Yo, so this is how I see it. Anyone know what this Bink format is? Miles audio system I'm not to worreid about; they could have sound fixed, albeit not very positional, today, if they wanted to. As for Bink - you've got the problem of having these bigass movie files on the CD i assume. That leaves them 4 options: 1) delay the release 2) find an OpenSource or simple way to convert them to mpg, play them. Unlikely. 3) port the player. painful. 4) find an OpenSource player that's stable, common, and supports Bink. Unlikely. I doubt mplayer supports Bink, but even if it did, it's not necessarily stable, uniform, or common enough. Though a binary COULD be built and called by the game to play the movies. If it supported Bink, which I doubt. 5) offer it as download. Bandwidth costs money. 6) have a cheap hack to disable videos - definitely not cool.
that's exactly my point - damn fine stuff - whether it was believable or not, it was damned fine stuff. You can't say that about most authors.
My first search on the internet revealed that my favorite author was dead - I had missed reports of his death by only one month. I cried, but I kept searching - despite my morbib first experience on the web, I learned better than most what kind of place it could be in my first 10 minutes.
Wonderful stuff - not-quite-so-believable - but somehow you can sense something there behind the writing...
I ramble. I just miss the author, and I miss the writing.
This is crap - betrayal of WWW's purpose.
on
Kid-Safe Domain Created
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What a fool. Now no.kids.us sites can reference anything upper-brow, as upper-brow sites won't be.kids.us.
I don't know about you, but I wasn't exactly interested in seeing all my kid friendly information about "Lydia" or whatever crap book I had to read back when I was in 4th or 5th grade, and I sure as hell don't want my children hanging around these labotomized websites.
This is just another excuse to push doctrine on kids - because I GARUNTEE you, no.kids.us site is going to mention that the first mention on Thanksgiving was in 1863, or that the Plymouth 'pilgrims' were first mentioned as such in 1870;.kids.us is committed to the wrong idea.
We need to be USING this wealth of knowledge that we have created for ourselves and our children. We need to be exposing them to powerful ideas at young ages; we need those kids who want to learn about the lies of their history to be able to learn about them, we need kids to be able to access information about draft dogders, we need to let our children be able to listen to dirty music, and yes, we need to let them see hate literature, to make what they will of it - and hopefully it generates disgust, but they damned well need the CHOICE to be disgusted.
WE MADE A DREAM of knowledge - we were spoonfed knowledge and WE WERE TIRED of it - BBS's, USENET,... and though the Web may as well be some governement defense project the fact is that the information is the collective talents of our world, for better or for worse.
Our kids must grow up in this world we have created for them - this INFORMATION world. This kid-safe subsection - it's crap. No offense, but if this.kids.us document were a person, I would beat him senseless and piss on his wretched limp body after I was done with him.
That being said, I make a final plea -.kids.us is a huge mistake.
You want to protect your libraries? Look at your homes first - how can you claim to respect knowledge when you block it out of the very place you live in, and shield your young, your curious from the wealth they seek? If you buy into this.kids.us crap, or buy filtering software, you might as well walk to your local library, strike up a book of matches and start burning, and while you're at it, burn your schools, public and private, and kill everyone who has every said anything intelligent.
I'm sorry I ranted but this is one of the few times in my life that something bad has happened that is unlikely to be overturned, despite the efforts of everyone out there. Tonight, I praise all of you with bloody knuckles because of the pent up fury of this attrocity against knowledge, learning, and the betterment of our society.
No, he's answering the correct one. The question was WHAT MAKES GOOD SCIENCE FICTION, not "what's the best sf out there".
Very big difference.
As for his opinion, he's dead right. Plot is the only place people have a lot of room to argue on; I say "plot" is good, but traditional plot structure blows. Traditional plot structure could not accomodate the story of an interstellar tyrant defeating his enemies to the point of extinction, assuming they offer no fight, and his race is unified, without identifying his conscience as the antagonist. However, from another standpoint, that could be really interesting; you might want to read it just for the sickness of it, or because the tyrant's mindset was so peculiar that you wanted to read it.
Can argue with this. Look at Zelazny; often remarked that Zelazny "made magic feel like science, and science feel like magic" (forget the source). Coils, despite the dubious nature of the science, was still a good book. The Madness Season, terrible science, but still, fun book.
Believable science is good for HARD SCIENCE science fiction. A sci-fi story that isn't strictly old-school doesn't always suffer from a unbelievability.
Writing. Writing is what makes good science fiction; a fancy, exciting world means nothing without good writing. On the other side, a crap world can be entertaining and even enthralling, providing that the writing is good.
Last year, I had the opportunity to take a class with Joe Haldeman, here at MIT. He asked us for a challenging topic to write a short story on - the topic we chose was "Sentient Asteroids" - and, surprisingly, he made a good story for the topic, even if it was flavored by September 11th in theme.
That is why my own stories will never be good - because I am not a good writer; no matter how detailed I make the worlds, the fact is that my writing sucks.
No offense, Raymond E Feist, but the writing of those Midkemia books has gone down over the years, despite the fact that more aspects of these worlds are fleshed out with every book. I stopped reading them - who else can say the same?
Of course, place an area in the middle for capitalization on popular themes, mass market fantasy books (cough cough), and such, but if you want good fantasy or science fiction, look for the writing.
He pulled this one on his buddies back in the Eighties. Read "The Median is not the Message" - wonderful essay - wherein he reveals that though the median amount of time someone has left to live with abdominal cancer is a mere 9 months, he has survived more than 10 years - The Median is Not the Message.
Unfortunately, something tells me he really did bite it this time. Rest well, statistician, evolver. We understand punctuated equilibreum.
Wtf yo! There are two reasons I wanted this kickass Messiah thing
1: import games that won't show up here. (Think Vib Ribbin for PS1.)
2: play backup ps1 games. I, like many others, like having backups of games - I don't buy them that often, and they tend to sit around for a year or three after i play them. When two years later I decide to finish FF7, I might find it under my bed, or just lose the damned CD. Who know's where it went. Or it could just get scratched. I'm crying about FFX - I'm no more than a couple hours from beating it, I loan it to my brother for the week, and he reports to me that he can't get past Killika Temple - must have gotten corrupted or deeply scratched. So I can never really replay the game. Unless I buy a new one or rent it.
Hence, Backups Are Cool.
Honestly, Sony has lost a LOT of support from me recently - I've always been supportive of Sony products because they don't suck, but Sony itself seems to suck these days.
Poll your biggest fans, Sony. They won't remain that way for long.
Anyone know of any commercial products released pre or even slightly post-MS-Windows, specifically X stuff? I mean hell, if X was called X Windows by a lot of people back in the day, which seems likely, looking back at the terminology in the Xerox patent document, then Microshat really doesn't have rights to be bitchy about it, right?
Also, would microshat be happy if Lindows.com had a giant flickering banner that said "NOT MICROSHAT WINDOWS" at the top, and all Lindows products said "Not Microshat Windows"? I mean, giant flickering banners and amusing subtitles DO clear things up...
Ah, as we can see, the Gnomes of South Park have finally finished their great work...
Once again proving that the creators of South Park are both visionaries and masters of the finer art of cut-throat business practices...
1. Underpants.
2. ???
3. $$$
clearly, "underpants" is actually a not so well disguised metaphor: get up close and personal with the lawmakers (not to mention lawyers, Ashcroft, and the DOJ, the great dirty underpants of the USA).
Step 2, '???', should have been obvious, as we all know that the patent office is completely incomprehensible.
Another reason to want people to license to avoid a court battle is that you think you're gonna lose. I bet this is some undefensible patent or two, like Rambus's BS.
Bladeenc has similar troubles with the frauenhoffer people. (I hope I misspelled that. I hate those bastards.)
Anyhow, I think their solution is simply not to distribute the binary. The source itself can't infringe, I think was the rationale.
In which case I would think that their friendly letter is the "toss it in the trash" type of letter.
Thoughts?
There were indeed lots of FBI, DoD, NSA (Though I guess they fall under DoD), etc, etc at DefCon. We all knew they were there, too... What I have trouble with is the fact that they can arrest a guy for making a presentation.
Kudos to Priest and the rest of the DefCon staff for a good job nonetheless. And Optyx for that kickass presentation on KIS.
Anyone else want to move to Japan?
If anyone would like to hear an song inspired by this same subject, I would reccomend the band Barcelona and their song "Shell Account", a gripping tale of CS major trying obvious passwords and them working.
Seriously, though, good band, good songs. Ultimate Geek band.
>I personally think all the... mentally unstable people... should eat a bullet.
Most of us ARE somewhat unstable - the price of a strong intellect and years of introspection. Most of us set our lives up to account for this - fallbacks, etc... I'd advise you look around. Someone you know now will probably be dead in 5 years from suicide. If you're lucky it'll be someone really close to you, then maybe you'll understand why your view is wrong and his/her death will have done someone some good.
Slashdot Mirror
Yo, so this is how I see it.
Anyone know what this Bink format is? Miles audio system I'm not to worreid about; they could have sound fixed, albeit not very positional, today, if they wanted to. As for Bink - you've got the problem of having these bigass movie files on the CD i assume. That leaves them 4 options:
1) delay the release
2) find an OpenSource or simple way to convert them to mpg, play them. Unlikely.
3) port the player. painful.
4) find an OpenSource player that's stable, common, and supports Bink. Unlikely. I doubt mplayer supports Bink, but even if it did, it's not necessarily stable, uniform, or common enough. Though a binary COULD be built and called by the game to play the movies. If it supported Bink, which I doubt.
5) offer it as download. Bandwidth costs money.
6) have a cheap hack to disable videos - definitely not cool.
that's exactly my point - damn fine stuff - whether it was believable or not, it was damned fine stuff. You can't say that about most authors.
...
My first search on the internet revealed that my favorite author was dead - I had missed reports of his death by only one month. I cried, but I kept searching - despite my morbib first experience on the web, I learned better than most what kind of place it could be in my first 10 minutes.
Wonderful stuff - not-quite-so-believable - but somehow you can sense something there behind the writing
I ramble. I just miss the author, and I miss the writing.
What a fool. .kids.us sites can reference anything upper-brow, as upper-brow sites won't be .kids.us.
.kids.us site is going to mention that the first mention on Thanksgiving was in 1863, or that the Plymouth 'pilgrims' were first mentioned as such in 1870; .kids.us is committed to the wrong idea.
... and though the Web may as well be some governement defense project the fact is that the information is the collective talents of our world, for better or for worse.
.kids.us document were a person, I would beat him senseless and piss on his wretched limp body after I was done with him.
.kids.us is a huge mistake.
.kids.us crap, or buy filtering software, you might as well walk to your local library, strike up a book of matches and start burning, and while you're at it, burn your schools, public and private, and kill everyone who has every said anything intelligent.
Now no
I don't know about you, but I wasn't exactly interested in seeing all my kid friendly information about "Lydia" or whatever crap book I had to read back when I was in 4th or 5th grade, and I sure as hell don't want my children hanging around these labotomized websites.
This is just another excuse to push doctrine on kids - because I GARUNTEE you, no
We need to be USING this wealth of knowledge that we have created for ourselves and our children. We need to be exposing them to powerful ideas at young ages; we need those kids who want to learn about the lies of their history to be able to learn about them, we need kids to be able to access information about draft dogders, we need to let our children be able to listen to dirty music, and yes, we need to let them see hate literature, to make what they will of it - and hopefully it generates disgust, but they damned well need the CHOICE to be disgusted.
WE MADE A DREAM of knowledge - we were spoonfed knowledge and WE WERE TIRED of it - BBS's, USENET,
Our kids must grow up in this world we have created for them - this INFORMATION world. This kid-safe subsection - it's crap. No offense, but if this
That being said, I make a final plea -
You want to protect your libraries? Look at your homes first - how can you claim to respect knowledge when you block it out of the very place you live in, and shield your young, your curious from the wealth they seek? If you buy into this
I'm sorry I ranted but this is one of the few times in my life that something bad has happened that is unlikely to be overturned, despite the efforts of everyone out there. Tonight, I praise all of you with bloody knuckles because of the pent up fury of this attrocity against knowledge, learning, and the betterment of our society.
May the world weep.
new-age science fiction at it's best. One of two good descriptions I've read yet.
Moderators, lets shoot for a rare 6 on this post.
No, he's answering the correct one.
The question was WHAT MAKES GOOD SCIENCE FICTION, not "what's the best sf out there".
Very big difference.
As for his opinion, he's dead right. Plot is the only place people have a lot of room to argue on; I say "plot" is good, but traditional plot structure blows. Traditional plot structure could not accomodate the story of an interstellar tyrant defeating his enemies to the point of extinction, assuming they offer no fight, and his race is unified, without identifying his conscience as the antagonist. However, from another standpoint, that could be really interesting; you might want to read it just for the sickness of it, or because the tyrant's mindset was so peculiar that you wanted to read it.
Sort of the BOFH, except interstellar war.
Thoughts?
>Believable, REAL people.
Can't argue with this.
>Believable science.
Can argue with this. Look at Zelazny; often remarked that Zelazny "made magic feel like science, and science feel like magic" (forget the source). Coils, despite the dubious nature of the science, was still a good book. The Madness Season, terrible science, but still, fun book.
Believable science is good for HARD SCIENCE science fiction. A sci-fi story that isn't strictly old-school doesn't always suffer from a unbelievability.
Grok me?
Writing.
Writing is what makes good science fiction;
a fancy, exciting world means nothing without good writing.
On the other side, a crap world can be entertaining and even enthralling, providing that the writing is good.
Last year, I had the opportunity to take a class with Joe Haldeman, here at MIT. He asked us for a challenging topic to write a short story on - the topic we chose was "Sentient Asteroids" - and, surprisingly, he made a good story for the topic, even if it was flavored by September 11th in theme.
That is why my own stories will never be good - because I am not a good writer; no matter how detailed I make the worlds, the fact is that my writing sucks.
No offense, Raymond E Feist, but the writing of those Midkemia books has gone down over the years, despite the fact that more aspects of these worlds are fleshed out with every book. I stopped reading them - who else can say the same?
Of course, place an area in the middle for capitalization on popular themes, mass market fantasy books (cough cough), and such, but if you want good fantasy or science fiction, look for the writing.
strike that - 20 years. Gotta be some sorta record!
He pulled this one on his buddies back in the Eighties. Read "The Median is not the Message" - wonderful essay - wherein he reveals that though the median amount of time someone has left to live with abdominal cancer is a mere 9 months, he has survived more than 10 years - The Median is Not the Message.
Unfortunately, something tells me he really did bite it this time. Rest well, statistician, evolver. We understand punctuated equilibreum.
explain that first part. How can you make your PS2 play imports?
Wtf yo! There are two reasons I wanted this kickass Messiah thing
1: import games that won't show up here. (Think Vib Ribbin for PS1.)
2: play backup ps1 games. I, like many others, like having backups of games - I don't buy them that often, and they tend to sit around for a year or three after i play them. When two years later I decide to finish FF7, I might find it under my bed, or just lose the damned CD. Who know's where it went. Or it could just get scratched. I'm crying about FFX - I'm no more than a couple hours from beating it, I loan it to my brother for the week, and he reports to me that he can't get past Killika Temple - must have gotten corrupted or deeply scratched. So I can never really replay the game. Unless I buy a new one or rent it.
Hence, Backups Are Cool.
Honestly, Sony has lost a LOT of support from me recently - I've always been supportive of Sony products because they don't suck, but Sony itself seems to suck these days.
Poll your biggest fans, Sony. They won't remain that way for long.
Someone should get these BSA bastards on TV, or slander them, like on ZDTV (or TechTv, whatever it's called these days. Leo Laporte... whatnot...)
Anyone know of any commercial products released pre or even slightly post-MS-Windows, specifically X stuff? I mean hell, if X was called X Windows by a lot of people back in the day, which seems likely, looking back at the terminology in the Xerox patent document, then Microshat really doesn't have rights to be bitchy about it, right?
Also, would microshat be happy if Lindows.com had a giant flickering banner that said "NOT MICROSHAT WINDOWS" at the top, and all Lindows products said "Not Microshat Windows"? I mean, giant flickering banners and amusing subtitles DO clear things up...
Ah, as we can see, the Gnomes of South Park have finally finished their great work...
Once again proving that the creators of South Park are both visionaries and masters of the finer art of cut-throat business practices...
1. Underpants.
2. ???
3. $$$
clearly, "underpants" is actually a not so well disguised metaphor: get up close and personal with the lawmakers (not to mention lawyers, Ashcroft, and the DOJ, the great dirty underpants of the USA).
Step 2, '???', should have been obvious, as we all know that the patent office is completely incomprehensible.
and of course, step 3 follows...
Someone mod this up!
The book, the Mythical Man-Month, addresses this issue... it's a good read, I reccomend it. Actually, I think there's a slashdot review of it...
Sorry, spelling error. Golgotha.
I heard someone ranting about how Golgatha was going to be like that, a long time ago. I wonder if anyone is still maintaining that Crack.com project?
You've got much to learn, young one...
RISC vs. CISC is not quite as simple as you've been led to believe.
Another reason to want people to license to avoid a court battle is that you think you're gonna lose. I bet this is some undefensible patent or two, like Rambus's BS.
Give em hell.
Bladeenc has similar troubles with the frauenhoffer people. (I hope I misspelled that. I hate those bastards.)
Anyhow, I think their solution is simply not to distribute the binary. The source itself can't infringe, I think was the rationale.
In which case I would think that their friendly letter is the "toss it in the trash" type of letter.
Thoughts?
There were indeed lots of FBI, DoD, NSA (Though I guess they fall under DoD), etc, etc at DefCon. We all knew they were there, too... What I have trouble with is the fact that they can arrest a guy for making a presentation. Kudos to Priest and the rest of the DefCon staff for a good job nonetheless. And Optyx for that kickass presentation on KIS. Anyone else want to move to Japan?
If anyone would like to hear an song inspired by this same subject, I would reccomend the band Barcelona and their song "Shell Account", a gripping tale of CS major trying obvious passwords and them working.
Seriously, though, good band, good songs. Ultimate Geek band.
... but getting there.
>I personally think all the ... mentally unstable people ... should eat a bullet.
Most of us ARE somewhat unstable - the price of a strong intellect and years of introspection. Most of us set our lives up to account for this - fallbacks, etc... I'd advise you look around. Someone you know now will probably be dead in 5 years from suicide. If you're lucky it'll be someone really close to you, then maybe you'll understand why your view is wrong and his/her death will have done someone some good.