I've heard rumours of scripts which involve [ick] Mara Jade. And the Thrawn series does have the potential to offer *political* closure, since it more or less finalizes how the Empire and New Republic eventually wind up. Whereas ROTJ left us in limbo -- yeah, we've done away with Palpatine, but there's still the huge Imperial machine, and it's not going to just go away overnight.
In fact, while reading the last book I found myself thinking "this isn't like Zahn, this seems rushed", and I was left with the impression that the 2nd and 3rd books started life expansions of story treatments intended for film, and were not originally birthed as novels.
(disclaimer: I'm a diehard Imperial, and found myself rooting for Thrawn, and later for Zahn's main Imperial command dude, whose name I forget.:)
Actually, I've been rather surprised that the various existing SW novels haven't been turned into made-for-TV movies or miniseries; as you say, a good team could make them worthwhile. But it may start happening if the upcoming TV series is successful. [cynical] After all, why waste two generations of existing fandom, and novels we already own outright and don't have to pay to have developed? Besides, that's a shitload of ad and toy revenue! [/cynical]
So it's more a case of your particular style that needs nn-many sentences to develop an argument, rather than nn-many sentences to form a paragraph (likely you're doing presentation, argument, and conclusion). Whereas another writer's style might compact or expand the same elements into more or fewer sentences.
[thinking] Since there are only two sentences in your post, by your own rules it must not be a complete paragraph. [g]
Seriously, I've noticed that the in-depth NYTimes articles follow a more or less set routine: forumulate the problem, present the argument, present the rebuttal, then reiterate a few key points, leaving the reader to think through to their own conclusions. What the op-ed stuff does, I've no idea, having never looked.
(I've done editing for Real Money, tho you can't always tell by what I post here:)
One of the ancient DOS apps I can't live without was written in Pascal (I do have its source, tho I'm not a coder myself). If for no other reason, I was happy to see Free Pascal come along, and am pleased that it continues to be developed. It never hurts to have more options available!
I use a DOS pedigree database that's written in Pascal. The author kindly gave me the source, and even tho I'm not a coder and there's not a single comment, I can follow most of it, just from knowing the program.
One thing I've noticed about Pascal apps, is that if they crash, they almost never take anything else with them, and don't mess up memory either.
Up above, I rambled about why I think it makes good business sense (and could benefit linux as a whole). But I hadn't thought in terms of the stock market. Combine our two perspectives, and all of a sudden I'm wondering what's taking them so long to agree to a merger.:)
I doubt M$ is at all interested in RedHat's fancy points, since as you say they could just download the code, tweak it, and compile it, same as anyone else can do under the GPL.
Rather, I'd bet their interest (if not entirely fictional, but we'll pretend it's real for this exercise) is entirely in the existing *enterprise* market segment, and the *support infrastructure* that's already in place and already making money from said enterprise customers.
Always remember, the real money isn't in consumer desktops. It's in enterprise systems.
At latest Novell seminar, the Novell reps discussed *why* Novell bought SuSE: Novell already has 90% of the NON-x86 server market. They see linux as a way to increase their marketshare in x86 servers.
For M$, it's could be something similar: they already have 90% or so of general business servers, but linux would be a good way to broaden their market in areas where so far they've not competed as strongly, such as internet servers and thin clients. RedHat is already geared toward servers in the enterprise, and enterprise is M$'s main *paying* client base. Buying RedHat would give M$ a very quick additional chunk of the *enterprise* server market, complete with its own existing support contracts and fee structure.
It might also be good for Win-Linux interoperability, even if M$ only *supported* interoperability with RedHat -- since under the GPL, source for said improved interoperability would have to be provided for anyone to use, other disties could quickly catch up.
A few anything-but-M$ bigots would jump ship, but the gains due to name recognition would likely offset that by several orders of magnitude -- after all, Big Business' major ideology is also money, and they don't care about OS religions.
So overall, it would probably first boost RedHat, and as other disties caught up, linux's enterprise marketshare regardless of brand name.
Ah. I've only used it for chat/chatroom myself, but direct connect does seem like a good feature; is this an add-on??
I'd never heard anything about 5.x one way or the other. I do have random old versions on different machines and they've all been nothing but well-mannered, so no motivation to upgrade!:D
Closest I've personally seen is a local clone shop called "Tiger Tech". That one, TigerDirect might have a case against, since they are essentially in the same *business* (all too closely -- selling low-end components and systems with a questionable warranty policy). OTOH, neither actually manufactures a product themselves. Where is the line usually drawn in such cases?? does just being a reseller make your name trademarkable?
Cripes, what a modernist. I'm still using AIM v1.6, I shit you not. Works fine, and its memory and resource footprint is just about zilch. I love it, and see no reason to upgrade.
I think I have v4.something on another machine, tho:)
See my post above where I just tested both, about 5 minutes ago. While they're largely identical, the AIM mail worked perfectly on the first try, while the NS mail took a couple thumpings and bounces before it decided to work.
[goes off, performs tests] I've never set up netscape mail, but I have two AIM and AIMmail accounts. So! Let's see if it works.
Mail sent to myscreenname@netscape.net (and.com) bounced.
I then went to mail.netscape.com and discovered that it thinks I *do* have an account there, using this very screen name (and it even knows my home email address, which it likely got from AIM). I logged in and found no messages.
I sent the netscape account another message; it bounced again. I then sent my ELN account a message FROM the netscape account, and replied directly to that message, and THAT finally worked. ???
Meanwhile, mail to and from both my AIM screen names work just fine at the AIM mail interface (which is largely identical, but the display is faster and seems less buggy). No bounces, no nonsense.
The first time I went there, it was clever enough to query my system and pick up the screen name I'd last used with AIM. (That evidently was the req to 127.nnnnn)
I then went back with AIM set to my other screen name, but it didn't pick up on that. Oh well, it's not like typing my login (or letting Moz do it for me) is all that onerous.
Anyway... while not as feature-rich as GMail, it's somewhat easier to use.
It did recognise both my AIM IDs when I logged in and out with AIM itself (AIM mail can check online/offline status).
Not that I need more webmail, or even more mailboxes, but I like AIM well enough to be interested in AIM mail for its own sake.
And I found and reported two bugs while I was there:)
I like AIM, it's a nice well-mannered lightweight little app, that has never once misbehaved for me. (Admittedly I'm using an ancient version, but it still works fine, which makes me happy.) As with other standalone utils, whatever one's opinion of AOL the company, the tools made by AOL's engineers are often very useful. (Notably the modem test utils!) And I remember when one particular security hole fixed at the server, so all users were protected whether they updated the client or not; this struck me as a good way to handle it.
So... I went to your mail.aol.com link, and was amused by this: I have two working** AIM screen names. AIM was not running at the time, but I had left it set to the 2nd screen name. The mail login automagically selected the same screen name as AIM last used. I did notice it querying 127.0.0.1, which presumably was to ask AIM what login name to use. (The things one can see at 26k slow... the mail page does load awfully slow for dialup.)
Anyway, I thought that was kinda clever, and will check it against the other screen name next. It did pick up on when I logged on with my other AIM name.
I did already find a rather nasty display bug when using Mozilla; the default greeting message displays partially out of sight leftward of the scrollbox it's supposed to be inside of. It really needs a screenshot to document it, but there's no way to do that at the bug reporting site..?
** I also have an AIM screen name that the system seems to have lost the password for -- the screen name is recognised but login will neither take the password nor send me the "lost password" thing -- it claims to do so, but nothing arrives). ???
[goes off, finds another bug, reports it]
Hmm. Once the main window finally loads, after that it's reasonably fast.
[does a test mailing in and out] So far so good. My setting for plaintext worked, too. I'm glad to see that here, especially since I gather AOL's own mail client no longer does plaintext??
Anyway, enough rambling, but so far it looks very promising. BTW thanks for the link to your AIM stuff, good assortment of tips.
I haven't looked at KDE in a while, but when I've messed with linux, KDE has been my preferred desktop. Anyway... last time around, I tweaked this and twiddled that until everything worked nicely, and was rather amused to realize that my "most usable" KDE configuration looked and behaved almost exactly like Win95. This certainly wasn't intentional on my part (I'm an old DOS-head, and my WinBoxen don't look much alike, so why would I expect an unrelated OS/desktop to look or act like Windows?) but did go to demonstrate that "usability" tends to have consistent fundamentals no matter where you're at.
It doesn't even have to be standardized from one desktop to the next, other than for the basics. It only has to be standardized within a given desktop, so once the user becomes accustomed *to that desktop*, they don't get any rude behavioural surprises.
Sortof like how I don't expect Win3.1 and Win9* to behave alike, other than in the most broadly used functions (like copy and paste, ALT-F4 to close apps, etc). But I do expect the desktop and apps *within each OS* to behave consistently, so I'm not unexpectedly confronted with oddball stuff like menus that wander around the screen and right-click being used to close the current window.
I'm reminded that one of the things many users *disliked* about many DOS apps, and Win3.0 apps, was that no two of them behaved alike, so what was learned in one app couldn't be applied across the board. This made reaching a usability comfort zone needlessly difficult.
[admiring your cartoon-physics hat, which has much brighter colours than mine] Sounds reasonable to me!! In another response, I muttered something about how light was observed to be affected by large masses/gravity; so, [insert vast leap of highly suspect logic] how do we make a black hole portable enough to generate the containment field for a practical lightsabre?:)
[vague recollection from college physics -- my uni had our own particle accelerator, one of the very first, way back in the '70s] I thought they'd decided photons do have mass, albeit barely enough to theorize about. IIRC the reason they concluded this was because light was observed to be affected (bent) by gravity from very large masses.
Okay, so we've got our pseudo-laser; how do we limit its range [ie. create the containment field] ?? I can't see carrying around a black hole on my belt, no matter how strong I am in the Force.
Er, well, maybe I can... after all, I *did* specify that this was cartoon physics.;)
As occasional SF authors have pointed out, melee weapons make good sense in a spacefaring culture. Why? because if your boarding party's distance weapon pokes holes in the hull, you'll all be breathing space, and if you blast too many critical control circuits, you may find yourself stuck in the middle of nowhere. So (unless the objective is simply destruction) it makes more sense to do your killing with a short-range or even hand-to-hand weapon, that is far less likely to penetrate the hull or damage critical systems (frex, life support and propulsion).
Second, there is a certain "don't fuck with me" value in a hand-to-hand weapon, that tends to intimidate the unintiated. That's one reason why mundane cops carry billy-clubs.
As to whether lightsabres make sense in a physics context [puts on cartoon physics hat] -- one could postulate a "mirror field" that reflects photons, and if you thus capture enough of 'em, you could wind up with enough mass to be "solid", but still with enough energy to burn the crap out of anything it touches.
Granted, but I was talking about how both CEOs and politicians often get endlessly recycled in different offices, regardless of their competence (or lack thereof).
Remember Shawn Crosby's "Star Wars car" that generated such a storm of comments here a year or so back? Well, way back in the era of the first generation Pentium (specifically a P233, IIRC), this same Shawn tricked out his computer's case so it looked like a droid. Your first thought on seeing it was that it must have been R2-D2 in a previous life.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard rumours of scripts which involve [ick] Mara Jade. And the Thrawn series does have the potential to offer *political* closure, since it more or less finalizes how the Empire and New Republic eventually wind up. Whereas ROTJ left us in limbo -- yeah, we've done away with Palpatine, but there's still the huge Imperial machine, and it's not going to just go away overnight.
:)
In fact, while reading the last book I found myself thinking "this isn't like Zahn, this seems rushed", and I was left with the impression that the 2nd and 3rd books started life expansions of story treatments intended for film, and were not originally birthed as novels.
(disclaimer: I'm a diehard Imperial, and found myself rooting for Thrawn, and later for Zahn's main Imperial command dude, whose name I forget.
Actually, I've been rather surprised that the various existing SW novels haven't been turned into made-for-TV movies or miniseries; as you say, a good team could make them worthwhile. But it may start happening if the upcoming TV series is successful. [cynical] After all, why waste two generations of existing fandom, and novels we already own outright and don't have to pay to have developed? Besides, that's a shitload of ad and toy revenue! [/cynical]
So it's more a case of your particular style that needs nn-many sentences to develop an argument, rather than nn-many sentences to form a paragraph (likely you're doing presentation, argument, and conclusion). Whereas another writer's style might compact or expand the same elements into more or fewer sentences.
:)
[thinking] Since there are only two sentences in your post, by your own rules it must not be a complete paragraph. [g]
Seriously, I've noticed that the in-depth NYTimes articles follow a more or less set routine: forumulate the problem, present the argument, present the rebuttal, then reiterate a few key points, leaving the reader to think through to their own conclusions. What the op-ed stuff does, I've no idea, having never looked.
(I've done editing for Real Money, tho you can't always tell by what I post here
I don't know about the Chicago Tribune, but I've had a NYTimes login account since 1997, and far as I can tell, my info has never been sold to anyone.
One of the ancient DOS apps I can't live without was written in Pascal (I do have its source, tho I'm not a coder myself). If for no other reason, I was happy to see Free Pascal come along, and am pleased that it continues to be developed. It never hurts to have more options available!
I use a DOS pedigree database that's written in Pascal. The author kindly gave me the source, and even tho I'm not a coder and there's not a single comment, I can follow most of it, just from knowing the program.
One thing I've noticed about Pascal apps, is that if they crash, they almost never take anything else with them, and don't mess up memory either.
I don't know what Novell's reps were referring to either, but that's what they said. Next time I see 'em, I'll have to remember to ask for specifics.
Up above, I rambled about why I think it makes good business sense (and could benefit linux as a whole). But I hadn't thought in terms of the stock market. Combine our two perspectives, and all of a sudden I'm wondering what's taking them so long to agree to a merger. :)
I doubt M$ is at all interested in RedHat's fancy points, since as you say they could just download the code, tweak it, and compile it, same as anyone else can do under the GPL.
Rather, I'd bet their interest (if not entirely fictional, but we'll pretend it's real for this exercise) is entirely in the existing *enterprise* market segment, and the *support infrastructure* that's already in place and already making money from said enterprise customers.
Always remember, the real money isn't in consumer desktops. It's in enterprise systems.
Great, I read your post, and now my monitor has a drippy nose! :)
I had the same thought, and even more so after reading http://ianmurdock.com/archives/000299.html (which someone up above linked to).
At latest Novell seminar, the Novell reps discussed *why* Novell bought SuSE: Novell already has 90% of the NON-x86 server market. They see linux as a way to increase their marketshare in x86 servers.
For M$, it's could be something similar: they already have 90% or so of general business servers, but linux would be a good way to broaden their market in areas where so far they've not competed as strongly, such as internet servers and thin clients. RedHat is already geared toward servers in the enterprise, and enterprise is M$'s main *paying* client base. Buying RedHat would give M$ a very quick additional chunk of the *enterprise* server market, complete with its own existing support contracts and fee structure.
It might also be good for Win-Linux interoperability, even if M$ only *supported* interoperability with RedHat -- since under the GPL, source for said improved interoperability would have to be provided for anyone to use, other disties could quickly catch up.
A few anything-but-M$ bigots would jump ship, but the gains due to name recognition would likely offset that by several orders of magnitude -- after all, Big Business' major ideology is also money, and they don't care about OS religions.
So overall, it would probably first boost RedHat, and as other disties caught up, linux's enterprise marketshare regardless of brand name.
Ah. I've only used it for chat/chatroom myself, but direct connect does seem like a good feature; is this an add-on??
:D
I'd never heard anything about 5.x one way or the other. I do have random old versions on different machines and they've all been nothing but well-mannered, so no motivation to upgrade!
Don't worry about it -- they'll sue Kipling next.
BTW your experience with TD is, by all I've read, highly typical. They are the Fry's of the direct marketing world.
Closest I've personally seen is a local clone shop called "Tiger Tech". That one, TigerDirect might have a case against, since they are essentially in the same *business* (all too closely -- selling low-end components and systems with a questionable warranty policy). OTOH, neither actually manufactures a product themselves. Where is the line usually drawn in such cases?? does just being a reseller make your name trademarkable?
Cripes, what a modernist. I'm still using AIM v1.6, I shit you not. Works fine, and its memory and resource footprint is just about zilch. I love it, and see no reason to upgrade.
:)
I think I have v4.something on another machine, tho
See my post above where I just tested both, about 5 minutes ago. While they're largely identical, the AIM mail worked perfectly on the first try, while the NS mail took a couple thumpings and bounces before it decided to work.
[goes off, performs tests] I've never set up netscape mail, but I have two AIM and AIMmail accounts. So! Let's see if it works.
.com) bounced.
Mail sent to myscreenname@netscape.net (and
I then went to mail.netscape.com and discovered that it thinks I *do* have an account there, using this very screen name (and it even knows my home email address, which it likely got from AIM). I logged in and found no messages.
I sent the netscape account another message; it bounced again. I then sent my ELN account a message FROM the netscape account, and replied directly to that message, and THAT finally worked. ???
Meanwhile, mail to and from both my AIM screen names work just fine at the AIM mail interface (which is largely identical, but the display is faster and seems less buggy). No bounces, no nonsense.
The first time I went there, it was clever enough to query my system and pick up the screen name I'd last used with AIM. (That evidently was the req to 127.nnnnn)
:)
I then went back with AIM set to my other screen name, but it didn't pick up on that. Oh well, it's not like typing my login (or letting Moz do it for me) is all that onerous.
Anyway... while not as feature-rich as GMail, it's somewhat easier to use.
It did recognise both my AIM IDs when I logged in and out with AIM itself (AIM mail can check online/offline status).
Not that I need more webmail, or even more mailboxes, but I like AIM well enough to be interested in AIM mail for its own sake.
And I found and reported two bugs while I was there
I like AIM, it's a nice well-mannered lightweight little app, that has never once misbehaved for me. (Admittedly I'm using an ancient version, but it still works fine, which makes me happy.) As with other standalone utils, whatever one's opinion of AOL the company, the tools made by AOL's engineers are often very useful. (Notably the modem test utils!) And I remember when one particular security hole fixed at the server, so all users were protected whether they updated the client or not; this struck me as a good way to handle it.
So... I went to your mail.aol.com link, and was amused by this: I have two working** AIM screen names. AIM was not running at the time, but I had left it set to the 2nd screen name. The mail login automagically selected the same screen name as AIM last used. I did notice it querying 127.0.0.1, which presumably was to ask AIM what login name to use. (The things one can see at 26k slow... the mail page does load awfully slow for dialup.)
Anyway, I thought that was kinda clever, and will check it against the other screen name next. It did pick up on when I logged on with my other AIM name.
I did already find a rather nasty display bug when using Mozilla; the default greeting message displays partially out of sight leftward of the scrollbox it's supposed to be inside of. It really needs a screenshot to document it, but there's no way to do that at the bug reporting site..?
** I also have an AIM screen name that the system seems to have lost the password for -- the screen name is recognised but login will neither take the password nor send me the "lost password" thing -- it claims to do so, but nothing arrives). ???
[goes off, finds another bug, reports it]
Hmm. Once the main window finally loads, after that it's reasonably fast.
[does a test mailing in and out] So far so good. My setting for plaintext worked, too. I'm glad to see that here, especially since I gather AOL's own mail client no longer does plaintext??
Anyway, enough rambling, but so far it looks very promising. BTW thanks for the link to your AIM stuff, good assortment of tips.
I haven't looked at KDE in a while, but when I've messed with linux, KDE has been my preferred desktop. Anyway... last time around, I tweaked this and twiddled that until everything worked nicely, and was rather amused to realize that my "most usable" KDE configuration looked and behaved almost exactly like Win95. This certainly wasn't intentional on my part (I'm an old DOS-head, and my WinBoxen don't look much alike, so why would I expect an unrelated OS/desktop to look or act like Windows?) but did go to demonstrate that "usability" tends to have consistent fundamentals no matter where you're at.
It doesn't even have to be standardized from one desktop to the next, other than for the basics. It only has to be standardized within a given desktop, so once the user becomes accustomed *to that desktop*, they don't get any rude behavioural surprises.
Sortof like how I don't expect Win3.1 and Win9* to behave alike, other than in the most broadly used functions (like copy and paste, ALT-F4 to close apps, etc). But I do expect the desktop and apps *within each OS* to behave consistently, so I'm not unexpectedly confronted with oddball stuff like menus that wander around the screen and right-click being used to close the current window.
I'm reminded that one of the things many users *disliked* about many DOS apps, and Win3.0 apps, was that no two of them behaved alike, so what was learned in one app couldn't be applied across the board. This made reaching a usability comfort zone needlessly difficult.
[admiring your cartoon-physics hat, which has much brighter colours than mine] Sounds reasonable to me!! In another response, I muttered something about how light was observed to be affected by large masses/gravity; so, [insert vast leap of highly suspect logic] how do we make a black hole portable enough to generate the containment field for a practical lightsabre? :)
[vague recollection from college physics -- my uni had our own particle accelerator, one of the very first, way back in the '70s] I thought they'd decided photons do have mass, albeit barely enough to theorize about. IIRC the reason they concluded this was because light was observed to be affected (bent) by gravity from very large masses.
;)
Okay, so we've got our pseudo-laser; how do we limit its range [ie. create the containment field] ?? I can't see carrying around a black hole on my belt, no matter how strong I am in the Force.
Er, well, maybe I can... after all, I *did* specify that this was cartoon physics.
As occasional SF authors have pointed out, melee weapons make good sense in a spacefaring culture. Why? because if your boarding party's distance weapon pokes holes in the hull, you'll all be breathing space, and if you blast too many critical control circuits, you may find yourself stuck in the middle of nowhere. So (unless the objective is simply destruction) it makes more sense to do your killing with a short-range or even hand-to-hand weapon, that is far less likely to penetrate the hull or damage critical systems (frex, life support and propulsion).
Second, there is a certain "don't fuck with me" value in a hand-to-hand weapon, that tends to intimidate the unintiated. That's one reason why mundane cops carry billy-clubs.
As to whether lightsabres make sense in a physics context [puts on cartoon physics hat] -- one could postulate a "mirror field" that reflects photons, and if you thus capture enough of 'em, you could wind up with enough mass to be "solid", but still with enough energy to burn the crap out of anything it touches.
Granted, but I was talking about how both CEOs and politicians often get endlessly recycled in different offices, regardless of their competence (or lack thereof).
Remember Shawn Crosby's "Star Wars car" that generated such a storm of comments here a year or so back? Well, way back in the era of the first generation Pentium (specifically a P233, IIRC), this same Shawn tricked out his computer's case so it looked like a droid. Your first thought on seeing it was that it must have been R2-D2 in a previous life.