Actually, back in the day bind _did_ tolerate underscores. I remember the anguish we had flushing machines called things like fileserver_one out the day that Vixie et al decided to enforce the standards. The DNS standards say [-a-z0-9], with dot as a delimiter. It's not the place for implementations to play hooky with that. For years there were hacks in bind to allow you to choose between accepting underscores in master zones (bad idea), secondary zones (quite bad idea) and recursive queries (sometimes unavoidable). Had the standards been followed in the first place this issue would never arise.
Aleister Crowley (pronounced to rhyme with 'holy' not 'foully').
Opinions vary. It certainly doesn't rhyme with foully, but there's a school of thought that rhymes it with truly, rather than holy. From odds and ends I've read I wouldn't say it was as clearcut as the Wikipedia entry makes out.
Besides, the three movies are currently placed in 4th, 14th and 20th place in IMDB's top250 movies of all time. How could that be if they are such a bad movies?
Don't you start thinking ``Hmm, perhaps this list might not strengthen my argument'' when, slipped in between `Apocalypse Now' and `Paths of Glory' you find Jim Carey? Admittedly, Eternal Sunshine is good, as Jim Carey vehicles go, but that's hardly a recommendatrion. The relentless whimsy (gentle reader frowed up) of Amelie the only thing keeping `Sunset Boulevard' from `It's a Wonderful Life'? `The Matrix' above `Taxi Driver'?
The Scouring of the Shire was too damning a criticism of socialism for Hollywood to let it play.
Perhaps. But more plausibly, it's probably dated quite badly: I'm old enough to remember people seriously advocating communism (which is what it's really attacking, not socialism) as a credible political system. I've voted in elections with communists on the ballot paper, for example, and Tolkein was writing in the light of the 1945 general election. But given Peter Jackson's target demographic, a swift political satire and a shot over the bows of Militant isn't really on the agenda. I think it's tremendously good, and one of the few sections of LotR that stands in terms of writing and in terms of plot --- the other bit I think is well-written is the stuff with the Barrow Wights in the first volume --- but I can see why it wasn't included. And given the third part is close to four hours anyway...!
How does the film resolve the fate of Saruman and Wormtongue without The Scouring of the Shire?
Her Earthsea books stand head and shoulders above the rest of her stuff --- for a start off, they're not mired in leftish Berkeley politics, as a lot of the rest is (including the books you mention: if she's not fighting the 1972 US presidential election, she's fighting the ERA wars).
The key three texts are Wizard of Earthsea, Tombs of Atuan, and especially The Farthest Shore. The last is in turn head and shoulder above the other two, but I don't know how readable it is in isolation: I have returned to it regularly over the thirty years since I first read it, the other two less so. There are a couple more novels in the same series she wrote later, which are hopeless, and a book of short stories, which is actually rather good.
Why do I rave?
She can write, which a lot of fantasy authors can't, so at a purely literary level they work. She can write compellingly of the context she has created, without it turning into a faux textbook, and she can turn a memorable phrase.
She, or her editor, can edit, so rather than being sold by the inch they don't have a scrap of fat on them. They're putatively kids' books --- my early seventies copies are explicitly in a kids' imprint --- from the days before Harry Potter provided the bloat.
By having what D&D fans would call ``low entropy'' magic she avoids the obvious question: ``If they're all able to do magic, why not just zap the bad guy?'' which Tolkein struggles with, and fails to answer.
``The various travels in the plot are just devices on which to hang exposition on the geography, history, cultures of Middle Earth.''
Exactly: and doesn't it wear those expositions heavily? Tolkein was quite right to berate CS Lewis for the incoherence of his backstory, but Tolkein's books are all background and no foreground. There may be great sweeps of invention of languages and a complex history, and as body of work it's impressive. Pointless, but impressive. However, the actual LotR itself has its fans endlessly saying ``ah, but if you read page 2047 of the Silmarillion, you'll understand''. Well firstly, books should stand on their own two feet, and if Tolkein _really_ wanted the readers to have a piece of context, he'd have provided it, rather than leaving it to his son to put out posthumously. It's not as if Tolkein lacked the space to put the detail in, given three volumes and half-a-dozen appendices.
Meanwhile, the characters themselves are ciphers --- hobbits are dimbos from Zummerset, Elves are a bit mysterious, Orcs are evil personified: go on, name an ambiguous character --- and the plot has McGuffins galore --- whoops, I've killed Galdalf, better bring him back by mysterious means.
``All of his works are delightful and, honestly, the popularity of it all speaks for itself.''
In other news, the Silmarillion is great literature, and Barbara Taylor Bradford should get a nobel prize for literature.
Seriously, all his works are delightful? Well, that's beyond fandom and into religion. And arguing that popularity is a sure sign of quality is preposterous.
Given English as we know it didn't exist in 1066 (ever tried reading Anglo Saxon?) I think he may have been wrong on that account:)
I was going to add a flame against JRRT's position on precisely that basis, but I didn't because I wasn't confident enough of the quote. He might have said ``In England'', for example. I think his belief was that the last great stories were the Norse and Icelandic sagas (Egil's Saga, etc). The move towards literary styles of writing, as opposed to the simple recording of oral tradition, was to him a bad idea. Which is why his books periodically break out into what Morrissey (in another context) referred to as ``such bloody awful poetry''.
Of course, the irony here is that LotR may be just about readable as written text --- go on, how many people don't skim through most of The Two Towers? --- but it's absolutely unreadable as spoken prose. If your claim is that literary English isn't as beautiful as spoken English (or spoken Icelandic), it behooves you to write at least passable spoken English. Which he fails, utterly, to do. Try reading a few paragraphs aloud. Then read, say, Tyndale's translation of the New Testament aloud.
The Hobbit is a great deal more readable than the tedium that is The Lord of The Rings. Not having read the three volumes of torpor in twenty-five years, I re-read them in a couple of sittings over the new year break last year. Tolkein is supposed to have said that nothing of value had been written in English since 1066, and I'm fairly certain his books don't change that. The trailers for the films were tedious in the extreme, but I did try to watch a few bits of the films as they had their terrestrial premiere on C4 over the past few weeks. They take `thumpingly literal' to new depths, and as I understand it (I didn't last long enough to find out) the one interesting bit of the books --- The Scouring of The Shire --- wasn't filmed anyway.
So filming The Hobbit might be a good idea, as the book has a lightness of touch that most of LotR sadly needs. But getting Peter Jackson to do it would remove any chance of said lightness of touch anyway.
I think the argument ``I have more industry experience than you because my log10(my/.) is one less than yours'' is pretty weak. Mine's yet another order of magnitude less than yours, but all that says is that I happened to be stood next to esr when he mentioned this website he thought was really cool. A lot of experienced people came to/. later, as it acquired critical mass.
I recall my father coming home from work (chemistry lecturer in higher education) and saying that he'd got access to calculators. A few weeks later I went over with him and played for a while on a Busicom, nixie tubes and all. This would be about 1972, I think, guessing from which building it was in.
The allegation is that a lot of the `Software Assurance' contracts sold around 2001 had (a) five year terms and (b) side letters which assured the purchasers that they'd get the XP follow-on as part of the deal. That makes for a very ugly situation if Vista doesn't ship: people have a contract, and a formal side-letter, which hasn't been delivered. Microsoft could make an ex-gratia statement that they are extending all SA agreements post some specificed date to be effective until Vista ships, but that will then pull in Office 2007 which they very much _don't_ want to ship on elderly SA agreements: if you bought SA in 2001, you'll have had Office XP and Office 2003 under it, so you're in the money. I've not seen hard numbers, but it's rumoured that a lot of big companies would be making very ugly noises if Vista slipped past the end of 2006.
Of course, no rational business will install it, and Microsoft don't intend them to. But it'll have shipped, so contractually all your XP licenses obtained with SA are now Vista licenses, and you can install it at your leisure. Microsoft know that shipping a new OS immediately prior to Christmas and Thanksgiving would be a disaster, so they'd rather take the hit on res sales from people holding off for Vista than ship something that will turn their name into mud. Although I'd like to have been at the meeting they told Dell and HP: throw in the tough retail conditions in the US and they're looking to take a bath. And the thought of lots of consumers doing XP->Vista upgrades is pretty horrifying. But hey, why solve today what you can put off until tomorrow?
The `journalists' --- to stretch a point --- are being juvenile. Clearly, every company's strategy is to only get good reviews. Clearly, writing bad reviews makes people less willing to lend you hardware gratis. If you find that shocking, you are so naive as to not be safe on the streets without having to hold the back of the coat of the child in front, and you probably have your mittens on a piece of string through the arms. There's an ocean between writing reviews of weird niche hardware for some free-to-air ad-funded website and being Woodward and Bernstein, and making out that a rather witty piece of email from a vendor is akin to the Saturday NIght Massacre is just laughable.
Actually, it's a weak analogy. I'm currently sat a couple of miles south of the (Ford-owned) Castle Bromwich Jaguar plant, and a couple of miles north of the (Ford-owned) Solihull Land Rover plant. Ownership has changed, but very little manufacturing happens outside the companies' historic estate. Yes, Jaguar use some Ford engines, and Land Rover still I think use engines from the ex-Rover BMW plant at Hams Hall, but beyond that you're arguing that the X-type using a Mondeo floorpan is some sort of heresy. Historically, plenty of European cars were `bitsa's, using components from other vendors' parts bins with gay abandon.
The Lotus Esprit and others used Austin Allegro door handles and switchgear for decades.
The Saab 96 is no less legendary for having using the 1.7l V4 from the Transit.
The Rover V8 was essentially the Buick V8, and went on to power not just P6s and Range Rovers, but Bristols and TVRs and God Knows What. And had Triumph used it, rather than the Ricardo V8 (which was, in turn, derived from the slant-4 used in Dolomites and Saab 99s) perhaps the Stag wouldn't have been the maintenance nightmare it was.
No-one accused the Ghandini Citroen BX as being a Peugot 405 (or, indeed, vice versa) but they share a floorpan and some engines.
Claims that object X is `just like' object Y simply because they share some components is usually the territory of cult brand obsessives.
Something tells me that bootlegging gasoline and electricity won't happen,
Actually, fuel smuggling is an endemic problem in Ireland. It's reckoned that about 50% of the fuel used in Northern Ireland has either been smuggled from the south (where it's cheaper) or produced by removing the die from duty-free agricultural diesel. The major fuel companies are pulling out of Ulster, for example: Login might be required.
And yet, since the rise of filesharing, people who used to tour rarely now tour continuously. Springsteen is about to make his third swing through the UK in twelve months. Jackson Browne has been doing his acoustic solo/with David Lindley thing a lot, and I think I've seen him play three times in the past three years: prior to that it was twice a decade, if that. More prosaically, I've just bought tickets for Evan Dando --- charging 15 quid a head in a ~2000 capacity venue --- and Van Morrison, playing for 30 quid a head in a ~1000 capacity venue.
Again, both were historically infrequent tourers. Morrison is these days doing gigs in small venues with a large band, usually only at weekends, and after the gig you can see him driving himself off in a somewhat ratty looking BMW 3 series. I refuse to believe that he's losing money on it, simply because he famously doesn't do things that lose money, and he's probably grossing less than 25K a night. Springsteen by contrast is charging 50 quid in an 8K venue, which is £400K per night: again, I refuse to believe you can lose money on that.
productivity and innovation coming from companies in Europe like Nokia, Saab, Porsche, BMW, Daimler Chrysler, etc? These companies somehow manage to do fine in quasi socialist European economies.
As a European man of the left, I have sympathy with your basic position. But some of the examples you choose aren't entirely good ones. I've owned Saabs for 20-odd years, from 96s and 99s to today's 9-3, but they've been on life-support since the late eighties. They had to collaborate with the FIAT group on what ended up as the 9000, and then once bought by GM there have been persistent rumours of closure. Today they make re-badged Vectras.
Daimler Chrysler are in dire straits, and a lot of their manufacturing has gone off-shore (the commodity Mercs are mostly made in South Africa, for example). They have a terrible repuation for quality, costs are through the roof and they are losing money.
Nokia I'll give you, but Finland's economy is not to be confused with Sweden.
Porsche are in a small niche where they can basically charge what they want, but still rely on VW for a lot of basic work (the Cayenne floorpan is a Touran floorpan, and VW picked up the bills).
BMW make money, but again quite a lot of their manufacturing is off-shore. They got a bloody nose a mile from here when they had to bail out of Longbridge, though, so their touch is not perfect.
We dropped the temperature in my machine room to a target of 18C. We've got ~400 hard drives in there, ranging from spiffy new 144GB FC and 500GB SATA in EMC and similar arrays, down to sub-1GB SCSI drives in elderly Suns. I think the oldest drive is a few hundred megs of ATA in a ~100MHz PC that has the GPS reference clock attached to it. I reckon that we lose perhaps five a year (sadly, we've not kept accurate stats) and the newer drives have a experienced MTBF of upwards of twenty years.
However, a few months ago our aircon failed. The electricity supply company dropped one of the phases for a few seconds, which put the aircon units into a `locked' failure state until manually reset, while the UPS and generator kicked in. We caught it within about 20 minutes, but the temperature exceeded 30C ambient for a few minutes, hotter in some of the cabinets.
We lost a drive in each of the EMC arrays during the following month, the first we'd seen go since early-life failure in the first few months of operation.
I was on the metro in the rush hour in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago, and I didn't see anyone using mobile video. They couldn't: it was crush loaded. I used the JR trains out to Kawasaki, which aren't crush loaded, and I didn't see anyone using it there. iPods, yes. But not a lot else.
Actually, there's a fair amount of evidence that the Russians never did have intentions beyond holding the WarPac line, and the main reason for their massive arms spend was an utter refusal to fight the Great Patriotic War again. I don't follow it terribly closely, but just as the US would claim it never intended to start a war, the Russians can quite plausibly make the same claim.
When I read the original article it struck me that either they had very good sources, or they were confident he wouldn't sue, or they were happy to get embroiled in one of those venue shopping disputes. Given The New Yorker is sold in newsagents in the UK, and people here have subscriptions (I do, for example), and mathmatics is an international field, it's hard to see how a UK court would object to being the venue for a libel action such as this. And, on the face of it, the guy wouldn't have problems showing the words were capable of admitting a defamatory reading, which is the basic test, or that it would lower him in the eyes of a reader, which is another. They'd have to plead justification, and that's hard.
Hell hath no fury like an academic with his reputation scorned.
We can assume that the Russians knew _of_ Venona by 1949 at the latest, because Kim Philby was told about it and he was, of course, a Soviet agent. However, it's not at all clear that the Russians knew how much, how accurately and how rapidly the material was being decrypted. They had stopped using duplicate pads in 1946, possibly in reaction to learning of Venona, but equally possibly because they understood perfectly well that using two-time pads is a bad idea.
But the impact on Russian espionage in the USA was considerable, and justified the Americans keeping quiet about the extent of the breaks. It's an open question how effective fragmentary intercepts would have been in court, and a defence lawyer would of course have wanted to trace the process used to produce this evidence. Although Venona has been declassified in large part, the full repertoire of methods used is not in the open literature even today. In the end, the Russians had to assume that _all_ their communications between the late 30s and 1946 had been compromised or would be compromised in the future, and that had a massively negative effect on their work.
Furthermore, given that most crypto breaks result from flaws in process rather than brute-force analysis --- used correctly, Enigma would have been far more secure, for example --- giving lessons in correct crypto procedure to your opponents is a bad idea.
Beta wasn't unquestionably better than VHS: rewind time, for example, was far worse.
The DAT argument was not about DRM: SCMS wasb't implemented on the vast majority of DAT machines sold, and strippers cost peanuts. DAT failed as a commodity format because the equipment and media were expensive, consumers had no need for the format, portables were insane money and there were no car systems, and tape (ie wind from track to track) looks obsolete from the moment it was launched. I used a DAT machine for a few years, because I had access to a huge pile of audio DAT tapes bought by accident when we should have bought DDS2. But even with free media, it made little sense.
Slashdot Mirror
ian
ian
ian
How does the film resolve the fate of Saruman and Wormtongue without The Scouring of the Shire?
ian
The key three texts are Wizard of Earthsea, Tombs of Atuan, and especially The Farthest Shore. The last is in turn head and shoulder above the other two, but I don't know how readable it is in isolation: I have returned to it regularly over the thirty years since I first read it, the other two less so. There are a couple more novels in the same series she wrote later, which are hopeless, and a book of short stories, which is actually rather good.
Why do I rave?
ian
Meanwhile, the characters themselves are ciphers --- hobbits are dimbos from Zummerset, Elves are a bit mysterious, Orcs are evil personified: go on, name an ambiguous character --- and the plot has McGuffins galore --- whoops, I've killed Galdalf, better bring him back by mysterious means.
Great fantasy writing: Le Guin.
In other news, the Silmarillion is great literature, and Barbara Taylor Bradford should get a nobel prize for literature.
Seriously, all his works are delightful? Well, that's beyond fandom and into religion. And arguing that popularity is a sure sign of quality is preposterous.
ian
Of course, the irony here is that LotR may be just about readable as written text --- go on, how many people don't skim through most of The Two Towers? --- but it's absolutely unreadable as spoken prose. If your claim is that literary English isn't as beautiful as spoken English (or spoken Icelandic), it behooves you to write at least passable spoken English. Which he fails, utterly, to do. Try reading a few paragraphs aloud. Then read, say, Tyndale's translation of the New Testament aloud.
So filming The Hobbit might be a good idea, as the book has a lightness of touch that most of LotR sadly needs. But getting Peter Jackson to do it would remove any chance of said lightness of touch anyway.
ian
I recall my father coming home from work (chemistry lecturer in higher education) and saying that he'd got access to calculators. A few weeks later I went over with him and played for a while on a Busicom, nixie tubes and all. This would be about 1972, I think, guessing from which building it was in.
ian
Of course, no rational business will install it, and Microsoft don't intend them to. But it'll have shipped, so contractually all your XP licenses obtained with SA are now Vista licenses, and you can install it at your leisure. Microsoft know that shipping a new OS immediately prior to Christmas and Thanksgiving would be a disaster, so they'd rather take the hit on res sales from people holding off for Vista than ship something that will turn their name into mud. Although I'd like to have been at the meeting they told Dell and HP: throw in the tough retail conditions in the US and they're looking to take a bath. And the thought of lots of consumers doing XP->Vista upgrades is pretty horrifying. But hey, why solve today what you can put off until tomorrow?
ian
ian
- The Lotus Esprit and others used Austin Allegro door handles and switchgear for decades.
- The Saab 96 is no less legendary for having using the 1.7l V4 from the Transit.
- The Rover V8 was essentially the Buick V8, and went on to power not just P6s and Range Rovers, but Bristols and TVRs and God Knows What. And had Triumph used it, rather than the Ricardo V8 (which was, in turn, derived from the slant-4 used in Dolomites and Saab 99s) perhaps the Stag wouldn't have been the maintenance nightmare it was.
- No-one accused the Ghandini Citroen BX as being a Peugot 405 (or, indeed, vice versa) but they share a floorpan and some engines.
Claims that object X is `just like' object Y simply because they share some components is usually the territory of cult brand obsessives.ian
ian
And yet, since the rise of filesharing, people who used to tour rarely now tour continuously. Springsteen is about to make his third swing through the UK in twelve months. Jackson Browne has been doing his acoustic solo/with David Lindley thing a lot, and I think I've seen him play three times in the past three years: prior to that it was twice a decade, if that. More prosaically, I've just bought tickets for Evan Dando --- charging 15 quid a head in a ~2000 capacity venue --- and Van Morrison, playing for 30 quid a head in a ~1000 capacity venue. Again, both were historically infrequent tourers. Morrison is these days doing gigs in small venues with a large band, usually only at weekends, and after the gig you can see him driving himself off in a somewhat ratty looking BMW 3 series. I refuse to believe that he's losing money on it, simply because he famously doesn't do things that lose money, and he's probably grossing less than 25K a night. Springsteen by contrast is charging 50 quid in an 8K venue, which is £400K per night: again, I refuse to believe you can lose money on that.
Daimler Chrysler are in dire straits, and a lot of their manufacturing has gone off-shore (the commodity Mercs are mostly made in South Africa, for example). They have a terrible repuation for quality, costs are through the roof and they are losing money.
Nokia I'll give you, but Finland's economy is not to be confused with Sweden.
Porsche are in a small niche where they can basically charge what they want, but still rely on VW for a lot of basic work (the Cayenne floorpan is a Touran floorpan, and VW picked up the bills).
BMW make money, but again quite a lot of their manufacturing is off-shore. They got a bloody nose a mile from here when they had to bail out of Longbridge, though, so their touch is not perfect.
ian
However, a few months ago our aircon failed. The electricity supply company dropped one of the phases for a few seconds, which put the aircon units into a `locked' failure state until manually reset, while the UPS and generator kicked in. We caught it within about 20 minutes, but the temperature exceeded 30C ambient for a few minutes, hotter in some of the cabinets.
We lost a drive in each of the EMC arrays during the following month, the first we'd seen go since early-life failure in the first few months of operation.
ian
ian
Actually, there's a fair amount of evidence that the Russians never did have intentions beyond holding the WarPac line, and the main reason for their massive arms spend was an utter refusal to fight the Great Patriotic War again. I don't follow it terribly closely, but just as the US would claim it never intended to start a war, the Russians can quite plausibly make the same claim.
Hell hath no fury like an academic with his reputation scorned.
ian
But the impact on Russian espionage in the USA was considerable, and justified the Americans keeping quiet about the extent of the breaks. It's an open question how effective fragmentary intercepts would have been in court, and a defence lawyer would of course have wanted to trace the process used to produce this evidence. Although Venona has been declassified in large part, the full repertoire of methods used is not in the open literature even today. In the end, the Russians had to assume that _all_ their communications between the late 30s and 1946 had been compromised or would be compromised in the future, and that had a massively negative effect on their work.
Furthermore, given that most crypto breaks result from flaws in process rather than brute-force analysis --- used correctly, Enigma would have been far more secure, for example --- giving lessons in correct crypto procedure to your opponents is a bad idea.
ian
Beta wasn't unquestionably better than VHS: rewind time, for example, was far worse. The DAT argument was not about DRM: SCMS wasb't implemented on the vast majority of DAT machines sold, and strippers cost peanuts. DAT failed as a commodity format because the equipment and media were expensive, consumers had no need for the format, portables were insane money and there were no car systems, and tape (ie wind from track to track) looks obsolete from the moment it was launched. I used a DAT machine for a few years, because I had access to a huge pile of audio DAT tapes bought by accident when we should have bought DDS2. But even with free media, it made little sense.
You can, of course, attach trailers to bikes to carry large loads. ian