You make a good point. When the Alan Jones cash for comments scandal broke, he got absolutely slammed in court for not disclosing who was paying him to promote various things on his show.
The same should apply to tweets. They are broadcasts, and so the people making them should disclose whether it is advertising or not.
It's a pretty annoying oversight that the rpi board doesn't have any holes for mounting screws, so you'd hope that an add-on plate like this might correct that oversight.
My biggest gripe with the Software Centre is that not everything is in there. Try searching it for apache.
I know - it only shows up if you search for "apache2" and even then - none of the additional plugin components show. What the...?
I tend to mostly use "apt-cache search" and "apt-get" for my needs these days. Still faster to find and install what you are looking for than either synaptic or Software Centre.
Actually nifty, you have illustrated that you are pretty keen on how awesome you are and that nothing gets even remotely close to your awesomeness...
Don't feel too bad, you probably push around a single piece of technology in a group of people who who have no understanding but are really appreciative, it tends to give individuals an overrated sense of importance, but a need to be very critical of anything else that is actually awesome
Oh, wait! I was supposed to critic the Stephenson novel, not you... sorry
Bit of a swing and a miss there gary. I make no bones about the fact that I have the honour to work with some engineers and physicists who are absolute geniuses in every sense of the word. I'm lucky to be in the same room as them. Also, no-one has bought the technology we work on yet, we are still several years away from even attempting to find people to sell it to. Definitely no overrated sense of importance here.
I find it interesting that you start your response to my request for an adult discussion about the book with a (clumsy attempt at a) personal attack. You are clearly the type of developer transitioned to business guy (probably a BA or a PM now?) that develops an inferiority complex because he isn't working in tech any more. I can spot your kind a mile off, even though I haven't worked in IT or an IT-related field since the turn of the century.
Now that we've gotten the mutual abuse out of the way...
So, the Baroque cycle held my interest because it managed to bring together many different historical elements that preceded the Enlightenment Era. I had passing knowledge of many elements of it, but to have it all laid out in a palatable storyline with the occasional Neil-ism (bloody awful puns blown up as big as a building but still invisible to a large portion of the audience) was truly enjoyable. Amongst the high-points... Ottoman-European interactions, pirate trade in Trinidad, European recovery from the black death, transition of money from weight in minted silver to representational value... Only minor complaint was the sex scenes got a little repetitive and I could not figure out if he held himself back or was just embarrassed
You think the storyline was palatable??? My core criticism is that the overly detailed historical backdrop you describe almost completely overwhelmed the thin thread of a story running through these novels.
You might not have read it, but someone earlier in this thread compared the Baroque cycle to Les Miserables. I was stunned. All that this book has in common with the Baroque cycle is that they are both set in the past. Victor Hugo's complex and emotionally driven characters shine in comparison to the cardboard cut-outs that wander around the Baroque cycle looking for something to do. I suggest you have a read of Les Mis in order to see how this sort of historical fiction should be written.
Or, if you don't want to invest that much time in a book recommended to you by some guy on the internet that you clearly dislike, and you want to try something shorter (after all, it seems that gary is a busy guy) take a look at Connie Willis - either "Doomsday Book", or "To Say Nothing of the Dog" for shorter examples of novels where the balance between the historical backdrop and story is managed substantially better that the Baroque Cycle was.
Those are books that are actually awesome. The Baroque Cycle, unfortunately, wasn't.
See also Cryptonomicon for any of that criticism. I suspect that in one you just find the "name dropping" of the minor characters interesting and in the other you don't.
I think that for me it is more about the ratio, than the period. The ratio of story to "name dropping" was ok in Crytonomicon, whereas in Baroque Cycle I felt it got out of control. The entire Baroque cycle is at least three times the length of Crytonomicon, and seems to digress more often.
I rather enjoyed it. It reminded me a lot of Les Miserables, in that the story immersed you in the history of what was happening at the time.
I felt Baroque Cycle was nothing like Les Mis. Victor Hugo was a masterful author, and his prose always had a point.
As an example, take the priest who gave Jean Valjean his silver. Leading up to this point, there is a long digression about the priest, what he had done in the past, and his back-story. It is important, because the priest's interaction with Valjean is pivotal to the entire way Valjean sees the world, and has a very strong effect on Valjean's personality going forward. The reasons why the priest does what he does is important, which is why Victor Hugo goes into it. It is good storytelling.
On the other hand, when Neal does a long digression on a historical character in Baroque Cycle it is generally just because the character is important historically, not because the character is important to the story. Neal is just name-dropping. It is annoying, and for those who are familiar with history around that time, it is also quite boring.
I bet the dude thinks each of his individual farts has a unique and pleasant aroma, and so is worth preserving for posterity.
You know, I think that you just invalidated any opinion I had for you prior critique. Do you actually believe this, or are you just talking because you think you are clever and witty?
Ok, you got me, I don't actually believe Neal bottles his own farts.
I think the real problem with Baroque Cycle was simply an escalation of commitment. Neal had spent so much time studying various historical characters, he felt that it was a waste of time not to include what he had learnt. But for me, this made for a fairly unenjoyable book.
If you find the Baroque cycle self-indulgent drivel, then you are the problem.
Put the book down and go read something from the children's section.
Instead of sniping from behind an AC facade, why don't you point out some of the strengths of the work. I believe I clearly pointed out some of what I consider to be the many weaknesses.
Then we can have an adult-level discussion in the manner you are pretending to desire.
Some people can't handle epics. Some can. I would recommend never even acknowledging the existence of the Wheel of Time.
Dude, GP here: I love the Wheel of Time, I've read all the books so far at least twice, and I'll probably run through them again before the final novel is released next year. I'm also a fan of many other epics - such as Stephen Donaldson's Gap Sequence (imho the best space opera ever written).
It is not that I can't handle epics, it is just that I think that the Baroque Cycle is incredibly poorly written.
And yet these days you can't go anywhere without hearing people who've been influenced by the Hunger Games. The next time I hear someone talking about bread and circus, only knowing what it is because of the hunger games, I'm going to puke.
Interestingly enough, those are probably exactly the kind of people I'd prefer to keep away from science and engineering disciplines.
Maybe Neal should keep writing about dystopian futures, if only to keep these disciplines clear of weak-minded fools...
Oh jesus. Virtually every important person in technology, of the last 20 years, cites Snowcrash as a major influence on their work.
I think the reason we're going to disagree on this is that you don't mean the same thing by technology that I do.
Very few, if any of the people that I consider influential in aerospace, biotech, micro-electronics fabrication or MEMS that I've dealt with through the years would have even have heard of Snowcrash. I myself read it about 10 years ago, and I barely remember it, and wouldn't say that has influenced my work one way or another.
Wait til you get to book 3 (The System of the World) and you have to wade thru chapters of theology. It's way worse. It's worth reading book 2 (The Confusion) though, if you've gotten that far.
The real shame is that if he had cut the drivel and tightened the plot (book 3 in particular reads like a B-movie with pointless double-crosses), he could have had a good one-booker.
I just started The Confusion - 1 chapter in. I almost didn't cause book 1 was so bad, but I usually try to finish what I started.
I agree it probably could have made a good one-booker, there are some gems in there, but they are very few, and very far between.
The scifi genre is just like any other, there are good ones and there are real lousy ones, but no matter how good or bad the scifi is, it will never encourage or discourage me from exploring
Nope, I just ain't gonna be influenced by a book
This. Especially not bad books. I quite enjoyed Cryptonomicon, and so right now I'm trying to read The Baroque Cycle.
What self-indulgent drivel it is. Pages and pages of History lessons than don't advance the plot at all, or even serve to improve the historical context. It is a case of: Neal read something interesting in a history book, and so is going to jam the detail into his prose regardless of whether it is relevant or useful.
His recent work is horrible. Neal has bought into his own celebrity and lost all sense of what made him a decent author. I bet the dude thinks each of his individual farts has a unique and pleasant aroma, and so is worth preserving for posterity.
And what innovation failure? I and the people around me have been innovating our asses off. I'm not going to self promote, but anyone in the world can go to http://scholar.google.com/ and see all the incredible research that is going on if they want to.
I have NEVER heard a Christian claim that dinos never existed. Nice straw man.
Actually, a Jehovah's witness who knocked on my door barely couple of weeks ago said exactly that. She completely refused to believe in any kind of evolution at all.
Normally I'd say you have to get out more if you want to meet these people with all sorts of weird and wonderful beliefs, but in this case the crazies came to me.
Why is it so hard for people to understand that Slashdot is "News for Nerds" AND "Stuff that Matters". Really, it's always been there, and it's hardly a long motto.
I've always assumed that "Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters" meant that articles would be "News for Nerds" OR "Stuff that Matters", not AND.
I've never nitpicked grammar before, but I'll be damned before I allow poor boolean logic to be applied to this site.
Plus I get to write two sentences in this post that end with "and". Life doesn't get better than this.
Only if they consistently make accurate predictions, and not just hit the Loto once.
Unfortunately, for this particular research area, we only have one planet to experiment on. So they can't exactly reset the planet back to 1981, change the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and re-run the experiment to see what the difference is.
Besides, they didn't just randomly draw a curve on a piece of paper, they designed a mathematical model, fed data into it, and made predictions based on that.
I was just going to point out to GP that we invented all the mobile phones and mp3 players and other cool stuff he wastes his time playing with, so we have some small claim to knowing things about science.
I'm not commenting on the climate one way or the other, but when you have dozens of different predictions over the years is it really surprising that a couple of them happened to hit the mark?
Well that's pretty much how science works. Lots of different people with different theories make different predictions based on those theories.
The guys that make accurate predictions the most are the ones whose theories scientists start to believe are true.
This is happening in Australia right now. A farmer lost his organic certification due to cross-contamination of his crop from a neighbour that was using GM seeds, and so is suing the neighbour.
Slashdot Mirror
It's never Lupus.
You make a good point. When the Alan Jones cash for comments scandal broke, he got absolutely slammed in court for not disclosing who was paying him to promote various things on his show.
The same should apply to tweets. They are broadcasts, and so the people making them should disclose whether it is advertising or not.
Easily solved with a small drill bit and itsy-bitsy bolts. This is a DIY product after all.
It's a six layer board. Pretty hard to find a safe place to drill without X-ray vision.
It's a pretty annoying oversight that the rpi board doesn't have any holes for mounting screws, so you'd hope that an add-on plate like this might correct that oversight.
But nope.
My biggest gripe with the Software Centre is that not everything is in there. Try searching it for apache.
I know - it only shows up if you search for "apache2" and even then - none of the additional plugin components show. What the ...?
I tend to mostly use "apt-cache search" and "apt-get" for my needs these days. Still faster to find and install what you are looking for than either synaptic or Software Centre.
Actually nifty, you have illustrated that you are pretty keen on how awesome you are and that nothing gets even remotely close to your awesomeness...
Don't feel too bad, you probably push around a single piece of technology in a group of people who who have no understanding but are really appreciative, it tends to give individuals an overrated sense of importance, but a need to be very critical of anything else that is actually awesome
Oh, wait! I was supposed to critic the Stephenson novel, not you... sorry
Bit of a swing and a miss there gary. I make no bones about the fact that I have the honour to work with some engineers and physicists who are absolute geniuses in every sense of the word. I'm lucky to be in the same room as them. Also, no-one has bought the technology we work on yet, we are still several years away from even attempting to find people to sell it to. Definitely no overrated sense of importance here.
I find it interesting that you start your response to my request for an adult discussion about the book with a (clumsy attempt at a) personal attack. You are clearly the type of developer transitioned to business guy (probably a BA or a PM now?) that develops an inferiority complex because he isn't working in tech any more. I can spot your kind a mile off, even though I haven't worked in IT or an IT-related field since the turn of the century.
Now that we've gotten the mutual abuse out of the way...
So, the Baroque cycle held my interest because it managed to bring together many different historical elements that preceded the Enlightenment Era. I had passing knowledge of many elements of it, but to have it all laid out in a palatable storyline with the occasional Neil-ism (bloody awful puns blown up as big as a building but still invisible to a large portion of the audience) was truly enjoyable. Amongst the high-points... Ottoman-European interactions, pirate trade in Trinidad, European recovery from the black death, transition of money from weight in minted silver to representational value... Only minor complaint was the sex scenes got a little repetitive and I could not figure out if he held himself back or was just embarrassed
You think the storyline was palatable??? My core criticism is that the overly detailed historical backdrop you describe almost completely overwhelmed the thin thread of a story running through these novels.
You might not have read it, but someone earlier in this thread compared the Baroque cycle to Les Miserables. I was stunned. All that this book has in common with the Baroque cycle is that they are both set in the past. Victor Hugo's complex and emotionally driven characters shine in comparison to the cardboard cut-outs that wander around the Baroque cycle looking for something to do. I suggest you have a read of Les Mis in order to see how this sort of historical fiction should be written.
Or, if you don't want to invest that much time in a book recommended to you by some guy on the internet that you clearly dislike, and you want to try something shorter (after all, it seems that gary is a busy guy) take a look at Connie Willis - either "Doomsday Book", or "To Say Nothing of the Dog" for shorter examples of novels where the balance between the historical backdrop and story is managed substantially better that the Baroque Cycle was.
Those are books that are actually awesome. The Baroque Cycle, unfortunately, wasn't.
See also Cryptonomicon for any of that criticism. I suspect that in one you just find the "name dropping" of the minor characters interesting and in the other you don't.
I think that for me it is more about the ratio, than the period. The ratio of story to "name dropping" was ok in Crytonomicon, whereas in Baroque Cycle I felt it got out of control. The entire Baroque cycle is at least three times the length of Crytonomicon, and seems to digress more often.
I rather enjoyed it. It reminded me a lot of Les Miserables, in that the story immersed you in the history of what was happening at the time.
I felt Baroque Cycle was nothing like Les Mis. Victor Hugo was a masterful author, and his prose always had a point.
As an example, take the priest who gave Jean Valjean his silver. Leading up to this point, there is a long digression about the priest, what he had done in the past, and his back-story. It is important, because the priest's interaction with Valjean is pivotal to the entire way Valjean sees the world, and has a very strong effect on Valjean's personality going forward. The reasons why the priest does what he does is important, which is why Victor Hugo goes into it. It is good storytelling.
On the other hand, when Neal does a long digression on a historical character in Baroque Cycle it is generally just because the character is important historically, not because the character is important to the story. Neal is just name-dropping. It is annoying, and for those who are familiar with history around that time, it is also quite boring.
I bet the dude thinks each of his individual farts has a unique and pleasant aroma, and so is worth preserving for posterity.
You know, I think that you just invalidated any opinion I had for you prior critique. Do you actually believe this, or are you just talking because you think you are clever and witty?
Ok, you got me, I don't actually believe Neal bottles his own farts.
I think the real problem with Baroque Cycle was simply an escalation of commitment. Neal had spent so much time studying various historical characters, he felt that it was a waste of time not to include what he had learnt. But for me, this made for a fairly unenjoyable book.
If you find the Baroque cycle self-indulgent drivel, then you are the problem.
Put the book down and go read something from the children's section.
Instead of sniping from behind an AC facade, why don't you point out some of the strengths of the work. I believe I clearly pointed out some of what I consider to be the many weaknesses.
Then we can have an adult-level discussion in the manner you are pretending to desire.
Some people can't handle epics. Some can. I would recommend never even acknowledging the existence of the Wheel of Time.
Dude, GP here: I love the Wheel of Time, I've read all the books so far at least twice, and I'll probably run through them again before the final novel is released next year. I'm also a fan of many other epics - such as Stephen Donaldson's Gap Sequence (imho the best space opera ever written).
It is not that I can't handle epics, it is just that I think that the Baroque Cycle is incredibly poorly written.
And yet these days you can't go anywhere without hearing people who've been influenced by the Hunger Games. The next time I hear someone talking about bread and circus, only knowing what it is because of the hunger games, I'm going to puke.
Interestingly enough, those are probably exactly the kind of people I'd prefer to keep away from science and engineering disciplines.
Maybe Neal should keep writing about dystopian futures, if only to keep these disciplines clear of weak-minded fools...
Oh jesus. Virtually every important person in technology, of the last 20 years, cites Snowcrash as a major influence on their work.
I think the reason we're going to disagree on this is that you don't mean the same thing by technology that I do.
Very few, if any of the people that I consider influential in aerospace, biotech, micro-electronics fabrication or MEMS that I've dealt with through the years would have even have heard of Snowcrash. I myself read it about 10 years ago, and I barely remember it, and wouldn't say that has influenced my work one way or another.
Wait til you get to book 3 (The System of the World) and you have to wade thru chapters of theology. It's way worse. It's worth reading book 2 (The Confusion) though, if you've gotten that far.
The real shame is that if he had cut the drivel and tightened the plot (book 3 in particular reads like a B-movie with pointless double-crosses), he could have had a good one-booker.
I just started The Confusion - 1 chapter in. I almost didn't cause book 1 was so bad, but I usually try to finish what I started.
I agree it probably could have made a good one-booker, there are some gems in there, but they are very few, and very far between.
The scifi genre is just like any other, there are good ones and there are real lousy ones, but no matter how good or bad the scifi is, it will never encourage or discourage me from exploring
Nope, I just ain't gonna be influenced by a book
This. Especially not bad books. I quite enjoyed Cryptonomicon, and so right now I'm trying to read The Baroque Cycle.
What self-indulgent drivel it is. Pages and pages of History lessons than don't advance the plot at all, or even serve to improve the historical context. It is a case of: Neal read something interesting in a history book, and so is going to jam the detail into his prose regardless of whether it is relevant or useful.
His recent work is horrible. Neal has bought into his own celebrity and lost all sense of what made him a decent author. I bet the dude thinks each of his individual farts has a unique and pleasant aroma, and so is worth preserving for posterity.
And what innovation failure? I and the people around me have been innovating our asses off. I'm not going to self promote, but anyone in the world can go to http://scholar.google.com/ and see all the incredible research that is going on if they want to.
Message to Neal: You ain't that influential.
You are going to tell me what I heard now?
The conversation I had with her definitely covered dinosaurs. She was not confused about what she was saying, and neither was I.
I realise that this might not be the official teaching of the Jehovah's witnesses, but she was a christian, and that was her personal belief.
I have NEVER heard a Christian claim that dinos never existed. Nice straw man.
Actually, a Jehovah's witness who knocked on my door barely couple of weeks ago said exactly that. She completely refused to believe in any kind of evolution at all.
Normally I'd say you have to get out more if you want to meet these people with all sorts of weird and wonderful beliefs, but in this case the crazies came to me.
5 ands in a row. Very nice: you, sir, have my respect.
How many bits (not bytes, bits) make up an "internet"?
Why, eight times the number of bytes of course. Did I win teh internets?
Why is it so hard for people to understand that Slashdot is "News for Nerds" AND "Stuff that Matters". Really, it's always been there, and it's hardly a long motto.
I've always assumed that "Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters" meant that articles would be "News for Nerds" OR "Stuff that Matters", not AND.
I've never nitpicked grammar before, but I'll be damned before I allow poor boolean logic to be applied to this site.
Plus I get to write two sentences in this post that end with "and". Life doesn't get better than this.
TFA isn't inconsistent, not all liquids and solutions are aqueous.
The liquid used in the experiment was a mixture of Pt(acetylacetonate)2, o-dichlorobenzene and oleylamine.
No water was involved, though you are correct that this technique wouldn't be able to be used for aqueous sstems.
Only if they consistently make accurate predictions, and not just hit the Loto once.
Unfortunately, for this particular research area, we only have one planet to experiment on. So they can't exactly reset the planet back to 1981, change the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and re-run the experiment to see what the difference is.
Besides, they didn't just randomly draw a curve on a piece of paper, they designed a mathematical model, fed data into it, and made predictions based on that.
Wow, that's brutal.
I was just going to point out to GP that we invented all the mobile phones and mp3 players and other cool stuff he wastes his time playing with, so we have some small claim to knowing things about science.
But your way is good too.
I'm not commenting on the climate one way or the other, but when you have dozens of different predictions over the years is it really surprising that a couple of them happened to hit the mark?
Well that's pretty much how science works. Lots of different people with different theories make different predictions based on those theories.
The guys that make accurate predictions the most are the ones whose theories scientists start to believe are true.
The eighties was 30 years ago?
Shit I'm old.
This is happening in Australia right now. A farmer lost his organic certification due to cross-contamination of his crop from a neighbour that was using GM seeds, and so is suing the neighbour.
http://www.abc.net.au/rural/telegraph/content/2012/s3470966.htm