget of cycles and power and allow the other party 18 cycles per second on a biological processor that is running on a couple of oranges for a whole games' worth of computation.
I we want to make this kind of competition interesting again I think there really should be limits on the power and cycle budget of the machine involved in order to get back to the essence of the whole game theory thing, which is not going flat out for the maximum number of ply you can look ahead but to try to quantify a strategic advantage.
Unfortunately that will not make for interesting press releases.
To me the current 'matches' look a little bit like sledgehammers being used to crack nuts. It does work, but there is no real output. All this stuff proves is that if you throw enough money at a problem you can force the outcome of something as trivial as a game of chess.
It does not advance the state of the art in computing at all.
it's an excellent idea ! you have a lot more reliability like that and you can incrementally increase your database capacity.
Nothing worse than having your one 'monster' database server go down on you...
Also there usually are limits as to how big that 'monster' server can get in practice, whereas by breaking it up and replicating you can scale as large as you want, and you also avoid trouble by slowing down that one machine when you do your backups.
(Simply replicate once more and have your tapedrive in a machine that you can take 'offline' without hurting your app). The
replication mechanism will take care of bringing it back into synch once you are done making your backup.
If you don't want to have the db and the www server residing on the same box you can always break that up into pairs of machines, but I really have not yet found a need for that (and I
have done quite a bit of *really* high volume web serving to back that up)
we serve up between 5 and 7 million pageviews daily to up to 100,000 individual IP's
Decent speed to me is one in which the server is no longer the bottleneck, in other words serving up
dynamic content you should be able to saturate the pipe that you are connected to.
I have never replaced the power supply because of energy costs, it simply isn't a factor in the
overal scheme of things (salaries, bandwidth, amortization of equipment)
500-700 Mhz machines are fine for most medium volume sites, I would only consider a really fast machine to break a bottleneck, and I'd have a second one on standby in case it burns up
1) use multiple machines / round robin DNS
2) use decent speed hardware but stay away from
'top of the line' stuff (fastest processor,
fastest drives) because they usually are not
more reliable
3) replicate your databases to all machines so
db access is always LOCAL
4) use a front end cache to make sure you use
as little database interaction as you can
get away with (say flush the cache once per
minute)
5) use decent switching hardware and routers, no
point in having a beast of a server hooked up
to a hub now is there...
that's it ! reasonable price and lots of performance
vapourware...
you may want to stop people browsing the 'images' directory...
In theory, no.
In practice: YES
check out google on the myth of the good corporate citizen
basically what it boils down to is that corporations in theory have less rights than a 'regular' citizen, but that in practice with all the legal power that they can buy they enjoy considerably more rights than ordinary people and that they are not ashamed (because of a lack of personal ethics) to abuse these rights
with a little luck this will save us from that dreaded 2^32 time bug !
you can buy a fuel cell kit at
the fuel cell store
that would give a whole new meaning to being cut off now wouldn't it ?
Naval Research Office + Miniature lithium ion batteries -> algae spying off the coast of china
the dreamcast modem uses a DSP of its own rather
than the main processor which makes it an
embedded modem rather than a winmodem
(even when it is running CE which it technically
can but which most games do not use because
of the overhead that would bring with it)
The dreamcast modem while not using a serial
interface does not qualify as a 'win' modem
because that implies the dreamcast is running
windows, which it certainly doesn't...