Sigh. Slashdot really needs to grow up. Obama does something conservative? He's just like Bush. Obama does something not conservative? He's a socialist or radical environmentalist or appeaser or (insert your tired negative label here).
I guess the only way Obama could appeal to this crowd is if he morphed into Sarah Palin. Naked.
Actually, people do go to Radio Shack for cell phones. And other consumer electronics. Never mind that service, quality, and prices all suck.
Amongst people I know, it's the technically clueless, the people who panic when faced with even the simplest problem, who seem least able to resist this particular brand. Maybe they find all those piles of mysterious high tech crap reassuring. It tells them that the people who work there Know What They're Doing.
Gawd, you must be even more ancient than I am, if you remember actually buying a single transistor!
That's what killed Radio Shack (in the form you fondly remember it) and Heathkit and a lot of cool stuff. Nobody wanted to hack out simple circuits after complex circuits became became (literally) cheaper than dirt.
Who else? The clerk at Radio Shack. Ask them anything resembling a technical question and they are guaranteed to tell you something stupid. I've been told that the particular (simple and common) connector or adapter I was looking for didn't exist, or was even physically impossible. More than once.
I've often wondered at the source of the assertive misinformedness of RS clerks. It's really, really consistent, even more so than their weird compulsion to sell you batteries you don't need. My best guess is that their training include exhortations to "Demonstrate you technical knowledge to the customer."
I'm sorry, are you saying that military torturers thought they'd be killed if they didn't obey orders?
On a battlefield, leaders certainly have the right to maintain their authority with lethal force. But even there, an officer or noncom who exercised that authority carelessly would be in for a world of hurt. I can't imagine any circumstances except a unit under actual fire from the enemy where that kind of action could take place without really strong consequences.
And a prison is not a battlefield, much less a unit under fire.
I fail to see why this is a "deeply symbolic moment in the history of operating systems" and not merely a moderately interesting moment in the corporate history of the respective companies (or, more specifically, in Red Hat's corporate history).
It's symbolic because Sun was one of the leaders of the big change that occurred at the beginning of the microcomputer era, when Unix started to replace the old mainframe OSs. And it's symbolic because Sun is the last major player to consider Unix part of its core strategy. Other Unix vendors have become insignificant (SGI, SCO), disappeared, or changed their emphasis to Linux and Windows (IBM, HP).
Also, if you want to run a supported, commercial Unix on commodity hardware, Solaris is really your only option. Which is why both HP and Dell offer Solaris preinstalled. Though I don't suppose they sell a lot of those systems.
As a benchmark of the rise of Linux and the fall of Unix, yeah, it's not that big a deal. But symbols and benchmarks are different things.
This may all be a big yawn to somebody whose career started after Linux began to take over. But to those of us who spent most of our professional lives working with Unix (I started in the early 70s, before Unix was even available commercially; I've worked for 5 different Unix vendors, including Sun) it's as big a symbol as the takeoff of a certain helicopter on Tuesday.
Your comment might better be addressed to the guy who submitted this story. I wasn't advocating the need for "simplistic morality plays", I was questioning the story's assumption that BSG was one.
I take it you're not a trekkie? If you're allergic to SMPs, I'd say the entire franchise is toxic to you! Sadly, some of us like that shit.
Sigh. Did you miss my use of the word naval? He's a "captain" of a civilian craft. (Technically, "master" is more correct, though you rarely hear that term outside the merchant marine.) So he doesn't have a naval rank to confuse anybody about.
In the real world, navy tugboats (the current U.S. Navy outsources that function, but they used to have their own) are usually commanded by petty officers. I wonder if the convention of captain-by-courtesy extends to them? I suspect not.
Sigh. Not your fault, but yours is the first post I've seen that actually tries to answer the question. To find your post I had to skim past 100 posts that say things like:
Stop watching TV
Device X is really great (never mind that Device X isn't coupon eligible)
Why do you want a hackable device? You can get this functionality off the shelf.
I swear, Slashdot conversations get more and more solipsistic every day.
Heinlein did a decent job with Johnny Rico. But if you think that represents the epitome of character development, you need to read more fiction that isn't SF.
Dude, get a life. I don't have specific figures, and I don't have time to go searching for them. But any book you read about TOS says that it was always in rating hell.
But even if it had been a blockbuster, your whole argument says that you need to get out more. In the 60s, people were fighting and dying over civil rights. If you think any TV show would have the same kind of impact on society, you watch way too much TV.
So, it only took them 3 iterations to get this detail down? And then it was only one obscure episode in the least-watched series? I stand by my previous statements. Especially since I saw a lot of commanders of small vessels in TNG wearing four pips. Not to mention the heroine of Voyager...
You're right. But when you adapt most fiction, you can usually preserve something of the original idea. War and Peace: the Movie is still a story about Napoleon's invasion of Russia even with 90% of the book missing.
That doesn't work with SF, because the stuff you have to take out is precisely the stuff real SF fans read the genre for.
If you think that, your reading/viewing habits are very narrow indeed. During the 60s, any TV viewer would see endless speeches by civil rights leaders (MLK was only the most prominent of many), demonstrations, demonstrations being broken up by racist thugs with dogs and firehoses, lynchings, claims by right-wing pundits that the whole thing was commie plot, calls for the impeachment of judges that struck down Jim Crow laws, and a lot more.
Compared to that, a black woman in a futuristic uniform saying "Hailing frequencies open!" hardly rates, especially on a TV show that never got decent ratings. It mattered mostly to black people who were delighted to see a black woman on TV who wasn't somebody's maid.
Nitpick: TOS was on NBC, not CBS. Their current affiliation with CBS is relatively recent, coming from a long series of mergers and acquistions that resulted in Paramount and CBS being under the same corporate umbrella.
Also, I don't think any of the references to the Viet Nam war really count as criticism. The most explicit reference was in the episode "A Private Little War", and the ending to that one sounds suspiciously like an endorsement of the Viet Nam war!
They did take some flack for their positive, nonstereotyped portrayal of black people. Some stations in the south even refused to air episodes where the relations between whites and blacks were deemed too intimate. That contributed in a small way to the social change that was going on at the time. But it's courageous only by TV standards. Compared to what some of the more courageous civil rights pioneers were doing at that time, it's positively trivial.
Now you've verged into one of my pet beliefs: that movie and TV SF (let's call it "science video") can never be "real" SF in the sense that (for example) Heinlein is SF. The problem with SV, as with all movies and TV, is that it aims at a mass audience in a compressed format. That means thoughtful exposition and intellectual complication, which is how the genre engages most of its readers, are off limits. Indeed, many people who work in the media don't even have the background to do it properly.
One reason I became a rabid trekkie early on was that TOS went further than any previous SV in trying to be real SF. One of their best inventions was Spock, who's a genuine alien, not just because he doesn't look human, but because he doesn't think human.
And yet even this key character is not carefully thought through. In an early episode, we're told that this guy's physiology is so alien that McCoy's instruments go wild on him. Later in that same episode, we get a melodramatic scene relating to his relationship with his human mother! Apparently nobody had the background to appreciate the inconsistency between these two facts. Or probably somebody did (TOS had some good scientific advisers) and the producers said, "Whatever, we need that bit of drama near the end, we're not looking for an audience that will know the difference."
Another example: Star Trek has always followed the convention that space fleet officers have naval ranks. But they've always carefully avoided the dual use of the word "captain" that's standard in real world navies. (In English-speaking countries, "captain" refers both to a rank equivalent to an army Colonel and a commander of a vessel, regardless of rank. In one of my favorite naval historical novels, The Sand Pebbles, the Captain of the U.S.S. San Pablo is a Lieutenant J.G.) A small complexity, but apparently deemed beyond the capacity of TV audiences.
Though I've always thought that this complexity was stomped on after the fact. Notice that in TOS, Kirk wears wrist insignia that anybody who knows naval ranks would recognize as a futuristic version of the "one and a half rings" of a Lt. Commander. That's about the right rank to command a ship with 400 people. But officially that's insignia of a Captain and all the other officers (regardless of rank) wear a single ring. Right.
And of course, we don't even want to talk about sound in a vacuum....
Please. There are lots of different opinions about what the "Constitutional tasks" of the government are. Even the people who wrote the thing didn't completely agree on what they were. Some early Americans insisted that a standing army or a professional police force were unconstitutional.
Imagining that there's some ideal government buried in the constitution is silly. It's on the same order as the fundamentalist demand that we judge all our moral, social, and scientific ideas solely on whether they agree with the Bible — another document that's full of ambiguity.
Which is not to run down either the Constitution or the Bible. Both are thoughtful attempts to tell lots of different people how to live together. Both are complicated, inconsistent, and ambiguous because that's how life is. Both provide good rules — but rules that need to be read with some intelligence. Claiming you're the only interpreter reading the document "literally" ends up being a selective reading designed to back up your own prejudices.
If you think that the roll of government needs to be cut way back, then argue that idea on its own merits. Don't hide behind a magic invocation of holy writ.
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh. Slashdot really needs to grow up. Obama does something conservative? He's just like Bush. Obama does something not conservative? He's a socialist or radical environmentalist or appeaser or (insert your tired negative label here).
I guess the only way Obama could appeal to this crowd is if he morphed into Sarah Palin. Naked.
Actually, people do go to Radio Shack for cell phones. And other consumer electronics. Never mind that service, quality, and prices all suck.
Amongst people I know, it's the technically clueless, the people who panic when faced with even the simplest problem, who seem least able to resist this particular brand. Maybe they find all those piles of mysterious high tech crap reassuring. It tells them that the people who work there Know What They're Doing.
Gawd, you must be even more ancient than I am, if you remember actually buying a single transistor!
That's what killed Radio Shack (in the form you fondly remember it) and Heathkit and a lot of cool stuff. Nobody wanted to hack out simple circuits after complex circuits became became (literally) cheaper than dirt.
Who else? The clerk at Radio Shack. Ask them anything resembling a technical question and they are guaranteed to tell you something stupid. I've been told that the particular (simple and common) connector or adapter I was looking for didn't exist, or was even physically impossible. More than once.
I've often wondered at the source of the assertive misinformedness of RS clerks. It's really, really consistent, even more so than their weird compulsion to sell you batteries you don't need. My best guess is that their training include exhortations to "Demonstrate you technical knowledge to the customer."
You just assumed that I had cable. Reasonable mistake.
I'm sorry, are you saying that military torturers thought they'd be killed if they didn't obey orders?
On a battlefield, leaders certainly have the right to maintain their authority with lethal force. But even there, an officer or noncom who exercised that authority carelessly would be in for a world of hurt. I can't imagine any circumstances except a unit under actual fire from the enemy where that kind of action could take place without really strong consequences.
And a prison is not a battlefield, much less a unit under fire.
I fail to see why this is a "deeply symbolic moment in the history of operating systems" and not merely a moderately interesting moment in the corporate history of the respective companies (or, more specifically, in Red Hat's corporate history).
It's symbolic because Sun was one of the leaders of the big change that occurred at the beginning of the microcomputer era, when Unix started to replace the old mainframe OSs. And it's symbolic because Sun is the last major player to consider Unix part of its core strategy. Other Unix vendors have become insignificant (SGI, SCO), disappeared, or changed their emphasis to Linux and Windows (IBM, HP).
Also, if you want to run a supported, commercial Unix on commodity hardware, Solaris is really your only option. Which is why both HP and Dell offer Solaris preinstalled. Though I don't suppose they sell a lot of those systems.
As a benchmark of the rise of Linux and the fall of Unix, yeah, it's not that big a deal. But symbols and benchmarks are different things.
This may all be a big yawn to somebody whose career started after Linux began to take over. But to those of us who spent most of our professional lives working with Unix (I started in the early 70s, before Unix was even available commercially; I've worked for 5 different Unix vendors, including Sun) it's as big a symbol as the takeoff of a certain helicopter on Tuesday.
How can I be alacrity, when I seem to be too slow to make any sense of your joke?
I'm really tired of you liberals making fun of Sarah!
Oh for heaven sake, when you respond to a response, read the post the person's respnding to.
They do make law. Please note the difference between statue law, case law, common law, and administrative law. Only the first is done by legislation.
Your comment might better be addressed to the guy who submitted this story. I wasn't advocating the need for "simplistic morality plays", I was questioning the story's assumption that BSG was one.
I take it you're not a trekkie? If you're allergic to SMPs, I'd say the entire franchise is toxic to you! Sadly, some of us like that shit.
Sigh. Did you miss my use of the word naval? He's a "captain" of a civilian craft. (Technically, "master" is more correct, though you rarely hear that term outside the merchant marine.) So he doesn't have a naval rank to confuse anybody about.
In the real world, navy tugboats (the current U.S. Navy outsources that function, but they used to have their own) are usually commanded by petty officers. I wonder if the convention of captain-by-courtesy extends to them? I suspect not.
Sigh. Not your fault, but yours is the first post I've seen that actually tries to answer the question. To find your post I had to skim past 100 posts that say things like:
I swear, Slashdot conversations get more and more solipsistic every day.
Sigh. After all these years, there are still slashdotters who don't grasp that "hacking" and "convenience" have nothing to do with each other.
You stretch out a franchise by maintaining the thoughtful content? If popular SF franchises are any evidence, the exact opposite is true.
Heinlein did a decent job with Johnny Rico. But if you think that represents the epitome of character development, you need to read more fiction that isn't SF.
Dude, get a life. I don't have specific figures, and I don't have time to go searching for them. But any book you read about TOS says that it was always in rating hell.
But even if it had been a blockbuster, your whole argument says that you need to get out more. In the 60s, people were fighting and dying over civil rights. If you think any TV show would have the same kind of impact on society, you watch way too much TV.
So, it only took them 3 iterations to get this detail down? And then it was only one obscure episode in the least-watched series? I stand by my previous statements. Especially since I saw a lot of commanders of small vessels in TNG wearing four pips. Not to mention the heroine of Voyager...
You're right. But when you adapt most fiction, you can usually preserve something of the original idea. War and Peace: the Movie is still a story about Napoleon's invasion of Russia even with 90% of the book missing.
That doesn't work with SF, because the stuff you have to take out is precisely the stuff real SF fans read the genre for.
If you think that, your reading/viewing habits are very narrow indeed. During the 60s, any TV viewer would see endless speeches by civil rights leaders (MLK was only the most prominent of many), demonstrations, demonstrations being broken up by racist thugs with dogs and firehoses, lynchings, claims by right-wing pundits that the whole thing was commie plot, calls for the impeachment of judges that struck down Jim Crow laws, and a lot more.
Compared to that, a black woman in a futuristic uniform saying "Hailing frequencies open!" hardly rates, especially on a TV show that never got decent ratings. It mattered mostly to black people who were delighted to see a black woman on TV who wasn't somebody's maid.
Nitpick: TOS was on NBC, not CBS. Their current affiliation with CBS is relatively recent, coming from a long series of mergers and acquistions that resulted in Paramount and CBS being under the same corporate umbrella.
Also, I don't think any of the references to the Viet Nam war really count as criticism. The most explicit reference was in the episode "A Private Little War", and the ending to that one sounds suspiciously like an endorsement of the Viet Nam war!
They did take some flack for their positive, nonstereotyped portrayal of black people. Some stations in the south even refused to air episodes where the relations between whites and blacks were deemed too intimate. That contributed in a small way to the social change that was going on at the time. But it's courageous only by TV standards. Compared to what some of the more courageous civil rights pioneers were doing at that time, it's positively trivial.
Now you've verged into one of my pet beliefs: that movie and TV SF (let's call it "science video") can never be "real" SF in the sense that (for example) Heinlein is SF. The problem with SV, as with all movies and TV, is that it aims at a mass audience in a compressed format. That means thoughtful exposition and intellectual complication, which is how the genre engages most of its readers, are off limits. Indeed, many people who work in the media don't even have the background to do it properly.
One reason I became a rabid trekkie early on was that TOS went further than any previous SV in trying to be real SF. One of their best inventions was Spock, who's a genuine alien, not just because he doesn't look human, but because he doesn't think human.
And yet even this key character is not carefully thought through. In an early episode, we're told that this guy's physiology is so alien that McCoy's instruments go wild on him. Later in that same episode, we get a melodramatic scene relating to his relationship with his human mother! Apparently nobody had the background to appreciate the inconsistency between these two facts. Or probably somebody did (TOS had some good scientific advisers) and the producers said, "Whatever, we need that bit of drama near the end, we're not looking for an audience that will know the difference."
Another example: Star Trek has always followed the convention that space fleet officers have naval ranks. But they've always carefully avoided the dual use of the word "captain" that's standard in real world navies. (In English-speaking countries, "captain" refers both to a rank equivalent to an army Colonel and a commander of a vessel, regardless of rank. In one of my favorite naval historical novels, The Sand Pebbles, the Captain of the U.S.S. San Pablo is a Lieutenant J.G.) A small complexity, but apparently deemed beyond the capacity of TV audiences.
Though I've always thought that this complexity was stomped on after the fact. Notice that in TOS, Kirk wears wrist insignia that anybody who knows naval ranks would recognize as a futuristic version of the "one and a half rings" of a Lt. Commander. That's about the right rank to command a ship with 400 people. But officially that's insignia of a Captain and all the other officers (regardless of rank) wear a single ring. Right.
And of course, we don't even want to talk about sound in a vacuum....
BSG doesn't so much tackle moral questions as sort of run past them.
Please. There are lots of different opinions about what the "Constitutional tasks" of the government are. Even the people who wrote the thing didn't completely agree on what they were. Some early Americans insisted that a standing army or a professional police force were unconstitutional.
Imagining that there's some ideal government buried in the constitution is silly. It's on the same order as the fundamentalist demand that we judge all our moral, social, and scientific ideas solely on whether they agree with the Bible — another document that's full of ambiguity.
Which is not to run down either the Constitution or the Bible. Both are thoughtful attempts to tell lots of different people how to live together. Both are complicated, inconsistent, and ambiguous because that's how life is. Both provide good rules — but rules that need to be read with some intelligence. Claiming you're the only interpreter reading the document "literally" ends up being a selective reading designed to back up your own prejudices.
If you think that the roll of government needs to be cut way back, then argue that idea on its own merits. Don't hide behind a magic invocation of holy writ.