...The Truman Show... also got nominations in the past, despite not being science fiction.
Why doesn't The Truman Show count as science fiction?
The absence of space travel, laser guns and robots doesn't stop something being science fiction, just as their presence doesn't guarantee it is. Good science fiction has always been about ideas -- about ideas that change society or our relationship with the universe.
For example, I've always considered most 'space opera' such as Star Wars to be simply adventure stories that happen to be set in space - not science fiction at all. Conversely, stories like The Truman Show which are about ideas, about the nature of the world, and which invoke a sense of wonder, strike me as being much closer to the heart of science fiction. (Though there's actually quite a bit of technology involved in the backstory to TTS too.) And of course there are stories with both, like Bladerunner, which not only has a future setting with all the trappings, but a plot which directly involves the nature of that setting, and asks deep questions about personal identity.
It wasn't me, but I agree with them. I mean, it doesn't carry on getting funnier every single time you see it, does it?
The first ten million times were the funniest. The next ten million, yeah, they were a bit funny too. The third ten million didn't make me laugh at at all. After that, it went into a bit of a decline...
Does anyone else find that sort of metallic noise familiar? It sounds uncannily like the effect of an audio processor called a ring modulator - also known as a multiplier. What's the betting they're just multiplying together all the inputs?
Yes, I agree - it's great that we have several convincing browsers to choose from.
But it's not a war. No browser is trying to squeeze the others out of business. None is using dirty trick, sly marketing, or deliberate incompatibilities to gain market share. None is linked to other software - and most importantly, none is linked directly into the OS. Even Apple's own browser is merely a straight option from those available, with no special advantages. The browsers compete - inasmuch as they compete at all - on a completely level playing field, the only differences being that of cost and technical merit. These are great days.
But even ignoring how wonderful zsh is, it's effectively an extension of ksh, and even has a compatibility mode for behaving substantially like ksh. It's open source, it's supplied with Mac OS X (and other systems too, I believe), it can do anything you want it to, and it even has a cool name! What more could you want (apart from zealots like me promoting it)?!
Well, AIUI it's as much Apple's as it is NeXT's, really. Which may or may not be less than it is Ritchie and Thompson's. NeXT did some great work, which should have been more appreciated, of course, but Apple have done a lot before and since then, as have many other people. Let's end on a note of agreement and say that, whoever made greater or lesser contributions, it's a great system:) And one that shows security doesn't need to be a handicap, nor something that users will reject.
For instance, they don't think having to type in a password to run Setup.exe is even remotely reasonable.
I don't think users are as resistant to security as that, provided it's done right. A case in point (and I mention this only as a relevant example, not because I'm a raving zealot, honest) is Mac OS X, which pretty much enforces a reasonable level of security. When you set it up, you create a user which has admin privileges but not root privileges -- and even that user must re-enter their password every time they install or change something at a system level. But although people do find Mac OS X features to complain about, the security is rarely one of them. Most people seem to accept it as a necessary evil in today's networked world.
At midnight on the twelfth of August, a huge mass of luminous gas erupted from Mars and sped towards Earth. Across two hundred million^W^W^Wthirty million miles of void, invisibly hurtling toward us, came the first of the missiles that were to bring so much calamity to Earth. As I watched, there was another jet of gas. It was another missile, starting on its way.
There are other reasons, too. EPOC, for example (the Psion palmtop's OS, pen-driven) always puts the 'OK' choice rightmost too, partly because for normal right-handed users that position will mean the pen obscures less of the screen than for the other buttons.
Was that the play directed by Ken Campbell? From all I hear, it sounds wonderful - it's a shame I was too young to see it. (Plus I didn't get to hear about HHGG until a few years later.)
The huge rush only applied to the end of the second series. The first series went through several drafts, and was recorded in plenty of time; I think the result is actually quite taut. (There's a book of an early version of the script, which I borrowed a few years ago. Some of the bits of dialog that got cut are in Neil Gaiman's book Don't Panic. I'd love to get an electronic copy of any version of the scripts.) And the second series started off in a leisurely way. The trouble was that it was broadcast over five consecutive days, a condition for a front-page feature in the Radio Times. By the start of that week they had about two and a half programmes done; after that it got more and more hectic, with things being recorded as they were written. Just as they were mixing the final episode, the tape got caught round the drive capstan, and they almost had to send the first half of the show off to be broadcast while they extricated the rest...
Stephen Moore wasn't the only one stuck in a room - many of the other actors were also stuck in broom cupboards and other niches, to get the proper sound separation. IIRC, Moore was particularly aggrieved as they sometimes forgot to let him out again!
Yes, but that was a different recording, as SteWhite said - done by the same people, but with the story shortened to fit onto LPs, and new music. (Not that the music in the radio series was bad -- quite the opposite, I think.) I've got the second series one somewhere...
IMNSHO the book(s) is(are) the weakest version with the radio version the best.
I think they all have something to contribute. The radio series, being first, has the best motivation - there is more reason for some of the things that happen. (For example, Arthur is initially introduced as a field researcher for the Guide; he agrees to go with Ford for that reason, and there are a couple of other references. By the book, this he gets dragged along out of desperation more than anything.) And of course, on radio the pictures are better! The special effects, voice treatments, stereo effects &c all added to the experience.
The book brings new elements in, such as all the stuff about towels, more background, &c. Some of the changes were for the better, too -- for example, in the radio series, it's Arthur who tries to persuade Mr Prosser to lie down in the mud; starting with the book, Ford does it, which fits the characters better. And of course all those wonderful asides and tangents it goes off in.
And the TV series is justly famous for introducing the 'computer graphics' sequences used for the book extracts, which were phenomenal, despite not being anywhere near a computer. Although some of the sets, costumes, sound, and special FX were a bit of a let-down, and the performances suffered from the extreme rush it was filmed in, it's worth seeing for other things too, such as the Restaurant set, the look on Arthur's face at times, the Deep Thought 'set', and Arthur's dressing-gown (which was never intended to be a permanent costume before).
So each different version has something to add. They're all valid.
Sometimes I think I'd like to see a 'definitive' text edition, including all the funny stuff cut from the early radio scripts, all the book text, and all the dialogue from the record and TV series -- or at least, as many as can be kept without shattering the already-fractured storyline!
I don't believe they've ever been released exactly as originally broadcast.
[fx: glances over at CD box sets of the two series, (c) BBC Worldwide 1996]
Er... excuse me?
Well, technically, you're right; I believe that there were some very minor changes; especially to the last couple of episodes which were recorded and mixed in a terrible hurry. But they are substantially as broadcast, and certainly what the original producers intended.
And if these CDs really aren't available where you are (which I suspect they are), I expect that at least some of the MP3s out there are from them. (Not that I'm condoning that kind of thing, of course...)
You folks may laugh... but he's right! It's the single most versatile, most general, and most widely available method for debugging. I've used it everywhere from my palmtop's built-in language to mainframe COBOL programs, from little Perl scripts to multi-tier Java systems. For anything complex, I find debuggers give either too little information or too much; it's much easier to fine tune print statements to narrow down exactly there the problems are, or at least exactly the information you need to illuminate what's going on. Of course, there's quite a knack involved in knowing exactly what and where to print, but someone who can't debug with print statements isn't a Real Programmer. So there.
[fx: reads downthread] Oh dear... The problem here is that different people see different things when they read. When you or I read 'socialist', we see someone who wants the community as a whole owning and controlling industry, and the social and political organisation that goes along with it. Or something along those lines.
But when many Yanks read 'socialist', they seem to see "Filthy! Subversive! Pinko! Dirty! Commie! Bastard! Atheist! Traitor! Die! Die! Die!" instead. Which kind of makes informed political debate rather difficult.
The majority of people do not have cell phones that support "text-messaging".
That may be true where you are, such as the technological backwater that is the US [fx: ducks]; here in Europe mobile phones have all supported texting pretty much since they started becoming popular something like 4 years ago. And lots of folk use it; even my mum knows how. It's certainly become popular enough not to need quotes every time you mention it!
Is it worth pointing out that here in the UK we have something like 10 times the population density? We also have a strong environmental lobby and some activist organisation. Yet we somehow manage to get the land needed to keep our power grid reasonably solid.
...between ignorance and stupidity. The former - simple lack of knowledge - is something that everyone suffers from in some area or other. This should not be a problem for tech supporters to deal with (nor tech support callers). However, stupidity is something completely different: the inability to recognise or fix that ignorance. That's what causes all these problems; again, on both ends of the call.
Example: the infamous `write click' problem. It's quite understandable that new users might not have heard the term `right-click' before, or needed to do it. Tech supporters should understand this; after all, even they had to learn it at some point. However, when the user needs to be told twice, or can't follow simple instructions, then they've crossed the borderline from ignorance to stupidity, and are fair game.
And yes, this idea is blatantly pinched from the introduction to ESR's How To Ask Questions The Smart Way FAQ, where he says "it's simply not efficient for us to try to help people who are not willing to help themselves. It's OK to be ignorant; it's not OK to play stupid."
Europe isn't just one place. It's a collection of different countries, each with its own culture, history, character, &c. There are many similarities and some overlap, of course, but there's still much more variation than over the US.
Here in the UK I get the impression we're more sticklers for the letter of the law than elsewhere in Europe, where they're much more relaxed about such things. But that's just my prejudice, based on very little info. Certainly there's quite a bit of file sharing, CD sharing, &c here too. But that's just anecdotal, and as someone said recently, the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'...
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Why doesn't The Truman Show count as science fiction?
The absence of space travel, laser guns and robots doesn't stop something being science fiction, just as their presence doesn't guarantee it is. Good science fiction has always been about ideas -- about ideas that change society or our relationship with the universe.
For example, I've always considered most 'space opera' such as Star Wars to be simply adventure stories that happen to be set in space - not science fiction at all. Conversely, stories like The Truman Show which are about ideas, about the nature of the world, and which invoke a sense of wonder, strike me as being much closer to the heart of science fiction. (Though there's actually quite a bit of technology involved in the backstory to TTS too.) And of course there are stories with both, like Bladerunner, which not only has a future setting with all the trappings, but a plot which directly involves the nature of that setting, and asks deep questions about personal identity.
The first ten million times were the funniest. The next ten million, yeah, they were a bit funny too. The third ten million didn't make me laugh at at all. After that, it went into a bit of a decline...
But that's beside the point; the point is why Windows->Linux should be any less daunting than Windows->FreeBSD.
Does anyone else find that sort of metallic noise familiar? It sounds uncannily like the effect of an audio processor called a ring modulator - also known as a multiplier. What's the betting they're just multiplying together all the inputs?
But it's not a war. No browser is trying to squeeze the others out of business. None is using dirty trick, sly marketing, or deliberate incompatibilities to gain market share. None is linked to other software - and most importantly, none is linked directly into the OS. Even Apple's own browser is merely a straight option from those available, with no special advantages. The browsers compete - inasmuch as they compete at all - on a completely level playing field, the only differences being that of cost and technical merit. These are great days.
But even ignoring how wonderful zsh is, it's effectively an extension of ksh, and even has a compatibility mode for behaving substantially like ksh. It's open source, it's supplied with Mac OS X (and other systems too, I believe), it can do anything you want it to, and it even has a cool name! What more could you want (apart from zealots like me promoting it)?!
Well, AIUI it's as much Apple's as it is NeXT's, really. Which may or may not be less than it is Ritchie and Thompson's. NeXT did some great work, which should have been more appreciated, of course, but Apple have done a lot before and since then, as have many other people. Let's end on a note of agreement and say that, whoever made greater or lesser contributions, it's a great system :) And one that shows security doesn't need to be a handicap, nor something that users will reject.
I don't think users are as resistant to security as that, provided it's done right. A case in point (and I mention this only as a relevant example, not because I'm a raving zealot, honest) is Mac OS X, which pretty much enforces a reasonable level of security. When you set it up, you create a user which has admin privileges but not root privileges -- and even that user must re-enter their password every time they install or change something at a system level. But although people do find Mac OS X features to complain about, the security is rarely one of them. Most people seem to accept it as a necessary evil in today's networked world.
At midnight on the twelfth of August, a huge mass of luminous gas erupted from Mars and sped towards Earth. Across two hundred million^W^W^Wthirty million miles of void, invisibly hurtling toward us, came the first of the missiles that were to bring so much calamity to Earth. As I watched, there was another jet of gas. It was another missile, starting on its way.
No they didn't - 'everyday' is an adjective. I think they meant 'every day', two words.
There are other reasons, too. EPOC, for example (the Psion palmtop's OS, pen-driven) always puts the 'OK' choice rightmost too, partly because for normal right-handed users that position will mean the pen obscures less of the screen than for the other buttons.
(* 'Like'. I said 'like'!)
The huge rush only applied to the end of the second series. The first series went through several drafts, and was recorded in plenty of time; I think the result is actually quite taut. (There's a book of an early version of the script, which I borrowed a few years ago. Some of the bits of dialog that got cut are in Neil Gaiman's book Don't Panic. I'd love to get an electronic copy of any version of the scripts.) And the second series started off in a leisurely way. The trouble was that it was broadcast over five consecutive days, a condition for a front-page feature in the Radio Times. By the start of that week they had about two and a half programmes done; after that it got more and more hectic, with things being recorded as they were written. Just as they were mixing the final episode, the tape got caught round the drive capstan, and they almost had to send the first half of the show off to be broadcast while they extricated the rest...
Stephen Moore wasn't the only one stuck in a room - many of the other actors were also stuck in broom cupboards and other niches, to get the proper sound separation. IIRC, Moore was particularly aggrieved as they sometimes forgot to let him out again!
zsh is great in other ways, too - I for one wouldn't be without its wonderful recursive file completion.
Yes, but that was a different recording, as SteWhite said - done by the same people, but with the story shortened to fit onto LPs, and new music. (Not that the music in the radio series was bad -- quite the opposite, I think.) I've got the second series one somewhere...
IMNSHO the book(s) is(are) the weakest version with the radio version the best.
I think they all have something to contribute. The radio series, being first, has the best motivation - there is more reason for some of the things that happen. (For example, Arthur is initially introduced as a field researcher for the Guide; he agrees to go with Ford for that reason, and there are a couple of other references. By the book, this he gets dragged along out of desperation more than anything.) And of course, on radio the pictures are better! The special effects, voice treatments, stereo effects &c all added to the experience.
The book brings new elements in, such as all the stuff about towels, more background, &c. Some of the changes were for the better, too -- for example, in the radio series, it's Arthur who tries to persuade Mr Prosser to lie down in the mud; starting with the book, Ford does it, which fits the characters better. And of course all those wonderful asides and tangents it goes off in.
And the TV series is justly famous for introducing the 'computer graphics' sequences used for the book extracts, which were phenomenal, despite not being anywhere near a computer. Although some of the sets, costumes, sound, and special FX were a bit of a let-down, and the performances suffered from the extreme rush it was filmed in, it's worth seeing for other things too, such as the Restaurant set, the look on Arthur's face at times, the Deep Thought 'set', and Arthur's dressing-gown (which was never intended to be a permanent costume before).
So each different version has something to add. They're all valid.
Sometimes I think I'd like to see a 'definitive' text edition, including all the funny stuff cut from the early radio scripts, all the book text, and all the dialogue from the record and TV series -- or at least, as many as can be kept without shattering the already-fractured storyline!
[fx: glances over at CD box sets of the two series, (c) BBC Worldwide 1996]
Er... excuse me?
Well, technically, you're right; I believe that there were some very minor changes; especially to the last couple of episodes which were recorded and mixed in a terrible hurry. But they are substantially as broadcast, and certainly what the original producers intended.
And if these CDs really aren't available where you are (which I suspect they are), I expect that at least some of the MP3s out there are from them. (Not that I'm condoning that kind of thing, of course...)
You folks may laugh... but he's right! It's the single most versatile, most general, and most widely available method for debugging. I've used it everywhere from my palmtop's built-in language to mainframe COBOL programs, from little Perl scripts to multi-tier Java systems. For anything complex, I find debuggers give either too little information or too much; it's much easier to fine tune print statements to narrow down exactly there the problems are, or at least exactly the information you need to illuminate what's going on. Of course, there's quite a knack involved in knowing exactly what and where to print, but someone who can't debug with print statements isn't a Real Programmer. So there.
[fx: reads downthread] Oh dear... The problem here is that different people see different things when they read. When you or I read 'socialist', we see someone who wants the community as a whole owning and controlling industry, and the social and political organisation that goes along with it. Or something along those lines.
But when many Yanks read 'socialist', they seem to see "Filthy! Subversive! Pinko! Dirty! Commie! Bastard! Atheist! Traitor! Die! Die! Die!" instead. Which kind of makes informed political debate rather difficult.
That may be true where you are, such as the technological backwater that is the US [fx: ducks]; here in Europe mobile phones have all supported texting pretty much since they started becoming popular something like 4 years ago. And lots of folk use it; even my mum knows how. It's certainly become popular enough not to need quotes every time you mention it!
Is it worth pointing out that here in the UK we have something like 10 times the population density? We also have a strong environmental lobby and some activist organisation. Yet we somehow manage to get the land needed to keep our power grid reasonably solid.
Example: the infamous `write click' problem. It's quite understandable that new users might not have heard the term `right-click' before, or needed to do it. Tech supporters should understand this; after all, even they had to learn it at some point. However, when the user needs to be told twice, or can't follow simple instructions, then they've crossed the borderline from ignorance to stupidity, and are fair game.
And yes, this idea is blatantly pinched from the introduction to ESR's How To Ask Questions The Smart Way FAQ, where he says "it's simply not efficient for us to try to help people who are not willing to help themselves. It's OK to be ignorant; it's not OK to play stupid."
Here in the UK I get the impression we're more sticklers for the letter of the law than elsewhere in Europe, where they're much more relaxed about such things. But that's just my prejudice, based on very little info. Certainly there's quite a bit of file sharing, CD sharing, &c here too. But that's just anecdotal, and as someone said recently, the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'...
Nah. Teflon would never support that huge chip...
Well, they are the country that invented the NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome...