To review sci-fi without making it sound utterly stupid?
I'm sure the book is fabulous, but is there any way to summarize the plot of a sci-fi novel without making it sound like a 6 year olds daydream?
"Ok so theres this guy and he can fly an go through space but then these bugs go in his ears and eat his brain! The make him quit his job and become a tabledancer on a space ship to pluto! And then this giant talking half-bear thing comes and wants to beat him up but he has a ray gun so thats the end of that!"
Re:Something about endings...
on
The Confusion
·
· Score: 2, Funny
You know Neil Stephenson! Really?
Oh wait, I thought you said you knew NEAL Stephenson. You're probably talking about the lawnmower salesman at Home Depot or something.
Re:SASKATCHEWAN RULES!!!
on
The Confusion
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
WiFi must rock in saskatchewan, since the whole fucking province is flat within a +-0.0000001% tolerance. The only thing to broadcast over are wheat fields and sod huts.
And I would never attempt any stunts unless I was protected by genuine saskatchewan sealskin bindings.
No, it's been improving, and ahead of schedule. Word is xbox will profitable sooner than originally expected, due to increased sales and drastically lower production costs. It makes me wonder how much of that includes boxes sold to dorks who think buying xboxes to mod and run linux on "screws microsoft over". It doesnt. An item sold is an item sold.
Xbox outsold PS2 this month. The list of third party titles and developers is snowballing.
I really dont get being a fanboy for any console based on the "company x is evil!" philosophy. Both are big companies with histories of Evil(tm), hell add Nintendo and their emulator witchhunts and censorship of games to the list, oh and their illegal developer lockin contracts of days-gone-by. Hell, if they had their way, Capcom, EA, et al would be contractually obliged to only develop for them.
More shit I dont want to read to clog up my google results.
Seriously, why cant we have a "blog" flag or something, so I can filter that stuff out of google searches? It's really annoying when I'm trying to research a problem and get nothing but other people ranting about the same problem..
Blogs are very rarely female supermodels with nude pics and lurid descriptions of their sexual fantasies.
Something in robots.txt that says "unlikely that anyone gives a rats ass"?
Sasser didn't hit us, we haven't had a worm/virus/trojan inhouse for years, but we're a technical bunch. Some of our customers got hit.
The administrative overhead is keeping us from using linux, either in-house or as a platform for our software systems.
In-house, we just dont have the time for the setup and deployment. Money is relatively abundant, time isnt. Exchange could be set up in a half a day, simple folder sharing is only one mouse click. You and I know linux is a different story altogether. Frankly, finding the half a day is tricky enough.
As for our deployed systems (pretty much self contained turnkey solutions), we're undertaking a port to Unix as MPE reaches its end-of-life. Much of the client stuff is still windows based, since thats what every client has had on it.
We have a windows port which is our most popular, there's more interest in it from clients than for a unix version. We rely heavily on SQL Server, and porting it to a less capable backend like mysql would be too much right now. Our clients really dont care about the politics or philosophy behind open source.
Myself, I'm pushing a cross-platform approach, and much of the new development is being done in Java, though.Net and C# is very tempting.
The OS will become irrelevant one bit at a time, and I cant wait.
No, stick it to apple, MSFT, RealOne, and every other competing service.
A few years ago I could go buy my music in a industry-wide supported format (CD, or before that tape, or before that LP) and play it in any device from a wide variety of manufacturers.
Apple, MS, et al seek to splinter that up. Apple wants its music downloads to be incompatible with Sonys and MSFTs.
Fuck them. I'm not going to pay a buck to listen at home, another buck to listen while jogging, another buck to listen in the car.
Hint, offer (non-drmed) mp3s. I'll pay a buck. Once. The next best solution is to strip the bogus crap out, as all it serves to do is to create a lock-in market out of thin air.
Yeah, Apple looks reall "fair" to slashbots right now. But they're slowly but surely tightening the noose. More and more files will be flagged as not-burnable to CD, more and more restrictions will be placed.
It doesn't make the community look bad. It makes Apple look bad.
When I invest in a service (by say, buying an iPod or paying a subscription) and then apple changes the terms of that service by altering the DRM, is that not a textbook bait-n-switch?
Apple can bite me. And all the slashbots lining up to apologize and defend them can bite me too.
Average would be 64 or even 32. Average would be the "minimum system requirements" listing on the box.
No, just because a 256 meg 9800 XT came out does not mean I leapt into my car to replace my month-old 9800 pro with it's mere "128" megs ram.
Cheap cards have 128 megs too, but it's useless to them - they aren't fast enough to make any real gaming use of it.
I have a gfx 5200 with 128 megs ram, it cant play anything with any sort of detail and I'm left scratching my head as to why they'd bother putting that much RAM on, I'd glady sacrifice 64megs of VRAM for a GPU with a little balls. I have an old 64meg Radeon VIVO that runs circles around it in many games.
What's supposed to be in/include/linux and/include/asm in the days of the 2.6 kernel?
In the "good old days" these were symlinks to/usr/src/linux/include/linux and asm-(arch), but now I'm reading some crap about sanitized kernel headers or glibc headers? Some are still saying kernel headers, some saying this blah blah. Google is a shitty source of information when everybody says something different.
What goes in there and where's the official source for it?
If you think this is offtopic, sit on it and glRotate.
I lost data after a power bounce. My system wouldnt boot, it forced me to do a fsck from a floppy. I learned my lesson to never use reiserfs for the root filesystem.
The only reason I used it was to recover gracefully from an unexpected system shutdown (ie, the power goes out) like NTFS does.
I cant think of seven channels worth watching, let along seven that would have something on simultaneously that I wouldnt want to miss.
Keep in mind cable channels repeat the same two 4 hour blocks 3 times a day each.
A TB of drive space? I'd rather have a DVDR for stuff thats worth keeping.
Though if you told me this thing can send multiple video streams over a LAN, in an accessible method (ie MPEG2 or something) to cheaper set-top devices and PCs, I'd be more interested.
The poster says the lead item on the government's daily threat matrix, in quotes as though he was quoting the article, which says no such thing.
Keep in mind the nature of the source, sort of a tongue-in-cheek political gossip column as well.
Some guy phoned in a tip, some low-level FBI grunt kicked it up the chain - as is his job. It was later found to be a hoax and thrown out. There was no panic or mayhem.
This happens all the time, everyone from assholes to crazies phone in to report bad guys from movies, etc. I remember reading an article about the rash of calls law enforcement got after Silence of the Lambs came out - people actually thought Hannibal Lecter was a real guy.
When asked for a name, he responded "I. P. Freely".
This links comes from what amounts to a trashy "dc insider" gossip column. Though, this sort of stuff happens all the time. People phone in bogus tips all the time. If they sound legit, they get investigated.
I also object to the articles description of Headhunter as "popular".
I hate egghead articles like this. She seems to assume that everyone without her credentials and background is a moron with no common sense.
Frankly, in my experience, the opposite has been true. Friends of mine with little to no post-secondary education, blue-collar types, seem to be more grounded and sensible, whereas the highly educated literate I dealt with in University were so gullible it was ridiculous.
But that's besides the point.
I know Nessie and Bigfoot are just ghost stories. I know ghost stories are make-believe. I know no spaceship crashed at Roswell, I know Neil Armstrong really did land on the moon, I know the face on mars is as real as the faces in any random cloud. So do 99% of the population, I'd imagine.
So why do I watch the alien abduction "special reports" on sci-fi, or the hunt for Nessie on history channel? Because it's ENTERTAINING.
Sure, you could replace those shows with dry astro-geology lectures, etc, but people will just tune out.
TV (and I'd say all mass media) are primarily forms of entertainment to people. That's the primary reason so few share the slashdotters outrage that $NEWSCHANNEL may be biased. Endless reporting/speculating about the latest little kid to be raped and murdered is entertainment to people. They don't know or care about the child, have no personal stake in the story, yet we'll keep having news about Jon Benet et al forever.
Nothing on TV is factual, everyone knows it. I watched one of the designers on "trading spaces" install what had to be 500 square feet of laminate flooring one episode, and then at the end sit there with a straight face and say that the entire room was less than $1000 bucks.
The day I care about the "factual science" of martian geology or microbiology, I'll pick up a textbook.
I don't watch TV for "factual" science, just like I don't read slashdot for "factual" computer science.
It still does use platter-based drives but it's a cool idea anyway.
From the article, I gather these are merely SAN boxes with up to 64GB of DRAM, fiber channel output, and 3 hot-swappable hard drives that act as backup.
Has a record been broken? Has anything special happened? Sure this is high-end stuff, but it doesnt seem new or particularly exciting.
I have this in dnsmasq.conf. dhcp-leases=/var/state/dhcp/dhcpd.l eases
I cant find any official-loooking docs on google, though I've found several annoying LUG posts stating "RTFM".
Whats up with that?
Also, does dnsmasq read/etc/hosts directly, or does it use calls like gethostbyname(), ie; will it read hosts from my ldap server (properly configured with libnss_ldap to serve hostnames).
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't Cray make some comparison about supercomputers vs clusters being like a tractor trailer vs a fleet of honda civics?
The civics might be fine for couriers, but if you need to move - say - an elephant they're useless.
Analogies suck, though, and I'm pretty sure I got that one wrong.
To review sci-fi without making it sound utterly stupid?
I'm sure the book is fabulous, but is there any way to summarize the plot of a sci-fi novel without making it sound like a 6 year olds daydream?
"Ok so theres this guy and he can fly an go through space but then these bugs go in his ears and eat his brain! The make him quit his job and become a tabledancer on a space ship to pluto! And then this giant talking half-bear thing comes and wants to beat him up but he has a ray gun so thats the end of that!"
You know Neil Stephenson! Really?
Oh wait, I thought you said you knew NEAL Stephenson. You're probably talking about the lawnmower salesman at Home Depot or something.
WiFi must rock in saskatchewan, since the whole fucking province is flat within a +-0.0000001% tolerance. The only thing to broadcast over are wheat fields and sod huts.
And I would never attempt any stunts unless I was protected by genuine saskatchewan sealskin bindings.
No, it's been improving, and ahead of schedule. Word is xbox will profitable sooner than originally expected, due to increased sales and drastically lower production costs. It makes me wonder how much of that includes boxes sold to dorks who think buying xboxes to mod and run linux on "screws microsoft over". It doesnt. An item sold is an item sold.
Xbox outsold PS2 this month. The list of third party titles and developers is snowballing.
I really dont get being a fanboy for any console based on the "company x is evil!" philosophy. Both are big companies with histories of Evil(tm), hell add Nintendo and their emulator witchhunts and censorship of games to the list, oh and their illegal developer lockin contracts of days-gone-by. Hell, if they had their way, Capcom, EA, et al would be contractually obliged to only develop for them.
Yep
But it'll cost you a few hundred bucks, and its severely crippled.
That is a good idea.
In fact, the first good idea I've read on slashdot in a long, long time.
If i could block forum posts too I'd be set. Maybe -rofl or -lol!!!1!1! or -;) (and other various emoticons).
More shit I dont want to read to clog up my google results.
Seriously, why cant we have a "blog" flag or something, so I can filter that stuff out of google searches? It's really annoying when I'm trying to research a problem and get nothing but other people ranting about the same problem..
Blogs are very rarely female supermodels with nude pics and lurid descriptions of their sexual fantasies.
Something in robots.txt that says "unlikely that anyone gives a rats ass"?
Sasser didn't hit us, we haven't had a worm/virus/trojan inhouse for years, but we're a technical bunch. Some of our customers got hit.
.Net and C# is very tempting.
The administrative overhead is keeping us from using linux, either in-house or as a platform for our software systems.
In-house, we just dont have the time for the setup and deployment. Money is relatively abundant, time isnt. Exchange could be set up in a half a day, simple folder sharing is only one mouse click. You and I know linux is a different story altogether. Frankly, finding the half a day is tricky enough.
As for our deployed systems (pretty much self contained turnkey solutions), we're undertaking a port to Unix as MPE reaches its end-of-life. Much of the client stuff is still windows based, since thats what every client has had on it.
We have a windows port which is our most popular, there's more interest in it from clients than for a unix version. We rely heavily on SQL Server, and porting it to a less capable backend like mysql would be too much right now. Our clients really dont care about the politics or philosophy behind open source.
Myself, I'm pushing a cross-platform approach, and much of the new development is being done in Java, though
The OS will become irrelevant one bit at a time, and I cant wait.
Regardless of OS, the 5200fx isn't nearly as capable as the Radeon 9700, no fanboy would dispute that.
It may run as smooth, but in resolutions and/or detail settings.
No, stick it to apple, MSFT, RealOne, and every other competing service.
A few years ago I could go buy my music in a industry-wide supported format (CD, or before that tape, or before that LP) and play it in any device from a wide variety of manufacturers.
Apple, MS, et al seek to splinter that up. Apple wants its music downloads to be incompatible with Sonys and MSFTs.
Fuck them. I'm not going to pay a buck to listen at home, another buck to listen while jogging, another buck to listen in the car.
Hint, offer (non-drmed) mp3s. I'll pay a buck. Once. The next best solution is to strip the bogus crap out, as all it serves to do is to create a lock-in market out of thin air.
Yeah, Apple looks reall "fair" to slashbots right now. But they're slowly but surely tightening the noose. More and more files will be flagged as not-burnable to CD, more and more restrictions will be placed.
It doesn't make the community look bad. It makes Apple look bad.
When I invest in a service (by say, buying an iPod or paying a subscription) and then apple changes the terms of that service by altering the DRM, is that not a textbook bait-n-switch?
Apple can bite me. And all the slashbots lining up to apologize and defend them can bite me too.
How do you figure average systems have 256MB RAM?
Average would be 64 or even 32. Average would be the "minimum system requirements" listing on the box.
No, just because a 256 meg 9800 XT came out does not mean I leapt into my car to replace my month-old 9800 pro with it's mere "128" megs ram.
Cheap cards have 128 megs too, but it's useless to them - they aren't fast enough to make any real gaming use of it.
I have a gfx 5200 with 128 megs ram, it cant play anything with any sort of detail and I'm left scratching my head as to why they'd bother putting that much RAM on, I'd glady sacrifice 64megs of VRAM for a GPU with a little balls. I have an old 64meg Radeon VIVO that runs circles around it in many games.
I wonder what moron modded this interesting?
I never found lara croft even remotely attractive, even in the latest games with the highest tech engines.
Now the girls of DOA, that's a different animal altogether.
What's supposed to be in /include/linux and /include/asm in the days of the 2.6 kernel?
/usr/src/linux/include/linux and asm-(arch), but now I'm reading some crap about sanitized kernel headers or glibc headers? Some are still saying kernel headers, some saying this blah blah. Google is a shitty source of information when everybody says something different.
In the "good old days" these were symlinks to
What goes in there and where's the official source for it?
If you think this is offtopic, sit on it and glRotate.
I lost data after a power bounce. My system wouldnt boot, it forced me to do a fsck from a floppy. I learned my lesson to never use reiserfs for the root filesystem.
The only reason I used it was to recover gracefully from an unexpected system shutdown (ie, the power goes out) like NTFS does.
I cant think of seven channels worth watching, let along seven that would have something on simultaneously that I wouldnt want to miss.
Keep in mind cable channels repeat the same two 4 hour blocks 3 times a day each.
A TB of drive space? I'd rather have a DVDR for stuff thats worth keeping.
Though if you told me this thing can send multiple video streams over a LAN, in an accessible method (ie MPEG2 or something) to cheaper set-top devices and PCs, I'd be more interested.
It was realeased worldwide for PS2.
There was moderate hype about it, but it was completely eclipsed by Metal Gear Solid SOL - of which Headhunter is but a second rate clone.
The poster says the lead item on the government's daily threat matrix, in quotes as though he was quoting the article, which says no such thing.
Keep in mind the nature of the source, sort of a tongue-in-cheek political gossip column as well.
Some guy phoned in a tip, some low-level FBI grunt kicked it up the chain - as is his job. It was later found to be a hoax and thrown out. There was no panic or mayhem.
This happens all the time, everyone from assholes to crazies phone in to report bad guys from movies, etc. I remember reading an article about the rash of calls law enforcement got after Silence of the Lambs came out - people actually thought Hannibal Lecter was a real guy.
It was released for PS2 in the US, IIRC.
It came out after dreamcast ceased production, and like Shenmue II or Rez, Sega sold it off to be an exclusive in the US.
When asked for a name, he responded "I. P. Freely".
This links comes from what amounts to a trashy "dc insider" gossip column. Though, this sort of stuff happens all the time. People phone in bogus tips all the time. If they sound legit, they get investigated.
I also object to the articles description of Headhunter as "popular".
You mean like OpenBeFS, of the OpenBeOS project?
As far as BeFS plugging into linux any time soon, I'd doubt it. Linux has enough problems with ACLs, let alone metadata indexing, etc, etc.
I hate egghead articles like this. She seems to assume that everyone without her credentials and background is a moron with no common sense.
Frankly, in my experience, the opposite has been true. Friends of mine with little to no post-secondary education, blue-collar types, seem to be more grounded and sensible, whereas the highly educated literate I dealt with in University were so gullible it was ridiculous.
But that's besides the point.
I know Nessie and Bigfoot are just ghost stories. I know ghost stories are make-believe. I know no spaceship crashed at Roswell, I know Neil Armstrong really did land on the moon, I know the face on mars is as real as the faces in any random cloud. So do 99% of the population, I'd imagine.
So why do I watch the alien abduction "special reports" on sci-fi, or the hunt for Nessie on history channel? Because it's ENTERTAINING.
Sure, you could replace those shows with dry astro-geology lectures, etc, but people will just tune out.
TV (and I'd say all mass media) are primarily forms of entertainment to people. That's the primary reason so few share the slashdotters outrage that $NEWSCHANNEL may be biased. Endless reporting/speculating about the latest little kid to be raped and murdered is entertainment to people. They don't know or care about the child, have no personal stake in the story, yet we'll keep having news about Jon Benet et al forever.
Nothing on TV is factual, everyone knows it. I watched one of the designers on "trading spaces" install what had to be 500 square feet of laminate flooring one episode, and then at the end sit there with a straight face and say that the entire room was less than $1000 bucks.
The day I care about the "factual science" of martian geology or microbiology, I'll pick up a textbook.
I don't watch TV for "factual" science, just like I don't read slashdot for "factual" computer science.
It still does use platter-based drives but it's a cool idea anyway.
From the article, I gather these are merely SAN boxes with up to 64GB of DRAM, fiber channel output, and 3 hot-swappable hard drives that act as backup.
Has a record been broken? Has anything special happened? Sure this is high-end stuff, but it doesnt seem new or particularly exciting.
RAMBUSes wotn fit in my linix box!
Do i need to compile my kernol?
Why isn't dnsmasq reading my /var/state/dhcp/dhcpd.leases file?
l eases
/etc/hosts directly, or does it use calls like gethostbyname(), ie; will it read hosts from my ldap server (properly configured with libnss_ldap to serve hostnames).
I have this in dnsmasq.conf.
dhcp-leases=/var/state/dhcp/dhcpd.
I cant find any official-loooking docs on google, though I've found several annoying LUG posts stating "RTFM".
Whats up with that?
Also, does dnsmasq read
Damn RAMBus I hate you!