Is this some way of the Hugo staff giving 2 awards for short stories or is it a sideways proof that Sci-Fi as a genre is more suited to 20-30 pages of prose and that when it hits the 300-400 page region it is less saleable to the general public?
No, you're reaching.
The only 20-30 page short stories that I've ever read have either been in a monthly rag or in a book of short stories.
And they're not my preference by far. I much prefer trilogies / quads / decs... most of my bookshelf is filled with series sci-fi/fantasy with a mere armful of solitary books.
I'll agree with that. Civil Campaign was a great mix of comedy and drama, probably the best in the series. However, the book that follows, Diplomatic Immunity was a bit of a let down, so maybe she needs to take break from that series.
(I can't put my finger on anything specific with DI, but the CC novel was just oodles of fun to read.)
I know people will bash this but why wasn't OotP on the list? It was a great book, much better than the ones that won and it out sold them by like an order of magnittude.
Mmmm, I *like* the HP series, but OotP wasn't really that great of a story (book #4 was much better). It was rather stilted in places and pacing. Book #4 starts with the World Cup and builds up to a big climax at the end in the Cemetary. Just about *anything* would be tough to follow that and book #5 is more of a "putting the pieces in place for #6/#7".
(I was particular dissapointed with the death, because in book #5 they were not a nice character, always on edge, which killed off any nice feelings that I had gained towards them in book #4. Then it felt like it was just kind of shoved in there in the middle of the big fight at the end. Almost as if the author needed a bigger climax then book #4, and was out of ideas of how to top it.)
So what should the Hugo judge, science or fiction?
And as numerous Hollywood "fizzles" have shown... all the special effects (or hard science in Sci-Fi) is useless if you don't have a good story (or tell it badly).
The best Sci-Fi in my book is stuff that puts the people ahead of the Sci-Fi. Where the science is merely a hook to draw you in and the futuristic universe is just a backdrop against which the tale plays out against.
Lois McMaster Bujold and C.J. Cherryh's stuff is almost *always* worth reading.
Bujold's best stuff is in the Vorkosigan universe (something like 10+ books). The high point of the series is probably Civil Campaign, which won't make sense unless you've read at least a few of the prior ones and understand the underpinnings.
Cherryh is very prolific. Best are the Faded Sun trilogy, and the 4 or 5 books in the Chanur universe. Or the Foreigner series (6 books now) which is a great book dealing with how humans and aliens get along (not well...). She also writes some good fantasy novels and series.
No hurracane is going to propell a SAFE at 200 mph. A safe has thick metal walls and a huge weight to surface area ratio. Even if the building it's in collapses, the safe would be in more danger from a fall than from the wind.
Maybe not the wind, but flooding will carry that puppy downstream just fine. (Hint to the poster talking about the freeway... it wasn't the wind or rain that did that, it was the tidal surge and flooding.)
So maybe the trick is to mount that safe above flood level...
The number of idiotic posts here is just another example of the declining clue of slashdot users.
Preach on (because I've given up).
The *only* reason I care about SPF is that it allows me to publish a single piece of information that says, "all mail from our domain comes from A.B.C.D IP addresses". Which keeps me from having to register my mail servers with every large ISP who uses a whitelist.
Unfortunately, the folks at SPF seem determined to sell this as an anti-spam tool or try to extend it to include user authentication or "sender reputation schemes". It's anti-domain forgery, nothing more, nothing less.
Now we have SenderID, which is the bastard child of SPF+Microsoft, patent encumbered, FoSS-hostile, etc.
(Worse, RMX-type systems have been under discussion for 12-18 months now... and we barely have working implementations.)
Re:Have it do something worthwhile
on
Palmtop Nirvana?
·
· Score: 1
My requirements are:
- cell phone
- address book, calendar, task list (classic PDA)
- add-in programs to let me keep track of expenses that then get imported into Quicken/Money/etc
- vehicle maintenance program (recording of work done, fuel used, etc)
- 1-2GB of memory
- acts as a USB-drive (or Firewire)
- plays MP3s
- 8-12 hours active use, 3-7 days of idle
My 3 year old Kyocera phone does everything except the 1-2GB memory, being a USB/firewire device, and playing MP3s. It at least means that I don't have to carry both a phone and a PDA, and since it uses the PalmOS I get lots and lots of add-in programs.
I'll be rather put out when this phone finally breaks... there's not too many PalmOS phones left.
Of course now we know that there are no lesser of two evils. Kerry and Bush will both screw over the country hard.
I generally vote Republican, but I think Kerry is a good match against Bush. Heck, the Democrats managed to field a number of decent candidates this year.
Still don't know who I'm voting for this year... maybe I'll just take a coin into the voting booth to decide.
This attack is also useful in forging signatures on digital documents that have been signed (since the public/private key pair only signs the hash of the digital document).
You (and a lot of the other "database lite" projects) completely miss the point of an application like FileMaker or MSAccess.
1) All of the data, queries and reports need to be stored in a single file, or a single folder. Even if that limits you to 2GB database sizes.
2) It should be easy to move that database from machine to machine using Windows Explorer. Backup copies should be as simple as closing the application, and dragging the file to the CD-writer.
3) Integrated queries and reports, stored in the database file along with the data. Bonus points if things work well on the web just by putting the database file up on a server and telling the web-engine portion where to find it.
Formats like MSAccess MDB files are easy for the user to manipulate. Very similar to working with an Excel file (tables are like tabs). No need to babysit their own personal copy of a SQL engine, or beg a DB admin to create a new field / table / database.
I'm semi-hopeful that now that IBM has released their java mini-database engine, we might see progress.
How do the Opteron CPUs stack up against the AMD64 CPUs? (I want ECC memory!)
Is a 2.0Ghz Opteron roughly equivalent to a 2.0Ghz AMD64?
(I'm probably going to go with the Asus SK8V, VIA K8T800 chipset, because I've heard that PunkBuster doesn't work with the NForce3 motherboards at the moment.)
The 2.0Ghz Opteron 146 chip seems to have vanished from the channel. Now you either have to go with the 144 chip for $230 or the 148 chip for $445. Pity, because the 146 chip was a decent trade-off between price/speed.
Or maybe I'm just antsy because my main PC is unstable (mysteriously so for the last 2-3 months, can't find anything wrong in hardware, nor software) and I'm itching for something new... sigh.
Fire up the Prime95 client from Mersenne.org - it's not a hardware test program, but it may as well be for as often as it will stumble over a hardware issue. Even hardware issues that Memtest86 / Memtest86+ miss. Overclockers have been using it for years to figure out if their systems are stable.
A close runner-up, in terms of programs that are extremely sensitive to mis-timings or other glitches is QuickPar. Tougher to find errors with that one, unless you try to create a recovery set for 20GB worth of data.
(My story ended by throttling back the CL value on my memory... the CL 2.0 memory that I had wasn't stable until I dialed back to CL 2.5.)
Yeah, but the lottery has money involved as the central issue...
Oh wait...
(Failure to provide a human-verifiable paper-trail, at the time the vote is placed, viewable by the voter and then secured in a lockbox should be prosecuted as voter fraud. After a hundred (more?) years of paper voting, I think we know the modes of failure and how to bypass/secure them. Ink on paper is simple and easy to understand. A magnetic-only record is still considered black magic.)
Unless, of course, there are no votes for X (assuming X != Nader) in a voting district.
Given the disgust with both main-party candidates in this year's election... I suspect Nader will get at least one vote in each district.
Hell, I've always voted republican, and I'm considering voting for Nader. (For other offices, I'm thinking a straight-across-the-board method of voting for anybody but the incumbent.)
Re:Depnds on the time for which you want to store
on
Portable Storage?
·
· Score: 1
Just out of curiosity, why do you say tape drives are good for long term backups? What about them makes them last longer? I would have chosen good optical discs for long term storage as long as they're kept in dark dry places.
1) Optical drives max out at 8GB per disc. You can get a 160GB tape. (Cost for 4GB DVD media is around $0.20/GB, tape is around $0.40/GB.) The larger size makes it easier to take snapshots of large data sets (rather then swapping 20 or 40 discs). Even the 25/50GB opticals are going to be too small by the time they hit the street.
2) Removable drives are an option... 160GB drives are below $80, but you'll also need caddies which cost $30-$50 (for good quality caddies). You'll get faster transfers then tape and you don't have to buy an expensive tape drive. OTOH, that 160GB drive is very heavy compared to a 160GB tape making it more expensive to ship.
For large quantities of snapshots (50+ tapes per year), tape is still ahead... but the cost of the drives is a pain.
Those aren't very portable. They're large, and you have to carry around a power supply as well (and most of those enclosures have a power brick, which takes even more space).
Which is why I only buy USB enclosures with built-in power supplies (currently the CA-805U2 from Macally). The size isn't *too* bad for occasional movement and you can stick a 300GB 5400rpm drive in them (total cost of $330 or so). Still bigger then other 3.5" drive enclosures since it has the built-in power supply, but you don't have to worry about losing the power brick.
My beef with DVD-Rs isn't compatibility, it's longevity. It doesn't take much to screw up a DVD.
If the data on the DVD is important, there are three options...
1) burn a duplicate
2) do a "sliding window" method where important data ends up on multiple discs (e.g. month 1-3 goes on disc A, month 2-4 goes on disc B, monthe 3-5 goes on disc C)
3) dedicate the last 5% of the disc to recovery data, created using QuickPar
I do option #3 for all of my video DVDs, the players that I have don't even care that there are extra files in the VIDEO_TS folder. Takes about 20min to create the parity files and then I create an ISO file using ImageTool Classic for burning.
Easy: stick to what's proven. For me it's CDRs. I won't even touch DVD-Rs until I stop reading a million different labels at the store.
I see the moderators are on crack again... (Who moderated this as "Interesting"? Come back and explain yourself!)
The DVD+R/DVD-R issue is completely dead. All of the newer and better drives support both standards and the differences in compatibility are single digit percentages. Same thing will happen with +R9/-R9, the first drive maker who sells a dual-format drive will make a killing and then everyone else will jump on board.
ESB was one of those that people either liked or hated, with not much in the middle.
Why? (shrug) I was surprised the first time that I found a ESB-hater, asked around and got a pretty even split of likers/haters.
My only guess would be that it's a bit of an interlude, things don't go well for the rebels, and it leaves a number of threads hanging for resolution in flick #6.
Best Buys's policy is for each employee to know as much as they can about the products they sell in their primary area of responsibility. Yet, in order to do so they have to research the product almost entirely on their own time. During slow times throughout the day when you would think an employee could do a little studying, typically this is when the merchandising manager obegins running around being his/her most concerned about the store's cleanliness and the straighntess of the product on the shelves etc., so employees rarely get to know their products that well and also because of the constant product turnover.
Back when I worked at Radio Shack (many moons ago...), my manager would quiz me on what page number product X was in the catalog. Heck, we used to have to know the Radio Shack product prefix#'s by heart (there was a method to the madness).
Google is fascinating because it proves you can get ahead without underhanded business tactics, coercion and lies. You can just make a product that is better than everyone elses, quality wise, and that's enough.
Well, at least as far as we know about.
There's been enough shills and shysters along the way (Sunbeam and the exec who was known as either the axe-man or the fixxer-upper dude) that it's best to wait and see for a few years before annointing them saints. Wal*Mart used to have a good corporate image as well, but I refuse to buy from them unless they're the *only* place where I can get product X. (Happened once last year.)
So far, Google looks clean... if they still are clean 5 or 10 years from now, I'll agree that they are truly a company to be admired.
If they're so successful, why the need to go public?
I don't know that the Google folks have every come out and said why, but the folks on the sidelines were placing bets that it was because Google had given so many employees private stock.
From what I understand, once X people hold private stock in your company, you have to start making reports to the SEC. Apparently, expensive reports (at a guess), because the general opinion was that since you're making SEC reports anyway, why not IPO and get a cash infusion.
At least... those are the types of comments that got mod'd up back when the Google IPO was just a rumor last year.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this some way of the Hugo staff giving 2 awards for short stories or is it a sideways proof that Sci-Fi as a genre is more suited to 20-30 pages of prose and that when it hits the 300-400 page region it is less saleable to the general public?
No, you're reaching.
The only 20-30 page short stories that I've ever read have either been in a monthly rag or in a book of short stories.
And they're not my preference by far. I much prefer trilogies / quads / decs... most of my bookshelf is filled with series sci-fi/fantasy with a mere armful of solitary books.
I'll agree with that. Civil Campaign was a great mix of comedy and drama, probably the best in the series. However, the book that follows, Diplomatic Immunity was a bit of a let down, so maybe she needs to take break from that series.
(I can't put my finger on anything specific with DI, but the CC novel was just oodles of fun to read.)
I know people will bash this but why wasn't OotP on the list? It was a great book, much better than the ones that won and it out sold them by like an order of magnittude.
Mmmm, I *like* the HP series, but OotP wasn't really that great of a story (book #4 was much better). It was rather stilted in places and pacing. Book #4 starts with the World Cup and builds up to a big climax at the end in the Cemetary. Just about *anything* would be tough to follow that and book #5 is more of a "putting the pieces in place for #6/#7".
(I was particular dissapointed with the death, because in book #5 they were not a nice character, always on edge, which killed off any nice feelings that I had gained towards them in book #4. Then it felt like it was just kind of shoved in there in the middle of the big fight at the end. Almost as if the author needed a bigger climax then book #4, and was out of ideas of how to top it.)
So what should the Hugo judge, science or fiction?
And as numerous Hollywood "fizzles" have shown... all the special effects (or hard science in Sci-Fi) is useless if you don't have a good story (or tell it badly).
The best Sci-Fi in my book is stuff that puts the people ahead of the Sci-Fi. Where the science is merely a hook to draw you in and the futuristic universe is just a backdrop against which the tale plays out against.
Lois McMaster Bujold and C.J. Cherryh's stuff is almost *always* worth reading.
Bujold's best stuff is in the Vorkosigan universe (something like 10+ books). The high point of the series is probably Civil Campaign, which won't make sense unless you've read at least a few of the prior ones and understand the underpinnings.
Cherryh is very prolific. Best are the Faded Sun trilogy, and the 4 or 5 books in the Chanur universe. Or the Foreigner series (6 books now) which is a great book dealing with how humans and aliens get along (not well...). She also writes some good fantasy novels and series.
No hurracane is going to propell a SAFE at 200 mph. A safe has thick metal walls and a huge weight to surface area ratio. Even if the building it's in collapses, the safe would be in more danger from a fall than from the wind.
Maybe not the wind, but flooding will carry that puppy downstream just fine. (Hint to the poster talking about the freeway... it wasn't the wind or rain that did that, it was the tidal surge and flooding.)
So maybe the trick is to mount that safe above flood level...
The number of idiotic posts here is just another example of the declining clue of slashdot users.
Preach on (because I've given up).
The *only* reason I care about SPF is that it allows me to publish a single piece of information that says, "all mail from our domain comes from A.B.C.D IP addresses". Which keeps me from having to register my mail servers with every large ISP who uses a whitelist.
Unfortunately, the folks at SPF seem determined to sell this as an anti-spam tool or try to extend it to include user authentication or "sender reputation schemes". It's anti-domain forgery, nothing more, nothing less.
Now we have SenderID, which is the bastard child of SPF+Microsoft, patent encumbered, FoSS-hostile, etc.
(Worse, RMX-type systems have been under discussion for 12-18 months now... and we barely have working implementations.)
My requirements are:
- cell phone
- address book, calendar, task list (classic PDA)
- add-in programs to let me keep track of expenses that then get imported into Quicken/Money/etc
- vehicle maintenance program (recording of work done, fuel used, etc)
- 1-2GB of memory
- acts as a USB-drive (or Firewire)
- plays MP3s
- 8-12 hours active use, 3-7 days of idle
My 3 year old Kyocera phone does everything except the 1-2GB memory, being a USB/firewire device, and playing MP3s. It at least means that I don't have to carry both a phone and a PDA, and since it uses the PalmOS I get lots and lots of add-in programs.
I'll be rather put out when this phone finally breaks... there's not too many PalmOS phones left.
Of course now we know that there are no lesser of two evils. Kerry and Bush will both screw over the country hard.
I generally vote Republican, but I think Kerry is a good match against Bush. Heck, the Democrats managed to field a number of decent candidates this year.
Still don't know who I'm voting for this year... maybe I'll just take a coin into the voting booth to decide.
Nice post.
This attack is also useful in forging signatures on digital documents that have been signed (since the public/private key pair only signs the hash of the digital document).
Moderately troublesome.
You (and a lot of the other "database lite" projects) completely miss the point of an application like FileMaker or MSAccess.
1) All of the data, queries and reports need to be stored in a single file, or a single folder. Even if that limits you to 2GB database sizes.
2) It should be easy to move that database from machine to machine using Windows Explorer. Backup copies should be as simple as closing the application, and dragging the file to the CD-writer.
3) Integrated queries and reports, stored in the database file along with the data. Bonus points if things work well on the web just by putting the database file up on a server and telling the web-engine portion where to find it.
Formats like MSAccess MDB files are easy for the user to manipulate. Very similar to working with an Excel file (tables are like tabs). No need to babysit their own personal copy of a SQL engine, or beg a DB admin to create a new field / table / database.
I'm semi-hopeful that now that IBM has released their java mini-database engine, we might see progress.
How do the Opteron CPUs stack up against the AMD64 CPUs? (I want ECC memory!)
Is a 2.0Ghz Opteron roughly equivalent to a 2.0Ghz AMD64?
(I'm probably going to go with the Asus SK8V, VIA K8T800 chipset, because I've heard that PunkBuster doesn't work with the NForce3 motherboards at the moment.)
The 2.0Ghz Opteron 146 chip seems to have vanished from the channel. Now you either have to go with the 144 chip for $230 or the 148 chip for $445. Pity, because the 146 chip was a decent trade-off between price/speed.
Or maybe I'm just antsy because my main PC is unstable (mysteriously so for the last 2-3 months, can't find anything wrong in hardware, nor software) and I'm itching for something new... sigh.
Fire up the Prime95 client from Mersenne.org - it's not a hardware test program, but it may as well be for as often as it will stumble over a hardware issue. Even hardware issues that Memtest86 / Memtest86+ miss. Overclockers have been using it for years to figure out if their systems are stable.
A close runner-up, in terms of programs that are extremely sensitive to mis-timings or other glitches is QuickPar. Tougher to find errors with that one, unless you try to create a recovery set for 20GB worth of data.
(My story ended by throttling back the CL value on my memory... the CL 2.0 memory that I had wasn't stable until I dialed back to CL 2.5.)
Yeah, but the lottery has money involved as the central issue...
Oh wait...
(Failure to provide a human-verifiable paper-trail, at the time the vote is placed, viewable by the voter and then secured in a lockbox should be prosecuted as voter fraud. After a hundred (more?) years of paper voting, I think we know the modes of failure and how to bypass/secure them. Ink on paper is simple and easy to understand. A magnetic-only record is still considered black magic.)
Unless, of course, there are no votes for X (assuming X != Nader) in a voting district.
Given the disgust with both main-party candidates in this year's election... I suspect Nader will get at least one vote in each district.
Hell, I've always voted republican, and I'm considering voting for Nader. (For other offices, I'm thinking a straight-across-the-board method of voting for anybody but the incumbent.)
Just out of curiosity, why do you say tape drives are good for long term backups? What about them makes them last longer? I would have chosen good optical discs for long term storage as long as they're kept in dark dry places.
1) Optical drives max out at 8GB per disc. You can get a 160GB tape. (Cost for 4GB DVD media is around $0.20/GB, tape is around $0.40/GB.) The larger size makes it easier to take snapshots of large data sets (rather then swapping 20 or 40 discs). Even the 25/50GB opticals are going to be too small by the time they hit the street.
2) Removable drives are an option... 160GB drives are below $80, but you'll also need caddies which cost $30-$50 (for good quality caddies). You'll get faster transfers then tape and you don't have to buy an expensive tape drive. OTOH, that 160GB drive is very heavy compared to a 160GB tape making it more expensive to ship.
For large quantities of snapshots (50+ tapes per year), tape is still ahead... but the cost of the drives is a pain.
Those aren't very portable. They're large, and you have to carry around a power supply as well (and most of those enclosures have a power brick, which takes even more space).
Which is why I only buy USB enclosures with built-in power supplies (currently the CA-805U2 from Macally). The size isn't *too* bad for occasional movement and you can stick a 300GB 5400rpm drive in them (total cost of $330 or so). Still bigger then other 3.5" drive enclosures since it has the built-in power supply, but you don't have to worry about losing the power brick.
My beef with DVD-Rs isn't compatibility, it's longevity. It doesn't take much to screw up a DVD.
If the data on the DVD is important, there are three options...
1) burn a duplicate
2) do a "sliding window" method where important data ends up on multiple discs (e.g. month 1-3 goes on disc A, month 2-4 goes on disc B, monthe 3-5 goes on disc C)
3) dedicate the last 5% of the disc to recovery data, created using QuickPar
I do option #3 for all of my video DVDs, the players that I have don't even care that there are extra files in the VIDEO_TS folder. Takes about 20min to create the parity files and then I create an ISO file using ImageTool Classic for burning.
Easy: stick to what's proven. For me it's CDRs. I won't even touch DVD-Rs until I stop reading a million different labels at the store.
I see the moderators are on crack again... (Who moderated this as "Interesting"? Come back and explain yourself!)
The DVD+R/DVD-R issue is completely dead. All of the newer and better drives support both standards and the differences in compatibility are single digit percentages. Same thing will happen with +R9/-R9, the first drive maker who sells a dual-format drive will make a killing and then everyone else will jump on board.
And you remember your 100's of web-board, Slashdot account, newegg account, style passwords? Or maybe you just use the same password for everything?
I simply keep mine in plain text files with the contents encrypted using GPGShell (encrypt current window).
Same end result. I used to keep them in an encrypted volume, but since that volume was always mounted, they were an easy target for a worm.
ESB was one of those that people either liked or hated, with not much in the middle.
Why? (shrug) I was surprised the first time that I found a ESB-hater, asked around and got a pretty even split of likers/haters.
My only guess would be that it's a bit of an interlude, things don't go well for the rebels, and it leaves a number of threads hanging for resolution in flick #6.
So what happens to the folks that have an MCSE, MCSD and a MCDBA certification?
Best Buys's policy is for each employee to know as much as they can about the products they sell in their primary area of responsibility. Yet, in order to do so they have to research the product almost entirely on their own time. During slow times throughout the day when you would think an employee could do a little studying, typically this is when the merchandising manager obegins running around being his/her most concerned about the store's cleanliness and the straighntess of the product on the shelves etc., so employees rarely get to know their products that well and also because of the constant product turnover.
Back when I worked at Radio Shack (many moons ago...), my manager would quiz me on what page number product X was in the catalog. Heck, we used to have to know the Radio Shack product prefix#'s by heart (there was a method to the madness).
Google is fascinating because it proves you can get ahead without underhanded business tactics, coercion and lies. You can just make a product that is better than everyone elses, quality wise, and that's enough.
Well, at least as far as we know about.
There's been enough shills and shysters along the way (Sunbeam and the exec who was known as either the axe-man or the fixxer-upper dude) that it's best to wait and see for a few years before annointing them saints. Wal*Mart used to have a good corporate image as well, but I refuse to buy from them unless they're the *only* place where I can get product X. (Happened once last year.)
So far, Google looks clean... if they still are clean 5 or 10 years from now, I'll agree that they are truly a company to be admired.
If they're so successful, why the need to go public?
I don't know that the Google folks have every come out and said why, but the folks on the sidelines were placing bets that it was because Google had given so many employees private stock.
From what I understand, once X people hold private stock in your company, you have to start making reports to the SEC. Apparently, expensive reports (at a guess), because the general opinion was that since you're making SEC reports anyway, why not IPO and get a cash infusion.
At least... those are the types of comments that got mod'd up back when the Google IPO was just a rumor last year.