To borrow a quote Winston Churchill (from memory, so bear with me), "he is a man who can put so few thoughts into so many words".
Okay, that was a tad harsh. Quicksilver has its moments, but not enough to justify 800+ pages, including a "Drammatis Personnae" section to keep all of the characters straight. The storyline move as quickly as molasses in Murmansk. And when it does become interesting, it feels as if Neal is just showing off his erudition, like a domineering party guest you soon find yourself steering away from.
Some authors can justify huge manuscripts (and huge efforts on the reader's part) by the sheer quality of their prose. Stephenson isn't quite there yet.
I'll have to chime in as well, since I just finished Quicksilver myself.
Christ, what a tedious read. It was one of the worst Xmas presents I ever received. (Yeah, it took me this long to slog through it.)
I got the feeling throughout the whole book that Stephenson was writing to impress himself. The interesting moments and plot points were drowned out by relentless pedantry. (Quick, raise your hand if you finished the book, and you really wanted to get Daniel Waterhouse off that damned ship for the first 200 pages. Arrrrrrrrgh!)
And Stephenson's tendency to ramble.. and ramble.. and ramble.. has finally caught up with him.
I was disappointed to say the least; I expected better. Sigh.
Agreed. Oryx and Crake is a great book. It shows off Margaret Atwood's strengths, the most important IMO is her way of making the fantastic seem plausible. By incorporating all those memes that surround us.. and that we fail to pay attention to anymore.. she creates a nightmare you can imagine with uncomfortable ease. (Check out the "pop-up ads" on the Web site. Nice touch. Good for a sardonic chuckle or two.)
In a way, I'm glad O&C could never be made into a movie (except maybe as animation). Hollywood could only fsck it up. (Hint to Ms. Atwood: talk to this guy before inking any movie deals. Please.)
And whaddya know.. I just handed over my copy to my wife, who in turn has put Atwood's The Blind Assassin (Booker Prize winner) in my hands. Life is good..
It would be a lot simpler if the folks who would buy the players didn't watch crap.
Visiting the video rental store is just plain depressing. For each copy of Momento (or any other movie that at least tries to be creative) there are 23 copies of Gigli (or some other collection of meaningless drivel for the Wal-Mart crowd).
(I demand quality from films. I mean, just because I want to see Adam Sandler screaming while trapped inside a spaceship headed for the Sun, does that make me a snob?)
Oh well. As long as I can choose not to turn ClearPlay on, I'm okay with it. Creative works won't wind up censored anyway as far as I can tell..
While most folks here are happily bashing Vote Here, I think we need to have some sense of perspective. Vote Here is trying to reach out to the open source community. Even if this is only one tentative "baby step", it's an improvement over Diebold.
What you (yeah, you) should be doing right now is to:
Write a nice note to Vote Here stating how you appreciate their efforts so far;
Add politely-worded suggestions on improving or expanding the process; and
Describe in succinct detail what other issues should be considered in their process.
This is bad for SUNW and the shareholders, no doubt. Yes, McNeally and friends do get a lifeline of cash, but I'm sure MSFT is aware that they're merely postponing the inevitable.
What this means IMO is that SUNW is a more viable takeover target than they were 24 hours ago.
Granted, they could buy back shares with the new cash (and may want to, for many reasons), but the underlying business plan is very vulnerable. Linux is eating Solaris' lunch, and a custom hardware solution isn't cutting it today in the marketplace. (I know, Sun servers are fun to work with, quite reliable, blah blah blah. But I know a few organizations that are abandoning Solaris for Linux, if only for the price advantage.)
I'd be looking for suitors right about now, if I were part of SUNW's mgmt. team. (Or I'd flip off everyone in Mountain View and unfurl the golden parachute, depending on what kind of bastard I felt like that day.)
So here's an idea to debate: another Unix vendor is desperately trying to break into the server and enterprise computing market. Assuming that said vendor has the cash and the will to use it (big assumptions there, I know), would this be a worthwhile strategy to pursue?
Moved down here in '92, never looked back. IBM, Cisco, SAS, Red Hat, Nortel, Ericsson, Glaxo (and a decent number of bio & tech startups) have a significant presence here. Having UNC, Duke, and NCSU less than 20 miles from each other doesn't hurt either.
Business 2.0 recently christened this area as the Next Big Boom Town.
However...
..it will only be a boom town once there is an actual boom. And it isn't here (yet?).
The telecomm meltdown has caused a LOT of pain locally. (Did you notice the high incidence of telecomm equipment manufacturers in that list above? I know many many underemployed or unemployed software developers.) In anticipation, the Tragedy of the Commons is in full effect down here. The locals are cheerily turning North Raleigh (near I-540, which didn't exist 5 years ago) into an overpriced, suburban wasteland to handle the influx of the likes of you, since the local suburbs can't absorb you anymore. (Cary, NC had a population of about 7,000 forty years ago; now it's up to 100,000 -- and not because the natives take the phrase "bedroom community" to heart.)
My advice to you: the Triangle area is great, but our grass is no greener than yours. Should you show up here someday, well, welcome to beautiful North Carolina. Then go home!
Party-goer: "So I build model trains in my spare time." Dullard: "I like model trains! Why, without the model trains, how could they build the real ones?"
How the left wing freaks protest the WTO all over the world but they support it when it takes a stand against US interests.
sigh I know, this post is a troll, but there's a tiny piece of tangled logic here that is desperately crying for help...
Who said anything about supporting the WTO? Most of us here are only objecting to the convenient moral double-standard of the U.S. (See many previous & succeeding posts on this issue.)
Had the quoted Congresscritter cited something such as, say, the potential for online casinos to defraud players, I might have agreed with him. But he blew it. He chose to resort to the standard hypocritical moral boiler-plate that fuels American political rhetoric (and which most thinking Americans have long since dismissed as bullshit).
Just because the WTO managed to get something (approximately) right for once doesn't mean that the institution itself is now awash in virtue in anyone's opinion.. or that the concept of the WTO is even a good idea.
I'll cut Spielberg a break with Schindler; most of it is very good, except for that last scene ("why didn't I sell this pin? I could have (sob) saved two more.."). It wrecked the whole flick for me, with all of that unnecessary treacle. I couldn't help but think, "man, if only another director handled this project, I wouldn't have this last crappy scene ruining the entire experience".
As for Ryan, well, once you check out the first half hour, there's not much else to see, unless you drool spontaneously when things blow up. The plot itself is just 100% inane.
But what would you expect from a guy who has defined the "Hollywood ending". You know, the ending where we all live happily ever after (or most of us anyway), and every loose plot thread is neatly tied up by the end of the movie because, you, dear viewer, are just too damn dumb to figure out everything by yourself..
As another MBA-to-be, I have to object to the stereotypes. The closed-mindedness of your statements is nothing short of apalling.
Does having an MBA make you evil? Maybe not. Maybe people who are already evil are attracted to the MBA degree and position.
Many of us who either have or are obtaining the MBA do NOT seek power or money as an end. (Granted, some do, and those idiots have tarnished the reputation of the rest of us.) Rather, more than a few of us are interested in growing our careers in other ways than the technical track, and to learn more non-technical skills along the way. (Like, oh, the kind that keep the software engineers in a firm employed.)
Let me tell you about my worst job-fair experience, pal: I interviewed with a hiring manager who was looking for top engineers, and he insisted (after learning my MBA plans, whoops, silly me) that a good engineer needs no business background. In as delicate a manner as possible, I told him he was utterly full of shit: a good engineer does NOT rise on technical skills alone.
(Needless to say, I blew that interview, but I'm not crying over it. The attitude tells a lot about the organization, after all; the same company let go of top engineers later anyway.)
Sorry, doesn't happen. At best, s/he gets steady paychecks. I know, I know, that sounds perfectly acceptable to a lot of you, but let's be honest: it's not much of a long-term career aspiration, despite how difficult it is to maintain these days.
Just off the top of my head, another thing: Doctoring photos as such is more than mere libel during a political campaign. The US actually does (again IIRC) have laws on the books for such smear tactics.
Someone help me out here, but there was a politician whose campaign in the 1940s (or 1950s) tried to frame his opponent with a photo of Joseph Stalin. A photo of Stalin was placed alongside that of the opponent, and the border between the 2 was blurred, and alongside one of the other guy. The border was blurred, and presto.. a photo of a conference between Stalin and a sitting American politician, just in time for the average voter.
The fallout from this particular incident, I believe, caused considerable flak back then.
Of course, nowadays we're much more sophisticated.
We just take a picture of Osama Bin Laden and (now ex-)Senator Max Cleland, stick them on the telly, without any editing whatsoever, and add a sinister voice-over to scare the sheep...
He's going after the pranksters because, if left unchecked, the doctored photo would be accepted as fact by the media and the public. The latter, I'm afraid, is horribly gullible. (Remember the "Latin America" gaffe of Dan Quayle's? He never said it. The story was literally too good to be true, but people believe it any way. Not that Quayle didn't have other problems, but..)
And oh yeah: Kerry wants the partisans on the other end of the political spectrum know he won't tolerate any bullshit. Not a bad policy when your eventual opponent has $150M stored up.
And, speaking of humour...my prof's PowerBook core dumped yesterday as he was lecturing
Yep, I saw a Mac running MacOS X 10.0 crash a few years ago. White on black text suddenly showed up on the screen.. during an Apple demo no less!
Of course, this happened during Apple's Worldwide Devleoper's Conference in 2001, and the Apple engineers were demonstrating how to debug the kernel remotely by first causing a debug trap, so this probably doesn't count.:)
Java should be opened up to the community, with compatibility standards strictly and ruthlessly enforced.
And maybe, just maybe,.Net could help it along.
The original reason for McNealy's reluctance to open up Java was the "embrace and extend" philosophy we all know so well from Redmond. But, could we expect MS to bother trying to modify Java and develop.Net at the same time?
MS could do it, they have the re$ources, but.. can they afford the mixed message it would send? "Java sucks, use.Net instead.. oh wait, here's our version of Java.."
Opening up Java could work, but only if MS is 100% committed to.Net, and if an officially open Java implementation wins overwhelming community support.
In short, don't expect Sun to open up Java until Microsoft runs the risk of falling into the "sunk cost trap". McNealy is probably well aware of this too..
It's been reported in other/. articles that on one hand, M$ will use an XML schema for all Word documents. However, the next licensing agreement for Office will stipulate that no one is permitted to reverse-engineer the schema for use in an open source project.
This makes me think that "security through legally -enforced obscurity" will be the order of the day in Redmond. Imagine if, say, all element names were encrypted, or were even just bloody confusing, e.g. <ioueWOIUKJRE87yjhi> arial </ioueWOIUKJRE87yjhi>.
This will make M$ appear open, but only appear so. C'est plus ca change...
Slashdot Mirror
To borrow a quote Winston Churchill (from memory, so bear with me), "he is a man who can put so few thoughts into so many words".
Okay, that was a tad harsh. Quicksilver has its moments, but not enough to justify 800+ pages, including a "Drammatis Personnae" section to keep all of the characters straight. The storyline move as quickly as molasses in Murmansk. And when it does become interesting, it feels as if Neal is just showing off his erudition, like a domineering party guest you soon find yourself steering away from.
Some authors can justify huge manuscripts (and huge efforts on the reader's part) by the sheer quality of their prose. Stephenson isn't quite there yet.
I'll have to chime in as well, since I just finished Quicksilver myself.
Christ, what a tedious read. It was one of the worst Xmas presents I ever received. (Yeah, it took me this long to slog through it.)
I got the feeling throughout the whole book that Stephenson was writing to impress himself. The interesting moments and plot points were drowned out by relentless pedantry. (Quick, raise your hand if you finished the book, and you really wanted to get Daniel Waterhouse off that damned ship for the first 200 pages. Arrrrrrrrgh!)
And Stephenson's tendency to ramble.. and ramble.. and ramble.. has finally caught up with him.
I was disappointed to say the least; I expected better. Sigh.
Agreed. Oryx and Crake is a great book. It shows off Margaret Atwood's strengths, the most important IMO is her way of making the fantastic seem plausible. By incorporating all those memes that surround us.. and that we fail to pay attention to anymore.. she creates a nightmare you can imagine with uncomfortable ease. (Check out the "pop-up ads" on the Web site. Nice touch. Good for a sardonic chuckle or two.)
In a way, I'm glad O&C could never be made into a movie (except maybe as animation). Hollywood could only fsck it up. (Hint to Ms. Atwood: talk to this guy before inking any movie deals. Please.)
And whaddya know.. I just handed over my copy to my wife, who in turn has put Atwood's The Blind Assassin (Booker Prize winner) in my hands. Life is good..
It would be a lot simpler if the folks who would buy the players didn't watch crap.
Visiting the video rental store is just plain depressing. For each copy of Momento (or any other movie that at least tries to be creative) there are 23 copies of Gigli (or some other collection of meaningless drivel for the Wal-Mart crowd).
(I demand quality from films. I mean, just because I want to see Adam Sandler screaming while trapped inside a spaceship headed for the Sun, does that make me a snob?)
Oh well. As long as I can choose not to turn ClearPlay on, I'm okay with it. Creative works won't wind up censored anyway as far as I can tell..
Well, it's a good thing Matsushita markets their wares as Sony. Imagine what the promo for their version of ClearPlay would be like:
"The filtering technology was brought to you by MatsushitFZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT..."
While most folks here are happily bashing Vote Here, I think we need to have some sense of perspective. Vote Here is trying to reach out to the open source community. Even if this is only one tentative "baby step", it's an improvement over Diebold.
What you (yeah, you) should be doing right now is to:
People who buy Apples are the same irrational fanboys
Have you ever noticed, during an average, run-of-the-mill barfight over the "Chevy vs. Ford" issue, that there are no BMW owners present?
And Apple isn't known for making servers.
Bzzzzzzzzzt.
Thank you for playing...
This is bad for SUNW and the shareholders, no doubt. Yes, McNeally and friends do get a lifeline of cash, but I'm sure MSFT is aware that they're merely postponing the inevitable.
What this means IMO is that SUNW is a more viable takeover target than they were 24 hours ago.
Granted, they could buy back shares with the new cash (and may want to, for many reasons), but the underlying business plan is very vulnerable. Linux is eating Solaris' lunch, and a custom hardware solution isn't cutting it today in the marketplace. (I know, Sun servers are fun to work with, quite reliable, blah blah blah. But I know a few organizations that are abandoning Solaris for Linux, if only for the price advantage.)
I'd be looking for suitors right about now, if I were part of SUNW's mgmt. team. (Or I'd flip off everyone in Mountain View and unfurl the golden parachute, depending on what kind of bastard I felt like that day.)
So here's an idea to debate: another Unix vendor is desperately trying to break into the server and enterprise computing market. Assuming that said vendor has the cash and the will to use it (big assumptions there, I know), would this be a worthwhile strategy to pursue?
Moved down here in '92, never looked back. IBM, Cisco, SAS, Red Hat, Nortel, Ericsson, Glaxo (and a decent number of bio & tech startups) have a significant presence here. Having UNC, Duke, and NCSU less than 20 miles from each other doesn't hurt either. Business 2.0 recently christened this area as the Next Big Boom Town.
However...
..it will only be a boom town once there is an actual boom. And it isn't here (yet?).
The telecomm meltdown has caused a LOT of pain locally. (Did you notice the high incidence of telecomm equipment manufacturers in that list above? I know many many underemployed or unemployed software developers.) In anticipation, the Tragedy of the Commons is in full effect down here. The locals are cheerily turning North Raleigh (near I-540, which didn't exist 5 years ago) into an overpriced, suburban wasteland to handle the influx of the likes of you, since the local suburbs can't absorb you anymore. (Cary, NC had a population of about 7,000 forty years ago; now it's up to 100,000 -- and not because the natives take the phrase "bedroom community" to heart.)
My advice to you: the Triangle area is great, but our grass is no greener than yours. Should you show up here someday, well, welcome to beautiful North Carolina. Then go home!
All over the world, these tranvestites are now in place.
Of course, you could argue that the original travesties were also false advertising...
Party-goer: "So I build model trains in my spare time."
Dullard: "I like model trains! Why, without the model trains, how could they build the real ones?"
sigh I know, this post is a troll, but there's a tiny piece of tangled logic here that is desperately crying for help...
Who said anything about supporting the WTO? Most of us here are only objecting to the convenient moral double-standard of the U.S. (See many previous & succeeding posts on this issue.)
Had the quoted Congresscritter cited something such as, say, the potential for online casinos to defraud players, I might have agreed with him. But he blew it. He chose to resort to the standard hypocritical moral boiler-plate that fuels American political rhetoric (and which most thinking Americans have long since dismissed as bullshit).
Just because the WTO managed to get something (approximately) right for once doesn't mean that the institution itself is now awash in virtue in anyone's opinion.. or that the concept of the WTO is even a good idea.
Obviously, sir, you have yet to see the sequel .
If you drop one of these things out of the window of your 30th-floor office, and a guy by the name of Fred J. Ipod is on the sidewalk below..
Actually, both movies were crap.
I'll cut Spielberg a break with Schindler; most of it is very good, except for that last scene ("why didn't I sell this pin? I could have (sob) saved two more.."). It wrecked the whole flick for me, with all of that unnecessary treacle. I couldn't help but think, "man, if only another director handled this project, I wouldn't have this last crappy scene ruining the entire experience".
As for Ryan, well, once you check out the first half hour, there's not much else to see, unless you drool spontaneously when things blow up. The plot itself is just 100% inane.
But what would you expect from a guy who has defined the "Hollywood ending". You know, the ending where we all live happily ever after (or most of us anyway), and every loose plot thread is neatly tied up by the end of the movie because, you, dear viewer, are just too damn dumb to figure out everything by yourself..
I thought that the dust in my PC case was just all those poor unfortunate bits that got shifted off the CPU registers..
As another MBA-to-be, I have to object to the stereotypes. The closed-mindedness of your statements is nothing short of apalling.
Does having an MBA make you evil? Maybe not. Maybe people who are already evil are attracted to the MBA degree and position.
Many of us who either have or are obtaining the MBA do NOT seek power or money as an end. (Granted, some do, and those idiots have tarnished the reputation of the rest of us.) Rather, more than a few of us are interested in growing our careers in other ways than the technical track, and to learn more non-technical skills along the way. (Like, oh, the kind that keep the software engineers in a firm employed.)
Let me tell you about my worst job-fair experience, pal: I interviewed with a hiring manager who was looking for top engineers, and he insisted (after learning my MBA plans, whoops, silly me) that a good engineer needs no business background. In as delicate a manner as possible, I told him he was utterly full of shit: a good engineer does NOT rise on technical skills alone. (Needless to say, I blew that interview, but I'm not crying over it. The attitude tells a lot about the organization, after all; the same company let go of top engineers later anyway.)
Sorry, doesn't happen. At best, s/he gets steady paychecks. I know, I know, that sounds perfectly acceptable to a lot of you, but let's be honest: it's not much of a long-term career aspiration, despite how difficult it is to maintain these days.
Okay, enough ranting...
Just off the top of my head, another thing: Doctoring photos as such is more than mere libel during a political campaign. The US actually does (again IIRC) have laws on the books for such smear tactics.
Someone help me out here, but there was a politician whose campaign in the 1940s (or 1950s) tried to frame his opponent with a photo of Joseph Stalin. A photo of Stalin was placed alongside that of the opponent, and the border between the 2 was blurred, and alongside one of the other guy. The border was blurred, and presto.. a photo of a conference between Stalin and a sitting American politician, just in time for the average voter.
The fallout from this particular incident, I believe, caused considerable flak back then.
Of course, nowadays we're much more sophisticated.
We just take a picture of Osama Bin Laden and (now ex-)Senator Max Cleland, stick them on the telly, without any editing whatsoever, and add a sinister voice-over to scare the sheep...
He's going after the pranksters because, if left unchecked, the doctored photo would be accepted as fact by the media and the public. The latter, I'm afraid, is horribly gullible. (Remember the "Latin America" gaffe of Dan Quayle's? He never said it. The story was literally too good to be true, but people believe it any way. Not that Quayle didn't have other problems, but..)
And oh yeah: Kerry wants the partisans on the other end of the political spectrum know he won't tolerate any bullshit. Not a bad policy when your eventual opponent has $150M stored up.
Duh.
Yep, I saw a Mac running MacOS X 10.0 crash a few years ago. White on black text suddenly showed up on the screen.. during an Apple demo no less!
Of course, this happened during Apple's Worldwide Devleoper's Conference in 2001, and the Apple engineers were demonstrating how to debug the kernel remotely by first causing a debug trap, so this probably doesn't count. :)
Mod parent up to 6, please..
Java should be opened up to the community, with compatibility standards strictly and ruthlessly enforced.
And maybe, just maybe, .Net could help it along.
The original reason for McNealy's reluctance to open up Java was the "embrace and extend" philosophy we all know so well from Redmond. But, could we expect MS to bother trying to modify Java and develop .Net at the same time?
MS could do it, they have the re$ources, but.. can they afford the mixed message it would send? "Java sucks, use .Net instead.. oh wait, here's our version of Java.."
Opening up Java could work, but only if MS is 100% committed to .Net, and if an officially open Java implementation wins overwhelming community support.
In short, don't expect Sun to open up Java until Microsoft runs the risk of falling into the "sunk cost trap". McNealy is probably well aware of this too..
It's been reported in other /. articles that on one hand, M$ will use an XML schema for all Word documents. However, the next licensing agreement for Office will stipulate that no one is permitted to reverse-engineer the schema for use in an open source project.
This makes me think that "security through legally -enforced obscurity" will be the order of the day in Redmond. Imagine if, say, all element names were encrypted, or were even just bloody confusing, e.g. <ioueWOIUKJRE87yjhi> arial </ioueWOIUKJRE87yjhi>.
This will make M$ appear open, but only appear so. C'est plus ca change...