Not just Unix puns - the protagonist makes a reference to some programming where INT21 was used as the error handler. Hopefully, on this site, I don't have to explain why I started laughing hysterically when I first read that.
This is a post-atomic war novel, set in *and written in* the late '50's, recounting the experiences of a small town in pre-civil rights rural Florida after the bombs hit. Well written, well thought out, good characters, including good African-American characters who are not cartoons.
If I were teaching history to HS kids, I'd want to assign this to convey both the cold war and race relations of the period (just like I'd assign "The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club" by Dorothy Sayers to convey the effect of WW I on British society).
By putting all of this "good for you" freight on the book, I'm afraid that I'm distracting from the fact that this is one hell of an entertaining read. I first read it as a teen; I'm now in my 50's and have read it probably 20 times and it stands up.
An amazing writer. His "Joe Mauser" series posits a world where MegaCorps strive with each other by hiring mercenaries to fight strictly-limited battles that are broadcast on TV.
Thoughtful (he'd have been all over "reality TV" if he'd lived past 1983) , but also hugely entertaining. He also comes from a different ideological angle than most Golden Age SF authors - his dad ran for US President twice as the candidate of the Socialist Labor party, and he himself was a lifetime member of the SLP.
From Wikipedia:
His novels predicted many things which have come to pass, including pocket computers and a worldwide computer network with information available at one's fingertips.
Much of his work is downloadable for free from Gutenberg or the other usual suspects.
It's actually even cheaper to get their eBooks through the webscriptions thing, but since that's basically a subscription to every book Baen publishes, you probably need to read a lot more than the one or two books a month that I do to make it worth it.
Actually, the subscription is equal to the price of three books. If I have two "definites", I can usually gambe that there's at least one good one in the remaining 4 or 5...
Re:That's why I like the basic Kindle
on
The eBook Backlash
·
· Score: 1
...except DRM ensures that you are never actual in control of anything. You can't simply copy things. Your "library manager" is there to make sure you're not a pirate. It's not there to do your bidding. It's there to do Amazon or Apple's bidding.
As some pundit said back in the '80s, the first time "the paperless office" came up, "We will have the paperless office the same time as the paperless bathroom".
We've had the obligatory LOTR references; does anyone else remember the 8-bit word processor called Palantir for CP/M and TurboDos? This is software so obscure there isn't even a Wikipedia entry...
Aaah good old terminate-and-stay-resident programs, from the heydays of non-multitasking OSs. Anyone else remember Int 27h and the magic of hooking a subroutine to make it appear like your OS was actually multitasking? Hmph...kids these days..
And they all wanted to be loaded last, and took militant action to make sure that they had their hands on Int27h. I remember reading some assembler source from the era where one of the first chunks of code was commented as "Duke it out with Sidekick"...
You actually have to understand what is being said. 'Alternatives to the primitive models' aren't all cheap either. Good luck finding a cheap magic lantern. And you should note that it says "fairly" high quality.
Cheap high-quality roll film cameras from the 1920s or 1930s that took now obsolete film sizes like 616 can be bought on the Bay for under $20 (search on "Agfa PD16" for a quick example). A quick search om "magic lantern" showed a Bausch and Lomb model currently at $79 (there seem to be more available in Great Britain than in the US).
Five Antonio Salieris won't produce Mozart's Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years.
Um, Mozart's Requiem wasn't entirely by Mozart -- he died while writing it, and substantial portions were written by his student Franz Xavier Sussmayer.
Were the first four decades of movie-making so great that they produced more "top" movies than the most recent four? Were the '50's really the golden age of cinema? Were the '70's through '90's really worse than the '40's through '60's?
He followed with a useful breakdown by decade, for which I thank him.
What I think that he hasn't considered is that in that first four-decade period, particularly the last three, movies were pretty much the whole enchilada when it came to visual storytelling entertainment.
With no TV, and with vaudeville dying off in the '20s, movies were the only game in town. Radio filled some of the niche that TV does now, but it, of course had no visual component.
I don't think that the poster realizes how pervasive the movies were in that time. In the New York City neighborhood where I grew up in the '60s (in Queens), I was astounded to learn that there had been a movie theatre about every 3 or 4 blocks on the main business street in the '30's and '40's. People regularly went to the movies 2 or 3 times a week, week in and week out, and this was not just "movie fans", it was pretty much everyone.
Given that movies were at the apex of popular culture in the era, they tended to draw a higher percentage from the pool of the highly-talented than they do today. If the movies today had their most talented people supplemeted with 70% of the most talented now working in TV, music videos, game design, etc., I'd expect the number of great films made now to be higher. I think that the falloff in numbers for the TV era is just a reflection of talent dilution at the very high end of the talent scale.
One better: TextWranger -- basically BBEdit without a few things -- is now free.
But only if you have OS X 10.3-something. I bought a Wall Street (G3 Series) laptop so I could learn something about Macs and OS X (I go back to CP/M, thru DOS and Windows, and the first production Linux server I put up ran kernel 0.99 pl13 on a 386-sx-20 with 4 megs of RAM, but I'd never been exposed to Macs) but 10.2 is the end of the line for the Wall Street.
Any suggestions as to a good free-as-in-beer editor that'll work under 10.2.x?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm personally waiting for "Wascally Wabbit".
Most free programming/systems administrator/etc. free books seem to be available only as PDF, which is pretty much unusable on a Kindle.
Does the Slashdot hive mind know of any sources for free computer books suitable for a Kindle or Nook (Calibre solves the epub to mobi problem)?
..."historians say" is such a hollow phrase ...
It reminds me of Weekly World News' "stunned scientists say" (and the scientists were always stunned).
I tried
1 furlong in feet =
and it couldn't come up with an answer. What good is it?
Full of Unix puns
Not just Unix puns - the protagonist makes a reference to some programming where INT21 was used as the error handler. Hopefully, on this site, I don't have to explain why I started laughing hysterically when I first read that.
This is a post-atomic war novel, set in *and written in* the late '50's, recounting the experiences of a small town in pre-civil rights rural Florida after the bombs hit. Well written, well thought out, good characters, including good African-American characters who are not cartoons.
If I were teaching history to HS kids, I'd want to assign this to convey both the cold war and race relations of the period (just like I'd assign "The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club" by Dorothy Sayers to convey the effect of WW I on British society).
By putting all of this "good for you" freight on the book, I'm afraid that I'm distracting from the fact that this is one hell of an entertaining read. I first read it as a teen; I'm now in my 50's and have read it probably 20 times and it stands up.
An amazing writer. His "Joe Mauser" series posits a world where MegaCorps strive with each other by hiring mercenaries to fight strictly-limited battles that are broadcast on TV.
Thoughtful (he'd have been all over "reality TV" if he'd lived past 1983) , but also hugely entertaining. He also comes from a different ideological angle than most Golden Age SF authors - his dad ran for US President twice as the candidate of the Socialist Labor party, and he himself was a lifetime member of the SLP.
From Wikipedia:
His novels predicted many things which have come to pass, including pocket computers and a worldwide computer network with information available at one's fingertips.
Much of his work is downloadable for free from Gutenberg or the other usual suspects.
It's actually even cheaper to get their eBooks through the webscriptions thing, but since that's basically a subscription to every book Baen publishes, you probably need to read a lot more than the one or two books a month that I do to make it worth it.
Actually, the subscription is equal to the price of three books. If I have two "definites", I can usually gambe that there's at least one good one in the remaining 4 or 5...
...except DRM ensures that you are never actual in control of anything. You can't simply copy things. Your "library manager" is there to make sure you're not a pirate. It's not there to do your bidding. It's there to do Amazon or Apple's bidding.
1) Install Calibre
2) Install DRM removal addons from http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/ebooks-formats-drm-and-you-%E2%80%94-a-guide-for-the-perplexed/
3) ???
4) Profit!
the paperless office
As some pundit said back in the '80s, the first time "the paperless office" came up, "We will have the paperless office the same time as the paperless bathroom".
ALL lenses made for Pentax SLRs (film or digital) work with Pentax digital SLRs (no adapters needed).
How do you make Spotmatic-era M42 screw mount lenses fit on a K-mount Pentax bayonet (K1000 through current) - duct tape?
I agree that I can use my old screw mount lenses on my K100D digital, but it *does* require an adapter....
We've had the obligatory LOTR references; does anyone else remember the 8-bit word processor called Palantir for CP/M and TurboDos? This is software so obscure there isn't even a Wikipedia entry...
Or we could act like adults.
You must be new here...
If I drop a cheeseburger and it breaks, it only costs me $1.69 to replace it. The iPad? $500 and up!
Rip-off artist! A cheeseburger at McDonald's is only $0.89. Even a double cheeseburger is only $1.19.
Kicking myself for not registering earlier.
Oh well, at least I have a 7-digit UID!
I have a low-5-digit UID, and could have had a 4-digit one had I registered earlier.
I'm glad the FSF has someone as uncompromising as Stallman.
I'm reminded that Malcom X once said that the reason that the white establishment was willing to talk to MLK was so they wouldn't have to talk to him.
Personally I'm waiting for "Wascally Wabbit".
But has Netcraft confirmed it?
Aaah good old terminate-and-stay-resident programs, from the heydays of non-multitasking OSs. Anyone else remember Int 27h and the magic of hooking a subroutine to make it appear like your OS was actually multitasking? Hmph...kids these days..
And they all wanted to be loaded last, and took militant action to make sure that they had their hands on Int27h. I remember reading some assembler source from the era where one of the first chunks of code was commented as "Duke it out with Sidekick"...
Cheap high-quality roll film cameras from the 1920s or 1930s that took now obsolete film sizes like 616 can be bought on the Bay for under $20 (search on "Agfa PD16" for a quick example). A quick search om "magic lantern" showed a Bausch and Lomb model currently at $79 (there seem to be more available in Great Britain than in the US).
Um, Mozart's Requiem wasn't entirely by Mozart -- he died while writing it, and substantial portions were written by his student Franz Xavier Sussmayer.
Were the first four decades of movie-making so great that they produced more "top" movies than the most recent four? Were the '50's really the golden age of cinema? Were the '70's through '90's really worse than the '40's through '60's?
He followed with a useful breakdown by decade, for which I thank him.
What I think that he hasn't considered is that in that first four-decade period, particularly the last three, movies were pretty much the whole enchilada when it came to visual storytelling entertainment.
With no TV, and with vaudeville dying off in the '20s, movies were the only game in town. Radio filled some of the niche that TV does now, but it, of course had no visual component.
I don't think that the poster realizes how pervasive the movies were in that time. In the New York City neighborhood where I grew up in the '60s (in Queens), I was astounded to learn that there had been a movie theatre about every 3 or 4 blocks on the main business street in the '30's and '40's. People regularly went to the movies 2 or 3 times a week, week in and week out, and this was not just "movie fans", it was pretty much everyone.
Given that movies were at the apex of popular culture in the era, they tended to draw a higher percentage from the pool of the highly-talented than they do today. If the movies today had their most talented people supplemeted with 70% of the most talented now working in TV, music videos, game design, etc., I'd expect the number of great films made now to be higher. I think that the falloff in numbers for the TV era is just a reflection of talent dilution at the very high end of the talent scale.
Nobody thinks they can print 72 pages of ads and get away with it.
Obviously, you don't remember Computer Shopper.
But only if you have OS X 10.3-something. I bought a Wall Street (G3 Series) laptop so I could learn something about Macs and OS X (I go back to CP/M, thru DOS and Windows, and the first production Linux server I put up ran kernel 0.99 pl13 on a 386-sx-20 with 4 megs of RAM, but I'd never been exposed to Macs) but 10.2 is the end of the line for the Wall Street.
Any suggestions as to a good free-as-in-beer editor that'll work under 10.2.x?
The Commonwealth of Virginia abolished parole about 3 years ago....