In the bad and mediocre ones, this is certainly true. A good scifi writer's world-building efforts don't consume much word-count though -- the outlines are set up in a page or two, then the characters simply exist in it. Good scifi should not be harder or less enjoyable than good literature from an older societal period (I'm thinking particularly of Henry James' _Portrait Of A Lady_, a book which relies completely on societal rules that have been dead for two generations).
A book that spends page afte page explaining technology that is tangential to the story is simply a bad book, not a sign that the sky is falling.
I'm generally not a fan of postmodernist outlooks, but they do have one thing to say that seems relevant here: you can't meaningfully look at a book without looking at the reader too.
I certainly skip over a lot of dross on the bookshelves, but I still find enough to read in scifi and literature to keep me happy. I was certainly in the same space as you after I finished my English degree though, and I still don't see a whole hell of a lot to read in the "modern literature" areas that were so popular with my classmates. The books aren't changing much, but my attitude toward them is different.
Enjoy your reading in other literatures, but there's no need to burn down the house you're leaving just because you don't want to live there anymore:)
I love SciFi, but honestly, heritage? Asimov, Dick, Heinlein & Clarke were all hobbled by their inability to write as well as they thought. I haven't read Lem. The four I have read wrote some really interesting stories and have some very good ideas, but characterization and plotting are weak and their novels generally limp along. Fantasy on the other hand typically focuses more on the writing and less on the magic.
So what should the Hugo judge, science or fiction? I think a blend of both. Take Robert Forward for instance, he writes technically solid hard science books that absolutely stink, with characters that might as well be Barbie and Ken dolls (and plenty of Heinlein/Clarke style gratuitous sex). They sure do explore our scientific options, as do Clarke's, but they're painful to read. Flipside, Roger Zelazny's _Lord of Light_ is mostly characterization and plot, with the science barely considered at all. Which one is more fun and more inspiring to read? And is _Lord of Light_ even a scifi book, or more of a fantasy book? It certainly blurs the line.
Vernor Vinge wins a Hugo practically every time he turns around, because he can write well and think scientifically. I greatly prefer reading him and have reread most of his books because they're so damned good.
Just some thoughts, really. I don't think LoTR really deserves a Hugo either, as much as I like it, but it looks to me like it's WETA and Peter Jackson getting the awards here, not Tolkein.
dunno what you did, but it doesn't look like that for me, and I only use Firefox (on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X). Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time on Slashdot too.
Vonage has its problems, but your firewall shouldn't be locking up from it. I'd suspect that you might be logging all the traffic and filling up your disk space?
Any salesweasel worth the oxygen they breathe is working to the compensation plan put together by their VP and usually blessed by the executive staff. If they're not working to the comp plan, they're too stupid to even act in their own interest, much less in the company's interest.
In other words, while it might be a rogue salesweasel causing the problem, it's more likely to be an idiot sales manager. Most likely of all: an executive team with dreams of going public and cashing in buckets of pre-IPO stock... in order to make revenue growth look good, they're pursuing bad business. Probably doing a number of other stupid and shady things too, such as fudging their accounting and stuffing the channel to make it look like each quarter's doing better than it really is.
And Windows really needs to lose that Program Manager interface, it's terribly clunky to use.
Get with the program man, you can install programs much more simply. Granted there are three or four different systems depending on your distribution, but that's because Linux has this funny thing called competition. You may have heard of it in an economics textbook.
I recently switched jobs and get to deal with a lot more Microsoft than I've had to in the past six years. Active Directory, NetBIOS, the whole damn shebang. It's really remarkably horrible compared to an all-Linux network. Oh well.
You'd be surprised. I work on the vendor side, have for most of the last ten years. I've spoken with thousands of customers, demoing products, running pilots, and troubleshooting failures. I'd say that about 30% of the American corporate IT world ranges from acceptably to highly capable, 20% is hopelessly incapable of buttoning their clothes, and the 50% in between follows the trade rags more or less as gospel. The 50% don't have staff or time or competence to truly evaluate products, so they trust Ziff Davis as Moses and buy pretty much whatever it says.
By the way, if you recognize and remember who I am, you're clearly in the 30%:)
Software companies that are not like this are few and far between, IME. I've worked for two of them and with nearly a hundred, probably. The commercial outfits that keep their software up to date are oddly enough the ones that are selling hardware and providing software as a value-add (Slim Devices is an excellent example).
I agree, though I've had different experiences. I just canned a 2.4GHz phone branded by Virgin (hey, it was the cheapest piece of junk at Target with a headset jack and a mute button). This phone had significant trouble communicating with its base station in a room with two WAPs (one D-Link, one NetGear).
The replacement phone is also 2.4Ghz, but it's a Uniden (a brand I've had good luck with in the past). No interference observed to date in either direction.
To finish off my sad story of cordless phones, I've also owned a few Panasonics (generally crap) and Sonys (okay, but the batteries die very quickly).
great article all right, three blinky ads and a big blank spot.
Interestingly enough, the URL you gave is the same as the URL I found from Google, but the link is FUBARed when going through Slashdot. It's probably all Taco's fault.
Here's a Google link, click the first article titled "Interference from Cordless Phones."
I work with both on a regular basis at customer sites and in my own vmware-based test and demo environments. 2k3 is a lot better as a server OS and as a AD domain controller.
That said, one of the reasons it's better is the improved security. If you rely on NTLM for IIS authentication, you may have some fun getting that to work (hint, allow delegation on the IIS server). DOS clients may have some trouble mounting network volumes too (hint, think workstation OS imaging).
However, 2003 definitely cuts the mysterious breakages down to a minimum. I see a lot less of machines falling out of the domain, for instance.
I've been privileged to answer a lot of RFPs in my career, so here's some tips from the other side to make the process go a little smoother:
Corporate background questions are fine, but please stick to general stuff that can be answered with boilerplate. No one at the vendor knows or cares where our executive team went to college, and it's going to be a huge PITA to track that sort of BS down.
Ask what you want to know, but please re-read the RFP when you're done writing it. If you've asked the same question 50 times in different wording, I'm going to answer it once and paste the same answer 49 times. That's not helping anyone.
Do not use forms, whether document or web based. It makes it very difficult for us to check our work and makes it impossible for us to provide supplemental information.
Do give a schedule with a reasonable amount of time. I'd release to vendors, wait a week, do a bidder's conference call, wait a week, and then collect responses. If it's taking them longer to respond, then they're either too strapped for resources or too far from their core competency.
And for your own protection, here's some stuff to look out for:
If they can't reveal processes for "security reasons" it very very probably means that they don't have any process. Run screaming.
If a vendor is grossly more or less expensive, find out why. They might have good reasons, or they might not know what they're doing.
Their strategy is to be the Unix king again. They're slowly building up resources to make themselves an amenable home for all the FOSS geeks. Then when Microsoft comes out with all guns blazing in the patent litigation war, they'll be a safe haven because of the agreements signed.
ohmigod, marketing said something nonsensical... stop the presses!
There's a reason why they're going to be first against the wall when the revolution comes, and it's doublespeak. Marketing blathers on about what they think you want to hear now. Remembering what they said yesterday is a pointless exercise, they were lying then just as much as they're lying now.
I may be a bit bitter, I'm just about to present my company's product in a marketing event where one of the other vendors is going to tell people that they don't have multi-tasking unless they're using a P4 with HT. Oh yes, and security updates won't work if you don't have multi-tasking.
It's got a great precedent, going back to the Middle Ages. Besides, you do recall who we hired to do some of our fighting in the Revolutionary War, right? If it wasn't for their Navy, we'd have gotten whupped real good.
Funny thing is, I agree with all your points on a point-by-point basis...
What I don't agree with is that the sky is falling.
"our project will only be destroyed by wealthy competitors if it gets too popular for their comfort."
This has always been the case. That's just the way it is, whether you're running a company or an OSS project or a hobby club or a common interests group. Is it fair? Of course not. The concept of "fair" in American business is about as useful as the concept of "The Tooth Fairy." It's about competition, and if your project is nibbling at their market share, they're going to take action against you. That action might be to make a better product than yours, but only if the cheaper and faster expedients of buying you out or suing you to death don't work.
I think you're wrong that individuals will be forced out; remember that pursuing an individual past a C&D is also quite expensive, both in terms of money (relatively cheap) and in terms of political capital (relatively expensive). It is very rare for massive numbers of infringing individuals and small companies to get sued, IMHO, and when large numbers do get sued the end result is very much as we're seeing with the RIAA: a scorched-earth result of well-earned hatred.
The end result is that large companies with large portfolios and small groups of individuals with ad hoc agendas will be the centers of software development... in other words, nothing will change.
I concur, though there are a number of middleware apps around Sabre that could have conceivably had an issue. However, those apps that I've been made aware of are almost universally Java on Solaris.
Slashdot Mirror
In the bad and mediocre ones, this is certainly true. A good scifi writer's world-building efforts don't consume much word-count though -- the outlines are set up in a page or two, then the characters simply exist in it. Good scifi should not be harder or less enjoyable than good literature from an older societal period (I'm thinking particularly of Henry James' _Portrait Of A Lady_, a book which relies completely on societal rules that have been dead for two generations).
A book that spends page afte page explaining technology that is tangential to the story is simply a bad book, not a sign that the sky is falling.
I'm generally not a fan of postmodernist outlooks, but they do have one thing to say that seems relevant here: you can't meaningfully look at a book without looking at the reader too.
:)
I certainly skip over a lot of dross on the bookshelves, but I still find enough to read in scifi and literature to keep me happy. I was certainly in the same space as you after I finished my English degree though, and I still don't see a whole hell of a lot to read in the "modern literature" areas that were so popular with my classmates. The books aren't changing much, but my attitude toward them is different.
Enjoy your reading in other literatures, but there's no need to burn down the house you're leaving just because you don't want to live there anymore
isn't the user the brightest thing around? Heh. If only :)
For those who don't get it, it's from A Deepness In The Sky. Here's the Amazon.
I love SciFi, but honestly, heritage? Asimov, Dick, Heinlein & Clarke were all hobbled by their inability to write as well as they thought. I haven't read Lem. The four I have read wrote some really interesting stories and have some very good ideas, but characterization and plotting are weak and their novels generally limp along. Fantasy on the other hand typically focuses more on the writing and less on the magic.
So what should the Hugo judge, science or fiction? I think a blend of both. Take Robert Forward for instance, he writes technically solid hard science books that absolutely stink, with characters that might as well be Barbie and Ken dolls (and plenty of Heinlein/Clarke style gratuitous sex). They sure do explore our scientific options, as do Clarke's, but they're painful to read. Flipside, Roger Zelazny's _Lord of Light_ is mostly characterization and plot, with the science barely considered at all. Which one is more fun and more inspiring to read? And is _Lord of Light_ even a scifi book, or more of a fantasy book? It certainly blurs the line.
Vernor Vinge wins a Hugo practically every time he turns around, because he can write well and think scientifically. I greatly prefer reading him and have reread most of his books because they're so damned good.
Just some thoughts, really. I don't think LoTR really deserves a Hugo either, as much as I like it, but it looks to me like it's WETA and Peter Jackson getting the awards here, not Tolkein.
dunno what you did, but it doesn't look like that for me, and I only use Firefox (on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X). Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time on Slashdot too.
You mean like Mandrake does? Mandrake won't accept a src.rpm unless it's bzip2.
Vonage has its problems, but your firewall shouldn't be locking up from it. I'd suspect that you might be logging all the traffic and filling up your disk space?
Any salesweasel worth the oxygen they breathe is working to the compensation plan put together by their VP and usually blessed by the executive staff. If they're not working to the comp plan, they're too stupid to even act in their own interest, much less in the company's interest.
In other words, while it might be a rogue salesweasel causing the problem, it's more likely to be an idiot sales manager. Most likely of all: an executive team with dreams of going public and cashing in buckets of pre-IPO stock... in order to make revenue growth look good, they're pursuing bad business. Probably doing a number of other stupid and shady things too, such as fudging their accounting and stuffing the channel to make it look like each quarter's doing better than it really is.
I wish bad management was rare...
I'm sorry, that site has been slashdotted into smoking rubble :)
And Windows really needs to lose that Program Manager interface, it's terribly clunky to use.
Get with the program man, you can install programs much more simply. Granted there are three or four different systems depending on your distribution, but that's because Linux has this funny thing called competition. You may have heard of it in an economics textbook.
I recently switched jobs and get to deal with a lot more Microsoft than I've had to in the past six years. Active Directory, NetBIOS, the whole damn shebang. It's really remarkably horrible compared to an all-Linux network. Oh well.
You'd be surprised. I work on the vendor side, have for most of the last ten years. I've spoken with thousands of customers, demoing products, running pilots, and troubleshooting failures. I'd say that about 30% of the American corporate IT world ranges from acceptably to highly capable, 20% is hopelessly incapable of buttoning their clothes, and the 50% in between follows the trade rags more or less as gospel. The 50% don't have staff or time or competence to truly evaluate products, so they trust Ziff Davis as Moses and buy pretty much whatever it says.
:)
By the way, if you recognize and remember who I am, you're clearly in the 30%
Software companies that are not like this are few and far between, IME. I've worked for two of them and with nearly a hundred, probably. The commercial outfits that keep their software up to date are oddly enough the ones that are selling hardware and providing software as a value-add (Slim Devices is an excellent example).
I agree, though I've had different experiences. I just canned a 2.4GHz phone branded by Virgin (hey, it was the cheapest piece of junk at Target with a headset jack and a mute button). This phone had significant trouble communicating with its base station in a room with two WAPs (one D-Link, one NetGear).
The replacement phone is also 2.4Ghz, but it's a Uniden (a brand I've had good luck with in the past). No interference observed to date in either direction.
To finish off my sad story of cordless phones, I've also owned a few Panasonics (generally crap) and Sonys (okay, but the batteries die very quickly).
great article all right, three blinky ads and a big blank spot.
Interestingly enough, the URL you gave is the same as the URL I found from Google, but the link is FUBARed when going through Slashdot. It's probably all Taco's fault.
Here's a Google link, click the first article titled "Interference from Cordless Phones."
I work with both on a regular basis at customer sites and in my own vmware-based test and demo environments. 2k3 is a lot better as a server OS and as a AD domain controller.
That said, one of the reasons it's better is the improved security. If you rely on NTLM for IIS authentication, you may have some fun getting that to work (hint, allow delegation on the IIS server). DOS clients may have some trouble mounting network volumes too (hint, think workstation OS imaging).
However, 2003 definitely cuts the mysterious breakages down to a minimum. I see a lot less of machines falling out of the domain, for instance.
I've been privileged to answer a lot of RFPs in my career, so here's some tips from the other side to make the process go a little smoother:
Corporate background questions are fine, but please stick to general stuff that can be answered with boilerplate. No one at the vendor knows or cares where our executive team went to college, and it's going to be a huge PITA to track that sort of BS down.
Ask what you want to know, but please re-read the RFP when you're done writing it. If you've asked the same question 50 times in different wording, I'm going to answer it once and paste the same answer 49 times. That's not helping anyone.
Do not use forms, whether document or web based. It makes it very difficult for us to check our work and makes it impossible for us to provide supplemental information.
Do give a schedule with a reasonable amount of time. I'd release to vendors, wait a week, do a bidder's conference call, wait a week, and then collect responses. If it's taking them longer to respond, then they're either too strapped for resources or too far from their core competency.
And for your own protection, here's some stuff to look out for:
If they can't reveal processes for "security reasons" it very very probably means that they don't have any process. Run screaming.
If a vendor is grossly more or less expensive, find out why. They might have good reasons, or they might not know what they're doing.
Their strategy is to be the Unix king again. They're slowly building up resources to make themselves an amenable home for all the FOSS geeks. Then when Microsoft comes out with all guns blazing in the patent litigation war, they'll be a safe haven because of the agreements signed.
ohmigod, marketing said something nonsensical... stop the presses!
There's a reason why they're going to be first against the wall when the revolution comes, and it's doublespeak. Marketing blathers on about what they think you want to hear now. Remembering what they said yesterday is a pointless exercise, they were lying then just as much as they're lying now.
I may be a bit bitter, I'm just about to present my company's product in a marketing event where one of the other vendors is going to tell people that they don't have multi-tasking unless they're using a P4 with HT. Oh yes, and security updates won't work if you don't have multi-tasking.
It's got a great precedent, going back to the Middle Ages. Besides, you do recall who we hired to do some of our fighting in the Revolutionary War, right? If it wasn't for their Navy, we'd have gotten whupped real good.
Funny thing is, I agree with all your points on a point-by-point basis...
What I don't agree with is that the sky is falling.
"our project will only be destroyed by wealthy competitors if it gets too popular for their comfort."
This has always been the case. That's just the way it is, whether you're running a company or an OSS project or a hobby club or a common interests group. Is it fair? Of course not. The concept of "fair" in American business is about as useful as the concept of "The Tooth Fairy." It's about competition, and if your project is nibbling at their market share, they're going to take action against you. That action might be to make a better product than yours, but only if the cheaper and faster expedients of buying you out or suing you to death don't work.
I think you're wrong that individuals will be forced out; remember that pursuing an individual past a C&D is also quite expensive, both in terms of money (relatively cheap) and in terms of political capital (relatively expensive). It is very rare for massive numbers of infringing individuals and small companies to get sued, IMHO, and when large numbers do get sued the end result is very much as we're seeing with the RIAA: a scorched-earth result of well-earned hatred.
The end result is that large companies with large portfolios and small groups of individuals with ad hoc agendas will be the centers of software development... in other words, nothing will change.
Maybe he's thinking of an editor... I frequently use a vi key sequence to indicate this sort of thing instead of typing ^H thirty times :)
Then again, ^D in vi is page-down, so who can say what was rattling around in the ole cranium.
I concur, though there are a number of middleware apps around Sabre that could have conceivably had an issue. However, those apps that I've been made aware of are almost universally Java on Solaris.