Yeah, the whole fact that she complains after the fact rubs me entirely the wrong way.
She didn't see it beforehand; she had no input to the production. They had the legal right to, and that's what happens to just about every author who sells rights. From the producers' POV, they don't want to be limited by slavish attention to following the author's whims. Another Halmi production, Dinotopia, actually went too far the other way. The author was deeply involved in the production; it looked beautiful, but was ultimately boring as he never had any story, just a visual concept (he was originally an artist) that he sent his protagonists through to display it, something that sustained the first miniseries but ran out of steam in subsequent episodes. But Le Guin is an award-winning writer, she knows what a story is and they were fools to think they could do better.
It saddens me that her most vehement criticisms come down to "wahh, marketing drones changed skin colors!", not "they completely and utterly bastardized the story".
Actually, while the Salon piece is pretty much just about race, her own site she does complain about how they fucked up the story, especailly after they did publicity about how much they respected her vision.
There are obviously circumstances in which caucasians are in the minority. They are nevertheless the exception rather than the rule.
As we're about 10% of the world's population, it's actually the rule outside your enclave. (I live in Hong Kong, so I'm disabused of any idea that we're a majority of the population.) That was something UKL expanded on in her Slate piece; that it's absurd to think in the future most people in every place will be Caucasian, as they are in every single SF movie and TV series (please correct me if you can think of one; I can't). It makes one wonder what happened back on Earth; is there still a rich white First World and a dirt-poor Third in the 23rd century? Was there a global ethnic cleansing? The implications are creepy and never explained.)
Of course, it's the same reason most aliens look like humans down to their fingernails (with some latex on their forehead or ears); because that's what Hollywood has available.
However, I was a bit surprised that was the thing UKL focused on; the general opinion (looking at the forum on the Sci-Fi Channels's site) is very negative with regard to the story, script and acting; everyone who read the books hated it, few who came to it without knowing the books liked it either.
for free software people to use a pdf that cannot be read by free software (Konqueror in my case) is rather like the "Temperance" society using (paying) a liquor company to advertise their position.
The bottom line is money; always money
The PDF wasn't supposed to be read by a browser; the bottom line is it was meant to be printed in the NYT. It's nice if the same file works in your, or any, browser, but that was beside the point. Especially as someone using Konqueror isn't the audience for the ad -- you already know about Firefox, and you choose not to use it regardless.
There is little to none free software used in professional publishing; that's just the state of play now. (Yes, I know about LaTex, which has a niche amongst mainly engineering and math types.)
However, this now presents a challenge to free software people. A very highly publicized pdf file about free software doesn't render properly so that details can be made out in any free pdf viewer today.
If anyone needed a `test case' where it fails, well, there ya go...
Really, I don't think so. The PDF was derived from the printed layout. If it works at all for any other purpose that's a bonus. If necessary, a more viewer-friendly version could be made easily (export to PS, distill with GS, say). They did make the JPEG, though of course the resolution is lousy, you can hardly read the large text on the 2nd page, let alone the 4 point type on page 1.
Funny, this is a free software project, right? So how come they can't produce a pdf that is readable in any free software project? Aka ghostscript (7.x), xpdf, kpdf, and gpdf all cannot render the names properly. I had to load acrobat reader (not free software!!!) to read the names.
Probably because their priority was to make sure it was in a format the NYT could use. I note that it was made by Adobe InDesign; extremely unfree software in every sense, but pretty well guaranteed to print correctly. InDesign uses OpenType to a much greater extent than any other DTP app, so it's probably some font issue that's the problem with other PDF apps. Also it's a huge amount of text to have on one page, possibly they're just overflowing -- as just about every non-Adobe implementation is based on GhostScript I think, a common bug would stop them all.
And of course Acrobat Reader is free, in the monetary sense, though I suppose you didn't mean that.
Everyone who says the government wasn't doing enough before 9/11 over here.
Everyone who says the government is doing too much after 9/11 over there.
Everyone who says both please insert gun in mouth and pull trigger.
It's not a contradiction, since you don't specify what the enough refers to.
Before 9/11, the govt didn't do enough to... monitor radical Islamic groups; coordinate intelligence; improve cockpit security; etc.
After 9/11 the govt did too much... to attack any group of Muslims (except of course Saudis); harass innocent travellers with ineffectual identity checks and rules; remove emabrrassing information from public view; etc.
scary thing is billy gates bought exclusive digital rights to many of the worlds finest paintings over a decade ago for little more than a song.
I'd be interested in how that's works, at least for anything done prior to the 1920s when the current infinite copyright regime kicks in. For modern art it might be possible.
You can blame President Clinton for ordering too many Humvees, and not enough Bradlee's.
Clinton wasn't planning to invade Iraq. He kept a lid on Saddam without committing ground troops and had no reason to believe that would change.
Yes, if we had more armor, fewer troops would have died. But we didn't. You go to war with the Army you have.
If you choose to go to war, you have no one to blame but yourself if your army is not up to it. Invading Iraq wasn't a military necessity, and even if you think it was, Rumsfeld et al had over a year to plan it, and build or fit more armor, amongst other things (like training prison guards, getting people who can speak Iraqi, etc).
Do you seriously think that GWB has anything to do with the thing failing? All GWB said was that he wants a missile defense system and pushed to have the money appropriated. he has absolutely nothig to do with the thing failing.
GWB didn't cause the missile to fail; however he ignored the advice given by every competent scientist that the system can never work no matter how much money is pissed away on it.
At least 25% of the time I try to use the headphones on a plane they don't work or there is intolerable crosstalk. If they can't wire these up reliably, I don't have great expectations of ethernet. Also the sockets would probably see a lot of wear and tear, not to mention getting chewing gum stuck in them. I think I destroyed a socket in my PC when I was constantly plugging and unplugging the router when I was having coonfig problems. With wireless, there is basically one device to maintain, maybe some repeaters they could fit in the ceilings, and nothing for passengers to break.
You need to have the right cookie, which you get by viewing the ad. So don't block cookies they give you. (I got into an endless loop the first time I used their day pass method.
Note how the (/.) article does NOT state the number of bugs in WindowsXP code. It just states the number of lines in XP code (supposedly, courtesy Microsoft Corp.) and some _industry_average_ bugs per line numbers. I would call that "propaganda" if I weren't on their side;)
They spent 4 years sieving through the Linux code. That's all they can speak authoritatively about. But if anyone has done similar work for MS, it'd very likely be under NDA. So they just used an "industry average". Meaningless really, who can say whether MS is above or below "average"? (Not just asserting "Winblows is teh sux" but actually measuring it.)
RTFA: they were working on the code from 2000; took them four years to analyse it. So the code they were looking at has been patched in current versions: "Seth Hallem, CEO of Coverity, a provider of source-code analysis, noted that the majority of the bugs documented in the study have already been fixed by members of the open-source development community."
Now we're arguing the definition of "first mover" I simply see it as "first to market", which is also distinct from "inventor". "Popularizer" is another thing; though you might be surprised how popular CP/M was. (It ran on Apple II as well as IBM PCs.) As for MS's crown, I gave CP/M as the first one I could think of that definitely preceded them. I'm sure there were other, earlier ones. Probably those associated with Apple, if not Apple itself. And I know I didn't document sufficiently; I simply wanted to lodge an objection. I've got things to do that have to take precedence over Slashdot debates at the moment so I just went with what I could remember. See the books Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy, Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger and the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley (which is quite close to the real events, according to most accounts) for something more authoritative and interesting than what I can offer.
in fact it was mainly your knee-jerk reaction and lack of any real information that made me go look these up.
Sorry, I had an appointment. But I knew most of those, certainly Microsoft (ever heard of CP/M from Digital Research?) and Intel, were in no way the first movers, so that's what jerked my knee.
The original poster is vindicated.
Your own post shows that none of the companies, except perhaps Xerox, was the "first mover". So who is vindicated? Changing the qualification to "first popularizer" is a different question altogether.
But the computer and electronics industry tends to confirm the first mover advantage:
Microsoft - first microcomputer software company Intel - first microprocessor company Oracle - first reliable and commercial RDMS company AOL - one of the original online services Xerox - first photocopier company Sony - first widespread transistor radio company
You've got to be joking. That just shows that the real first movers have been wiped from the public mind.
n addition to blocking spam, we mod our/etc/hosts.allow to keep these systems from connecting to many services:
Living in Hong Kong, it's really irritating to clik on a porn site and get redirected to a 403 because "Too much traffic from your country, try later". Of course, I can then use a proxy if I really want to see the page, but it's a pain.
Remember, even if the country is more or less capitalistic, the government is still totalitarian. They execute people for drunk driving and such...
Actually, there have been several recent cases when drunken cadres have killed pedestrians in hit and runs, and when the families of the victims tried to get justice they found themselves beaten and imprisoned. Communism didn't work out the way Marx thought; it's a long way from a Workers' Paradise.
I simply ban China and most other Asian countries at my router.
If you'd read the FA, it was explained that most spam is sent from zombie PCs, all over the world, but primarily in the US. China come into it mostly as hosting the websites that those idiots who want to buy herbal viagra go to.
Evil Corporations who choose to be bad citizens and pollute and act unethically should be boycotted and should not recieve patronage, but when someone proposes doing the same to a government which is being a bad Internet citizen, they are attacked.
But you're NOT doing it to the Chinese government, but to ordinary people like me, who live in Hong Kong, thousands of miles away from the ISPs in Beijing and Henan, to which I have no relation or control. Go picket the Chinese embassy if you want them to pay attention. Kicking me around does nothing to stop spam. Go to FLorida and stop the cunts who actually origiante the spam (95% of the pam I get is from America).
I disagree. At my workplace I am constantly hearing people on phone conversations. If I had to "pay attention for a few seconds" every time one of them talked, I would get nothing done.
We must be wired up differently. I could never concentrate on my work in a shared office for just that reason.
The shoe bomber had the right idea, just he was laughably inept. The heel of a normal shoe (he used atletic shoes) is bigger than most cell phones, and made of plastic or something that roughly resembles plastic explosive already. But blowing up random planes has not been an al-Qaeda tactic, and not many others are willing to be suicide bombers (Lockerbie was unaccompanied luggage).
Slashdot Mirror
She didn't see it beforehand; she had no input to the production. They had the legal right to, and that's what happens to just about every author who sells rights. From the producers' POV, they don't want to be limited by slavish attention to following the author's whims. Another Halmi production, Dinotopia, actually went too far the other way. The author was deeply involved in the production; it looked beautiful, but was ultimately boring as he never had any story, just a visual concept (he was originally an artist) that he sent his protagonists through to display it, something that sustained the first miniseries but ran out of steam in subsequent episodes. But Le Guin is an award-winning writer, she knows what a story is and they were fools to think they could do better.
Actually, while the Salon piece is pretty much just about race, her own site she does complain about how they fucked up the story, especailly after they did publicity about how much they respected her vision.
As we're about 10% of the world's population, it's actually the rule outside your enclave. (I live in Hong Kong, so I'm disabused of any idea that we're a majority of the population.) That was something UKL expanded on in her Slate piece; that it's absurd to think in the future most people in every place will be Caucasian, as they are in every single SF movie and TV series (please correct me if you can think of one; I can't). It makes one wonder what happened back on Earth; is there still a rich white First World and a dirt-poor Third in the 23rd century? Was there a global ethnic cleansing? The implications are creepy and never explained.)
Of course, it's the same reason most aliens look like humans down to their fingernails (with some latex on their forehead or ears); because that's what Hollywood has available.
However, I was a bit surprised that was the thing UKL focused on; the general opinion (looking at the forum on the Sci-Fi Channels's site) is very negative with regard to the story, script and acting; everyone who read the books hated it, few who came to it without knowing the books liked it either.
The PDF wasn't supposed to be read by a browser; the bottom line is it was meant to be printed in the NYT. It's nice if the same file works in your, or any, browser, but that was beside the point. Especially as someone using Konqueror isn't the audience for the ad -- you already know about Firefox, and you choose not to use it regardless.
There is little to none free software used in professional publishing; that's just the state of play now. (Yes, I know about LaTex, which has a niche amongst mainly engineering and math types.)
Really, I don't think so. The PDF was derived from the printed layout. If it works at all for any other purpose that's a bonus. If necessary, a more viewer-friendly version could be made easily (export to PS, distill with GS, say). They did make the JPEG, though of course the resolution is lousy, you can hardly read the large text on the 2nd page, let alone the 4 point type on page 1.
Probably because their priority was to make sure it was in a format the NYT could use. I note that it was made by Adobe InDesign; extremely unfree software in every sense, but pretty well guaranteed to print correctly. InDesign uses OpenType to a much greater extent than any other DTP app, so it's probably some font issue that's the problem with other PDF apps. Also it's a huge amount of text to have on one page, possibly they're just overflowing -- as just about every non-Adobe implementation is based on GhostScript I think, a common bug would stop them all.
And of course Acrobat Reader is free, in the monetary sense, though I suppose you didn't mean that.
It's not a contradiction, since you don't specify what the enough refers to.
Before 9/11, the govt didn't do enough to ... monitor radical Islamic groups; coordinate intelligence; improve cockpit security; etc.
After 9/11 the govt did too much... to attack any group of Muslims (except of course Saudis); harass innocent travellers with ineffectual identity checks and rules; remove emabrrassing information from public view; etc.
I'd be interested in how that's works, at least for anything done prior to the 1920s when the current infinite copyright regime kicks in. For modern art it might be possible.
Clinton wasn't planning to invade Iraq. He kept a lid on Saddam without committing ground troops and had no reason to believe that would change.
Yes, if we had more armor, fewer troops would have died. But we didn't. You go to war with the Army you have.
If you choose to go to war, you have no one to blame but yourself if your army is not up to it. Invading Iraq wasn't a military necessity, and even if you think it was, Rumsfeld et al had over a year to plan it, and build or fit more armor, amongst other things (like training prison guards, getting people who can speak Iraqi, etc).
GWB didn't cause the missile to fail; however he ignored the advice given by every competent scientist that the system can never work no matter how much money is pissed away on it.
At least 25% of the time I try to use the headphones on a plane they don't work or there is intolerable crosstalk. If they can't wire these up reliably, I don't have great expectations of ethernet. Also the sockets would probably see a lot of wear and tear, not to mention getting chewing gum stuck in them. I think I destroyed a socket in my PC when I was constantly plugging and unplugging the router when I was having coonfig problems. With wireless, there is basically one device to maintain, maybe some repeaters they could fit in the ceilings, and nothing for passengers to break.
You need to have the right cookie, which you get by viewing the ad. So don't block cookies they give you. (I got into an endless loop the first time I used their day pass method.
They spent 4 years sieving through the Linux code. That's all they can speak authoritatively about. But if anyone has done similar work for MS, it'd very likely be under NDA. So they just used an "industry average". Meaningless really, who can say whether MS is above or below "average"? (Not just asserting "Winblows is teh sux" but actually measuring it.)
RTFA: they were working on the code from 2000; took them four years to analyse it. So the code they were looking at has been patched in current versions: "Seth Hallem, CEO of Coverity, a provider of source-code analysis, noted that the majority of the bugs documented in the study have already been fixed by members of the open-source development community."
...and yet a new fiber backbone network off previously layed fibre
s/off/from/
s/layed/laid/
Now we're arguing the definition of "first mover" I simply see it as "first to market", which is also distinct from "inventor". "Popularizer" is another thing; though you might be surprised how popular CP/M was. (It ran on Apple II as well as IBM PCs.) As for MS's crown, I gave CP/M as the first one I could think of that definitely preceded them. I'm sure there were other, earlier ones. Probably those associated with Apple, if not Apple itself. And I know I didn't document sufficiently; I simply wanted to lodge an objection. I've got things to do that have to take precedence over Slashdot debates at the moment so I just went with what I could remember. See the books Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy, Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger and the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley (which is quite close to the real events, according to most accounts) for something more authoritative and interesting than what I can offer.
Sorry, I had an appointment. But I knew most of those, certainly Microsoft (ever heard of CP/M from Digital Research?) and Intel, were in no way the first movers, so that's what jerked my knee.
The original poster is vindicated.
Your own post shows that none of the companies, except perhaps Xerox, was the "first mover". So who is vindicated? Changing the qualification to "first popularizer" is a different question altogether.
But the computer and electronics industry tends to confirm the first mover advantage:
Microsoft - first microcomputer software company
Intel - first microprocessor company
Oracle - first reliable and commercial RDMS company
AOL - one of the original online services
Xerox - first photocopier company
Sony - first widespread transistor radio company
You've got to be joking. That just shows that the real first movers have been wiped from the public mind.
Living in Hong Kong, it's really irritating to clik on a porn site and get redirected to a 403 because "Too much traffic from your country, try later". Of course, I can then use a proxy if I really want to see the page, but it's a pain.
Actually, there have been several recent cases when drunken cadres have killed pedestrians in hit and runs, and when the families of the victims tried to get justice they found themselves beaten and imprisoned. Communism didn't work out the way Marx thought; it's a long way from a Workers' Paradise.
For a few weeks. Then it would be coming from another three countries. Maybe eastern Europe, the Mid East, even South Africa.
Look on the bright side, spam is financing the rapid build up of Internet infrastructure throughout the Third World.
If you'd read the FA, it was explained that most spam is sent from zombie PCs, all over the world, but primarily in the US. China come into it mostly as hosting the websites that those idiots who want to buy herbal viagra go to.
But you're NOT doing it to the Chinese government, but to ordinary people like me, who live in Hong Kong, thousands of miles away from the ISPs in Beijing and Henan, to which I have no relation or control. Go picket the Chinese embassy if you want them to pay attention. Kicking me around does nothing to stop spam. Go to FLorida and stop the cunts who actually origiante the spam (95% of the pam I get is from America).
We must be wired up differently. I could never concentrate on my work in a shared office for just that reason.
The shoe bomber had the right idea, just he was laughably inept. The heel of a normal shoe (he used atletic shoes) is bigger than most cell phones, and made of plastic or something that roughly resembles plastic explosive already. But blowing up random planes has not been an al-Qaeda tactic, and not many others are willing to be suicide bombers (Lockerbie was unaccompanied luggage).