Creation myths are powerful. For whatever reason, we need to point to some man and say, "_He_ invented radio (telegraphy, the light bulb, baseball, &c.)" The truth with all of these things is that there was no moment of invention--but there's no glamor to that.
Nationalism, I think, has much to do with the invention of creation myths as well. Abner Doubleday was trumped up as the fictitious "inventor" of baseball, because the fiction perpetuated the notion that baseball was uniquely American in origin, and not a derivative of ball games from across the Atlantic. Similarly, the acclamation of Samuel Morse as the inventor of telegraphy overlooks the innovation of the British Wheatstone; and it was also a Brit, Joseph Swan, and not Thomas Edison, who conceived of the idea of putting an incandescent carbon filament in a vacuum to make the first light bulb.
hyacinthus.
It's really too bad that Apple under Amelio decided to go with NeXT and not BeOS. I know that few may agree with what I'm about to say, but I feel that Apple's acquisition of, and eventual absorption into, NeXT, may prove to be a crucial disaster in Apple's career.
During my short stay at Caltech (another crucial disaster, but never mind that), I saw a number of NeXT boxes. They were very pretty...and not much else. An acquaintance of mine joked that the NeXT boxes in the undergraduate computer lab could have been replaced with those cardboard computer props that furniture stores use, and nobody would have been able to tell the difference. I also remember my astonishment at the hard drive space NeXTStep demanded, over 200 MB, I remember--this at a time when my personal computer had an 80 MB hard drive and I barely felt the need for more.
NeXT failed, deservedly; but now Jobs is back, fighting old battles, playing all the same old tricks. Release dates have been pushed back so many times as to become meaningless--remember, back in 1997, when Jobs had regained power, that Rhapsody was supposed to be the future? Functionality has taken second place in importance to Jobs's pedestrian notions of how computers ought to be pretty, e.g. his quixotic attempt to revive the cube. And system requirements have bloated monstrously. If Apple had gone with Be, they would have had an OS with a spare, functional interface, which booted in ten seconds and required not even 100 MB of hard drive space.
I do agree that Be's best chance was acquisition by Apple. That would have rendered irrelevant most of the problems which made BeOS such a poor competitor in the desktop OS market. Its paucity of drivers wouldn't have mattered, because it would have been running on proprietary hardware. It would have had an established audience with a small, but significant, share of the market.
It's too bad. Be and BeOS are still around, but the company seems intent on making one dumb mistake after another. Their ludicrous attempts to position themselves as players in nonexistent niche markets didn't convince anybody--BeOS wasn't a "Media OS" (whatever that is), and nobody outside of a few trade shows cares about "internet appliances". And just visit www.be.com these days--they barely admit that BeOS is one of their products.
What "old" Wired? So far as I can remember, Wired, at least as far back as when I first learned about it six or seven years ago, was only as good as its guest writers. If Bruce Sterling or William Gibson wrote, you got something interesting, maybe. Otherwise, it was worthless.
And of course it was typeset by people who seemed to think that "typesetting" meant using every possible font setting on the Font menu of their word processor.
I happen mostly to agree with the thesis of this article, that OOP has been applied indiscriminately as a programmer's panacea. The head of development at my previous job was a tremendous proponent of OOP, and he urged us all to read DESIGN PATTERNS and write up detailed class hierarchies. If there were any savings in effort and reduction in complexity, I didn't see them; instead, I saw a proliferation of classes and a disposition to spend more time drawing up nice-looking diagrams than in grappling with real problems.
But I don't care for some of the rhetorical tricks this article uses. Graphs without units or cited source, e.g. the "productivity comparison" which laughably charts "results" versus "time" for OOP technique and the highly specific category of "other". The bandying-about of general claims, with the excuse, "Sorry, we lost the references." The scarcity of citation throughout the document (and _no_, a URL link to another website does not count as another citation; I'm talking about citation from _real_ sources with good credentials.) Belabored, if not ludicrous, analogies (OOP and communism??) And of course, the obligatory venom towards academia.
One day, I hope, "computer science" will not be an oxymoron. But mostly I see stuff like this article--intelligent to a degree, propounding arguments which merit some consideration, but in the end, just as much a "religious" document as the OOP texts the author disparages.
This gets labelled "Insightful"? And if this comment is disconcerting, the replies to it are equally disconcerting, for the same reason. By the gods, this isn't about money! It's about honor, and trust, about having the integrity to look someone in the face and telling them the truth. A simple, "We're trying to cut costs, and thus we're going to let you go," _in person_, would do the trick.
But concepts like honor and trust (_and_ gratitude, of which you seem so proud to have none) are getting old-fashioned these days, and even those who call themselves "moral" seem to think that morality has everything to do with sexual decorum, and nothing to do with treating people honorably. If you're a person of no honor, willing to lie to your employees and conceal information from them, then you'll assume that nobody else has any honor, either--and then it becomes imperative to treat departing employees as potential threats. Get them out the door as quickly as possible, before they cause an "incident" or sabotage something!
It's a bullshit, self-perpetuating attitude. I'm reminded of a story I read in an Eastside newspaper a month or two ago, about an executive at a high-tech company who brutally sacked a friend of hers, and then wrote her, "The company comes before our friendship." Money before honor, profits before loyalty. If that's to be the prevailing attitude in business these days, then I'm not surprised that people like you can't think past your paycheck, and boast about not owing anything to anyone, least of all your employers.
hyacinthus.
P. S. It's spelled "nonexistent". If you read real books, instead of programming manuals, you'd know that.
Yeah, that's right. Just as, in real life, a private citizen would need to purchase the back issue of the magazine or periodical in order to read it.
If you want the article that badly, get off your ass and visit a library. Publishers aren't obliged freely to provide all of their material on-line for all eternity, in order to benefit the lazy.
I didn't even bother with 3001. I'm a little amazed, really; Clarke has been dropping one bomb after another in the last couple decades (the 2001 sequels, the Rama sequels, &c.) and his reputation has not suffered for it.
THE MATRIX was a formulaic action film with a futuristic gloss--in other words, it was nearly indistinguishable, except in production quality, from half of the films calling themselves "sci-fi", at least as far back as TOTAL RECALL.
DARK CITY was a far better movie with a more plausible--certainly a more interesting--story and a minimum of gratuitous violence. Why did everyone ignore it?
If THE PHANTOM MENACE sucked (and it did), it wasn't Jar-Jar's fault. To all the Jar-Jar haters, I say this: at least he was a relatively unique creation, a real character. There weren't any others of note in THE PHANTOM MENACE. Qui-Gon Jinn was there merely to deliver the occasional gnomic utterance; young Obi-Wan was there merely to look good waving a lightsaber. As for young Anakin, well! he was a dumping-ground for whatever Lucas thought would make him look precocious and extraordinary.
I don't place much credence in anything that's "reported" on Ain't It Cool, but I'm a little heartened at the possibility, even, that Lucas may bring in outside help for this second STAR WARS movie. As I wrote elsewhere, I'm convinced that THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK was good chiefly because Lucas didn't write or direct it.
I'm reminded of the situation with another series which began with great promise and turned into a disappointing mess, "Babylon 5". I remember, when the show premiered, how its creator, J. Michael Straczynski, made a big deal over how it was a collective effort, with big-name writers working on some episodes (Peter David wrote one, David Gerrold wrote one; Neil Gaiman eventually got around to writing one; Harlan Ellison promised to write one, but then, what are promises from Harlan Ellison worth?) But eventually JMS jealously shut everyone out, insisted on writing everything himself; the result was...well, "Into the Fire", the disposable fifth season, and the lame attempt to continue the franchise with "Crusade" were the eventual results. It also occurs to me that both George Lucas and JMS make a big deal of their independence from the "establishment" (Lucas from Hollywood; JMS from Paramount).
What a baby! mind you, I took my Computer Science degree
at a university that was once rated among the ten worst in
California (San Diego State University--so rated during
President Day's term there) but I didn't have to exercise
any math skill that I hadn't learned by my last year of high
school. Introductory calculus, at best. _Nothing_ compared
to what's required for a real education in a physical science.
But, hey, if you want to treat a college education like a slightly
up-market version of ITT Tech vocational training, that's your
business.
Almost everything about _2001_ which has lodged in the public consciousness--HAL's calm, axe-murderer voice (Douglas Rain); the precise appearance of the monolith; the use of the music of Strauss, Ligeti, &c.; the match cut from the thrown bone to the orbiting satellite--all of these things were Kubrick's devices.
I've read "The Sentinel", and I've read THE LOST WORLDS OF 2001. Clarke contributed the skeleton of the plot--the manipulation of the development of the forerunners of man (q.v. "Encounter in the Dawn"), the alien artifact planted on the Moon (q.v. "The Sentinel"), the voyage to the outer solar system which goes horribly wrong (q.v. LOST WORLDS). The idea of HAL as the psychotic artificial intelligence was not, as I recall, present in any of the drafts anthologized in LOST WORLDS. Clarke's original conception (of a benevolent AI named "Athene") was quite different from what Kubrick eventually delivered.
Clarke also contributed his drab, talky literary style; in the first third of the movie, Kubrick spends perhaps twenty minutes delivering, with not a single word, what required chapters of exposition for Clarke--the concise link between the monolith, incipient "man-ape" intelligence, carnivorism, and murder.
Any idea that Clarke is chiefly responsible for _2001_'s greatness need only witness the mediocrity of _2010_ and especially _2061_.
...because I've never met a programmer who
could type worth a curse.
I'm an indifferent typist, 60-70 wpm, I skill
I attribute solely to learning how to type on
real typewriter keyboards. My error rate is
greater on a computer keyboard; my typing rate
is fastest on the IBM Selectric keyboard.
But I occasionally got praised for being "fast"
by programmers whose typing hadn't advanced much
past hunt-n-peck.
Typing the English language requires a steadier,
more sustained typing rhythm than typing broken
lines of curly braces and keywords, in any case.
Superfast typing isn't _needed_ for programming.
Besides, the miniscule amount of time that would
be saved by quicker typing is more than offset
by the time programmers waste in reading e-mail,
chatting on AIM, and reading Slashdot.
hyacinthus.
The teacher is stupid because he's not man enough to take
responsibility for his own words. "Oh, I was just joking" is
euphemism for saying "Please don't hit me".
The stupid is stupid because _he's_ not man enough to admit
that the choice lay in _his_ hands, whether or not to do
something irresponsible. I'm reminded of a Smothers Brothers
exchange: "Would you jump off a bridge if someone asked you
to?" "Heh. Not again!"
The lovely thing about this story is how it will bring out the
seething contempt for academia and education which boils
under the surface of Slashdot (how many posts shall we see
from semiliterate geeks boasting, "My teachers didn't
appreciate me either, now I'm writing ten lines of code a day
and earning a six-figure salary, that will teach _them_ to
make me read Shakespeare and learn trigonometry!")
hyacinthus
Re:Sounds really intuitive, no no, really.
on
3D GUI Project
·
· Score: 1
I think it's about time to ban that word, "intuitive", from
discourse on user interfaces. Increasingly, it means nothing,
or worse. Some idiot or other no doubt felt that it would be
"intuitive" to rig up application interfaces to mimic "real-
world" objects; half those idiots must work for Apple now,
and thus we get QuickTime 4 Player, Sherlock, Aqua, etc.
"Intuitiveness" isn't a testable or falsifiable concept; I can
make whatever claims I want about what is "intuitive", and
who is to prove me wrong?
hyacinthus
The idea of a stillsuit won't work anyway, so I can't complain too much about the Lynch movie's botching of Herbert's concept. (Consider: a stillsuit reclaims water by recondensation of perspiration. Perspiration allows a man to keep cool in the hot desert sun by carrying off all that heat in the vaporization of the water. When you recondense the water, it has to yield up all that heat. Therefore, a man wearing a stillsuit would not be cooled off, and would cook in the sun.)
hyacinthus.
Agreed! The really depressing thing about this latest adaptation of DUNE is how good the Lynch movie looks by comparison. And consider how hard it is to find anything really to _praise_ about Lynch's film. The acting? Kyle McLachlan has never been good in anything. _Anything_. At most you can say was that he didn't spoil BLUE VELVET. All the good actors in DUNE were wasted, their roles cut back to nothing; consider Max von Sydow as Kynes, or Jose Ferrer as the Emperor. Other roles were given to bad actors: remember Kenneth McMillan as Baron Harkonnen, shouting and screaming at the top of his lungs; or Patrick Stewart, at his pompous worst, as Halleck. Others went to non-actors, e.g. Sting as Feyd-Rautha, who, to be fair, is not required to do anything other than to look reasonably menacing during a knife fight. The story is butchered; important roles, such as those of Stilgar or Halleck, are reduced almost to the point of being cameos; the additions made to the story are asinine (the "weirding modules", for instance, or the way that Paul causes the rainstorm at the end of the movie.) And cast over the whole affair is a pall of typical Lynchian weirdness--the depiction of the Guild navigators and the way they navigate, the depiction of Baron Harkonnen, &c.
But then you see this TV miniseries, and you realize that, at the very least, Lynch's DUNE had excellent set design, and the occasional striking actor or actress in various roles. (Francesca Annis as Jessica, for instance.) The TV miniseries has almost _nothing_ going for it.
Let's start with the casting. The series boasts one real actor, William Hurt. Hurt's acting style is laconic, almost lazy; it works sometimes (q.v. Lawrence Kasdan's BODY HEAT) but he's totally miscast as Duke Leto, who, to my mind, is supposed to be a man of action, blade-sharp. Juergen Prochnow wasn't a bad choice, although he was too strident at times. For example, in the scene where Leto evacuates the spice-harvesting crew in his ornithopter, he's supposed to be quiet and forcible, a "cool one", as Kynes thinks to himself; Prochnow starts shouting his lines, which isn't right, while Hurt comes across as calmer and more like a cool-headed leader. But in most scenes, Hurt looks bored. As for the rest of the casting...hah! Jessica looks like a weakling. Halleck at least looks more like he ought to look (Stewart was a bad choice all round for _that_ role) but doesn't make as strong as impression as he should. Baron Harkonnen isn't the blustering idiot he is in Lynch's movie, but then, almost anyone would have been an improvement--and, as a friend pointed out to me, he doesn't seem _evil_, really. Chani and Stilgar are merely adequately cast (we should be thankful that they've got more than a half-dozen lines each, I suppose.) Feyd was cast for his beautiful chest and not much more, I suspect, and Paul's little better. When Paul wakes up from one of his nightmares, crying because he's seen the death of his father, my lover, who was watching with me, snorted and said "Yeah, right". And he's not wrong; Alec Newman's attempt to show emotion at such times were uniformly ridiculous; he makes even Kyle McLachlan look good.
The miniseries gets some more of the story in, which is good. The superbly written dinner-party scene in the novel is present, albeit as an insubstantial shadow of itself, in the miniseries. The Fremen characters are far better fleshed out than in Lynch's movie. In the film, Stilgar is reduced merely to giving out the occasional gnomic utterance, while Chani might as well be missing altogether; but in the miniseries they've got real roles, and I'd have to say the best thing about the miniseries is that it makes a major character out of Stilgar. But the interpolations and alterations made to the story...oh my! Constantly the miniseries fabricates polarities which did not exist in the novel, cause-and-effect relationships which did not exist in the novel, presumably in order to reduce the story's complexity to something understandable. For example, the hunter-seeker attempt on Paul's life is made to be a foolish gamble of Rabban's, one which results in the Baron's launching his attack--and not part of the whole scheme of the vendetta, worked out long in advance by the Baron and Piter de Vries, as is made clear in Herbert's novel. Irulan is fabricated into some sort of covert ally of the Atreides, which is a ridiculous invention; it was almost painful to see her clumsy attempts at spying and intrigue (in the world of DUNE, let's be clear about this, nobody could _possibly_ learn anything from a conversation by lurking behind a column and eavesdropping. In the world of DUNE, conspirators are much, much more careful than that.) Events in Paul's story are shuffled to make them seem to fall in a more logical order (e.g. causing the Sardaukar attack on Sietch Tabr to precede the Fremen assault on the Emperor's camp.)
Worst of all is the modernization of the dialogue. A note to all would-be writer-directors: unless you are Stanley Kubrick or Alfred Hitchcock, which you are not, DO NOT ALTER THE WORDS OF THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR. He knew what he was doing, better than you. In the case of adapting DUNE, I'll accept that it's probably necessary to correct Herbert's tendency to use strange names for ordinary things (often using stupid-looking portmanteau words: "lasgun", "pru-door", "sandsnork".) If I were adapting DUNE, I'd substitute "blade" or "knife" for "kindjal", "dart gun" for "maula pistol", and "chess" for "cheops". (Note to science fiction and fantasy writers. Chess has been around in nearly its present form for centuries. Many many variants have been invented. How many of these improvements have caught on? NONE. Chess is going to stay chess. It's not going to mutate into Star Trek chess or pyramid chess or anything else. If it did, I'd stop playing it.) But the miniseries hardly perserves any of Herbert's dialogue? Why? What made John Harrison (the writer-director of this series) think he could possible improve on what Herbert wrote?
The set design is cheap-looking, thanks in part to the overuse of computer-generated backgrounds. Superposing a live-action character on a computer-generated background may look a little better than old-fashioned process shots, but it still looks fake. The costumes were ridiculous--that ludicrous thing that Feyd-Rautha was wearing, for example! or the butterfly evening dress that Irulan wore to the dinner party on Arrakis! And the attempts to portray Jessica's or Paul's altered states of consciousness with swirly computer graphics looked like, well, swirly computer graphics. (But there, we run into the limitation of Frank Herbert's imagination. For, let's be honest here, when it comes to explain just what makes Paul so special, what makes him the Kwisatz Haderach, he fails. Reread the paragraphs where Paul explains what he is, after he's taken the Water of Life--"There is in each one of us an ancient force..."--and just try to find anything in them, other than a rather trite rehash of the old idea of feminine and masculine forces.)
I could go on a lot longer. I'm not sorry I spent the six hours watching the series, but I was expecting something more faithful to the book, and instead got this botched-up semi-original, something made, I suspect, to show off computer graphics more than anything else. It was a huge disappointment.
One more thing. Three two-hour shows comes out to, let's say, ninety minutes of TV per show, or about, let's say, two hundred and fifty minutes of air time. The rule of thumb for a screenplay is, one minute per page. If it's not possible to condense the five hundred pages of Herbert's DUNE into a screenplay half the size, and in the process come up with something which is less of a hatchet job than John Harrison's miniseries, I'll eat my hat. I'll bet even _I_ could do better than that.
You were a good writer once. A great writer, never, and nowhere near Asimov's equal, but a good writer with a healthy knowledge of, and respect for, the "science" in science fiction. I was saddened to see you stretch out 2001 into a string of increasingly poor sequels. I was disappointed to see you collaborate with Gentry Lee, to spin a mediocre but readable novel, RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA, into a series of inferior knock-offs. But _this_! It merely confirms my suspicion that you've little left to do but continue to dine out on your reputation as a futurist and colossus of science fiction--a reputation to which you've added little in nearly thirty years.
Very truly yours,
hyacinthus
P. S. You were just waiting for Stanley Kubrick to cash in his chips, weren't you? I've read LOST WORDS OF 2001, and I know that HAL, as he appears in the final story, wasn't in the first drafts you wrote. Is there not a good chance that HAL was Kubrick's creation? If so, your attempt to merchandise him is even _more_ contemptible. But it's contemptible even if he were all yours.
The DUNE prequels suffer from the same problem that afflicts a lot of historical fiction. They were written, not so much to tell a story, but to provide explanations and descriptions of a number of events which we already know happened, and (if possible) to give an ironic twist to those explanations. It's "connect-the-dots" fiction. So DUNE tells us that the "Old Duke" died in a bullfight? Well, let that death be the result of a Harkonnen plot, and let the young Duncan Idaho (who has a ludicrously involved history all his own) be the one who detects the plot, too late. So DUNE tells us that Gurney Halleck's sister died in a Harkonnen brothel? Well, let her die before his eyes, then, and let Glossu Rabban be her executioner. So DUNE tells us that Vladimir Harkonnen is Jessica's father? Well, we can kill _four_ birds with that stone: not only can we explain how that happened, but we can make the Reverend Mohiam Jessica's mother! and we can now explain how Baron Harkonnen got fat, too! and we can bring the doctor Wellington Yueh into the story too! what incredible irony!
There's no suspense in HOUSE ATREIDES and HOUSE HARKONNEN, really. The authors feel compelled to introduce new characters, like Dominic Vernius and his children, or Abulurd Harkonnen and his wife, but we know that they must die, because DUNE itself has nothing to say about these _ex post facto_ creations. They serve, by their deaths, merely to nudge the "permanent" characters in prescribed directions. Kailea and her son Victor by Leto serve only to explain why Jessica broke her oath with the Bene Gesserit, and bore not a daughter but a son. Abulurd Harkonnen serves only to explain why Glossu Rabban became such a monster that he acquired the nickname of "Beast". And so on.
It doesn't help that the prequels capture few of DUNE's strengths, but faithfully replicate many of that book's weaknesses. The Harkonnens, just as in DUNE, are ludicrously extreme in their barbarism and cruelty. The writers don't add anything to the one-note characterization of Baron Harkonnen in DUNE: he's just the same, at once both sinister and ridiculous. In addition, I was a little revolted that the prequels continued Frank Herbert's tradition of making monstrous caricatures of his homosexual characters: Vladimir Harkonnen is a narcissist, obsessed with the perfection of his own body, who takes men for lovers only because he loathes women. The DUNE prequels also continue Frank Herbert's method of telling, not showing. DUNE tends to bog down in extended passages of internal monologue (too many paragraphs of various characters' gloating over their own cleverness, for one thing), and the prequels do no better.
...that a Slashdot contributor should think that throwing computers at our electoral system is the way to solve its problems. Typical, also, that he should pepper his language with such contemptuous phrases as "dead tree" and "19th century technology". Sigh...
I will give him this, though. It would be easier, possibly, to design a computer-generated interface less susceptible to error, and easier to use for those with some disability (e.g. poor eyesight, tremors in the hands, &c.) than to design a mechanical or paper-based scheme.
While I still lived in California, San Diego used Hollerith-card "butterfly" ballots just as Florida used. They are seriously flawed in that they separate the _ballot questions_ from the _ballot_ itself. The ballot is simply a numbered card with perforations. While it's in the machine, it's not easy to tell whether one of its holes has been perforated or not. Out of the machine, it's easy enough to check for "hanging chads", but impossible to tell if the correct holes have been punched, or if a vote was spoiled with multiple perforations.
In Seattle, a Scantron-type ballot was used. These are superior to the Hollerith-card ballots because the ballot choices are printed on the ballot itself; it's very easy to check the ballot for missing or duplicate filled-in bubbles. No special machinery is _required_ at all, although of course a photoelectric ballot-scanner is used for on-the-spot vote counting. It would be far easier manually to recount Scantron-type ballots than Hollerith-card ballots. However, the ballots may be difficult to fill in for anyone who had difficulty grasping a pen steadily; and they would be susceptible to fraud (an extra bubble filled in, and voila, a good vote is now spoiled and worthless.)
It should be possible, however, to design a small, dedicated "voting computer" whose sole purpose would be to display an interface to a ballot which it would then print on a piece of card. This card would, just as the Scantron-type ballot, have the choices clearly printed on it, along with the voters' responses. The interface presented by the machine could easily be adapted for accessibility to the disabled. The important thing, though, is that the computer be nothing more than a ballot printer. It is _vital_ that a printed voting record be generated. The ability to fall back on manual vote counting _must_ be left open.
Before I go any further, let me emphasize that I have _not_ seen RED PLANET. But this passage from the review caught my eye:
"It's a fairly standard plot, not a bad start at all--but at no point do we get any idea of who the characters are. For the rest of this movie, we're kept in the dark: no character is explored in any detail, characters are inexplicably offended and say weird statements which have little or no rational value to them. No scene ever gets to the meat of who these people are, why anyone might be doing what they're doing, or even some clue as to the dynamics which connect them. It's nearly a half-hour into the movie before we even start to know what kind of person Val Kilmer's character is--and he's the star of the show! By the end, it's hard to like, dislike or even much care about these characters. No sympathy, no tension, no nothing."
This passage fairly accurately describes the characterization in RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA and in other works by that titan of science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke. His plots were often mere skeletons on which to hang descriptions of the strange and wonderful, and his human characters in such stories often were generic stereotypes of astronaut-scientists. (Quick: what memorable differences separate the characters of 2001's Commander Bowman and RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA's Commander Norton?)
Mind you, even on a bad day, the science in Clarke's science fiction was plausible to a degree not likely to be found in RED PLANET--but then, I've long since given up expecting much plausibility from what passes for "sci-fi" in the movies these days. I'll be glad for anything which isn't just a dumb action or horror movie with a futuristic gloss and lots of special effects (qq. v. THE FIFTH ELEMENT, EVENT HORIZON, &c.)
How I would love to have a pool table at work! Or even a ping-pong table, though I'm terrible at the game.
And about the last thing I want my employer to do is supply me ("free!") with everything that would allow my job to invade my private life--the broadband access, the free PC, the cell phone.
I can already hear the cries of protest about this viewpoint. To these people I ask this: in all honesty, how much of what you now know did you learn in high school? For that matter, how much out of COLLEGE? The point is this: "education" in its modern incarnation is created to limit thought, not expand it. Worse, it's [sic] ultimate goal appears to be to mold frames of thought such that certain viewpoints are literally impossible to attain.
How much did I learn in high school and college? Where do I start? Nearly all of the academic knowledge which I possess, and consider truly valuable, I learned during my school years. I learned my math skills (aside: I consider it incredible, how many of my fellow programmers seem to know nothing beyond the simplest algebra); my command of chemistry; my knowledge of (a little) Latin and (less) Greek; what I know, also, of Greek and Roman literature and history.
Mind you, I have to distinguish somewhat between "what I learned at school" and "what I learned in my school years". A good deal of my math, and most of my chemistry, for example, I learned on my own--using school library facilities to do it, perhaps, but still, on my own. In other subjects, Latin and Greek especially, I would have gone nowhere without the help of school materials and especially school instructors, many of whom I came to consider friends, because we shared a common enthusiasm for an academic discipline.
If you go to school convinced of its uselessness, it will be useless.
I may not like Katz's turgid, overwrought style, but his subject interests me.
Yes, I was a nerd when I was in grade school. My parents sent me to a private school until 6th grade, so I was spared the full impact of taunts and bullying until I hit junior high school. Junior high school was the worst. But...do you know, it was never really that bad. The number of bullies I had trouble with probably could have been counted on the fingers of one hand, and they were all talk, no action. Of course, when you're in a wholly new school in a wholly new neighborhood, and only eleven years old, mere _words_ bite deep. But after a couple of years I made friendships and got used to the school routine, and the bullying dwindled to, at most, a minor annoyance.
What really saved me though, in high school, was that I found an acceptable outlet for my scholarly inclinations, in the form of school competitions. I was on the Science Olympiad team three years running (and we got to the national level all three years too:) That gave me many things: something to do at school which really exercised my intellect; a team of fellow students who were also enthusiastic about the sciences; a social outlet in the form of team practices (and the occasional field trip to Kansas or Alabama, wherever the national competition was being held.) I didn't realize, until several years later, how lucky I was to have this resource. My high school, La Jolla High School, is (or was) very active in extracurricular academic competitions of this kind. But since then I've met a lot of people about my age who went to high schools were there were no such outlets for the academically inclined.
So I can sympathize _somewhat_ with the "self-described oddballs" whom Katz quotes. I was certainly odd in high school--I preferred chemistry to sports, and once spent a whole afternoon in the school library reading back issues of "Scientific American". Yet I still found friends and a social niche of sorts. (Mind you, I would have had a much harder time of it, Science Olympiad or no Science Olympiad, if I hadn't play-acted at normality in other respects--concealing my complete lack of interest in the opposite sex, for example. I didn't come out of the closet until many years after I graduated from high school.)
Also, I daresay, I attended high school at the very end of an era. When I graduated from high school (1992), my parents _had_ bought me my first PC (a 386) but I played no computer games, I didn't own a modem and didn't want one, and I hadn't even _heard_ of e-mail or the nascent World Wide Web. I and my friends, my fellow Science Olympians, we were into the _sciences_, not _computers_. The competitions we did encouraged a certain amount of teamwork, socialization, and hands-on activity. But, within a few years, my high school's preeminence in Science Olympiad dried up. The kids who, in a previous age, would have gone in the sciences as I wanted to do, got into computers instead. _Our_ enthusiasm for the sciences may have seemed nerdy and weird, but it was appreciated at least a little--after all, La Jolla High School was able to trumpet its students' success in such things as Science Olympiad and the San Diego Science and Engineering Fair. In our own little way, we contributed to the school's prestige, and yes, we felt just the merest tinge of pride in our school because of that. But the gamers and computer geeks of Katz's book are complete loners. They're not in it for anyone but themselves (I was especially disquieted by the words of the 17-year-old who says "I feel like a god" whenever he's working with his beloved computers.) If you cut yourself off so resolutely from any involvement in the society of your school, and take refuge in activities which are almost completely solitary, should you be surprised that you're treated like an outcast?
Slashdot Mirror
Creation myths are powerful. For whatever reason, we need to point to some man and say, "_He_ invented radio (telegraphy, the light bulb, baseball, &c.)" The truth with all of these things is that there was no moment of invention--but there's no glamor to that. Nationalism, I think, has much to do with the invention of creation myths as well. Abner Doubleday was trumped up as the fictitious "inventor" of baseball, because the fiction perpetuated the notion that baseball was uniquely American in origin, and not a derivative of ball games from across the Atlantic. Similarly, the acclamation of Samuel Morse as the inventor of telegraphy overlooks the innovation of the British Wheatstone; and it was also a Brit, Joseph Swan, and not Thomas Edison, who conceived of the idea of putting an incandescent carbon filament in a vacuum to make the first light bulb. hyacinthus.
It's really too bad that Apple under Amelio decided to go with NeXT and not BeOS. I know that few may agree with what I'm about to say, but I feel that Apple's acquisition of, and eventual absorption into, NeXT, may prove to be a crucial disaster in Apple's career.
During my short stay at Caltech (another crucial disaster, but never mind that), I saw a number of NeXT boxes. They were very pretty...and not much else. An acquaintance of mine joked that the NeXT boxes in the undergraduate computer lab could have been replaced with those cardboard computer props that furniture stores use, and nobody would have been able to tell the difference. I also remember my astonishment at the hard drive space NeXTStep demanded, over 200 MB, I remember--this at a time when my personal computer had an 80 MB hard drive and I barely felt the need for more.
NeXT failed, deservedly; but now Jobs is back, fighting old battles, playing all the same old tricks. Release dates have been pushed back so many times as to become meaningless--remember, back in 1997, when Jobs had regained power, that Rhapsody was supposed to be the future? Functionality has taken second place in importance to Jobs's pedestrian notions of how computers ought to be pretty, e.g. his quixotic attempt to revive the cube. And system requirements have bloated monstrously. If Apple had gone with Be, they would have had an OS with a spare, functional interface, which booted in ten seconds and required not even 100 MB of hard drive space.
I do agree that Be's best chance was acquisition by Apple. That would have rendered irrelevant most of the problems which made BeOS such a poor competitor in the desktop OS market. Its paucity of drivers wouldn't have mattered, because it would have been running on proprietary hardware. It would have had an established audience with a small, but significant, share of the market.
It's too bad. Be and BeOS are still around, but the company seems intent on making one dumb mistake after another. Their ludicrous attempts to position themselves as players in nonexistent niche markets didn't convince anybody--BeOS wasn't a "Media OS" (whatever that is), and nobody outside of a few trade shows cares about "internet appliances". And just visit www.be.com these days--they barely admit that BeOS is one of their products.
hyacinthus.
What "old" Wired? So far as I can remember, Wired, at least as far back as when I first learned about it six or seven years ago, was only as good as its guest writers. If Bruce Sterling or William Gibson wrote, you got something interesting, maybe. Otherwise, it was worthless.
And of course it was typeset by people who seemed to think that "typesetting" meant using every possible font setting on the Font menu of their word processor.
hyacinthus.
I happen mostly to agree with the thesis of this article, that OOP has been applied indiscriminately as a programmer's panacea. The head of development at my previous job was a tremendous proponent of OOP, and he urged us all to read DESIGN PATTERNS and write up detailed class hierarchies. If there were any savings in effort and reduction in complexity, I didn't see them; instead, I saw a proliferation of classes and a disposition to spend more time drawing up nice-looking diagrams than in grappling with real problems.
But I don't care for some of the rhetorical tricks this article uses. Graphs without units or cited source, e.g. the "productivity comparison" which laughably charts "results" versus "time" for OOP technique and the highly specific category of "other". The bandying-about of general claims, with the excuse, "Sorry, we lost the references." The scarcity of citation throughout the document (and _no_, a URL link to another website does not count as another citation; I'm talking about citation from _real_ sources with good credentials.) Belabored, if not ludicrous, analogies (OOP and communism??) And of course, the obligatory venom towards academia.
One day, I hope, "computer science" will not be an oxymoron. But mostly I see stuff like this article--intelligent to a degree, propounding arguments which merit some consideration, but in the end, just as much a "religious" document as the OOP texts the author disparages.
hyacinthus.
This gets labelled "Insightful"? And if this comment is disconcerting, the replies to it are equally disconcerting, for the same reason. By the gods, this isn't about money! It's about honor, and trust, about having the integrity to look someone in the face and telling them the truth. A simple, "We're trying to cut costs, and thus we're going to let you go," _in person_, would do the trick.
But concepts like honor and trust (_and_ gratitude, of which you seem so proud to have none) are getting old-fashioned these days, and even those who call themselves "moral" seem to think that morality has everything to do with sexual decorum, and nothing to do with treating people honorably. If you're a person of no honor, willing to lie to your employees and conceal information from them, then you'll assume that nobody else has any honor, either--and then it becomes imperative to treat departing employees as potential threats. Get them out the door as quickly as possible, before they cause an "incident" or sabotage something!
It's a bullshit, self-perpetuating attitude. I'm reminded of a story I read in an Eastside newspaper a month or two ago, about an executive at a high-tech company who brutally sacked a friend of hers, and then wrote her, "The company comes before our friendship." Money before honor, profits before loyalty. If that's to be the prevailing attitude in business these days, then I'm not surprised that people like you can't think past your paycheck, and boast about not owing anything to anyone, least of all your employers.
hyacinthus.
P. S. It's spelled "nonexistent". If you read real books, instead of programming manuals, you'd know that.
The ironic thing is, this is probably one of the
few cases where the brainless, reflexive insult "faggot" is actually _correct_.
hyacinthus (cheerfully queer).
Yeah, that's right. Just as, in real life, a private citizen would need to purchase the back issue of the magazine or periodical in order to read it.
If you want the article that badly, get off your ass and visit a library. Publishers aren't obliged freely to provide all of their material on-line for all eternity, in order to benefit the lazy.
hyacinthus.
I didn't even bother with 3001. I'm a little amazed, really; Clarke has been dropping one bomb after another in the last couple decades (the 2001 sequels, the Rama sequels, &c.) and his reputation has not suffered for it.
hyacinthus.
THE MATRIX was a formulaic action film with a futuristic gloss--in other words, it was nearly indistinguishable, except in production quality, from half of the films calling themselves "sci-fi", at least as far back as TOTAL RECALL.
DARK CITY was a far better movie with a more plausible--certainly a more interesting--story and a minimum of gratuitous violence. Why did everyone ignore it?
hyacinthus.
If THE PHANTOM MENACE sucked (and it did), it wasn't Jar-Jar's fault. To all the Jar-Jar haters, I say this: at least he was a relatively unique creation, a real character. There weren't any others of note in THE PHANTOM MENACE. Qui-Gon Jinn was there merely to deliver the occasional gnomic utterance; young Obi-Wan was there merely to look good waving a lightsaber. As for young Anakin, well! he was a dumping-ground for whatever Lucas thought would make him look precocious and extraordinary.
I don't place much credence in anything that's "reported" on Ain't It Cool, but I'm a little heartened at the possibility, even, that Lucas may bring in outside help for this second STAR WARS movie. As I wrote elsewhere, I'm convinced that THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK was good chiefly because Lucas didn't write or direct it.
I'm reminded of the situation with another series which began with great promise and turned into a disappointing mess, "Babylon 5". I remember, when the show premiered, how its creator, J. Michael Straczynski, made a big deal over how it was a collective effort, with big-name writers working on some episodes (Peter David wrote one, David Gerrold wrote one; Neil Gaiman eventually got around to writing one; Harlan Ellison promised to write one, but then, what are promises from Harlan Ellison worth?) But eventually JMS jealously shut everyone out, insisted on writing everything himself; the result was...well, "Into the Fire", the disposable fifth season, and the lame attempt to continue the franchise with "Crusade" were the eventual results. It also occurs to me that both George Lucas and JMS make a big deal of their independence from the "establishment" (Lucas from Hollywood; JMS from Paramount).
hyacinthus.
hyacinthus.
Almost everything about _2001_ which has lodged in the public consciousness--HAL's calm, axe-murderer voice (Douglas Rain); the precise appearance of the monolith; the use of the music of Strauss, Ligeti, &c.; the match cut from the thrown bone to the orbiting satellite--all of these things were Kubrick's devices.
I've read "The Sentinel", and I've read THE LOST WORLDS OF 2001. Clarke contributed the skeleton of the plot--the manipulation of the development of the forerunners of man (q.v. "Encounter in the Dawn"), the alien artifact planted on the Moon (q.v. "The Sentinel"), the voyage to the outer solar system which goes horribly wrong (q.v. LOST WORLDS). The idea of HAL as the psychotic artificial intelligence was not, as I recall, present in any of the drafts anthologized in LOST WORLDS. Clarke's original conception (of a benevolent AI named "Athene") was quite different from what Kubrick eventually delivered.
Clarke also contributed his drab, talky literary style; in the first third of the movie, Kubrick spends perhaps twenty minutes delivering, with not a single word, what required chapters of exposition for Clarke--the concise link between the monolith, incipient "man-ape" intelligence, carnivorism, and murder.
Any idea that Clarke is chiefly responsible for _2001_'s greatness need only witness the mediocrity of _2010_ and especially _2061_.
hyacinthus.
...because I've never met a programmer who could type worth a curse. I'm an indifferent typist, 60-70 wpm, I skill I attribute solely to learning how to type on real typewriter keyboards. My error rate is greater on a computer keyboard; my typing rate is fastest on the IBM Selectric keyboard. But I occasionally got praised for being "fast" by programmers whose typing hadn't advanced much past hunt-n-peck. Typing the English language requires a steadier, more sustained typing rhythm than typing broken lines of curly braces and keywords, in any case. Superfast typing isn't _needed_ for programming. Besides, the miniscule amount of time that would be saved by quicker typing is more than offset by the time programmers waste in reading e-mail, chatting on AIM, and reading Slashdot. hyacinthus.
They're _both_ stupid.
The teacher is stupid because he's not man enough to take
responsibility for his own words. "Oh, I was just joking" is
euphemism for saying "Please don't hit me".
The stupid is stupid because _he's_ not man enough to admit
that the choice lay in _his_ hands, whether or not to do
something irresponsible. I'm reminded of a Smothers Brothers
exchange: "Would you jump off a bridge if someone asked you
to?" "Heh. Not again!"
The lovely thing about this story is how it will bring out the
seething contempt for academia and education which boils
under the surface of Slashdot (how many posts shall we see
from semiliterate geeks boasting, "My teachers didn't
appreciate me either, now I'm writing ten lines of code a day
and earning a six-figure salary, that will teach _them_ to
make me read Shakespeare and learn trigonometry!")
hyacinthus
I think it's about time to ban that word, "intuitive", from discourse on user interfaces. Increasingly, it means nothing, or worse. Some idiot or other no doubt felt that it would be "intuitive" to rig up application interfaces to mimic "real- world" objects; half those idiots must work for Apple now, and thus we get QuickTime 4 Player, Sherlock, Aqua, etc. "Intuitiveness" isn't a testable or falsifiable concept; I can make whatever claims I want about what is "intuitive", and who is to prove me wrong? hyacinthus
The idea of a stillsuit won't work anyway, so I can't complain too much about the Lynch movie's botching of Herbert's concept. (Consider: a stillsuit reclaims water by recondensation of perspiration. Perspiration allows a man to keep cool in the hot desert sun by carrying off all that heat in the vaporization of the water. When you recondense the water, it has to yield up all that heat. Therefore, a man wearing a stillsuit would not be cooled off, and would cook in the sun.) hyacinthus.
Agreed! The really depressing thing about this latest adaptation of DUNE is how good the Lynch movie looks by comparison. And consider how hard it is to find anything really to _praise_ about Lynch's film. The acting? Kyle McLachlan has never been good in anything. _Anything_. At most you can say was that he didn't spoil BLUE VELVET. All the good actors in DUNE were wasted, their roles cut back to nothing; consider Max von Sydow as Kynes, or Jose Ferrer as the Emperor. Other roles were given to bad actors: remember Kenneth McMillan as Baron Harkonnen, shouting and screaming at the top of his lungs; or Patrick Stewart, at his pompous worst, as Halleck. Others went to non-actors, e.g. Sting as Feyd-Rautha, who, to be fair, is not required to do anything other than to look reasonably menacing during a knife fight. The story is butchered; important roles, such as those of Stilgar or Halleck, are reduced almost to the point of being cameos; the additions made to the story are asinine (the "weirding modules", for instance, or the way that Paul causes the rainstorm at the end of the movie.) And cast over the whole affair is a pall of typical Lynchian weirdness--the depiction of the Guild navigators and the way they navigate, the depiction of Baron Harkonnen, &c.
But then you see this TV miniseries, and you realize that, at the very least, Lynch's DUNE had excellent set design, and the occasional striking actor or actress in various roles. (Francesca Annis as Jessica, for instance.) The TV miniseries has almost _nothing_ going for it.
Let's start with the casting. The series boasts one real actor, William Hurt. Hurt's acting style is laconic, almost lazy; it works sometimes (q.v. Lawrence Kasdan's BODY HEAT) but he's totally miscast as Duke Leto, who, to my mind, is supposed to be a man of action, blade-sharp. Juergen Prochnow wasn't a bad choice, although he was too strident at times. For example, in the scene where Leto evacuates the spice-harvesting crew in his ornithopter, he's supposed to be quiet and forcible, a "cool one", as Kynes thinks to himself; Prochnow starts shouting his lines, which isn't right, while Hurt comes across as calmer and more like a cool-headed leader. But in most scenes, Hurt looks bored. As for the rest of the casting...hah! Jessica looks like a weakling. Halleck at least looks more like he ought to look (Stewart was a bad choice all round for _that_ role) but doesn't make as strong as impression as he should. Baron Harkonnen isn't the blustering idiot he is in Lynch's movie, but then, almost anyone would have been an improvement--and, as a friend pointed out to me, he doesn't seem _evil_, really. Chani and Stilgar are merely adequately cast (we should be thankful that they've got more than a half-dozen lines each, I suppose.) Feyd was cast for his beautiful chest and not much more, I suspect, and Paul's little better. When Paul wakes up from one of his nightmares, crying because he's seen the death of his father, my lover, who was watching with me, snorted and said "Yeah, right". And he's not wrong; Alec Newman's attempt to show emotion at such times were uniformly ridiculous; he makes even Kyle McLachlan look good.
The miniseries gets some more of the story in, which is good. The superbly written dinner-party scene in the novel is present, albeit as an insubstantial shadow of itself, in the miniseries. The Fremen characters are far better fleshed out than in Lynch's movie. In the film, Stilgar is reduced merely to giving out the occasional gnomic utterance, while Chani might as well be missing altogether; but in the miniseries they've got real roles, and I'd have to say the best thing about the miniseries is that it makes a major character out of Stilgar. But the interpolations and alterations made to the story...oh my! Constantly the miniseries fabricates polarities which did not exist in the novel, cause-and-effect relationships which did not exist in the novel, presumably in order to reduce the story's complexity to something understandable. For example, the hunter-seeker attempt on Paul's life is made to be a foolish gamble of Rabban's, one which results in the Baron's launching his attack--and not part of the whole scheme of the vendetta, worked out long in advance by the Baron and Piter de Vries, as is made clear in Herbert's novel. Irulan is fabricated into some sort of covert ally of the Atreides, which is a ridiculous invention; it was almost painful to see her clumsy attempts at spying and intrigue (in the world of DUNE, let's be clear about this, nobody could _possibly_ learn anything from a conversation by lurking behind a column and eavesdropping. In the world of DUNE, conspirators are much, much more careful than that.) Events in Paul's story are shuffled to make them seem to fall in a more logical order (e.g. causing the Sardaukar attack on Sietch Tabr to precede the Fremen assault on the Emperor's camp.)
Worst of all is the modernization of the dialogue. A note to all would-be writer-directors: unless you are Stanley Kubrick or Alfred Hitchcock, which you are not, DO NOT ALTER THE WORDS OF THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR. He knew what he was doing, better than you. In the case of adapting DUNE, I'll accept that it's probably necessary to correct Herbert's tendency to use strange names for ordinary things (often using stupid-looking portmanteau words: "lasgun", "pru-door", "sandsnork".) If I were adapting DUNE, I'd substitute "blade" or "knife" for "kindjal", "dart gun" for "maula pistol", and "chess" for "cheops". (Note to science fiction and fantasy writers. Chess has been around in nearly its present form for centuries. Many many variants have been invented. How many of these improvements have caught on? NONE. Chess is going to stay chess. It's not going to mutate into Star Trek chess or pyramid chess or anything else. If it did, I'd stop playing it.) But the miniseries hardly perserves any of Herbert's dialogue? Why? What made John Harrison (the writer-director of this series) think he could possible improve on what Herbert wrote?
The set design is cheap-looking, thanks in part to the overuse of computer-generated backgrounds. Superposing a live-action character on a computer-generated background may look a little better than old-fashioned process shots, but it still looks fake. The costumes were ridiculous--that ludicrous thing that Feyd-Rautha was wearing, for example! or the butterfly evening dress that Irulan wore to the dinner party on Arrakis! And the attempts to portray Jessica's or Paul's altered states of consciousness with swirly computer graphics looked like, well, swirly computer graphics. (But there, we run into the limitation of Frank Herbert's imagination. For, let's be honest here, when it comes to explain just what makes Paul so special, what makes him the Kwisatz Haderach, he fails. Reread the paragraphs where Paul explains what he is, after he's taken the Water of Life--"There is in each one of us an ancient force..."--and just try to find anything in them, other than a rather trite rehash of the old idea of feminine and masculine forces.)
I could go on a lot longer. I'm not sorry I spent the six hours watching the series, but I was expecting something more faithful to the book, and instead got this botched-up semi-original, something made, I suspect, to show off computer graphics more than anything else. It was a huge disappointment.
One more thing. Three two-hour shows comes out to, let's say, ninety minutes of TV per show, or about, let's say, two hundred and fifty minutes of air time. The rule of thumb for a screenplay is, one minute per page. If it's not possible to condense the five hundred pages of Herbert's DUNE into a screenplay half the size, and in the process come up with something which is less of a hatchet job than John Harrison's miniseries, I'll eat my hat. I'll bet even _I_ could do better than that.
hyacinthus.
You were a good writer once. A great writer, never, and nowhere near Asimov's equal, but a good writer with a healthy knowledge of, and respect for, the "science" in science fiction. I was saddened to see you stretch out 2001 into a string of increasingly poor sequels. I was disappointed to see you collaborate with Gentry Lee, to spin a mediocre but readable novel, RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA, into a series of inferior knock-offs. But _this_! It merely confirms my suspicion that you've little left to do but continue to dine out on your reputation as a futurist and colossus of science fiction--a reputation to which you've added little in nearly thirty years.
Very truly yours,
hyacinthus
P. S. You were just waiting for Stanley Kubrick to cash in his chips, weren't you? I've read LOST WORDS OF 2001, and I know that HAL, as he appears in the final story, wasn't in the first drafts you wrote. Is there not a good chance that HAL was Kubrick's creation? If so, your attempt to merchandise him is even _more_ contemptible. But it's contemptible even if he were all yours.
No, that was _us_. Only in America could such an asinine law even be considered.
It was House Bill No. 246, Indiana State Legislature, 1897. It was not passed, but neither was it rejected out of hand, as it should have been.
hyacinthus.
The DUNE prequels suffer from the same problem that afflicts a lot of historical fiction. They were written, not so much to tell a story, but to provide explanations and descriptions of a number of events which we already know happened, and (if possible) to give an ironic twist to those explanations. It's "connect-the-dots" fiction. So DUNE tells us that the "Old Duke" died in a bullfight? Well, let that death be the result of a Harkonnen plot, and let the young Duncan Idaho (who has a ludicrously involved history all his own) be the one who detects the plot, too late. So DUNE tells us that Gurney Halleck's sister died in a Harkonnen brothel? Well, let her die before his eyes, then, and let Glossu Rabban be her executioner. So DUNE tells us that Vladimir Harkonnen is Jessica's father? Well, we can kill _four_ birds with that stone: not only can we explain how that happened, but we can make the Reverend Mohiam Jessica's mother! and we can now explain how Baron Harkonnen got fat, too! and we can bring the doctor Wellington Yueh into the story too! what incredible irony!
There's no suspense in HOUSE ATREIDES and HOUSE HARKONNEN, really. The authors feel compelled to introduce new characters, like Dominic Vernius and his children, or Abulurd Harkonnen and his wife, but we know that they must die, because DUNE itself has nothing to say about these _ex post facto_ creations. They serve, by their deaths, merely to nudge the "permanent" characters in prescribed directions. Kailea and her son Victor by Leto serve only to explain why Jessica broke her oath with the Bene Gesserit, and bore not a daughter but a son. Abulurd Harkonnen serves only to explain why Glossu Rabban became such a monster that he acquired the nickname of "Beast". And so on.
It doesn't help that the prequels capture few of DUNE's strengths, but faithfully replicate many of that book's weaknesses. The Harkonnens, just as in DUNE, are ludicrously extreme in their barbarism and cruelty. The writers don't add anything to the one-note characterization of Baron Harkonnen in DUNE: he's just the same, at once both sinister and ridiculous. In addition, I was a little revolted that the prequels continued Frank Herbert's tradition of making monstrous caricatures of his homosexual characters: Vladimir Harkonnen is a narcissist, obsessed with the perfection of his own body, who takes men for lovers only because he loathes women. The DUNE prequels also continue Frank Herbert's method of telling, not showing. DUNE tends to bog down in extended passages of internal monologue (too many paragraphs of various characters' gloating over their own cleverness, for one thing), and the prequels do no better.
hyacinthus
...that a Slashdot contributor should think that throwing computers at our electoral system is the way to solve its problems. Typical, also, that he should pepper his language with such contemptuous phrases as "dead tree" and "19th century technology". Sigh...
I will give him this, though. It would be easier, possibly, to design a computer-generated interface less susceptible to error, and easier to use for those with some disability (e.g. poor eyesight, tremors in the hands, &c.) than to design a mechanical or paper-based scheme.
While I still lived in California, San Diego used Hollerith-card "butterfly" ballots just as Florida used. They are seriously flawed in that they separate the _ballot questions_ from the _ballot_ itself. The ballot is simply a numbered card with perforations. While it's in the machine, it's not easy to tell whether one of its holes has been perforated or not. Out of the machine, it's easy enough to check for "hanging chads", but impossible to tell if the correct holes have been punched, or if a vote was spoiled with multiple perforations.
In Seattle, a Scantron-type ballot was used. These are superior to the Hollerith-card ballots because the ballot choices are printed on the ballot itself; it's very easy to check the ballot for missing or duplicate filled-in bubbles. No special machinery is _required_ at all, although of course a photoelectric ballot-scanner is used for on-the-spot vote counting. It would be far easier manually to recount Scantron-type ballots than Hollerith-card ballots. However, the ballots may be difficult to fill in for anyone who had difficulty grasping a pen steadily; and they would be susceptible to fraud (an extra bubble filled in, and voila, a good vote is now spoiled and worthless.)
It should be possible, however, to design a small, dedicated "voting computer" whose sole purpose would be to display an interface to a ballot which it would then print on a piece of card. This card would, just as the Scantron-type ballot, have the choices clearly printed on it, along with the voters' responses. The interface presented by the machine could easily be adapted for accessibility to the disabled. The important thing, though, is that the computer be nothing more than a ballot printer. It is _vital_ that a printed voting record be generated. The ability to fall back on manual vote counting _must_ be left open.
hyacinthus
Before I go any further, let me emphasize that I have _not_ seen RED PLANET. But this passage from the review caught my eye:
"It's a fairly standard plot, not a bad start at all--but at no point do we get any idea of who the characters are. For the rest of this movie, we're kept in the dark: no character is explored in any detail, characters are inexplicably offended and say weird statements which have little or no rational value to them. No scene ever gets to the meat of who these people are, why anyone might be doing what they're doing, or even some clue as to the dynamics which connect them. It's nearly a half-hour into the movie before we even start to know what kind of person Val Kilmer's character is--and he's the star of the show! By the end, it's hard to like, dislike or even much care about these characters. No sympathy, no tension, no nothing."
This passage fairly accurately describes the characterization in RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA and in other works by that titan of science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke. His plots were often mere skeletons on which to hang descriptions of the strange and wonderful, and his human characters in such stories often were generic stereotypes of astronaut-scientists. (Quick: what memorable differences separate the characters of 2001's Commander Bowman and RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA's Commander Norton?)
Mind you, even on a bad day, the science in Clarke's science fiction was plausible to a degree not likely to be found in RED PLANET--but then, I've long since given up expecting much plausibility from what passes for "sci-fi" in the movies these days. I'll be glad for anything which isn't just a dumb action or horror movie with a futuristic gloss and lots of special effects (qq. v. THE FIFTH ELEMENT, EVENT HORIZON, &c.)
hyacinthus
How I would love to have a pool table at work! Or even a ping-pong table, though I'm terrible at the game.
And about the last thing I want my employer to do is supply me ("free!") with everything that would allow my job to invade my private life--the broadband access, the free PC, the cell phone.
hyacinthus.
How much did I learn in high school and college? Where do I start? Nearly all of the academic knowledge which I possess, and consider truly valuable, I learned during my school years. I learned my math skills (aside: I consider it incredible, how many of my fellow programmers seem to know nothing beyond the simplest algebra); my command of chemistry; my knowledge of (a little) Latin and (less) Greek; what I know, also, of Greek and Roman literature and history.
Mind you, I have to distinguish somewhat between "what I learned at school" and "what I learned in my school years". A good deal of my math, and most of my chemistry, for example, I learned on my own--using school library facilities to do it, perhaps, but still, on my own. In other subjects, Latin and Greek especially, I would have gone nowhere without the help of school materials and especially school instructors, many of whom I came to consider friends, because we shared a common enthusiasm for an academic discipline.
If you go to school convinced of its uselessness, it will be useless.
I may not like Katz's turgid, overwrought style, but his subject interests me.
:) That gave me many things: something to do at school which really exercised my intellect; a team of fellow students who were also enthusiastic about the sciences; a social outlet in the form of team practices (and the occasional field trip to Kansas or Alabama, wherever the national competition was being held.) I didn't realize, until several years later, how lucky I was to have this resource. My high school, La Jolla High School, is (or was) very active in extracurricular academic competitions of this kind. But since then I've met a lot of people about my age who went to high schools were there were no such outlets for the academically inclined.
Yes, I was a nerd when I was in grade school. My parents sent me to a private school until 6th grade, so I was spared the full impact of taunts and bullying until I hit junior high school. Junior high school was the worst. But...do you know, it was never really that bad. The number of bullies I had trouble with probably could have been counted on the fingers of one hand, and they were all talk, no action. Of course, when you're in a wholly new school in a wholly new neighborhood, and only eleven years old, mere _words_ bite deep. But after a couple of years I made friendships and got used to the school routine, and the bullying dwindled to, at most, a minor annoyance.
What really saved me though, in high school, was that I found an acceptable outlet for my scholarly inclinations, in the form of school competitions. I was on the Science Olympiad team three years running (and we got to the national level all three years too
So I can sympathize _somewhat_ with the "self-described oddballs" whom Katz quotes. I was certainly odd in high school--I preferred chemistry to sports, and once spent a whole afternoon in the school library reading back issues of "Scientific American". Yet I still found friends and a social niche of sorts. (Mind you, I would have had a much harder time of it, Science Olympiad or no Science Olympiad, if I hadn't play-acted at normality in other respects--concealing my complete lack of interest in the opposite sex, for example. I didn't come out of the closet until many years after I graduated from high school.)
Also, I daresay, I attended high school at the very end of an era. When I graduated from high school (1992), my parents _had_ bought me my first PC (a 386) but I played no computer games, I didn't own a modem and didn't want one, and I hadn't even _heard_ of e-mail or the nascent World Wide Web. I and my friends, my fellow Science Olympians, we were into the _sciences_, not _computers_. The competitions we did encouraged a certain amount of teamwork, socialization, and hands-on activity. But, within a few years, my high school's preeminence in Science Olympiad dried up. The kids who, in a previous age, would have gone in the sciences as I wanted to do, got into computers instead. _Our_ enthusiasm for the sciences may have seemed nerdy and weird, but it was appreciated at least a little--after all, La Jolla High School was able to trumpet its students' success in such things as Science Olympiad and the San Diego Science and Engineering Fair. In our own little way, we contributed to the school's prestige, and yes, we felt just the merest tinge of pride in our school because of that. But the gamers and computer geeks of Katz's book are complete loners. They're not in it for anyone but themselves (I was especially disquieted by the words of the 17-year-old who says "I feel like a god" whenever he's working with his beloved computers.) If you cut yourself off so resolutely from any involvement in the society of your school, and take refuge in activities which are almost completely solitary, should you be surprised that you're treated like an outcast?
hyacinthus