Thanks for your comments. Very interesting. I don't think I'm ready for LSD yet (heh, maybe when I'm 50?) but I may have to give it a whirl at some point.
Interesting -- yes, some of those dreams remind me of things I've experienced, i.e. analyzing something that I know is just a creation of my mind and marvelling at the detail and vividness of it, astonished at my mind's ability to create a rich reality.
If LSD is way different then any of the things I've described (in my other comment) then maybe I will have to give it a try before I check out of here.
If you want to try lucid dreaming I'd definitely check out this faq. The basics are to keep a detailed dream journal and to do little mantras about remembering your dreams as you fall asleep each night. It's all just suggestion, really. It's also a lot of work.
I guess that's why I say acid might be cheating... because I'm not sure as you said, that it "takes you to places you cannot go on your own", but rather takes you to places that you can't go without a lot of work on your own -- i.e. meditation and working on lucid dreaming. Just a theory, though.
Maybe once I feel I've explored lucid dreaming thoroughly I'll give acid a try and see if it really does take me in new directions.
Yeah -- I can see that the commitment level would make a substantial difference.
Aside from that, though, the content of a trip vs. a dream... how different are they? I realize this is most likely different for everyone. But I've had dreams that were totally wacky where space and time seem totally pliable both in and out of my control. This is something many of my slightly acidic friends report. And I have had a couple of lucid dreams where I was able to exit the dreamspace and just think while asleep. I was able to perform amazing feats of mental exploration and creativity that seemed nearly godlike to me at the time. However upon waking I couldn't quite put it all back together. Again, this is a common theme in the trips I've heard recounted.
I wonder if anyone who has done LSD has also had experience with lucid dreaming? I have experimented to some degree with lucid dreaming, and after discussing acid trips with friends who've had them, I kind of theorize that LSD is very similar dreaming while awake.
I'm 30 and I haven't tried LSD. It's not likely that I will, but I don't think it's wrong or particularly dangerous. It's possible I'd try it at some point if I got exceedingly bored with other means of exploring conciousness.
But for now when I get the inclination for some exploration of conciousness, I just crack out the dream journal and go from there. I guess I think of LSD as cheating a bit. Like steroids or something.
Of course, someone with experience with both might feel differently.
One of the designers is worried about not having enough numbers and suggests they use a larger numberspace or an easily extensible system and some other clever guy says, "Heh! It'll be a great day when we have that problem!"
I can't counthow many times I've heard that. But nobody ever ends up happy when that day comes.
Historically, this [superior product wins] has not been true... VHS/Betamax is a classic example
Actually I don't agree. Better products do usually win. With two caveats: the product has to be noticably better, and it also has to have few or no liabilities in other respects.
In the VHS/Betamax example I remember hearing all the hooplah about how Beta was superior. Then I saw it and I honestly couldn't see or hear the difference. Doesn't matter much what the specs say if you can't tell. (For the record -- I'm an amatuer filmmaker so I'm probably more likely to notice than the average person.) Also Betamax had a serious liability: movies were not as readily available. So: not much better, but noticably inconvenient == not a better product. VHS won because it was better when everything was taken into account.
I'm a Mac user (after being an Amiga user) so I am not just jumping on the "popular is best" bandwagon. But even in those cases, I would say that for their purpose, taking everything into account (price, performance, compatibility) they were inferior products for most applications.
The reason people (especially geeks) think that the best product doesn't always win is because they don't usually look at the big picture, but rather a few exciting technical issues.
If the maker wants to make more money by showing them in a cinema first, that seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Agreed. But fair or not, a black market will arise to compete with any market, and it will succeed to the degree that the company is trying to milk it's customers. I'm not saying it's right, but thems the breaks of the real world. Not accounting for this is certainly the movie company's right, but it's also stupid.
This kind of thing is the safety valve of supply and demand.
Well I can't complain about your English because it is my native language and I still misspelled "arsen" (it's arson):)
But the poster I replied to was comparing the crimes. He implied that since some crimes are too awful for the laws to be challenged, that we shouldn't debate whether copyright laws are unjust. What a ridiculous statement it was!
Oh yes, that's very insightful: comparing rape, burglary, and arsen to copyright infringement. That's some of the most pitiful comment moderation I've seen in some time.
Sure: you can fall on either side of the copyright debate, but if you think copyright related crimes, especially ones where nobody profits from the crime and the only loss is a theoretical and arguable one at best, are in the same ballpark as the other examples you gave... well... you need to get out more often.
And this is coming from an artist who has been (on rare occasion) paid for my work.
I loved my C64 back in the day (even wrote some games for it back in the day (scroll all the way down)). I also did some 3D stuff on the Amiga 4000 with the video toaster. There really was a lot of fun to be had on those machines.
But it kind of makes my skin crawl that a group of completely unrelated people are marketing completely unrelated stuff under the commodore name. I don't know exactly why it bothers me, but it does. Maybe because it's such a blatant attempt at manipulation?
I don't know. But I sure loved the machines and software back in the day.
Yes, when I lived in the SF Bay Area I paid $3.80 each way per day to ride the BART to and from work. But the BART carried me 35 miles in 45 minutes. During rush hour that is quite a feat.
I've had a 2004 Prius since last November. Got about 15K miles on it already. I like the car a lot and I've seen per-tank averages as low as 38 and as high as 48. Usually falls right in the middle.
One thing I realized is that the Prius isn't a hybrid in the sense most are expecting: It's not a 50/50 responsibility between the two motors. It's basically a gasoline car with an electric assist for accelleration. The electricity for assisted accelleration comes, as much as it can, from braking and coasting.
I read somewhere the basics of the EPA test, and while they may be reasonable for gasoline cars (at least for comparison purposes, if not actual numbers), they really are inaccurate for hybrids. For example, I think the tests are only run for a couple minutes -- and I've seen my Prius average over 100 MPG for a couple minute stretchees. I've also seen it average 20MPG for couple minute stretches. Depends on how much electricity there is waiting in the battery in many cases.
For driving down the highway a conventional drivetrain is best.
Sort of -- as a Prius owner I notice that the city is often better than the highway milage. But the highway milage isn't bad by any means -- on a trip from SF to LA (about 500 highway miles) I averaged 42 MPG, which is pretty decent. As you indicate, it used the gasoline engine almost continuously and little electrical energy was captured or used.
So the car is using the "conventional" drivetrain for most of that, but your comment almost makes it sound like the Hybrid engine fares worse on the highway than if it were a gasoline only engine. I doubt that's true.
I wish you luck... I didn't intend to sound like there was anything wrong with other relational models, or that SQL was the ultimate relational language.
But I do think that anything that is proven to work in practice is a lot more impressive than something that would work better in theory. I guess I'm just saying that even with all it's flaws, I am impressed what SQL can do and has done.
I hope there is more development in relational languages. And when some of the new ideas rise to the top and supplant SQL because they are so compelling, then I'll extol their virtues as well.
Pretty interesting. It sounds somwhat similar to what I did, also an OO interface to relational data. My system would construct the SQL automatically using a small data description struct in each class. Then the class could retrieve objects (or sets of objects) and each field was wrapped in an accessor method, and you could verify the validity of the data through the object and store it back to the DB if it was changed. It was really beautiful, and I received many pats on the back for my work.
And as the company grew and new needs arose I had to hack it and hack it until it was more unweildy and harder to work with than if I had just grouped a few SQL wraper functions that returned plain old data. Modifying the OO layer became a ongoing maintenance task unto itself. That company failed for other reasons (or maybe not?).
At the place I work now we've gone with the simpler approach and every developer we hire can quickly grok what's going on and get things done without asking the keeper of the OO system to give him/her more functionality and without having to hack around the system's cleverness. I worried at first that such a ad-hoc system would collapse eventually. Well, four years and thousands of major changes later I think that it is a more adaptable and maintainable system than my clean OO system was. Warts and all.
It's all just my opinion, but it is backed up a bit by a couple of real world experiences.
And mathematics is an incomplete and inaccurate description of the real world; and the real world is where I work.
I'm not saying that justifies making sloppy languages or not trying to get things as clean as you can. My point is that it's incompleteness and inaccuracy don't appear to be a hinderance to it's practicality.
If Date & crew realize that, great. I wish them much luck in coming up with a new system that I may use and love some day down the road. If it's superiority outweigh the transition costs, that is.
Maybe instead of dismissing Pascal's comments as a "psuedo-academic argument", you should read some of his books where he fleshes things out in greater detail.
Maybe I should. But I've been too busy keeping up with the real-world business demands of my employer for the past several years. And during that time (and before) I can't recall ever seeing a good ROI for clever data modeling.
I'm not saying there's no value in his work or opinions, but I just laugh a bit when I see people going on about how awful SQL is when so much is built upon it with great success.
I guess I'm a slob. I would say that 3rd normal form is about as high as I usually go, but there's always a few bits of 1st normal form hanging around to accomodate some bit of slop where cleanly modelling the real world becomes unweildy. So I consider the DB 1st normal form. Anything higher is nice if you can get it. Anything lower is probably unacceptable.
Right you are. But the fact that there isn't a practical replacement available indicates it is better at it's job than a casual observer might realize.
It's very easy to say that something could be better. It's much harder to make something better.
I've actually written (for a former company) an OO system for putting together relational queries. With this, I wrote a reporting engine such that you could define a report in an XML file, and it would build the right query and organize the data. It ran better than hand-written SQL queries, and was much easier to write.
Since I don't know the specifics I really can't comment, but this sounds just like the type of thing I'm very averse to. I'm sure it seemed wonderful to you, maybe a few of your friends, and perhaps even suited the problem well. So did my attempts at such lofty "improved" systems.
But I'd like to see how people walking in off the street would relate to it. And more importantly (so we're not relying on just the fact that SQL is widely known) I'd like to see how it adapts to a hundred different projects with vastly different needs.
I'm not trying to put down your work, because I've been there and I'm reasonably good. But don't confuse impressing yourself while solving a specific problem with creating a framework that applies reasonably well to nearly every problem there is.
It has been quite obvious that the designers of SQL had little understanding of data fundamentals in general, and the relational model in particular
Gimme a break. Love it or hate it, SQL is an amazingly powerful way to work with arbitrarily complex data sets. Need proof? It is the backbone of nearly every non-toy scale data storage project. No amount of psuedo-academic argument can make irrellavent the fact that it works.
Everybody goes through a phase where they bitch about SQL. So did I. And I built a clever OO DataModel module that abstracted it into pretty heirarchies and all sorts of clever crap. Then I tried actually building systems with it and realized I was better off with ugly ol' SQL.
I've been part of too many projects where people pulled out the UML books in favor of a decent First Normal Form DB design and led the team down the tubes.
I'm not saying these other methods don't have their place -- they do. But they aren't going to displace SQL because it has it's place also. And it's place isn't theoretical, it's been practically demonstrated a million times.
And the fact that less than half of the time I let the JVM start up, the applet just crashed or behaved erratically anyways.
I'm not down on Java. I even made a goofy Java game. But regardlesss of whose fault it was, I think "Java" and "Browser lockup" became nearly synonymous.
Cheers.
Re:Depends on the kind of graffiti
on
Reverse Graffiti
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It doesnt show anyone something they arnt expecting.
The people you're speaking of aren't going to see it as art anyways. Art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. You simply can't show art to someone who doesn't want to see it. You can show them paint stains that took you hours to carefully render, and they'll treat it with about as much consideration as a mess left by a dog on the sidewalk.
Anyone who _does_ appreciate such art would have appreciated it in a far less invasive forum as well.
Don't delude yourself into thinking you're some kind of feeling man's vingilante. You're just an artist who turned to vandalism because they don't know who their audience is.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for your comments. Very interesting. I don't think I'm ready for LSD yet (heh, maybe when I'm 50?) but I may have to give it a whirl at some point.
Cheers.
Interesting -- yes, some of those dreams remind me of things I've experienced, i.e. analyzing something that I know is just a creation of my mind and marvelling at the detail and vividness of it, astonished at my mind's ability to create a rich reality.
If LSD is way different then any of the things I've described (in my other comment) then maybe I will have to give it a try before I check out of here.
Thanks for the comments. Cheers.
If you want to try lucid dreaming I'd definitely check out this faq. The basics are to keep a detailed dream journal and to do little mantras about remembering your dreams as you fall asleep each night. It's all just suggestion, really. It's also a lot of work.
I guess that's why I say acid might be cheating... because I'm not sure as you said, that it "takes you to places you cannot go on your own", but rather takes you to places that you can't go without a lot of work on your own -- i.e. meditation and working on lucid dreaming. Just a theory, though.
Maybe once I feel I've explored lucid dreaming thoroughly I'll give acid a try and see if it really does take me in new directions.
Thanks for the comment. Best of luck to you.
Yeah -- I can see that the commitment level would make a substantial difference.
Aside from that, though, the content of a trip vs. a dream... how different are they? I realize this is most likely different for everyone. But I've had dreams that were totally wacky where space and time seem totally pliable both in and out of my control. This is something many of my slightly acidic friends report. And I have had a couple of lucid dreams where I was able to exit the dreamspace and just think while asleep. I was able to perform amazing feats of mental exploration and creativity that seemed nearly godlike to me at the time. However upon waking I couldn't quite put it all back together. Again, this is a common theme in the trips I've heard recounted.
I'm curious your opinion of all that...?
Cheers.
I wonder if anyone who has done LSD has also had experience with lucid dreaming? I have experimented to some degree with lucid dreaming, and after discussing acid trips with friends who've had them, I kind of theorize that LSD is very similar dreaming while awake.
I'm 30 and I haven't tried LSD. It's not likely that I will, but I don't think it's wrong or particularly dangerous. It's possible I'd try it at some point if I got exceedingly bored with other means of exploring conciousness.
But for now when I get the inclination for some exploration of conciousness, I just crack out the dream journal and go from there. I guess I think of LSD as cheating a bit. Like steroids or something.
Of course, someone with experience with both might feel differently.
Cheers.
One of the designers is worried about not having enough numbers and suggests they use a larger numberspace or an easily extensible system and some other clever guy says, "Heh! It'll be a great day when we have that problem!"
I can't counthow many times I've heard that. But nobody ever ends up happy when that day comes.
Cheers.
Historically, this [superior product wins] has not been true... VHS/Betamax is a classic example
Actually I don't agree. Better products do usually win. With two caveats: the product has to be noticably better, and it also has to have few or no liabilities in other respects.
In the VHS/Betamax example I remember hearing all the hooplah about how Beta was superior. Then I saw it and I honestly couldn't see or hear the difference. Doesn't matter much what the specs say if you can't tell. (For the record -- I'm an amatuer filmmaker so I'm probably more likely to notice than the average person.) Also Betamax had a serious liability: movies were not as readily available. So: not much better, but noticably inconvenient == not a better product. VHS won because it was better when everything was taken into account.
I'm a Mac user (after being an Amiga user) so I am not just jumping on the "popular is best" bandwagon. But even in those cases, I would say that for their purpose, taking everything into account (price, performance, compatibility) they were inferior products for most applications.
The reason people (especially geeks) think that the best product doesn't always win is because they don't usually look at the big picture, but rather a few exciting technical issues.
Cheers.
If the maker wants to make more money by showing them in a cinema first, that seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Agreed. But fair or not, a black market will arise to compete with any market, and it will succeed to the degree that the company is trying to milk it's customers. I'm not saying it's right, but thems the breaks of the real world. Not accounting for this is certainly the movie company's right, but it's also stupid.
This kind of thing is the safety valve of supply and demand.
Cheers.
Well I can't complain about your English because it is my native language and I still misspelled "arsen" (it's arson) :)
But the poster I replied to was comparing the crimes. He implied that since some crimes are too awful for the laws to be challenged, that we shouldn't debate whether copyright laws are unjust. What a ridiculous statement it was!
Cheers.
Oh yes, that's very insightful: comparing rape, burglary, and arsen to copyright infringement. That's some of the most pitiful comment moderation I've seen in some time.
Sure: you can fall on either side of the copyright debate, but if you think copyright related crimes, especially ones where nobody profits from the crime and the only loss is a theoretical and arguable one at best, are in the same ballpark as the other examples you gave... well... you need to get out more often.
And this is coming from an artist who has been (on rare occasion) paid for my work.
Cheers.
I loved my C64 back in the day (even wrote some games for it back in the day (scroll all the way down)). I also did some 3D stuff on the Amiga 4000 with the video toaster. There really was a lot of fun to be had on those machines.
But it kind of makes my skin crawl that a group of completely unrelated people are marketing completely unrelated stuff under the commodore name. I don't know exactly why it bothers me, but it does. Maybe because it's such a blatant attempt at manipulation?
I don't know. But I sure loved the machines and software back in the day.
Cheers.
Yes, when I lived in the SF Bay Area I paid $3.80 each way per day to ride the BART to and from work. But the BART carried me 35 miles in 45 minutes. During rush hour that is quite a feat.
Cheers.
I've had a 2004 Prius since last November. Got about 15K miles on it already. I like the car a lot and I've seen per-tank averages as low as 38 and as high as 48. Usually falls right in the middle.
One thing I realized is that the Prius isn't a hybrid in the sense most are expecting: It's not a 50/50 responsibility between the two motors. It's basically a gasoline car with an electric assist for accelleration. The electricity for assisted accelleration comes, as much as it can, from braking and coasting.
I read somewhere the basics of the EPA test, and while they may be reasonable for gasoline cars (at least for comparison purposes, if not actual numbers), they really are inaccurate for hybrids. For example, I think the tests are only run for a couple minutes -- and I've seen my Prius average over 100 MPG for a couple minute stretchees. I've also seen it average 20MPG for couple minute stretches. Depends on how much electricity there is waiting in the battery in many cases.
Cheers.
For driving down the highway a conventional drivetrain is best.
Sort of -- as a Prius owner I notice that the city is often better than the highway milage. But the highway milage isn't bad by any means -- on a trip from SF to LA (about 500 highway miles) I averaged 42 MPG, which is pretty decent. As you indicate, it used the gasoline engine almost continuously and little electrical energy was captured or used.
So the car is using the "conventional" drivetrain for most of that, but your comment almost makes it sound like the Hybrid engine fares worse on the highway than if it were a gasoline only engine. I doubt that's true.
Cheers.
The FBI is spending nearly $600 million to modernize its antiquated systems.
Call it hubris, but how many people here think they could modernize their systems for a tiny fraction of that?
I wish you luck... I didn't intend to sound like there was anything wrong with other relational models, or that SQL was the ultimate relational language.
But I do think that anything that is proven to work in practice is a lot more impressive than something that would work better in theory. I guess I'm just saying that even with all it's flaws, I am impressed what SQL can do and has done.
I hope there is more development in relational languages. And when some of the new ideas rise to the top and supplant SQL because they are so compelling, then I'll extol their virtues as well.
Cheers.
Pretty interesting. It sounds somwhat similar to what I did, also an OO interface to relational data. My system would construct the SQL automatically using a small data description struct in each class. Then the class could retrieve objects (or sets of objects) and each field was wrapped in an accessor method, and you could verify the validity of the data through the object and store it back to the DB if it was changed. It was really beautiful, and I received many pats on the back for my work.
And as the company grew and new needs arose I had to hack it and hack it until it was more unweildy and harder to work with than if I had just grouped a few SQL wraper functions that returned plain old data. Modifying the OO layer became a ongoing maintenance task unto itself. That company failed for other reasons (or maybe not?).
At the place I work now we've gone with the simpler approach and every developer we hire can quickly grok what's going on and get things done without asking the keeper of the OO system to give him/her more functionality and without having to hack around the system's cleverness. I worried at first that such a ad-hoc system would collapse eventually. Well, four years and thousands of major changes later I think that it is a more adaptable and maintainable system than my clean OO system was. Warts and all.
It's all just my opinion, but it is backed up a bit by a couple of real world experiences.
Cheers.
And mathematics is an incomplete and inaccurate description of the real world; and the real world is where I work.
I'm not saying that justifies making sloppy languages or not trying to get things as clean as you can. My point is that it's incompleteness and inaccuracy don't appear to be a hinderance to it's practicality.
If Date & crew realize that, great. I wish them much luck in coming up with a new system that I may use and love some day down the road. If it's superiority outweigh the transition costs, that is.
Cheers.
Maybe instead of dismissing Pascal's comments as a "psuedo-academic argument", you should read some of his books where he fleshes things out in greater detail.
Maybe I should. But I've been too busy keeping up with the real-world business demands of my employer for the past several years. And during that time (and before) I can't recall ever seeing a good ROI for clever data modeling.
I'm not saying there's no value in his work or opinions, but I just laugh a bit when I see people going on about how awful SQL is when so much is built upon it with great success.
Cheers.
I guess I'm a slob. I would say that 3rd normal form is about as high as I usually go, but there's always a few bits of 1st normal form hanging around to accomodate some bit of slop where cleanly modelling the real world becomes unweildy. So I consider the DB 1st normal form. Anything higher is nice if you can get it. Anything lower is probably unacceptable.
In my pragmatic little world, anyways.
Cheers.
Right you are. But the fact that there isn't a practical replacement available indicates it is better at it's job than a casual observer might realize.
It's very easy to say that something could be better. It's much harder to make something better.
Cheers.
I've actually written (for a former company) an OO system for putting together relational queries. With this, I wrote a reporting engine such that you could define a report in an XML file, and it would build the right query and organize the data. It ran better than hand-written SQL queries, and was much easier to write.
Since I don't know the specifics I really can't comment, but this sounds just like the type of thing I'm very averse to. I'm sure it seemed wonderful to you, maybe a few of your friends, and perhaps even suited the problem well. So did my attempts at such lofty "improved" systems.
But I'd like to see how people walking in off the street would relate to it. And more importantly (so we're not relying on just the fact that SQL is widely known) I'd like to see how it adapts to a hundred different projects with vastly different needs.
I'm not trying to put down your work, because I've been there and I'm reasonably good. But don't confuse impressing yourself while solving a specific problem with creating a framework that applies reasonably well to nearly every problem there is.
Cheers.
From the article:
It has been quite obvious that the designers of SQL had little understanding of data fundamentals in general, and the relational model in particular
Gimme a break. Love it or hate it, SQL is an amazingly powerful way to work with arbitrarily complex data sets. Need proof? It is the backbone of nearly every non-toy scale data storage project. No amount of psuedo-academic argument can make irrellavent the fact that it works.
Everybody goes through a phase where they bitch about SQL. So did I. And I built a clever OO DataModel module that abstracted it into pretty heirarchies and all sorts of clever crap. Then I tried actually building systems with it and realized I was better off with ugly ol' SQL.
I've been part of too many projects where people pulled out the UML books in favor of a decent First Normal Form DB design and led the team down the tubes.
I'm not saying these other methods don't have their place -- they do. But they aren't going to displace SQL because it has it's place also. And it's place isn't theoretical, it's been practically demonstrated a million times.
Cheers.
I'd blame the slow JVM startup time for that one.
And the fact that less than half of the time I let the JVM start up, the applet just crashed or behaved erratically anyways.
I'm not down on Java. I even made a goofy Java game. But regardlesss of whose fault it was, I think "Java" and "Browser lockup" became nearly synonymous.
Cheers.
It doesnt show anyone something they arnt expecting.
The people you're speaking of aren't going to see it as art anyways. Art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. You simply can't show art to someone who doesn't want to see it. You can show them paint stains that took you hours to carefully render, and they'll treat it with about as much consideration as a mess left by a dog on the sidewalk.
Anyone who _does_ appreciate such art would have appreciated it in a far less invasive forum as well.
Don't delude yourself into thinking you're some kind of feeling man's vingilante. You're just an artist who turned to vandalism because they don't know who their audience is.
Cheers.