Comment And thus it begins (Score 1) 196
Want to know when Skynet was born? Ask the IoT.
Comment Sinking feeling in my stomach - bullying (Score 1) 447
Why does this bring to mind a stepford kind of vibe? Or is it Logans run? Not sure but I know I just do not like this idea.
What really bugs me is how middle-schoolers will use this as a way to cyber-bully the kids outside of their cliques, perhaps in a way that lasts waaay beyond middle school years? I just don't see a happy ending for this one.
Comment Re:Win 95 + Office 95 only needed 8 meg! (Score 1) 284
Keeping things in perspective: My first IBM System/3 mini ran entire businesses with 8K of RAM.
How did it get to 8Meg? 8Gig? And how long till it's 8TB?
Comment Didn't the Stones sell out for that.... (Score 1) 284
Remember it well, fortunately don't need to run it anymore.
Wasn't it Win95 that had the "Start it up" campaign hyping the "start" button?
Comment talk about shooting the messenger... (Score 1) 327
C'mon folks, this is just a tool like any other presentation software.
The problem isn't that powerpoint exists - the problem is that people don't know how to communicate any other way, having been trained to use powerpoint.
This is strictly an education issue...
Submission + - Some of the Greatest Science Fiction Novels Are Fix-Ups
HughPickens.com writes: What do science fiction classics like Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, Van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle, Simak's City, and Sturgeon's More Than Human have in common? Each of them is a "fix-up" — a novel constructed out of short stories that were previously published on their own. "This used to be one standard way to write a science fiction novel — publish a series of stories that all take place in the same world, and then knit them together into a book," says Charlie Jane Anders. "Sometimes a great deal of revision happened, to turn the separate stories into a single narrative and make sure all the threads joined up. Sometimes, the stories remain pretty separate but there are links between them."
The Golden Age science fiction publishing market was heavily geared towards magazines and short stories. And then suddenly, there was this huge demand for tons of novels. According to Andrew Liptak this left many science fiction authors caught in a hard place: Many had come to depend on the large number of magazines on the market that would pay them for their work, and as readership declined, so too did the places in which to publish original fiction. The result was an innovative solution: repackage a number of preexisting short stories by adding to or rewriting portions of them to work together as a single story. There's also something kind of beautiful about a novel in stories says Anders. You get more narrative "payoff" with a collection of stories that also forms a single continuous meta-story than you do with a single over-arching novel — because each story has its own conclusion, and yet the story builds towards a bigger resolution. Fix-ups are a good, representative example of the transition that the publishing industry faced at the time, and how its authors adapted concludes Liptak. "It’s a lesson that’s well-worth looking closely at, as the entire publishing industry faces new technological challenges and disruptions from the likes of self-publishing and micro-press platforms."
The Golden Age science fiction publishing market was heavily geared towards magazines and short stories. And then suddenly, there was this huge demand for tons of novels. According to Andrew Liptak this left many science fiction authors caught in a hard place: Many had come to depend on the large number of magazines on the market that would pay them for their work, and as readership declined, so too did the places in which to publish original fiction. The result was an innovative solution: repackage a number of preexisting short stories by adding to or rewriting portions of them to work together as a single story. There's also something kind of beautiful about a novel in stories says Anders. You get more narrative "payoff" with a collection of stories that also forms a single continuous meta-story than you do with a single over-arching novel — because each story has its own conclusion, and yet the story builds towards a bigger resolution. Fix-ups are a good, representative example of the transition that the publishing industry faced at the time, and how its authors adapted concludes Liptak. "It’s a lesson that’s well-worth looking closely at, as the entire publishing industry faces new technological challenges and disruptions from the likes of self-publishing and micro-press platforms."
Comment Re:No, not those who don't understand... (Score 1) 921
I think that sums it up perfectly.
Comment So God DOES play dice with the universe? (Score 1) 287
Or is this just the quasi-science that Michael Crichton based "Timeline" on?
Comment Refurbed badly? (Score 1) 218
That's the benefit of the Costco 90 day return policy.. get a new computer, use it for tax season, return it (and maybe take a tax deduction for its purchase before you return it??)...sheesh. I'll bet there are lots of "new" computers out there that have been in at least one user's hands before.
Comment Sign of aging boomers (Score 1) 618
I look at the multitude of senior citizens out there who carry phones - and wouldn't be able to even place a call with most smartphones. Not a huge surprise that so many are still "dumb" phones. Also consider the cost - most people on planet earth just cannot pay the extra thirty bucks a month or so for internet capabilities/data plans.
Submission + - Beards of FOSS (wordpress.com)
kriegs writes: Too good to pass up — The beards of FOSS reviewed. Who's got the best facial hair in the open source community?
Comment Re:My grandmother is one of them... (Score 1) 301
My in-laws are in this category too... but besides that there are still those who absolutely need dial-up as an option.
I work from home and rely on internet and phone for my job. If connectivity is down I can't host webcasts... so I pay for cable internet (even though I'm a satellite TV customer), DSL as a backup, and Dial-up from AT&T as the backup to that. There have been many occasions over the past two years where I've suddenly had to switch from cable to DSL. I haven't had the double failure yet but if I do i'm ready. As for my in-laws - they have DSL but insist they need to pay for AOL too. I'm just tired of telling them not to.
Comment About time... a total anachronism (Score 1) 316
'Nuff said.
Comment Who cares about eh set top brand... (Score 1) 182
What matters is having that "Netflix" button on your remote - isn't content still king here?
Comment Moore's Law roughly seems to hold (Score 1) 214
Look at PCs and storage as the bellwether here - both have considerably declined in price per unit of (whatever) over time. Storage was $1 per byte for RAM around the time Moore made his prognostication. Disks held 5MB per 14" platter. Today quite a lot more in quite a lot less volume. Same for compute power. A million transistors on a chip seemed like a lot just 20 years ago. Now we're pushing a billion and the CPUs still cost less than they did a score ago. Is it an exact straight line over time? Of course not. But I wish I could get the same value per dollar from just about any other commodity. Pizzas would be about .001 cents per slice by now. Mmmmm Pizzas.
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