system.reflecti0n.net

Will Mac Fanboys wreck the reporting of all things Apple? Basically any commentary or editorializing seems to raise a steady stream of criticism and whining from those that believe apple products must be defended at all costs. Their response has even sometimes been classified as a "Denial of Argument" attack, as coined on Buzz Out Loud.

If DDoS and smear campaigns persist will the employees of tech news sites just not bother covering Apple anymore?

Why do so many individuals think a company worth billions of dollars actually needs their help in defending Apple's brand?

Tags: apple, fanboys, bad press

Now that Vista has the slick-looking Aero interface, does it suffer from the same problems Mac does with adoption by  businesses?

That is, does it not look business-like enough anymore to be seriously considered for use in the office?

Tags: apple, mac, windows, vista, operating systems

I really don't need the title of any book to tell me its a novel or not. You know what I'm talking about, about one in four books these days reserve the subtitle for "A Novel", as in: "The Long Hard Road: A Novel". As soon as I see this I have to wonder, how many other inanities and obviations is the author plotting to trifle me with? I tend to avoid novels that insist on telling me they are novels.

A book with a poor title smacks of low self-esteem and doesn't make for an attractive offer. I would leave a book with a bad title on the shelf nineteen times out of twenty.

Tags: writing, creativity, demotivator, books

I enjoyed reading Trader by Charles de Lint. However, at the first opportunity of really setting the speaking character's personality through dialog, he starts dropping words here and there and producing sentence fragments instead of true dialog. Without looking through his entire bibliography, I wondered if he wrote this book early on in his career and was still working out his chops. Ok, that's probably a mean thing to say coming from a guy who's never done anything better than a short story, but still I wonder. I have my own troubles with dialog myself... that is, never having written a novel of my own, I really have none.

I think alot of writers chop up the dialog because it sounds more "conversational", but who really speaks like that? I suppose the argument could be made that its probably some regional colloquialism, but listening to the podcasts, newscasts and tv from the 'States, Canada and the U.K. I'd never hear that mode of talking. Sure, we're not all grammatical wizards. We're not always going to use every word at our disposal. But how much better could a story be when the dialog sounds natural? Even if we really do speak in partial sentences and left-off phrases, our brains manage to fill in the gaps as we go. Real conversations occupy a different part of the brain than the part we read with. Its just a shame to be reading along wondering "where did the words go?"

Tags: reading, books, writing, inspiration