Actually, being what thems be, I don't think the BSDs are meant to be anything but operating systems.
People for whom BSD (*BSD? DILLIGAF?) is intended:
Computer owners, computer users, homosexuals, fat guys with beards.
People for whom it (they) is (are) not intended:
Luddites, Amish, gays, fat guys without beards.
So I indexed all my files and filed the indexes, I updated my indexes and indexed those updates, and now I need another tool to index all those indexes, and a metadata storage manager cos my database of indexed metadata just outgrew my filesystem.
Uses a small percentage of the total volume of the tyre to support and cushion.
I mean, seriously, solid tyre hoo-ha surfaces every decade or two with the regularity of a herpes outbreak only to fade into the obscurity it deserves. Pneumatic tyres are that way for a reason, and it's called a compromise between simplicity, light-weight, and performance. You can only sacrifice so much in one direction before it becomes simply unacceptable.
Philip K. Dick: his characters are so real you want to yell at them, his plots are so bizarre you MUST keep reading.
Stanislaw Lem: absolutely brilliant and nearly perfectly thought out machinations whose characters don't get in the way of a good story.
Frank Herbert: pretty little psychological japes.
Edmund Spenser: iron robot kills amazons and one communist giant (plus followers), 1590's. Heavens!
Edgar Rice Burroughs (also Leigh Brackett): pfiffle, if you don't know why this is great, you watch too much TV.
Jules Verne: he has to be in here.
M. P. Shiel: brilliant exposition of the madness underlying us all in "The Purple Cloud". cf "The Quiet Earth"(1985, NZ "talkie"), which I would suspect the screenwriter(s) had read, hopefully.
What makes these great is not their characters, per se. You want a good character in a watery, unreadable plot, Kate Wilhelm and "James Tiptree Junior" (Alice Sheldon) are perfectly adept at that. Even Gardiner Dozios at his best was but a slightly more tightly written Steinbeck. And that just doesn't cut it for Sci-Fi. It's the imagination, it's the literary control. The great author can keep you reading, keep you from thinking about lunch or that nasty big credit card bill for a few hours and, if they're truly masters, they will ask the questions no-one else has thought to ask, or no-one else has asked so pointedly.
Take my colleague William Henry Harrison. There was a fellow who could outshoot any Kentuckian alive, kick a filthy southern secessionist in the balls, and still take time out for his daily prayers and nightly rounds of "Stuff this where the Nabokov don't shine, Whig!".
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Actually, being what thems be, I don't think the BSDs are meant to be anything but operating systems. People for whom BSD (*BSD? DILLIGAF?) is intended: Computer owners, computer users, homosexuals, fat guys with beards. People for whom it (they) is (are) not intended: Luddites, Amish, gays, fat guys without beards.
So I indexed all my files and filed the indexes, I updated my indexes and indexed those updates, and now I need another tool to index all those indexes, and a metadata storage manager cos my database of indexed metadata just outgrew my filesystem.
Other negatives:
Uses a small percentage of the total volume of the tyre to support and cushion.
I mean, seriously, solid tyre hoo-ha surfaces every decade or two with the regularity of a herpes outbreak only to fade into the obscurity it deserves. Pneumatic tyres are that way for a reason, and it's called a compromise between simplicity, light-weight, and performance. You can only sacrifice so much in one direction before it becomes simply unacceptable.
Philip K. Dick: his characters are so real you want to yell at them, his plots are so bizarre you MUST keep reading.
Stanislaw Lem: absolutely brilliant and nearly perfectly thought out machinations whose characters don't get in the way of a good story.
Frank Herbert: pretty little psychological japes.
Edmund Spenser: iron robot kills amazons and one communist giant (plus followers), 1590's. Heavens!
Edgar Rice Burroughs (also Leigh Brackett): pfiffle, if you don't know why this is great, you watch too much TV.
Jules Verne: he has to be in here.
M. P. Shiel: brilliant exposition of the madness underlying us all in "The Purple Cloud". cf "The Quiet Earth"(1985, NZ "talkie"), which I would suspect the screenwriter(s) had read, hopefully.
What makes these great is not their characters, per se. You want a good character in a watery, unreadable plot, Kate Wilhelm and "James Tiptree Junior" (Alice Sheldon) are perfectly adept at that. Even Gardiner Dozios at his best was but a slightly more tightly written Steinbeck. And that just doesn't cut it for Sci-Fi. It's the imagination, it's the literary control. The great author can keep you reading, keep you from thinking about lunch or that nasty big credit card bill for a few hours and, if they're truly masters, they will ask the questions no-one else has thought to ask, or no-one else has asked so pointedly.
Take my colleague William Henry Harrison. There was a fellow who could outshoot any Kentuckian alive, kick a filthy southern secessionist in the balls, and still take time out for his daily prayers and nightly rounds of "Stuff this where the Nabokov don't shine, Whig!".
Anyway, I liked "Dark Star".