Interesting articles



  • First http://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-windows-torture-chrome-os,12737.html

    Wrong on so many levels, publicity crap is going out of hand

    Second http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Naked-nude-web-coders-nude-house-boobies,news-11189.html

    Hmmm, I think I'll submit a resume or at least take a company tour



  • @serguey123 said:

    First http://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-windows-torture-chrome-os,12737.html

    Wrong on so many levels, publicity crap is going out of hand

     

    Not wrong.

    The current paradigm for dealing with a computer could use a change. Currently, dealing with a computer is complex. Half the reason for that is dumb users, of course, but the other half is badly designed software, either because of apathy, ignorance or flat-out incompetence.

     



  • @dhromed said:

    Not wrong.

    The current paradigm for dealing with a computer could use a change. Currently, dealing with a computer is complex. Half the reason for that is dumb users, of course, but the other half is badly designed software, either because of apathy, ignorance or flat-out incompetence.

    The part that's wrong is the assumption that Chrome OS is going the right direction. It's not. It's going the direction that optimizes for Google revenue.



  • Okay, in the second thing there's a MAJOR WTF / misunderstanding of the point of nudism at the end of the article:

    @Article said:

    Taylor's company page has no problems indicating that he's favoring female employees. Why? Because he'd rather look at breasts than a man's family inheritance. "I don't want to look at men," he said"[...].

    So, if they're so pure and naturist and stuff, why this thing? Isn't it the fucking point of nudism that you do [i]not[/i] judge people by how they look? I'm not saying that nudism would work for me that well, I'll probably think of it they same way as this jerk, [i]but I don't claim to be a nudist or find nudism a good thing for myself[/i]. That man, guys, is a fricken hypocrite.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @dhromed said:

    Not wrong.

    The current paradigm for dealing with a computer could use a change. Currently, dealing with a computer is complex. Half the reason for that is dumb users, of course, but the other half is badly designed software, either because of apathy, ignorance or flat-out incompetence.

    The part that's wrong is the assumption that Chrome OS is going the right direction. It's not. It's going the direction that optimizes for Google revenue.

    I'm not sure I'd agree with that. How would you feel if you had to set-up and maintain a washing machine? You want to just plug it in and let it do its thing, right? For most people, that's what they want from their computers.



  • @derula said:

    Okay, in the second thing there's a MAJOR WTF / misunderstanding of the point of nudism at the end of the article:

    @Article said:

    Taylor's company page has no problems indicating that he's favoring female employees. Why? Because he'd rather look at breasts than a man's family inheritance. "I don't want to look at men," he said"[...].

    So, if they're so pure and naturist and stuff, why this thing? Isn't it the fucking point of nudism that you do not judge people by how they look? I'm not saying that nudism would work for me that well, I'll probably think of it they same way as this jerk, but I don't claim to be a nudist or find nudism a good thing for myself. That man, guys, is a fricken hypocrite.

    He's not so much a hypocrite as just a plain old perv.



  • @intertravel said:

    He's not so much a hypocrite as just a plain old perv.

    Maybe he's both?



  • What if the girls have their days? Are they gonna bleed on the office chairs and the boss will lick it up at night?



  • As impossible as it is to believe for users of an IT forum, a lot of people don't have home internet connections, and therefore will have no access to the "cloud" when they could be working from the hard disk.

    I think the main reason Chrome OS might be so hated among coders is just the idea of, for the first time in what seems like ever, a personal computing environment where you can't code at all without extra hardware (a proper web server which, by the way, will likely go up in price if standard PCs become less popular).


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @serguey123 said:

    First http://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-windows-torture-chrome-os,12737.html

    Wrong on so many levels, publicity crap is going out of hand

     

    All I want to know is-- what OS do the Chrome OS servers run on?

    And if you say "Chrome OS", then what OS runs the servers that serve those servers?

    At some point there's gotta be a non-Chrome OS server, or a standalone version of Chrome OS-- or Google's running a tesserect box with sqrt(-1) processors that boots itself up at runtime.

    I'd like a copy of either of those last two.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    @serguey123 said:

    First http://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-windows-torture-chrome-os,12737.html

    Wrong on so many levels, publicity crap is going out of hand

     

    All I want to know is-- what OS do the Chrome OS servers run on?

    If you're asking seriously:

    1) Google maintains their own Linux distro

    2) We're talking about computers normal human beings use, NOT servers



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    All I want to know is-- what OS do the Chrome OS servers run on?

    And if you say "Chrome OS", then what OS runs the servers that serve those servers?

    At some point there's gotta be a non-Chrome OS server, or a standalone version of Chrome OS-- or Google's running a tesserect box with sqrt(-1) processors that boots itself up at runtime.

    I'd like a copy of either of those last two.

    Calling it "Chrome OS" is a deliberate deception on Google's part.  They know if they were honest and called it "Google Linux" it would be ignored by 99% of the population.

     


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @El_Heffe said:

    Calling it "Chrome OS" is a deliberate deception on Google's part.  They know if they were honest and called it "Google Linux" it would be ignored by 99% of the population.
     

    That's what bugs me about it. What it is and what they're pitching are two conceptually different things-- and when push comes to shove, they don't even use what they're pushing.

     "We've come up with GoogleCar, which is completely autonomous, self-driving and 100% location aware. It takes the difficult and confusing task of driving and abstracts it to The Internet so you can just get to where you're going."

    [i]"So do you use a GoogleCar?"[/i]

    "Oh, fuck no. I drive a Civic with 'Google' painted on the side."



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    when push comes to shove, they don't even use what they're pushing.
    Eh? The idea of Chrome OS is that it's designed for whatever the opposite of a power user is. Obviously the people building it are not in that category, but so what? Does that mean it's not a long-overdue product?



  • I don't get why anyone has a problem with this. I WISH most drivers had a GoogleCar that drove itself. I don't want one, and I don't expect the people who design it to use one, but for everyone else, hell yeah!



  • @intertravel said:

    The idea of Chrome OS is that it's designed for whatever the opposite of a power user is.
    The problem is the washing machine anaolgy that someone else used earlier.  People want a computer to be like a washing maching -- push one button and POOF it magically does exactly what you what.  Unfortunately, any computer that simple is going to be mostly useless.  The people who want/expect this level of simplicity are people who have no concept of how a computer works and no understanding that the whole point of a computer is that it's NOT a single puprose machine that only does one thing  It can do just about anything, and unfortunately, that brings with it a certain amount of complexity.  Sure, some of the complexity is due to shitty, poorly designed software, but even if we had nothing but brilliant programmers, computers still wouldn't be as easy to use a washing machine.  Not even close.

    @intertravel said:

    Does that mean it's not a long-overdue product?
    The idea of a simple computer designed for people who only want to do a couple of simple tasks is very appealling.   In reality, it has already been tried many times and every one has failed.  Anyone remember word processors?  Not software, the ones that looked like a typewriter with a little LCD screen.  They were a hell of a lot better than a regular typewriter, so where are they today?  They disappeared years ago when people realized they could buy a computer that not only did all the things that the word processor did but a million other things too.  Pretty much the same way that people abandoned WebTV and the only people still using AOL are your grandparents who don't know any better.  People who only want to do one simple task today have this bad habit of eventually wanting to do more and more.

    Whether or not Chrome OS is a huge success that takes over the world, I couldn't care less.  It just bugs me when companies are deliberately deceptive.  Just be honest and call it Google Linux.  Heck, Google has a gazillion dollars in the bank.  Call up Linux Torvalds and offer him a couple million dollars to endorse it.  What's the worst that could happen? It couldn't be any worse that 1-800-GOOG-411.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @El_Heffe said:

    People want a computer to be like a washing maching -- push one button and POOF it magically does exactly what you what.
     

    Not that my analogies are any better, but this one's always bugged me. I've never used a washing machine that was one button magic! They all have a plethora of settings, require specific input in the form of certain types of detergent-- and if you pick the wrong ones, you'll fuck up your entire load of clothes, possibly to the point of destroying them entierly. 

    Plus, if you shove a cat in a computer, it probably won't die. The same can't be said about the washing machine. Makes you think, doesn't it?



  • @El_Heffe said:

    People who only want to do one simple task today have this bad habit of eventually wanting to do more and more.
     

    How about an OS that allows you to level up as you improve your skills? 

    The first time the OS booted you'd get a screen that would allow you to tick boxes to say what you wanted to do (e.g. Internet browsing and word processing) and only those applications would be available to you. As you get more proficient at using those apps you get access to more complicated ones or extra configuration options in the existing ones.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    Plus, if you shove a cat in a computer, it probably won't die. The same can't be said about the washing machine. Makes you think, doesn't it?
     

    Makes me think what kind of person would try to shove a washing machine into a computer.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @RTapeLoadingError said:

    @El_Heffe said:

    People who only want to do one simple task today have this bad habit of eventually wanting to do more and more.
     

    How about an OS that allows you to level up as you improve your skills? 

    The first time the OS booted you'd get a screen that would allow you to tick boxes to say what you wanted to do (e.g. Internet browsing and word processing) and only those applications would be available to you. As you get more proficient at using those apps you get access to more complicated ones or extra configuration options in the existing ones.

     

    That would be a nifty learning tool for kids. Start them off in trainer mode with limited access, and as they become more proficient, it automatically and slowly phases in more advanced concepts and tools.



  • @RTapeLoadingError said:

    [quote user="El_Heffe"]People who only want to do one simple task today have this bad habit of eventually wanting to do more and more.

     

    How about an OS that allows you to level up as you improve your skills? 

    The first time the OS booted you'd get a screen that would allow you to tick boxes to say what you wanted to do (e.g. Internet browsing and word processing) and only those applications would be available to you. As you get more proficient at using those apps you get access to more
    complicated ones or extra configuration options in the existing ones.

    [/quote]

    So either 1) you move to a new PC and have to start form scratch, or 2) there's some sort of "expert override" which everyone will do because the "internet tutorials" require it.



  • @MiffTheFox said:

    @RTapeLoadingError said:

    @El_Heffe said:

    People who only want to do one simple task today have this bad habit of eventually wanting to do more and more.
     

    How about an OS that allows you to level up as you improve your skills? 

    The first time the OS booted you'd get a screen that would allow you to tick boxes to say what you wanted to do (e.g. Internet browsing and word processing) and only those applications would be available to you. As you get more proficient at using those apps you get access to more complicated ones or extra configuration options in the existing ones.

    So either 1) you move to a new PC and have to start form scratch, or 2) there's some sort of "expert override" which everyone will do because the "internet tutorials" require it.

     

    I was thinking primarily about the home user who doesn't change their PC very often.  It wouldn't be hard to save the entire OS config settings much the way a game save works - if Oblivion can remember exactly where I left my elf and what he was carrying then it shouldn't be hard for the OS to do much the same.

    The idea isn't to make it an uncrackable operating environment but be one that is less daunting for the inexperienced or unconfident user.  They would see only the things the need rather that lots of icons and menu options that they don't want or understand.

    It would probably be useful to have an option in the applications and desktop that allow the user to expand what they can see or do.  

     



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    Not that my analogies are any better, but this one's always bugged me. I've never used a washing machine that was one button magic! They all have a plethora of settings, require specific input in the form of certain types of detergent-- and if you pick the wrong ones, you'll fuck up your entire load of clothes, possibly to the point of destroying them entierly. 
     

    I just pop in the clothes, ad a small quantity of detergent in a ball to the load, set it to 40 C and turn it on.

    So, no, I don't think washing machines are particuarly complex. :)



  • @El_Heffe said:

    The problem is the washing machine anaolgy that someone else used earlier.  People want a computer to be like a washing maching -- push one button and POOF it magically does exactly what you what.  Unfortunately, any computer that simple is going to be mostly useless.  The people who want/expect this level of simplicity are people who have no concept of how a computer works and no understanding that the whole point of a computer is that it's NOT a single puprose machine that only does one thing  It can do just about anything, and unfortunately, that brings with it a certain amount of complexity.  Sure, some of the complexity is due to shitty, poorly designed software, but even if we had nothing but brilliant programmers, computers still wouldn't be as easy to use a washing machine.  Not even close.

    Do you have a newsletter?


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Lorne Kates said:

    That would be a nifty learning tool for kids. Start them off in trainer mode with limited access, and as they become more proficient, it automatically and slowly phases in more advanced concepts and tools.

    There was a computer like this in Vernor Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep. Some aliens who are a bit before industrialization, technology-wise, get ahold of it. Their random actions convinces the computer that they're a child, so it starts teaching them really simple stuff...language, reading, numbers, etc, and then works them up to building cannons.

    Speaking of hard sci-fi (OK, on a different thread), Vinge is easily my favorite current hard sci-fi author. He's a computer scientist, and you get some interesting concepts out of that in his writing.



  • @intertravel said:

    He's not so much a hypocrite as just a plain old perv.
     

    If you think looking at tits is a perversion, what do you consider normal?


  • Garbage Person

    @levbor said:

    @intertravel said:

    He's not so much a hypocrite as just a plain old perv.
     

    If you think looking at tits is a perversion, what do you consider normal?


    This is how proper Americans dress. All these slutty foreigners tempting our young men into sin!


  • @Lorne Kates said:

    That would be a nifty learning tool for kids. Start them off in trainer mode with limited access, and as they become more proficient, it automatically and slowly phases in more advanced concepts and tools.

    Yah. Apple tried that. (Remember Launcher? Simple Finder?) It doesn't work.

    @RTapeLoadingError said:

    I was thinking primarily about the home user who doesn't change their PC very often.  It wouldn't be hard to save the entire OS config settings much the way a game save works - if Oblivion can remember exactly where I left my elf and what he was carrying then it shouldn't be hard for the OS to do much the same.

    Yeah. Apple tried that. (Spatial Finder.) It worked, and it was a big part of what made Classic Macs so much easier to use than Windows, but they gave up with the Unix-loving NeXT engineers took over and took a shit over all of Apple's usability research.

    @boomzilla said:

    There was a computer like this in Vernor Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep. Some aliens who are a bit before industrialization, technology-wise, get ahold of it. Their random actions convinces the computer that they're a child, so it starts teaching them really simple stuff...language, reading, numbers, etc, and then works them up to building cannons.

    Speaking of hard sci-fi (OK, on a different thread), Vinge is easily my favorite current hard sci-fi author. He's a computer scientist, and you get some interesting concepts out of that in his writing.

    Too bad his books are SO FUCKING BORING! The Deus Ex Machina ending doesn't help, either. Fire Upon the Deep was about 300 pages longer than it should have been. That whole LONG section about them going to a space station for repairs and getting attacked by butterfly-men or whatever the fuck they were was utterly pointless to the story, AND it happened at the expense of the much more interesting story on the Tines' planet.

    I really did like the Tines, though-- that's one of the most creative alien races I've ever seen in fiction. I also like how he writes them as if we already knew what they were, leading to early parts of the books where you were just going "WTF?" until you figure out how they work. I think in the first chapter there's a mention of one of the Tines positioning "eyes" about 30' apart on a hill to get a good telescopic view of something, and you're scratching your head going, "are they like on vines or something?" Too bad they're in such a FUCKING BORING book.



  • @Weng said:

    @levbor said:

    @intertravel said:

    He's not so much a hypocrite as just a plain old perv.
     

    If you think looking at tits is a perversion, what do you consider normal?


    This is how proper Americans dress. All these slutty foreigners tempting our young men into sin!

    Are there some men in that crowd?


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    Too bad they're in such a FUCKING BORING book.
    Not enough pictures for you, huh?



  • @serguey123 said:

    Are there some men in that crowd?

    I think the one on the left played Balki in Perfect Strangers. Also the ... person to his right may actually be Leonardo DiCaprio, but I wasn't sure enough to circle him/her.



  • @boomzilla said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    Too bad they're in such a FUCKING BORING book.
    Not enough pictures for you, huh?

    You were actually riveted for all 700ish pages? Even once you figured out the scenes at the space station were utterly useless to the plot? And then he glosses over a lot of the Tines stuff that could have been really interesting had he not glossed over it?



  • @levbor said:

    @intertravel said:

    He's not so much a hypocrite as just a plain old perv.
     

    If you think looking at tits is a perversion, what do you consider normal?

    It's not what you do, it's how you do it.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    @boomzilla said:
    @blakeyrat said:
    Too bad they're in such a FUCKING BORING book.
    Not enough pictures for you, huh?

    You were actually riveted for all 700ish pages? Even once you figured out the scenes at the space station were utterly useless to the plot? And then he glosses over a lot of the Tines stuff that could have been really interesting had he not glossed over it?

    The space station...you mean the one with the guys with tusks? If you think it wasn't meaningful, you need to read it again. It kinda revealed some important stuff about some of the main characters.

    Was I "riveted" for every single page? No, I suppose probably not. But I didn't think it was simply long for long's sake.

    The tines were pretty cool. He actually wrote a short story about a tine that was some kid's pet in the slow zone. I can't remember the name or the anthology where it appeared.

    One of my favorite parts of the book was the galactic usenet.



  • @boomzilla said:

    The space station...you mean the one with the guys with tusks? If you think it wasn't meaningful, you need to read it again. It kinda revealed some important stuff about some of the main characters.

    It's been a few years, admittedly.

    @boomzilla said:

    Was I "riveted" for every single page? No, I suppose probably not. But I didn't think it was simply long for long's sake.

    I'd have less of a beef if:

    The enemy fleet chasing them wasn't the *fault* of the human fleet (allegedly) traveling with them to defend them. Uh, they were trying to wipe out humans, you idiot-- if you get in a huge clusterfuck of ships crewed with HUMANS and go the opposite direction of the ship with TWO individual humans in it, they'll chase the bigger cluster-- meaning the ONLY reason the enemy fleet was chasing the heroes in the first place was because the heroes (specifically the commander of the larger human fleet) were dumbshits. (He attempts to justify this away by dropping a single sentence about how the plant-aliens on the enemy ships were under the control of the evil energy being or some... shit I can barely remember, but it was still stupid.)

    The whole situation was solved by a almost-literal Deus Ex Machina anyway! It turns out the grey-haired guy just happens to have the exact information he needs to defeat the numerically superior fleet, placed in his head by the friendly energy being who created him.

    Apart from that, the whole concept of "people get dumber when they get closer to the center of the galaxy" is fucking stupid. Really fucking stupid. And there's so many plotholes... how did the "evil" energy being know the archeologist dug up the "energy being weapon" if energy beings aren't allowed that far into the galaxy? And didn't it know that the weapon only worked if you CHASE AFTER THE WEAPON? Stay at the edge of the galaxy and you're well out of range of anything it can do. (The friendly energy being knew this-- notice that it didn't come with them to the Tines planet, it stayed the fuck away.)
    Why did it travel so fucking slow, and get so distracted by blowing up random planets/space stations on its way to the Tine planet? Of course that's the only way the heroes could beat it there, by making it have ADHD.
    If the first space station destroyed was the super important built-by-the-ancients FTL communication hub, how come they don't have any problems communicating via FTL later in the book? (At least until their computer got too dumb to translate the languages.) What was the point of spending a chapter on how important it was if it obviously wasn't actually all that important?
    Why are computers affected by the "dumb radiation" before people are? Does that imply the navigation computer on their ship is like 5 times smarter than a human brain? What about the kid's notebook computer on the Tines planet? It didn't get dumber.
    Why gloss over the fact that there's still a large fleet of insane genocidal aliens who will arrive at the Tines' planet in 20 years or so, and its all their fault?

    Notice how there aren't any plot holes in the Tines plot-- that's because it was much, much better than the space travel plot and he should have spent a lot more time focusing on it. I think this started as two separate books he crammed together into one, because until the last like 20 pages, the space travelers and the humans stuck on the Tine planet never meet or communicate in any way.

    (I did like when the plant guy saved the puppies from the burning building, that was pretty cute.)


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    I'd have less of a beef if:

    Yeah, you've forgotten (or didn't get the whole point in the first place. :-P (spoilers ahead)

    The whole thing revolves around the laws of physics changing the farther you get from the center of the galaxy, so that FTL travel, comms, etc, becomes possible, as well as AI and a bunch of other stuff. And you get far enough, the beings that live there are so advanced that they are basically gods. One of the main characters, in fact, studied Applied Theology in school.

    So yeah, it's a literal Deus ex Machina. But the interesting thing about that is that it's all happened before.

    A key point about The Blight (i.e., evil energy being) was that it was really good at using other beings from deeper zones as extensions of itself. In fact, it had essentially created the plant guys explicitly for that purpose. I'm not saying that there absolutely weren't any holes, but I think you dozed off somewhere in the 700ish pages (or maybe forgot some details in the ensuing years). There's enough in there, that you really need to read it multiple times (like most good books), and you'll see new stuff each time through.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Why gloss over the fact that there's still a large fleet of insane genocidal aliens who will arrive at the Tines' planet in 20 years or so, and its all their fault?

    Well, I think it was going to be more like a few hundred years or something, but it was fairly vague on that account. And that would probably require another 700 pages that you'd be annoyed to read. :-)

    @blakeyrat said:

    I think this started as two separate books he crammed together into one, because until the last like 20 pages, the space travelers and the humans stuck on the Tine planet never meet or communicate in any way.

    Uh...there was a fair amount of communication between them. How did you think that Flenser got radios and cannon? Also, if you think they were two different books, you've really missed the point.
    @blakeyrat said:

    (I did like when the plant guy saved the puppies from the burning building, that was pretty cute.)

    Yeah, Blueshell had a rough time.



  • No, I understand how it worked, I still think its fucking stupid. Explaining your deus ex machina doesn't make it less of one-- its like prefacing a racist post with "not to be racist, but..."

    They got the radio and guns from the laptop from the crashed ship.

    Did I doze off? Possibly. Because its a fucking boring book! Badly needed an editor.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    No, I understand how it worked, I still think its fucking stupid. Explaining your deus ex machina doesn't make it less of one-- its like prefacing a racist post with "not to be racist, but..."

    Sorry, but that's just bullshit. I can understand that you thought the whole frame for the whole point of the story was stupid, and I guess if that's where you're going to start, it's pretty hard to salvage anything. We all draw the line for suspension of disbelief in different places. And there's no accounting for taste.

    It really wasn't a typical deus ex machina that's introduced out of the blue right at the end. The whole story was building to it, though the first time through, as with many good stories, it's easy to miss that fact, as you have so ably demonstrated. I would really only use that phrase tongue in cheek here, since some of the intelligences involved were referred to as gods or being god-like, really in a Clarke-like way of sufficiently advanced technology. Because in the context of the story, it wasn't a literary deus ex machina.

    @blakeyrat said:
    They got the radio and guns from the laptop from the crashed ship.
    One faction built their guns based on the laptop. The others were guided by Pham on the OOB.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Did I doze off? Possibly. Because its a fucking boring book! Badly needed an editor.

    LOL. Sure, sure, awards aren't the be all, end all, but that's probably a better indicator of the quality of the book than any blakeyrant.



  • @boomzilla said:

    Sorry, but that's just bullshit. I can understand that you thought the whole frame for the whole point of the story was stupid, and I guess if that's where you're going to start, it's pretty hard to salvage anything.

    Maybe that is the problem.

    @boomzilla said:

    It really wasn't a typical deus ex machina that's introduced out of the blue right at the end. The whole story was building to it,

    No; the deus ex machina of the "energy being killer" machine was built-up to from the first chapter. I have no problem with that, except the 200 pages of tedium leading up to it. The one where Mr. Grey Hair somehow knows how to defeat the enemy fleet came out of nowhere.

    Look, my real point is that the story with the Tines (which has virtually NOTHING to do with the story about the energy beings) is a much better-written and more interesting story, and should have been focused on exclusively.

    @boomzilla said:

    One faction built their guns based on the laptop. The others were guided by Pham on the OOB.

    Oh yeah, I think I do vaguely remember that. Didn't the "evil" kingdom have access to the spaceship, though? Or am I mis-remembering? Or maybe the kids had the FTL radio from out of the spaceship? Pretty sure the smart puppies were in the spaceship, and they were part of the "evil" kingdom led by Steel Death Claw Evil Monsterbad or whatever his stupid-ass scary name was.

    @boomzilla said:

    LOL. Sure, sure, awards aren't the be all, end all, but that's probably a better indicator of the quality of the book than any blakeyrant.

    The Road got a lot of awards also. It's shit.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Oh yeah, I think I do vaguely remember that. Didn't the "evil" kingdom have access to the spaceship, though? Or am I mis-remembering? Or maybe the kids had the FTL radio from out of the spaceship? Pretty sure the smart puppies were in the spaceship, and they were part of the "evil" kingdom led by Steel Death Claw Evil Monsterbad or whatever his stupid-ass scary name was.
     

    The "evil" puppies had the spacecraft, the radio, and one human kid. The "good" puppies had the computer and the other human kid.



  • @Someone You Know said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    Oh yeah, I think I do vaguely remember that. Didn't the "evil" kingdom have access to the spaceship, though? Or am I mis-remembering? Or maybe the kids had the FTL radio from out of the spaceship? Pretty sure the smart puppies were in the spaceship, and they were part of the "evil" kingdom led by Steel Death Claw Evil Monsterbad or whatever his stupid-ass scary name was.
     

    The "evil" puppies had the spacecraft, the radio, and one human kid. The "good" puppies had the computer and the other human kid.

    Ah, ok. See, my memory sux. And that's the part of the novel I liked.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    No; the deus ex machina of the "energy being killer" machine was built-up to from the first chapter. I have no problem with that, except the 200 pages of tedium leading up to it. The one where Mr. Grey Hair somehow knows how to defeat the enemy fleet came out of nowhere.

    I suppose that was maybe a little less supported, although the explanation was basically that "Old One," the Power that put him together, essentially put some sort of programming in. There were several times in the book where this programming took over the operation of the body. Though it wasn't all that miraculous of a deus ex machina. Basically, all it did was to pick out which ships to target.

    The concept of things like sentient protocols and data packets were cool, too.

    @blakeyrat said:
    @boomzilla said:
    Sure, sure, awards aren't the be all, end all, but that's probably a better indicator of the quality of the book than any blakeyrant.
    The Road got a lot of awards also. It's shit.
    Yeah, like I said, not the be all, end all (though I haven't seen the movie or read the book and don't really know anything about The Road), but the Hugos and Nebulas seem to have a pretty decent track record for good SF.


  • @boomzilla said:

    I suppose that was maybe a little less supported, although the explanation was basically that "Old One," the Power that put him together, essentially put some sort of programming in.

    Yeah, because it KNEW IT ADVANCE they'd be in that EXACT situation? If it could predict THAT would happen, why couldn't it predict the archeologists digging up the weapon in the first place, and stopped the plot before it even started? Either they're omniscient or they aren't.

    Anyway, I don't hate the book, I just think it's overrated.

    @boomzilla said:

    The concept of things like sentient protocols and data packets were cool, too.

    I don't remember anything about that.

    @boomzilla said:

    Yeah, like I said, not the be all, end all (though I haven't seen the movie or read the book and don't really know anything about The Road), but the Hugos and Nebulas seem to have a pretty decent track record for good SF.

    Yeah, but like you said, tastes vary. All awards given by a panel of like-minded people are crap, IMO. Especially those that also involve taking a lot of time from panel members.

    And it doesn't have nearly as many plot holes as, say, Mass Effect 2. And lots of people on this board were defending that turd.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    @boomzilla said:
    I suppose that was maybe a little less supported, although the explanation was basically that "Old One," the Power that put him together, essentially put some sort of programming in.

    Yeah, because it KNEW IT ADVANCE they'd be in that EXACT situation? If it could predict THAT would happen, why couldn't it predict the archeologists digging up the weapon in the first place, and stopped the plot before it even started? Either they're omniscient or they aren't.


    Meh...now you're confusing "Old One" with The Blight. In the book, the programming was more described as Old One putting a part of himself (as much as possible, given the constraints, and designed to go into deeper zones...i.e., graceful degradation) into Pham. So, basically some AI code that was able to reason, etc, by itself. There were apparently parts of Pham's brain that seemed to be missing in order to accomodate this stuff. The Blight didn't know about the countermeasure due (IIRC) to some other intelligences that worked to keep it hidden. There was no claim to omniscience, IIRC. Just operating at a much higher level that we could (compare a human to, say, an ant).

    @blakeyrat said:

    @boomzilla said:
    The concept of things like sentient protocols and data packets were cool, too.

    I don't remember anything about that.

    I figured. But that was a big part of how The Blight spread at first. While trying to escape in the beginning, for instance, the humans tried to turn off all external comms to prevent any sort of infection from anything the Blight might send. I think there was some sort of maintenance robot or something that they missed, and was the Blight's way into the ship, at which point the occupants were toast.

    They were an interesting example (IMHO) of an extrapolation of consequences from the concept of the zones of thought. Of course, Vinge was the guy who came up with the whole "Singularity" junk, which I'm not sure I fully buy into. I suspect the zones of thought stuff came from related navel gazing.

    @blakeyrat said:
    @boomzilla said:
    Yeah, like I said, not the be all, end all (though I haven't seen the movie or read the book and don't really know anything about The Road), but the Hugos and Nebulas seem to have a pretty decent track record for good SF.

    Yeah, but like you said, tastes vary. All awards given by a panel of like-minded people are crap, IMO. Especially those that also involve taking a lot of time from panel members.

    And it doesn't have nearly as many plot holes as, say, Mass Effect 2. And lots of people on this board were defending that turd.

    Hey, I know people who defend Windows! /ducks Everything I've knownforgotten about Mass Effect 2 I read on this board.

    Seriously, though, I think most of the holes are from your memory / reading comprehension. Which is not to say that you'd like it even after a careful reading, but I'd question your taste in SF if you didn't. :-P



  • @boomzilla said:

    Seriously, though, I think most of the holes are from your memory / reading comprehension. Which is not to say that you'd like it even after a careful reading, but I'd question your taste in SF if you didn't. :-P

    Except I won't give it a careful reading because I've already done that and I know from experience it really, really drags. I don't need to re-read it to verify this.

    Anyway, you can judge my taste in SF based on a single data point. Well, you can, but you'd be being an ass.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    Except I won't give it a careful reading because I've already done that and I know from experience it really, really drags. I don't need to re-read it to verify this.

    I wouldn't expect you to read it again, but given all of your incorrect recollections, I'd suspect that we have different meanings of careful, not to mention attention spans, as far as reading goes.
    @blakeyrat said:
    Anyway, you can judge my taste in SF based on a single data point. Well, you can, but you'd be being an ass.

    It's the only data point I have. It doesn't make me an ass, but it makes my judgment fairly uncertain.



  • I want to see programs of a complexity like Photoshop or 3ds Max running on the cloud, or games like Crysis or Bioshock.

    The cloud is a joke.  I'm never moving all 2 TB of my shit to some webserver in India with nothing but my trust in a company like Google keeping it safe.  Even if I have to scrounge parts from ebay for the remainder of my life, I will NOT move to the cloud.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Master Chief said:

    I want to see programs of a complexity like Photoshop or 3ds Max running on the cloud, or games like Crysis or Bioshock.

    The cloud is a joke.  I'm never moving all 2 TB of my shit to some webserver in India with nothing but my trust in a company like Google keeping it safe.  Even if I have to scrounge parts from ebay for the remainder of my life, I will NOT move to the cloud.

     

    I agree with you, but that bit about Crysis did get me thinking. I'd almost, almost be willing to Cloud up a game iff it farmed off a massively amazing physics and graphics engine to a super-super computer, and send me back the video.

    BUT only if the amount of time it would take to render and send one frame of the game over a super-highspeed network was orders of magnitudes less than what it would take for me to compute and render a "good enough" version of the frame on my own PC (for whatever value of PC exists in a future with super-highspeed networks).

    I imagine a game called Meteor, where you get to design a meteor, chuck it at a fully modeled Earth, and watch the ensuing destruction to cities, peoples and the environment. My PC could handle that "good enough" by treating buildings like chunks, modeling ocean and air currents in 5km grids, and abstracting other minutia. The graphics, even on today's cards, would be satisfying.

    Given that, I'd expect the Cloud of Destruction to be able to render out buildings in such detail that it knows the tensile strength of each drop of mortar, renders out all the drywall screws, and takes into account the street musician leaning against the wall. I want it to properly model out each of the billions of humans as they react to footfall. I want to be able to zoom into the small commuter plane that was going to make a landing, but now both the pilot and copilot are frantically pulling back on the stick, shouting "PULL UP PULL UP!" as their jet careens towards the massive tidal wave swallowing LAX.

    Then I'll gladly move to the cloud for that game-- but when I fill in the reg form, I'll still be Joeseph Bloow, living at 123 Fake St.



  • @Master Chief said:

    I want to see programs of a complexity like Photoshop or 3ds Max running on the cloud,

    What does "running on the cloud" mean in that context? There's no reason your local computer couldn't download the binary from a server, then upload save files back to the server.

    @Master Chief said:

    or games like Crysis or Bioshock.

    You mean like Steam? Because that's been around for quite awhile.

    Or do you mean OnLive? Because... both of those things exist right now. (And while I had doubts about OnLive, as it turns out it actually does work pretty well.)

    @Master Chief said:

    The cloud is a joke.

    I not convinced from your first paragraph that you even know what it is.

    Plus, the largest cloud provider runs their data centers in Virginia. (Although you can select other locations.)

    @Master Chief said:

    Even if I have to scrounge parts from ebay for the remainder of my life, I will NOT move to the cloud.

    ... what?

    @Lorne Kates said:

    I agree with you, but that bit about Crysis did get me thinking. I'd almost, almost be willing to Cloud up a game iff it farmed off a massively amazing physics and graphics engine to a super-super computer, and send me back the video.

    You mean like OnLive which (and I can't stress this enough) ALREADY EXISTS?!? (Although your specific game does not yet exist on it.)



  • @Master Chief said:

    I want to see programs of a complexity like Photoshop or 3ds Max running on the cloud

    [url=http://www.aviary.com/tools]Your wish is my command.[/url]


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