I haven't seen the series. Having read what Ms. Le Guin thinks of it, though, I won't bother. I first read the first Earthsea books when they were just being published, when I was in junior high school. I've lost count how many times I've read them since.
I wouldn't want to watch a mockery of them. I certainly don't want to watch something that hasn't even got the integrity to mock.:/
It's a shame. The Earthsea books are among the great fantasy books of the last century, perhaps not quite a match for "Lord of the Rings" or Michael Ende's "Neverending Story", but absolutely in the same class as Roger Zelazny's Amber series and Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia". They deserved better treatment from moviemakers. *We* deserved better treatment, as well.
If it makes Le Guin feel better, I doubt that the SciFi channel did any worse a number on the Earthsea trilogy than whoever it was that made the movie version of the Neverending Story.
I think it was before 2000 that I last had that few spams in a day. <wry grin> That's what happens when you have an old email address and like to post to Usenet....
Tell me about it, I could use an extra 6 or 7 hours a day myself. What I'm hoping is that the SenderID systems are compatible with SPF so that their SenderID filtering software will recognize my SPF record and my SPF filtering will recognize (most) of their SenderID record.
I hope you're right. I don't shoot at Microsoft on sight, like a lot of the people who hang out here <G>, but I admit that I almost expect Microsoft to find a way to break simple cross-recognition. On the other hand, they probably don't want to alienate Meng. He's a quiet, patient kind of guy, but not eternally so.:)
WHy not still support SPF? SPF!=SenderID You can still use SPF without the Microsoft extenstions!
I know.:) And I'm thinking about it. On the SPF mailing list today, though, the local estimate of SPF support stands at around 70K users. That isn't enough to create a standard, and if many of those 70K users are planning to go with Sender ID, they'll go away.
I don't want to go through all the work of creating and testing the code to support SPF if only a few people will be using it in the end. The old problem of not enough time in the day....
After reading the statement on the ASF web sit, I reluctantly had to agree with the Apache Software Foundation on the issue of Sender ID. The "free license" offered to those that support SenderID in open-source software packages has too many pitfalls, too many places where it could encumber open source projects. The SpamBouncer will therefore not support SenderID either until there are fundamental changes in the license.
This is a shame. Meng Weng Wong's original idea for SPF was quite good, and I was planning to support it.
Isn't it the case that Acrobat is pretty much killing FrameMaker. I'm not saying that it's a replacement in every case but people are using Acrobat.
Huh? Have you ever *used* either FrameMaker or Acrobat? They don't do the same things. That's like asking whether Excel is killing Oracle Database Server!
I use both. Most professional Technical Writers use both FrameMaker and Acrobat. FrameMaker is a powerful desktop publishing/layout program. Acrobat generates online documents and also good, cross-platform standard output to send to service bureaus and print shops, but it has absolutely *NO* layout or document production features. You can't use it to write anything, just to manipulate output that you produced somewhere else.
I think that what killed the Mac version of FrameMaker was partly that large companies are using FrameMaker on Windows or Unix more these days, and that Mac OSX *is* simply another flavor of Unix.
I do hope, however, that Adobe does not abandon the Mac platform.:(
Unless and until Adobe kills the Unix versions of FrameMaker, there's a Mac-usable version out there.
This saddens me, though. I'm a technical writer and can't imagine having to do books with Microsoft Word. Word is not suitable for long technical documents, period. It *breaks* when you try to do complex things with it. I'm planning to switch to a Mac with my personal computer, and just hope that I won't be reduced to running FrameMaker under a Windoze emulator.
I can't imagine this is a worthwhile investment for the myriad of reasons the submitter. Stick with the 10 year renewl option.
I disagree. Stick with one or two year renewals, and don't renew with Verisign. They're unethical slimeballs that do not deserve your money or respect.
Yep. Judges aren't all that clued about technology, but most of them are a whole lot more clued about people, especially crooks, than we techies are. And the judge that's hearing this case sounded like he was about to toss SCO's case, and SCO, out of court with extreme prejudice a month ago.
Let's just say that neither I nor my company are lining up to buy a license for Linux from SCO, and our product is built on a hardened/secured Linux platform. <G>
The appeals court said one of the arguments by the Recording Industry Association of America "borders upon the silly," rejecting the trade group's claims that Verizon was responsible for downloaded music because such data files traverse its network.
It looks to me like the appeals court might just have ruled that Verizon is a common carrier.I'm not at all sure this is a good thing. This is why.
I'm no lawyer, but as I understand it, under U.S. law common carriers (like the phone company) are legally obligated to provide service to all comers at a reasonable price, and for any legal purpose. They cannot pick and choose their customers. In return, they are shielded from liability for what others do using their service. For example, the phone company isn't liable for fraudulent telemarketing calls because it is a common carrier.
I can think of one possible pitfall right now if ISPs are deemed common carriers. ISPs set their own rules for proper use of their networks -- these are called Authorized Use Policies (AUP) or Terms of Service (TOS). Violations of an ISP's AUP/TOS can and often do result in the violator being disconnected. The most common violators are spammers.
Thanks (NOT!) to the CAN-Spam Act foisted on us by our foolish and venal Congress and President, spam is legal in the United States as of January 1.:( I am no lawyer, but I do not think a common carrier can legally forbid use of its services for *any* legal purpose. So, if ISPs become common carriers, can they continue to ban use of their networks for spamming?
Even worse, if ISPs are deemed common carriers, can they block email that was sent in compliance with U.S. law?
The problem is that the order-taking/filling is just as distributed as the spammers themselves. There isn't a penis-pill warehouse the FBI can raid and shut down the whole operation. Small operators abound, and when you consider they can sell a $2 bottle of pills for $50, and take into account the zero cost of spamming.
This is even more true when you don't need an actual product to ship -- scams are low-overhead operations. P.T. Barnum would've loved these guys.
Oh, I suspect he's running a spam filter on his email address, probably an industrial strength one. <wry grin> I'd add a comment about not sinking to his level, but I'm not sure there's room on his level for more people than him.;>
I just finished For Us, The Living last night, and I agreed with most of what this reviewer said.
He did miss one glaringly obvious fact about this book, though, to anyone familiar with Utopian literature -- it's essentially a retelling of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. Bellamy was looking backward from 2000 to 1887, and Heinlein from 2086 to 1939, of course. In addition, Heinlein's idea of how a perfect world would look differs considerably from Bellamy's. But the similarities between the two are spooky, and not to be explained by the inherent similarities between all Utopian books.
I wouldn't hand this Heinlein book to someone not already familiar with Heinlein, or to anyone just looking for a good story. It isn't a good story. I would, however, hend it to someone interested in political thought and social engineering without hesitation, even if I thought that person would not be interested in Heinlein the storyteller. Nearly all of Heinlein's ideas about people, politics, and society are here.
As for "I get very annoyed when I hear arguments usually from those who have been educated beyond their intelligence about the virtues of keeping happy, backwards people in ignorance,"
Clarke is clearly a thinker and a powerful rhetoritician. I don't disagree with his conclusion, but I wonder if his powerful rhetoric (i.e. such a broadly applicable, powerful, yet vague criticism) hinders his readers' ability for clear thinking in this example.
Clarke, in everything I've ever read by him, leans strongly towards trusting the intelligence and character of his readers and other people. This is especially true when he's commenting on legal issues. He does not like "big brotherism" -- laws passed to protect people from themselves. I think he feels that adults should be free to make their own choices and live with the consequences of those choices.
So I suspect his reaction to your question would be that anyone who is in the habit of thinking for himself in the first place isn't going to be unduly influenced by Clark's obviously partisan views on governmental information control. I think he'd probably also say that someone who isn't in the habit of thinking for himself needs to learn.
I hear that he's also allergic to fans who worship him instead of thinking about what he said and responding intelligently to it. So if I ever met him, I'll have to be careful not to tell him how much I loved, "Rendevous with Rama.";>
It's too bad you missed all the symbolism (much overt, far more oblique). The entire series is allegory; in fact, it's about the most theological set of books this side of C.S. Lewis.
<starting to steam at the ears>
Given that, it's rather amusing that you are outraged at, and want to kill, a character who is clearly a Christ figure, for not living up to your expectations of what a saviour/hero should be. Kind of what happened to Him, too.
<taking a deep breath>
You certainly out-did the reviewer here -- he simply said that people who disagree with him have no taste. You imply that they'd have murdered Jesus Christ. Nicely done. NOT.
For the record, I:
am a practicing Orthodox Christian, and
think that Steven Donaldson, if not the worst SF writer ever, comes close, and
think that comparing him to C. S. Lewis, in writing skill or theological depth, verges on literary malpractice, if not blasphemy.
Seriously, I suspect my dislike of the Thomas Covenant books is partly because I cannot stand book-length ongoing puns. But that isn't by any means the only reason. I'm not fond of Robert Asprin's "Myth, Inc." series, either, but I don't loathe it and thoroughly enjoyed the "Thieves World" shared universe he created. And I absolutely love C. S. Lewis's work, so I'm not allergic to allegory, to put it mildly.
After forcing myself to read "Lord Foul's Bane" through to the end, though, and then forcing myself to try reading two other Thomas Covenant books.... I realized that I just couldn't stand being preached at under false pretenses any more.:/ These books are sold as stories, not sermons. Despite that, Donaldson *NEVER LETS UP*. After the third book, I'd come to loathe Thomas Covenant as a whiny, self-indulgent little twit who couldn't be less Christlike.
<Wheewww!> Rant over.
To summarize this, I don't mind you having a different opinion about the literary merits of Donaldson's work than I do, BUT I do mind your having turned disagreement with you into an issue, not of taste, but of theological interest. It isn't, and to have implied such was rude, condescending, and deserved a virtual whack over the head with a verbal blunderbuss -- something I don't normally administer.
It's a disarmingly simple concept: sell songs in digital format for less than a buck and let buyers play them whenever and wherever they like?as long as it's on an Apple iPod.
This isn't accurate. I installed Itunes a week ago on my Win2k laptop. I've downloaded about fifty songs (mostly old tunes I loved as a kid), and played them a lot. I don't own an iPod. I don't even own a Macintosh, although that will probably change when I buy my next laptop.
Further, people who have CD burners can burn purchased songs from iTunes onto an Audio CD that will play in any CD player. I *think* the software limits you to making only ten CDs for each tune, but as far as I know that's the only limit.
Apple apparently is using iTunes to sell iPods, but you definitely don't need an iPod to use and benefit from the iTunes service.
Governments and big corporations are starting to realize that the cost of using Microsoft includes:
Windows licensing fees
Third-party firewall software
Third-party antivirus software
Salaries for IT personnell competent to put out constant security fires and keep on top of each new security hole and workaround <wry grin>
Linux isn't free of security holes, but it has considerably fewer because the underlying design isn't nearly as permissive to start with. Further, the open source model means that security holes get fixed more quickly.
Convenience of use and a good GUI loom large to non-geeks, but even they are beginning to wonder if the price they pay for the (Windows version of) these things isn't too high.
Firstly, without trying to sound too stand-offish, we are not talking about SPAM here.
Uh, Eric.... I read the rest of your response, but you lost me with this statement. You lost me because I know what spam is -- I've been fighting it since Canter & Siegel sent out their Usenet spam in 1994.
Spam isn't restricted to email any more than it is to Usenet posts. The essential outrage of spam is that it appropriates without permission resources that do not belong to the spammer and to which the spammer has no right.
In other words, spam is a telemarketer who calls collect to sell you something. It is a junk faxer that users your paper and toner to advertise to you. And (yes) it is a bulk mailer who uses your CPU cycles and disk space to send you advertising you did not ask to get. It is advertising or promoting something using the victim's resources without the victim's consent.
That is EXACTLY what your company did with your routers.
I'm not an IT person; I'm a technical writer. It's been well over ten years since I had to worry about routers and suchlike. I'd never heard of your company before.
I have now. And I'll let you guess how likely it is that I will ever, under any conceivable circumstances, do business with your company or keep quiet when an IT person at my company considers which routers to buy. <wry grin>
I'm not accusing you of being evil, or of having had any part in this abysmal decision, but you should not have attempted to defend something that was indefensible.
Fact is, I never did do Napster, and never have downloaded music except for an occasional song off of a legitimate band web site. I didn't because I wasn't willing to take stuff and not pay for it unless the artist wanted to give it to me. So, until iTunes became available, I missed the digital music revolution almost entirely....
And I LOVE IT. I love being able to buy and download exactly the songs I want -- particularly specific rock or pop or country songs I love by groups whose other stuff I don't much care for.
I want iTunes to succeed. It's opened a new world to me. And if it doesn't make money, I wonder if it will stay around. <sigh>
I've caught them in exactly two errors in four or five years of regular use. I'd gladly pay a monthly membership fee for them if they weren't a free service. (SHHHHH!!! Don't tell them.);>
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I haven't seen the series. Having read what Ms. Le Guin thinks of it, though, I won't bother. I first read the first Earthsea books when they were just being published, when I was in junior high school. I've lost count how many times I've read them since.
I wouldn't want to watch a mockery of them. I certainly don't want to watch something that hasn't even got the integrity to mock. :/
It's a shame. The Earthsea books are among the great fantasy books of the last century, perhaps not quite a match for "Lord of the Rings" or Michael Ende's "Neverending Story", but absolutely in the same class as Roger Zelazny's Amber series and Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia". They deserved better treatment from moviemakers. *We* deserved better treatment, as well.
If it makes Le Guin feel better, I doubt that the SciFi channel did any worse a number on the Earthsea trilogy than whoever it was that made the movie version of the Neverending Story.
I think it was before 2000 that I last had that few spams in a day. <wry grin> That's what happens when you have an old email address and like to post to Usenet....
I hope you're right. I don't shoot at Microsoft on sight, like a lot of the people who hang out here <G>, but I admit that I almost expect Microsoft to find a way to break simple cross-recognition. On the other hand, they probably don't want to alienate Meng. He's a quiet, patient kind of guy, but not eternally so. :)
I know. :) And I'm thinking about it. On the SPF mailing list today, though, the local estimate of SPF support stands at around 70K users. That isn't enough to create a standard, and if many of those 70K users are planning to go with Sender ID, they'll go away.
I don't want to go through all the work of creating and testing the code to support SPF if only a few people will be using it in the end. The old problem of not enough time in the day....
After reading the statement on the ASF web sit, I reluctantly had to agree with the Apache Software Foundation on the issue of Sender ID. The "free license" offered to those that support SenderID in open-source software packages has too many pitfalls, too many places where it could encumber open source projects. The SpamBouncer will therefore not support SenderID either until there are fundamental changes in the license.
This is a shame. Meng Weng Wong's original idea for SPF was quite good, and I was planning to support it.
Huh? Have you ever *used* either FrameMaker or Acrobat? They don't do the same things. That's like asking whether Excel is killing Oracle Database Server!
I use both. Most professional Technical Writers use both FrameMaker and Acrobat. FrameMaker is a powerful desktop publishing/layout program. Acrobat generates online documents and also good, cross-platform standard output to send to service bureaus and print shops, but it has absolutely *NO* layout or document production features. You can't use it to write anything, just to manipulate output that you produced somewhere else.
I think that what killed the Mac version of FrameMaker was partly that large companies are using FrameMaker on Windows or Unix more these days, and that Mac OSX *is* simply another flavor of Unix.
I do hope, however, that Adobe does not abandon the Mac platform. :(
No GUI layout, as far as I know. A pain to learn and use. A worse pain to install and set up. And no professional support.
Without those things, LaTeX isn't going anywhere in the business world or with that large subset of writers who aren't also geeks.
Unless and until Adobe kills the Unix versions of FrameMaker, there's a Mac-usable version out there.
This saddens me, though. I'm a technical writer and can't imagine having to do books with Microsoft Word. Word is not suitable for long technical documents, period. It *breaks* when you try to do complex things with it. I'm planning to switch to a Mac with my personal computer, and just hope that I won't be reduced to running FrameMaker under a Windoze emulator.
I disagree. Stick with one or two year renewals, and don't renew with Verisign. They're unethical slimeballs that do not deserve your money or respect.
...to see someone diplomatically tell SCO to go to hell. I hope the court system and the judges don't let these folks down.
Yep. Judges aren't all that clued about technology, but most of them are a whole lot more clued about people, especially crooks, than we techies are. And the judge that's hearing this case sounded like he was about to toss SCO's case, and SCO, out of court with extreme prejudice a month ago.
Let's just say that neither I nor my company are lining up to buy a license for Linux from SCO, and our product is built on a hardened/secured Linux platform. <G>
It looks to me like the appeals court might just have ruled that Verizon is a common carrier.I'm not at all sure this is a good thing. This is why.
I'm no lawyer, but as I understand it, under U.S. law common carriers (like the phone company) are legally obligated to provide service to all comers at a reasonable price, and for any legal purpose. They cannot pick and choose their customers. In return, they are shielded from liability for what others do using their service. For example, the phone company isn't liable for fraudulent telemarketing calls because it is a common carrier.
I can think of one possible pitfall right now if ISPs are deemed common carriers. ISPs set their own rules for proper use of their networks -- these are called Authorized Use Policies (AUP) or Terms of Service (TOS). Violations of an ISP's AUP/TOS can and often do result in the violator being disconnected. The most common violators are spammers.
Thanks (NOT!) to the CAN-Spam Act foisted on us by our foolish and venal Congress and President, spam is legal in the United States as of January 1. :( I am no lawyer, but I do not think a common carrier can legally forbid use of its services for *any* legal purpose. So, if ISPs become common carriers, can they continue to ban use of their networks for spamming?
Even worse, if ISPs are deemed common carriers, can they block email that was sent in compliance with U.S. law?
This is even more true when you don't need an actual product to ship -- scams are low-overhead operations. P.T. Barnum would've loved these guys.
Oh, I suspect he's running a spam filter on his email address, probably an industrial strength one. <wry grin> I'd add a comment about not sinking to his level, but I'm not sure there's room on his level for more people than him. ;>
I just finished For Us, The Living last night, and I agreed with most of what this reviewer said.
He did miss one glaringly obvious fact about this book, though, to anyone familiar with Utopian literature -- it's essentially a retelling of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward . Bellamy was looking backward from 2000 to 1887, and Heinlein from 2086 to 1939, of course. In addition, Heinlein's idea of how a perfect world would look differs considerably from Bellamy's. But the similarities between the two are spooky, and not to be explained by the inherent similarities between all Utopian books.
I wouldn't hand this Heinlein book to someone not already familiar with Heinlein, or to anyone just looking for a good story. It isn't a good story. I would, however, hend it to someone interested in political thought and social engineering without hesitation, even if I thought that person would not be interested in Heinlein the storyteller. Nearly all of Heinlein's ideas about people, politics, and society are here.
Clarke, in everything I've ever read by him, leans strongly towards trusting the intelligence and character of his readers and other people. This is especially true when he's commenting on legal issues. He does not like "big brotherism" -- laws passed to protect people from themselves. I think he feels that adults should be free to make their own choices and live with the consequences of those choices.
So I suspect his reaction to your question would be that anyone who is in the habit of thinking for himself in the first place isn't going to be unduly influenced by Clark's obviously partisan views on governmental information control. I think he'd probably also say that someone who isn't in the habit of thinking for himself needs to learn.
I hear that he's also allergic to fans who worship him instead of thinking about what he said and responding intelligently to it. So if I ever met him, I'll have to be careful not to tell him how much I loved, "Rendevous with Rama." ;>
<starting to steam at the ears>
<taking a deep breath>
You certainly out-did the reviewer here -- he simply said that people who disagree with him have no taste. You imply that they'd have murdered Jesus Christ. Nicely done. NOT.
For the record, I:
Seriously, I suspect my dislike of the Thomas Covenant books is partly because I cannot stand book-length ongoing puns. But that isn't by any means the only reason. I'm not fond of Robert Asprin's "Myth, Inc." series, either, but I don't loathe it and thoroughly enjoyed the "Thieves World" shared universe he created. And I absolutely love C. S. Lewis's work, so I'm not allergic to allegory, to put it mildly.
After forcing myself to read "Lord Foul's Bane" through to the end, though, and then forcing myself to try reading two other Thomas Covenant books.... I realized that I just couldn't stand being preached at under false pretenses any more. :/ These books are sold as stories, not sermons. Despite that, Donaldson *NEVER LETS UP*. After the third book, I'd come to loathe Thomas Covenant as a whiny, self-indulgent little twit who couldn't be less Christlike.
<Wheewww!> Rant over.
To summarize this, I don't mind you having a different opinion about the literary merits of Donaldson's work than I do, BUT I do mind your having turned disagreement with you into an issue, not of taste, but of theological interest. It isn't, and to have implied such was rude, condescending, and deserved a virtual whack over the head with a verbal blunderbuss -- something I don't normally administer.
So there. ;P
Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus was founded in 1871, a good eighty years before rock music. Maybe it would ragtime instead? ;>
This isn't accurate. I installed Itunes a week ago on my Win2k laptop. I've downloaded about fifty songs (mostly old tunes I loved as a kid), and played them a lot. I don't own an iPod. I don't even own a Macintosh, although that will probably change when I buy my next laptop.
Further, people who have CD burners can burn purchased songs from iTunes onto an Audio CD that will play in any CD player. I *think* the software limits you to making only ten CDs for each tune, but as far as I know that's the only limit.
Apple apparently is using iTunes to sell iPods, but you definitely don't need an iPod to use and benefit from the iTunes service.
Governments and big corporations are starting to realize that the cost of using Microsoft includes:
Linux isn't free of security holes, but it has considerably fewer because the underlying design isn't nearly as permissive to start with. Further, the open source model means that security holes get fixed more quickly.
Convenience of use and a good GUI loom large to non-geeks, but even they are beginning to wonder if the price they pay for the (Windows version of) these things isn't too high.
Uh, Eric.... I read the rest of your response, but you lost me with this statement. You lost me because I know what spam is -- I've been fighting it since Canter & Siegel sent out their Usenet spam in 1994.
Spam isn't restricted to email any more than it is to Usenet posts. The essential outrage of spam is that it appropriates without permission resources that do not belong to the spammer and to which the spammer has no right.
In other words, spam is a telemarketer who calls collect to sell you something. It is a junk faxer that users your paper and toner to advertise to you. And (yes) it is a bulk mailer who uses your CPU cycles and disk space to send you advertising you did not ask to get. It is advertising or promoting something using the victim's resources without the victim's consent.
That is EXACTLY what your company did with your routers.
I'm not an IT person; I'm a technical writer. It's been well over ten years since I had to worry about routers and suchlike. I'd never heard of your company before.
I have now. And I'll let you guess how likely it is that I will ever, under any conceivable circumstances, do business with your company or keep quiet when an IT person at my company considers which routers to buy. <wry grin>
I'm not accusing you of being evil, or of having had any part in this abysmal decision, but you should not have attempted to defend something that was indefensible.
Fact is, I never did do Napster, and never have downloaded music except for an occasional song off of a legitimate band web site. I didn't because I wasn't willing to take stuff and not pay for it unless the artist wanted to give it to me. So, until iTunes became available, I missed the digital music revolution almost entirely....
And I LOVE IT. I love being able to buy and download exactly the songs I want -- particularly specific rock or pop or country songs I love by groups whose other stuff I don't much care for.
I want iTunes to succeed. It's opened a new world to me. And if it doesn't make money, I wonder if it will stay around. <sigh>
Since I already use OpenBSD on my server, I'd just *LOVE* to get paid not to use Linux. Where do I sign up? <EVIL grin>
Check out his article, "The Tragedy of the Electronic Commons," on his old web site on the Well .
As Solomon (or somebody) commented a few thousand years ago, there is nothing new under the sun.
I've caught them in exactly two errors in four or five years of regular use. I'd gladly pay a monthly membership fee for them if they weren't a free service. (SHHHHH!!! Don't tell them.) ;>