Oh yeah, and just to help raise the trolls, Dr Who is most excellent SF. Its a shame that Star Wars and Star Trek have both never lived up to the promise realised by a low budget BBC production in the 1960s.
There's little if anything is unique to great science fiction versus great fiction in general.
So what's great fiction? Great fiction changes the reader; for better or for worse it leaves the reader in a subjectively significantly different state after reading. It can be subtle, it can be life founding, it can simply illuminate a viewpoint, but it leaves a mark in a manner the reader knows of or about (if only long after the fact).
Why and how does it leave a mark? That rather depends on the exact mark left on which exact reader. Social, cultural, and educational background play a huge role and don't even begin to define the set.
That said, what do I consider makes for great SF? Something that leaves me thinking, especially if it leaves me thinking months or years later. There are works which achieve that mark. David Zindell's Neverness is one. L E Modesitt Jr's Adiamantine is another. Stepping outside the SF boundary Myer's Silverlock has left such deep marks I'm forced to renew them regularly. The list goes on.
So I guess what you are really trying to say is that you,
Microsoft, need to have your markets protected from Open Source,
and you want others to agree to help you in that defence because
your successful and market competitive Intellectual Property
preserving products are not able to retain market share and
profitability in the face of their Open Source competitors, and
that therefore, because Microsoft is a profitable company that
employs large numbers of people, we should all agree to defend it
and subsidise it with our hard earned money despite the fact that
its products don't actually do what we want at the price we want?
Or am I missing something in this new socialist
for-the-good-of-the-people please-help-us-do-the-right-thing
vision of Microsoft? --
If you're interested in the design, development, and implementation of MUDs, and that enclude Everquest, WorldForge, UltimaOnline, TheRealm, Skotos, BatMUD, LambdaMOO, etc, have a look into the MUD-Dev mailing list. It is a high signal list (typically 10 posts a day) which features many of the architects, designers, implementors, and inspirations of the above games and many others
We moved to Silicon Valley (the self, the wife, a kid) from Florida in 1996, rented a four bedroom house, leased a minivan, and still had our monthly bills drop by almost $400 per month.
Despite the fact that I'd love to have Linus working here at VA, I'm actually rather glad that he *doesn't* work for a Linux company. As for the tired proprietary source argument -- I'd love to hear the argument that all closed source is necessarily a Bad Thing. I need a good laugh about now. Note: I make my living with Open Source, in this particular case with the Linux/IA64 port.
VA hosts Debian.org, Themes.org, Mesa3D.org, GNU.org, FSF.org, SVLUG.org, and Mail-Archive.com to name but a paltry few. You figure out the other Open Source sites VA hosts; there are quite a few of them. You go find my prior post on how VA essentially donates an entire T3 to Open Source projects.
We (VA Research) have EMP working under Linux as I type. Full BIOS and Console redirection, full access to hardware event logs, power control, sensors, etc...but...its just not quite finished. Soon. Yes, it will be Open Source.
Note: The graphs one up from there are correct -- just the tags are wrong. VA recently moved the machines, and the mapping from addresses to graphs is wrong -- so the right data is under the wrong name.
Mark V of Xfree fame is currently at VA Research, and slated to work on XFree for the G400. Yes, he has the specs from Matrox. We're just awaiting cards.
> Bottom line is, don't print pseudostatistics > like that - they don't mean anything. If YOU > think KDE sucks - fine, you're entitled to > your opinion. Some of us happen to think its > one of the best things to happen to Linux on > the Desktop for a long time.
All that is required to satisfy his statement is that there exist, somewhere, anywhere, at least 9 people that consider that KDE "sucks". You woud then provide the tenth person to satisfy the "nine out of ten people agree that KDE sucks!". Simple, no? There's no requirement for the ratio to be generally applied, just for it to be true in at least one case.
What you are looking at is the disassociation between the developers of products/programs, and the presentation of those same products.
Bubba can write the sweetest foozlebubber out there, and as soon as the foozlebubber is done, Bubba the programmer is basically doe with his job. He has satisfied the contract (with himself and the field) to produce a foozlebubber. There is next to nothing to motivate him to provide an install tool, or other hand-holding pre-use functionality. He is already done with his job.
This reduces the definition of a product in an interesting fashion, especially when compared to standard western commercialism. Products, in this new pattern, are defined by their functionality, not by their presentation, market penetration, market demographics, marketting image, PR agencies, or other soft metrics, but by the simple and inelegant measure of, "What can they do?"
Its a land of tools, of toolboxes, and of work done and things accomplished, not of feel-good, image, or hero worship.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah, and just to help raise the trolls, Dr Who is most excellent SF. Its a shame that Star Wars and Star Trek have both never lived up to the promise realised by a low budget BBC production in the 1960s.
There's little if anything is unique to great science fiction versus great fiction in general.
So what's great fiction? Great fiction changes the reader; for better or for worse it leaves the reader in a subjectively significantly different state after reading. It can be subtle, it can be life founding, it can simply illuminate a viewpoint, but it leaves a mark in a manner the reader knows of or about (if only long after the fact).
Why and how does it leave a mark? That rather depends on the exact mark left on which exact reader. Social, cultural, and educational background play a huge role and don't even begin to define the set.
That said, what do I consider makes for great SF? Something that leaves me thinking, especially if it leaves me thinking months or years later. There are works which achieve that mark. David Zindell's Neverness is one. L E Modesitt Jr's Adiamantine is another. Stepping outside the SF boundary Myer's Silverlock has left such deep marks I'm forced to renew them regularly. The list goes on.
So I guess what you are really trying to say is that you, Microsoft, need to have your markets protected from Open Source, and you want others to agree to help you in that defence because your successful and market competitive Intellectual Property preserving products are not able to retain market share and profitability in the face of their Open Source competitors, and that therefore, because Microsoft is a profitable company that employs large numbers of people, we should all agree to defend it and subsidise it with our hard earned money despite the fact that its products don't actually do what we want at the price we want? Or am I missing something in this new socialist for-the-good-of-the-people please-help-us-do-the-right-thing vision of Microsoft?
--
If you're interested in the design, development, and implementation of MUDs, and that enclude Everquest, WorldForge, UltimaOnline, TheRealm, Skotos, BatMUD, LambdaMOO, etc, have a look into the MUD-Dev mailing list. It is a high signal list (typically 10 posts a day) which features many of the architects, designers, implementors, and inspirations of the above games and many others
MUD-Dev has been active since the late 1980s, but unfortunately the archives only extend back to 1996 due to the earlier traffic being lost:
--
We moved to Silicon Valley (the self, the wife, a kid) from Florida in 1996, rented a four bedroom house, leased a minivan, and still had our monthly bills drop by almost $400 per month.
--
Despite the fact that I'd love to have Linus working here at VA, I'm actually rather glad that he *doesn't* work for a Linux company. As for the tired proprietary source argument -- I'd love to hear the argument that all closed source is necessarily a Bad Thing. I need a good laugh about now. Note: I make my living with Open Source, in this particular case with the Linux/IA64 port.
--
VA hosts Debian.org, Themes.org, Mesa3D.org, GNU.org, FSF.org, SVLUG.org, and Mail-Archive.com to name but a paltry few. You figure out the other Open Source sites VA hosts; there are quite a few of them. You go find my prior post on how VA essentially donates an entire T3 to Open Source projects.
I believe you owe VA an apology.
--
We (VA Research) have EMP working under Linux as I type. Full BIOS and Console redirection, full access to hardware event logs, power control, sensors, etc...but...its just not quite finished. Soon. Yes, it will be Open Source.
--
Have you noticed that Gnu.Org (and FSF.org, Mesa3d.org, Debian.org etc etc etc) are all hosted at VA?
http://www.debian.org/~rwalker/mrtg/ total.htmlNote: The graphs one up from there are correct -- just the tags are wrong. VA recently moved the machines, and the mapping from addresses to graphs is wrong -- so the right data is under the wrong name.
--
Mark V of Xfree fame is currently at VA Research, and slated to work on XFree for the G400. Yes, he has the specs from Matrox. We're just awaiting cards.
--
> You mean YOU think KDE sucks.
...
> Bottom line is, don't print pseudostatistics
> like that - they don't mean anything. If YOU
> think KDE sucks - fine, you're entitled to
> your opinion. Some of us happen to think its
> one of the best things to happen to Linux on
> the Desktop for a long time.
All that is required to satisfy his statement is that there exist, somewhere, anywhere, at least 9 people that consider that KDE "sucks". You woud then provide the tenth person to satisfy the "nine out of ten people agree that KDE sucks!". Simple, no? There's no requirement for the ratio to be generally applied, just for it to be true in at least one case.
What you are looking at is the disassociation between the developers of products/programs, and the presentation of those same products.
Bubba can write the sweetest foozlebubber out there, and as soon as the foozlebubber is done, Bubba the programmer is basically doe with his job. He has satisfied the contract (with himself and the field) to produce a foozlebubber. There is next to nothing to motivate him to provide an install tool, or other hand-holding pre-use functionality. He is already done with his job.
This reduces the definition of a product in an interesting fashion, especially when compared to standard western commercialism. Products, in this new pattern, are defined by their functionality, not by their presentation, market penetration, market demographics, marketting image, PR agencies, or other soft metrics, but by the simple and inelegant measure of, "What can they do?"
Its a land of tools, of toolboxes, and of work done and things accomplished, not of feel-good, image, or hero worship.