Slashdot Mirror

I happen to like this Greenpeace sponsered study: http://archive.greenpeace.org/climate/renewables/r eports/kpmg8.pdf which is currently transforming the solar power industry.
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Be a part of Solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/birds-eye-v iew-of-mountaintop.html

Luke's list (Luke 3:23-38) from David to Jesus has 43 names: David, Nathan, Mattathah, Menan, Melea, Eliakim, Jonan, Joseph, Judah, Simeon, Levi, Matthat, Jorim, Eliezer, Jose, Er, Elmodam, Cosam , Addi, Melchi, Neri, Shealtiel, Zerubbabel, Rhesa, Joannas, Judah, Joseph, Semei, Mattathiah, Maath, Naggai, Esli, Nahum, Amos, Mattathiah, Joseph, Janna, Melchi, Levi, Matthat, Heli, Joseph and Jesus.

Matthew's list (Matthew 1:2-16) from David to Jesus has only 28 names: David, Solomon, Rehoboam, Abijah, Asa, Jehoshaphat, Joram, Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, Manasseh, Amon, Josiah, Jeconiah , Shealtiel, Zerubbabel, Abiud, Eliakim, Azor, Zadok, Achim, Eliud, Eleazar, Matthan, Jacob, Joseph and Jesus.

Moreover, only 6 ancestors appear in both of these lists: David, Shealtiel, Zerubbabel, Eliakim, Joseph, Jesus.

Luke's list has 43 generations from David to Joseph (or Mary, as Christians claim), but Matthew's list has only 28 generations from David to Joseph. That would mean that if Luke's list is indeed Mary's genealogy, then Mary would be 15 generations younger than Joseph. 15 generations is a lot of time even if the average age at which all of Mary's ancestors gave birth to the next generation was just 10 years, in which case Mary would be 150 years younger than Joseph! That is clearly not the case.

Let us assume that Matthew's list got shorter because of loss in translation, and other errors. If that is true, let not the evangelists admit that Bible is true (i.e. inerrant) in the literal sense. Hence it has to interpreted, in which case, they should not hold it as evidence against scientific evidence.

The most holy book, has 15 errors in such a short passage. Many of those errors could be claimed to be because of human intervention. Then what does that say about the amount of strain we should have when living exactly by its preaching?

Does it make sense that The Holy Word of God given by God so that ordinary men may live by its above-human-logic morality, is infused with silly logical errors so that we may be confused by it? This is not strictly a valid argument in Christianity because God the Potter can choose to make the pot anyway he wishes.

Using common sense to figure out what is literal and figurative in the bible as many evangelists do today, requires arbitrary line drawing. Don't you see how this works? The universe is earth-centric... wait, science disproved that, so that must have been a metaphor. The earth (and universe) are only 6000 years old... wait science disproved that, I guess that must have been a metaphor too. I've got an idea... why not look at this like you would any other source of information: fairly. If the claims made in the bible show themselves to be wrong, then stop making excuses for it and treat it like it is: an unreliable source of information.

The only reason people started believing that the bible should be interpreted symbolically is because all of its claims turned out to be ludicrous... not because the bible states or implies that it should be interpreted this way.This is a dishonest and bias way to analyze data. If I came up with an explanation for something which was later disproved, you wouldn't automatically assume that my data was just figurative would you? So why do people do this with the bible? If you look at anything in a figurative sense, you can make any crazy statement a truth.

God is just the line in the sand which separates the known from the unknown. As science continues to answer these unknowns, the line keeps getting drawn further and further back until God becomes obsolete. The only important question left will be, "are you willing to let go?"

http://edwinjose.blogspot.com/2007/03/is-bible-wor d-of-god-part-2.html

I didn't know who the guy was so I looked him up.

Man's a creep. So he posts pictures of men he baits on craiglist posing as a woman but his image should be considered off limits? Hypocrite, to say the least.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Every action has a reaction. Play with the bull, get the horns. Crap, I just ran out of clichés.

For those who can't access 10zenmonkey, you can read a short blurb here.

Not sure why he got all worked up for that picture anyway. I look way worse on most of my photos. And usually with my eyes closed.

There is a GUI.

http://unixhacks.blogspot.com/2006/11/security-enh anced-linux-gui-frontend.html

Is The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs obligatory around here yet? If not, it should be.

I'll start.

See this post: O, Bulgaria, defender of freedom:

Meg, if your subjects don't like the way iTunes and iPods are set up, they don't have to buy them. They have absolute freedom of choice here. The market can vote with its dollars. I realize this is probably a novel concept for someone from, um, Bulgaria. No, seriously. I really do want to get some lessons in morality from a politician whose native country sided with the Nazis in the second World War, then fell in with the Soviets for a few decades. Yep. Please, Meglena Kuneva. Please teach me right from wrong, O heroic defender of human rights. You're all about freedom, aren't you? Thank you, thank you, for saving the world from the curse of DRM on iTunes.

Is The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs obligatory around here yet? If not, it should be.

I'll start.

See this post: O, Bulgaria, defender of freedom:

Meg, if your subjects don't like the way iTunes and iPods are set up, they don't have to buy them. They have absolute freedom of choice here. The market can vote with its dollars. I realize this is probably a novel concept for someone from, um, Bulgaria. No, seriously. I really do want to get some lessons in morality from a politician whose native country sided with the Nazis in the second World War, then fell in with the Soviets for a few decades. Yep. Please, Meglena Kuneva. Please teach me right from wrong, O heroic defender of human rights. You're all about freedom, aren't you? Thank you, thank you, for saving the world from the curse of DRM on iTunes.

It strikes me that running this lean would really boost the NOX production and it seems a waste to throw that away on the catalytic converter. How about a follow on diesel cylinder that runs on the exhaust? Too much extra weight?
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Run on the Sun: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Ok, I read the article and the problem is that someone at Microsoft will say one thing such as..

Microsoft is a far cry from the days when president and CEO Steve Ballmer publicly declared Linux a "cancer"

and then does the opposite spreading patent FUD.

Or how about this line..

Microsoft is crafting a multifaceted plan to approach open source from a number of different levels: Linux as an operating system competitor; interoperability with Linux in mixed environments;

while still trying to kill interoperability..

Microsoft is like the Aliens in the movie Mars Attacks. "We come in peace... We come in peace..." while they are running around killing people.

and then theres people like you. "Come on they're trying!" quoting all these articles...

Look at what Microsoft DO not what they SAY

Bear in mind that the Microsoft "tax" is almost a net subsidy. I really don't care about whether MS gets the money or the OEM pockets it. I just don't want the SALE going to Microsoft. Since 1998, I've been installing Linux on machines originally sold with various flavors of MS Operating Systems on them. Servers, Desktops and Laptops. If I can buy a machine that has an "Microsoft-shaped absence of Microsoft" from the factory, that's good enough for me... I just want the sales figures to reflect that I have no use for MS software, and, as such, I didn't buy it.

Mind you, I wouldn't complain if I could get a Dell laptop with Ubuntu preinstalled and everything worked out of the box and continued to work with ordinary Ubuntu updates. That would be spiffy. I'd pay an extra $50 (over the MS-subsidized price) for that. Sure.

Americans would and eventually will accept smaller cars, at least as soon as gas prices rise high enough. This could happen through any number of methods, including declining oil production, wars in oil states, or Pigouvian taxes. The latter makes a lot of sense because it would help prevent the first two in a feasible time horizon and with few negative externalities save creating a tax that would probably never die (hence bloating government) and potentially increasing the mass difference between very large and very small cars, leading to additional fatalities when they collide.

Still, the benefits for both geopolitics and the environment would be enormous. It would also be much simpler to implement than the grandiose and probably error-prone systems like the one you propose.

We saw a natural example of what happens to auto sales when prices increase two summers ago: SUV sales dropped precipitously and Honda sold even more Civics than it usually does. Prices have a way of making the unthinkable reality, whether Americans will "accept" them or not.

gCensus is a great website - it spurred me to create a similar project in Ruby. I'm writing Ruby code to pull Census boundary & data files and parse them into KML files for Google Earth display (height adds a great dimensionality) and Google Maps. I'm posting my progress here: http://censuskml.blogspot.com/.

I believe this article had been slashdotted in the past. I even wrote a blog entry summarizing my thoughts on it. Although it seems that writing inflamatory articles about Computer Science is an easy way of herding slashdot traffic.

The intellectual property rights to the ODF standard also does not give rights to things it merely references. Office standards require a lot of flexability in what you can add to a document. In theory you can embed any arbitrary format into ODF and OOXML. The suggestion that IP rights can be granted on other formats just because you can embed them in OOXML or ODF is just ridiculous.

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The Wraith
http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/

I'm glad to see this finally on Slashdot. I've been pushing for Comcast to provide full disclosure since I was terminated. I didn't have DSL in my area until last Monday so now I'm not dealing with 28.8 speeds. While this may be legal, I'm hoping Comcast will come clean. I really appreciate Carolyn from the Boston Globe for publishing the story. There are many other articles coming from various consumer advocate groups in the next couple months so stay tuned.

Since Comcast disconnected me in january, I've found dozens of people who have been disconnected across the country. What's amusing is Comcast is untilling to disclose what "Acceptable Use" is. They only point to their AUP/TOS on their web site and tell you to read it and follow it. Cox Communications and other reputable providers will tell you what Acceptable is in real numbers (50 Gigs a month, 80 Gigs and so on). Comcast will ONLY tell you an example of what Abuse is.

They say an abuser downloads 256,000 photos or 30,000 sounds or 13 million (that's right, million) emails a month. So on my blog I posted what Comcast is saying in english. Abusers of their system are downloasing around 200-250 Gigs a month which is 100 times more than their "average" user. So the average user is only downloading about 1 - 2 Gigs a month. Hardly using the service in my book. Not really streaming video, purchasing movies from Amazon.com Unbox or anything. If you purchase 2 HD-DVD videos from Amazon and download them then you are already violating AUP/TOS with Comcast. Tonight I've updated my blog to include stories of other's who are providing videos for download online.

I've posted my story on the web at my blog. I'm hoping to get the word out and have people look at fiber networks such as Utopia. Their fiber infrastructure provides choices. If a company (such as Comcast) is abusing customers, they can choose another. Of course having a 1 gig pipe to the house is also faster than anything Cable can provide. Must be why Verizon is rolling out FiOS.

Anyway, Major Kudos to Carolyn at the Boston Globe!

Halliburton is incorporated in Delaware and its stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Reuters reported that Mr. Lesar said Halliburton would like to list its shares on an exchange in the Middle East, which it could do while maintaining its listing in New York.

Groklaw is rather good at trying to trash OOXML.
The site has joined with IBM and Sun's blogger and OASIS laywer Andy Upgrove to attack OOXML in every posting about the subject.
And stating that ODF might have it's flaws as well as commenting that the findings on OOXML as found on their pages might not be entirly correct will get those comments moderated away.

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The Wraith
http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/

The lawmaking does influence the standardization choices. However the creation of Microsofts own XML formats started long before the EU asked OASIS to put it's formats up for ISO standardization. So the MS Office format was already going away from it's traditional binary formats and becoming readable/interpretable before lawmakers were interested in open standards.

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The Wraith
http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/

The reviews of the national bodies were to identify possible problems with contradictions with ISO standards. Ecma responded to those review and then if need the ISO JCT1 SC34 committe can advise on the raised issues.

Result of that can be continuation of the fastreracking proces, delay of the fastracking proces (for instance when an amendment by the proposing body is recommended) or withdrawel of the standard by the proposing body for instance when the JCTS committee strongly advinses against it. However the continuing of the fasttracking proces is mostly a procederal matter at this stage. There is no vote yet. so unless Ecma were to delay or stop the fastracking proces themselves the procedure would stay on course.

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The Wraith
http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/

OOXML is not nescesarily a bad standard.
Just not a perfect standard.
I wrote already in my blog about this:
http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/2007/03/ooxml-hoax -6-iso-fasttracking-requires.html

I think that Groklaw is trying to discredit OOXML in a very anoying way by hiding the realities of both formats. Groklaw seems to sit on the IBM bandwagon in a big way. (though I might be biased because any positive comment on OOXML I put on Groklaw has been moderated away)

It would have been better if slashdot had linked to the original article in stead of the Groklaw interpretation of it.
Original article here: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9012860&intsrc=new s_ts_head

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The Wraith
http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/

OOXML is not nescesarily a bad standard.
Just not a perfect standard.
I wrote already in my blog about this:
http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/2007/03/ooxml-hoax -6-iso-fasttracking-requires.html

I think that Groklaw is trying to discredit OOXML in a very anoying way by hiding the realities of both formats. Groklaw seems to sit on the IBM bandwagon in a big way. (though I might be biased because any positive comment on OOXML I put on Groklaw has been moderated away)

It would have been better if slashdot had linked to the original article in stead of the Groklaw interpretation of it.
Original article here: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9012860&intsrc=new s_ts_head

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The Wraith
http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/

Considering the extra surface area, I wonder if solar power could help out this ship: http://www.aeroscraft.com/Index.html.
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Solar power: the past present and future: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Thanks, this clears things up. This is a guy who is paid to hold a certain opinion, not to formulate an opinion. Looks to me as though the article is basically a vehicle to get the word "alarmism" out there some more. Presumably the emails are hoaxes created to get a hook for the article to be printed.
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Solar: the clean power source. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Here is a well-cited argument by a physics professor at the University of Ottawa.

Essentially, it says that even if CO2 emissions cause global warming, their effects pale in comparison to those brought on by environmental catastrophes brought on by large-scale industrial operations such as clearcutting and war.

- RG>

It is a BS story by a small group of Bush lovers up here in Canada. The "professor" has a PHD in geography, not climate science, and has written no papers on the topic of climate.

http://canadiancynic.blogspot.com/2007/03/ejankula tor-strikes-again.html

Wow, you tell people not to use Linux without a support contract based on one nasty incident? Has it really never occurred to you just how ridiculous that is? I've heard of one nasty incident regarding verizon, and I'm sure I could quickly find one nasty incident for every other major cell phone company. Does that mean I shouldn't have a cell phone? I'm quite certain that I could easily find one nasty incident involving Microsoft's and Apple's tech support as well.

You've blown one bad apple entirely out of proportion. Now I'm not saying that we should sweep it under the rug, either, but surely a broader picture, including the myriad uneventful, unnoticed except by those few directly involved, and extremely helpful support threads, would be far more accurate. Yes, the failure to provide reliable support does hurt the image of linux and techies in general. However, your constant rehashing of this single incident hurts those images much much more.

Your Honor, the prosecution keeps saying I killed this man for money but I have no recollection of this nor any recollection of agreeing to do this so I can not possibly plead guilty which is my legal right. Thus I can't get a fair trial. I move to dismiss.
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Innocent power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

This one actually worked I think. I'm coaching soccer again this spring and I notice that I'm not going to have to adjust the practice schedule, which starts this week, this time to account for DST coming part way into the season. I don't like DST because when I'm really busy I often don't hear about it or remember it and end up being late to church, or early as I was last fall. But the adjustment in the start time works for me for soccer practice.
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"Let the Sun shine" http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Sorry, I think my level of facetiousness was unclear. I'm saying that a large part of the public anthropomorphizes Pluto, and that they view Pluto as "a cute underdog who is fighting for its rights against nasty scientists who want to take away its status as a planet", not that that is my view. The IAU's new definition and Pluto's "demotion" is one of the few astronomy-related stories that has gotten major attention in the media recently; it was, I think, the only astronomy story that made it onto my local NPR station's weekday talkshow. And it's one of the few astronomy issues that has any kind of foothold on the public attention span. Here are a few examples of what seems to be the general mindset regarding Pluto. And note how many of those things ascribe feelings or intentions to Pluto -- they're doing the anthropomorphizing, not me.

Of course there's lots of research going on; but the public seems to fixate on things that are of little consequence, when they could be getting interested in things that are hugely important to our understanding of the universe and our place in it. And they vote in politicians who make policy decisions about science funding, and a lot of things end up getting cut because (again, facetiousness:) "those nasty scientists made Pluto sad".

I, on the other hand, see Pluto as a very interesting object that doesn't have any desires at at of its own, and which deserves a lot more study by us humans. I don't particularly care whether it's a planet or not; as long as the scientific community uses a definition that's consistent and useful, that's fine with me. I await the arrival of New Horizons impatiently.

Honoring Tombaugh is fine. He did some great work. But declaring Pluto a planet as it passes overhead is not honoring him; that's just silliness. It'd be better to find a pre-existing science scholarship and rename it for him, or put up a statue, or donate good telescopes to a few high schools in his name, or declare April to be "Clyde Tombaugh Science Month", than to make some kind of silly protest against the scientific community's agreed definitions.

http://badhardware.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive .html#6205633451904649648/

Aug 5, 2006 11:08 AM

Dear Miss [my name],

We intend to publish a prominent news story in this weekend's paper, revealing your identity as the author of the book, Girl With a One Track Mind.

We have matched up the dates of films you have worked on - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Batman Begins and Lara Croft Tomb Raider - and it is clear that they correlate to your blog. We have obtained your birth certificate, and details about where you went to school and college.

We propose to publish the fact that you are 33 and live in [my address] -London, and that your mother, [her name], is a [her address] -based [her profession]. The article includes extracts from your book and blog, relevant to your career in the film industry. We also have a picture of you, taken outside your flat.

Unfortunately, the picture is not particularly flattering and might undermine the image that has been built up around your persona as Abby Lee. I think it would be helpful to both sides if you agreed to a photo shoot today so that we can publish a more attractive image.

We are proposing to assign you our senior portrait photographer, Francesco Guidicini, and would arrange everything to your convenience, including a car to pick you up. We would expect you to provide your own clothes and make up. As the story will be on a colour page, we would prefer the outfit to be one of colourful eveningwear.

We did put this proposal to you yesterday, but heard nothing back. Clearly this is now a matter of urgency, and I would appreciate you contacting me as soon as possible. To avoid any doubt we will, of course, publish the story as it is if we do not hear from you.

Yours sincerely,
Nicholas Hellen
Acting News Editor
Sunday Times

Losses are about 7% on the grid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transm ission#Losses. While this is significant it is not huge. The real problem is stringing out lines to remote locations which is expensive.
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Destress the grid: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

It's about right, the Milky Way may have formed as a disk more recently. One way to think about it is that the Sun has been around about 15 times since it formed for a motion of 200 km/s. A way to think about the morphologies of galaxies is to consider that stars form in response to the global potential. This is a hand wave, but you can see how it would not require a lot of mixing to get a fairly smooth distribution of stars. Bars may well be large-scale dynamical instabilities so that their shape, in a manner of speaking, happens of itself.
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Have your roof watch the Sun: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Heck, if you think that's bad, wait for this one - they were actually arguing about just switching to DST permanently, but the cows were against it. (Search for "cow") Heck, there's a lot of "cow" arguments against DST.

I know Josh Barnes has produced some vidio of spirals rotating but I have not found it. Here are some more exciting merger simulation: http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~barnes/pressrel/mice/vi d301_04.mpg and http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~barnes/pressrel/mice/v0 211d3.mpg found at http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~barnes/research/interac tion_models/mice/index.html#modeling. Models which concentrate on just rotation tend to be just two dimensional to save on computing. The are used to study secular evolution which could also lead from the Tully-Fisher to the Faber-Jackson relation.
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Fun with the Sun: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

He's already considering it.

A good example is Unlucky property woman, who shows up wailing in front of an awful lot of destroyed buildings.

A good example is Unlucky property woman, who shows up wailing in front of an awful lot of destroyed buildings.

See:
    http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-educatio n-technology-has-failed.html
    http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTech nologyHasFailedSchools.html

"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand.

Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change...

So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."

I had a rejected /. story on this topic a couple weeks ago. Details here: http://btetc.blogspot.com/2007/02/have-you-sold-yo ur-brain.html

Basically, it's normal for the co. to protect themselves against you going in there, learning how they do everything, then duplicating their business/technology models for their competitors. Not unfair, as far as that goes.

But the contract I was looking at overreached by a *shocking degree, claiming "exclusive ownership" of any *idea "capable of being used in, or in connection with, the business... " for a period of 6 months.

I was able to get them to adjust these terms, and in fact to admit that any programmer who signed such a thing had to be insane. But YMMV.

For me, the trick for getting FC6 going on a pavillion was to toggle the plug and play bios setting http://forum.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php? t=139555&highlight=a1612n and after that things went pretty smoothly. A have not heard back on my question about why power saving for the screen makes the mouse disappear. But, for the most part linux does well on this machine.
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Run your computer on solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Are kids who grew up here complaining about losing construction/landscaping and migrant farm jobs to immigration?

Short answer: Yes.

Long form: Yes, but not primarily kids, but unskilled adults who used to be able to make a living wage off of these jobs. Illegal labor pushes wages down (hence its existence), which limits the ability of unskilled laborers to live at any level of comfort. It also is used to break unions, taking away many of the protections needed for stability. To be blunt, and honest, my father who has been driving trucks for the last 50 years rejoiced when the tech firms started facing outsourcing as a major threat, he figured it was payback to the white collar Americans who sat by and cheared the death of the working class. I'm not quite that brash, but I would wish that we all would learn a lesson from this, the only people who will profit by the current scheme is the very rich.

The phrase "no one wants to do" is a fallacy. No one wants to do it because wages were pushed down by cheap labor. I'm sure if you restored construction jobs back to the respectable wage they were at until recently, you would have a flood of citizens offering their skills. It really doesn't matter if some guy in an office making 100k a year thinks construction is undesirable, what matters is some people NEED those jobs, money is tight in the middle and lower classes, especially in todays economy.

I really wish people would stop misusing the term "immigration", immigration is NOT the issue, and no one thinks it is, ILLEGAL immigration is the issue. Here in Phoenix the vocal proponents to illegal immigration have been trying to spin the issue to be one of "anti-immigration", when in fact it is just an issue of "anti-illegal-immigration", apples and oranges, since legal immigrants have the same rights and obligations as the rest of us citizens, taxes, social security, minimum wage laws, etc... Illegal immigrants get the free ride at the expense of everyone except business owners and significant stock holders.

Somewhat tangentially, I came up with a good fix to the whole problem, allow illegal immigrants the same rights as the rest of us, at the same costs to business owners. They need insurance, they need to pay taxes, etc... And their employers are held responsible for violations (just as they are for lapsing on the rights of citizens). To make this enforceable, amnesty and a monetary reward will be granted to all illegals who rat out their employers. More here.

I've spent considerable time pondering the possible aesthetics of video games, and agree with you that any list of pure specs cannot lead to higher aesthetics. Tetris was simple in every possible criteria, but still could be seen as one of the more beautiful games ever, much like primitive cave paintings. Your last paragraph captures this perfectly.

That said, though, no one really has analyzed the aesthetics of games, and many people say that they cannot be aesthetic since they are A) mass produced for market, and B) interactive. I disagree with both of these premises, btw.

Its late, and I'm lazy, so I'll just link to articles I wrote about this topic:
http://nonservium.blogspot.com/2006/09/prelude-to- interactive-art-aesthetic.html
http://nonservium.blogspot.com/2006/12/video-games -as-art-revisited.html
Yeah, self promotion AND laziness, I now embody the modern internet.

Obviously his idea of art revolves around complexity, and not the limitations of the medium. If he was a poet he would be Kerouac with massive free-flowing strings of consciousness, and his haiku would be as broken and unstructured as Kerouac's too. This is a relatively routine distinction in art, some people think that the limitations of a medium or style increases its merit, while others are too lazy, limited, of whatnot, to see the point. This is becoming more and more common in digital media, we're spoiled by ever increasing power, and have a hard time respecting even out current low limitations. Imagine this guy developing on a 8-bit system, or worse a text adventure!

I personally think that good are is a sort of metaphorical collaboration between the artist and the medium. /. has been inundated with philosophers lately! I'm very happy that the esoteric crowd is ranting too!

I've spent considerable time pondering the possible aesthetics of video games, and agree with you that any list of pure specs cannot lead to higher aesthetics. Tetris was simple in every possible criteria, but still could be seen as one of the more beautiful games ever, much like primitive cave paintings. Your last paragraph captures this perfectly.

That said, though, no one really has analyzed the aesthetics of games, and many people say that they cannot be aesthetic since they are A) mass produced for market, and B) interactive. I disagree with both of these premises, btw.

Its late, and I'm lazy, so I'll just link to articles I wrote about this topic:
http://nonservium.blogspot.com/2006/09/prelude-to- interactive-art-aesthetic.html
http://nonservium.blogspot.com/2006/12/video-games -as-art-revisited.html
Yeah, self promotion AND laziness, I now embody the modern internet.

Obviously his idea of art revolves around complexity, and not the limitations of the medium. If he was a poet he would be Kerouac with massive free-flowing strings of consciousness, and his haiku would be as broken and unstructured as Kerouac's too. This is a relatively routine distinction in art, some people think that the limitations of a medium or style increases its merit, while others are too lazy, limited, of whatnot, to see the point. This is becoming more and more common in digital media, we're spoiled by ever increasing power, and have a hard time respecting even out current low limitations. Imagine this guy developing on a 8-bit system, or worse a text adventure!

I personally think that good are is a sort of metaphorical collaboration between the artist and the medium. /. has been inundated with philosophers lately! I'm very happy that the esoteric crowd is ranting too!

what do you know of Microsoft's development practices - beyond "they write crappy bloated software" - I'm talking about what a software engineer would see and deal with daily? What methodologies do they use?

This is something I definitely wouldn't want to deal with.

What is microsoft doing? Are they trying to get into the Linux market or are they just playing patent games?

The PS3 is dead, Let's wait for the PS4 http://sqlservercode.blogspot.com/

I've been looking for a useful device in this space. Each one I've seen obviously has to make tradeoffs around battery life, screen size, keyboard size, and processor speed, and it's hard to compare one device to another based on features when it's really a question of whether one device achieves a better balance of tradeoffs than another.

That said, anyone interested in this space might want to take a look at the following devices:

- Sony Vaio UX series (official site w/ too much flash)
- Nokia N800 internet tablet (official site, user forums)
- OQO 02 (official site)
- Sony Mylo (my review, official site)

Short summary: the Mylo is possibly the best handheld Skype phone on the market and comes with Google Talk as well and has great UI and case design, but is expensive and has a poor keyboard. The Nokia N800 has fantastic battery life and a great browser that can handle nearly any website except Youtube, and also has a Nokia-supported very active open source development community - the device runs Debian, but lacks a keyboard and ships with apps that are too rough for non-geek end-users. The OQO 02 is a complete laptop with the best keyboard of the bunch and a lot of nice hardware UI touches, but isn't shipping until April, is expensive, and has fairly short battery life. The Vaio UX series has the best display and most processor power of the bunch, but is a little too large for comfort and has a terrible keyboard - the worst of the lot).

For my purposes, the OQO 02 has the best balance of features and tradeoffs, but I could have chosen the Nokia N800 if I wanted a maximally hackable portable computer.

--Pat