I went and checked before I posted (and love myself all the more for it). The back cover of the paperback Urth of the New Sun sez Le Guin. It makes more sense, too. Card isn't a quarter the prose stylist Le Guin and Wolfe are.
I thought the Card attribution sounded funny. Ursula seems to be making a hobby of mapping great SF writers onto mainstream writers--try to find a Bhil Dick novel without "Dick is our own Borges" on the cover some time.
Forward this message for good luck!
on
The Year 1000
·
· Score: 1
Chainmail was popular, but very difficult to make.
Unfortunately, the opposite is the case these days.
The fact that tech stocks went up overall that day, even after all the analysis about how this could drive down the whole stock market, suggests to me that investors actually believed Judge Jackson's ruling. That is to say: they believed that Microsoft has been holding back the computer market, and that, if they're prevented from doing so, the overall market will grow. In other words, the opinion of the market seems to be that Microsoft has been stifling innovation.
Ya caught me. The Lem comparison is pretty tenuous. What brought him to mind, really, was the culture on the 33d plane of existence in Alan Mendelsohn. The systematic self-delusion of the people there was very reminiscent of The Star Diaries which I happened to be reading at about the same time, and which is full of subtle (and not-so-subtle) political satire.
Note, by the way, that for the wordplay in Cyberiad, the briliant translator (whose name, unfortunately, I don't have on hand. Anyone want to help me out?) deserves almost as much credit as the author.
Hemos, why is the "buy this' link to Fatbrain, which calls itself an "online bookstore specializing in professional books, interactive training and certification?"
Do you guys have a deal now that they'll carry/.-reviewed books or something?
I don't think so; 5 Novels came out over a year ago, before the Potter boom really hit. Also, there's enough humorous adventure fiction for teens that (unless there are parallels I'm missing) I don't see why Pinkwater is particularly well-positioned to take advantage of their popularity.
Re:The Last Guru and Roald Dahl
on
5 Novels
·
· Score: 1
The comparison to Dahl is interesting. Both certainly produce the sense in their readers of having been inducted into a secret society. The big difference that leaps to mind is that Dahl embraces the fear and disgust that early teens have a love/hate relationship with, whereas Pinkwater tends to carefully avoid the threatening or shocking. Dahl's word is often a harsh and terrifying one, compared to Pinkwater's gentleness. I'll have to think about it a little more to decide if I think that's Dahl exploiting his audience, or being truer to it.
My mother went to the liquor store and asked for a large bottle of cheap beer. "You mean, our inexpensive beers," the faintly-offended store clerk asked her.
"No, cheap beer," my mother said. "It's for the slugs.
My mother described his expression as "indescribable."
Comment seems to be divided between 'that's really cool!' and 'but what of the privacy risks?' I have the ideal solution--only let me and my friends use flycams. We would only use them for Good, you see...
What about self-replication?
on
Nanosystems
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· Score: 1
Here's what I don't get about the vision of nanotechnology--why do its proponents see the coming up with self-replicating machines part as such a trivial step? People have been trying to make self-replicating macromachines for centuries with no luck. Worth writes "Once you can build bottom up, you can build machine systems capable of making perfect copies of themselves, as ribosomes do with DNA." But I'm not persuaded that the existence of self-replicating molecules proves much. People are self-replicating big machines, and that hasn't helped us toward the macro-scale goal. Are there actually factors that make independent replication of complex sturctures easier on a smaller scale?
Come to think of it, using Worth's definition (nanotech is anything constructed molecule-by-molecule), aren't all living things (or at least all genitic manipulation) nanotech?
Mr. Worth has a fun, breezy style--readable to a fault (when do Jolt references cease to be hip and start to be annoying?). However, this piece sometimes reads more like an ad than a review, and more like an ad for the movement than an ad for the book. What are we supposed to take away from a sentence like "Carbon is one seriously cool atom?" Knowledge about Drexler's book? About Nanotech? About physics?
I wish the review had been more specific. The section on Chapter 9 ends with "With a grab-bag of molecular rods and strained-shell carbon bearings, Drexler shows where we can and where we can't [extrapolate to the nanoscale from the macroscale]." I'd love a few examples, or a brief explanation of the principles at work. I realze that Chris was trying to write a review, not the Cliff Notes, but I was disappointed that I came away from the piece without my knowledge of the field being increased.
For the life of me, I do not know what to tell this guy to earn my 411 infodollars. Would someone who's feeling a little more eloquent care to have a go?
A rather less politely-worded letter was sent to the maintainer of Ulysses for Dummies, a spoof of Joyce's novel, early last year. The hilarious and thorough reply concluded, 'Frankly, we're going to keep the site just as it is, and the successful IDG Books "... for Dummies" series will just have to learn to live with it.'
Having contributed a couple non-techie book reviews, I'm very aware of this issue.
A couple of my friends have been talking about whether it would be possible to do a general alt-culture website based on the Slash code, and the consensus has been that, to be worthwhile, it would have to be heavily configurable, with multiple department editors maintaining different areas of interest.
Well...the arrival of the YRO, Apache, and BSD sections have gotten me wondering...could Slashdot broaden that way itself?
At the moment, I suspect that most users don't exclude any subjects--would making/. so big that it was necessary to exclude stuff to be able to keep up kill the core culture or not? It doesn't seem like it would have to.
I have a Sigma Designs card, which allows you to alter the zone setting some specific number of times (around five, if memory serves). If you're a grotesquely rich bastard, of course, you could just have a machine set for every zone you want access to.
Re:Sounds like RTS Game fodder to me...
on
The Big U
·
· Score: 1
This has occurred to me too and, considering the important role of MARS and the APPASMU in the book, I suspect it was on NS's mind as well.
Here's a Neal Stephenson FAQ: this one at dmoz which quotes Neal as saying that "Big U" will be reprinted "Over my dead body."
This may well be true, but it's worth noting that the source given for the quote is a Usenet posting that does not mention where or when Stephenson said it.
Moral: Fact checking becomes embarassingly easy when done to generously crosslinked hypertext.
A model for understanding decision-making within an ideological or social movement has occurred to me. Let me share it with you.
One approach to deciding what should be done within a group might be to have a small number of leaders confer in private, so as to present a unified front to the rest of the world. In such a model, which we could call a "cathedral" approach, public criticism of the leader's policies would be considered divisive and counterproductive.
Another approach to decision-making might be for it to be done in the open, with all voices being heard, and all concerns being discussed. This more chaotic model I have decided to term the "bazaar" approach. In such a system, eloquent and thoughtful criticism of a leader might be not just tolerated but encouraged as a sign of vigorous and independent critical thought.
Now all we need to do is figure out which of these approaches would be more appropriate for the Open Source movement...
The idea of more TLDs is certainly very appealing. When I first heard about CORE, and their push for.firm,.web,.info,.etc., I thought it was a really neat idea, and I headed on over to their site to have a look. Well, it turns out that corenic.org, corenic.net, and corenic.com all point to the same site.
To make this explicit for the boys in the back row firing spitwads at each other: groups with enough resources snap up their names in every major TLD "to avoid confusion." Adding more TLDs without controls over who can use them is unlikely to change this, and will probably result in little effect except that the registrar business will become a little more profitable as a larger block of names has to be purchased every time a new movie, breakfast cereal, or presidential candidate is launched.
Furthermore, so long as the Big Two browsers default to.com, that TLD will be the only noospheric real estate attractive to groups interested in reaching a general public instead of us nerds. If you need proof of this, looks at what an organization with its own TLD uses.
Slashdot Mirror
I went and checked before I posted (and love myself all the more for it). The back cover of the paperback Urth of the New Sun sez Le Guin. It makes more sense, too. Card isn't a quarter the prose stylist Le Guin and Wolfe are.
I thought the Card attribution sounded funny. Ursula seems to be making a hobby of mapping great SF writers onto mainstream writers--try to find a Bhil Dick novel without "Dick is our own Borges" on the cover some time.
Chainmail was popular, but very difficult to make.
Unfortunately, the opposite is the case these days.
The fact that tech stocks went up overall that day, even after all the analysis about how this could drive down the whole stock market, suggests to me that investors actually believed Judge Jackson's ruling. That is to say: they believed that Microsoft has been holding back the computer market, and that, if they're prevented from doing so, the overall market will grow. In other words, the opinion of the market seems to be that Microsoft has been stifling innovation.
Ya caught me. The Lem comparison is pretty tenuous. What brought him to mind, really, was the culture on the 33d plane of existence in Alan Mendelsohn. The systematic self-delusion of the people there was very reminiscent of The Star Diaries which I happened to be reading at about the same time, and which is full of subtle (and not-so-subtle) political satire.
Note, by the way, that for the wordplay in Cyberiad, the briliant translator (whose name, unfortunately, I don't have on hand. Anyone want to help me out?) deserves almost as much credit as the author.
Hemos, why is the "buy this' link to Fatbrain, which calls itself an "online bookstore specializing in professional books, interactive training and certification?"
/.-reviewed books or something?
Do you guys have a deal now that they'll carry
Don't take his writing too seriously
though. This is not the book to analyze and write an english paper on.
Why not?
I don't think so; 5 Novels came out over a year ago, before the Potter boom really hit. Also, there's enough humorous adventure fiction for teens that (unless there are parallels I'm missing) I don't see why Pinkwater is particularly well-positioned to take advantage of their popularity.
The comparison to Dahl is interesting. Both certainly produce the sense in their readers of having been inducted into a secret society. The big difference that leaps to mind is that Dahl embraces the fear and disgust that early teens have a love/hate relationship with, whereas Pinkwater tends to carefully avoid the threatening or shocking. Dahl's word is often a harsh and terrifying one, compared to Pinkwater's gentleness. I'll have to think about it a little more to decide if I think that's Dahl exploiting his audience, or being truer to it.
According to register.com, slugbot.com, org, and net are still available. Enjoy.
My mother went to the liquor store and asked for a large bottle of cheap beer. "You mean, our inexpensive beers," the faintly-offended store clerk asked her.
"No, cheap beer," my mother said. "It's for the slugs.
My mother described his expression as "indescribable."
Comment seems to be divided between 'that's really cool!' and 'but what of the privacy risks?' I have the ideal solution--only let me and my friends use flycams. We would only use them for Good, you see...
Here's what I don't get about the vision of nanotechnology--why do its proponents see the coming up with self-replicating machines part as such a trivial step? People have been trying to make self-replicating macromachines for centuries with no luck. Worth writes "Once you can build bottom up, you can build machine systems capable of making perfect copies of themselves, as ribosomes do with DNA." But I'm not persuaded that the existence of self-replicating molecules proves much. People are self-replicating big machines, and that hasn't helped us toward the macro-scale goal. Are there actually factors that make independent replication of complex sturctures easier on a smaller scale?
Come to think of it, using Worth's definition (nanotech is anything constructed molecule-by-molecule), aren't all living things (or at least all genitic manipulation) nanotech?
Mr. Worth has a fun, breezy style--readable to a fault (when do Jolt references cease to be hip and start to be annoying?). However, this piece sometimes reads more like an ad than a review, and more like an ad for the movement than an ad for the book. What are we supposed to take away from a sentence like "Carbon is one seriously cool atom?" Knowledge about Drexler's book? About Nanotech? About physics?
I wish the review had been more specific. The section on Chapter 9 ends with "With a grab-bag of molecular rods and strained-shell carbon bearings, Drexler shows where we can and where we can't [extrapolate to the nanoscale from the macroscale]." I'd love a few examples, or a brief explanation of the principles at work. I realze that Chris was trying to write a review, not the Cliff Notes, but I was disappointed that I came away from the piece without my knowledge of the field being increased.
For the life of me, I do not know what to tell this guy to earn my 411 infodollars. Would someone who's feeling a little more eloquent care to have a go?
Beat ing Children
Dear god, I hope he's kidding
A rather less politely-worded letter was sent to the maintainer of Ulysses for Dummies, a spoof of Joyce's novel, early last year. The hilarious and thorough reply concluded, 'Frankly, we're going to keep the site just as it is, and the successful IDG Books " ... for Dummies" series will just have to learn to live with it.'
Having contributed a couple non-techie book reviews, I'm very aware of this issue.
/. so big that it was necessary to exclude stuff to be able to keep up kill the core culture or not? It doesn't seem like it would have to.
A couple of my friends have been talking about whether it would be possible to do a general alt-culture website based on the Slash code, and the consensus has been that, to be worthwhile, it would have to be heavily configurable, with multiple department editors maintaining different areas of interest.
Well...the arrival of the YRO, Apache, and BSD sections have gotten me wondering...could Slashdot broaden that way itself?
At the moment, I suspect that most users don't exclude any subjects--would making
(then my book reviews wouldn't have so many spelling errors)
...have teamed up to
/.ers thinking it was a software bicycle or a software grilled cheese sandwich.
Quoth the Katz:
develop a software program that will be tested in
20 schools around the country in December.
Ooh, good thing he clarified, I wouldn't want
How about replacing "a software program" with "software"?
I have a Sigma Designs card, which allows you to alter the zone setting some specific number of times (around five, if memory serves). If you're a grotesquely rich bastard, of course, you could just have a machine set for every zone you want access to.
This has occurred to me too and, considering the important role of MARS and the APPASMU in the book, I suspect it was on NS's mind as well.
Might also work as some kind of board game/CCG.
Here's a Neal Stephenson FAQ: this one at dmoz which quotes Neal as saying that "Big U" will be reprinted
"Over my dead body."
This may well be true, but it's worth noting that the source given for the quote is a Usenet posting that does not mention where or when Stephenson said it.
Moral: Fact checking becomes embarassingly easy when done to generously crosslinked hypertext.
Does mean the "caning Gates" option has been eliminated? Dang.
One approach to deciding what should be done within a group might be to have a small number of leaders confer in private, so as to present a unified front to the rest of the world. In such a model, which we could call a "cathedral" approach, public criticism of the leader's policies would be considered divisive and counterproductive.
Another approach to decision-making might be for it to be done in the open, with all voices being heard, and all concerns being discussed. This more chaotic model I have decided to term the "bazaar" approach. In such a system, eloquent and thoughtful criticism of a leader might be not just tolerated but encouraged as a sign of vigorous and independent critical thought.
Now all we need to do is figure out which of these approaches would be more appropriate for the Open Source movement...
Eric: 5 points
Bruce: 98 points
To make this explicit for the boys in the back row firing spitwads at each other: groups with enough resources snap up their names in every major TLD "to avoid confusion." Adding more TLDs without controls over who can use them is unlikely to change this, and will probably result in little effect except that the registrar business will become a little more profitable as a larger block of names has to be purchased every time a new movie, breakfast cereal, or presidential candidate is launched.
Furthermore, so long as the Big Two browsers default to