>Detail is a good thing when it adds texture and context to your story.
Detail is always good, as long as it is not repetitive (last half of the sentence courtesy of Robert Jordan not having a good editor).
> But when you feel the need to inform your audience of the translations of every minor character's name in a half dozen fictional languages, that's taking it a little too far.
No, you have gone just about far enough, although a little farther wouldn't hurt.
>Do we really need to know that Gandalf's half-brother's cousin's second wife is known as Wilma to the Dwarves of Khazaa Dum, and Betty to the Elves of Mirkwood?
Gandalf had no known siblings, even in the loose sense used by the Maia. If he did, however, yes, we would need to know all that.
>Is my short attention span to blame for me not being endlessly fascinated by meticulous, excessive, and ultimately pointless details?
I just can't understand the love for Martin. I read maybe half of A Game of Thrones, and then gave up (and a book has to be really bad to make me stop in the middle).
Tolkien and Pratchett are probably my top two favorite fantasy (book) authors. My only (terribly weak) complaint about Discworld is that there isn't enough background - although I haven't yet read any of the ancillary books.
In case you hadn't noticed, The Hobbit is fundamentally a fairy tale to be read aloud to kids at bedtime. And adults that enjoy that sort of thing may like reading it outside of that context.
I use myopenid.com as my openid provider. However, my openid is http://www.clowersnet.net/~krc/. If myopenid.com does something I don't like, I create an account with a different provider and change two lines in my website to point to my new provider. My new provider could even be my own server. Everything else keeps working as it did before - the openid consumers I have logged into don't even know that anything changed.
You know, instead of throwing out random arguments, and letting everyone else shoot them down, you could just read up on openid and get most of these answers yourself. Then if you still had unanswered questions, you could ask someone.
It is pretty basic right now, but I only have 2 people on my roster, and I actually chat with them about once a month max, so it is good enough for me (I also use irssi to lurk on the irc channel for the window manager Awesome). As far XMPP encryption, I don't know about TLS, but it works fine with Gtalk's legacy SSL encryption.
As far as implementations, there are 3 major Open Source servers: ejabberd (Erlang), OpenFire (aka WildFire, written in Java) and jabberd2 (C), not to mention djabberd, LiveJournal's Perl-based jabber server framework.
Using XML doesn't automatically make something good, but it doesn't automatically make it bad either. XML was designed for moving data between different systems, and that is how XMPP uses it. And XMPP is certainly more lightweight than SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions). Also, as far as I can see, JSON was created in the 2000-2001 time frame (ECMA-262 was ratified in late 1999) and the current JSON.org went online in 2002. XMPP was started in 1998.
Miguel is a Gnome dev, but he is not the leader or even a leader of Gnome.
Mono is not a core component of Gnome. Some of the most well known programs that use Mono are Banshee (Music player, not the default), Beagle (desktop search, there are several others), and F-Spot (Photo Manager, gthumb and Digikam are possible replacements). You can have a fully functional Gnome desktop without Mono.
As far as d-bus issues, unless those are actually fixed, KDE 4 will not be an improvement over Gnome, as it abandons dcop in favor of d-bus.
Rackspace! Heavy advertiser on Slashdot, employer of more RHCEs than Red Hat,... tech savvy move! And running on LAMP. Nice.
They may be running Linux and Apache, but it is not LAMP. I don't know what DB they are using, but they are not using PHP. They are using Java (and it was written by a slashdotter).
I haven't seen stability problems in 2.6 for a long time. Lately I have been using the 2.6.24 (pre-release) kernel from Ubuntu Hardy (I'm on Debian Sid), and I haven't had any trouble with the kernel. X.org and Mozilla nightly problems, sure. But no kernel problems.
You mean outside of waiting for an official package? There is a package called kernel-package that makes thing a little easier and produces a.deb that you can install with "dpkg -i"
Slashdot Mirror
That is the one feature that makes me consider switching to FF3 from SeaMonkey.
Wild guess, do you have pango-graphite installed?
>Detail is a good thing when it adds texture and context to your story.
Detail is always good, as long as it is not repetitive (last half of the sentence courtesy of Robert Jordan not having a good editor).
> But when you feel the need to inform your audience of the translations of every minor character's name in a half dozen fictional languages, that's taking it a little too far.
No, you have gone just about far enough, although a little farther wouldn't hurt.
>Do we really need to know that Gandalf's half-brother's cousin's second wife is known as Wilma to the Dwarves of Khazaa Dum, and Betty to the Elves of Mirkwood?
Gandalf had no known siblings, even in the loose sense used by the Maia. If he did, however, yes, we would need to know all that.
>Is my short attention span to blame for me not being endlessly fascinated by meticulous, excessive, and ultimately pointless details?
Maybe.
I just can't understand the love for Martin. I read maybe half of A Game of Thrones, and then gave up (and a book has to be really bad to make me stop in the middle).
Care to give book recommendations for those authors?
I have not read anything by any of them except The Wizard of EarthSea, which I couldn't stand.
Tolkien and Pratchett are probably my top two favorite fantasy (book) authors. My only (terribly weak) complaint about Discworld is that there isn't enough background - although I haven't yet read any of the ancillary books.
Tolkien didn't do allegory.
Just say "Most literature, film, music is entertaining filler."
Everything has a genre.
Who cares about characters? The Xeelee sequence ranges from effectively no characters to really poor characters, but it is still a great series.
Thousands of years after the first Homo sapiens appeared, the population was still low.
Also, massive wars against Morgoth can severely reduce your population.
LotR was not nearly long enough, which is why I am reading all of the lost tales, etc.
In case you hadn't noticed, The Hobbit is fundamentally a fairy tale to be read aloud to kids at bedtime. And adults that enjoy that sort of thing may like reading it outside of that context.
My yahoo login has a security image...
Too late, I already have one, and I find it to be very useful.
I use myopenid.com as my openid provider. However, my openid is http://www.clowersnet.net/~krc/. If myopenid.com does something I don't like, I create an account with a different provider and change two lines in my website to point to my new provider. My new provider could even be my own server. Everything else keeps working as it did before - the openid consumers I have logged into don't even know that anything changed.
You know, instead of throwing out random arguments, and letting everyone else shoot them down, you could just read up on openid and get most of these answers yourself. Then if you still had unanswered questions, you could ask someone.
It is pretty basic right now, but I only have 2 people on my roster, and I actually chat with them about once a month max, so it is good enough for me (I also use irssi to lurk on the irc channel for the window manager Awesome). As far XMPP encryption, I don't know about TLS, but it works fine with Gtalk's legacy SSL encryption.
Documentation: http://www.xmpp.org/
As far as implementations, there are 3 major Open Source servers: ejabberd (Erlang), OpenFire (aka WildFire, written in Java) and jabberd2 (C), not to mention djabberd, LiveJournal's Perl-based jabber server framework.
A list of clients: http://www.jabber.org/software/clients.shtml
For a GUI client, I like Psi. Right now I am using the xmpp extension for irssi.
Using XML doesn't automatically make something good, but it doesn't automatically make it bad either. XML was designed for moving data between different systems, and that is how XMPP uses it. And XMPP is certainly more lightweight than SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions). Also, as far as I can see, JSON was created in the 2000-2001 time frame (ECMA-262 was ratified in late 1999) and the current JSON.org went online in 2002. XMPP was started in 1998.
SuSE != Gnome
Miguel is a Gnome dev, but he is not the leader or even a leader of Gnome.
Mono is not a core component of Gnome. Some of the most well known programs that use Mono are Banshee (Music player, not the default), Beagle (desktop search, there are several others), and F-Spot (Photo Manager, gthumb and Digikam are possible replacements). You can have a fully functional Gnome desktop without Mono.
As far as d-bus issues, unless those are actually fixed, KDE 4 will not be an improvement over Gnome, as it abandons dcop in favor of d-bus.
They may be running Linux and Apache, but it is not LAMP. I don't know what DB they are using, but they are not using PHP. They are using Java (and it was written by a slashdotter).
And the DRM kernel stuff will be getting upgrades soon
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Linux_Weather_Forecast/hardware#The_TTM_memory_manager
http://www.x.org/wiki/ttm
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/DRI2
I haven't seen stability problems in 2.6 for a long time. Lately I have been using the 2.6.24 (pre-release) kernel from Ubuntu Hardy (I'm on Debian Sid), and I haven't had any trouble with the kernel. X.org and Mozilla nightly problems, sure. But no kernel problems.
You mean outside of waiting for an official package? .deb that you can install with "dpkg -i"
There is a package called kernel-package that makes thing a little easier and produces a
http://myrddin.org/howto/debian-kernel-recompiling/
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch08s06.html.en
or http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=kernel+debian+way
A brave new world: the music biz at the dawn of 2008
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/state-of-digital-music-2007.ars