Then they are obliged to take regular doses of Prozac or some similar mind-killing drug, suppressing their dangerous weirdness for the good of the community and turning them into a good zombie.
The adjective "goth" in the description above doesn't boost my confidence in it. Anything that needs to be described with this word these days is, if not guaranteed to be crap, quite likely to be.
Nowadays "goth" means "spouting all the formulaic cliches to sell to the angst-ridden adolescents with bad make-up and vampire fixations". Death, morbid poetry, the occult, fringey sexual connotations, and tortured-looking fonts on the artwork.
The Crow (the original comic book) was good. After the movie came out, it all dropped off rapidly. And don't even mention Poppy Z. Brite (the Trent Reznor of literature).
Probably the whole of the Season of Mists arc (my introduction to Sandman). Or if that's not allowed, perhaps Dream of a Thousand Cats, or Three Septembers and a January.
Next up: who's your favourite Endless? Can we have a Slashdot poll on this?
(Mine would probably be Delirium, or possibly Dream. Though Death's kinda cute too.)
One problem I've noticed with colour screens (at least the active-matrix type) is that they don't work well in bright sunlight. When I first tried to use my laptop outdoors (I thought it was a good idea, given that it's portable and all that), I found that the screen was nigh-unreadable.
Perhaps the Palm display is a different, more light-friendly technology. Though in any case, I can't see many applications where I'd want colour on a PalmPilot. More pixels would be much more useful.
Microsoft's internal culture is based on control. Control of standards, APIs, and the future development of their products are cornerstones of the Microsoft world-view. That Microsoft would cede these on anything, especially the kernel of an operating system, is fantastically unlikely.
In my view, Microsoft would rather kill and bury WinCE than open-source it; the later would break some of the stranglehold they have on APIs.
If Microsoft take any sort of remotely-un-closed course of action (in itself unlikely), it will no doubt be under an oppressively strict licence, prohibiting any forking or reuse of code in other projects or redistribution of code or binaries, and placing other conditions to give MS's bureaucracy control of everything. And of course, the open-source benefits won't come.
I can't see why anyone would want a personal information appliance with a 160x160 256-colour screen. The colour capability does not add to its ability to present information (except perhaps marginally). I can see how 4-level greyscale might be useful (say, for antialiasing text), but a full colour LCD sounds more at home in a video game than a Pilot. (Unless Palm put in a Springboard slot and release a TV tuner module or something.)
Rather than adding colour, Palm should be increasing the screen size to something more useful. 160x160 is just not enough to display any substantial amount of information.
Though, seeing how neither Palm nor Handspring has taken this initiative, I suspect that higher resolutions would break a lot of software. Which probably means we're doomed to 160x160.
This reminds me of what is probably one of the least useful phrasebooks ever written (the following review of which occasionally appears on mailing lists):
This comes from the best sixty cents I ever spent, a British book called "The Incomplete Book of Failures: The Official Handbook of the Not-Terribly-Good Club of Great Britain". It's probably out of print and unavailable, but get it if you can.
The Worst Phrasebook =================
Pedro Carolino is one of the all-time freats. In 1883 he wrote an English-Portuguese phrasebook despite having little or no command of the English language.
His greatly recommended book "The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English" has now been reprinted under the title "English As She is Spoke".
After a brief dedication:
'We expect then, who the little book (for the care what we wrote him, and for her typographical correction) that may be worth the acceptation of the studious persons, and especially of the youth, at which we dedicate him particularly.'
Carolino kicks off with some 'Familiar phrases' which the Portuguese holidaymaker might find useful. Among these are:
Dress your hairs This hat go well Undress you to Exculpate me by your brother's She make the prude Do you cut the hairs? He has tost his all good
He then moves on the 'Familiar Dialogues' which include 'For to wish the good morning,' and 'For to visit a sick.'
Dialogue 18 - 'For to ride a horse' - begins: 'Here is a horse who have bad looks. Give me another. I will not that. He not sall know to march, he is pursy, he is foundered. Don't you are ashamed to give me a jade as like? he is unshoed, he is with nails up.' In the section on 'Anecdotes' Carolino offers the following guaranteed to enthrall any listener:
'One eyed was laied against a man which had good eyes that he saw better than him. The party was accepted. I had gain, over said the one eyed; why I se you two eyes, and you not look me who one.'
It is difficult to top that, but Carolino manages in a useful section of 'Idiotism and proverbs'. These include:
Nothing some money, nothing of Swiss He eat to coaches A take is better than two you shall have The stone as roll not heap up not foam
and the well-known expression:
The dog than bark not bite
Carolino's particular genius was aided by the fact that he did not possess an Enlish-Portuguese Dictionary. However, he did possess Portuguese-French and French-English dictionaries through both of which he dragged his original expressions. The results yield language of originality and great beauty. Is there anything in conventional English which could equal the vividness of 'To craunch a marmoset'?
Back in the old days, when Netscape was the big evil corporate intruder, the W3C published its own standards for the next generation of HTML. It included things such as mathematical formulae and so on. Netscape wasn't interested, choosing instead to work on flashy, cool-looking things (frames, Javascript, background images) that commercial content developers and users would find cool.
Who won? Netscape. They had the browser, and people were more interested in stuff that looks cool than in standards correctness.
Even if Netscape is more standards compliant than Microsoft, that won't guarantee its ascendancy. If MS's HTML looks cool and works with the standard Windows browser, it will become the defacto standard, for everyone save purists.
How come it works on your system? On the Linux systems I've used it on, it'd crash after a while. (On SGI IRIX, it would do the same, only spawning lots of zero-size alert dialogs; irritating, that.)
There have been a number. There was Mnemonic, the Freedows of browsers, which was meant to be really kick-ass with lots of innovative design features, but never seems to have gotten anywhere. Then there were some which got up to simple HTML rendering (sub-NCSA-Mosaic standard).
Writing a simple HTML 2.0 browser isn't too difficult. KDE and GNOME have one each for documentation. Writing something with a DOM and layers and CSS and JavaScript and such (as many modern sites require) is another matter.
Given that Netscape 4.x is crash-prone, Mozilla is not anywhere close to release (it may be usable in the end-user sense in time to run on top of GNU HURD and GNUSTEP), and content/tool companies are abandoning Netscape compatibility (i.e., Cold Fusion's decision to only support MSIE), maybe it's time for some enterprising hackers to short-circuit the process and get MSIE running on WINE.
Microsoft would probably resist this all the way, with undocomented system-level hooks, VxDs and such. Though if it can be done, it may very well be useful.
BTW anyone know the max resolution we could get with a human eye?
I once read that it's pretty poor; the reason why we perceive things at a high resolution is because our brains correct the input based on subsequent images and heuristics.
Mind you, this discovery may change this estimate.
Once they figure this out enough to be able to tap into the human optic nerve and get decent images out, it could lead to a major advance in journalism and filmmaking; implanted video recorders tapping into the optic nerve and storing the images for later downloading. (Greg Egan's Distress describes one such system.)
...and then someone will code an emulator (which will run trivially on the computers of the day), and people will play vintage PlayStation games on their computers, downloading them from the Net.
(With any luck, downloading a 650Mb PSX disc image will be as much a matter as downloading a 40k C64 tape image is today, and the copyright owners will care as much as the owners of Wizball and Paradroid care about you pirating their decade-old war3z.)
Aye, Krycek is one possibility. Perhaps making him an Anakinesque fallen hero would work.
Or have something about the early days of the Cigarette Smoking Man (Spender or whatever his name is) and his cabal; though that might be too Dark Skies-esque.
One idea I've had was for something focusing on the early days of the Well-Manicured Man's involvement in the conspiracy, set in the labyrinthine British intelligence establishment at the height of the Cold War. There'd be plenty of potential there for intrigue, paranoia and head-spinning plot twists, and WMM (with his reversal and subsequent death in the movie) would make a great Anakin.
The real reason for copyright extension was because the content barons (Disney and such) would have lost control of their older films. You can bet that when the extension expires, there'll be another one; unless, by then, copyright has been turned into an in perpetua property right, like land titles. (Which is quite probable; the megacorps which have the money to influence Congress would want it this way.)
A while ago, NtK mentioned the existence of a site named linuxchick.com. This turned out to be a fairly generic porn site, seemingly putting the word "Linux" in its title to get more hits. They didn't even have any penguin graphics.
I'd say that Greg Egan would be among the best slashdot interview candidates. He's extremely on the ball as far as technology goes (his day job is contract programming), and has some of the most lucid and innovative ideas in speculative fiction.
Yes, censorship will fail. Kids won't be protected from porn, and small ISPs will go out of business. Soon the Australian Internet industry will be an oligopoly of a handful of giant interests (Telstra, Ozemail, Kerry Packer, &c.), who have the capital to install censorship routers and review content, and you can bet that there'll be strict guidelines against things like hosting your own pages on your Linux box at home.
However, it's easy to lie with statistics. The small ISPs going to the wall can be explained as a natural tendency to consolidate, or the result of other factors. The problem can be explained away, and the experiment can be branded an inspiring success by advocates of censorship in other countries. Expect this to inspire the Christian Coalition and miscellaneous social engineers in the US and elsewhere.
And expect the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to subsidise these pro-censorship groups under the table. After all, in this climate, censoring routers and filter software will become Australia's main high-tech industry. This industry will want to export their censorware, and there is only so much demand in China and Saudi Arabia, so they will endeavour to boost demand in the US and other countries.
He doesn't care. The Australian IT industry already considers him as an enemy, and will always. He hasn't got a hope in Hell of winning back their confidence, which gives him free rein to appeal to the social engineers and religious busybodies.
That's the way politics works. It's all about vested interests and covering one's arse. Lofty principles don't matter one whit.
Slashdot Mirror
Then they are obliged to take regular doses of Prozac or some similar mind-killing drug, suppressing their dangerous weirdness for the good of the community and turning them into a good zombie.
Psi Corps, here we come.
My favourite of that book would have to be Stopp't Clock Yard, without a doubt.
That story is every bit as intricate a Sandman story as Neil himself would have written.
By comparison, some of the others are pretty lame and self-indulgent.
The adjective "goth" in the description above doesn't boost my confidence in it. Anything that needs to be described with this word these days is, if not guaranteed to be crap, quite likely to be.
Nowadays "goth" means "spouting all the formulaic cliches to sell to the angst-ridden adolescents with bad make-up and vampire fixations". Death, morbid poetry, the occult, fringey sexual connotations, and tortured-looking fonts on the artwork.
The Crow (the original comic book) was good. After the movie came out, it all dropped off rapidly. And don't even mention Poppy Z. Brite (the Trent Reznor of literature).
Probably the whole of the Season of Mists arc (my introduction to Sandman). Or if that's not allowed, perhaps Dream of a Thousand Cats, or Three Septembers and a January.
Next up: who's your favourite Endless? Can we have a Slashdot poll on this?
(Mine would probably be Delirium, or possibly Dream. Though Death's kinda cute too.)
Though they'd have to be careful about choosing an animal for the cover...
One problem I've noticed with colour screens (at least the active-matrix type) is that they don't work well in bright sunlight. When I first tried to use my laptop outdoors (I thought it was a good idea, given that it's portable and all that), I found that the screen was nigh-unreadable.
Perhaps the Palm display is a different, more light-friendly technology. Though in any case, I can't see many applications where I'd want colour on a PalmPilot. More pixels would be much more useful.
Microsoft's internal culture is based on control. Control of standards, APIs, and the future development of their products are cornerstones of the Microsoft world-view. That Microsoft would cede these on anything, especially the kernel of an operating system, is fantastically unlikely.
In my view, Microsoft would rather kill and bury WinCE than open-source it; the later would break some of the stranglehold they have on APIs.
If Microsoft take any sort of remotely-un-closed course of action (in itself unlikely), it will no doubt be under an oppressively strict licence, prohibiting any forking or reuse of code in other projects or redistribution of code or binaries, and placing other conditions to give MS's bureaucracy control of everything. And of course, the open-source benefits won't come.
I can't see why anyone would want a personal information appliance with a 160x160 256-colour screen. The colour capability does not add to its ability to present information (except perhaps marginally). I can see how 4-level greyscale might be useful (say, for antialiasing text), but a full colour LCD sounds more at home in a video game than a Pilot. (Unless Palm put in a Springboard slot and release a TV tuner module or something.)
Rather than adding colour, Palm should be increasing the screen size to something more useful. 160x160 is just not enough to display any substantial amount of information.
Though, seeing how neither Palm nor Handspring has taken this initiative, I suspect that higher resolutions would break a lot of software. Which probably means we're doomed to 160x160.
Isn't that the name given to the high-tech arm of the Hollywood entertainment-industrial complex?
Back in the old days, when Netscape was the big evil corporate intruder, the W3C published its own standards for the next generation of HTML. It included things such as mathematical formulae and so on. Netscape wasn't interested, choosing instead to work on flashy, cool-looking things (frames, Javascript, background images) that commercial content developers and users would find cool.
Who won? Netscape. They had the browser, and people were more interested in stuff that looks cool than in standards correctness.
Even if Netscape is more standards compliant than Microsoft, that won't guarantee its ascendancy. If MS's HTML looks cool and works with the standard Windows browser, it will become the defacto standard, for everyone save purists.
How come it works on your system? On the Linux systems I've used it on, it'd crash after a while. (On SGI IRIX, it would do the same, only spawning lots of zero-size alert dialogs; irritating, that.)
There have been a number. There was Mnemonic, the Freedows of browsers, which was meant to be really kick-ass with lots of innovative design features, but never seems to have gotten anywhere. Then there were some which got up to simple HTML rendering (sub-NCSA-Mosaic standard).
Writing a simple HTML 2.0 browser isn't too difficult. KDE and GNOME have one each for documentation. Writing something with a DOM and layers and CSS and JavaScript and such (as many modern sites require) is another matter.
Given that Netscape 4.x is crash-prone, Mozilla is not anywhere close to release (it may be usable in the end-user sense in time to run on top of GNU HURD and GNUSTEP), and content/tool companies are abandoning Netscape compatibility (i.e., Cold Fusion's decision to only support MSIE), maybe it's time for some enterprising hackers to short-circuit the process and get MSIE running on WINE.
Microsoft would probably resist this all the way, with undocomented system-level hooks, VxDs and such. Though if it can be done, it may very well be useful.
BTW anyone know the max resolution we could get with a human eye?
I once read that it's pretty poor; the reason why we perceive things at a high resolution is because our brains correct the input based on subsequent images and heuristics.
Mind you, this discovery may change this estimate.
Once they figure this out enough to be able to tap into the human optic nerve and get decent images out, it could lead to a major advance in journalism and filmmaking; implanted video recorders tapping into the optic nerve and storing the images for later downloading. (Greg Egan's Distress describes one such system.)
...and then someone will code an emulator (which will run trivially on the computers of the day), and people will play vintage PlayStation games on their computers, downloading them from the Net.
(With any luck, downloading a 650Mb PSX disc image will be as much a matter as downloading a 40k C64 tape image is today, and the copyright owners will care as much as the owners of Wizball and Paradroid care about you pirating their decade-old war3z.)
A perpetual extension would be clearly unconstitutional
So's much of the War on Drugs (civil forfeiture, for example).
I think I've seen a price of US$10,000 quoted for a secondhand copy; well up from the $200-$300 usually cited.
It could lend credence to the rumour that Neal has been buying up and destroying copies.
Aye, Krycek is one possibility. Perhaps making him an Anakinesque fallen hero would work.
Or have something about the early days of the Cigarette Smoking Man (Spender or whatever his name is) and his cabal; though that might be too Dark Skies-esque.
One idea I've had was for something focusing on the early days of the Well-Manicured Man's involvement in the conspiracy, set in the labyrinthine British intelligence establishment at the height of the Cold War. There'd be plenty of potential there for intrigue, paranoia and head-spinning plot twists, and WMM (with his reversal and subsequent death in the movie) would make a great Anakin.
The real reason for copyright extension was because the content barons (Disney and such) would have lost control of their older films. You can bet that when the extension expires, there'll be another one; unless, by then, copyright has been turned into an in perpetua property right, like land titles. (Which is quite probable; the megacorps which have the money to influence Congress would want it this way.)
A while ago, NtK mentioned the existence of a site named linuxchick.com. This turned out to be a fairly generic porn site, seemingly putting the word "Linux" in its title to get more hits. They didn't even have any penguin graphics.
Neal Stephenson would also be a good choice.
Yes, censorship will fail. Kids won't be protected from porn, and small ISPs will go out of business. Soon the Australian Internet industry will be an oligopoly of a handful of giant interests (Telstra, Ozemail, Kerry Packer, &c.), who have the capital to install censorship routers and review content, and you can bet that there'll be strict guidelines against things like hosting your own pages on your Linux box at home.
However, it's easy to lie with statistics. The small ISPs going to the wall can be explained as a natural tendency to consolidate, or the result of other factors. The problem can be explained away, and the experiment can be branded an inspiring success by advocates of censorship in other countries. Expect this to inspire the Christian Coalition and miscellaneous social engineers in the US and elsewhere.
And expect the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to subsidise these pro-censorship groups under the table. After all, in this climate, censoring routers and filter software will become Australia's main high-tech industry. This industry will want to export their censorware, and there is only so much demand in China and Saudi Arabia, so they will endeavour to boost demand in the US and other countries.
He doesn't care. The Australian IT industry already considers him as an enemy, and will always. He hasn't got a hope in Hell of winning back their confidence, which gives him free rein to appeal to the social engineers and religious busybodies.
That's the way politics works. It's all about vested interests and covering one's arse. Lofty principles don't matter one whit.