If you're at all interested in why someone might prefer "Have Spacesuit..." to most of Heinlein's other works, check out Alexei Panshin's comments in "Heinlein in Dimension" at http://www.enter.net/~torve/critics/Dimension/ hd03 -5.html
and if you're interested in why someone might not like "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," check out a later chapter in the same book
I guess it depends on context. Making my customers wait two years for a finished product was never a viable option. As you point out, a lot of clients would rather have a working beta than nothing at all; this is generally because software tends to get written to meet needs that exist today, not to address needs that someone thinks they'll have in a couple of years. In that context, your version of XP would in fact be better than the heavily planned out methodology, especially since the finished version was of equivalent quality (BTW, what does finished software look like? I've never seen any:) )
But then that tends to be the problem with discussions of methodology: context tends to be ignored, I think mostly because it gets in the way of sweeping judgements (XP is good for everything! XP is good for nothing! etc)
I write a lot of reports, which eventually require more formatting than you can get from a text editor. But I write all the initial drafts in Emacs, and only use a word processor to apply formatting when the content development phase is pretty much over.
Since I started doing this, my output has increased significantly, and the whole process is way more pleasant.
1: The genre is swamped with juvenile series books!
Sorry, the genre has always been swamped with juvenile series books. The name Captain Future mean anything to you? The problem is not the volume of low end material that's being published, the problem is that there doesn't seem to be much of a high end. The question is why.
2: Authors are too interested in setting at the expense of character!
If anything, I'd say it was the opposite. Characters in SF, even the good stuff, have rarely been well developed. This is perfectly appropriate: SF writers have to spend a much higer percentage of words sketching in the background landscape than do mainstream writers. Consequently they tend to rely more on character "types" than do their mainstream counterparts. The problem is that SF writers are expected to present more well-rounded characters than they were in the past, with the result that we get a lot of tacked on sentimentality that really adds nothing to the stories. (And don't try to tell me that classic sf writers like Asimov, Heinlein & Clarke had great characters... they were ok, but they weren't in even remotely the same league as Proust or Dickens).
3. Science has caught up with SF!... There's probably some truth to this, in the sense that science has made it harder for us to project our fantasies on to the future in ways that make dramatic sense.... which is to say that science has tended to kill off genre conventions faster than it replaced them.
4. It's all been done!
Not strictly true, but it's probably safe to say that most of the low hanging fruit has been picked. It's a lot harder to come up with anything original now than it was back when nothing had been written yet.
5. People are a lot more pessimistic about technology now. SF is all about optimism!
People have always had a love/hate relationship with technology. Yeah, the atom bomb hastened the end of WWII, but it also led to an arms race that a whole lot of people figured would probably result in the end of the world. Space travel was a pleasant fantasy... until those commies got there first with Sputnik. DDT was great for getting rid of those pesky insects... and birds too, as Rachel Carson pointed out in Silent Spring (early 60s). None of which stopped a whole lot of great sf from being written during those decades, much of it far from the rah-rah gung ho optimism one might find in, say, the collected works of E.E. "Doc" Smith.
Here's my suggestion as to why good written sf has been in decline lately.
Economics: The Thor Power Tools decision essentially killed the careers of many mid-list authors. Most of the interesting sf writers were mid-list authors. Follow the money...
"Would one dare do anything so risky as carouse, drive a car, hit the ski slopes, if three hundred years of life would be thereby imperiled?"
I agree this is a stupid (or at least poorly-considered) comment, but for a different reason: People routinely imperil decades of their lives doing exactly those kinds of things now, why would we expect the prospect of additional decades, or even centuries, to change this kind of behaviour?
"Oh gee, when I only stood to lose 50 years I used to drive like a lunatic, but now I stand to lose 250 years, it's just not worth it!"
A substantial fraction of the population already thinks they're immortal (ie impervious to harm), real immortality won't change that.
How can you possibly equate bosses and entrepreneurs? Some bosses are entrepreneurs, no doubt about it, but most bosses (especially middle management) took no more risks than anyone else; they just have the kind of education/background that tends to lead to management-type work. (eg. MBA, CA, relevant experience).
And in reality, these people are no more deserving of respect than anyone else. Some do their jobs well, lots more are merely competent, and far too many are frankly incompetent.
Incompetent people in positions of authority are not reasonable in any society, capitalist or otherwise, if for no other reason than their bad decisions will ultimately affect the stability of your income and the fullness of your head of hair. It may be politically necessary to put up with their abuse from time to time, but it is never reasonable.
Thinking of yourself as a grunt with no leverage is a cop out! You don't have to bet your house on a business deal to be capable of independent thought, and your leverage resides in your skills, your ideas, and your record of achievement.
As science fiction and various futurists have repeatedly demonstrated, it is impossible to accurately predict:
a) what will be invented in the next 10,20 or 50 years b) how those inventions will interact with each other c) how those interactions will affect society
Read sf from the 40s & 50s. The accepted wisdom was that by the early 21st century: --Going into space would be like taking a commercial airline -- there would be colonies on the Moon, Mars, Venus, etc. -- we'd have those flying cars we all want so bad -- computers would still be as big as houses but they'd have artificial intelligence
I'm not trying to dis sf writers; their predictions aren't meant to be taken (too) seriously.
But frankly, Marshall Brain has made the cardinal mistake that bad sf writers sometimes make: he's taken a single trend and extrapolated it, assuming that everything else will stay mostly the same as it is right now.
Since no one else has mentioned it yet, I will: tax-funded organizations can save considerable amounts of public money using open source software. As one example, our provincial post-secondary library system has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees by developing open source versions of commercial products (or rather, leading in the development of these products, since it's the commercial vendors who have been trailing us). It's actually a lot cheaper for us to hire programmers than pay for commercial licences for some of this stuff.
That's one example, but more generally, consider how much money the public sector must already be saving in annual licensing fees for web server software, operating systems, scripting languages, etc. As far as our agency is concerned, open source means lower costs, increased flexibility, and the ability to do a heck of a lot more with our limited budget.
The great TCP/IP vs. OSI debate that raged in the 1980s is a great example of what this guy is talking about. On the one hand, you had TCP/IP, a relatively simple protocol that had evolved informally over a period of years (de facto standard); and OSI, a much more complex, hard-to-implement standard that was developed by an ISO committee (de jure standard). For several years, many industry observers figured that OSI was going to replace TCP/IP, if only because of the high-powered corporations that were getting behind it. But what emerged from the ISO OSI process was a bloated mess of a standard, virtually unimplementable because it tried to do everything to please everybody. Fortunately, TCP/IP was so entrenched by the time the OSI standard was released, that no one seriously considered replacing the one with the other.
So what this demonstrates, since it appears that a lot of posters didn't actually read the article: de facto standards are usually good, because at least we know they describe technologies that work. De jure standards are usually bad, because they tend to be about political compromise rather than the quest for good technology.
Remember the old Dilbert cartoon, where the sales rep gushes, "this device conforms to all international communications protocols" and Dilbert replies, "so it does nothing useful and it's not your fault" ?...
Ditch the proto-Elvis Costello glasses and the polyester slacks. Wear jeans and t-shirts. It's easy, and while it probably won't make you popular, it will make you less unpopular. For god's sake, fight the battles that matter: it doesn't matter if you look like the herd, as long as you don't think like them.
Later on, when you get to college, you can go back to looking as geeky as you want, because by then Elvis Costello will actually exist, and people will assume you're some kind of trendy post punk.
Just read Reynolds' Chasm City over the holidays. It terms of sub-genre it's a blend of cyberpunk and space-opera; if you like both (as I do) you will probably like the book. Reynolds writes and plots well, there is some memorable imagery (some of it a bit gruesome); and the story does have a point to it, although at times I found myself wondering if it would. Reynolds hasn't written a lot at this point, but he's definitely a talent to watch.
Seems odd to me that the OT posts (the ones that advise you to change your reading habits) are being modded up in this discussion, and the ones that just attempt to answer your question are not. Yeah, maybe you should seek more variety, but heck, I read nothing but sf for years before I decided it was time to dig into the classics, and I don't think I suffered any permanent damage as a result...
Cordwainer Smith wrote some of the strangest science fiction of his day (the 1950s + 1960s, mostly) set in a relatively coherent future history. There are several things that make his work unique:
--many of his central characters have values and beliefs that differ significantly from the dominant value systems of the past or present. You would expect that people living in the far future would have significantly different values than we do, but this is extremely rare in sf.
--his inventive use of language. He was remarkably skilled at inventing new words that were both poetic and convincing. (His knowledge of foreign languages helped a lot with this).
--his odd, sometimes bizarre, future societies. (See "A Planet Named Shayol" for a good example.)
Smith managed to convey the potential alienness of the future better than any other sf writer I've come across.
1. What is the relative number of people who complain about the loss of main street america vs. the number of people who tell you they love wal-mart? I'd love to know, and I wasn't aware that a study had been done. Please also supply your source for this information.
2. At what relative percentage is it permissable to dismiss the wants of the minority group as the complaints of a bunch of vocal losers?
Your argument might be reassuring if it was convincing (I guess if "we as a society" wanted it then it must be good!... ignoring history for the moment) But in fact your argument contains an implied contradiction.
Your argument implies that "we as a society" want two incompatible things. That is, we want the big box stores and the Mom & Pop shops to coexist. Else why would all those people be "screaming and crying" at the loss of "Main Street America"?
So if we accept your premise, it's clear from the above that "we as a society" don't always get what we want, since we wanted the Mom & Pop shops to continue and they didn't.
A more reasonable, though less reassuring, conclusion would be that "we as a society" have to live with the consequences (intended or otherwise) of the economic decisions of the majority, whether we wanted them or not.
And if a consequence was unintended, that means "we as a society" did not choose for it to happen. Choice involves making a conscious decision. If the majority of people who shop at big box stores were unaware that one result of their cumulative preference would be the demise of "Main Street America", then in fact they did not "choose to lose it", they just lost it.
It's interesting that two of the instructors had to develop their own e-textbook because nothing appropriate for their course was available in electronic format.
This is a pretty clear indication that the decision was made to go electronic before any reasonable assessment was made of whether the necessary course materials were actually available in that format.
Did the college factor in the cost of developing their own textbooks into their calculation of the overall cost of this initiative?
Did they pause to consider that maybe their students would benefit more from having the best course materials available for use, regardless of format?
The observation that "students prefer to look things up online" is irrelevant. Part of a decent post-secondary education is learning how to locate the best source of information available, which isn't always the most convenient source.
Absolutely. Leigh Brackett said that she borrowed from Celtic mythology when she was writing space opera in the 40s and 50s. The influence is often pretty apparent. Many of her characters have traditional Celtic names: Rhiannon (from The Sword of Rhiannon) for example.
Interesting theory, but in what way can the Jedi be termed "fascist"? According to commonly accepted definitions, fascism includes the characteristics of extreme nationalism, total subservience of the individual to the state, a rejection of all ethics and morality, and an exaltation of violence and ruthlessness. The Jedi exhibit few if any of these characteristics.
The Jedi are elitist, yes, and somewhat authoritarian in their organization. But why would they be obliged to be democratic, since they aren't a government?
The problem is not that musicians are compensated too well; the problem is that in general the current system does not reward musical ability. (Yes, there are exceptions).
As someone else pointed out, Britney and 'NSync are not primarily musicians; they are entertainers. They become mega-stars precisely because their rudimentary musicianship facilitates the creation of product that is easily digestible by a large public, most of whom are interested in the cult of personality, not music per se.
There are plenty of great musicians out there. Most are totally underpaid. And we'll never get to hear them because the recording industry is about selling product, not about promoting music.
Reading this review, I am reminded of Russ Walter's observation that a computer hobbyist is someone who likes to tinker with computers, but a computer hobbiest is even more hobbier.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're at all interested in why someone might prefer "Have Spacesuit..." to most of Heinlein's other works, check out Alexei Panshin's comments in "Heinlein in Dimension" at/ hd03 -5.html
d 04 -4.html
:)
http://www.enter.net/~torve/critics/Dimension
and if you're interested in why someone might not like "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," check out a later chapter in the same book
http://www.enter.net/~torve/critics/Dimension/h
Of course, many Heinlein fans hate "Heinlein in Dimension." You have been warned.
I guess it depends on context. Making my customers wait two years for a finished product was never a viable option. As you point out, a lot of clients would rather have a working beta than nothing at all; this is generally because software tends to get written to meet needs that exist today, not to address needs that someone thinks they'll have in a couple of years. In that context, your version of XP would in fact be better than the heavily planned out methodology, especially since the finished version was of equivalent quality (BTW, what does finished software look like? I've never seen any :) )
But then that tends to be the problem with discussions of methodology: context tends to be ignored, I think mostly because it gets in the way of sweeping judgements (XP is good for everything! XP is good for nothing! etc)
I write a lot of reports, which eventually require more formatting than you can get from a text editor. But I write all the initial drafts in Emacs, and only use a word processor to apply formatting when the content development phase is pretty much over.
Since I started doing this, my output has increased significantly, and the whole process is way more pleasant.
1: The genre is swamped with juvenile series books!
Sorry, the genre has always been swamped with juvenile series books. The name Captain Future mean anything to you? The problem is not the volume of low end material that's being published, the problem is that there doesn't seem to be much of a high end. The question is why.
2: Authors are too interested in setting at the expense of character! ... they were ok, but they weren't in even remotely the same league as Proust or Dickens).
If anything, I'd say it was the opposite. Characters in SF, even the good stuff, have rarely been well developed. This is perfectly appropriate: SF writers have to spend a much higer percentage of words sketching in the background landscape than do mainstream writers. Consequently they tend to rely more on character "types" than do their mainstream counterparts. The problem is that SF writers are expected to present more well-rounded characters than they were in the past, with the result that we get a lot of tacked on sentimentality that really adds nothing to the stories. (And don't try to tell me that classic sf writers like Asimov, Heinlein & Clarke had great characters
3. Science has caught up with SF! ... ... which is to say that science has tended to kill off genre conventions faster than it replaced them.
There's probably some truth to this, in the sense that science has made it harder for us to project our fantasies on to the future in ways that make dramatic sense.
4. It's all been done!
Not strictly true, but it's probably safe to say that most of the low hanging fruit has been picked. It's a lot harder to come up with anything original now than it was back when nothing had been written yet.
5. People are a lot more pessimistic about technology now. SF is all about optimism! ... until those commies got there first with Sputnik. DDT was great for getting rid of those pesky insects ... and birds too, as Rachel Carson pointed out in Silent Spring (early 60s). None of which stopped a whole lot of great sf from being written during those decades, much of it far from the rah-rah gung ho optimism one might find in, say, the collected works of E.E. "Doc" Smith.
People have always had a love/hate relationship with technology. Yeah, the atom bomb hastened the end of WWII, but it also led to an arms race that a whole lot of people figured would probably result in the end of the world. Space travel was a pleasant fantasy
Here's my suggestion as to why good written sf has been in decline lately.
Economics: The Thor Power Tools decision essentially killed the careers of many mid-list authors. Most of the interesting sf writers were mid-list authors. Follow the money ...
I agree this is a stupid (or at least poorly-considered) comment, but for a different reason: People routinely imperil decades of their lives doing exactly those kinds of things now, why would we expect the prospect of additional decades, or even centuries, to change this kind of behaviour?
"Oh gee, when I only stood to lose 50 years I used to drive like a lunatic, but now I stand to lose 250 years, it's just not worth it!"
A substantial fraction of the population already thinks they're immortal (ie impervious to harm), real immortality won't change that.
How can you possibly equate bosses and entrepreneurs? Some bosses are entrepreneurs, no doubt about it, but most bosses (especially middle management) took no more risks than anyone else; they just have the kind of education/background that tends to lead to management-type work. (eg. MBA, CA, relevant experience).
And in reality, these people are no more deserving of respect than anyone else. Some do their jobs well, lots more are merely competent, and far too many are frankly incompetent.
Incompetent people in positions of authority are not reasonable in any society, capitalist or otherwise, if for no other reason than their bad decisions will ultimately affect the stability of your income and the fullness of your head of hair. It may be politically necessary to put up with their abuse from time to time, but it is never reasonable.
Thinking of yourself as a grunt with no leverage is a cop out! You don't have to bet your house on a business deal to be capable of independent thought, and your leverage resides in your skills, your ideas, and your record of achievement.
As science fiction and various futurists have repeatedly demonstrated, it is impossible to accurately predict:
a) what will be invented in the next 10,20 or 50 years
b) how those inventions will interact with each other
c) how those interactions will affect society
Read sf from the 40s & 50s. The accepted wisdom was that by the early 21st century:
--Going into space would be like taking a commercial airline
-- there would be colonies on the Moon, Mars, Venus, etc.
-- we'd have those flying cars we all want so bad
-- computers would still be as big as houses but they'd have artificial intelligence
I'm not trying to dis sf writers; their predictions aren't meant to be taken (too) seriously.
But frankly, Marshall Brain has made the cardinal mistake that bad sf writers sometimes make: he's taken a single trend and extrapolated it, assuming that everything else will stay mostly the same as it is right now.
The future will be far stranger than that.
Since no one else has mentioned it yet, I will: tax-funded organizations can save considerable amounts of public money using open source software. As one example, our provincial post-secondary library system has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees by developing open source versions of commercial products (or rather, leading in the development of these products, since it's the commercial vendors who have been trailing us). It's actually a lot cheaper for us to hire programmers than pay for commercial licences for some of this stuff.
That's one example, but more generally, consider how much money the public sector must already be saving in annual licensing fees for web server software, operating systems, scripting languages, etc. As far as our agency is concerned, open source means lower costs, increased flexibility, and the ability to do a heck of a lot more with our limited budget.
The great TCP/IP vs. OSI debate that raged in the 1980s is a great example of what this guy is talking about. On the one hand, you had TCP/IP, a relatively simple protocol that had evolved informally over a period of years (de facto standard); and OSI, a much more complex, hard-to-implement standard that was developed by an ISO committee (de jure standard). For several years, many industry observers figured that OSI was going to replace TCP/IP, if only because of the high-powered corporations that were getting behind it. But what emerged from the ISO OSI process was a bloated mess of a standard, virtually unimplementable because it tried to do everything to please everybody. Fortunately, TCP/IP was so entrenched by the time the OSI standard was released, that no one seriously considered replacing the one with the other.
...
So what this demonstrates, since it appears that a lot of posters didn't actually read the article: de facto standards are usually good, because at least we know they describe technologies that work. De jure standards are usually bad, because they tend to be about political compromise rather than the quest for good technology.
Remember the old Dilbert cartoon, where the sales rep gushes, "this device conforms to all international communications protocols" and Dilbert replies, "so it does nothing useful and it's not your fault" ?
Actually, Calgarians subsist entirely on steak and doughnuts.
Ditch the proto-Elvis Costello glasses and the polyester slacks. Wear jeans and t-shirts. It's easy, and while it probably won't make you popular, it will make you less unpopular. For god's sake, fight the battles that matter: it doesn't matter if you look like the herd, as long as you don't think like them.
Later on, when you get to college, you can go back to looking as geeky as you want, because by then Elvis Costello will actually exist, and people will assume you're some kind of trendy post punk.
Just read Reynolds' Chasm City over the holidays. It terms of sub-genre it's a blend of cyberpunk and space-opera; if you like both (as I do) you will probably like the book. Reynolds writes and plots well, there is some memorable imagery (some of it a bit gruesome); and the story does have a point to it, although at times I found myself wondering if it would. Reynolds hasn't written a lot at this point, but he's definitely a talent to watch.
Seems odd to me that the OT posts (the ones that advise you to change your reading habits) are being modded up in this discussion, and the ones that just attempt to answer your question are not. Yeah, maybe you should seek more variety, but heck, I read nothing but sf for years before I decided it was time to dig into the classics, and I don't think I suffered any permanent damage as a result...
Cordwainer Smith wrote some of the strangest science fiction of his day (the 1950s + 1960s, mostly) set in a relatively coherent future history. There are several things that make his work unique:
--many of his central characters have values and beliefs that differ significantly from the dominant value systems of the past or present. You would expect that people living in the far future would have significantly different values than we do, but this is extremely rare in sf.
--his inventive use of language. He was remarkably skilled at inventing new words that were both poetic and convincing. (His knowledge of foreign languages helped a lot with this).
--his odd, sometimes bizarre, future societies. (See "A Planet Named Shayol" for a good example.)
Smith managed to convey the potential alienness of the future better than any other sf writer I've come across.
1. What is the relative number of people who complain about the loss of main street america vs. the number of people who tell you they love wal-mart? I'd love to know, and I wasn't aware that a study had been done. Please also supply your source for this information.
2. At what relative percentage is it permissable to dismiss the wants of the minority group as the complaints of a bunch of vocal losers?
Thanks!
Your argument implies that "we as a society" want two incompatible things. That is, we want the big box stores and the Mom & Pop shops to coexist. Else why would all those people be "screaming and crying" at the loss of "Main Street America"?
So if we accept your premise, it's clear from the above that "we as a society" don't always get what we want, since we wanted the Mom & Pop shops to continue and they didn't.
A more reasonable, though less reassuring, conclusion would be that "we as a society" have to live with the consequences (intended or otherwise) of the economic decisions of the majority, whether we wanted them or not.
And if a consequence was unintended, that means "we as a society" did not choose for it to happen. Choice involves making a conscious decision. If the majority of people who shop at big box stores were unaware that one result of their cumulative preference would be the demise of "Main Street America", then in fact they did not "choose to lose it", they just lost it.
This is a pretty clear indication that the decision was made to go electronic before any reasonable assessment was made of whether the necessary course materials were actually available in that format.
Did the college factor in the cost of developing their own textbooks into their calculation of the overall cost of this initiative?
Did they pause to consider that maybe their students would benefit more from having the best course materials available for use, regardless of format?
The observation that "students prefer to look things up online" is irrelevant. Part of a decent post-secondary education is learning how to locate the best source of information available, which isn't always the most convenient source.
As requested, here is a single source.
Most of the anti-library rhetoric coming out last year originated from Judy Platt, spokeswoman for the Association of American Publishers.
Absolutely. Leigh Brackett said that she borrowed from Celtic mythology when she was writing space opera in the 40s and 50s. The influence is often pretty apparent. Many of her characters have traditional Celtic names: Rhiannon (from The Sword of Rhiannon) for example.
Interesting theory, but in what way can the Jedi be termed "fascist"? According to commonly accepted definitions, fascism includes the characteristics of extreme nationalism, total subservience of the individual to the state, a rejection of all ethics and morality, and an exaltation of violence and ruthlessness. The Jedi exhibit few if any of these characteristics.
The Jedi are elitist, yes, and somewhat authoritarian in their organization. But why would they be obliged to be democratic, since they aren't a government?
As someone else pointed out, Britney and 'NSync are not primarily musicians; they are entertainers. They become mega-stars precisely because their rudimentary musicianship facilitates the creation of product that is easily digestible by a large public, most of whom are interested in the cult of personality, not music per se.
There are plenty of great musicians out there. Most are totally underpaid. And we'll never get to hear them because the recording industry is about selling product, not about promoting music.
Reading this review, I am reminded of Russ Walter's observation that a computer hobbyist is someone who likes to tinker with computers, but a computer hobbiest is even more hobbier.