Brief Lives was awful. I liked Mr Punch a lot, but I haven't read it in, dunno, five years. I thought Signal to Noise pretentious, opaque and derivative. Your milage may vary, etc.
The last ACME book was superb. Desperately sad, but brilliant.
From Hell was stunning, as was Cages (comic done by Gaiman's sometime collaborator, Dave McKean). Both put Gaimain's entire work to shame imho, and stand up to any work from any medium in the last ten years.
Richard Sala's okay, but I'd rate Love & Rockets, Eightball, or even Edward Gorey over him.
I thought Brief Lives was awful. From the dreadful art, to the meandering pointless story. Didn't really hang together, and nothing really happened. Plus it concentrated too much on the endless, and when you look at them closely they don't hang together (are they people, or concepts. How do the two inform each other. Never really touched in the series. Sure Delirium was a bit whacked, but Dream hardly personified dreams did he).
But compared to stuff from Vertigo that was coming out at the time (Shade, Doom Patrol) it was pretty shallow.
I prefer his non Sandman work. I thought Mr Punch was really good, though Cages (Dave McKean's solo work) is far better written than anything Gaiman has ever written.
Neverwhere the series was awful. Cliched characterisation, unlikely dialogue and acting (admittedly not all his fault, but his script can't have helped) at a Kiddie drama level.
> My point is that I bet there's a lot of people out there who think Sandman was crap. They probably also collected Youngblood.
A fair few of them collected Acme Novelty Library, Love & Rockets, Cages etc. The more you get into comics as an art form, the less impressive it seems. Just as if you've read widely, his prose seems a little ordinary.
There's a fashion designer (can't remember his name, but he's based in Soho, London and was responsible for those single strap backpacks everyone's been wearing for the last year) who actually designs clothes with this in mind. Dunno how much of a gimic it is. But he designs clothes with crotch protection, veils to hide the face, etc. Kind of the logical progression of all this urban survival crap that everyone's been wearing for the last couple of years.
>>No type system to speak of > >Types are inferred from their context. treat a scalar like a number and so will perl. the 21st >century is calling - time to hang up your lisp/ml puritinism - those languages were never any good >for GETTING WORK DONE NOW. I emphasize that because perl lets you get things done much quicker >than anything else.
There was a reason for types and that was you'd rather the compiler picked up your bugs, than have to try and work out what went wrong at run time (when your code is treating your string as an integer, or vica versa).
Perl's good for a quick hack, where you're not going to keep the code. But try and maintain it...oh boy.
Dunno I'd be a fan of Stan Lee for his art... Jack Kirby on the other hand...
Warren Ellis was going to be doing an online comic. I think the idea was that the serialised strip would be partly supported by advertising, and partly there to sell the Graphic Novel whenever it came out. Not a bad idea, as these days most comic books are basically just promotion for the inevitable collected edition. This way you get round the problem of most people not going into comic shops, and also get a certain (if small) amount of income while writing the thing.
BTW: People who dig slashdot, would probably dig Transmetropoliton. Hunter Thompson crossed with cyberpunk. There be TPBs available in bookshops.
The British one was different though. 1/3 was American, the rest British - the British parts being markedly better. A bit more pragmatic than their American counterparts, with a weather eye to the downsides of technology.
Stopped buying it when the UK arm collapsed, and it turned into a corporate love fest. Very sad.
The wierdest thing was that about WiredUK the British contributors tended to be fairly left wing. Where the American one would cover Yahoo's owner's many millions, the British one seemed more comfortable covering the use of the Internet in fighting the McDonalds libel case.
If you work in the financial industry, time is worth a hell of a lot of money. Developers are expensive, and time to market can be worth millions (or whatever. A new tool for a trader could generate a significant edge worth millions). £1000 is nothing (especially as a large organisation can arrange discounts).
As for the advantages of using component based software. Well this is hardly revolutionary. Our website would be a nightmare if we were using Perl. An unsupportable mess at best. And what would we do when we needed a transaction server? Distribution and replication of data? Perl has its place, but I'm not convinced that it scales for data intensive tasks. Which is not to say that NT does them well (it does them very badly in my experience).
Java's networking classes are fast. The GUI stuff tends to be slow. Writing decent, optimised GUIs in Java is such a black art its ridiculous (though it has been done, and in 1.02 as well. The guys who managed it got bought up by Microsoft, since then nada...).
Personally I think applets always were a bit of a stupid idea, made more so by the crap JVMs on all browsers. Writing an applet that works across all of them is an interesting exercise in futility. Shame really.
My experiences of every Visual-edit product on the market have been uniformly awful. At my last job we used Visual Cafe, mainly because it was the only tool available with a *usable* gui design tool (okay it was buggy as hell, changed code seemingly at random, crashed more often than netscape, all the supplied components needed rewriting and generally it made my life miserable...but the alternatives?). That was for 1.02. It got better, but even today it's flaky, unreliable and just plain annoying. I spent as mucu time coding around it's annoyances
For 1.1 we looked at Visual Age, but decided it was too slow and big (64Megs min!), didn't support inner classes and had an *interesting* interface. Anyway, by this stage we'd invested too much time, effort and code into Visual Cafe. We knew its bugs, we didn't want to switch to a whole new load of bugs:) Apart from that I though Visual Age was really nice...
My current place has a mandated standard of J/Builder. Nobody seems to like it much, and now that I've moved from the horrors of Java GUI development, to the pleasures of servlet development, I've switched to using XEmacs for everything. It's reliable, and does everything I need. In general I'd say that if you're not developing GUIs stick to either, that vi, or codewright, or something. Even if I was developing GUIs still, I have to say I'd be tempted to stay with Emacs. Less time spent fighting the tool's idiotic idea of how to do things, is more time spent productively.
Java's a nice language, and on the server I think it's lovely. There's no way I'd switch to Perl, C/C++, or even Python for the sort of stuff I'm doing now. However the AWT has been, and probably always will be broken. The code is shit. Javasoft never seem to fix anything until about a year later EVEN WHEN you give them the fix. Swing has a nice design, granted (though even there, there are some braindeadisms), but why didn't they just ditch the entire AWT and start from scratch. Uggh. As for the implementation...apparently recently they've actually started optimising it. Maybe it will end up as good as really badly written MFC code. Maybe... After a while you do start to wonder whether the only thing worse than a Microsoft programmer, is a Sun programmer. Sigh. We need an open source project to rewrite the windowing system so that it works. Any takers?
You do now about JGL, don't you? It's basically STL implemented in Java. There's also a group in Australia (Pizza I think) who developed templates for Java. For that matter it's a nobrainer to implement oneself, and a more efficient version than C++'s as well (use casts).
Well if marijuana (sp?) was legal, none of that would be a problem, yes? They'd grow it on their farms. Same for meth maybe. Anyway, by that argument we should ban plastics, cars, power stations...
It's this kind of comment which makes me despair. The sort of clueless optimism that did so much to damage Java in its early days, untempered by anything vaguely connected to reality.
Tuning is about optimising your machine/code for the conditions that it's running in. Nobody runs it under similar conditions, therefore everyone needs different tweeks. It depends upon your load, the types of request, how much memory you have, your bandwidth, back end CGI processes, etc, bleeding etc. And don't tell me that Linux is running fast enough as it is, next you'll be telling me that nobody would ever need more than 1GB of memory.
The website that I'm partly responsible for at my (very big) company could always be faster. Such is life.
In Kosovar, so far all we have are oral accounts from survivors, photographs and evidence from reconnasance planes, and of course the fact that the Serbians seem to commit genocide on a regular basis.
In the former Yugoslavia, what more evidence could you possibly want? Eyewitnesses, charity workers, photographs, graves, boasts of the Serbians themselves, the large numbers who went missing in areas where there was little, or no righting.
This isn't the first time the Serbians have massacred other races. They went round systematically killing Bosnians and Muslims in earlier phases of the civil war, and they even had concentration camps set up where they killed, raped and tortured any poor unfortunate to be there (woman, children, men). And they killed a LOT.
In Kosova there is evidence (photographic, obtained by the BBC), that in one village they executed all the men. There is evidence that in the capital they systematically rounded up all the intelligensia and killed them. If Kosovars refuse to leave their homes (and they were the overwhelming majority in Kosovar, which was an autonomous republic of Yugoslavia, and was never part of Serbia), they are killed. Footage and evidence of Serbian attrocities are being smuggled out, it's a shame that most people and the media give the Serbian propoganda machine any credence.
The Serbians have one lovely trick, btw. They kill all the men, and they rape the women, so that they will have Serbian children. Not a one off, either. Happens again and again. I've friends who've worked in Bosnia who've worked with women who have to deal with this. Imagine having the child of the butchers who killed your husband, and quite possibly other children.
The Serbians (well Milosvich and his cronies) are almost entirely responsible for the entire mess. Orchestrated so that he could stay in power, and possibly also because he is clinically insane.
french Canadians want to separate from canada, but they have a dept to Canada, and they dont want to talk about it.
They also want to share lots of things with Canada, without giving anything back..
Similiar was in Kosovo.
Serbian propoganda. Fact was, before the Serbians stirred them up by stripping away their rights (ie. the rights to use THEIR hospitals, THEIR universities), stripped the Kosovans of all the decent jobs, decent housing and treated them as second class citizens in their own region, they were quite happy being part of Yugoslavia. Bar a few nationalists (who were anything but popular), there was no support for independence.
The difference with Quebec is that they are given a choice every so often to democratically see if majority wants to quit, and they always fail.
Kosovo is a curcial part of Serb heritage, and they cant vote to give it away.
Kosovo was an autonomous region in Yugoslavia. It was not part of Serbia. Serbia was last independent a few hundred years ago. Very few Serbians lived there. And surely the rights of the people living there, come before the rights of those who used to live there.
Also look into the Economy there. Where is the money going to come from to restore what was destroyed? What jobs will the Kosovars have where they moved to? All countries surrounding have their economy in a bad position.
Well frankly that's the Serbian's fault. They provoked the war in Yugoslavia, they have been doing their best to destroy Kosovar, they killed a huge number of people in Bosnia deliberately and systematically in and out of their death camps. Frankly I think they deserve more than just to have their economy destroyed
And even assuming that Molosovich wanted to get rid of Kosovars, all that UN/NATO did was help him to speed things up.
I think the fact that he drove them out of their villages, treated them as second-class citizens, killed them and otherwise mistreated them suggests that he did want rid of them. Of course recently such actions as rounding up and killing all the intellectuals he could find in Kosovar's capital suggest a certain speeding up of the process
a) Molosevic's troops are guilty of deliberate genocide. This is documented fact, by many and various agencies. They deliberately killed all the Men they could find in Bosnia, and raped their women (to make them pregnant) in an attempt to destroy their culture. They are now doing the same in Kosovo. They have razed villages. They have executed old men and women who didn't want to leave the villages that they had lived in for their entire lives.
b) The Kosovans were quite happy staying part of Yugoslavia, UNTIL the Serbians stripped them of their rights. They weren't allowed to use their universities. They weren't allowed to use their hospitals. They were given second class status as citizens. This was in Kosova, where they made up 90% of the population. Again this is well documented, by agencies with a vested interested in not taking sides (such as the Red Cross). When the Kosovans started to demonstrate against this, they were killed. So they started fighting back. They were (and are) heavily outnumbered and out gunned.
c) Kosova has been 90% Albanian for a long, long time.
I think you should read up on the subject, and stop listening to Serbian propoganda, before telling other people to get a clue.
Slashdot Mirror
ROTFL
Brief Lives was awful. I liked Mr Punch a lot, but I haven't read it in, dunno, five years. I thought Signal to Noise pretentious, opaque and derivative. Your milage may vary, etc.
The last ACME book was superb. Desperately sad, but brilliant.
From Hell was stunning, as was Cages (comic done by Gaiman's sometime collaborator, Dave McKean). Both put Gaimain's entire work to shame imho, and stand up to any work from any medium in the last ten years.
Richard Sala's okay, but I'd rate Love & Rockets, Eightball, or even Edward Gorey over him.
I thought Brief Lives was awful. From the dreadful art, to the meandering pointless story. Didn't really hang together, and nothing really happened. Plus it concentrated too much on the endless, and when you look at them closely they don't hang together (are they people, or concepts. How do the two inform each other. Never really touched in the series. Sure Delirium was a bit whacked, but Dream hardly personified dreams did he).
But compared to stuff from Vertigo that was coming out at the time (Shade, Doom Patrol) it was pretty shallow.
I prefer his non Sandman work. I thought Mr Punch was really good, though Cages (Dave McKean's solo work) is far better written than anything Gaiman has ever written.
Neverwhere the series was awful. Cliched characterisation, unlikely dialogue and acting (admittedly not all his fault, but his script can't have helped) at a Kiddie drama level.
> My point is that I bet there's a lot of people out there who think Sandman was crap. They probably also collected Youngblood.
A fair few of them collected Acme Novelty Library, Love & Rockets, Cages etc. The more you get into comics as an art form, the less impressive it seems. Just as if you've read widely, his prose seems a little ordinary.
now Nausica on the other hand...
Cian
Oddly enough, Radio 4 (BBC radio channel in UK) adapted this for a play about 2/3 years ago. I have no idea why.
Cian
There's a fashion designer (can't remember his name, but he's based in Soho, London and was responsible for those single strap backpacks everyone's been wearing for the last year) who actually designs clothes with this in mind. Dunno how much of a gimic it is. But he designs clothes with crotch protection, veils to hide the face, etc. Kind of the logical progression of all this urban survival crap that everyone's been wearing for the last couple of years.
>>No type system to speak of
>
>Types are inferred from their context. treat a scalar like a number and so will perl. the 21st
>century is calling - time to hang up your lisp/ml puritinism - those languages were never any good
>for GETTING WORK DONE NOW. I emphasize that because perl lets you get things done much quicker
>than anything else.
There was a reason for types and that was you'd rather the compiler picked up your bugs, than have to try and work out what went wrong at run time (when your code is treating your string as an integer, or vica versa).
Perl's good for a quick hack, where you're not going to keep the code. But try and maintain it...oh boy.
Cian
>Would there be a Sandman without Silver Surfer?
Probably. Silver Surfer being a Marvel character, and Sandman based (loosely) on an old DC character.
Cian
Dunno I'd be a fan of Stan Lee for his art... Jack Kirby on the other hand...
Warren Ellis was going to be doing an online comic. I think the idea was that the serialised strip would be partly supported by advertising, and partly there to sell the Graphic Novel whenever it came out. Not a bad idea, as these days most comic books are basically just promotion for the inevitable collected edition. This way you get round the problem of most people not going into comic shops, and also get a certain (if small) amount of income while writing the thing.
BTW: People who dig slashdot, would probably dig Transmetropoliton. Hunter Thompson crossed with cyberpunk. There be TPBs available in bookshops.
The British one was different though. 1/3 was American, the rest British - the British parts being markedly better. A bit more pragmatic than their American counterparts, with a weather eye to the downsides of technology.
Stopped buying it when the UK arm collapsed, and it turned into a corporate love fest. Very sad.
The wierdest thing was that about WiredUK the British contributors tended to be fairly left wing. Where the American one would cover Yahoo's owner's many millions, the British one seemed more comfortable covering the use of the Internet in fighting the McDonalds libel case.
If you work in the financial industry, time is worth a hell of a lot of money. Developers are expensive, and time to market can be worth millions (or whatever. A new tool for a trader could generate a significant edge worth millions). £1000 is nothing (especially as a large organisation can arrange discounts).
As for the advantages of using component based software. Well this is hardly revolutionary. Our website would be a nightmare if we were using Perl. An unsupportable mess at best. And what would we do when we needed a transaction server? Distribution and replication of data? Perl has its place, but I'm not convinced that it scales for data intensive tasks. Which is not to say that NT does them well (it does them very badly in my experience).
Java boy
If you ignore the GUI, it is. Java's a damn good middleware language. And since 1.2 its got a lot faster, and a lot less resource hungry.
Developers of Visual Cafe. Oh yeah, great products...
Java's networking classes are fast. The GUI stuff tends to be slow. Writing decent, optimised GUIs in Java is such a black art its ridiculous (though it has been done, and in 1.02 as well. The guys who managed it got bought up by Microsoft, since then nada...).
Personally I think applets always were a bit of a stupid idea, made more so by the crap JVMs on all browsers. Writing an applet that works across all of them is an interesting exercise in futility. Shame really.
Cian
My experiences of every Visual-edit product on the market have been uniformly awful. At my last job we used Visual Cafe, mainly because it was the only tool available with a *usable* gui design tool (okay it was buggy as hell, changed code seemingly at random, crashed more often than netscape, all the supplied components needed rewriting and generally it made my life miserable...but the alternatives?). That was for 1.02. It got better, but even today it's flaky, unreliable and just plain annoying. I spent as mucu time coding around it's annoyances
:) Apart from that I though Visual Age was really nice...
For 1.1 we looked at Visual Age, but decided it was too slow and big (64Megs min!), didn't support inner classes and had an *interesting* interface. Anyway, by this stage we'd invested too much time, effort and code into Visual Cafe. We knew its bugs, we didn't want to switch to a whole new load of bugs
My current place has a mandated standard of J/Builder. Nobody seems to like it much, and now that I've moved from the horrors of Java GUI development, to the pleasures of servlet development, I've switched to using XEmacs for everything. It's reliable, and does everything I need. In general I'd say that if you're not developing GUIs stick to either, that vi, or codewright, or something. Even if I was developing GUIs still, I have to say I'd be tempted to stay with Emacs. Less time spent fighting the tool's idiotic idea of how to do things, is more time spent productively.
What's JOVE?
_____________________________________
Java's a nice language, and on the server I think it's lovely. There's no way I'd switch to Perl, C/C++, or even Python for the sort of stuff I'm doing now. However the AWT has been, and probably always will be broken. The code is shit. Javasoft never seem to fix anything until about a year later EVEN WHEN you give them the fix. Swing has a nice design, granted (though even there, there are some braindeadisms), but why didn't they just ditch the entire AWT and start from scratch. Uggh. As for the implementation...apparently recently they've actually started optimising it. Maybe it will end up as good as really badly written MFC code. Maybe... After a while you do start to wonder whether the only thing worse than a Microsoft programmer, is a Sun programmer. Sigh. We need an open source project to rewrite the windowing system so that it works. Any takers?
You do now about JGL, don't you? It's basically STL implemented in Java. There's also a group in Australia (Pizza I think) who developed templates for Java. For that matter it's a nobrainer to implement oneself, and a more efficient version than C++'s as well (use casts).
Cian
Well if marijuana (sp?) was legal, none of that would be a problem, yes? They'd grow it on their farms. Same for meth maybe. Anyway, by that argument we should ban plastics, cars, power stations...
Not a drug user, christ I barely even drink...
It's this kind of comment which makes me despair. The sort of clueless optimism that did so much to damage Java in its early days, untempered by anything vaguely connected to reality.
Tuning is about optimising your machine/code for the conditions that it's running in. Nobody runs it under similar conditions, therefore everyone needs different tweeks. It depends upon your load, the types of request, how much memory you have, your bandwidth, back end CGI processes, etc, bleeding etc. And don't tell me that Linux is running fast enough as it is, next you'll be telling me that nobody would ever need more than 1GB of memory.
The website that I'm partly responsible for at my (very big) company could always be faster. Such is life.
Cian
In Kosovar, so far all we have are oral accounts from survivors, photographs and evidence from reconnasance planes, and of course the fact that the Serbians seem to commit genocide on a regular basis.
In the former Yugoslavia, what more evidence could you possibly want? Eyewitnesses, charity workers, photographs, graves, boasts of the Serbians themselves, the large numbers who went missing in areas where there was little, or no righting.
This isn't the first time the Serbians have massacred other races. They went round systematically killing Bosnians and Muslims in earlier phases of the civil war, and they even had concentration camps set up where they killed, raped and tortured any poor unfortunate to be there (woman, children, men). And they killed a LOT.
In Kosova there is evidence (photographic, obtained by the BBC), that in one village they executed all the men. There is evidence that in the capital they systematically rounded up all the intelligensia and killed them. If Kosovars refuse to leave their homes (and they were the overwhelming majority in Kosovar, which was an autonomous republic of Yugoslavia, and was never part of Serbia), they are killed. Footage and evidence of Serbian attrocities are being smuggled out, it's a shame that most people and the media give the Serbian propoganda machine any credence.
The Serbians have one lovely trick, btw. They kill all the men, and they rape the women, so that they will have Serbian children. Not a one off, either. Happens again and again. I've friends who've worked in Bosnia who've worked with women who have to deal with this. Imagine having the child of the butchers who killed your husband, and quite possibly other children.
The Serbians (well Milosvich and his cronies) are almost entirely responsible for the entire mess. Orchestrated so that he could stay in power, and possibly also because he is clinically insane.
Cian
french Canadians want to separate from canada, but they have a dept to Canada, and they dont want to talk about it.
They also want to share lots of things with Canada, without giving anything back..
Similiar was in Kosovo.
Serbian propoganda. Fact was, before the Serbians stirred them up by stripping away their rights (ie. the rights to use THEIR hospitals, THEIR universities), stripped the Kosovans of all the decent jobs, decent housing and treated them as second class citizens in their own region, they were quite happy being part of Yugoslavia. Bar a few nationalists (who were anything but popular), there was no support for independence.
The difference with Quebec is that they are given a choice every so often to democratically see if majority wants to quit, and they always fail.
Kosovo is a curcial part of Serb heritage, and they cant vote to give it away.
Kosovo was an autonomous region in Yugoslavia. It was not part of Serbia. Serbia was last independent a few hundred years ago. Very few Serbians lived there. And surely the rights of the people living there, come before the rights of those who used to live there.
Also look into the Economy there. Where is the money going to come from to restore what was destroyed? What jobs will the Kosovars have where they moved to? All countries surrounding have their economy in a bad position.
Well frankly that's the Serbian's fault. They provoked the war in Yugoslavia, they have been doing their best to destroy Kosovar, they killed a huge number of people in Bosnia deliberately and systematically in and out of their death camps. Frankly I think they deserve more than just to have their economy destroyed
And even assuming that Molosovich wanted to get rid of Kosovars, all that UN/NATO did was help him to speed things up.
I think the fact that he drove them out of their villages, treated them as second-class citizens, killed them and otherwise mistreated them suggests that he did want rid of them. Of course recently such actions as rounding up and killing all the intellectuals he could find in Kosovar's capital suggest a certain speeding up of the process
Cian
Off topic, but...
a) Molosevic's troops are guilty of deliberate genocide. This is documented fact, by many and various agencies. They deliberately killed all the Men they could find in Bosnia, and raped their women (to make them pregnant) in an attempt to destroy their culture. They are now doing the same in Kosovo. They have razed villages. They have executed old men and women who didn't want to leave the villages that they had lived in for their entire lives.
b) The Kosovans were quite happy staying part of Yugoslavia, UNTIL the Serbians stripped them of their rights. They weren't allowed to use their universities. They weren't allowed to use their hospitals. They were given second class status as citizens. This was in Kosova, where they made up 90% of the population. Again this is well documented, by agencies with a vested interested in not taking sides (such as the Red Cross). When the Kosovans started to demonstrate against this, they were killed. So they started fighting back. They were (and are) heavily outnumbered and out gunned.
c) Kosova has been 90% Albanian for a long, long time.
I think you should read up on the subject, and stop listening to Serbian propoganda, before telling other people to get a clue.
...all woman, extremely attractive and a determined, strong engineer...
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Not to mention modest...
Cian - who's intimidated regularily, but then that's what comes from living in Hackney...