I have always been of the opinion that words have meaning, but sometimes I am not sure if this view is shared. In particular, I am troubled by the meaning of the word 'science' in 'science fiction'.

I have always thought of Science Fiction as fiction that is based on the extrapolation of the impact of scientific and technological advances on the human (or alien) condition. Further, the science and technology should have some real basis in science, i.e., what is postulated should be theoretically possible.

Today I received a multi-paged ad from the Science Fiction Book Club. However, like the Science Fiction section of most book stores, it was only about (at best) 30% SF - the majority of the books were horror, fantasy, and semi-porn 'art' collections. Science Fiction is a vastly different genre than the horror-fantasy genre; the former is based on the reasoned application of science, the later is based on whatever the author wishes to pull out of their ass. They are very, very different.

Which takes me back to my point that words have meaning. I would kindly ask the book sellers of the world to take the horror-fantasy titles out of the SF section; I am tired of looking in vain through the SF section for SF books. It degrades the SF genre to associate those other titles with real SF. It confuses the general public as to what SF really is ("Just dragons and naked girls - sorry son, you can't read that!").

In this era where Science and Fantasy are so easily and casually confused in the public arena this would be a small step in making sure that we can distinguish between what we wish were possible and what really is possible.

Regards,

David

Its the little things

I have been a fedora/RedHat user for a long time, and still am, where servers are concerned. However, I've started using Ubuntu on the desktop, and I'm impressed so far.

I started using Ubuntu because it was the only Distro that would work on my new laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1525. I tried Suse, Debian, Fedora, and several distros that came free in some Linux mags; they would install but not boot, or boot but not recognize major elements (USB, network, hard drives, etc.). I went on line and found that Dell was selling this machine in Europe with Ubuntu, whereupon I downloaded the latest Ubuntu and the rest is history. It works very well.

With one small glitch.

When I use vim, there was no context highlighting. I googled around and found this vim command:

:syntax on

So my question is: Why, why would this function not be turned on by default as it has been in every other distro I've used. What is the reasoning?

There are other weird little things. For instance, Dia on Fedora: When one is exporting a graph as a .png or .jpg, on Fedora Dia will ask you to define the size the graphic file (pixel width x height). But not on Ubuntu, with the exact same Dia version. Why? There is a way around this, of course, which is to run the export from the command line.

These are very, very minor issues. But why do different distros have different defaults for these very common applications? This, at least, should be standardized across all platforms.

Regards,

David