How silly. Considering what/who the corporations back we'd be better off without 95% of it, and the musicians who make that 5% of worthwhile music could probably make a better living without so much hyped competition for listeners' cash.
And that's just live music, already-recorded music and current musicians could quite possibly be better off after the inevitable game of musical chairs (read copyrights) as the industry buys them back up again.
Album production costs have been dropping for a decade as the tools have become more available to mere computer users as software, minus the corporate overhead. It's like the effect of desktop publishing on typesetting -- 35,000 times as many people are setting type now as opposed to when you had to pay $40+/hr for somebody to type it into specialized iron.
It's not that the only choices were _ever_ just BS & N'S, their corporate sponsors are just expanding to fill the bandwidth so profit can be maximized.
Not so sure on the second, but it's darn true that stories with lotsa comments (>350 or so) are freezing my machine for several minutes as the browser renders them for display.
Re:Relativity, Anyone?
on
The Forever War
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'd also suggest Frederik Pohl's story "The Gold at Starbow's End" (collected in a book of the same title), plus the novel Gateway from around the same time. The relativistic physics speculation in these 25yo works may not have been treated kindly by subsequent developments but the fictive descriptions are worth the read.
BTW, Forever War isn't a novel but a concatenation of a series of stories published in Analog magazine. At the time Haldeman acknowledged the influence of both Troopers and his Vietnam experiences. Some may also enjoy his mundane (non-sfnal) novel about Vietnam, War Year.
A friend of mine told me about visiting a bookstore in England that had the sf and fantasy in a section called "Imaginative Literature," which made him wonder what the rest of the literature there was.
[I had a lot more to say, but Internet Exploiter erased it. I'll add more later today.]
Sorry, buddy. Professional writers, editors, and coders want to get paid for their work -- you see, they pay for material goods with that money, shelter and food are useful even for "creative types". And if you can't recognize the difference between professional writing and editing and amateur stuff, there are plenty of half-assed fiction sites out there for your pleasure. Perhaps you'd like some slash fiction?
(This is not a diatribe against amateur online writing in general, some of which is damn fine. I read a lot of it and a fair amount of the best is done by professionals in their spare time. How far do you think Open Source would get if none of the coders had day jobs?)
Weirdly enough, I just had a similar experience. Two or three weeks ago I suddenly thought of the MSC stories for what musta been the first time in twenty years. Last week a copy of the Scholastic edition popped up in an unsorted pile of books in a bookstore near where I work. And today/. joins in with this story...
Just don't use the recipes, especially the ones for explosives, unless you're interested in qualifying for the Darwin awards.
There's lots of other stuff that'll scratch the same itch textually -- some of the memoirs of Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary are fun and also insightful wrt dealing with denizens of byzantine power structures. I believe some of WSBurroughs' book The Job could be relevant as well.
OSX takes the lead for now in the cool GUI department, but those who
accuse MS of stealing ideas from Aqua are overlooking a key point in
the embrace and extend philosophy. Like Win95, 98, and ME before it;
Windows XP will not only adopt new interface ideas, but those ideas
will actually be tested for usuability and integration with existing
user practices.
I witnessed usability testing at MSFT a few years ago on a specific product (not an OS, so YMMV) and though it was a nice gesture the testing occurred too late in the development cycle for any real insights to affect the interface. And it didn't look as though the analysis of the data was very deep, I recall the tech missing that the users didn't recognize a widget on a configuration screen as scrollable.
And it seems to me that until recently Apple's done the best job of integrating usability into an interface that's powerful and doesn't make you want to scratch your eyes out. (One exception: the single-button mouse, suitable for children and beginners, constraining for skilled users.) Still, it looks as though they're jettisoning a lot of the basic principles these days.
Funny how both MSFT and Apple seem to stumble the most when they target the consumer rather than the professional.
Slashdot Mirror
How silly. Considering what/who the corporations back we'd be better off without 95% of it, and the musicians who make that 5% of worthwhile music could probably make a better living without so much hyped competition for listeners' cash.
And that's just live music, already-recorded music and current musicians could quite possibly be better off after the inevitable game of musical chairs (read copyrights) as the industry buys them back up again.
Album production costs have been dropping for a decade as the tools have become more available to mere computer users as software, minus the corporate overhead. It's like the effect of desktop publishing on typesetting -- 35,000 times as many people are setting type now as opposed to when you had to pay $40+/hr for somebody to type it into specialized iron.
It's not that the only choices were _ever_ just BS & N'S, their corporate sponsors are just expanding to fill the bandwidth so profit can be maximized.
Think about this the next time you hear the results of some political poll.
I love those December-August romances.
I'd agree with you on the first.
Not so sure on the second, but it's darn true that stories with lotsa comments (>350 or so) are freezing my machine for several minutes as the browser renders them for display.
I'd also suggest Frederik Pohl's story "The Gold at Starbow's End" (collected in a book of the same title), plus the novel Gateway from around the same time. The relativistic physics speculation in these 25yo works may not have been treated kindly by subsequent developments but the fictive descriptions are worth the read.
BTW, Forever War isn't a novel but a concatenation of a series of stories published in Analog magazine. At the time Haldeman acknowledged the influence of both Troopers and his Vietnam experiences. Some may also enjoy his mundane (non-sfnal) novel about Vietnam, War Year.
You seem to have missed the point, since that's what he's saying. Yow!
A friend of mine told me about visiting a bookstore in England that had the sf and fantasy in a section called "Imaginative Literature," which made him wonder what the rest of the literature there was.
[I had a lot more to say, but Internet Exploiter erased it. I'll add more later today.]
Sorry, buddy. Professional writers, editors, and coders want to get paid for their work -- you see, they pay for material goods with that money, shelter and food are useful even for "creative types". And if you can't recognize the difference between professional writing and editing and amateur stuff, there are plenty of half-assed fiction sites out there for your pleasure. Perhaps you'd like some slash fiction?
(This is not a diatribe against amateur online writing in general, some of which is damn fine. I read a lot of it and a fair amount of the best is done by professionals in their spare time. How far do you think Open Source would get if none of the coders had day jobs?)
I believe that was Digital Research, not Digital Equipment Corporation.
Yeah, I know, don't feed the trolls. Are they animals, or some form of insect life, I wonder?
I think yr stats are way too low -- or are humans not animals?
Weirdly enough, I just had a similar experience. Two or three weeks ago I suddenly thought of the MSC stories for what musta been the first time in twenty years. Last week a copy of the Scholastic edition popped up in an unsorted pile of books in a bookstore near where I work. And today /. joins in with this story...
Just don't use the recipes, especially the ones for explosives, unless you're interested in qualifying for the Darwin awards.
There's lots of other stuff that'll scratch the same itch textually -- some of the memoirs of Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary are fun and also insightful wrt dealing with denizens of byzantine power structures. I believe some of WSBurroughs' book The Job could be relevant as well.
I witnessed usability testing at MSFT a few years ago on a specific product (not an OS, so YMMV) and though it was a nice gesture the testing occurred too late in the development cycle for any real insights to affect the interface. And it didn't look as though the analysis of the data was very deep, I recall the tech missing that the users didn't recognize a widget on a configuration screen as scrollable.
And it seems to me that until recently Apple's done the best job of integrating usability into an interface that's powerful and doesn't make you want to scratch your eyes out. (One exception: the single-button mouse, suitable for children and beginners, constraining for skilled users.) Still, it looks as though they're jettisoning a lot of the basic principles these days.
Funny how both MSFT and Apple seem to stumble the most when they target the consumer rather than the professional.