I found a decent one at Barnes & Noble or Borders or something, of all places. It was all about villians. Think, "Wicked," only a full book long. Stories about the Dark Queen, Necromancers as heroes, etc. Hilarious. Lent it to someone and they never returned it....
Kuttner. I LOVE Kuttner's Proud Robot collection. An 'engineer' who can't do anything unless he's completely blitzed, and then spends his sober hours figuring out what on earth he's done.
Ellison is getting more mainstream as he gets older, but "Repent Harlequin Said the Ticktockman" is probably one of the top ten Sci-Fi stories ever written.
Zelazney's short fiction is quite good. Some of it is campy, but Lord of Light is something many people haven't read but enjoy quite a bit on their first read.
Generally, I like to read a lot of anthologies - Sci-Fi is like normal fiction; you hear a lot about novels, but if you read short stories you get the authors who aren't so worried about cover count on books sold. You get a lot of authors who pack their stories tightly. You get a lot of authors whose fiction is amazing. My favorite collection of all time is, "The World Treasury of Science Fiction." Good luck finding a copy...
Another good way to go is early novellas from people - Blood Music was sold as a novel but better as a novella. (In-My-Never-Humble-Opinion-No-Matter-How-Hard-I-T ry) Bear did a wonderfully snide and macabre short story in "Heads" as well...
Can't think of anything else off the top of my head, unfortunately. Sometimes, I like to go buy two or three anthologies and spend a weekend digesting 2k pages. It's fun.
Artists often good critics. They tend to get too involved in their work. Think there's any residual bitterness in Card about not having had as much fame / cash as a younger writer when Star Trek was making someone else money by the pound? I'll flame and troll and call him a jerk highly consistently in this story, because I think he deserves it for knocking something that always was what he's become.
Honestly, I liked the speaker for the dead idea. It was quite impressive to me. The idea of someone who attempted to learn enough to actually describe someone's character with as much impartiality as possible was brilliant. The namby-pamby idea that ANYONE would turn up good because that's just the way people are was a little bit of a cop out to me. Maybe just a bit more than that. It's almost a religious idea, but then he's gone so far down a different path for some reason that I just don't understand how the two books could be written by the same author...
Niven and Aldiss are the ones that tear it for me. The rest, I'm cool with. The calling of it a 'crap set' is mainly due to his mismatching and popularizing.... My main problem with OSC is his close-mindedness, and the problems that creates for him when rating. He'd love to be Asimov, but just doesn't.... quite.... make it..... I, Robot and the Foundation Trilogy and even Positronic Man are all quite mainstream now, but were more groundbreaking than all of OSC's work put together. There are a few authors I just love which just don't get the press these guys do, because they were just a bit older or more obscure... Authors should pick people not everyone has heard of to push forward, not the same cookie cutter preferences. Especially when being angry about there being a cookie cutter TV series that set the making of THEIR series / movie / whatever a bit behind.....
If Star Trek hadn't been successful, there would have been no TNG or movies. It would have been something different that milked the nerd-urge of the seventies and eighties. Trek had decent grounding and so got quite a bit more popular, but TNG was what made Paramount their real cash on TV, and the movies made a killing.
Without its rabid fanbase that created success, Trek would have died an earlier death. A much earlier death...
I hate to say this, but I completely disagree with you... If anyone is worthy of this kind of respect, it's Harlan Ellison. OSC wrote a popular children to mid-teen's book. And a decent sequel. That's about it. He's been churning out rather reprehensible drivel ever since, and if you look at the list of authors he calls paradigms of the field, you'll know what I mean....
Screw the enraged Trekkies, he's knocked SciFi as a whole by listing such a crap set of unabashedly mainstream and modernly-popular authors - with the exception of Ellison - to represent 'Sci-Fi of the time' or whatever he calls it. Card is a hack and lucky he wrote two good books. After that, well, he went downhill and the new books might as well be the Narnia chronicles... Only not as content-filled.
The main reason for this problem is not that there's no alternative, but that Microsoft has choked the market so badly that any 'alternative' has to be interoperable with their most obnoxious software. It's lame, it sucks, but it's the way they do business. And that's why people hate it.
Linux is more desktop-ready every year, but since the bar for Linux is so much higher on a usability standpoint it will probably not reach the bar for absolute acceptance for another three or four years.
Unless we're on a corporate link where we can't use anything but g*d*f*ing IE because the tech department is lazy, pathetically understaffed, stupid, incompetent, or REALLY pathetically understaffed and run by someone who doesn't quite care....
On the smart side, he's gotten >100,000 people to look at his birdbath multiple times, where there hasn't been a single story on Slackware / debian / enlightenment / Nethack / etc on the Slashdot front page in weeks.
Possible he's running Google ads somewhere nearby?
Software at 0, TCO to infinity aaaand beyooond... Or possibly approaching 0 so all software engineers can do what they're really trained to do - play Quake...
Ah... nah. I'd say, "1. Write short document stating that in 'reparation for virus damage' computers would occasionally be confiscated when they managed to infect multiple computers connected to the local network 2. Notify them of this agreement and make them sign it 3. When one of them has an infected machine that starts pinging the shit out of your network, give them a 'first warning' 4. Point to document in step 1 kindly, in writing, and create yourself an Ebay account.
5. Repeat
6. Profit and learn to laugh evilly."
Not exactly true. Ever read 'the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test'? There's a character in there that has fascinated me for years - he's a computer programmer that spends half the year working, the other half hanging out and getting stoned. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if those with the personal freedom to push towards what they enjoy and are interested in are those who produce the most.
I've known quite a few very bright computer people, and an incredibly bright programmer or two, who were interested in having a good time and computers were a part of that occasionally. I'm pretty sure that if they worked their asses off for one day in two, they'd outdo me working halfass for four days.
Uh.... did you count your hard drive spinning as well? As far as I remember, I've never had my box power up and not be able to get to a load screen.... HOWEVER, I've been stuck there a few times because of my extra hard drive / etc.... One might think that the highly fine tuned physical movement of the drive disk might be much of the power consumption if not more of it than the raw CPU power usage...
It's also possible that some high quality bloggers will develop personalities and let them be part of their blogging and continue to be trustable due to having actual character rather than cotton-candy personalities like real news reporters have grown to. This story has convinced me to start a blog, damnit, and I'm going to be freaking ME. Disagree, dislike, whatever, but I'm going to be honest and as knowledgable as possible.
Yeah, now that bar has a case for 'defamation of character' as well... in five years, I bet I will be scared of drinking in a bar called the 'Longhorn' due to worries about the roof leaking, the stools having random stuff on them from the last person who used them, the prices being high, and an uneasy feeling that the whole structure was so unsound it could fall down on my head - oversized supporting timbers and all - at any time.
Is it not mildly possible that, rather than Red-Blooded, uber-aggressive, and possibly even slightly overconfident Americans are not the source of this phenomena, and rather that this particular problem is a result of the inherently fickle nature of the industry these companies are in and the business world in general?
Not to mention, of course, the fact that 9 billion isn't really a piddly number.....
Slashdot Mirror
I found a decent one at Barnes & Noble or Borders or something, of all places. It was all about villians. Think, "Wicked," only a full book long. Stories about the Dark Queen, Necromancers as heroes, etc. Hilarious. Lent it to someone and they never returned it....
Kuttner. I LOVE Kuttner's Proud Robot collection. An 'engineer' who can't do anything unless he's completely blitzed, and then spends his sober hours figuring out what on earth he's done.
T ry) Bear did a wonderfully snide and macabre short story in "Heads" as well...
Ellison is getting more mainstream as he gets older, but "Repent Harlequin Said the Ticktockman" is probably one of the top ten Sci-Fi stories ever written.
Zelazney's short fiction is quite good. Some of it is campy, but Lord of Light is something many people haven't read but enjoy quite a bit on their first read.
Generally, I like to read a lot of anthologies - Sci-Fi is like normal fiction; you hear a lot about novels, but if you read short stories you get the authors who aren't so worried about cover count on books sold. You get a lot of authors who pack their stories tightly. You get a lot of authors whose fiction is amazing. My favorite collection of all time is, "The World Treasury of Science Fiction." Good luck finding a copy...
Another good way to go is early novellas from people - Blood Music was sold as a novel but better as a novella. (In-My-Never-Humble-Opinion-No-Matter-How-Hard-I-
Can't think of anything else off the top of my head, unfortunately. Sometimes, I like to go buy two or three anthologies and spend a weekend digesting 2k pages. It's fun.
Artists often good critics. They tend to get too involved in their work. Think there's any residual bitterness in Card about not having had as much fame / cash as a younger writer when Star Trek was making someone else money by the pound? I'll flame and troll and call him a jerk highly consistently in this story, because I think he deserves it for knocking something that always was what he's become.
Honestly, I liked the speaker for the dead idea. It was quite impressive to me. The idea of someone who attempted to learn enough to actually describe someone's character with as much impartiality as possible was brilliant. The namby-pamby idea that ANYONE would turn up good because that's just the way people are was a little bit of a cop out to me. Maybe just a bit more than that. It's almost a religious idea, but then he's gone so far down a different path for some reason that I just don't understand how the two books could be written by the same author...
I love anonymous cowards that tell me to go hide. They're funny.
Niven and Aldiss are the ones that tear it for me. The rest, I'm cool with. The calling of it a 'crap set' is mainly due to his mismatching and popularizing.... My main problem with OSC is his close-mindedness, and the problems that creates for him when rating. He'd love to be Asimov, but just doesn't.... quite.... make it..... I, Robot and the Foundation Trilogy and even Positronic Man are all quite mainstream now, but were more groundbreaking than all of OSC's work put together. There are a few authors I just love which just don't get the press these guys do, because they were just a bit older or more obscure... Authors should pick people not everyone has heard of to push forward, not the same cookie cutter preferences. Especially when being angry about there being a cookie cutter TV series that set the making of THEIR series / movie / whatever a bit behind.....
Correction:
If Star Trek hadn't been successful, there would have been no TNG or movies. It would have been something different that milked the nerd-urge of the seventies and eighties. Trek had decent grounding and so got quite a bit more popular, but TNG was what made Paramount their real cash on TV, and the movies made a killing.
Without its rabid fanbase that created success, Trek would have died an earlier death. A much earlier death...
I hate to say this, but I completely disagree with you... If anyone is worthy of this kind of respect, it's Harlan Ellison. OSC wrote a popular children to mid-teen's book. And a decent sequel. That's about it. He's been churning out rather reprehensible drivel ever since, and if you look at the list of authors he calls paradigms of the field, you'll know what I mean....
Screw the enraged Trekkies, he's knocked SciFi as a whole by listing such a crap set of unabashedly mainstream and modernly-popular authors - with the exception of Ellison - to represent 'Sci-Fi of the time' or whatever he calls it. Card is a hack and lucky he wrote two good books. After that, well, he went downhill and the new books might as well be the Narnia chronicles... Only not as content-filled.
The main reason for this problem is not that there's no alternative, but that Microsoft has choked the market so badly that any 'alternative' has to be interoperable with their most obnoxious software. It's lame, it sucks, but it's the way they do business. And that's why people hate it.
Linux is more desktop-ready every year, but since the bar for Linux is so much higher on a usability standpoint it will probably not reach the bar for absolute acceptance for another three or four years.
Unless we're on a corporate link where we can't use anything but g*d*f*ing IE because the tech department is lazy, pathetically understaffed, stupid, incompetent, or REALLY pathetically understaffed and run by someone who doesn't quite care....
Err... I see ads... Is there a chance they break even on bandwidth if they get traffic of the level Slashdot gives instead of losing $$?
On the smart side, he's gotten >100,000 people to look at his birdbath multiple times, where there hasn't been a single story on Slackware / debian / enlightenment / Nethack / etc on the Slashdot front page in weeks.
Possible he's running Google ads somewhere nearby?
That looks like a Fax number to me, though. I mean, who would allow their actual phone number to get out on the internet?
Software at 0, TCO to infinity aaaand beyooond... Or possibly approaching 0 so all software engineers can do what they're really trained to do - play Quake...
Meaning he'd be sitting there staring at a pile of computers and fifty Ebay accounts wondering what to do with them?
Ah... nah. I'd say,
"1. Write short document stating that in 'reparation for virus damage' computers would occasionally be confiscated when they managed to infect multiple computers connected to the local network
2. Notify them of this agreement and make them sign it
3. When one of them has an infected machine that starts pinging the shit out of your network, give them a 'first warning'
4. Point to document in step 1 kindly, in writing, and create yourself an Ebay account.
5. Repeat
6. Profit and learn to laugh evilly."
All that coughing might be the result of your having participated in said activities... Moderation, my friend :P
Not exactly true. Ever read 'the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test'? There's a character in there that has fascinated me for years - he's a computer programmer that spends half the year working, the other half hanging out and getting stoned. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if those with the personal freedom to push towards what they enjoy and are interested in are those who produce the most.
I've known quite a few very bright computer people, and an incredibly bright programmer or two, who were interested in having a good time and computers were a part of that occasionally. I'm pretty sure that if they worked their asses off for one day in two, they'd outdo me working halfass for four days.
Uh.... did you count your hard drive spinning as well? As far as I remember, I've never had my box power up and not be able to get to a load screen.... HOWEVER, I've been stuck there a few times because of my extra hard drive / etc.... One might think that the highly fine tuned physical movement of the drive disk might be much of the power consumption if not more of it than the raw CPU power usage...
It's also possible that some high quality bloggers will develop personalities and let them be part of their blogging and continue to be trustable due to having actual character rather than cotton-candy personalities like real news reporters have grown to. This story has convinced me to start a blog, damnit, and I'm going to be freaking ME. Disagree, dislike, whatever, but I'm going to be honest and as knowledgable as possible.
Yeah, now that bar has a case for 'defamation of character' as well... in five years, I bet I will be scared of drinking in a bar called the 'Longhorn' due to worries about the roof leaking, the stools having random stuff on them from the last person who used them, the prices being high, and an uneasy feeling that the whole structure was so unsound it could fall down on my head - oversized supporting timbers and all - at any time.
There was an article posted less than a week ago about PR companies harnessing bloggers.... Gee, maybe Microsoft DOES read Slashdot.
Is it not mildly possible that, rather than Red-Blooded, uber-aggressive, and possibly even slightly overconfident Americans are not the source of this phenomena, and rather that this particular problem is a result of the inherently fickle nature of the industry these companies are in and the business world in general?
Not to mention, of course, the fact that 9 billion isn't really a piddly number.....
It's Duhlux-tronaut, sahn, Duhlux-tronaut. It ain't that hahd!