I use one much like this four or five times a day, and have none of the problems described. I fill it through the spout though, so never have to remove the lid.
Though I was confident this was just a metaphor, I did try cracking a walnut using this method. I submerged three walnuts in a jar with some tap water, and let them sit for three years before trying to open them.
It was a let-down: they were easier to open, but certainly not by hand, I still had to use a nutcracker. They smelled bad, too. I did not try eating them.
In the same vein is the talk Pathological Physics: Tales from 'The Box' [1] which talks about various physics papers written by amateurs and sent in to the physics department at the university the speaker was in.
Even if that's the intended meaning of literally, it is still a reckless exaggeration. I'm pretty sure that Stephenson's endings are no more abrupt than some of Shakespeare's (check out Hamlet and Macbeth) or some of Frank Herbert's (see Dune and Children of Dune), and I never hear anyone go out of their way to describe either of them as being unable to write endings.
Everything from Stephenson after Anathem is an unremitting slog. He needs an editor who won't back down from telling him he needs to cut a third of his pages.
No, no it doesn't. Are you talking about the recent movies that split the first novel into two movies? The novel Dune ends after Paul defeats his enemies and becomes emperor.
I know that, I've read them too. In the SP, and in this thread we're discussing endings to novels. No one is complaining about a series that isn't finished due to the author's death.
I kind of think it was. The best argument I think is embodied in Kent Pitman's comments in this usenet thread [1] where he argues that for the Lisp Machine romantics (at least the subset that include him) what they are really referring to is the total integration of the software, and he gives some pretty good examples of the benefits they bring. He freely admits there's not any reason why the experience could not be reproduced on other systems, it's that it hasn't been that is the problem.
I found his two specific examples particularly interesting. Search for
* Tags Multiple Query Replace From Buffer
and
* Source Compare
which are how he introduced them. He also describes "One of the most common ways to get a foothold in Genera for debugging" which I find pretty appealing, and still not available in any modern systems.
In the same vein was an incident where an improperly localized phone in Turkey caused a sent message to arrive with different characters, with very different meaning, and the fallout was two deaths [1], discussed here [2]
> There are several lessons to take away from this tragedy. One is that localization is a good thing. Another is that it is best not to kill people who make you angry until you have carefully investigated the situation
The person that was killed was the person who started the violence, the wife. I would posit that instead physically attacking someone who comes over to apologize, you should try listening first.
Also, if your wife and her family are that crazy, give them time to cool down before you put yourself in that situation...
In a similar vein is this 2003 post in an MIT discussion forum by Scott McKay [1].
I'd also highly recommend that anyone interested in this kind of thing listen to all three of the Dynamic Languages Wizards Series panels from 2001: runtime [2], language design [3], and compilation [4]
Note that though these are videos, there isn't that much compelling in the visual portion, you could easily rip them to audio files and lose little.
I know that Guy Steele joined Thinking Machines, but after they'd at least designed the CM-1. He talked a little about it in A Conversation with Guy Steele Jr. in the April 2005 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal. I don't have a link, but I am sure he has talked about it elsewhere too.
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