I watched the original series when it first aired and there was nothing else like it on TV at the time. Those were the lean years; no Star Trek except reruns of the original series, no other big budgeted SF TV shows (Space:1999 had been canned the year before BSG started), and no cable channels to fill the void. There were three networks (that's right, pre-FOX, pre-UPN) and cable was a rare thing involving bulky switch boxes... Whoa, this is turning into a "when I was your age" type rant.
In its day, BSG was fairly sophisticated and thoughtful. In its day, the SFX were the best you could see on TV (those vector graphics displays they used were, for the time, amazing). Re-making the show now with deacades of new Star Trek series and Farscape and SG1 and such to compare it to pretty much requires the details to be rebuilt from the ground up... The underlying theme of conflict and hope should hold up no matter who's gender changed.
Actually, it was a ruse to keep people from coming in every single weekend. "Regularly scheduled maintenance" went a long way to keep the lusers from tying things up all the time. Sometimes tech support liked to have "private time" with the machine...
That's good in theory, but my experience was that thinking ahead doesn't happen very often. True story: while working as a sys prog on an MVS system, some users called in with a problem. It seems that some obscure program they ran had stopped working; could I help? As it turns out, the problem was a result of a change in profile variables that had happened 14 months earlier (they didn't run it very often). I fixed the problem, then pointed out that the application was coded in VS BASIC, a language so old that IBM had offically stopped all support for the language some time earlier. I explained that the next time we upgraded the OS (scheduled for six months hence), it might stop working entirely. It would be completely unavailable until such time as it was re-written or they managed to persuade the data-center to back out the upgrade. Certainly there was no-one on staff who actually knew how to code in VS BASIC.
I got blank stares and "but it works now, right?"
I left that company about a year later, the only person who knew enough about that system and how it was run to even identify the language, let alone fix anything...
Unless there is some unavoidable reason to upgrade mainframe apps (say, Y2K), they will generally remain untouched as long as possible. Period. And don't bother pointing out the irony of the users insisting on the latest and greatest bug-ladden version of MS Office...
Migrating COBOL apps to PC platforms won't happen on a large scale for two reasons:
Reliability - We used to "reboot" our mainframe once a month, whether we needed to or not. No way will mission critical applications end up on any system that dies on a daily/hourly basis.
Inertia - The reason for all those lines of godawful COBOL code is that it works. It runs and doesn't cost anything more to keep it running (at least not on the applications side of things; for some reason support time and effort doesn't count, no matter how much is required). There is a strong "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality in the people that decide where to allocate programmer time.
I worked on the support side of a mainframe for sixteen years and my experience was that, so long as the reports showed up on the users desk in the morning, there was no problem no matter how many problems there were. Why would anyone invest any time and/or effort fixing something that "works" when there are so many newer and more interesting ways to waste money and make life harder for the support staff...
...about this is the level of technical competency implied in the organization that is responsible for "justice" in cases involving things like MS, DMCA, DRM and so on. The "holing up in a cabin in Montana" thing is looking more and more appealing...
Based on a friend's suggestion, I created an alternate e-mail address and used it to create user IDs on classmates.com and match.com and, sure enough, until I kill the ID months later, I was getting 30+ spams a day after my ISP was done with its own filtering. I wasn't being very scientific and I don't know if it was one or the other or both, but it's a place to start...
The Cassinni Division and the Sky Road are set in the same 'world'.
In the "introduction to the American Edition" for The Star Fraction, MacLeod states, "The four books can be read in any order, and the last two of them present alternative possible futures emerging from that mid twenty-first-century world I imagined at the beginning." In The Sky Road, terrestrial space travel had stopped for over a century after the "revolution", while it had continued for that time in The Cassini Division. Remember that the "tinkers" were the pariahs in the former, while it was the "non-cos" in the latter...
I actually did read them "in any order" (basically reverse) the first time, but I think they work better in sequence...
I think this reviewer is missing out; reading this book by itself is kinda like watching Return of the Jedi without have seen the two previous parts. MacLeod's first work, The Star Fraction, is a good prequel (now available in the US), but to really grasp the setup for The Cassini Division, it is very helpful to read The Stone Canal first. (The Sky Road is a sequel to The Stone Canal as well, but the world described is mutually exlusive with The Cassini Division)
Personally, I've enjoyed all of MacLeod's works (including the trilogy in progess that starts with Cosmonaut Keep). Part of that is the well paced/structured stories, the intriguing look at tech and/or politics, and especially the low-key humor that he works in. In The Cassini Division, the story is peopled with ber-socialists; guess what the euphemism, "Go employ yourself!" refers to...
"Progress, far from consisting on change, depends on retentiveness.... Those who cannot remember the past are condemmed to repeat it." George Santayana, The Life of Reason
"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidible outcry in defence of custom." Thomas Paine, Common Sense
...and finally;
"Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil." Eric Hoffler, The True Believer
I realize I'm gonna be stating the obvious here on a number of points, but I'm building to something... Even as recently a ten years ago, stamping out a new CD of new music took large chunks of money. Large enough that only Big Names were worth the investment (though there was a thriving community of Not So Big Names and even Very Small Names survivng by producing cassette tapes). Now, a "professional" quality recording studio and CD burning setup costs less than a new car and anyone can record and sell CDs, and thanks to the web, these people can get attention without repetitive and redundant radio saturation or MTV airplay. Extrordinairily talented people who don't fit the recording industry's concept of Things They Can Sell now have a way to get their stuff out; maybe they won't sell a million CDs, but they might actually see some money for what they do sell (or, failing that, they may get a chance to do what they enjoy without someone in a suit telling them about "target demographics"). On some level, the recording industry realizes that they are selling buggy whips to an increasingly motorized society and they're starting to panic. The "devil" they point to is the "pirates" (who, according to the first chapter of this series, have been with us for over a century). The same pattern is showing up in movies; remember the shockwaves from Clerks and The Blair Witch Project? Low budgets, big returns, who knew?
So we know that "piracy" is not nearly the issue that the RIAA has made it out to be. We know that copyright laws are seriously gronked (though the intriguing points raised by Mr. Ziemann in chapter 4 about why had not occurred to me). We know that the lawmakers are either ignorant of the damage they're doing, or unconcerned (nothing like a few thousand bucks to soothe one's aching conscience). We know these things because we choose to investigate (even if it's only reading YRO posts on/.). But what about the millions of people who don't read slashdot and/or have never given the matter any thought? How can they be reached?
For myself, I try to spread the proverbial word. I've hooked my little sister on a number of indy bands and I'm working on my nephew. I expose my friends and classmates to college radio and small label bands. I buy my music, for the most part, directly from small labels or places like CDbaby. I'm always experimenting and encouraging others to do so. I try to inform people I know about the damage being done by the DMCA without sermonizing (well, I try anyway). Is it doing any good? I dunno. Probably not much. But maybe it's enough; a couple lines after the above quote, Thomas Paine also said, "Time makes more converts than reason."
We just used the JANAAF thermo tables, so it would have just been (effectively) pure combustion, with no allowances for how that combustion was used (be it ICE or fuel cell). OTOH, we just played with room temp and sea level pressure; fuel cells operate at higher temps (slightly higher for membrane type, much higher for the types that would be used in cars) and so the numbers would be off. But still, we didn't calculate anything for the later processing required (i.e. the adsorption process that separates the H2 from CO2 after steam reformation, or the compression/refrigeration to store the H2, etc.), so it would still run at a loss...
We talked about this in a class I took last semester, and we ran some numbers on the "steam reformation" process... It turns out that A) you still get the same amount of CO2 emissions as if you had used the methane directly, and B) you end up with enough H2 to genererate slightly less energy than burning the methane directly. The electolysis method is worse, using around twice as much energy to generate the H2 as the H2 itself can produce.
The whole "hydrogen economy" thing that the Dubya is selling is just a scam to make him look more "green".
At current launch rates, NASA should stick with expendable vehicles.
Actually they're thinking about that, kinda.
About the time this issue of PS hit the stands, we had an AIAA seminar with the guy who's in charge of the OSP program at Marshall Center. The latest thinking is, as much as possible, to use off the shelf tech so that they can get something in (and over) the air as soon as possible. The includes using a Delta 4 first stage (upgraded enough to be safe for human use) and only the 6-seater "plane" would be reusable. There was also an encouraging discussion on cycle time; i.e. the new system would actually include the infrastructure to refurbish the OSP and have it ready to launch again in days or weeks, rather than the months (or more) that the shuttles take. OTOH, the OSP is still keeping us stuck in low-Earth orbit. Bah.
Not quite. Yes, only two out of five have failed (that's 20% of the fleet) in 22 years. But thats two out of 107 flights. That's slightly less than a 2% catastrophic failure rate. If commercial airlines failed at that rate, we'd have to have a couple dedicated news channels just to handle the crash coverage for the dozen per day per major airport.
The sad truth that is starting to bubble to the surface is that the shuttle was simumtaneously the only way NASA could survive the budget cutbacks of the 70's and an unbreakable hobble on efforts to actually exploit outer space. The whole re-usable scam meant that the NASA budget could only be cut so far before killing a very visible and popular program. But it also meant that we (as a nation and/or planet) have been constrained to Low-Earth orbit for twenty fscking years. The shuttle was designed by committee to do a little bit of everything, but unfortunately, engineering limitations left it doing everything poorly. The shuttle is another example of the classic dollar auction spinning wildly out of control. It is disaster prone, and it's time to look at it honestly before it kills the space program entirely.
Maybe. Then again, maybe not. While it's nice that the IEEE has (finally) taken a stand, it didn't strike me as a very strong stand, and a very limited one.
It may be a sign of snowball, but it's a small sign on a pretty shallow hill...
By the time I get this posted, I'll probably be redundant, but still...
S.M. Stirling has done some terrific alternate history stuff: the Draka series
Marching Through Georgia
Under the Yoke
The Stone Dogs
Drakon (takes place after the main trilogy)
Draka! (short stories by other writers based on the trilogy)
and the Nantucket trilogy (wherein the island of Nantucket is relocated to 3000 years in the past without explanation)
Island in the Sea of Time
Against the Tide of Years
On the Oceans of Eternity
I haven't seen anyone list John Varley yet; he's not all that new, but he's still rwiting and still putting out some amazing stuff. Try the Titan trilogy (Titan, Wizard and Demon) or any of his "Eight Worlds" stuff (nearly any of his other novels and most of his short stories).
Ken McLeod has written a number of excellent books (though not all are avaialable in the U.S.) at least one of which was reviewed here. (I was going to link to the review since that's how I "discovered" his stuff, but I can't find it.) "The Sky Road", "The Stone Canal" and "The Cassini Division" all show (or at least hint at) the catastrophic "Deliverance" from the very different perspectives of the three characters mostly responsible, seen through the eyes of people well before and well after the disaster. Often in the same book. Well crafted, entertaining, grim, thought-provoking, even funny at times...
Jonathan Lethem has written a handful of really terrific books, starting with "Gun, With Occasional Music" (a murder mystery, kinda) and one of my favorites, "As She Climbed Across the Table" (a love story about a particle physicist, an anthro professor, and the spatial anomaly that comes between them). Definitely on the bizarre side, but worth checking out...
Miscellaneous others in no particular order/spelling; Elizabeth Moon, Neil Gaiman, Alan Steele, Neal Stephenson, F. Paul Wilson...
Okay, not so long ago and not so far away, there was another situation where copyright violation kept an IP alive. It's called Star Trek.
For those too young to remember, there was a 10 year period (1969-79) where Star Trek was just another cancelled TV series. A lame animated series showed up in 73(?) that quickly died and there were novelizations of both series, but otherwise, the only "authorized" new ST material was a dozen or so novels of varying degrees of quality. That and tons of fan fiction. The sort of stuff that Paramont gets real huffy about these days. Sturgeon's law applied to the results; most of it was crap (did anyone else run across any of the K/S stuff?), but the stuff that wasn't crap helped keep the franchise alive and Rick Berman employed. This was a time when fanzines were typed and mimeographed, mail involved paper and stamps, videotape was 3/4" wide and only used by TV stations... The point being that a cavalier attitude towards copyrights made it possible for Paramont to to make millions of dollars sucking the life and spirit from the desicated husk of Star Trek, long after their attempts to kill it failed.
That depends. According to their bulletin, you can't trust MS. But the bulletin came from MS, so you can't trust the bulletin. So you can trust MS. Whch means you can't trust them which...
I was an "Automation Analyst" for a mainframe-based system a few years back, when upper management decided that they could "fix" all our IT problems by outsourcing the datacenter (our management was always 5-10 years behind on the business trend curve). When this was announced, almost a third of the datacenter staff bailed right away (the severence packages they offered were pretty insubstantial unless you were a lifer). Those that remained were interviewed by the outsourcing company and offered jobs or the option of waiting it out until the cut-off.
My ex-boss (one of the first to bail) offered me a position at his new gig, and I negotiated what I thought was the best of both worlds; I would continue to work my old job until the cut-off, collect severance, then go and work for my ex-boss at a substantial increase in pay.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
What followed was six months of hell. Because my background included a little bit of everything, instead of just doing my job for those six months, I did my job, I helped out in operations, I helped out tech support (including network, security, and some really nasty legacy systems), and when I wasn't otherwise occupied, I worked with the outsourcers explaining where the bodies were buried. I developed insomnia, a nervous twitch and grey hair (in my 30's!) by the time I and the rest of the hold-outs were finally laid off and the outsourcing company officially took over.
On the plus side, it was a good kick in the metaphorical seat; because of that little trauma I finally got up off my duff and finished my BS and now I'm working on my masters.
Though I do still take a little guilty pleasure when I hear from former coworkers about the stunningly bad job the outsourcing company has been doing...
Years ago, I was a sysprog on an insurance company's mainframe and I coded a lot of utilities (mostly in REXX, but still). Some were used by computer operators, some by application programmers, some by my fellow sysprogs, and some by insurance people. I found that it was significantly easier to code interfaces for fellow sysprogs and operators (I'd been an operator before moving to sysprog), then for the application programmers, and far hardest for the less technical insurance crowd. While they were (for the most part) intelligent people, they didn't think like I did. And even though I put a lot of effort into simplifying their interface (setting defaults, remembering preferences, structuring the inputs into logical groups), I never felt like I was really getting things where the user was comfortable with the result. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that there was only so much I could do; these people were by no means stupid, but they did look at things differently and all my interface design assumptions were based on the way that I perceived the problem.
Maybe the problem with user friendliness is that the people creating the interfaces are necessarily more technical. And even a manual is a sort of user interface and often are written by the people responsible for the interface that prompted the need for a manual. If a user doesn't have any grasp on the underlying assumptions that are built in to an interface, it doesn't mean that he/she is stupid...
But isn't the whole point of this subscription service to pay for a lack of otherwise free information (i.e. advertisements)? I already "subscribe" to a college radio station(KVCU), partly so that I only have to listen to them grovel for pledges four weeks a year instead of hearing 30 minutes of ads/self-promotion out of every 60 on a commercial station. Is this so different?
Actually, the Mars Society is also sponsoring a seperate study called Translife that will involve putting mice in orbit, then spinning up their craft to simulate a 1/3 g environment and see what (if any) effects prolonged low-gravity exposure will have on small furry mammals. A later step will involve a larger orbit and more direct exposure to the sort of radiation levels that Mars-bound astronauts will encounter. The research stations (the first up in the Canadian Arctic, the second in Utah, with Europe and Australia in the works) are just intended to simulate the actual operational side of Mars exploration...
Actually, in his book (A Case for Mars) Dr. Zubrin plans on taking along a small nuclear plant (100 kWe) to provide the power needed, and the stoichiometry of producing methane from water and carbon dioxide yields two moles of O2 for every mole of methane produced...
Slashdot Mirror
I watched the original series when it first aired and there was nothing else like it on TV at the time. Those were the lean years; no Star Trek except reruns of the original series, no other big budgeted SF TV shows (Space:1999 had been canned the year before BSG started), and no cable channels to fill the void. There were three networks (that's right, pre-FOX, pre-UPN) and cable was a rare thing involving bulky switch boxes... Whoa, this is turning into a "when I was your age" type rant.
In its day, BSG was fairly sophisticated and thoughtful. In its day, the SFX were the best you could see on TV (those vector graphics displays they used were, for the time, amazing). Re-making the show now with deacades of new Star Trek series and Farscape and SG1 and such to compare it to pretty much requires the details to be rebuilt from the ground up... The underlying theme of conflict and hope should hold up no matter who's gender changed.
Actually, it was a ruse to keep people from coming in every single weekend. "Regularly scheduled maintenance" went a long way to keep the lusers from tying things up all the time. Sometimes tech support liked to have "private time" with the machine...
That's good in theory, but my experience was that thinking ahead doesn't happen very often. True story: while working as a sys prog on an MVS system, some users called in with a problem. It seems that some obscure program they ran had stopped working; could I help? As it turns out, the problem was a result of a change in profile variables that had happened 14 months earlier (they didn't run it very often). I fixed the problem, then pointed out that the application was coded in VS BASIC, a language so old that IBM had offically stopped all support for the language some time earlier. I explained that the next time we upgraded the OS (scheduled for six months hence), it might stop working entirely. It would be completely unavailable until such time as it was re-written or they managed to persuade the data-center to back out the upgrade. Certainly there was no-one on staff who actually knew how to code in VS BASIC.
I got blank stares and "but it works now, right?"
I left that company about a year later, the only person who knew enough about that system and how it was run to even identify the language, let alone fix anything...
Unless there is some unavoidable reason to upgrade mainframe apps (say, Y2K), they will generally remain untouched as long as possible. Period. And don't bother pointing out the irony of the users insisting on the latest and greatest bug-ladden version of MS Office...
Migrating COBOL apps to PC platforms won't happen on a large scale for two reasons:
I worked on the support side of a mainframe for sixteen years and my experience was that, so long as the reports showed up on the users desk in the morning, there was no problem no matter how many problems there were. Why would anyone invest any time and/or effort fixing something that "works" when there are so many newer and more interesting ways to waste money and make life harder for the support staff...
Good thing I'm not bitter.
...about this is the level of technical competency implied in the organization that is responsible for "justice" in cases involving things like MS, DMCA, DRM and so on. The "holing up in a cabin in Montana" thing is looking more and more appealing...
Based on a friend's suggestion, I created an alternate e-mail address and used it to create user IDs on classmates.com and match.com and, sure enough, until I kill the ID months later, I was getting 30+ spams a day after my ISP was done with its own filtering. I wasn't being very scientific and I don't know if it was one or the other or both, but it's a place to start...
In the "introduction to the American Edition" for The Star Fraction, MacLeod states, "The four books can be read in any order, and the last two of them present alternative possible futures emerging from that mid twenty-first-century world I imagined at the beginning." In The Sky Road, terrestrial space travel had stopped for over a century after the "revolution", while it had continued for that time in The Cassini Division. Remember that the "tinkers" were the pariahs in the former, while it was the "non-cos" in the latter...
I actually did read them "in any order" (basically reverse) the first time, but I think they work better in sequence...
I think this reviewer is missing out; reading this book by itself is kinda like watching Return of the Jedi without have seen the two previous parts. MacLeod's first work, The Star Fraction, is a good prequel (now available in the US), but to really grasp the setup for The Cassini Division, it is very helpful to read The Stone Canal first. (The Sky Road is a sequel to The Stone Canal as well, but the world described is mutually exlusive with The Cassini Division)
Personally, I've enjoyed all of MacLeod's works (including the trilogy in progess that starts with Cosmonaut Keep). Part of that is the well paced/structured stories, the intriguing look at tech and/or politics, and especially the low-key humor that he works in. In The Cassini Division, the story is peopled with ber-socialists; guess what the euphemism, "Go employ yourself!" refers to...
...and finally;
I realize I'm gonna be stating the obvious here on a number of points, but I'm building to something... Even as recently a ten years ago, stamping out a new CD of new music took large chunks of money. Large enough that only Big Names were worth the investment (though there was a thriving community of Not So Big Names and even Very Small Names survivng by producing cassette tapes). Now, a "professional" quality recording studio and CD burning setup costs less than a new car and anyone can record and sell CDs, and thanks to the web, these people can get attention without repetitive and redundant radio saturation or MTV airplay. Extrordinairily talented people who don't fit the recording industry's concept of Things They Can Sell now have a way to get their stuff out; maybe they won't sell a million CDs, but they might actually see some money for what they do sell (or, failing that, they may get a chance to do what they enjoy without someone in a suit telling them about "target demographics"). On some level, the recording industry realizes that they are selling buggy whips to an increasingly motorized society and they're starting to panic. The "devil" they point to is the "pirates" (who, according to the first chapter of this series, have been with us for over a century). The same pattern is showing up in movies; remember the shockwaves from Clerks and The Blair Witch Project? Low budgets, big returns, who knew?
So we know that "piracy" is not nearly the issue that the RIAA has made it out to be. We know that copyright laws are seriously gronked (though the intriguing points raised by Mr. Ziemann in chapter 4 about why had not occurred to me). We know that the lawmakers are either ignorant of the damage they're doing, or unconcerned (nothing like a few thousand bucks to soothe one's aching conscience). We know these things because we choose to investigate (even if it's only reading YRO posts on /.). But what about the millions of people who don't read slashdot and/or have never given the matter any thought? How can they be reached?
For myself, I try to spread the proverbial word. I've hooked my little sister on a number of indy bands and I'm working on my nephew. I expose my friends and classmates to college radio and small label bands. I buy my music, for the most part, directly from small labels or places like CDbaby. I'm always experimenting and encouraging others to do so. I try to inform people I know about the damage being done by the DMCA without sermonizing (well, I try anyway). Is it doing any good? I dunno. Probably not much. But maybe it's enough; a couple lines after the above quote, Thomas Paine also said, "Time makes more converts than reason."
We just used the JANAAF thermo tables, so it would have just been (effectively) pure combustion, with no allowances for how that combustion was used (be it ICE or fuel cell). OTOH, we just played with room temp and sea level pressure; fuel cells operate at higher temps (slightly higher for membrane type, much higher for the types that would be used in cars) and so the numbers would be off. But still, we didn't calculate anything for the later processing required (i.e. the adsorption process that separates the H2 from CO2 after steam reformation, or the compression/refrigeration to store the H2, etc.), so it would still run at a loss...
We talked about this in a class I took last semester, and we ran some numbers on the "steam reformation" process... It turns out that A) you still get the same amount of CO2 emissions as if you had used the methane directly, and B) you end up with enough H2 to genererate slightly less energy than burning the methane directly. The electolysis method is worse, using around twice as much energy to generate the H2 as the H2 itself can produce.
The whole "hydrogen economy" thing that the Dubya is selling is just a scam to make him look more "green".
Whoops, stupid math error: that's 40% of the fleet...
Actually they're thinking about that, kinda.
About the time this issue of PS hit the stands, we had an AIAA seminar with the guy who's in charge of the OSP program at Marshall Center. The latest thinking is, as much as possible, to use off the shelf tech so that they can get something in (and over) the air as soon as possible. The includes using a Delta 4 first stage (upgraded enough to be safe for human use) and only the 6-seater "plane" would be reusable. There was also an encouraging discussion on cycle time; i.e. the new system would actually include the infrastructure to refurbish the OSP and have it ready to launch again in days or weeks, rather than the months (or more) that the shuttles take. OTOH, the OSP is still keeping us stuck in low-Earth orbit. Bah.
Not quite. Yes, only two out of five have failed (that's 20% of the fleet) in 22 years. But thats two out of 107 flights. That's slightly less than a 2% catastrophic failure rate. If commercial airlines failed at that rate, we'd have to have a couple dedicated news channels just to handle the crash coverage for the dozen per day per major airport.
The sad truth that is starting to bubble to the surface is that the shuttle was simumtaneously the only way NASA could survive the budget cutbacks of the 70's and an unbreakable hobble on efforts to actually exploit outer space. The whole re-usable scam meant that the NASA budget could only be cut so far before killing a very visible and popular program. But it also meant that we (as a nation and/or planet) have been constrained to Low-Earth orbit for twenty fscking years. The shuttle was designed by committee to do a little bit of everything, but unfortunately, engineering limitations left it doing everything poorly. The shuttle is another example of the classic dollar auction spinning wildly out of control. It is disaster prone, and it's time to look at it honestly before it kills the space program entirely.
Actually, CaseyB has it right;
nano- prefix indicates 10^-9
mega- indicates 10^6
therefore mega(nano) = 10^-3 or milli-
Maybe. Then again, maybe not. While it's nice that the IEEE has (finally) taken a stand, it didn't strike me as a very strong stand, and a very limited one.
It may be a sign of snowball, but it's a small sign on a pretty shallow hill...
By the time I get this posted, I'll probably be redundant, but still...
S.M. Stirling has done some terrific alternate history stuff: the Draka series
- Marching Through Georgia
- Under the Yoke
- The Stone Dogs
- Drakon (takes place after the main trilogy)
- Draka! (short stories by other writers based on the trilogy)
and the Nantucket trilogy (wherein the island of Nantucket is relocated to 3000 years in the past without explanation)I haven't seen anyone list John Varley yet; he's not all that new, but he's still rwiting and still putting out some amazing stuff. Try the Titan trilogy (Titan, Wizard and Demon) or any of his "Eight Worlds" stuff (nearly any of his other novels and most of his short stories).
Ken McLeod has written a number of excellent books (though not all are avaialable in the U.S.) at least one of which was reviewed here. (I was going to link to the review since that's how I "discovered" his stuff, but I can't find it.) "The Sky Road", "The Stone Canal" and "The Cassini Division" all show (or at least hint at) the catastrophic "Deliverance" from the very different perspectives of the three characters mostly responsible, seen through the eyes of people well before and well after the disaster. Often in the same book. Well crafted, entertaining, grim, thought-provoking, even funny at times...
Jonathan Lethem has written a handful of really terrific books, starting with "Gun, With Occasional Music" (a murder mystery, kinda) and one of my favorites, "As She Climbed Across the Table" (a love story about a particle physicist, an anthro professor, and the spatial anomaly that comes between them). Definitely on the bizarre side, but worth checking out...
Miscellaneous others in no particular order/spelling; Elizabeth Moon, Neil Gaiman, Alan Steele, Neal Stephenson, F. Paul Wilson...
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...
Okay, not so long ago and not so far away, there was another situation where copyright violation kept an IP alive. It's called Star Trek.
For those too young to remember, there was a 10 year period (1969-79) where Star Trek was just another cancelled TV series. A lame animated series showed up in 73(?) that quickly died and there were novelizations of both series, but otherwise, the only "authorized" new ST material was a dozen or so novels of varying degrees of quality. That and tons of fan fiction. The sort of stuff that Paramont gets real huffy about these days. Sturgeon's law applied to the results; most of it was crap (did anyone else run across any of the K/S stuff?), but the stuff that wasn't crap helped keep the franchise alive and Rick Berman employed. This was a time when fanzines were typed and mimeographed, mail involved paper and stamps, videotape was 3/4" wide and only used by TV stations... The point being that a cavalier attitude towards copyrights made it possible for Paramont to to make millions of dollars sucking the life and spirit from the desicated husk of Star Trek, long after their attempts to kill it failed.
That depends. According to their bulletin, you can't trust MS. But the bulletin came from MS, so you can't trust the bulletin. So you can trust MS. Whch means you can't trust them which...
Ah, the classic "I am lying" paradox...
I was an "Automation Analyst" for a mainframe-based system a few years back, when upper management decided that they could "fix" all our IT problems by outsourcing the datacenter (our management was always 5-10 years behind on the business trend curve). When this was announced, almost a third of the datacenter staff bailed right away (the severence packages they offered were pretty insubstantial unless you were a lifer). Those that remained were interviewed by the outsourcing company and offered jobs or the option of waiting it out until the cut-off.
My ex-boss (one of the first to bail) offered me a position at his new gig, and I negotiated what I thought was the best of both worlds; I would continue to work my old job until the cut-off, collect severance, then go and work for my ex-boss at a substantial increase in pay.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
What followed was six months of hell. Because my background included a little bit of everything, instead of just doing my job for those six months, I did my job, I helped out in operations, I helped out tech support (including network, security, and some really nasty legacy systems), and when I wasn't otherwise occupied, I worked with the outsourcers explaining where the bodies were buried. I developed insomnia, a nervous twitch and grey hair (in my 30's!) by the time I and the rest of the hold-outs were finally laid off and the outsourcing company officially took over.
On the plus side, it was a good kick in the metaphorical seat; because of that little trauma I finally got up off my duff and finished my BS and now I'm working on my masters.
Though I do still take a little guilty pleasure when I hear from former coworkers about the stunningly bad job the outsourcing company has been doing...
Years ago, I was a sysprog on an insurance company's mainframe and I coded a lot of utilities (mostly in REXX, but still). Some were used by computer operators, some by application programmers, some by my fellow sysprogs, and some by insurance people. I found that it was significantly easier to code interfaces for fellow sysprogs and operators (I'd been an operator before moving to sysprog), then for the application programmers, and far hardest for the less technical insurance crowd. While they were (for the most part) intelligent people, they didn't think like I did. And even though I put a lot of effort into simplifying their interface (setting defaults, remembering preferences, structuring the inputs into logical groups), I never felt like I was really getting things where the user was comfortable with the result. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that there was only so much I could do; these people were by no means stupid, but they did look at things differently and all my interface design assumptions were based on the way that I perceived the problem.
Maybe the problem with user friendliness is that the people creating the interfaces are necessarily more technical. And even a manual is a sort of user interface and often are written by the people responsible for the interface that prompted the need for a manual. If a user doesn't have any grasp on the underlying assumptions that are built in to an interface, it doesn't mean that he/she is stupid...
But isn't the whole point of this subscription service to pay for a lack of otherwise free information (i.e. advertisements)? I already "subscribe" to a college radio station(KVCU), partly so that I only have to listen to them grovel for pledges four weeks a year instead of hearing 30 minutes of ads/self-promotion out of every 60 on a commercial station. Is this so different?
Actually, the Mars Society is also sponsoring a seperate study called Translife that will involve putting mice in orbit, then spinning up their craft to simulate a 1/3 g environment and see what (if any) effects prolonged low-gravity exposure will have on small furry mammals. A later step will involve a larger orbit and more direct exposure to the sort of radiation levels that Mars-bound astronauts will encounter. The research stations (the first up in the Canadian Arctic, the second in Utah, with Europe and Australia in the works) are just intended to simulate the actual operational side of Mars exploration...
Actually, in his book (A Case for Mars) Dr. Zubrin plans on taking along a small nuclear plant (100 kWe) to provide the power needed, and the stoichiometry of producing methane from water and carbon dioxide yields two moles of O2 for every mole of methane produced...
How about, Wayne County, like no place on Earth.