Yup. Some further details for anyone who doesn't know:
Ursula K. Le Guin coined the term "ansible"; it first appeared in her novel Rocannon's World in 1966.
James Blish used a similar (but not identical) device, called the Dirac transmitter; that term first appeared in his 1957 story "Beep."
E. E. "Doc" Smith had a faster-than-light communications device called the "ultraphone" in his Skylark of Valeron in 1934. I'm pretty sure there were a variety of FTL communications devices in pulp science fiction.
But yeah, Le Guin was the originator of the term "ansible." Card and others got the term from her.
Re:A special flop the Slashdot crowd will apprecia
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
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· Score: 1
Thanks for posting this! I was disappointed not to see A/UX on the original list.
I did QA for A/UX 3.0 back in '91-'92 (as a contractor working at Apple), testing 3rd-party applications for compatibility. Various of us referred to A/UX as "Apple's best-kept secret"; most of my Mac-user friends had never heard of it.... As someone else noted in another comment, I don't think the government contracts were the only reason for A/UX's existence, but my impression was that pretty much nobody else was buying the OS.
I've been using Frame at various jobs (tech writing) for the past twelve years; it's really the clear best choice for any multi-chapter document, despite its many flaws and despite Word's increasing sophistication. Frame automatically handles (and updates) cross-references (giving you a great deal of control over exactly how they appear); it manages character and paragraph tags much much better than Word does; it provides mechanisms for displaying or hiding conditional text; it automatically generates indexes and tables of contents; it provides a system for managing all the chapter files that make up a book (continuous page numbering across files, for example, is trivially easy); it has a fairly powerful mechanism for designing page layouts (for books, not for things like ads) and managing text flows and so on; its system of using page-design templates works well.
Unfortunately, FM also has a lot of problems, as others have noted in various threads here. It has languished for the past several years, with updates coming out infrequently and with only minor additions to the software in each new update. It still has ridiculous UI problems that have been around as long as I've been using it; the lack of multiple levels of undo is probably the most glaring example of that, but there are dozens of other examples. The app has been showing its age for some time now, and a lot of Mac users didn't upgrade to version 7 because it didn't add much to the previous version and because we were expecting a future version to be OS X native.
I'm not familiar with Lyx and Kword, so I can't comment on those.
Interesting -- that sounds like a sort of reversal of what a studio did with a different movie some years back. They took a script loosely based on a book called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and they gave it a title from a completely unrelated book by William S. Burroughs, which was derived from a novel by Alan Nourse. The Nourse novel was called Bladerunner.
Regarding a couple of the women whose names you didn't recognize:
Nancy Kress is probably the best-known woman on the Locus SF novels list; she came to prominence with the Hugo-winning and Nebula-winning novella (later turned into a novel) "Beggars in Spain" in 1991, and has continued to write good stories and novels (and to win awards) ever since. She's more recently best-known for the Probability Moon, Probability Sun, Probability Space trilogy.
Liz Williams is a novelist becoming well-known in the UK but not so well-known in the US. For a sample of her work, you could read her short story "Century to Starboard," which we just published at Strange Horizons (if I may be forgiven a small plug).
The Best Books of 2003 Tally provides info on which (and how many) year's-best lists various books were listed on; may give you a little more info than the combined lists, though the sources are different for this list.
Also note that the 2003 Book Directory doesn't link only to Amazon; it also provides links to reviews when such are available online.
The "Turn on full keyboard access" option has been in System Preferences for a while, but it didn't work in web pages in Safari until now. (That is, you could tab around from one control to another in dialog boxes, but you couldn't tab from one control to another (except text boxes) in a web page in Safari until now.)
It's amazing how quickly the information about the DOS attack has mutated. The CNN article on the subject implies that the DOS attack has already been launched:
"Virus experts suggested MyDoom's author was a fan of the Linux open source community, because the bug, which targets computers running Microsoft Windows, launched a Denial of Service Attack on SCO's site."
(Note the reference to the worm as a "bug"; I suspect the writer thought "worm" and "bug" were synonyms.)
(But I dropped them a note with a correction, so the article may have been fixed by now.)
For the etymology of the word wherefore, see a good dictionary. The etymology given at MW10 suggests that the second half of the word does not come from the meaning of fore that has to do with future events. Also, etymology is not the same as literal meaning. The meaning of wherefore is indeed "for what purpose"; it has nothing to do with times in the future.
Desperate attempt to add a vaguely topic-relevant note to the above: some of my earliest experiences with getting cool stuff from the Net involved downloading copies of HyperCard stacks like "Monks With Macs" and Shakespeare plays.
It's not just short fiction. Note that it took only 44 votes to get on the ballot in the novel category, and only 486 people nominated novels. Only 626 people cast nominating ballots in any category, and that's an unusually high number of nominators; for the past few years, it's been more like 500 nominators total.
A supporting membership in ConJose currently costs $35 (it was cheaper a few months ago), and entitles you to vote on the final Hugo ballot (but you don't get to go to the con). Usually about 2 to 3 times as many people vote on the final ballot as nominate, but that still means only about a thousand people decide which works get Hugos.
So if anyone here thinks the Hugo ballot doesn't represent what they'd like to see winning awards, consider buying a supporting membership in ConJose and voting in this year's Hugos. Even better, consider buying a supporting membership in next year's WorldCon (TorCon), so that you can nominate next year.
The more people participate in the process, the more accurate the results.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. Some further details for anyone who doesn't know:
Ursula K. Le Guin coined the term "ansible"; it first appeared in her novel Rocannon's World in 1966.
James Blish used a similar (but not identical) device, called the Dirac transmitter; that term first appeared in his 1957 story "Beep."
E. E. "Doc" Smith had a faster-than-light communications device called the "ultraphone" in his Skylark of Valeron in 1934. I'm pretty sure there were a variety of FTL communications devices in pulp science fiction.
But yeah, Le Guin was the originator of the term "ansible." Card and others got the term from her.
Thanks for posting this! I was disappointed not to see A/UX on the original list.
I did QA for A/UX 3.0 back in '91-'92 (as a contractor working at Apple), testing 3rd-party applications for compatibility. Various of us referred to A/UX as "Apple's best-kept secret"; most of my Mac-user friends had never heard of it.... As someone else noted in another comment, I don't think the government contracts were the only reason for A/UX's existence, but my impression was that pretty much nobody else was buying the OS.
I've been using Frame at various jobs (tech writing) for the past twelve years; it's really the clear best choice for any multi-chapter document, despite its many flaws and despite Word's increasing sophistication. Frame automatically handles (and updates) cross-references (giving you a great deal of control over exactly how they appear); it manages character and paragraph tags much much better than Word does; it provides mechanisms for displaying or hiding conditional text; it automatically generates indexes and tables of contents; it provides a system for managing all the chapter files that make up a book (continuous page numbering across files, for example, is trivially easy); it has a fairly powerful mechanism for designing page layouts (for books, not for things like ads) and managing text flows and so on; its system of using page-design templates works well.
Unfortunately, FM also has a lot of problems, as others have noted in various threads here. It has languished for the past several years, with updates coming out infrequently and with only minor additions to the software in each new update. It still has ridiculous UI problems that have been around as long as I've been using it; the lack of multiple levels of undo is probably the most glaring example of that, but there are dozens of other examples. The app has been showing its age for some time now, and a lot of Mac users didn't upgrade to version 7 because it didn't add much to the previous version and because we were expecting a future version to be OS X native.
I'm not familiar with Lyx and Kword, so I can't comment on those.
Interesting -- that sounds like a sort of reversal of what a studio did with a different movie some years back. They took a script loosely based on a book called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and they gave it a title from a completely unrelated book by William S. Burroughs, which was derived from a novel by Alan Nourse. The Nourse novel was called Bladerunner.
If you don't want to pay for it, you can also download it for free in a wide variety of formats, with the blessings of the author and publisher.
If you're interested in such statistics, you might be interested in the Broad Universe statistics page.
Regarding a couple of the women whose names you didn't recognize:
Nancy Kress is probably the best-known woman on the Locus SF novels list; she came to prominence with the Hugo-winning and Nebula-winning novella (later turned into a novel) "Beggars in Spain" in 1991, and has continued to write good stories and novels (and to win awards) ever since. She's more recently best-known for the Probability Moon, Probability Sun, Probability Space trilogy.
Liz Williams is a novelist becoming well-known in the UK but not so well-known in the US. For a sample of her work, you could read her short story "Century to Starboard," which we just published at Strange Horizons (if I may be forgiven a small plug).
You can find some reviews of works on the list, plus other related info, at various places on the Locus Online site. For example:
Book and Magazine Reviews Index (last updated Nov. '03)
Claude Lalumiere's Best SF and Fantasy Books of 2003
The Best Books of 2003 Tally provides info on which (and how many) year's-best lists various books were listed on; may give you a little more info than the combined lists, though the sources are different for this list.
Also note that the 2003 Book Directory doesn't link only to Amazon; it also provides links to reviews when such are available online.
The "Turn on full keyboard access" option has been in System Preferences for a while, but it didn't work in web pages in Safari until now. (That is, you could tab around from one control to another in dialog boxes, but you couldn't tab from one control to another (except text boxes) in a web page in Safari until now.)
It's amazing how quickly the information about the DOS attack has mutated. The CNN article on the subject implies that the DOS attack has already been launched:
"Virus experts suggested MyDoom's author was a fan of the Linux open source community, because the bug, which targets computers running Microsoft Windows, launched a Denial of Service Attack on SCO's site."
(Note the reference to the worm as a "bug"; I suspect the writer thought "worm" and "bug" were synonyms.)
(But I dropped them a note with a correction, so the article may have been fixed by now.)
Totally off-topic response:
For the etymology of the word wherefore, see a good dictionary. The etymology given at MW10 suggests that the second half of the word does not come from the meaning of fore that has to do with future events. Also, etymology is not the same as literal meaning. The meaning of wherefore is indeed "for what purpose"; it has nothing to do with times in the future.
Desperate attempt to add a vaguely topic-relevant note to the above: some of my earliest experiences with getting cool stuff from the Net involved downloading copies of HyperCard stacks like "Monks With Macs" and Shakespeare plays.
It's not just short fiction. Note that it took only 44 votes to get on the ballot in the novel category, and only 486 people nominated novels. Only 626 people cast nominating ballots in any category, and that's an unusually high number of nominators; for the past few years, it's been more like 500 nominators total.
A supporting membership in ConJose currently costs $35 (it was cheaper a few months ago), and entitles you to vote on the final Hugo ballot (but you don't get to go to the con). Usually about 2 to 3 times as many people vote on the final ballot as nominate, but that still means only about a thousand people decide which works get Hugos.
So if anyone here thinks the Hugo ballot doesn't represent what they'd like to see winning awards, consider buying a supporting membership in ConJose and voting in this year's Hugos. Even better, consider buying a supporting membership in next year's WorldCon (TorCon), so that you can nominate next year.
The more people participate in the process, the more accurate the results.
Agreed. The punishment for breaking the law is apparently that they'll be required to obey the law in the future...
"You have been found guilty of murder. Your punishment is that you are now prohibited from killing people ever again."
~That'll be effective.~
--jed