Nope... I'm not ignoring the existence of epics. I'm just acknowledging the unmitigated willingness to go back for more of the same on the part of the public, and the corrupting effect that has once the people shovelling the slop realize how low expectations will drop if it's a choice between the familiar and the new (and possibly challenging.) Several authors of some note have complained from time to time that their audiences will not let them walk away from a well-loved story. Indeed, Stephen King, Lord and Master of the formula, parodied the whole thing in Misery.
It also doesn't follow that since smart people read epics, and Trek fans are smart people, Trek must be worthy of the same respect or categorization as some sort of classical epic. It simply isn't. There isn't any coherence there to speak of outside of the vaunted "consistency" of the Trek "universe" in regards to technology and back story. This is not all moving toward some gestalt. This is Paramount squeezing and squeezing and squeezing. I challenge you to tell me how, for instance, the latest movie advanced some greater narrative agenda. No fair, by the way, outlining the morality play presented and claiming that Star Trek is all about recasting morality plays in sci-fi terms and so any movie with a morality play in it is part of some Trek epic.
I'm not going to deny that there's a benefit to telling a story across several volumes. Sometimes it grants the author a level of freedom to work at a reasonable pace but keep food on the table, too. On the other hand, the floundering, sopping mess that is Star Trek reflects no greater theme or arc. Simple economic opportunism is driving the train here. The article rightly points out that Berman et al wish the original series would go the hell away, and the last motion picture was, indeed, a collective clock-punching by a cast that clearly thinks walking through their parts and looking smug is quite enough for the rubes who are showing up as regular as clockwork because they're big fans who'd probably pay to watch Brent Spiner eat poop on a stick (me among them.) ------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Well... the "arguably troublesome" bit was to cover my tail on God Emperor... which I don't mind as much and I think belongs. The final two, though... *yrgh*... maybe it's just the weird old couple at the end.
I think the first four were adequate. Of course, I was bugged by Paul by the end of the first book, and so didn't need much convincing that he was going to go and cause some trouble for the universe one way or the other.
Point taken, though.:) ------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
TOS had its place. Heck, I milked it for a 20 page paper more than a couple of years ago. In fact, my first memory of television involves Star Trek.
TNG was ok. I watched it faithfully while it was possible to not reorient the antenna to do so. DS9 was ok, too.
Voyager is excruciating.
In a lot of ways, it's all an echo of the ongoing disaster that is the Fantasy/SciFi section of your local chain bookseller. People without anything new to say are happy to push these megaseries on a public that is shockingly resistant to learning new characters and settings. For a while it was a sort of cute "Tolkien wrote a trilogy, so good fantasy must come in threes" meme. Then it was Frank Herbert extending Dune through the arguably troublesome fourth and disastrous last two volumes. And along the way, David Eddings, Stephen Donaldson, Piers Anthony, and others decided people were happy to just stick with the familiar. In fact, they got punished in the market if they tried to stray.
It's ironic that a genre in which the readers pride themselves on the new and imaginative would much rather look in satisfaction on bookshelves with row upon row of "volume four in the fifth trilogy of a ten part epic."
Star Trek is trailing edge and predictable now. Let it die. Let's see something new. ------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
The Gartner Group doesn't seem to be doing the slamming. IDG has interpreted this as a "kiss of death" when what Gartner seems to have addressed is the "desktop productivity" side of Linux. Is that a surprise to anybody? Linux isn't quite there yet on the desktop.
I'm glad they were careful to ask Microsoft if Linux was making a dent in NT sales. Glad to see the Linux threat we heard about in the DOJ case has already been vanquished and it's business as usual for the red-blooded innovators of Redmond.
*snork* ------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
I used to hate Enlightenment. I thought it was way too slow, way too oriented around the eyecandy, and too surrounded by some weird fanboy culture (which wouldn't keep me from using it, but did keep me from admitting to it.)
During my explorations of Gnome, I warmed to E a little, largely thanks to Red Hat's reasonably conservative defaults, which made it seem less intrusive and reminded me of its underlying configurability.
Now that they've worked support for KDE into the mix, along with support for Gnome, along with some reasonably functional standalone features, I'm really impressed and pleased. This release marks Enlightenment truly coming into its own.
A perusal of e.themes.org reveals there's still a general obsession with "industrial" themage, but that's not a real showstopper. There are also some fairly pleasant, non-headache inducing, non-urban decay invoking themes. I can even play my Run Lola Run soundtrack without feeling like a total Sprocket.
I'll be monkeying around with the menu configs (cursed two button mouse that I never get around to replacing), but I'm pretty sure the versatility alone in regards to Gnome and KDE support will keep me as a user this time.
Congratulations to the team. You've taken a lot of abuse and derision in the past, but the product is catching up with the vision and it's worth it. ------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
It's a shame that this piece has to have the flaws it does: namely some rather bizarre appeals to authority (Jesse Berst) and red-baiting.
The reason it's a shame is this:
I got really sick of the bumper crop of "papers" that sprang up in the wake of CatB, all written by people long on verbiage and enthusiasm, but short on falsifiable premises. All of them were passively accepted as "good" on these pages and duly posted, making me long for a checkbox in the preferences to disable display of "enthusiastic but amateur pseudoscholars" items.
I waver from week to week on how I feel about ESR's body of work. I'm happy that CatB inspired the Netscape folk to give Mozilla a shot. I'm pleased that someone is trying to describe the open source development model sytematically. On the other hand, there's a certain middle-American craving for respectability that comes out in the style and execution.
That aside, the author of this piece seems, by the time he reaches his conclusion, to have read ESR the wrong way. Where CatB and friends tend to cleave to descriptives (with ESR's HOWTO on the subject of project management offering the prescriptives), this author seems to take the whole thing as a manual that needs to be confronted because it has suspicious ideological flavor.
His conclusion, in part, reads:
However, little seems to have been learned from the overall history of programming and software development. Ignoring the lessons of history may make open source an interesting footnote in the overall history of computing a century from now.
That's an interesting idea, I suppose, except that "open source" development existed prior to ESR calling it such. The development model springs from the personalities of the community that practices it. Steven Levy's Hackers provides a nice psychological history of just where this comes from. It is not something anyone dreamed up to storm the gates of Microsoft, because it predates Microsoft. Reading Hackers, once more, Bill Gates inspired the ire of early home computer hobbyists precisely because of his resistance to sharing the source to his BASIC. In some ways, Gates and company are the radical new development model on the scene if we want to talk history.
Following from that, once you strip open source development of some "meaning" outside "the way enthusiasts have been behaving toward the software they write for the last thirty years", it's hard to argue that it can "fail" and become a footnote to anything because it's not a directed ideological or theoretical movement, except in the heads of some of its advocates. The burden of proof lies on the newcomers: people who would proprietize the process. Open source programming developed "naturally," before Richard Stallman (who has applied a certain ideological bent to the process, and who doesn't show up in Levy's book until the very last chapter.) It certainly developed before ESR decided to identify it on his own terms, label it, and make it more palatable to business. It didn't develop as a reaction to big business, but was already in place culturally when big business came to computing. It developed, in some ways, before there was anything we would recognize as "computing."
Linux has already "succeeded", and it succeeded the moment Linus felt happy that he had some sort of working Unix on his home machine. It succeeded wildly when the rest of us agreed that it was indeed a reasonably working Unix and that we'd like it on our computers, too.
"Open source" on the whole has already succeeded, too. The author may wish it away because it makes him see commies under the bed, but it's a model that existed prior to attempts to prove or disprove it in papers. It's an expression of a community's personality and can fail about as much as any element of a popular culture can. Which is to say that while it may mutate in form from time to time (its latest variation being better organization and application of project management tools) it will probably always be around as long as there are hobbyist programmers. The fact that it has given us usable tools makes it a "success" by any standard that's true to the form itself. ------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Thank you so much for tweaking the auto-points for good karma. I like to initially read/. stories with a threshold of '2', and it was getting sort of tedious dealing with the generally safe postings of the anointed on the occasions when they weren't really contributing anything new. Initially it turned me off to the good karma bump altogether, but this seems like a good compromise: it'll reward/.'s best contributors and hopefully make reading with a '2' threshold a little more interesting.
I hope you move ahead with making anonymous posting a privilege of registered membership. If it deters even a few people from just spouting off because they happened by and have no more ties to Slashdot than that it's displayed on their browser at the moment, it's a good thing. There is clearly still room for abuse by registered users hiding behind momentary anonymity, but if an extra hoop has to be jumped through to gain that privilege in the first place, maybe it will help curb the "drive-by flamings." ------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
...anyone around who knows if there is an option to start kfm in a way that it doesnt put any icons on the root-window and works only as a file-manager/thumbnail-viewer/browser etc.?
Seems like the quick way to do that is to just bring up kfm and delete the icons from the desktop. "Trash" might fight, since it doesn't seem to include a "delete" option on its context menu, but a quick trip to the shell and rm -rf ~/Desktop/Trash will get rid of it.
Don't know if kfm puts it back or not. ------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Does this mean I'm not going to get my mug for spending three hours updating their software projects page?
They sent me mails demanding I pay for the mugs they said volunteers would get for free. I wrote back, they said "sorry," and then never wrote back or sent the mug.
Especially frustrating is the fact that I just got my own office, and now I have no kewl penguin mug for my desk. ------------ Michael Hall mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Slashdot Mirror
Nope... I'm not ignoring the existence of epics. I'm just acknowledging the unmitigated willingness to go back for more of the same on the part of the public, and the corrupting effect that has once the people shovelling the slop realize how low expectations will drop if it's a choice between the familiar and the new (and possibly challenging.) Several authors of some note have complained from time to time that their audiences will not let them walk away from a well-loved story. Indeed, Stephen King, Lord and Master of the formula, parodied the whole thing in Misery.
It also doesn't follow that since smart people read epics, and Trek fans are smart people, Trek must be worthy of the same respect or categorization as some sort of classical epic. It simply isn't. There isn't any coherence there to speak of outside of the vaunted "consistency" of the Trek "universe" in regards to technology and back story. This is not all moving toward some gestalt. This is Paramount squeezing and squeezing and squeezing. I challenge you to tell me how, for instance, the latest movie advanced some greater narrative agenda. No fair, by the way, outlining the morality play presented and claiming that Star Trek is all about recasting morality plays in sci-fi terms and so any movie with a morality play in it is part of some Trek epic.
I'm not going to deny that there's a benefit to telling a story across several volumes. Sometimes it grants the author a level of freedom to work at a reasonable pace but keep food on the table, too. On the other hand, the floundering, sopping mess that is Star Trek reflects no greater theme or arc. Simple economic opportunism is driving the train here. The article rightly points out that Berman et al wish the original series would go the hell away, and the last motion picture was, indeed, a collective clock-punching by a cast that clearly thinks walking through their parts and looking smug is quite enough for the rubes who are showing up as regular as clockwork because they're big fans who'd probably pay to watch Brent Spiner eat poop on a stick (me among them.)
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Well... the "arguably troublesome" bit was to cover my tail on God Emperor... which I don't mind as much and I think belongs. The final two, though... *yrgh*... maybe it's just the weird old couple at the end.
I think the first four were adequate. Of course, I was bugged by Paul by the end of the first book, and so didn't need much convincing that he was going to go and cause some trouble for the universe one way or the other.
Point taken, though. :)
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Let it die.
TOS had its place. Heck, I milked it for a 20 page paper more than a couple of years ago. In fact, my first memory of television involves Star Trek.
TNG was ok. I watched it faithfully while it was possible to not reorient the antenna to do so. DS9 was ok, too.
Voyager is excruciating.
In a lot of ways, it's all an echo of the ongoing disaster that is the Fantasy/SciFi section of your local chain bookseller. People without anything new to say are happy to push these megaseries on a public that is shockingly resistant to learning new characters and settings. For a while it was a sort of cute "Tolkien wrote a trilogy, so good fantasy must come in threes" meme. Then it was Frank Herbert extending Dune through the arguably troublesome fourth and disastrous last two volumes. And along the way, David Eddings, Stephen Donaldson, Piers Anthony, and others decided people were happy to just stick with the familiar. In fact, they got punished in the market if they tried to stray.
It's ironic that a genre in which the readers pride themselves on the new and imaginative would much rather look in satisfaction on bookshelves with row upon row of "volume four in the fifth trilogy of a ten part epic."
Star Trek is trailing edge and predictable now. Let it die. Let's see something new.
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
The Gartner Group doesn't seem to be doing the slamming. IDG has interpreted this as a "kiss of death" when what Gartner seems to have addressed is the "desktop productivity" side of Linux. Is that a surprise to anybody? Linux isn't quite there yet on the desktop.
I'm glad they were careful to ask Microsoft if Linux was making a dent in NT sales. Glad to see the Linux threat we heard about in the DOJ case has already been vanquished and it's business as usual for the red-blooded innovators of Redmond.
*snork*
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
I used to hate Enlightenment. I thought it was way too slow, way too oriented around the eyecandy, and too surrounded by some weird fanboy culture (which wouldn't keep me from using it, but did keep me from admitting to it.)
During my explorations of Gnome, I warmed to E a little, largely thanks to Red Hat's reasonably conservative defaults, which made it seem less intrusive and reminded me of its underlying configurability.
Now that they've worked support for KDE into the mix, along with support for Gnome, along with some reasonably functional standalone features, I'm really impressed and pleased. This release marks Enlightenment truly coming into its own.
A perusal of e.themes.org reveals there's still a general obsession with "industrial" themage, but that's not a real showstopper. There are also some fairly pleasant, non-headache inducing, non-urban decay invoking themes. I can even play my Run Lola Run soundtrack without feeling like a total Sprocket.
I'll be monkeying around with the menu configs (cursed two button mouse that I never get around to replacing), but I'm pretty sure the versatility alone in regards to Gnome and KDE support will keep me as a user this time.
Congratulations to the team. You've taken a lot of abuse and derision in the past, but the product is catching up with the vision and it's worth it.
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
It's a shame that this piece has to have the flaws it does: namely some rather bizarre appeals to authority (Jesse Berst) and red-baiting.
The reason it's a shame is this:
I got really sick of the bumper crop of "papers" that sprang up in the wake of CatB, all written by people long on verbiage and enthusiasm, but short on falsifiable premises. All of them were passively accepted as "good" on these pages and duly posted, making me long for a checkbox in the preferences to disable display of "enthusiastic but amateur pseudoscholars" items.
I waver from week to week on how I feel about ESR's body of work. I'm happy that CatB inspired the Netscape folk to give Mozilla a shot. I'm pleased that someone is trying to describe the open source development model sytematically. On the other hand, there's a certain middle-American craving for respectability that comes out in the style and execution.
That aside, the author of this piece seems, by the time he reaches his conclusion, to have read ESR the wrong way. Where CatB and friends tend to cleave to descriptives (with ESR's HOWTO on the subject of project management offering the prescriptives), this author seems to take the whole thing as a manual that needs to be confronted because it has suspicious ideological flavor.
His conclusion, in part, reads:
However, little seems to have been learned from the overall history of programming and software development. Ignoring the lessons of history may make open source an interesting footnote in the overall history of computing a century from now.
That's an interesting idea, I suppose, except that "open source" development existed prior to ESR calling it such. The development model springs from the personalities of the community that practices it. Steven Levy's Hackers provides a nice psychological history of just where this comes from. It is not something anyone dreamed up to storm the gates of Microsoft, because it predates Microsoft. Reading Hackers, once more, Bill Gates inspired the ire of early home computer hobbyists precisely because of his resistance to sharing the source to his BASIC. In some ways, Gates and company are the radical new development model on the scene if we want to talk history.
Following from that, once you strip open source development of some "meaning" outside "the way enthusiasts have been behaving toward the software they write for the last thirty years", it's hard to argue that it can "fail" and become a footnote to anything because it's not a directed ideological or theoretical movement, except in the heads of some of its advocates. The burden of proof lies on the newcomers: people who would proprietize the process. Open source programming developed "naturally," before Richard Stallman (who has applied a certain ideological bent to the process, and who doesn't show up in Levy's book until the very last chapter.) It certainly developed before ESR decided to identify it on his own terms, label it, and make it more palatable to business. It didn't develop as a reaction to big business, but was already in place culturally when big business came to computing. It developed, in some ways, before there was anything we would recognize as "computing."
Linux has already "succeeded", and it succeeded the moment Linus felt happy that he had some sort of working Unix on his home machine. It succeeded wildly when the rest of us agreed that it was indeed a reasonably working Unix and that we'd like it on our computers, too.
"Open source" on the whole has already succeeded, too. The author may wish it away because it makes him see commies under the bed, but it's a model that existed prior to attempts to prove or disprove it in papers. It's an expression of a community's personality and can fail about as much as any element of a popular culture can. Which is to say that while it may mutate in form from time to time (its latest variation being better organization and application of project management tools) it will probably always be around as long as there are hobbyist programmers. The fact that it has given us usable tools makes it a "success" by any standard that's true to the form itself.
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Thank you so much for tweaking the auto-points for good karma. I like to initially read /. stories with a threshold of '2', and it was getting sort of tedious dealing with the generally safe postings of the anointed on the occasions when they weren't really contributing anything new. Initially it turned me off to the good karma bump altogether, but this seems like a good compromise: it'll reward /.'s best contributors and hopefully make reading with a '2' threshold a little more interesting.
I hope you move ahead with making anonymous posting a privilege of registered membership. If it deters even a few people from just spouting off because they happened by and have no more ties to Slashdot than that it's displayed on their browser at the moment, it's a good thing. There is clearly still room for abuse by registered users hiding behind momentary anonymity, but if an extra hoop has to be jumped through to gain that privilege in the first place, maybe it will help curb the "drive-by flamings."
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
Seems like the quick way to do that is to just bring up kfm and delete the icons from the desktop. "Trash" might fight, since it doesn't seem to include a "delete" option on its context menu, but a quick trip to the shell and rm -rf ~/Desktop/Trash will get rid of it.
Don't know if kfm puts it back or not.
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
What the hell was the "whole LSA fiasco"?
Well... two questions....
Does this mean I'm not going to get my mug for spending three hours updating their software projects page?
They sent me mails demanding I pay for the mugs they said volunteers would get for free. I wrote back, they said "sorry," and then never wrote back or sent the mug.
Especially frustrating is the fact that I just got my own office, and now I have no kewl penguin mug for my desk.
------------
Michael Hall
mphall@cstone.nospam.net