Hrm, I'm wondering where half of these criticisms come from because they are the exact opposite of my experiences using the new nautilus, and contrary to even a casual examination of what spacial nautilus does.
#1) It is just like DOS. You can only be 'active' in one directory at a time. Deep dir's were hell, but shallow ones were kinda quick and easy to copy/move files around and open them.
You can have views of multiple directories open at any point in time (in fact, as many views as you need.) Deep directories also do not matter because it takes just as many steps to unfold the tree to the necessary number of steps as it does to open a deep directory in nautilus. In what ways is this "just like dos."
#2) The entire "browser" style has lasted only because Suzie Soccermom has never learned that by using a "Tree-view + detailed list" is easier, (damn Windows default settings).
I see advantages and disadvantages to both. The "tree + detailed list" view frequently annoys me because I find myself managing excessively long lists on both sides of pane. Although, there is an inherent problem with GUI file managers because it is rarely obvious what a click and drag might do.
#3) IIRC Xtree, Norton Commander and Dosshell were all designed to quickly & easily allow of folder/file manipulation at the deep level. This is a huge improvment over the existing DOS CLI.
Nautilus is designed to quickly and easily allow folder/file manipulation at any level you choose. (I started using Nautilus with some pretty deep file trees and found it to be pretty darn easy.) I still can't see the relationship between Nautilus and the DOS CLI (or even the unix shell CLI which has many of the same problems you cite here.)
Like a previous poster stated. Spatial systems would work very good for large numbers of files, if the OS did all the sorting for you. (Didn't MS try this with "My Documents, My Pictures, My P0rn..." and we all hated them dearly for it?)
Actually, I've found that spacial systems work equally well for shallow and large and deep and few file systems. I think a lot of the grousing about a spatial model vs, a tree model comes from the fact that the tree folks just don't want to be bothered dealing with it.
Why link to a great article on the web if you are not going to provide an accurate summary?
The point of the securityfocus.com article was not "South Pole Research Station Hacked Twice", but that the US DoJ has used this as a spin campaign to justify the cyberterrorism provisions of the patriot act.
"The hacked computer... controlled the life support systems for the South Pole Station that housed 50 scientists 'wintering over' during the South Pole's most dangerous season," reads the Justice Department report. "Due in part to the quick response allowed by [the USA Patriot Act], FBI agents were able to close the case quickly with the suspects' arrest before any harm was done to the South Pole Research Station."
However, the FBI and DoJ's version of events is contradicted by the NSF internal assessment of the attack...
And as described in the memo, released as a partially-redacted draft, the incident was something less than a cyber terror attack to begin with, and prompted a measured response from network administrators. "Given the fact that no financial records or systems were compromised, no safety or loss of life was threatened, and no critical system corrupted, we need to balance legitimate security needs with the legitimate needs of our scientists at the Pole," the memo reads.
The previous security problems at the South Pole appears in the second to last paragraph as support for the claim that the attack was not threatening to life support at Amudsen-Scott.
The trouble with Manos is that like most Ed Wood films, its badness becomes something of a redeeming quality. It is so bad that you can get a chuckle out of it. You ignore the characters on the screen, and focus on the actors stumbling over their lines, and the director who thought this stuff up. IMNSHO, the movies produced by professionals that fail on every level to be entertaining or make sense are more offensively bad that the movies made by incompetent first-timers.
For example, Highlander 2 is so bad that you can't even laugh at the production values. The producers earnestly tried to put out a sequel worthy of the first and failed in every respect. When it came out, its badness was the only thing my group of friends could agree on at the time.
I know that, in hindsight, it is easy to find flaws.
Which I guess is the point. The design of these systems are intended to minimize the possibility of failure. It is easy for us to armchair analyze the decisions involved and say that someone didn't do their homework, and ignore the thousands of anticipated disasters that were accounted for and prevented.
That CS majors are seen as an inferior type of geek relative to their cancer-curing, drug-designing, atom-smashing counterparts?
There is the old saying that any field that has to put the word "science" in its name, probably isn't. (I don't agree with this myself but...)
Is there, after all, something intrinsically semi-autistic, and therefore testosterone-linked, in fiddling with computers?
I would argue that the mythology that geeks have cultivated of computer science as the persuit of the semi-autistic is a factor. However, I don't think that computer science necessarily is more anti-social than other fields.
I'm reading a Singh's chapter on the Benchley Park decryption effort in The Code Book. He describes the work on enigma ciphers as a colaborative social endeavor that included a lunchtime game of rounders. It is quite interesting that women were involved in computer science from the start but faded out.
I think that in other fields there is quite a bit more diversity in accomodated problem-solving styles. Mathematics for example runs a range from solitary thinkers who disappear for a decade to solve a problem to promiscuous collaborators.
There _must_ be some deeper reason why women don't play chess,,whether it's genes, nutrition, alien mind control, whatever, and we must accept the possibility that this reason is also applicable to computer science.
When we have advanced socially to the point where chess is no longer defined as a man's game, then we can entertain that hypothesis.
Limit login attempts: Usually cheap and easy to implement. However it does not protect from a case where a person gets the password file.
Computationally expensive hashes: If the password file is compromised, forces the attacker to spend more resources on an attack.
Two-factor authentication: The good news is that the attacker must have both the token and password to log in. The bad news is that the user must have both the token and password to login. Can be expensive.
Certificates: Can be used to decentralize the password problem. The server never needs to know what passwords the private keys are encrypted with. The bad news is that it takes only one compromised private key with a weak password.
One Time Passwords: Good against snooping attacks. Current software choices are irritating though.
So somebody said that maybe all life COULD be devoured by a properly-designed nanotech robot that would reproduce quickly and break up organic matter into component monomers, etc etc etc.
I keep reading about the grey goo, and I've yet to see an argument that it is possible from someone who demonstrates an understanding of the complex tradeoffs that limit our currently existing biological self-replicating machines. Problems like:
1: Oxygen is both a nutrient, and a poison. 2: The lack of a universal catalyst. A machine that catalyzes the transformation of one amino acid will be less than optimal for catalyzing a different amino acid. 3: Energy and trace elements severely limit growth at a microscopic level.
And how many lives will be jeopardized now that the paramedics have to second guess themselves?
Nice way to throw in a bit of hysteria there. I suspect that if these implants became common enough to be a concern for paramedics, that parametics will be trained to look for signs of an implant such as a big-ass scar or medical alert badge. In cases where there is doubt, such as good circulation to the extremities, they would use standard equipment such as a stethoscope and O2 meter to figure out what is going on.
Don't know why this one got modded up as insightful, but...
ELDERLY VOLUNTEERS AT THE POLLS!
Come on! Whenever I've gone to the polls, I've never seen anyone younger than retirement home/Tuesdasy night bingo age running the show.
The obvious solution to this problem is for the self-proclaimed technically elite to volunteer to work at the polls.
Certainly, they're nice and friendly, but seriously -- this is the generation that, for the most part, yell and scream if someone automates anything in their life with a computer.
I've not found this to be the case. All of the people over 65 in my family are comfortable using computers, and only get pissed off when some "whippersnapper" decides to make dramatic, arbitrary, and unasked-for changes to the systems they they use. Getting bent out of shape over having to learn something new to do basic and necessary tasks is not unique to the elderly. How much bile has been vented on a weekly basis by the technology elites here about changes to the Nautilus file manager?
Of course, blame the user is the ultimate cop-out for bad design. Touch-screen voting machines are being pushed as even easier to use and manage than the mechanical systems they replace. I'm finding it hard to believe that the errors we are seing are due to technically naive poll volunteers who somehow managed to deal with systems that (at least according to touchscreen voting companies) more complex. Even if we assume that poll workers are fools, voting machines must be foolproof to ensure that every vote counts.
There seems to be a contradiction between two of this author's arguments.
First he argues that gratis software undermines the market for commercial software. Because anyone can roll out a "free" version.
Then he argues that OSS is not always better and that there are advantages to closed production methods and commercialization.
The reason why Photoshop, MS Word, MS Outlook, SPSS, SAS, Illustrator and Endnote are not hurting very much is because rolling out a "free" version is easier said than done. The open source equivalents are still a bit scruffy behind the ears.
If you are going to compete in any market, you have to offer something that your clients consider worth paying for. You are also going to have to continue to innovate to stay one step ahead of the competition. This is true whether you are talking about software or publishing.
However, it doesn't take into account the fact that, for typical web distribution, the compression phase only has to be run once, and should probably not be counted. In that case, it looks like bzip2 slightly edges out gzip. Also, the default page is set up for a 1000kbit connection, which is probably faster than most internet connections -- which favors gzip. And, of course, it doesn't give benchmarks for image data, which might be different than results for source code.
While the compression phase only has to run once, the decompression phase is what worries me. According to the tests, the decompression phase for bzip2 runs 5-8 times that of gzip. Multiplied by a half-dozen images per page, that is a lot of work to render a page.
Bzip2 is great for applications where I can sit and twiddle my thumbs for a few seconds (or 20 minutes as the case may be). But gzip still rules the roost for interactive applications.
It seems like any time compression is brought up, somebody brings touts bzip2 as the uber-compression scheme.
Bzip2 provides a modest to moderate decrease in file size at the expense of huge increases in compression/decompression time. A nice comparison can be found at http://www.elis.ugent.be/~wheirman/compression/. Gzip seems to occupy a nice sweet-spot between file size and avoiding thumb-twiddling.
I also suspect that at least part of what Asimov was doing with his Robot stories was highlighting the complexities of human ethics by offering up robotics as a simple rule-based foil.
Leave this man alone. He hasn't done anything substantially criminal. It's not like he was shipping food in violation of sanctions to the poor Yugoslavians or anything.
Actually, the exhibition match was a big deal for Yugoslavia drawing in thousands of people with money to spend into the local economy. In the process, Fischer pocketed a goodly sum just for showing up. Now, certainly we can debate at length whether said sanctions were a good idea, but arguing that "it was just a chess match" or that it was not a criminal act is missing the point. I'm much more sympathetic to Americans engaging sister-cities programs in Cuba who face the same penalties than the star of what many argue was THE chess event of the 1990s.
Another facet behind this story is that it is not as if Fischer is being persecuted here. He's been living comfortably overseas for over a decade. The maximum penalty he faces is 10 years and $250,000. If he behaves himself, he could probably get away with a token fine and public service. There was no big manhunt. Although his probable where abouts have been known off and on for the last 10 years, we have placed no public pressure on the countries he lived in to capture him. He was detained and deported on a routine problem with his passport. For the most part, it seems as if the U.S. had written Fischer off as a loss, and was willing to let him live as and expatriate.
At the end, the total amount of recall I have of specific aspects of the book will be about equivalent to the recall I'd have after seeing a movie, only the movie gives me the information passively and in a fifth the time. Do you really remember significantly more detail about a story from reading a book than from seeing a movie?
I have yet to see a movie that successfully managed to cover more than 1/5th of a good novel, and the process of going from novel to screenplay usually does quite a bit of violence to the story along the way. The ideal source material for a movie appears to be either the short story or the stage play.
Novels are novels and movies are movies. There is quite a bit that you can do in a novel that is hugely difficult to do in a movie. I just finished A Wizard of Earthsea and Tombs of Atuan this week for perhaps the 5th time, and realized how much large chunks of those novels center on internal psychological narrative that is very difficult to do without relying on something trite like a voiceover. Even further, Tombs of Atuan is even more sparse with both action and dialogue.
And that of course misses the point that fiction is not just about character and plot, but about the beauty of words, the twist of an unusual metaphor that sparks a new connection, since I'm reading Le Guin:
In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constapation. The airport is where you can't go anywhere elese. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of any meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes. "Sita Dulip's Method", published in
Changing Planes
Or William Gibson's best opening hook:
The sky was the color of a television, tuned to a blank channel.
Certainly, cinema has its own beauty, its own poetry, its own way of presenting the unusual twist of metaphor. But its a different beauty and poetry from a well-written novel or short story. As much as the two mediums like to trade off plots and characters, filmmakers figured out about 80 years ago that cinema is something different.
There is the entire assumption in this post that movies and novels are about information rather than entertainment or even *gasp* art. Only bad movies are passive. Good movies require just as much interest an effort as a good novel. Of course, the magic of a good movie or a good novel is the hook. A good work of art will inspire you to give of your time and energy willingly.
If you want the information there is no problem finding reviews with all the information in the form of a synopsis.
Also, (and I think this is hugely important) reading has very limited memetic aspects. When I've read a new book, the first thing I want to do is discuss it with other people. However, since relatively few people have read the same book. The meme hasn't propagated.
I think memetics is a bunch of hooey and the wrong theory to describe what is going on here. But in practice, I've not found this to be a problem to talk about books as opposed to talking about movies.
Here we go again with NASA concetrating on trying to find "life" on other planets. What ever happened to the science of simply exploring and learning about our solar system and how it formed instead of this quest of focusing on trying to find life on other planets. There is more to space exploration than finding life.
Um, where does this statement come from? The post uses the phrase "building blocks of life" which is the only phrase used in the article its self (unusual for a science news article given that journalists are more obsessed with the "life" question than planetary astronomers.)
Of course there is more to space exploration than finding life. However, one of the more interesting aspects about the outer solar system appears to be an abundance of organics. Understanding the distribution, formation and chemestry of organics in the outer solar system can help us improve our theories about how organic compounds came to dominate the chemistry of Earth.
No. I plan my tool purchases well in advance and sparingly. Mostly what I get from Maximum PC is an idea of what I might be getting 3 years from now. Part of my preference for CPU is that they are willing to run reviews of budget items that Maximum PC would distain as being not cutting-edge enough.
New Scientist is a British import I really wish I had the cash to subscribe to. Their science coverage is a notch above Scientific American and a few steps above Discover. It is a magazine that I make a special trip to the library for at least once a month. In addition, it is quite interesting to see how a European science periodical approaches issues such as GMOs and energy policy.
Fortean Times sort of a brainy "Ripley's Believe it or Not". It manages to cover the weird and bizzare without falling into either smug skeptical dismissal or empty-headed conspiracy. Their recent coverage of H. P. Lovecraft's connection with the occult was excellent. (verdict: Lovecraft was a life long atheist who did just enough background research to fill his stories) In some cases they are willing to step in and declare a myth to be bullshit. For example, with the WWI angels legend, the creator is both still alive, and explicitly honest as to having created that little bit of propaganda.
Basically if you give a damn about computer hardware, you should have a subscription. Very highly recommended.
I skim it once a month at the library but to be quite honest, I've not read much there that is worth paying money for. The quality is drowned under the noise of 30-something geeks coping the attitude of 13-year-old walking gonads. Mostly though it seems to be built around the assumption of dropping 3K into a custom rig every other year.
Computer Power User is both more readable and less of an insult to its readership, but even it is rarely worth paying for.
Ultimately, it comes down to a matter of preference and a lot of the "my operating system is better than your operating system" just resolves to a pissing match. I cut my teeth on solaris and irix back before I tried Linux and I found Linux (granted with an early version of Red Hat) to be a bit scattered in comparison. I've not found the same problems to be true of FreeBSD.
A few hundred words of copy from a Linux advocate with a few choice quotes from a BSD advocate for balance. Other than the once-a-month "there is more than linux in open-source operating systems" there is not really that much in this article that is NEWS or worth reading.
But is this generally true? Growing up near a world-class music school, I've never heard musicians talk about music in terms of Herz, refraction, interference or resonance. (With the exception of the frequency associated with a standard European scale.) And I've not heard anyone worth listening to claim that the non-trivial task of learning to build a violin worth playing provides any deeper insight into musical performance than practice.
Slashdot Mirror
Hrm, I'm wondering where half of these criticisms come from because they are the exact opposite of my experiences using the new nautilus, and contrary to even a casual examination of what spacial nautilus does.
#1) It is just like DOS. You can only be 'active' in one directory at a time. Deep dir's were hell, but shallow ones were kinda quick and easy to copy/move files around and open them.
You can have views of multiple directories open at any point in time (in fact, as many views as you need.) Deep directories also do not matter because it takes just as many steps to unfold the tree to the necessary number of steps as it does to open a deep directory in nautilus. In what ways is this "just like dos."
#2) The entire "browser" style has lasted only because Suzie Soccermom has never learned that by using a "Tree-view + detailed list" is easier, (damn Windows default settings).
I see advantages and disadvantages to both. The "tree + detailed list" view frequently annoys me because I find myself managing excessively long lists on both sides of pane. Although, there is an inherent problem with GUI file managers because it is rarely obvious what a click and drag might do.
#3) IIRC Xtree, Norton Commander and Dosshell were all designed to quickly & easily allow of folder/file manipulation at the deep level. This is a huge improvment over the existing DOS CLI.
Nautilus is designed to quickly and easily allow folder/file manipulation at any level you choose. (I started using Nautilus with some pretty deep file trees and found it to be pretty darn easy.) I still can't see the relationship between Nautilus and the DOS CLI (or even the unix shell CLI which has many of the same problems you cite here.)
Like a previous poster stated. Spatial systems would work very good for large numbers of files, if the OS did all the sorting for you. (Didn't MS try this with "My Documents, My Pictures, My P0rn..." and we all hated them dearly for it?)
Actually, I've found that spacial systems work equally well for shallow and large and deep and few file systems. I think a lot of the grousing about a spatial model vs, a tree model comes from the fact that the tree folks just don't want to be bothered dealing with it.
The point of the securityfocus.com article was not "South Pole Research Station Hacked Twice", but that the US DoJ has used this as a spin campaign to justify the cyberterrorism provisions of the patriot act.
However, the FBI and DoJ's version of events is contradicted by the NSF internal assessment of the attack...
The previous security problems at the South Pole appears in the second to last paragraph as support for the claim that the attack was not threatening to life support at Amudsen-Scott.
The trouble with Manos is that like most Ed Wood films, its badness becomes something of a redeeming quality. It is so bad that you can get a chuckle out of it. You ignore the characters on the screen, and focus on the actors stumbling over their lines, and the director who thought this stuff up. IMNSHO, the movies produced by professionals that fail on every level to be entertaining or make sense are more offensively bad that the movies made by incompetent first-timers.
For example, Highlander 2 is so bad that you can't even laugh at the production values. The producers earnestly tried to put out a sequel worthy of the first and failed in every respect. When it came out, its badness was the only thing my group of friends could agree on at the time.
I know that, in hindsight, it is easy to find flaws.
Which I guess is the point. The design of these systems are intended to minimize the possibility of failure. It is easy for us to armchair analyze the decisions involved and say that someone didn't do their homework, and ignore the thousands of anticipated disasters that were accounted for and prevented.
That CS majors are seen as an inferior type of geek relative to their cancer-curing, drug-designing, atom-smashing counterparts?
There is the old saying that any field that has to put the word "science" in its name, probably isn't. (I don't agree with this myself but...)
Is there, after all, something intrinsically semi-autistic, and therefore testosterone-linked, in fiddling with computers?
I would argue that the mythology that geeks have cultivated of computer science as the persuit of the semi-autistic is a factor. However, I don't think that computer science necessarily is more anti-social than other fields.
I'm reading a Singh's chapter on the Benchley Park decryption effort in The Code Book. He describes the work on enigma ciphers as a colaborative social endeavor that included a lunchtime game of rounders. It is quite interesting that women were involved in computer science from the start but faded out.
I think that in other fields there is quite a bit more diversity in accomodated problem-solving styles. Mathematics for example runs a range from solitary thinkers who disappear for a decade to solve a problem to promiscuous collaborators.
There _must_ be some deeper reason why women don't play chess, ,whether it's genes, nutrition, alien mind control, whatever, and we must accept the possibility that this reason is also applicable to computer science.
When we have advanced socially to the point where chess is no longer defined as a man's game, then we can entertain that hypothesis.
Just some summary of the solutions so far:
Limit login attempts: Usually cheap and easy to implement. However it does not protect from a case where a person gets the password file.
Computationally expensive hashes: If the password file is compromised, forces the attacker to spend more resources on an attack.
Two-factor authentication: The good news is that the attacker must have both the token and password to log in. The bad news is that the user must have both the token and password to login. Can be expensive.
Certificates: Can be used to decentralize the password problem. The server never needs to know what passwords the private keys are encrypted with. The bad news is that it takes only one compromised private key with a weak password.
One Time Passwords: Good against snooping attacks. Current software choices are irritating though.
So somebody said that maybe all life COULD be devoured by a properly-designed nanotech robot that would reproduce quickly and break up organic matter into component monomers, etc etc etc.
I keep reading about the grey goo, and I've yet to see an argument that it is possible from someone who demonstrates an understanding of the complex tradeoffs that limit our currently existing biological self-replicating machines. Problems like:
1: Oxygen is both a nutrient, and a poison.
2: The lack of a universal catalyst. A machine that catalyzes the transformation of one amino acid will be less than optimal for catalyzing a different amino acid.
3: Energy and trace elements severely limit growth at a microscopic level.
And how many lives will be jeopardized now that the paramedics have to second guess themselves?
Nice way to throw in a bit of hysteria there. I suspect that if these implants became common enough to be a concern for paramedics, that parametics will be trained to look for signs of an implant such as a big-ass scar or medical alert badge. In cases where there is doubt, such as good circulation to the extremities, they would use standard equipment such as a stethoscope and O2 meter to figure out what is going on.
Don't know why this one got modded up as insightful, but...
ELDERLY VOLUNTEERS AT THE POLLS!
Come on! Whenever I've gone to the polls, I've never seen anyone younger than retirement home/Tuesdasy night bingo age running the show.
The obvious solution to this problem is for the self-proclaimed technically elite to volunteer to work at the polls.
Certainly, they're nice and friendly, but seriously -- this is the generation that, for the most part, yell and scream if someone automates anything in their life with a computer.
I've not found this to be the case. All of the people over 65 in my family are comfortable using computers, and only get pissed off when some "whippersnapper" decides to make dramatic, arbitrary, and unasked-for changes to the systems they they use. Getting bent out of shape over having to learn something new to do basic and necessary tasks is not unique to the elderly. How much bile has been vented on a weekly basis by the technology elites here about changes to the Nautilus file manager?
Of course, blame the user is the ultimate cop-out for bad design. Touch-screen voting machines are being pushed as even easier to use and manage than the mechanical systems they replace. I'm finding it hard to believe that the errors we are seing are due to technically naive poll volunteers who somehow managed to deal with systems that (at least according to touchscreen voting companies) more complex. Even if we assume that poll workers are fools, voting machines must be foolproof to ensure that every vote counts.
There seems to be a contradiction between two of this author's arguments.
First he argues that gratis software undermines the market for commercial software. Because anyone can roll out a "free" version.
Then he argues that OSS is not always better and that there are advantages to closed production methods and commercialization.
The reason why Photoshop, MS Word, MS Outlook, SPSS, SAS, Illustrator and Endnote are not hurting very much is because rolling out a "free" version is easier said than done. The open source equivalents are still a bit scruffy behind the ears.
If you are going to compete in any market, you have to offer something that your clients consider worth paying for. You are also going to have to continue to innovate to stay one step ahead of the competition. This is true whether you are talking about software or publishing.
Gee, am I the only one who has been writing xhtml in vim for a while now?
It's not that hard to do.
1: add the doctype at the top.
2: always close your tags.
3: check you work with a validator.
html tidy will also identify and clean up any mistakes.
However, it doesn't take into account the fact that, for typical web distribution, the compression phase only has to be run once, and should probably not be counted. In that case, it looks like bzip2 slightly edges out gzip. Also, the default page is set up for a 1000kbit connection, which is probably faster than most internet connections -- which favors gzip. And, of course, it doesn't give benchmarks for image data, which might be different than results for source code.
While the compression phase only has to run once, the decompression phase is what worries me. According to the tests, the decompression phase for bzip2 runs 5-8 times that of gzip. Multiplied by a half-dozen images per page, that is a lot of work to render a page.
Bzip2 is great for applications where I can sit and twiddle my thumbs for a few seconds (or 20 minutes as the case may be). But gzip still rules the roost for interactive applications.
It seems like any time compression is brought up, somebody brings touts bzip2 as the uber-compression scheme.
Bzip2 provides a modest to moderate decrease in file size at the expense of huge increases in compression/decompression time. A nice comparison can be found at http://www.elis.ugent.be/~wheirman/compression/. Gzip seems to occupy a nice sweet-spot between file size and avoiding thumb-twiddling.
I also suspect that at least part of what Asimov was doing with his Robot stories was highlighting the complexities of human ethics by offering up robotics as a simple rule-based foil.
Leave this man alone. He hasn't done anything substantially criminal. It's not like he was shipping food in violation of sanctions to the poor Yugoslavians or anything.
Actually, the exhibition match was a big deal for Yugoslavia drawing in thousands of people with money to spend into the local economy. In the process, Fischer pocketed a goodly sum just for showing up. Now, certainly we can debate at length whether said sanctions were a good idea, but arguing that "it was just a chess match" or that it was not a criminal act is missing the point. I'm much more sympathetic to Americans engaging sister-cities programs in Cuba who face the same penalties than the star of what many argue was THE chess event of the 1990s.
Another facet behind this story is that it is not as if Fischer is being persecuted here. He's been living comfortably overseas for over a decade. The maximum penalty he faces is 10 years and $250,000. If he behaves himself, he could probably get away with a token fine and public service. There was no big manhunt. Although his probable where abouts have been known off and on for the last 10 years, we have placed no public pressure on the countries he lived in to capture him. He was detained and deported on a routine problem with his passport. For the most part, it seems as if the U.S. had written Fischer off as a loss, and was willing to let him live as and expatriate.
I have yet to see a movie that successfully managed to cover more than 1/5th of a good novel, and the process of going from novel to screenplay usually does quite a bit of violence to the story along the way. The ideal source material for a movie appears to be either the short story or the stage play.
Novels are novels and movies are movies. There is quite a bit that you can do in a novel that is hugely difficult to do in a movie. I just finished A Wizard of Earthsea and Tombs of Atuan this week for perhaps the 5th time, and realized how much large chunks of those novels center on internal psychological narrative that is very difficult to do without relying on something trite like a voiceover. Even further, Tombs of Atuan is even more sparse with both action and dialogue.
And that of course misses the point that fiction is not just about character and plot, but about the beauty of words, the twist of an unusual metaphor that sparks a new connection, since I'm reading Le Guin:
Or William Gibson's best opening hook:
Certainly, cinema has its own beauty, its own poetry, its own way of presenting the unusual twist of metaphor. But its a different beauty and poetry from a well-written novel or short story. As much as the two mediums like to trade off plots and characters, filmmakers figured out about 80 years ago that cinema is something different.
There is the entire assumption in this post that movies and novels are about information rather than entertainment or even *gasp* art. Only bad movies are passive. Good movies require just as much interest an effort as a good novel. Of course, the magic of a good movie or a good novel is the hook. A good work of art will inspire you to give of your time and energy willingly.
If you want the information there is no problem finding reviews with all the information in the form of a synopsis.
Also, (and I think this is hugely important) reading has very limited memetic aspects. When I've read a new book, the first thing I want to do is discuss it with other people. However, since relatively few people have read the same book. The meme hasn't propagated.
I think memetics is a bunch of hooey and the wrong theory to describe what is going on here. But in practice, I've not found this to be a problem to talk about books as opposed to talking about movies.
Here we go again with NASA concetrating on trying to find "life" on other planets. What ever happened to the science of simply exploring and learning about our solar system and how it formed instead of this quest of focusing on trying to find life on other planets. There is more to space exploration than finding life.
Um, where does this statement come from? The post uses the phrase "building blocks of life" which is the only phrase used in the article its self (unusual for a science news article given that journalists are more obsessed with the "life" question than planetary astronomers.)
Of course there is more to space exploration than finding life. However, one of the more interesting aspects about the outer solar system appears to be an abundance of organics. Understanding the distribution, formation and chemestry of organics in the outer solar system can help us improve our theories about how organic compounds came to dominate the chemistry of Earth.
Add to this, the problem of having your private key available when you need it, no matter which computer you happen to be sending mail from.
Don't you?
Seriously?
or 1 to 1.5 k a year?
No. I plan my tool purchases well in advance and sparingly. Mostly what I get from Maximum PC is an idea of what I might be getting 3 years from now. Part of my preference for CPU is that they are willing to run reviews of budget items that Maximum PC would distain as being not cutting-edge enough.
New Scientist is a British import I really wish I had the cash to subscribe to. Their science coverage is a notch above Scientific American and a few steps above Discover. It is a magazine that I make a special trip to the library for at least once a month. In addition, it is quite interesting to see how a European science periodical approaches issues such as GMOs and energy policy.
Fortean Times sort of a brainy "Ripley's Believe it or Not". It manages to cover the weird and bizzare without falling into either smug skeptical dismissal or empty-headed conspiracy. Their recent coverage of H. P. Lovecraft's connection with the occult was excellent. (verdict: Lovecraft was a life long atheist who did just enough background research to fill his stories) In some cases they are willing to step in and declare a myth to be bullshit. For example, with the WWI angels legend, the creator is both still alive, and explicitly honest as to having created that little bit of propaganda.
Basically if you give a damn about computer hardware, you should have a subscription. Very highly recommended.
I skim it once a month at the library but to be quite honest, I've not read much there that is worth paying money for. The quality is drowned under the noise of 30-something geeks coping the attitude of 13-year-old walking gonads. Mostly though it seems to be built around the assumption of dropping 3K into a custom rig every other year.
Computer Power User is both more readable and less of an insult to its readership, but even it is rarely worth paying for.
Ultimately, it comes down to a matter of preference and a lot of the "my operating system is better than your operating system" just resolves to a pissing match. I cut my teeth on solaris and irix back before I tried Linux and I found Linux (granted with an early version of Red Hat) to be a bit scattered in comparison. I've not found the same problems to be true of FreeBSD.
A few hundred words of copy from a Linux advocate with a few choice quotes from a BSD advocate for balance. Other than the once-a-month "there is more than linux in open-source operating systems" there is not really that much in this article that is NEWS or worth reading.
But is this generally true? Growing up near a world-class music school, I've never heard musicians talk about music in terms of Herz, refraction, interference or resonance. (With the exception of the frequency associated with a standard European scale.) And I've not heard anyone worth listening to claim that the non-trivial task of learning to build a violin worth playing provides any deeper insight into musical performance than practice.