Yep. In fact, I think Card's best work is LOST BOYS (his only book besides Ender's Game [up to the Bugger Queen] that I read all in one sitting) -- which is set right in a Morman community, with strong Mormon values and even normal Mormon events, like "Family Home Evening". It *works* because the Mormon community is used only to create a strong sense of setting and personalities, not to proselytize.
I picked up a signed preview copy of LOST BOYS off a freebie table. Good find, eh?:)
That has the smell of retroactive history to me. Or perhaps of retrofitting an existing partial manuscript (that just wasn't working and wasn't good enough to sell on its own) to make it fit around Ender's Game.
And that would explain why the two parts are so jarringly dissonant.
They didn't call it "THE ILIAD". They called it "TROY".
As I've said every time the Troy film comes up, if you expect a slavish retelling of The Iliad, you'll hate it, because it deviates considerably, and the Greek gods are entirely absent. But if you view it afresh, and IF you like character-driven stories, you'll love it -- because it focuses most strongly on character interaction, and does a stellar job of it.
Fundamentally, the film is about "How my testosterone-poisoned little brother caused an international incident", "why kings shouldn't be so damned stiff-necked", and "what happens when a talented but insecure athlete gets WAY too much hero worship".
TROY could have built the characters and the setting from scratch without changing ANYTHING in the script. But instead they chose to use familiar settings and characters, and to retell The Iliad not as a series of *events*, but as a tangle of *character interactions* -- which I believe was Homer's intent anyway, AND precisely what made The Iliad an enduring work. It was about the *people*, not about the *events*.
And that is what made Troy a really GOOD film, regardless of what it was based on or what changes it made along the way.
Agreed. Troy was *great*. (See my previous rants on this page:)
Ender's Game is a book by Orson Scott Card... See, we're at interstellar-war with the Buggers, and it's not going well. We need a fresh approach. Ender was, um, a fresh approach.:) You've really got to read the book, tho -- and for ghu's sake DON'T read any spoilers first.
I don't really care what nonsense he believes, so long as he doesn't push it on ME. Just as I don't care what nonsense *you* believe, so long as it doesn't impact ME.:)
Cripes, one of the best places to check out hot new SF/F authors is the "L.Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future Contest" series. The fact that L.Ron was a flaming nutcase, and that the Co$ is the biggest baddest scam around, doesn't detract from the quality of these young writers.
Obviously I have not seen Card's script, and might have different opinions if I could read it. But speaking as one who has read a lot of Card, including all the Ender books:
Card sometimes does not understand what is most important inside his own books. In fact, IMO Ender's Game is the most prominent example of that. (See my other post where I rant about how it goes wrong the moment we go off to rescue the Bugger queen.) So I find it perfectly plausible that to someone who had read and loved the original book, Card's idea of how to *script* it might well be a poor treatment, because (as the sequels amply demonstrate) he's lost sight of what really made the book have such drive, and may have concentrated on stuff that really relates to the sequels (all of which grate by comparison).
OSCard also wrote a nice howto book, "How to Write SF/F" in which he says that one of the most important things is to know when to END a story. Well, he certainly fails to take his own advice. Ender's Game properly ended at the point where we killed off the Buggers. It went wrong from the moment the next section started (where Ender goes off and rescues the Bugger queen). It took the book from a heart-squeezing and memorable high to a "WTF? why??", and the sequels went downhill from there. (I don't even remember which one had us largely trapped on the planet of the Piggies, but I have seldom been so bored with any book.)
As to Ender's Shadow, while the book isn't bad in itself, and explains a lot, I still agree that it dilutes Ender's Game to the point of insignificance.
And over the course of the series, I really wasn't thrilled to learn that Bean and Peter had never outgrown the sociopathy that is to some degree normal in very small children; in fact, they had become really extreme examples of it as adults.
Now, as to TROY -- it's a *wonderful* movie. If you expect to see a slavish re-creation of The Iliad, you're doomed to disappointment. But as a character-driven tale of how normal, honest people interact and react when confronted by a younger brother's stupidity, a ruler's arrogance, an overdose of hero worship -- it's absolutely believable, and very well done (and moves so well that it didn't seem like it was 3 hours long, either). Troy was the best film I've seen since Pirates of the Caribbean.
If the film of Ender's Game gets the same attention to character development and interaction as Troy got, it will be GOOD.
Re:Curt Schilling was right
on
Juiced
·
· Score: 1
Seeing the two of 'em side by side, man, was it ever obvious!!
And I never thought Jose was really all that good. To my mind, being so strong that every ball you touch leaves the park is not, in itself, sufficient for greatness. Without steroids, my guess is that he'd have made a lot of high flies to the outfield instead, and been summarily canned for his lack of team attitude.
Actually, what he ORIGINALLY said was that sequels were for losers without the imagination to create new works, and that STAR WARS would *NEVER* have a sequel, period. And then it became a box-office smash, and then there were "three planned all along". And when TESB promised to be an even bigger money-maker, all of a sudden they were part of "nine that I'd planned since high school".
Lucas is THE reigning master of retroactive history.
Back in Jose Canseco's glory days, only he and (a couple years later) Mark McGwire showed the obvious physical signs of anabolic steroid use.
Which isn't to say that other, lower-impact steroids weren't used later on (um, what's the one that the Olympics decided to allow?) But at the time, beefing up just wasn't done, because there was a widespread belief in baseball that if you built up a lot of muscle, it would *detract* from your performance (reduce speed and flexibility). So I really doubt that steroids were used at all before Jose Canseco.
Then Brian Downing turned his career around by working himself up from a "nine-stone weakling" to a 210 lb. powerhouse, and all of a sudden bulking up became accepted practice.
Re:Curt Schilling was right
on
Juiced
·
· Score: 1
I love baseball. Canseco arrived back when I was still able to follow it closely, so I saw his rise from rookie to star.
Jose Canseco is everything that is wrong with baseball, all in one package. He's a self-centered jerk who will do anything to stay the center of attention. If he can't do that on the diamond, he'll do it on the bookstore shelf. (And no, I probably won't read the book, and most certainly won't buy it -- because the man still makes me want to spit nails. He's one of the reasons I still refer to a certain team as the "Unspeakable Athletics".)
I remember how different he was from his twin brother -- who behaved like a team player, and didn't exhibit any of the physical signs of steroid use that Jose so clearly did ("neanderthal face", roid-monster temper, and brittle bones -- steroids were the direct *cause* of many of his injuries).
And now he comes out and says it was all wonderful, because HE did it.
I should have said "it isn't Company C's *ethical" place to sue."
It's one thing if Company B actually harmed Company C, and Company C sues
But in the scenario presented (as best I recall by now:) Company B didn't directly harm Company C; Company C just took it upon themselves to punish Company B, for violating a contract that didn't actually involve Company C at all.
I wouldn't say that... for years, Apple depended on user ignorance to keep a monopoly market for overpriced hardware (such as the Sony monitor that sold for $900 with a Mac, but for $300 with a PC -- and the ONLY difference was a $3 adapter. I still have some of the adapters.) Lock-in was what they were all about. Only when their marketshare fell below 10% did they feel any need to let Apple customers in on the big secret, and then only because so many had already discovered "cheating" around the system by way of adapters for PC hardware.
So... IMO, if Apple can find a way to use TC to force their loyalists back into buying overpriced hardware (per above, identical to PC hardware except for the Apple label) -- I expect they will suddenly become all for it.
Especially since there is a certain percentage of the market who love the Mac desktop and will stay with it no matter what it costs.
Swell, so long as your old hardware doesn't need to interoperate with the rest of the world. Go read Alsee's posts on the matter (http://slashdot.org/~Alsee) -- over time and many discussions, I have come to believe that he is absolutely correct.:(
Apparently the weirdly mangled links are a new bug affecting autolinked URLs. I had the same thing happen in a post I made here today. See http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=142805&cid= 11970828, which when autolinked in this plaintext post comes out like this:
I can't seem to post to the bugtrack thing, so emailed Pater, but someone who can get into the bugtracker should report it.
Back to the topic, I also read the rebuttal, and wondered WTF that had to do with anything, as it seems to only address a very small segment of the possible uses and abuses.
For some unknown reason Slashcode FUBARs the link (I tried again, previewed, and it was wonked the same way, so evidently it's a slashcode bug) So let's try Real HTML instead of the URL: thing:
Now, what if this were the case for EVERY computer... I foresee a thriving and extremely lucrative business in TC data recovery, where rather than merely sending Ontrack or whomever your wonked HD, you have to $$$$end them the entire computer (um... can TC include the monitor??)
Itself a good working definition of totalitarianism. "Either play by our rules, or you don't get to play at all."
I suppose a "resistance group" could implement an Internet2 type of thing, but that still won't make its users anything better than second-class citizens.
[After long discussions here with Alsee, I've concluded that TC is probably the single biggest looming threat to personal freedom, since in a modern society, if you control the data, you control the person.]
Re:I'll take content over "hip-looking, style-lade
on
Web Design Garage
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And when my eyes are tired, I find I miss my old amber mono... (well, I guess I could fire up the 286... it still works.)
There's a grave tendency to mistake flamboyancy for style. Sortof the same mentality that uses the BLINK tag for emphasis!!
Quick! Everybody change all your sites to use CSS 2.0, so all the websurfers out there will have to use Firefox or Mozilla! THAT'LL take IE off the map in a hurry. Bwahahahaha!!!
And that gives me another clue as to what it's doing that's so utterly FUBAR'd:
With Nero-full (and EZCD Creator), you can have an ordinary WinExplorer window open, and drag files from there into your compilation. (This will sometimes crash Nero-full, but does NOT take Windows with it.)
But doing so with Nero Express is a dead-bang way to lock the whole system up solid. Even a box that otherwise crashes seldom to never. And it takes quite a while to do so -- about 5 minutes of helplessness on a P3-450, where I could tell it was still chugging at something, but the end result was a solidly-frozen desktop.
Given your clue, it looks to me like the stupid thing is doing something seriously illegal in its file access -- sortof halfassed using Explorer and halfassed doing it itself. Well, gee, no freakin' WONDER it locks up -- it's probably generating the mother of all SHARE violations!!
In my observation, Nero succeeded *wholly* because of OEM disty deals -- and then only because as I heard it, the OEM lic. fee was a mere $5. So Nero became very much cheaper to bundle than Roxio (which formerly had most of the OEM market), thus highly attractive in a market with tiny margins. But private individuals hardly ever went out and *bought* Nero. Maybe never.
But which one continues to sell on the retail store shelves? Roxio.
I think Nero is trying to suck money out of an entirely imaginary retail market. IMO that also explains the horrible Nero Express -- "we'll sell OEMs a shitty nonfunctional version, so everyone who buys their CDRWs will then buy an upgrade to Nero-the-real-thing." Well, it doesn't work that way in real life. Rather, people see "Nero Express is shitty" and go looking for something else entirely to buy, having learned only to distrust the Nero name. (Or they just pirate Nero-realversion, which IMO is perfectly fair since we already paid for the entirely nonfunctional Nero Express when we bought that CDRW drive.)
It's just the DirectCD component of Roxio, interfaced via the "Send To" menu. And it doesn't exactly make coasters, but it does typically fail to close the session (and it does something funky to the 8+3 filenames), so the resulting CD is not usually readable on non-XP boxen; also, whatever it does tends to leave only the most recent session readable.
Good for quick and dirty sneakernet disks, but I wouldn't rely on it for anything else.
I can't tell from their site, but from all posts here, it sounds like NeroLinux is brother to the horrible, crippled, and braindead NeroExpress, NOT to Nero-fullversion. (I rant a bit about the difference somewhere upstream).
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. In fact, I think Card's best work is LOST BOYS (his only book besides Ender's Game [up to the Bugger Queen] that I read all in one sitting) -- which is set right in a Morman community, with strong Mormon values and even normal Mormon events, like "Family Home Evening". It *works* because the Mormon community is used only to create a strong sense of setting and personalities, not to proselytize.
:)
I picked up a signed preview copy of LOST BOYS off a freebie table. Good find, eh?
That has the smell of retroactive history to me. Or perhaps of retrofitting an existing partial manuscript (that just wasn't working and wasn't good enough to sell on its own) to make it fit around Ender's Game.
And that would explain why the two parts are so jarringly dissonant.
They didn't call it "THE ILIAD". They called it "TROY".
As I've said every time the Troy film comes up, if you expect a slavish retelling of The Iliad, you'll hate it, because it deviates considerably, and the Greek gods are entirely absent. But if you view it afresh, and IF you like character-driven stories, you'll love it -- because it focuses most strongly on character interaction, and does a stellar job of it.
Fundamentally, the film is about "How my testosterone-poisoned little brother caused an international incident", "why kings shouldn't be so damned stiff-necked", and "what happens when a talented but insecure athlete gets WAY too much hero worship".
TROY could have built the characters and the setting from scratch without changing ANYTHING in the script. But instead they chose to use familiar settings and characters, and to retell The Iliad not as a series of *events*, but as a tangle of *character interactions* -- which I believe was Homer's intent anyway, AND precisely what made The Iliad an enduring work. It was about the *people*, not about the *events*.
And that is what made Troy a really GOOD film, regardless of what it was based on or what changes it made along the way.
Agreed. Troy was *great*. (See my previous rants on this page :)
... See, we're at interstellar-war with the Buggers, and it's not going well. We need a fresh approach. Ender was, um, a fresh approach. :) You've really got to read the book, tho -- and for ghu's sake DON'T read any spoilers first.
Ender's Game is a book by Orson Scott Card
You misspelled "Mormon".
:)
I don't really care what nonsense he believes, so long as he doesn't push it on ME. Just as I don't care what nonsense *you* believe, so long as it doesn't impact ME.
Cripes, one of the best places to check out hot new SF/F authors is the "L.Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future Contest" series. The fact that L.Ron was a flaming nutcase, and that the Co$ is the biggest baddest scam around, doesn't detract from the quality of these young writers.
Obviously I have not seen Card's script, and might have different opinions if I could read it. But speaking as one who has read a lot of Card, including all the Ender books:
Card sometimes does not understand what is most important inside his own books. In fact, IMO Ender's Game is the most prominent example of that. (See my other post where I rant about how it goes wrong the moment we go off to rescue the Bugger queen.) So I find it perfectly plausible that to someone who had read and loved the original book, Card's idea of how to *script* it might well be a poor treatment, because (as the sequels amply demonstrate) he's lost sight of what really made the book have such drive, and may have concentrated on stuff that really relates to the sequels (all of which grate by comparison).
I agree entirely.
OSCard also wrote a nice howto book, "How to Write SF/F" in which he says that one of the most important things is to know when to END a story. Well, he certainly fails to take his own advice. Ender's Game properly ended at the point where we killed off the Buggers. It went wrong from the moment the next section started (where Ender goes off and rescues the Bugger queen). It took the book from a heart-squeezing and memorable high to a "WTF? why??", and the sequels went downhill from there. (I don't even remember which one had us largely trapped on the planet of the Piggies, but I have seldom been so bored with any book.)
As to Ender's Shadow, while the book isn't bad in itself, and explains a lot, I still agree that it dilutes Ender's Game to the point of insignificance.
And over the course of the series, I really wasn't thrilled to learn that Bean and Peter had never outgrown the sociopathy that is to some degree normal in very small children; in fact, they had become really extreme examples of it as adults.
Now, as to TROY -- it's a *wonderful* movie. If you expect to see a slavish re-creation of The Iliad, you're doomed to disappointment. But as a character-driven tale of how normal, honest people interact and react when confronted by a younger brother's stupidity, a ruler's arrogance, an overdose of hero worship -- it's absolutely believable, and very well done (and moves so well that it didn't seem like it was 3 hours long, either). Troy was the best film I've seen since Pirates of the Caribbean.
If the film of Ender's Game gets the same attention to character development and interaction as Troy got, it will be GOOD.
Seeing the two of 'em side by side, man, was it ever obvious!!
And I never thought Jose was really all that good. To my mind, being so strong that every ball you touch leaves the park is not, in itself, sufficient for greatness. Without steroids, my guess is that he'd have made a lot of high flies to the outfield instead, and been summarily canned for his lack of team attitude.
Actually, what he ORIGINALLY said was that sequels were for losers without the imagination to create new works, and that STAR WARS would *NEVER* have a sequel, period. And then it became a box-office smash, and then there were "three planned all along". And when TESB promised to be an even bigger money-maker, all of a sudden they were part of "nine that I'd planned since high school".
Lucas is THE reigning master of retroactive history.
Back in Jose Canseco's glory days, only he and (a couple years later) Mark McGwire showed the obvious physical signs of anabolic steroid use.
Which isn't to say that other, lower-impact steroids weren't used later on (um, what's the one that the Olympics decided to allow?) But at the time, beefing up just wasn't done, because there was a widespread belief in baseball that if you built up a lot of muscle, it would *detract* from your performance (reduce speed and flexibility). So I really doubt that steroids were used at all before Jose Canseco.
Then Brian Downing turned his career around by working himself up from a "nine-stone weakling" to a 210 lb. powerhouse, and all of a sudden bulking up became accepted practice.
I love baseball. Canseco arrived back when I was still able to follow it closely, so I saw his rise from rookie to star.
Jose Canseco is everything that is wrong with baseball, all in one package. He's a self-centered jerk who will do anything to stay the center of attention. If he can't do that on the diamond, he'll do it on the bookstore shelf. (And no, I probably won't read the book, and most certainly won't buy it -- because the man still makes me want to spit nails. He's one of the reasons I still refer to a certain team as the "Unspeakable Athletics".)
I remember how different he was from his twin brother -- who behaved like a team player, and didn't exhibit any of the physical signs of steroid use that Jose so clearly did ("neanderthal face", roid-monster temper, and brittle bones -- steroids were the direct *cause* of many of his injuries).
And now he comes out and says it was all wonderful, because HE did it.
Yeah, right.
I should have said "it isn't Company C's *ethical" place to sue."
:) Company B didn't directly harm Company C; Company C just took it upon themselves to punish Company B, for violating a contract that didn't actually involve Company C at all.
It's one thing if Company B actually harmed Company C, and Company C sues
But in the scenario presented (as best I recall by now
I wouldn't say that... for years, Apple depended on user ignorance to keep a monopoly market for overpriced hardware (such as the Sony monitor that sold for $900 with a Mac, but for $300 with a PC -- and the ONLY difference was a $3 adapter. I still have some of the adapters.) Lock-in was what they were all about. Only when their marketshare fell below 10% did they feel any need to let Apple customers in on the big secret, and then only because so many had already discovered "cheating" around the system by way of adapters for PC hardware.
So... IMO, if Apple can find a way to use TC to force their loyalists back into buying overpriced hardware (per above, identical to PC hardware except for the Apple label) -- I expect they will suddenly become all for it.
Especially since there is a certain percentage of the market who love the Mac desktop and will stay with it no matter what it costs.
Swell, so long as your old hardware doesn't need to interoperate with the rest of the world. Go read Alsee's posts on the matter (http://slashdot.org/~Alsee) -- over time and many discussions, I have come to believe that he is absolutely correct. :(
Apparently the weirdly mangled links are a new bug affecting autolinked URLs. I had the same thing happen in a post I made here today. See http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=142805&cid= 11970828, which when autolinked in this plaintext post comes out like this:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=142805&cid [slashdot.org]= 11970828
I can't seem to post to the bugtrack thing, so emailed Pater, but someone who can get into the bugtracker should report it.
Back to the topic, I also read the rebuttal, and wondered WTF that had to do with anything, as it seems to only address a very small segment of the possible uses and abuses.
Ed Foster's Gripelog entry about the Thinkpad incident
An expensive lesson about Thinkpad security:4 40/804
http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/story/2005/3/14/235
Now, what if this were the case for EVERY computer... I foresee a thriving and extremely lucrative business in TC data recovery, where rather than merely sending Ontrack or whomever your wonked HD, you have to $$$$end them the entire computer (um... can TC include the monitor??)
Itself a good working definition of totalitarianism. "Either play by our rules, or you don't get to play at all."
I suppose a "resistance group" could implement an Internet2 type of thing, but that still won't make its users anything better than second-class citizens.
[After long discussions here with Alsee, I've concluded that TC is probably the single biggest looming threat to personal freedom, since in a modern society, if you control the data, you control the person.]
And when my eyes are tired, I find I miss my old amber mono... (well, I guess I could fire up the 286... it still works.)
There's a grave tendency to mistake flamboyancy for style. Sortof the same mentality that uses the BLINK tag for emphasis!!
Quick! Everybody change all your sites to use CSS 2.0, so all the websurfers out there will have to use Firefox or Mozilla! THAT'LL take IE off the map in a hurry. Bwahahahaha!!!
I'm reminded of a story a while back, that said those bazillion spams didn't come from a bazillion spammers, but rather from only five major players.
Also, home machines are typically either entirely clean, or infected with multiple trojans (each of which has its own home server to report to).
So it may well be a few tens of thousands of machines totalling millions of hits.
Oh, that's just peachy...
And that gives me another clue as to what it's doing that's so utterly FUBAR'd:
With Nero-full (and EZCD Creator), you can have an ordinary WinExplorer window open, and drag files from there into your compilation. (This will sometimes crash Nero-full, but does NOT take Windows with it.)
But doing so with Nero Express is a dead-bang way to lock the whole system up solid. Even a box that otherwise crashes seldom to never. And it takes quite a while to do so -- about 5 minutes of helplessness on a P3-450, where I could tell it was still chugging at something, but the end result was a solidly-frozen desktop.
Given your clue, it looks to me like the stupid thing is doing something seriously illegal in its file access -- sortof halfassed using Explorer and halfassed doing it itself. Well, gee, no freakin' WONDER it locks up -- it's probably generating the mother of all SHARE violations!!
In my observation, Nero succeeded *wholly* because of OEM disty deals -- and then only because as I heard it, the OEM lic. fee was a mere $5. So Nero became very much cheaper to bundle than Roxio (which formerly had most of the OEM market), thus highly attractive in a market with tiny margins. But private individuals hardly ever went out and *bought* Nero. Maybe never.
But which one continues to sell on the retail store shelves? Roxio.
I think Nero is trying to suck money out of an entirely imaginary retail market. IMO that also explains the horrible Nero Express -- "we'll sell OEMs a shitty nonfunctional version, so everyone who buys their CDRWs will then buy an upgrade to Nero-the-real-thing." Well, it doesn't work that way in real life. Rather, people see "Nero Express is shitty" and go looking for something else entirely to buy, having learned only to distrust the Nero name. (Or they just pirate Nero-realversion, which IMO is perfectly fair since we already paid for the entirely nonfunctional Nero Express when we bought that CDRW drive.)
It's just the DirectCD component of Roxio, interfaced via the "Send To" menu. And it doesn't exactly make coasters, but it does typically fail to close the session (and it does something funky to the 8+3 filenames), so the resulting CD is not usually readable on non-XP boxen; also, whatever it does tends to leave only the most recent session readable.
Good for quick and dirty sneakernet disks, but I wouldn't rely on it for anything else.
I can't tell from their site, but from all posts here, it sounds like NeroLinux is brother to the horrible, crippled, and braindead NeroExpress, NOT to Nero-fullversion. (I rant a bit about the difference somewhere upstream).