Ah, spiffy. I'd never heard this distinction before, despite being rather active in the community.
I think the attempt at making a distinction became an issue in the 70s, when movie/TV-related SF started to swamp the whole genre, and all the related novelisations, three or four places removed from any original thought, started to take over the book rackspace as well.
One thing does bother me, though, it feels rather subjective, sort of an "I'm better than you" classification...sort of like Trekkie vs. Trekker.
Yes, it is. Just trying to define "SF" has always been a good way to start an argument. It used to be that stuff like 1984 was excluded from the genre by the literati because it was too good. Now any mystical mishmash with special effects is included. It goes to the writers of this stuff having no respect, and often no knowledge, of the genre. One reason Star Wars (the original one) was good was because of the elements it recycled from the old pulp (1900-1940) era Space Opera. As Lucas disappeared up his own arsehole in the sequels it went downhill.
As I said, SF is often judged worthless by people who've never read it.
Read Niven (his early stuff), Pohl, Neal Stephenson, just at random for some good SF. For boring and pretentious, look at some of Lucas's recent scifi.
There is of course no authoritative definition, but I think most hard core SF fans would say that scifi is low idea content; where there is no originality in plot and no logic in the science (if it's mentioned at all). The SF elements are never original and often tacked on to plots that could as easily been in historical or fantasy settings. In "real" SF the ideas are central. There are very few SF movies or TV shows, almost all non-literary mass-media is scifi.
Scifi can be fun, as an emotional or visual experience, but it rarely provokes any reflection. Possibly the most annoying thing about scifi is that people make judgements on SF when they haven't actually been exposed to the real thing, just the bubblegum and pretty special effects of scifi, which they rightly judge as insubstantial.
The majority of people in China (which includes Taiwan Province and Hong Kong) supported the Serbian military aggression against the Kosovars
That's complete bullshit. For a start, the majority of Chinese (like Americans) couldn't tell you which continent the Kosovars lived on if you held a gun to their head. Total ignorance does not means support. (What the central government did is another thing entirely.)
Secondly, as a resident of Hong Kong I aver that those who DID know what the Serbs were doing were repulsed as much as anyone else. Though being on the other side of the world and lacking any army or vote, it makes no difference what we think in this or most other foreign issues. I do know some local charities have been active in supporting aid in the Balkans.
Yahoo is now a terrorist organization because they mention the names of web sites deemed terrorists (I noticed that they did not have actual links in an anchor tags, but it does list an executable URL.).
Nowhere in the Yahoo article did it say that reading or linking to the sites was illegal. The only prohibition mentioned was donating money to them. Yahoo was exercising preemptive self-censorship.
Or you could have printed it and had Kinkos scan and OCR it. I just had an old 700 page document OCR'd there and put on a CD in XML format for just over $20.
And then you spend a week proofreading it to find all the OCR errors. 99.9% accuracy (which is better than you'll ever get) is still about more than one per page. Maybe that's good enough for most novels, cosidering few publishers seem to even spellcheck their ms now before printing them.
If there's anything that raises my hackles a bit, it's the concept of building a business model on illegal behavior as a means of doing legitimate business down the road. That's the opposite of the way things are done in this country.
No, it's exactly how things were done. In the 19th C the US didn't recognise foreign IP rights, to allow its industry to catch up with Europe. That included copyright, so authors like Charles Dickens were screwed by US publishers who just reprinted their books with no payment to him. Only when the US started to want to sell IP, that's when you got sanctimonious about "respecting" it.
The fact is, simplicity works sometimes. IE lets me see more of the actual web page I want to look at with less interface clutter.
Try Opera, using F11 to go to full screen (same as IE), look up the shortcuts (ctrl-B to call up the keyBoard help) and mouse gestures; you can go most of the time without anything on the screen except the web page.
"There won't be anything we won't say to people to try and convince them that our way is the way to go."
-- Bill Gates on Microsoft marketing
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
-- Bill Gates circa 1981
"If you can't make it good, at least make it look good."
-- Bill Gates on the solid code base of Win9X
Bill certainly did not make the 640k statement, and I rather doubt he made the others. (He may be a megalomaniac, but he's not Dr Evil.) Do you have a source other than "Funny Bill Gates' quotes" web pages? It's interesting that the addition of "1981" seems to make it more authoritative, but for instance a Google groups search finds no mention before April 1992. (Possibly an April Fool's joke that went rogue.)
Following up myself...
Well, coming at it from the usmint.GOV site I found it links to moneyfactory.GOV, so they'ev just squatted the site. Too bad they pander to those who get confused with URLs that don't end in.com (or start with www) instead of just bouncing them to the.gov site. Presumably they publicise the.com otherwise we wouldn't have the link in the FA. What's the point in having 200 TLDs if they all alias to.coms?
Why the fuck is the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing using www.moneyfactory.com as their URL? As part of the government, shouldn't they be in.gov, or at possibly.us?
These are people who need to consult a dictionary more often.
There seem to be more such around, even in newspapers and magazines.
For instance, mixing up "horde" and "hoard", "cum" (Latin, not porno) and "come"; "straight-laced" for "strait-laced" (thinking of straight vs kinky, rather than tight vs loose); "Identikit" for "identical"; and on usenet and the web you can't escape lose/loose; its/it's; etc. Being a pedant (note: that's not a pederast) is tough.
My school runs Windows 2000, and I have *never* seen a *single* computer crash.... they have a fixed environment and don't mess with it - but, nonetheless, Windows XP (or 2000) can be made rock solid with proper administration.
I assume you're talking about desktop machines under your physical control, that you can admisniter of the network whenever the mood strikes. These are laptops the kids take home, connect directly to the Internet, load any cute software they come across, have their dad or older brother attempt to fix/upgrade/patch, etc.
In many other programming languages and mathematics "=" means "equality" NOT assignment; saner languages use ":=" for assignment. Yet, because of C's popularity, we will be stuck with this abuse of notation forever
Don't blame K&R for that, it was used long before C, eg in Fortran. Personally I'm happy with it, on the principle that assignment is such a common operator that I want it to be a sngle character, rather than two, like Pacal's:=.
Those are too hard to pronounce. Who not just distinguish them by prefixing the metric ones with the word "metric", as we do with tons and metric tons.
I think "decimal" would be more sensible; say "decimal GB" vs "binary GB" when it makes a difference.
...is that a search for VB.NET does not return any results either unless you perform an "Exact Phrase" search.
For ordinary searches, punctuation marks like "." are treated as spaces, which mean logical ANDs. And some words (in this case "vb" and "net") are ignored as being too common. If you search for "vb.net", which I suppose is what you get from an "exact phrase", you find "vb" followed by a space or punctuation and then "net".
Google tries to be intuitive, which means guessing what most people would expect, which of course means that sometimes you're surprised.
Hasn't Aunty has decided to put their entire archive online? How soon before anyone who cares to can listen to HHGTTG for free?
The BBC makes millions from tapes, videos, CDs, DVDs of their archive. How could they destroy that market and at the same time spend untold millions on bandwidth, servers, etc? Someone must have been seriously deranged to have suggested they'd do that; they'll back out of it if they haven't already. They were complaining about the cost of putting news online during the Iraq invasion.
I think some people need to quit being so stick-in-the-mud about rendering text into a visual format. Just because it is different doesn't make it bad.
Point of order: the first incarnation of HHGTG was as a BBC radio series. Then the novelisation, then the TV serial. So it's not rendering text so much as rewriting a script.
And though it may be heresy; I don't think the books were that great. Adams was a great script writer, but a mediocre novelist (IMHO, YMMV, etc).
Mass-market by definition cannot be cool. Cool requires a degree of exclusivity.
Coke, Levis, Nike seem to have squared that circle. It only requires the perception of exclusivity. Coinsider also diamonds. Are they exclusive? Many might say yes, though almost every married woman has at least one.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the attempt at making a distinction became an issue in the 70s, when movie/TV-related SF started to swamp the whole genre, and all the related novelisations, three or four places removed from any original thought, started to take over the book rackspace as well.
One thing does bother me, though, it feels rather subjective, sort of an "I'm better than you" classification...sort of like Trekkie vs. Trekker.
Yes, it is. Just trying to define "SF" has always been a good way to start an argument. It used to be that stuff like 1984 was excluded from the genre by the literati because it was too good. Now any mystical mishmash with special effects is included. It goes to the writers of this stuff having no respect, and often no knowledge, of the genre. One reason Star Wars (the original one) was good was because of the elements it recycled from the old pulp (1900-1940) era Space Opera. As Lucas disappeared up his own arsehole in the sequels it went downhill.
Rather, it's a way for SF fans to distinguish themselves from the mouth-breathing fanboys who've appropriated the term.
As I said, SF is often judged worthless by people who've never read it.
Read Niven (his early stuff), Pohl, Neal Stephenson, just at random for some good SF. For boring and pretentious, look at some of Lucas's recent scifi.
There is of course no authoritative definition, but I think most hard core SF fans would say that scifi is low idea content; where there is no originality in plot and no logic in the science (if it's mentioned at all). The SF elements are never original and often tacked on to plots that could as easily been in historical or fantasy settings. In "real" SF the ideas are central. There are very few SF movies or TV shows, almost all non-literary mass-media is scifi.
Scifi can be fun, as an emotional or visual experience, but it rarely provokes any reflection. Possibly the most annoying thing about scifi is that people make judgements on SF when they haven't actually been exposed to the real thing, just the bubblegum and pretty special effects of scifi, which they rightly judge as insubstantial.
That's true, but the OP said "scifi". Whether he knows it or not, ther is a distinction. Star Wars is good scifi, but not even on the radar as SF.
That's complete bullshit. For a start, the majority of Chinese (like Americans) couldn't tell you which continent the Kosovars lived on if you held a gun to their head. Total ignorance does not means support. (What the central government did is another thing entirely.)
Secondly, as a resident of Hong Kong I aver that those who DID know what the Serbs were doing were repulsed as much as anyone else. Though being on the other side of the world and lacking any army or vote, it makes no difference what we think in this or most other foreign issues. I do know some local charities have been active in supporting aid in the Balkans.
Nowhere in the Yahoo article did it say that reading or linking to the sites was illegal. The only prohibition mentioned was donating money to them. Yahoo was exercising preemptive self-censorship.
And then you spend a week proofreading it to find all the OCR errors. 99.9% accuracy (which is better than you'll ever get) is still about more than one per page. Maybe that's good enough for most novels, cosidering few publishers seem to even spellcheck their ms now before printing them.
No, it's exactly how things were done. In the 19th C the US didn't recognise foreign IP rights, to allow its industry to catch up with Europe. That included copyright, so authors like Charles Dickens were screwed by US publishers who just reprinted their books with no payment to him. Only when the US started to want to sell IP, that's when you got sanctimonious about "respecting" it.
Try Opera, using F11 to go to full screen (same as IE), look up the shortcuts (ctrl-B to call up the keyBoard help) and mouse gestures; you can go most of the time without anything on the screen except the web page.
-- Bill Gates on Microsoft marketing
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
-- Bill Gates circa 1981
"If you can't make it good, at least make it look good."
-- Bill Gates on the solid code base of Win9X
Bill certainly did not make the 640k statement, and I rather doubt he made the others. (He may be a megalomaniac, but he's not Dr Evil.) Do you have a source other than "Funny Bill Gates' quotes" web pages? It's interesting that the addition of "1981" seems to make it more authoritative, but for instance a Google groups search finds no mention before April 1992. (Possibly an April Fool's joke that went rogue.)
Following up myself... .com (or start with www) instead of just bouncing them to the .gov site. Presumably they publicise the .com otherwise we wouldn't have the link in the FA. What's the point in having 200 TLDs if they all alias to .coms?
Well, coming at it from the usmint.GOV site I found it links to moneyfactory.GOV, so they'ev just squatted the site. Too bad they pander to those who get confused with URLs that don't end in
Why the fuck is the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing using www.moneyfactory.com as their URL? As part of the government, shouldn't they be in .gov, or at possibly .us?
What he actually typed was "lamen" (no "y").
These are people who need to consult a dictionary more often.
There seem to be more such around, even in newspapers and magazines. For instance, mixing up "horde" and "hoard", "cum" (Latin, not porno) and "come"; "straight-laced" for "strait-laced" (thinking of straight vs kinky, rather than tight vs loose); "Identikit" for "identical"; and on usenet and the web you can't escape lose/loose; its/it's; etc. Being a pedant (note: that's not a pederast) is tough.
Is that "layman's" or "lamer's"?
Yes, agreed, it's idiotic.
My district experimented with notebooks in one grade school (only about 120), and they had them locked down good and proper.
How do you lock down a notebook? -- A serious, not rhetorical, question.
Mac OS X can be trashed just as easily as Windows XP if it's not locked down.
I didn't mention OSX at all.
the families should not be able to upgrade them or fix/patch them.
But they will, inevitably.
I assume you're talking about desktop machines under your physical control, that you can admisniter of the network whenever the mood strikes. These are laptops the kids take home, connect directly to the Internet, load any cute software they come across, have their dad or older brother attempt to fix/upgrade/patch, etc.
Don't blame K&R for that, it was used long before C, eg in Fortran. Personally I'm happy with it, on the principle that assignment is such a common operator that I want it to be a sngle character, rather than two, like Pacal's :=.
I think "decimal" would be more sensible; say "decimal GB" vs "binary GB" when it makes a difference.
Because the difference, absolutely and proportionally, between binary and decimal capacities increases with size, it matters even more:
I researched this a year ago when working out a fake number to use in a book, and finally have the opportunity to share this worthless information...
For ordinary searches, punctuation marks like "." are treated as spaces, which mean logical ANDs. And some words (in this case "vb" and "net") are ignored as being too common. If you search for "vb.net", which I suppose is what you get from an "exact phrase", you find "vb" followed by a space or punctuation and then "net".
Google tries to be intuitive, which means guessing what most people would expect, which of course means that sometimes you're surprised.
The BBC makes millions from tapes, videos, CDs, DVDs of their archive. How could they destroy that market and at the same time spend untold millions on bandwidth, servers, etc? Someone must have been seriously deranged to have suggested they'd do that; they'll back out of it if they haven't already. They were complaining about the cost of putting news online during the Iraq invasion.
Point of order: the first incarnation of HHGTG was as a BBC radio series. Then the novelisation, then the TV serial. So it's not rendering text so much as rewriting a script.
And though it may be heresy; I don't think the books were that great. Adams was a great script writer, but a mediocre novelist (IMHO, YMMV, etc).
Coke, Levis, Nike seem to have squared that circle. It only requires the perception of exclusivity. Coinsider also diamonds. Are they exclusive? Many might say yes, though almost every married woman has at least one.