Most of the science in Heinlein's books was the best available at the time.
For instance, "Blowups happen" was written roughly around the time of the Manhatten Project. Think about that. How much info was available on nuclear power? Even the experts would have been hard-pressed to predict the final form it would take.
Likewise, the outdated visions of Mars and Venus in his books from the '50's was the best guess available at the time. This was before the Mercury program, after all: we were limited to observation by ground-based telescopes. Our knowledge has increased by orders of magnitude in the meantime.
I'm inclined to cut him a break.
Jon Acheson
Heinlein books to start out with.
on
New Heinlein Novel
·
· Score: 3, Informative
His big-name books are:
Starship Troopers - An homage to the poor, bloody infantryman that has been called a variety of unpleasant names by critics and other degenerates. Thankfully, it's nothing like the movie. A must-read if you like military sci-fi.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - The citizens of the moon revolt against the government of earth in order to gain their independence.
Stranger in a Strange Land - The life and times of Valentine Michael Smith, messiah. This is the Heinlein novel the literary crowd likes the best, but I find it to be one of his worst: it just never really comes together.
Most of his books are quite good, particularly the "Heinlein juveniles." The science is dated now in many cases, but they're great reads. Personal favorites include The Door into Summer, Citizen of the Galaxy, Starman Jones and The Past Through Tomorrow.
Many feel that Heinlein's later books, after 1966, aren't nearly as good. They certainly get more self-indulgent and cheezy. To start out with, I would avoid the following books, because they're not really indicative of most of his work: I Will Fear No Evil, Time Enough For Love, The Number of the Beast, Friday, Job: A Comedy of Justice, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and To Sail Beyond the Sunset.
And of the three, I think the third was the real culprit. The show just did not seem like it was worked out very well in advance. Probably because Joss was doing the last season of Buffy, and Angel, and Firefly. It started to come together after the first six episodes, but by then it was too late. I guess you have to hit the ground running.
I think Joss should have waited until Buffy was done, and then started up a new show. He would have had a lot more time to come up with a coherent history and setting, and might have gotten Buffy's old timeslot too.
The article says that they sold out Amazon's preorders in a day. How do you sell out preorders? If you're running Amazon, don't you want as many preorders as possible?
Still, sweet!
Now all we need is a Farscape movie or three, and the world will be a better place.
To get "mind share" (profit can go to hell since that's not why most of us are here), OO.o is going to have to provide above and beyond what MS Office provides. Is that possible? I don't think it is.
On the contrary, all Open Office needs to do to eat MS Office's lunch is implement about 50% of the features and remove 50% of the bugs. Because MS Office is a nasty bug-infested feature landfill that makes my daily work more difficult, and I want to switch.
If Open Office has a Master Document feature that doesn't destroy literally every document created with it, it has a marketing advantage over MS Office.
If Open Office has automatic numbering that works reliably, it has a marketing advantage over MS Office.
If Open Office is free of the section break bug that has plagued every version of MS word for the last 12 years, it has a marketing advantage over MS Office.
OTOH, it woudn't be nearly as big an issue if Open Office had no way of doing forms you can fill out, even though MS Word contains two or three separate ways to do this. It's a feature nobody uses. And nobody would miss Clippy.
I'm VERY interested in the next version of Open office, now beta, that outputs PDFs.
I've been playing around with the current stable release, and so far it's surprisingly good. If the new beta is maybe a little better , and allows me to output decent PDFs with less trouble than MS Word, I'll probably start using it as my full-time writing tool.
Part of the reason his writing may seem hackneyed is because every single comics writer that followed Stan Lee has imitated his style to some extent. The writing style, concepts and situations Lee pioneered are taken for granted nowadays because people have been doing riffs on them for 40 years. Thus, when you read Stan Lee writing like Stan Lee, it's safe to say that it's going to resemble something you've seen before.
For another example, doesn't Star Wars seem a little trite and hackneyed now? Or even The Matrix? But when they came out, they were like nothing most people had seen before. From what I have read, Stan Lee was like that back in the day.
Was at a Who concert way back when Keith Moon was still their drummer. Moon had serious issues, and that night he passed out on stage.
So they asked if any one in the audience could play drums. "You have to be good." Some lucky fan got to live out their dream that night, and played drums for the Who for the rest of the concert.
The person is also going to look much different based on the climate, diet, amount of exercise, probably even occupation and social class to some extent.
It's interesting that nobody is talking about everyone having laptops instead of desktop machines. Yet that was one of the big sea changes to occur in the next ten years.
If I hadn't invested in a nice monitor, I'd certainly have bought a laptop instead of a new desktop this time around, and I still want a better laptop than I have.
I've been thinking about this more and more recently: nearly all of the fricking clutter in my office and in my home is paper, and I want it to go away.
Getting a Palm did away with a BIG chunk of that clutter: no more scribbled notes to myself or notepads full of handwritten ideas filling up the drawers.
More and more of the doc I work on at work is electronic, and with a 2-monitor setup, that's the way to go. One screen for reference, one for work. You still have the problem of printing things out to take and show someone, but that kind of thing could be done with a tablet-sized PDA. Most of those get thrown out immediately, anyway.
Next up is electronic bill-paying, to clear the mail off the kitchen table.
Then, it's tabletop role-playing with a laptop instead of a GM's screen. That may have to wait for better LCDs, but I want to see what WXGA looks like before I put it off.
After that, the last to go will probably be taxes, just because dammit, I want the hardcopy record if the bastards ever come knocking on my door.
There will probably always be some paper in the loop, but if I can take it down to 5% of what there is now, it will all be good.
1) That "hot" career WON'T be hot in 4-6 years when you hit the workplace. Because by that point it will be glutted with losers like you trying to get rich quick. See the IT field today for an example of this in action.
2) "Yet another English major." Snob much?
3) People do much better work in the fields they enjoy. Grim Sean is completely right.
4) There actually aren't that many English majors out there who can actually cut write well, and the ones that can are in a steady demand. It may not net you $100K a year, unless you can stand ISO 9000 work, but you can make a pretty good living. I do.
The real issue is that Amazon's system doesn't do moderation very well, and as a result the reviews get spammed with people who really really like something.
Or, you get situations where teachers apparently tell their classes to submit reviews on Amazon for a book, and you have 30 reviews that say nothing.
And, of course, being a bookseller, there is a strong motivation for them to bias things so that positive reviews outweigh negative ones.
The actor playing the terminator has to convey that things are going on inside its head, without emoting. It's not just totally flat, or it would be boring. You have to project that single-minded Terminator intensity. Schwarzenegger and the actress playing the T-X were both able to do this.
It's kind of like playing a Vulcan on Star Trek. Leonard Nimoy and Tim Russ were able to play it poker-faced and still be interesting to watch. Jolene Blalock, on the other hand, is just dull.
It's a limited role, but it's not like reading off a card.
Jon Acheson
Streaks of brilliance drowned in tedium.
on
A Game of Thrones
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I guess I'm one of the few that didn't like this one. Here's the review I wrote for epinions.com:
The frustrating thing about this book is that it contains the seeds of a great novel. Unfortunately, that storyline is hitched to too many other storylines that simply don't measure up. As a result, I found myself deeply regretting ever having started. I wanted to find out what happened to the two or three characters I actually cared about, but that meant wading through hundreds of pages of other subplots, most of which I frankly didn't want to read.
The best part of the book by far is the story of Jon Snow, bastard of King Eddard Stark, who is sent to "take the black" and join the garrison manning the titanic Wall that protects the north of the kingdom from attack from Beyond. There he learns about responsibility and sets to work improving the neglected defenses. And beyond the wall, some force is stirring...
It's a great story, and I wanted more of it. But by the end of the 800 pages of this book, that story is still just getting started, because most of the book is spent elsewhere. Which is where we get into trouble.
Basically, there are a lot of other plots going on, and most of them just did't measure up for me. Some of the characters, like Sansa the cookie-cutter princess, are simply shallow and insipid. The others are either objectionably passive (Eddard and Daenerys), mindlessly reactionary (Catelyn), or inherently unsympathetic (Tyrion Lannister). Bran and Arya might turn out to be likeable, but their stories haven't even gotten started by the end of the book. And yet, each of these characters is given their own series of chapters. The end result is too many chapters, and a book that is bogged down in the tedious lives of characters I didn't care about.
It also bothers me that in 800-odd pages Martin wasn't able to tell a complete story, or even get some of the plots fully started. Tolkien told the entire Lord of the Rings in about 900 pages, and LotR isn't exactly thin on plot or background. It also bothered me that when we got to the big battle at the end of the book, most of it happened off screen. Martin devoted more space in his book to people talking in bars! I felt cheated.
The pluses: Martin's writing does a good job of describing what is going on and establishing a sense of medieval atmosphere, and the world he builds in the novel was genuinely interesting to me. I still think the tale of Jon Snow would have made a brilliant standalone novel. On a paragraph by paragraph level, the writing is solid.
This book frustrated me immensely. It was good enough in parts that I didn't want to throw it against the wall, but most of the time it was like eating cardboard. I wouldn't read the rest of this series if I got it for free.
However, people who only want a book to immerse them for x number of pages should be satisfied with it, especially with three more equally overstuffed volumes already out in the series. Given the number of positive reviews for the book, your mileage may definitely vary.
Given the amount of money involved in creating and fueling a space-worthy vehicle, I'd make a guess that the amount needed to move the launch location would be a drop in the ocean by comparison.
You're wrong. It's actually the other way around.
For instance, Burt Rutan is expected to spend about $3-10 million US on his SpaceShip One X-Prize vehicle. Getting it certified by the FAA would cost him about between $100 and $300 million US.
I've heard it said that the Shuttle still hasn't flown enough to get FAA certification, but I don't know if that's true.
Gee, heard any stories lately about pharmaceutical, biotech, or other high-tech industries cutting safety and reliability corners in their pursuit of the almighty better bottom line? Yeah, me neither. Corporations would never screw over consumers and try to cover it up to earn more profit. So let's go ahead and dump manned space flight entirely into the hands of private industry and the markets.
Does the phrase "Columbia" ring a bell? How about "Veteran's Administration?" Government beaurocracies are, if anything, more susceptible to corruption than private companies, because they're completely political entities, and as long as you can play the political game, nothing else matters.
Even if you aren't stuck with Outlook, i would still dispute your assertion. Palm's built in applications haven't seen a major overhawl in over 5 years - anyone who considers them "good" is either an undemanding user, happy with mediocrity or hasn't seen any other PIM's on organisers.
Or Palm got it right the first time, and you're a sore loser.
I wouldn't consider myself a power user but I find it pretty depressing in all this time Palm haven't figured out that people often have more than one address associated with a contact or that a task may need an alarm with it. That is just for starters.
"I'm a power user, and I'm claiming false modesty."
So do two address entries, or put the second address in the note field. If you want a task with an alarm, I don't know. There are probably more advanced organizers for Palm that will do this, the default one is deliberately simple. It suffices for my needs.
If I really wanted to micro-manage my life, I'd probably want something more capable than either system gives away as their default organizer. I'd want nested sub-tasks, for instance, and the ability to automatically schedule around my vacations. I assume the organizer on the PPC side is equivalent to the functionality in Outlook? Because that's only one feature up on palm (alarms), and since it has no sub-task nesting, it's still useless for real work.
Windows hasn't significantly updated Notepad since Win95, and the app has glaring deficiencies, but it hardly means Windows has been standing still. The Palm platform has seen continuous improvement in almost every area since its inception, but they got a lot of things right in the first generation that didn't need changing.
If you're making a system for Grandma, it would be better if it had a CD-RW drive instead of a regular CD drive. That way you easily back the system up for Grandma when you come to visit.
I did that for my parent's P133 system just this past weekend with the drive we got my Dad for Father's Day.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the science in Heinlein's books was the best available at the time.
For instance, "Blowups happen" was written roughly around the time of the Manhatten Project. Think about that. How much info was available on nuclear power? Even the experts would have been hard-pressed to predict the final form it would take.
Likewise, the outdated visions of Mars and Venus in his books from the '50's was the best guess available at the time. This was before the Mercury program, after all: we were limited to observation by ground-based telescopes. Our knowledge has increased by orders of magnitude in the meantime.
I'm inclined to cut him a break.
Jon Acheson
Most of his books are quite good, particularly the "Heinlein juveniles." The science is dated now in many cases, but they're great reads. Personal favorites include The Door into Summer, Citizen of the Galaxy, Starman Jones and The Past Through Tomorrow.
Many feel that Heinlein's later books, after 1966, aren't nearly as good. They certainly get more self-indulgent and cheezy. To start out with, I would avoid the following books, because they're not really indicative of most of his work: I Will Fear No Evil, Time Enough For Love, The Number of the Beast, Friday, Job: A Comedy of Justice, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and To Sail Beyond the Sunset.
Jon Acheson
And of the three, I think the third was the real culprit. The show just did not seem like it was worked out very well in advance. Probably because Joss was doing the last season of Buffy, and Angel, and Firefly. It started to come together after the first six episodes, but by then it was too late. I guess you have to hit the ground running.
I think Joss should have waited until Buffy was done, and then started up a new show. He would have had a lot more time to come up with a coherent history and setting, and might have gotten Buffy's old timeslot too.
Jon Acheson
The article says that they sold out Amazon's preorders in a day. How do you sell out preorders? If you're running Amazon, don't you want as many preorders as possible?
Still, sweet!
Now all we need is a Farscape movie or three, and the world will be a better place.
Bug fixes are only supplied for Office 2000 and 2003 on Windows.
I've been running Office 97 at home.
I'm NOT paying $200 to upgrade from Office 97 to Office 2000 when Office 2000 doesn't fix ANY of the major bugs in 97 (and there ARE major bugs).
Time to switch to Open Office. At least I know it will read in my Word and Excel docs acceptably well.
Anyone know how the automatic numbering system in OO is supposed to work?
Jon Acheson
On the contrary, all Open Office needs to do to eat MS Office's lunch is implement about 50% of the features and remove 50% of the bugs. Because MS Office is a nasty bug-infested feature landfill that makes my daily work more difficult, and I want to switch.
If Open Office has a Master Document feature that doesn't destroy literally every document created with it, it has a marketing advantage over MS Office.
If Open Office has automatic numbering that works reliably, it has a marketing advantage over MS Office.
If Open Office is free of the section break bug that has plagued every version of MS word for the last 12 years, it has a marketing advantage over MS Office.
OTOH, it woudn't be nearly as big an issue if Open Office had no way of doing forms you can fill out, even though MS Word contains two or three separate ways to do this. It's a feature nobody uses. And nobody would miss Clippy.
I'm VERY interested in the next version of Open office, now beta, that outputs PDFs.
I've been playing around with the current stable release, and so far it's surprisingly good. If the new beta is maybe a little better , and allows me to output decent PDFs with less trouble than MS Word, I'll probably start using it as my full-time writing tool.
Jon Acheson
Part of the reason his writing may seem hackneyed is because every single comics writer that followed Stan Lee has imitated his style to some extent. The writing style, concepts and situations Lee pioneered are taken for granted nowadays because people have been doing riffs on them for 40 years. Thus, when you read Stan Lee writing like Stan Lee, it's safe to say that it's going to resemble something you've seen before.
For another example, doesn't Star Wars seem a little trite and hackneyed now? Or even The Matrix? But when they came out, they were like nothing most people had seen before. From what I have read, Stan Lee was like that back in the day.
Jon Acheson
Was at a Who concert way back when Keith Moon was still their drummer. Moon had serious issues, and that night he passed out on stage.
So they asked if any one in the audience could play drums. "You have to be good." Some lucky fan got to live out their dream that night, and played drums for the Who for the rest of the concert.
Jon Acheson
The person is also going to look much different based on the climate, diet, amount of exercise, probably even occupation and social class to some extent.
Jon Acheson
Okay, so you're spending an extra $10K for each new node, and he's spending $0.50 for each new bullet. Who's winning now?
Jon Acheson
And if you have a desk, and you have a laptop, you can put the laptop away and still have your desk.
Jon Acheson
I was thinking the laptop would be just for the GM, or maybe chargen. Having a laptop in front of everyone would be a distraction, I would think.
Plus, people generally want to roll real dice.
Jon Acheson
It's interesting that nobody is talking about everyone having laptops instead of desktop machines. Yet that was one of the big sea changes to occur in the next ten years.
If I hadn't invested in a nice monitor, I'd certainly have bought a laptop instead of a new desktop this time around, and I still want a better laptop than I have.
Jon Acheson
I've been thinking about this more and more recently: nearly all of the fricking clutter in my office and in my home is paper, and I want it to go away.
Getting a Palm did away with a BIG chunk of that clutter: no more scribbled notes to myself or notepads full of handwritten ideas filling up the drawers.
More and more of the doc I work on at work is electronic, and with a 2-monitor setup, that's the way to go. One screen for reference, one for work. You still have the problem of printing things out to take and show someone, but that kind of thing could be done with a tablet-sized PDA. Most of those get thrown out immediately, anyway.
Next up is electronic bill-paying, to clear the mail off the kitchen table.
Then, it's tabletop role-playing with a laptop instead of a GM's screen. That may have to wait for better LCDs, but I want to see what WXGA looks like before I put it off.
After that, the last to go will probably be taxes, just because dammit, I want the hardcopy record if the bastards ever come knocking on my door.
There will probably always be some paper in the loop, but if I can take it down to 5% of what there is now, it will all be good.
Jon Acheson
1) That "hot" career WON'T be hot in 4-6 years when you hit the workplace. Because by that point it will be glutted with losers like you trying to get rich quick. See the IT field today for an example of this in action.
2) "Yet another English major." Snob much?
3) People do much better work in the fields they enjoy. Grim Sean is completely right.
4) There actually aren't that many English majors out there who can actually cut write well, and the ones that can are in a steady demand. It may not net you $100K a year, unless you can stand ISO 9000 work, but you can make a pretty good living. I do.
Jon Acheson
I got my Gainward FX 5200 for around $89. It too is passively cooled, but 3D performance is just above GeForce 2 levels. FWIW, it supports DirectX 9.
It also runs ok under Mandrake 9.1, though you have to use the text install.
Note that the passively cooled is plain old FX 5200, not FX 5200 ultimate, which has a buzzy fan.
Jon Acheson
The real issue is that Amazon's system doesn't do moderation very well, and as a result the reviews get spammed with people who really really like something.
Or, you get situations where teachers apparently tell their classes to submit reviews on Amazon for a book, and you have 30 reviews that say nothing.
And, of course, being a bookseller, there is a strong motivation for them to bias things so that positive reviews outweigh negative ones.
Jon Acheson
And now Microsoft is finding out that they're the only ones buying that CPU, GPU, etc. anymore, because the rest of the PC market has moved on.
Their hardware costs are probably going up, not down.
Dolt yourself.
Jon Acheson
The actor playing the terminator has to convey that things are going on inside its head, without emoting. It's not just totally flat, or it would be boring. You have to project that single-minded Terminator intensity. Schwarzenegger and the actress playing the T-X were both able to do this.
It's kind of like playing a Vulcan on Star Trek. Leonard Nimoy and Tim Russ were able to play it poker-faced and still be interesting to watch. Jolene Blalock, on the other hand, is just dull.
It's a limited role, but it's not like reading off a card.
Jon Acheson
I guess I'm one of the few that didn't like this one. Here's the review I wrote for epinions.com:
The frustrating thing about this book is that it contains the seeds of a great novel. Unfortunately, that storyline is hitched to too many other storylines that simply don't measure up. As a result, I found myself deeply regretting ever having started. I wanted to find out what happened to the two or three characters I actually cared about, but that meant wading through hundreds of pages of other subplots, most of which I frankly didn't want to read.
The best part of the book by far is the story of Jon Snow, bastard of King Eddard Stark, who is sent to "take the black" and join the garrison manning the titanic Wall that protects the north of the kingdom from attack from Beyond. There he learns about responsibility and sets to work improving the neglected defenses. And beyond the wall, some force is stirring...
It's a great story, and I wanted more of it. But by the end of the 800 pages of this book, that story is still just getting started, because most of the book is spent elsewhere. Which is where we get into trouble.
Basically, there are a lot of other plots going on, and most of them just did't measure up for me. Some of the characters, like Sansa the cookie-cutter princess, are simply shallow and insipid. The others are either objectionably passive (Eddard and Daenerys), mindlessly reactionary (Catelyn), or inherently unsympathetic (Tyrion Lannister). Bran and Arya might turn out to be likeable, but their stories haven't even gotten started by the end of the book. And yet, each of these characters is given their own series of chapters. The end result is too many chapters, and a book that is bogged down in the tedious lives of characters I didn't care about.
It also bothers me that in 800-odd pages Martin wasn't able to tell a complete story, or even get some of the plots fully started. Tolkien told the entire Lord of the Rings in about 900 pages, and LotR isn't exactly thin on plot or background. It also bothered me that when we got to the big battle at the end of the book, most of it happened off screen. Martin devoted more space in his book to people talking in bars! I felt cheated.
The pluses: Martin's writing does a good job of describing what is going on and establishing a sense of medieval atmosphere, and the world he builds in the novel was genuinely interesting to me. I still think the tale of Jon Snow would have made a brilliant standalone novel. On a paragraph by paragraph level, the writing is solid.
This book frustrated me immensely. It was good enough in parts that I didn't want to throw it against the wall, but most of the time it was like eating cardboard. I wouldn't read the rest of this series if I got it for free.
However, people who only want a book to immerse them for x number of pages should be satisfied with it, especially with three more equally overstuffed volumes already out in the series. Given the number of positive reviews for the book, your mileage may definitely vary.
Jon Acheson
Every time Phil Collins or Led Zeppelin comes on, and it'll automatically change the channel?
OK!
Jon Acheson
You're wrong. It's actually the other way around.
For instance, Burt Rutan is expected to spend about $3-10 million US on his SpaceShip One X-Prize vehicle. Getting it certified by the FAA would cost him about between $100 and $300 million US.
I've heard it said that the Shuttle still hasn't flown enough to get FAA certification, but I don't know if that's true.
Jon Acheson
Does the phrase "Columbia" ring a bell? How about "Veteran's Administration?" Government beaurocracies are, if anything, more susceptible to corruption than private companies, because they're completely political entities, and as long as you can play the political game, nothing else matters.
Jon Acheson
Or Palm got it right the first time, and you're a sore loser.
"I'm a power user, and I'm claiming false modesty."
So do two address entries, or put the second address in the note field. If you want a task with an alarm, I don't know. There are probably more advanced organizers for Palm that will do this, the default one is deliberately simple. It suffices for my needs.
If I really wanted to micro-manage my life, I'd probably want something more capable than either system gives away as their default organizer. I'd want nested sub-tasks, for instance, and the ability to automatically schedule around my vacations. I assume the organizer on the PPC side is equivalent to the functionality in Outlook? Because that's only one feature up on palm (alarms), and since it has no sub-task nesting, it's still useless for real work.
Windows hasn't significantly updated Notepad since Win95, and the app has glaring deficiencies, but it hardly means Windows has been standing still. The Palm platform has seen continuous improvement in almost every area since its inception, but they got a lot of things right in the first generation that didn't need changing.
Jon Acheson
If you're making a system for Grandma, it would be better if it had a CD-RW drive instead of a regular CD drive. That way you easily back the system up for Grandma when you come to visit.
I did that for my parent's P133 system just this past weekend with the drive we got my Dad for Father's Day.
Jon Acheson