Much as I'm loathe to say anything good about Microsoft, I'd probably install Vista on my right eye if Microsoft could get me some decent municipal wifi in the cities I frequent. Anything which brings about more free wifi is a good thing in my book.
Agreed, when B5 came out it was going head to head with Star Trek DS9 for the title of "best series about guys on a space station."
The thing was, the early seasons of D29 followed the old Star Trek formula of pressing the "reset" button after every episode, while B5 went off on its arc, with massive plot elements changing from episode to episode. After a few seasons, it was clear that B5 was going somewhere, while DS9 was still mostly about some guys hanging out in Quark's bar. Cheers in space. Fun, and I watched it, but not great stuff.
But then, in the later seasons, even DS9 made itself a nice little plot arc, which I always saw as a late admission that the Babylon 5 way had something going for it.
I pretty much leave my mail client open all day, and it's set to go check for new mail every 10 minutes or so, and make a little noise if it finds anything. Technically, this means I check my e-mail 6 times an hour, or 144 times a day.
Per e-mail address. There's several.
Am I addicted? Hell no. Most of this happens when I'm watching TV, or eating a sandwitch, or on the toilet. It's kinda like my telephone, it only becomes important when it rings.
And sometimes it even rings when I'm on the toilet, and I ignore it.
It's that time effect that's really got me worried. I'll admit, it's a step in the right direction, but 10 years seems a little fruity. It's fairly easy to point to a spot on a map of California and shout "There will be a quake here in ten years or less!" In fact, I think I can do this with a few different disasters...
There will be an Earthquake in Japan sometime in the next ten years!
There will be another Hurricane in Florida sometime in the next ten years!
There will be a volcano in Hawaii in the next ten years!
I'll need to change my underpants sometime in the next ten years!
Do you see how easy this is? Little step in the right direction, sure, but ten years is a damn long time.
The last time I checked, commercial airplanes in the US weren't allowed to fly past the speed of sound to prevent sonic booms (which, incidently, growing up next to an Air Force base, I can tell you is really something you get used to quickly).
The way I see it, my getting across the country isn't a matter of airplanes not being able to go faster, it's airplanes not being allowed to go faster.
Amen, brother! I spent a couple bucks at the arcade not too long ago trying to struggle with the almost unplayable controls on Tekken 4, before giving up, going home, and remembering how much better things were when E. Honda was around.
I really can't follow the old=crappy logic at all. This planet's a good 6 billion, maybe we should go find a new one? Screw being backward compatible with Earth-based life, just find us something new and cheap!
I'm seeing a lot of comments on here claiming they don't actually play PS1 games on a PS2.
Well, let me take a stand and say, I do.
And quite frankly, I'm not swayed by the argument that "as soon as the new system is released, you can pick up an old one for almost nothing." It would fall subject to a problem I have right now, that being "physical space."
I can't physically shove another game system into the corner of my room devoted to consoles without unplugging an old one. It's a small space. If I had to have a PS1 and a PS2, that would mean unplugging my old Dreamcast. Yes, horror of horrors, I actually do still use that old Sega box. Hate to say it, but Grandia II and Code Veronica looked like crap on their PS2 ports.
I might unplug that box if I could run both Xbox 1 and 2 games though. I just need Microsoft to give me the reason.
And this "intellectual property" argument smells a bit fishy. I was under the impression that MS had such tight control over the games on the Xbox that if Bill Gates asked, they'd sprout legs, get out of their cases, and jump through flaming hoops. I think Billy just wants me to pay for stuff twice.
If the Xbox2 isn't backward compatible, how much do you want to bet a handful of the more popular games will get remade with "special features" and released again on Xbox2?
Looking over the list quickly, there aren't a whole lot of surprises here. The usual crop of perennial big authors are here, (Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, Orson Scott Card, William Gibson) and even many of the lesser authors are familiar to anyone who even occasionally reads Asimov's or Analog.
The problem here is that the list is so massive, there's actually almost no point to it. There's no plot descriptions whatsoever attached to the list, just a link to elsewhere.
If you're going to recommend a book, I think whoever a book is being recommended to deserves at least a brief explanation of "WHY?" I know that's difficult for a long list like this, but just a sentence or two would be nice, not just a links leading eventually to Amazon.
BTW: I'm finding Greg Bear's latest series a tad scientifically iffy, and his characters unbearably (no pun intended) flat and boring. The new William Gibson book, on the other hand, has enough of his signiture sarcastic view of mass-media to be entertaining, but that's just my humble opinion. Go read your own books.
I've got a lot of family in New Mexico and Arizona, and I've actually been to a couple towns which claim to have his body, and you know what?
Nobody really cares, outside of those towns.
The problem is, some of these town, having basically nothing aside from big-ass desert, have so little in the way of anything whatsoever, that some of these little towns a hundred miles from anything have to go out of their ways to rationalize their existance.
And you know what's really shocking? It's not even a tourist thing. There's not that much cash in it. Nobody makes holy pilgrimages to Billy the Kid's tomb. It's a pride thing. It's completely about these towns wanting some claim to history, however miniscule.
It's rather sad really. Not unlike the town of Roswell, where you can't go downtown without seeing a dozen shops selling schlocky plastic alien trinkets.
Alright, I'll give you that one. Been eyeing Simcity 4, but all the reviews have been saying give it a miss until some more bug patches come out. Sometimes, I do trust them.
But then, I've yet to read a bad review of Tekken 4. I HATE Tekken 4. The fact that I passionately hate this game and havn't seen any reviews knocking it makes me wonder if I'm on anywhere near the same wavelength as most of the people whose reviews I read, and therefore makes me doubt even the reviews I chose to trust.
But then, I guess part of being an individual is disagreeing with the critics every once and a while.
That, and part of me is still jealous of people who get to play video games for a living......
I was happy to see that he pointed out that there is a fairly sizable difference between game reviewers, and the average gamer. Now, don't get me wrong, I love Gamespot and IGN as much as the next guy, and I always yank a few reviews before I buy a game, but most of their reviewers have a different philosophy than I do.
They sit there and carefully and systematically work through each game, taking notes on the sound, music, graphics, etc. They evaluate the game the same way Roger Ebert carefully picks through a movie and sees it's good bits and bad bits.
But then, every once in a while, the normal non-professional movie fan just says "Fuck it," and rents Six String Samurai.
It's the same thing with games. I mean, I loved the depth and careful construction that went into the last Final Fantasy game. I appreciate the graphical detail in the last Warcraft game. But unlike a professional game reviewer, I'll occasionally just say screw it all and toss a quarter in the Ms. Pac-Man machine in the local arcade.
The average gamer often just wants something fun. Games that start as 300 page design documents just don't sound fun, no matter how much effort went into them. Now, maybe if the game started out as a 15 page comic book.....
I have to say, I really tried to like Buffy. Every season or so, I'd watch an episode or two, just because I knew plenty of people who swore by it, and it never really rubbed off.
But it wasn't the angst. In fact, it was more the lack of angst. Anne Rice books, though they kinda wear on you after the first half dozen or so, at least have some amount of feeling. At least with angsty books, there has to be a bit of introspection in the characters. A certain amount of emotional depth which is inherent in the plotline.
The vampires in Buffy, however, always fell into two types. There were the "funny vampires," and the "really angry evil vampires." It seemed the basic episode tended to degenerate into "vampire mastermind has plan, tells inept-yet-funny henchmen to carry it out, day is saved by meddling kids." In effect, it was like watching those old Scooby Doo cartoons.
Now, don't get me wrong. I kinda like those old Scooby Doo cartoons. It's mindless entertainment. I can see where other people might like Buffy, I just never understood why they needed 7 years of it. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
Now, I was never a regular reader of the comics, but I did have a healthy respect for them. So I cringed when they trotted out the giant glowing "LXG" logo.
Where's the fun in that? The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen wouldn't use an acronym like that? In fact, I find it hard to swallow that ANY Victorian would use the letter "X" for extra. I guess they were just trying to make the logo not say "LEG."
The clips in the background look good, but I worry that the trailer's missing the feel of the comic completely. Something about the entire thing just doesn't feel Victorian. To much of the overblown "action movie" music, possibly. I'm going to cross my fingers and hope they pull off this movie...
I'm not going to deny that this is one of the all time greatest sci-fi novels. It is. I absolutely loved this book.
What I worry about is that it's the type of sci-fi which mostly revolves around characters who spend most of the story simply gawking in awe and wonder at whatever they stumble across. In a book, this is alright, as the author can stop and explain in detail what a character's looking at and why it's important. However, this is exactly the sort of thing which creates lousy sci-fi movies.
2001 is possibly the only movie ever to make this sort of extended gawking interesting. I might hear some objections, but I thought the first Star Trek movie came pretty close to pulling it off too. More recently, however, we've seen movies like the Solaris remake and Mission to Mars do this in exactly the WRONG way.
I'm going to have to say I'm going to wait for this one with nervous anticipation. There's so many ways this movie can go completely wrong, yet, somehow I still want to see them make the attempt.
Thinking about it a little more, I think I might have a fundamental disagreement with what most people think a handheld should be.
When I look at a PDA, my mind doesn't look at it as an organizer. Certainly it serves that role, but I think we're limiting outselves if we leave it at something that simple. Deep down, I really want this technology to evolve to a point where what I hold in my hand is something slightly less powerful and versitile as a laptop. If I just wanted to plan my day, I'd have stuck with paper.
The way I see it, the goal of new technology isn't to ask ourselves "what can I live with," so much as "what else can we do with this." This will, of course, mean that when I dump this m105 about a month from now, I'm probably going to have to spend substantially more than the ~$150 I paid for it when it first came out.
Which is part of what bothers me. Spend $200 bucks today on a handheld, and you're likely buying something not unlike what was available 2 years ago for $200 bucks. There's a strange lack of progress in PDA technology which I simply don't understand. I don't blame Palm for this one, it's universal. Nobody's particularly impressed with Palm hardware lately, but there's little else out there that's really substantially better.
I saw this headline, and immediately jumped for joy when I heard Palm was going to release a new sub-$100 handheld. "Finlly!" I thought, something that could replace my aging Palm M105.
But then I checked the details. 2 meg of memory? Exactly what can you do with that much space these days, even on a handheld? The idea seems to be to attract new customers, but why would you sell something that's obviously less powered than the lowest current model?
You're not going to attract new customers by putting out lousy hardware. Palm's gotten bad press lately for failure to innovate, and this is not helping.
For those who didn't know, the novel was serialized in Analog, starting January 2002, and running for about three issues.
I know the concept sounds goofy. I wasn't all that keen on reading a "Neanderthals run around Toronto" story either, considering the crap that's been made using plotlines like this in movies.
Nevertheless, the book's well researched, well written, and altogether enjoyable. You do owe it to yourselves to at least thumb through this one.
I mean, we all know someone with an Analog subscription, right? Just go bug them for a couple of back issues.
Capitalism, Amazon, and Existentialism
on
Amazon.Heartbreak
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I won't debate for a moment the idea that Amazon is a massive, greedy, corporate mega-mall. To wander around their site is to be bombarded with advertisement after advertisement, ad nauseum.
They are also by far the best major book distributor out there.
More to the point, they're still in business
The way I see it, "selling out" may have been the only real way to survive the dot-com crash. Now I know, they STILL havn't turned a profit, but unlike the legions of now defunct companies, they still have something of a chance of doing so. Survival, much as we may not like to admit it, occasionally depends on watching the stock value, and digging up some operating costs.
That isn't to say that the compitition doesn't have a few things going for them. I always found B&N's site useful for out of print books, and Books a Million's usually pennies cheaper, but both use somewhat shallow imitations of Amazon's site design.
I might not like everything about it, but I use Amazon VERY often, and until there's a clearly better alternative, that will not change.
p.s. fictionwise.com comes in a close second for my favorite literature site. I still cling to an absurd sense of optimism in regard to e-books.
Looking at this thing, I must admit it seems pretty cool. I am however somewhat wary of anything which is pushed simply as an e-book reader.
Like just about everyone else, I've got gripes about the copy protection, book pricing, etc. about e-books...but the fact remains that I read quite a few of them. In fact, I don't think I'd make it through busrides to work without my e-copy of Analog.
The thing is though, I read it on my Palmpilot. It's not even a GOOD Palmpilot. It's one of those crappy m105 models. Simply put, I've already got a little green monochrome book reader.
To convince me to buy this, it would have to be dirt cheap. I mean real cheap. Sub $100 type of cheap.
I actually voted for Empire in that poll (and yea, I feel guilty about sometimes using MSNBC too), but that 52% kinda surprised me.
I kinda smell some flames coming, but doesn't anyone else wonder why the the one voted best wasn't directed by Lucas? While I'm at it, didn't it make the least money of the 1st 3 movies? Why is that?
Or, maybe I'm spending way too much time thinking about Star Wars.
I think one of the main problems Lucas is running up against is the fact that single movies don't exert the influence on mass culture they once did. Simply put, for quite some time now there has been a lack of big movies that "everyone" goes to see. This is not exactly a bad thing, it just shows that movies are differently targeted.
For example, if you ask me, there's been a distinct increase in the quality of war movies over the past decade, even though less people are going to see them. Saving Private Ryan wasn't for everyone, but I think most would agree it was at least a better movie than Force 10 from Navarone.
To get back to Star Wars though, I really think a big part of the problem with Episode I was the attempt to appeal to a wide audience. Keeping away from flaming comments about commercialism, the objective should not be to make a movie EVERYONE likes, but to make a movie every will agree was not a waste of time, even if it wasn't their cup of tea.
Debate me if you will, but I see Empire Strikes Back in this vein. A bit darker then the other movies, but bad? No. It was different, and it was good. Did everyone like it? No again, but few claim to outright hate the movie. It was quality filmmaking, not churned out sludge for mass appeal.
Oddly enough, there was an electrical fire in the server room at my campus just a week ago, and I'm told the soot caked on the motherboards was "quite black."
Now that I know this sort of thing's fashionable, I might just have to take the time to set a few fires off around the office too....
"The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, however, disagreed....saying it would hinder online commerce and would open a plethora of class-action lawsuits."
I must say, I really despise this argument. Doing the right thing, even with regards to law, should not be put on the backburner simply because it's regarded as "too much trouble."
The fact of the matter is, would you really be upset if every spammer on the web was hit with multiple class-action suits? Do you really think the economy would be harmed if I got a little less pr0n in my inbox every day?
Slashdot Mirror
Much as I'm loathe to say anything good about Microsoft, I'd probably install Vista on my right eye if Microsoft could get me some decent municipal wifi in the cities I frequent. Anything which brings about more free wifi is a good thing in my book.
Only if I can get a toy that I can use to shoot at the screen during episodes. Those things were awesome.
Agreed, when B5 came out it was going head to head with Star Trek DS9 for the title of "best series about guys on a space station."
The thing was, the early seasons of D29 followed the old Star Trek formula of pressing the "reset" button after every episode, while B5 went off on its arc, with massive plot elements changing from episode to episode. After a few seasons, it was clear that B5 was going somewhere, while DS9 was still mostly about some guys hanging out in Quark's bar. Cheers in space. Fun, and I watched it, but not great stuff.
But then, in the later seasons, even DS9 made itself a nice little plot arc, which I always saw as a late admission that the Babylon 5 way had something going for it.
Are you kidding? The last movie I saw on an airplane was the Shaggy Dog remake...
If I'm going to plunge to earth from a mile above, I want to make damn sure that I'm watching a movie I picked. Or at least, not Shaggy Dog.
I pretty much leave my mail client open all day, and it's set to go check for new mail every 10 minutes or so, and make a little noise if it finds anything. Technically, this means I check my e-mail 6 times an hour, or 144 times a day.
Per e-mail address. There's several.
Am I addicted? Hell no. Most of this happens when I'm watching TV, or eating a sandwitch, or on the toilet. It's kinda like my telephone, it only becomes important when it rings.
And sometimes it even rings when I'm on the toilet, and I ignore it.
It's that time effect that's really got me worried. I'll admit, it's a step in the right direction, but 10 years seems a little fruity. It's fairly easy to point to a spot on a map of California and shout "There will be a quake here in ten years or less!" In fact, I think I can do this with a few different disasters...
There will be an Earthquake in Japan sometime in the next ten years!
There will be another Hurricane in Florida sometime in the next ten years!
There will be a volcano in Hawaii in the next ten years!
I'll need to change my underpants sometime in the next ten years!
Do you see how easy this is? Little step in the right direction, sure, but ten years is a damn long time.
The last time I checked, commercial airplanes in the US weren't allowed to fly past the speed of sound to prevent sonic booms (which, incidently, growing up next to an Air Force base, I can tell you is really something you get used to quickly).
The way I see it, my getting across the country isn't a matter of airplanes not being able to go faster, it's airplanes not being allowed to go faster.
Now, a couple of Maglevs might be nice....
Amen, brother! I spent a couple bucks at the arcade not too long ago trying to struggle with the almost unplayable controls on Tekken 4, before giving up, going home, and remembering how much better things were when E. Honda was around.
I really can't follow the old=crappy logic at all. This planet's a good 6 billion, maybe we should go find a new one? Screw being backward compatible with Earth-based life, just find us something new and cheap!
I'm seeing a lot of comments on here claiming they don't actually play PS1 games on a PS2.
Well, let me take a stand and say, I do.
And quite frankly, I'm not swayed by the argument that "as soon as the new system is released, you can pick up an old one for almost nothing." It would fall subject to a problem I have right now, that being "physical space."
I can't physically shove another game system into the corner of my room devoted to consoles without unplugging an old one. It's a small space. If I had to have a PS1 and a PS2, that would mean unplugging my old Dreamcast. Yes, horror of horrors, I actually do still use that old Sega box. Hate to say it, but Grandia II and Code Veronica looked like crap on their PS2 ports.
I might unplug that box if I could run both Xbox 1 and 2 games though. I just need Microsoft to give me the reason.
And this "intellectual property" argument smells a bit fishy. I was under the impression that MS had such tight control over the games on the Xbox that if Bill Gates asked, they'd sprout legs, get out of their cases, and jump through flaming hoops. I think Billy just wants me to pay for stuff twice.
If the Xbox2 isn't backward compatible, how much do you want to bet a handful of the more popular games will get remade with "special features" and released again on Xbox2?
Looking over the list quickly, there aren't a whole lot of surprises here. The usual crop of perennial big authors are here, (Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, Orson Scott Card, William Gibson) and even many of the lesser authors are familiar to anyone who even occasionally reads Asimov's or Analog.
The problem here is that the list is so massive, there's actually almost no point to it. There's no plot descriptions whatsoever attached to the list, just a link to elsewhere.
If you're going to recommend a book, I think whoever a book is being recommended to deserves at least a brief explanation of "WHY?" I know that's difficult for a long list like this, but just a sentence or two would be nice, not just a links leading eventually to Amazon.
BTW: I'm finding Greg Bear's latest series a tad scientifically iffy, and his characters unbearably (no pun intended) flat and boring. The new William Gibson book, on the other hand, has enough of his signiture sarcastic view of mass-media to be entertaining, but that's just my humble opinion. Go read your own books.
I've got a lot of family in New Mexico and Arizona, and I've actually been to a couple towns which claim to have his body, and you know what?
Nobody really cares, outside of those towns.
The problem is, some of these town, having basically nothing aside from big-ass desert, have so little in the way of anything whatsoever, that some of these little towns a hundred miles from anything have to go out of their ways to rationalize their existance.
And you know what's really shocking? It's not even a tourist thing. There's not that much cash in it. Nobody makes holy pilgrimages to Billy the Kid's tomb. It's a pride thing. It's completely about these towns wanting some claim to history, however miniscule.
It's rather sad really. Not unlike the town of Roswell, where you can't go downtown without seeing a dozen shops selling schlocky plastic alien trinkets.
Alright, I'll give you that one. Been eyeing Simcity 4, but all the reviews have been saying give it a miss until some more bug patches come out. Sometimes, I do trust them.
But then, I've yet to read a bad review of Tekken 4. I HATE Tekken 4. The fact that I passionately hate this game and havn't seen any reviews knocking it makes me wonder if I'm on anywhere near the same wavelength as most of the people whose reviews I read, and therefore makes me doubt even the reviews I chose to trust.
But then, I guess part of being an individual is disagreeing with the critics every once and a while.
That, and part of me is still jealous of people who get to play video games for a living......
I was happy to see that he pointed out that there is a fairly sizable difference between game reviewers, and the average gamer. Now, don't get me wrong, I love Gamespot and IGN as much as the next guy, and I always yank a few reviews before I buy a game, but most of their reviewers have a different philosophy than I do.
They sit there and carefully and systematically work through each game, taking notes on the sound, music, graphics, etc. They evaluate the game the same way Roger Ebert carefully picks through a movie and sees it's good bits and bad bits.
But then, every once in a while, the normal non-professional movie fan just says "Fuck it," and rents Six String Samurai.
It's the same thing with games. I mean, I loved the depth and careful construction that went into the last Final Fantasy game. I appreciate the graphical detail in the last Warcraft game. But unlike a professional game reviewer, I'll occasionally just say screw it all and toss a quarter in the Ms. Pac-Man machine in the local arcade.
The average gamer often just wants something fun. Games that start as 300 page design documents just don't sound fun, no matter how much effort went into them. Now, maybe if the game started out as a 15 page comic book.....
I have to say, I really tried to like Buffy. Every season or so, I'd watch an episode or two, just because I knew plenty of people who swore by it, and it never really rubbed off.
But it wasn't the angst. In fact, it was more the lack of angst. Anne Rice books, though they kinda wear on you after the first half dozen or so, at least have some amount of feeling. At least with angsty books, there has to be a bit of introspection in the characters. A certain amount of emotional depth which is inherent in the plotline.
The vampires in Buffy, however, always fell into two types. There were the "funny vampires," and the "really angry evil vampires." It seemed the basic episode tended to degenerate into "vampire mastermind has plan, tells inept-yet-funny henchmen to carry it out, day is saved by meddling kids." In effect, it was like watching those old Scooby Doo cartoons.
Now, don't get me wrong. I kinda like those old Scooby Doo cartoons. It's mindless entertainment. I can see where other people might like Buffy, I just never understood why they needed 7 years of it. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
Just my 2c.
Now, I was never a regular reader of the comics, but I did have a healthy respect for them. So I cringed when they trotted out the giant glowing "LXG" logo.
Where's the fun in that? The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen wouldn't use an acronym like that? In fact, I find it hard to swallow that ANY Victorian would use the letter "X" for extra. I guess they were just trying to make the logo not say "LEG."
The clips in the background look good, but I worry that the trailer's missing the feel of the comic completely. Something about the entire thing just doesn't feel Victorian. To much of the overblown "action movie" music, possibly. I'm going to cross my fingers and hope they pull off this movie...
I'm not going to deny that this is one of the all time greatest sci-fi novels. It is. I absolutely loved this book.
What I worry about is that it's the type of sci-fi which mostly revolves around characters who spend most of the story simply gawking in awe and wonder at whatever they stumble across. In a book, this is alright, as the author can stop and explain in detail what a character's looking at and why it's important. However, this is exactly the sort of thing which creates lousy sci-fi movies.
2001 is possibly the only movie ever to make this sort of extended gawking interesting. I might hear some objections, but I thought the first Star Trek movie came pretty close to pulling it off too. More recently, however, we've seen movies like the Solaris remake and Mission to Mars do this in exactly the WRONG way.
I'm going to have to say I'm going to wait for this one with nervous anticipation. There's so many ways this movie can go completely wrong, yet, somehow I still want to see them make the attempt.
I mean, what if they do it right?
It'll be damn cool, that's what.
Thinking about it a little more, I think I might have a fundamental disagreement with what most people think a handheld should be.
When I look at a PDA, my mind doesn't look at it as an organizer. Certainly it serves that role, but I think we're limiting outselves if we leave it at something that simple. Deep down, I really want this technology to evolve to a point where what I hold in my hand is something slightly less powerful and versitile as a laptop. If I just wanted to plan my day, I'd have stuck with paper.
The way I see it, the goal of new technology isn't to ask ourselves "what can I live with," so much as "what else can we do with this." This will, of course, mean that when I dump this m105 about a month from now, I'm probably going to have to spend substantially more than the ~$150 I paid for it when it first came out.
Which is part of what bothers me. Spend $200 bucks today on a handheld, and you're likely buying something not unlike what was available 2 years ago for $200 bucks. There's a strange lack of progress in PDA technology which I simply don't understand. I don't blame Palm for this one, it's universal. Nobody's particularly impressed with Palm hardware lately, but there's little else out there that's really substantially better.
Perhaps slightly better, but nothing substantial.
I saw this headline, and immediately jumped for joy when I heard Palm was going to release a new sub-$100 handheld. "Finlly!" I thought, something that could replace my aging Palm M105.
But then I checked the details. 2 meg of memory? Exactly what can you do with that much space these days, even on a handheld? The idea seems to be to attract new customers, but why would you sell something that's obviously less powered than the lowest current model?
You're not going to attract new customers by putting out lousy hardware. Palm's gotten bad press lately for failure to innovate, and this is not helping.
For those who didn't know, the novel was serialized in Analog, starting January 2002, and running for about three issues.
I know the concept sounds goofy. I wasn't all that keen on reading a "Neanderthals run around Toronto" story either, considering the crap that's been made using plotlines like this in movies.
Nevertheless, the book's well researched, well written, and altogether enjoyable. You do owe it to yourselves to at least thumb through this one.
I mean, we all know someone with an Analog subscription, right? Just go bug them for a couple of back issues.
I won't debate for a moment the idea that Amazon is a massive, greedy, corporate mega-mall. To wander around their site is to be bombarded with advertisement after advertisement, ad nauseum.
They are also by far the best major book distributor out there.
More to the point, they're still in business
The way I see it, "selling out" may have been the only real way to survive the dot-com crash. Now I know, they STILL havn't turned a profit, but unlike the legions of now defunct companies, they still have something of a chance of doing so. Survival, much as we may not like to admit it, occasionally depends on watching the stock value, and digging up some operating costs.
That isn't to say that the compitition doesn't have a few things going for them. I always found B&N's site useful for out of print books, and Books a Million's usually pennies cheaper, but both use somewhat shallow imitations of Amazon's site design.
I might not like everything about it, but I use Amazon VERY often, and until there's a clearly better alternative, that will not change.
p.s. fictionwise.com comes in a close second for my favorite literature site. I still cling to an absurd sense of optimism in regard to e-books.
Looking at this thing, I must admit it seems pretty cool. I am however somewhat wary of anything which is pushed simply as an e-book reader.
Like just about everyone else, I've got gripes about the copy protection, book pricing, etc. about e-books...but the fact remains that I read quite a few of them. In fact, I don't think I'd make it through busrides to work without my e-copy of Analog.
The thing is though, I read it on my Palmpilot. It's not even a GOOD Palmpilot. It's one of those crappy m105 models. Simply put, I've already got a little green monochrome book reader.
To convince me to buy this, it would have to be dirt cheap. I mean real cheap. Sub $100 type of cheap.
I honestly don't see it happening.
I actually voted for Empire in that poll (and yea, I feel guilty about sometimes using MSNBC too), but that 52% kinda surprised me.
I kinda smell some flames coming, but doesn't anyone else wonder why the the one voted best wasn't directed by Lucas? While I'm at it, didn't it make the least money of the 1st 3 movies? Why is that?
Or, maybe I'm spending way too much time thinking about Star Wars.
I think one of the main problems Lucas is running up against is the fact that single movies don't exert the influence on mass culture they once did. Simply put, for quite some time now there has been a lack of big movies that "everyone" goes to see. This is not exactly a bad thing, it just shows that movies are differently targeted.
For example, if you ask me, there's been a distinct increase in the quality of war movies over the past decade, even though less people are going to see them. Saving Private Ryan wasn't for everyone, but I think most would agree it was at least a better movie than Force 10 from Navarone.
To get back to Star Wars though, I really think a big part of the problem with Episode I was the attempt to appeal to a wide audience. Keeping away from flaming comments about commercialism, the objective should not be to make a movie EVERYONE likes, but to make a movie every will agree was not a waste of time, even if it wasn't their cup of tea.
Debate me if you will, but I see Empire Strikes Back in this vein. A bit darker then the other movies, but bad? No. It was different, and it was good. Did everyone like it? No again, but few claim to outright hate the movie. It was quality filmmaking, not churned out sludge for mass appeal.
Oddly enough, there was an electrical fire in the server room at my campus just a week ago, and I'm told the soot caked on the motherboards was "quite black."
Now that I know this sort of thing's fashionable, I might just have to take the time to set a few fires off around the office too....
"The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, however, disagreed....saying it would hinder online commerce and would open a plethora of class-action lawsuits."
I must say, I really despise this argument. Doing the right thing, even with regards to law, should not be put on the backburner simply because it's regarded as "too much trouble."
The fact of the matter is, would you really be upset if every spammer on the web was hit with multiple class-action suits? Do you really think the economy would be harmed if I got a little less pr0n in my inbox every day?
Didn't think so.