Reminds me of the "redemption scenario" mission in X-Wing; had to run that one almost fifty times before beating it.
That mission was all about power management and creative use of proton torpedoes. It seemed impossible until you figured out the right power tweaks and that you can get right next to the bombers and they won't flinch until hit or torpedo-locked, so you can just nail them point-blank with dead-fired torpedoes for instant kills, and the rest of the formation will just keep on flying in a straight, steady path like nothing happened.
Once you figure that out, the mission's easy to win every single time. IMO there are much harder ones than that in the game.
Looking at the screenshots of the "Firepower" game mentioned by the anonymous coward, then I'm pretty sure you'd love the hell out of Return Fire (assuming the AC is right and Firepower was the game you were talking about). There's a sequel, too, but I haven't played it. I've only played it on PC, but Wikipedia says it's available on the Saturn, Playstation, and 3DO as well.
Huh, reading the intro paragraph, it appears that it was made by the same people as Firepower and is a sequel of sorts. That explains the similarity.
My understanding of the situation (from the discussion of this same story on Fark a day or two ago) is that the main charge isn't even misrepresenting where she lives; it's telling the FEC that her PAC raises money for many candidates while actually only raising money for one, which lets her get around donation limits.
A few years ago I never imagined I'd be playing my favorite N64, PS1, and PS2 games on a PC, at insane resolutions and with FSAA. Gamecube will get there, and the Wii won't be far behind it.
Honestly not sure about the other current generation consoles, but then again I'd have said "no way!" if, the first time I saw Mario64, someone had told me that in just a few years I'd have a PC+emulator that could do a good enough job of pretending to be an N64 to run that exact same game at 1600x1200, without even straining. The only thing that worries me is that there's not even an original X-Box emulator yet--then again, if you take away the dual-release X-Box/PC games, the dual-release X-Box/PS(1,2) games, and the ones that were just minor updates to Dreamcast or Saturn games, are there any truly exclusive X-Box games worth playing? I can see why it might be hard to get volunteers to write an emulator for that system, and I'm more optimistic that a PS3 (and maybe 360, depending on which is easier and how many of the decent "exclusives" on each end up being ported over the next couple of years) emulator project would draw some developers.
At any rate, I'm fairly confident that the PC is going to remain the best solution for playing your back-catalog from every system. My biggest concern right now is that some of the very early 3D 32 bit Windows games will continue to be hard or impossible to play on a modern machine, but however much I like a few of them it's still a pretty small gap. If only VMWare or VirtualBox or someone would release an emulator that includes faithful emulation of, say, the original ATI Radeon or a GeForce 2 or something.
You've played Tacyon: The Fringe, right? Not that it's new, but if you like space fighter combat games and haven't played it you really, really need to.
Hahaha, you have no idea how happy that post makes me.
I'm showing that to my wife (and parents, and friends, and in-laws...) next time they have to help me fix my résumé. Hey, it's not my fault that I want to (accurately) convey that I'm pretty good at something, while others with half my skill would (inaccurately) use words like "excellent" and "proficient" to describe their abilities. I always feel like I'm lying on the damn things just to reach the very lowest acceptable level of optimistic-exaggeration--and thanks to you I don't feel bad about it any more:)
This resulted in her entering into a violent stage out of the blue where she felt compelled to hit me, often quite hard, and she had no shame about doing it in public. It hurt a lot, and I was extremely unhappy about it and did not feel that it was deserved in the slightest. Our female friends thought that it was funny and laughed about it despite the fact that it was clearly upsetting me, and they told me that I was being too uptight about things when I made it clear that I was really displeased with the situation. My male friends were actually quite sympathetic and told me that what she was doing was wrong and that it made them uncomfortable to watch.
Heh, you're not alone, and it's a problem among straight guys too.
I've seen this so often that I find it hard to believe this kind of shit isn't way, way more common than men beating women. Even if no-one likes the situation--including other women--no one's going to call the cops about it, though.
Seems it's fairly socially acceptable for a woman to slug a guy at 80-100% of full strength, as long as she limits the strikes to certain areas (the upper arm and shoulder seem to be popular). Other places, too, as long as the power behind the blow is reduced a bit more. If a woman hit another woman like that, it'd be a fight in a hurry. Hell, if a guy repeatedly did that to another guy, at exactly the same strength, sooner or later he'd wind up with a broken nose.
I think I toggle them too often. My CFLs have always burnt out in a year or so, even in two very different houses in different parts of the country.
I've stopped buying them. I've got maybe two or three fixtures in the whole house where they'd make sense, and even those I want to be able to turn on for just a second or two a few times a day without worrying that I'm gonna kill the stupid CFLs.
There are actually perfectly good reasons for per-application streams.
Yeah, I figured there had to be.
Imagine listening to a podcast via a headset that has a mic. A phone call comes in over Skype. I want the podcast volume to drop but not Skype.
OK, that's a good one. I don't use Skype, so I guess I'd never run in to it.
It's pretty common in gaming as well - Game volume is X (via the headset) but voice chat volume is Y (via the same headset).
Not so much with this one, though. Any game that supports headsets will have a separate volume for them (just like they have a separate one for music, for effects, for in-game voices, etc.) and if they don't then you're probably using a separate app to handle the headset, which will have an independent volume control.
Yeah, "left" and "right" in my post was an awful oversimplification. Sorry.
I don't think we're so far from agreeing, though. I'm not happy with the current bill, and don't expect it to work. Kind of disgusted with the process, really, since all they had to do was pick damn near any existing, good system and copy it. Sure, some would work better here than others, but there were still plenty to choose from. Switzerland's or Germany's would have been OK systems to clone--not so different from what we have now to be as great a shock as single-payer, but still effective. Doesn't help that one side of the aisle's flatly denying that any other existing system's better than ours, and the other side's too disorganized to counter them as effectively as they ought to be able to.
Instead we get this mess, with no price controls and no super-strict regulation of insurance companies, to mention just a couple of apparently-necessary elements for effective non-nationalized and non-single-payer health care systems that it's lacking.
I hope it doesn't delay decent reform too long if it passes but fails miserably at fixing anything, which it might. My hope is that expansion to universal coverage--which is the one good thing this bill might actually accomplish--creates demand for high-quality and cost-effective universal coverage, thus becoming a driver of other necessary reforms. The remote possibility of that happening is the only silver lining this reform's got, IMO. It is, at best, the first step of many toward a comprehensive, coherent, modern health coverage system. At worst, it gets us maybe 10 more years of our current embarrassingly-bad system after it fails completely (longer, maybe, except that at the current rate of increase I think health care costs will become a much more acute problem than they are now in less than 10 years and force some kind of action)
Obama had already backtracked on promises ("positions" he calls them) particularly FISA and was throwing out promises that simply didn't make sense (we'll reduce health care costs by increasing costs through adding universal health care), hung around associates that made the Republican team look like a paragon of sanity, and had some Big Plans that would involve gutting the US economy for some sort of nebulous socialist gain.
Reducing health care costs by moving to a universal health care system makes perfect sense when you consider, you know, the facts. Every other wealthy democracy has it, and IIRC the one that comes the closest to spending as much as we do per-capita on health care still spends something like 30% less.
As for it being "socialist"... well, yeah, I'd say the label fits. Maybe not the current bill so much, as it's still the farthest-right of any health care system among nations comparable to ours politically and economically, but what Obama was proposing during the election would have at least gotten us on the far right edge of the spectrum of health care systems among our peers. If it works, though, who cares what it's called? I say base your political positions on what works in the real world. Ideology should yield in the face of strong, relevant opposing data.
Fortunately, in this case, we have a large number of other wealthy democracies doing better than we are, all with health care systems that are farther left than ours. Lots of big, real-world experiments. Unfortunately, we don't have any examples of ones farther right (again, among nations comparable to ours). What this means is that we can, with a high degree of certainty, expect a better (and, oddly enough, cheaper) system if we move to the left on health care. Moving to the right is unknown territory, but since ours is easily the farthest right, the most expensive by far, and still doesn't manage to cover everyone--well, I'd say moving farther right or staying where we are don't look like appealing options.
I hadn't had problems with Linux audio for a few years before PulseAudio came along and broke everything.
Personally, I didn't know anything needed fixing; I thought they'd finally got that ALSA/ESD/ARTS/OSS shit sorted out. Stuff just worked. Was great over several installations on several machines for a couple of years.
Then Ubuntu decided PulseAudio was ready to replace whatever the hell had been just doing its damn job before, when it really wasn't. After that, I never knew what to expect when opening an app that needed sound--no audio at all (VLC)? Instant crash of its host app (Flash)? Working fine, as if nothing's wrong (Totem, which I hate)?
I wasn't able to find a way to un-break it, either. Understand that I ran Gentoo for over two years (back before it had a graphical installer, too) so I know how to un-break Linux audio (or at least how to break it more until it starts working again) but nothing I did fixed the problem without causing a half-dozen others.
Supposedly it's better now, but I'm a web-dev and couldn't live with a Flash plugin that made Firefox (with all of my tabs!!!) insta-crash about 3/4 of the time when it tried to play audio, among other sound issues. I run Ubuntu in a virtual machine on Vista now, and I doubt I'll do otherwise for a good long while since it's working so much better for me than dual-booting ever did. So, uh, thanks PulseAudio, I guess.
(as an aside, what do you do with the individual per-application volume adjustment? It's not just that I don't know what *I'd* use it for--I can't think of what *anyone* would use it for.)
ALSA is Linux's basic sound system. It provides sound drivers in the kernel, plus some tools to interface with them and to do very basic audio stuff.
There are other packages that can sit on top of ALSA to provide more functionality. PulseAudio is one of those. AFAIK the only "cool" thing it does that other layers like it don't is let you set your volume on an application-by-application basis--though personally, I've never thought "oh man, if only my system's audio services could set this..." um... oh god, see, I can't even think of a plausible scenario for which I might want that. I honestly thought I'd be able to when I started typing this, but I just can't come up with one.
Anywho, Ubuntu decided to ship PulseAudio as its main audio daemon a couple releases back, though it wasn't even close to mature enough for the job. It was a damn mess, like being back in Linux about 6-7 years ago when its audio systems were always a pain in the ass and you had to do all kinds of dicking around to get everything to work right.
I've only read his Starship Troopers, which struck me as decent but nothing special, in terms of prose, story, or thematic presentation.
Incidentally, I'm reading another Asimov novel now (I forgot that I'd read A Pebble in the Sky when writing that last post); it's The Stars, Like Dust, and it's kind of crappy. Maybe I'll see the light when I read his foundation novels, but so far he's failed to impress me and it makes me kind of sad that he's often considered the major sci-fi author. Am I reading the wrong stuff? Is this aimed at 6th-8th graders, while some of his other stuff is more mature?
While you do that, I'm going to get three of them on indefinite retainer and start accepting a shitload of jobs on Craigslist, passing them off to those guys, and keeping the difference.
Why is this sort of thing so common on the low end of web development? It's amazing how happy you can make people in that market by just returning their calls and emails and taking less than a month to perform a task that requires maybe 30 minutes of your time, because they've usually dealt with assholes who can't be bothered to do any of that.
Most places I've seen would charge you $500-$1,000 just to set up and skin an open-source e-commerce package.
$1,000 won't buy you shit. Just getting some non-hideous custom graphics will cost you most of that money--and maybe more. I've seen shops charge north of $10,000 for sites that weren't a quarter as complex as an e-commerce site.
I'm not even sure I support those. I really enjoy going out to bars without smoking. It was absolutely disgusting previously. Had take a shower and wash my hair twice when I got home. It also irritated the hell out of my eyes and nose too.
I used to be on the fence, but living in Iowa (a smoke-free state these days) for a year changed my mind.
It was awesome. I didn't appreciate how much better it made going out anywhere (but especially bars and restaurants--the smoke makes my wife lose her apatite, even from over in the usually-not-distant-enough "smoking section") until I moved back to Missouri and had a "WTF is going on? Are those disgusting bastards actually smoking indoors? God, the smell is awful!" moment when I walked in to a restaurant before remembering that that's what it's like everywhere that doesn't have an indoor smoking ban.
Living in a ban state made a supporter out of me. Didn't figure I'd ever care about it this much, but now it's one of the few local/state issues that might actually get me out to the polls if it came up for a vote.
Asimov's short stories are shit, mostly. Clarke's short stories are at least much better, if not reliably good. If you must read Asimov, I recommend his scientific essays, which are amazing (there are a couple dozen collections of them floating around). His writing on literature is also very good--I have his guides to Shakespeare and The Bible, and they're both engaging, informative, fun reads. Generally, stick to his non-fic. I still haven't tried his novels (his short stories turned me off so much from his fiction) but his non-fic is solid.
If you want to read older sci-fi, I can personally recommend:
just about anything by Bradbury
at least some of Clarke (so far, I can only vouch for The City and the Stars and Childhood's End)
Atwood when she ventures in to the genre (and when she doesn't, for that matter)
W.M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz. I cannot stress enough how good this book is. I don't mean "good for sci-fi"; I mean good.
Vonnegut. All of it (well... almost all of it). I actually like him best when he's not writing sci-fi, but that seems to be a minority opinion. Personal favorites are Deadeye Dick, Bluebeard, and Mother Night, but the closest thing to a canonical "big three" for him is Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions (though some would probably sub The Sirens of Titan in BoC's place)
Orson Scott Card's novella Ender's Game is what I'd call top-notch (and I mean top) juvenile fiction. Haven't read the later novel-length version, so I can't comment on it.
Dune. I like it all the way to the end of God Emperor of Dune, at which point I feel the story is over and the remaining books are just an author wanking over a universe he can't let go. The writing's at least serviceable throughout (I can't say that for some of his other books) and, if nothing else, the series is fun for a game of "spot the socio-cultural reference"
Most of these can stand on the same shelf as any contemporary literature and not be (overly) dwarfed.
Others I've heard are on the same level, but haven't yet read:
P.K. Dick (ok, ok, make fun of me all you want, I know it's a geek sin that I haven't read him yet)
Le Guin
As for Stephenson, I've read Snow Crash, Anathem, and Cryptonomicon, in that order, and my preference is the exact reverse of that order, if that helps you choose your next Stephenson read (assuming you haven't read it already). SC was OK but I doubt I'd have kept reading him if Anathem hadn't been better, and Cryptonomicon was so good that I've decided to dedicated a big chunk of time to reading The Diamond Age and his big trilogy.
I loved the vision of the future in that book and find myself thinking/talking about it frequently, but I thought the story itself failed to be even a little bit compelling and the writing was, to put it mildly, sub-par.
I guess it won all those awards for Vinge's creative ideas about technology and not for the writing? Or were the other Hugo contenders that year actually that bad?
Incidentally, can anyone tell me whether I can expect more of the same mediocre work in A Fire Upon the Deep, or is it better? I mean, I don't demand perfection (I read Neal Stephenson for god's sake, I love E.M. Forster for his flaws, and Jack London wrote some of my favorite low-calorie brain candy) but I have to maintain some standards or I'd be buried in a mountain of mostly-shit reading material.
French character had me doubled over laughing. "Laterre" and "Magna Feeks" or whatever. Hilarious.
Liked the book a lot. The ending fell apart a little (especially the heavily foreshadowed last major plot event/action sequence that never materialized) but it was still pretty good. I think Cryptonomicon is still my favorite of his novels, but Anathem is solidly second.
However, I (finally) read A Canticle for Leibowitz just prior to reading Anathem as I'd heard that they were similar (not so much, as it turns out) and didn't want my reading of the earlier novel to be tainted by the later one, and... well, it's in a whole different class, aside from bearing only a passing resemblance in terms of story. I haven't read everything by Stephenson yet, but I doubt he's got anything that's even close to it. It's one of the few sci-fi books I've read that I could have read right after tackling one of the canonical literary classics without being jarred by the sudden drop in quality of prose and general execution of the story and themes.
It's worth noting that Asimov wrote of sci-fi having three stages of development, according to their focus (these are my names standing in for his longer descriptions):
Adventure Devices People
He considered sci-fi that focused on the human condition to be the most mature form of it. If you go back and read even some of the "best" of that gadget-inspired sci-fi, it's easy to see why--almost all of it is complete garbage, even if you've already filtered it to a couple hundred of the top stories. As for the adventure-focused sci-fi, it's mostly Swiss Family Robinson in space, which can be fun but isn't especially valuable in a fiction-as-art sort of way.
Most of the greatest sci-fi is great either because it anticipates/inspires something technological (though that doesn't mean the story or its prose are necessarily any good) or because it comments well on the human condition. Unless you're lucky or prescient, writing tech-focused stories is a good way to churn out crap and a bad way to make a mark on literary history.
Slashdot Mirror
That mission was all about power management and creative use of proton torpedoes. It seemed impossible until you figured out the right power tweaks and that you can get right next to the bombers and they won't flinch until hit or torpedo-locked, so you can just nail them point-blank with dead-fired torpedoes for instant kills, and the rest of the formation will just keep on flying in a straight, steady path like nothing happened.
Once you figure that out, the mission's easy to win every single time. IMO there are much harder ones than that in the game.
Looking at the screenshots of the "Firepower" game mentioned by the anonymous coward, then I'm pretty sure you'd love the hell out of Return Fire (assuming the AC is right and Firepower was the game you were talking about). There's a sequel, too, but I haven't played it. I've only played it on PC, but Wikipedia says it's available on the Saturn, Playstation, and 3DO as well.
Huh, reading the intro paragraph, it appears that it was made by the same people as Firepower and is a sequel of sorts. That explains the similarity.
My understanding of the situation (from the discussion of this same story on Fark a day or two ago) is that the main charge isn't even misrepresenting where she lives; it's telling the FEC that her PAC raises money for many candidates while actually only raising money for one, which lets her get around donation limits.
A few years ago I never imagined I'd be playing my favorite N64, PS1, and PS2 games on a PC, at insane resolutions and with FSAA. Gamecube will get there, and the Wii won't be far behind it.
Honestly not sure about the other current generation consoles, but then again I'd have said "no way!" if, the first time I saw Mario64, someone had told me that in just a few years I'd have a PC+emulator that could do a good enough job of pretending to be an N64 to run that exact same game at 1600x1200, without even straining. The only thing that worries me is that there's not even an original X-Box emulator yet--then again, if you take away the dual-release X-Box/PC games, the dual-release X-Box/PS(1,2) games, and the ones that were just minor updates to Dreamcast or Saturn games, are there any truly exclusive X-Box games worth playing? I can see why it might be hard to get volunteers to write an emulator for that system, and I'm more optimistic that a PS3 (and maybe 360, depending on which is easier and how many of the decent "exclusives" on each end up being ported over the next couple of years) emulator project would draw some developers.
At any rate, I'm fairly confident that the PC is going to remain the best solution for playing your back-catalog from every system. My biggest concern right now is that some of the very early 3D 32 bit Windows games will continue to be hard or impossible to play on a modern machine, but however much I like a few of them it's still a pretty small gap. If only VMWare or VirtualBox or someone would release an emulator that includes faithful emulation of, say, the original ATI Radeon or a GeForce 2 or something.
Of course you'll be able to play current console games 10 years from now.
Using an emulator.
On a PC.
You've played Tacyon: The Fringe, right? Not that it's new, but if you like space fighter combat games and haven't played it you really, really need to.
Hahaha, you have no idea how happy that post makes me.
I'm showing that to my wife (and parents, and friends, and in-laws...) next time they have to help me fix my résumé. Hey, it's not my fault that I want to (accurately) convey that I'm pretty good at something, while others with half my skill would (inaccurately) use words like "excellent" and "proficient" to describe their abilities. I always feel like I'm lying on the damn things just to reach the very lowest acceptable level of optimistic-exaggeration--and thanks to you I don't feel bad about it any more :)
Heh, you're not alone, and it's a problem among straight guys too.
I've seen this so often that I find it hard to believe this kind of shit isn't way, way more common than men beating women. Even if no-one likes the situation--including other women--no one's going to call the cops about it, though.
Seems it's fairly socially acceptable for a woman to slug a guy at 80-100% of full strength, as long as she limits the strikes to certain areas (the upper arm and shoulder seem to be popular). Other places, too, as long as the power behind the blow is reduced a bit more. If a woman hit another woman like that, it'd be a fight in a hurry. Hell, if a guy repeatedly did that to another guy, at exactly the same strength, sooner or later he'd wind up with a broken nose.
I think I toggle them too often. My CFLs have always burnt out in a year or so, even in two very different houses in different parts of the country.
I've stopped buying them. I've got maybe two or three fixtures in the whole house where they'd make sense, and even those I want to be able to turn on for just a second or two a few times a day without worrying that I'm gonna kill the stupid CFLs.
Yeah, I figured there had to be.
OK, that's a good one. I don't use Skype, so I guess I'd never run in to it.
Not so much with this one, though. Any game that supports headsets will have a separate volume for them (just like they have a separate one for music, for effects, for in-game voices, etc.) and if they don't then you're probably using a separate app to handle the headset, which will have an independent volume control.
Yeah, "left" and "right" in my post was an awful oversimplification. Sorry.
I don't think we're so far from agreeing, though. I'm not happy with the current bill, and don't expect it to work. Kind of disgusted with the process, really, since all they had to do was pick damn near any existing, good system and copy it. Sure, some would work better here than others, but there were still plenty to choose from. Switzerland's or Germany's would have been OK systems to clone--not so different from what we have now to be as great a shock as single-payer, but still effective. Doesn't help that one side of the aisle's flatly denying that any other existing system's better than ours, and the other side's too disorganized to counter them as effectively as they ought to be able to.
Instead we get this mess, with no price controls and no super-strict regulation of insurance companies, to mention just a couple of apparently-necessary elements for effective non-nationalized and non-single-payer health care systems that it's lacking.
I hope it doesn't delay decent reform too long if it passes but fails miserably at fixing anything, which it might. My hope is that expansion to universal coverage--which is the one good thing this bill might actually accomplish--creates demand for high-quality and cost-effective universal coverage, thus becoming a driver of other necessary reforms. The remote possibility of that happening is the only silver lining this reform's got, IMO. It is, at best, the first step of many toward a comprehensive, coherent, modern health coverage system. At worst, it gets us maybe 10 more years of our current embarrassingly-bad system after it fails completely (longer, maybe, except that at the current rate of increase I think health care costs will become a much more acute problem than they are now in less than 10 years and force some kind of action)
Reducing health care costs by moving to a universal health care system makes perfect sense when you consider, you know, the facts. Every other wealthy democracy has it, and IIRC the one that comes the closest to spending as much as we do per-capita on health care still spends something like 30% less.
As for it being "socialist"... well, yeah, I'd say the label fits. Maybe not the current bill so much, as it's still the farthest-right of any health care system among nations comparable to ours politically and economically, but what Obama was proposing during the election would have at least gotten us on the far right edge of the spectrum of health care systems among our peers. If it works, though, who cares what it's called? I say base your political positions on what works in the real world. Ideology should yield in the face of strong, relevant opposing data.
Fortunately, in this case, we have a large number of other wealthy democracies doing better than we are, all with health care systems that are farther left than ours. Lots of big, real-world experiments. Unfortunately, we don't have any examples of ones farther right (again, among nations comparable to ours). What this means is that we can, with a high degree of certainty, expect a better (and, oddly enough, cheaper) system if we move to the left on health care. Moving to the right is unknown territory, but since ours is easily the farthest right, the most expensive by far, and still doesn't manage to cover everyone--well, I'd say moving farther right or staying where we are don't look like appealing options.
If there were a "+1 Epic Troll" moderation I'd give it to you. Seriously, bravo sir. That exchange literally made me LOL.
I hadn't had problems with Linux audio for a few years before PulseAudio came along and broke everything.
Personally, I didn't know anything needed fixing; I thought they'd finally got that ALSA/ESD/ARTS/OSS shit sorted out. Stuff just worked. Was great over several installations on several machines for a couple of years.
Then Ubuntu decided PulseAudio was ready to replace whatever the hell had been just doing its damn job before, when it really wasn't. After that, I never knew what to expect when opening an app that needed sound--no audio at all (VLC)? Instant crash of its host app (Flash)? Working fine, as if nothing's wrong (Totem, which I hate)?
I wasn't able to find a way to un-break it, either. Understand that I ran Gentoo for over two years (back before it had a graphical installer, too) so I know how to un-break Linux audio (or at least how to break it more until it starts working again) but nothing I did fixed the problem without causing a half-dozen others.
Supposedly it's better now, but I'm a web-dev and couldn't live with a Flash plugin that made Firefox (with all of my tabs!!!) insta-crash about 3/4 of the time when it tried to play audio, among other sound issues. I run Ubuntu in a virtual machine on Vista now, and I doubt I'll do otherwise for a good long while since it's working so much better for me than dual-booting ever did. So, uh, thanks PulseAudio, I guess.
(as an aside, what do you do with the individual per-application volume adjustment? It's not just that I don't know what *I'd* use it for--I can't think of what *anyone* would use it for.)
Sorry if you already know some of this:
ALSA is Linux's basic sound system. It provides sound drivers in the kernel, plus some tools to interface with them and to do very basic audio stuff.
There are other packages that can sit on top of ALSA to provide more functionality. PulseAudio is one of those. AFAIK the only "cool" thing it does that other layers like it don't is let you set your volume on an application-by-application basis--though personally, I've never thought "oh man, if only my system's audio services could set this..." um... oh god, see, I can't even think of a plausible scenario for which I might want that. I honestly thought I'd be able to when I started typing this, but I just can't come up with one.
Anywho, Ubuntu decided to ship PulseAudio as its main audio daemon a couple releases back, though it wasn't even close to mature enough for the job. It was a damn mess, like being back in Linux about 6-7 years ago when its audio systems were always a pain in the ass and you had to do all kinds of dicking around to get everything to work right.
I've only read his Starship Troopers, which struck me as decent but nothing special, in terms of prose, story, or thematic presentation.
Incidentally, I'm reading another Asimov novel now (I forgot that I'd read A Pebble in the Sky when writing that last post); it's The Stars, Like Dust, and it's kind of crappy. Maybe I'll see the light when I read his foundation novels, but so far he's failed to impress me and it makes me kind of sad that he's often considered the major sci-fi author. Am I reading the wrong stuff? Is this aimed at 6th-8th graders, while some of his other stuff is more mature?
His non-fiction, though--freakin' amazing.
While you do that, I'm going to get three of them on indefinite retainer and start accepting a shitload of jobs on Craigslist, passing them off to those guys, and keeping the difference.
Jesus, that's cheap.
Why is this sort of thing so common on the low end of web development? It's amazing how happy you can make people in that market by just returning their calls and emails and taking less than a month to perform a task that requires maybe 30 minutes of your time, because they've usually dealt with assholes who can't be bothered to do any of that.
WTF is up with free lance web developers?
Most places I've seen would charge you $500-$1,000 just to set up and skin an open-source e-commerce package.
$1,000 won't buy you shit. Just getting some non-hideous custom graphics will cost you most of that money--and maybe more. I've seen shops charge north of $10,000 for sites that weren't a quarter as complex as an e-commerce site.
osCommerce is a piece of shit.
It's the code equivalent of Finnegan's Wake, but without any hint of genius at work in its production.
Broken architecture, ugly-ass code, no templating system to speak of (a side effect of the broken architecture) etc. STAY AWAY.
I used to be on the fence, but living in Iowa (a smoke-free state these days) for a year changed my mind.
It was awesome. I didn't appreciate how much better it made going out anywhere (but especially bars and restaurants--the smoke makes my wife lose her apatite, even from over in the usually-not-distant-enough "smoking section") until I moved back to Missouri and had a "WTF is going on? Are those disgusting bastards actually smoking indoors? God, the smell is awful!" moment when I walked in to a restaurant before remembering that that's what it's like everywhere that doesn't have an indoor smoking ban.
Living in a ban state made a supporter out of me. Didn't figure I'd ever care about it this much, but now it's one of the few local/state issues that might actually get me out to the polls if it came up for a vote.
Asimov's short stories are shit, mostly. Clarke's short stories are at least much better, if not reliably good. If you must read Asimov, I recommend his scientific essays, which are amazing (there are a couple dozen collections of them floating around). His writing on literature is also very good--I have his guides to Shakespeare and The Bible, and they're both engaging, informative, fun reads. Generally, stick to his non-fic. I still haven't tried his novels (his short stories turned me off so much from his fiction) but his non-fic is solid.
If you want to read older sci-fi, I can personally recommend:
Most of these can stand on the same shelf as any contemporary literature and not be (overly) dwarfed.
Others I've heard are on the same level, but haven't yet read:
As for Stephenson, I've read Snow Crash, Anathem, and Cryptonomicon, in that order, and my preference is the exact reverse of that order, if that helps you choose your next Stephenson read (assuming you haven't read it already). SC was OK but I doubt I'd have kept reading him if Anathem hadn't been better, and Cryptonomicon was so good that I've decided to dedicated a big chunk of time to reading The Diamond Age and his big trilogy.
I loved the vision of the future in that book and find myself thinking/talking about it frequently, but I thought the story itself failed to be even a little bit compelling and the writing was, to put it mildly, sub-par.
I guess it won all those awards for Vinge's creative ideas about technology and not for the writing? Or were the other Hugo contenders that year actually that bad?
Incidentally, can anyone tell me whether I can expect more of the same mediocre work in A Fire Upon the Deep, or is it better? I mean, I don't demand perfection (I read Neal Stephenson for god's sake, I love E.M. Forster for his flaws, and Jack London wrote some of my favorite low-calorie brain candy) but I have to maintain some standards or I'd be buried in a mountain of mostly-shit reading material.
Some of the jokes surrounding the
[SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER]
French character had me doubled over laughing. "Laterre" and "Magna Feeks" or whatever. Hilarious.
Liked the book a lot. The ending fell apart a little (especially the heavily foreshadowed last major plot event/action sequence that never materialized) but it was still pretty good. I think Cryptonomicon is still my favorite of his novels, but Anathem is solidly second.
However, I (finally) read A Canticle for Leibowitz just prior to reading Anathem as I'd heard that they were similar (not so much, as it turns out) and didn't want my reading of the earlier novel to be tainted by the later one, and... well, it's in a whole different class, aside from bearing only a passing resemblance in terms of story. I haven't read everything by Stephenson yet, but I doubt he's got anything that's even close to it. It's one of the few sci-fi books I've read that I could have read right after tackling one of the canonical literary classics without being jarred by the sudden drop in quality of prose and general execution of the story and themes.
It's worth noting that Asimov wrote of sci-fi having three stages of development, according to their focus (these are my names standing in for his longer descriptions):
Adventure
Devices
People
He considered sci-fi that focused on the human condition to be the most mature form of it. If you go back and read even some of the "best" of that gadget-inspired sci-fi, it's easy to see why--almost all of it is complete garbage, even if you've already filtered it to a couple hundred of the top stories. As for the adventure-focused sci-fi, it's mostly Swiss Family Robinson in space, which can be fun but isn't especially valuable in a fiction-as-art sort of way.
Most of the greatest sci-fi is great either because it anticipates/inspires something technological (though that doesn't mean the story or its prose are necessarily any good) or because it comments well on the human condition. Unless you're lucky or prescient, writing tech-focused stories is a good way to churn out crap and a bad way to make a mark on literary history.