One of the earliest and best counter-examples. Motteux's footnotes are hilarious and the translation is greater than the sum of its parts. I never dared ask him but I'm fairly sure Pratchettt knows it.
Telling a story is not necessarily literature. Even limiting literature to narrative includes wide variation. The Odyssey comes fairly close to a story but is around 3000 years old. Tristram Shandy, which is an early modern novel, jumps all over the place and the reader has to spend a long time working out exactly what is going on. Moby-Dick gets a lot of its interest from non-narrative digressions, leaving the reader to make his or her own decision about what the plot really means - is the White Whale supposed to represent evil, or is it just a whale doing what a whale does and the plot is about Ahab's disordered mind? Is it about the American tendency* to follow orders even if the person issuing them is crazy (The Caine Mutiny is definitely influenced by Moby-Dick despite its being based on events in WW2)?
And in the last century, Ulysses is a work of literature in which not very much happens and there is little plot, it is just the (frequently very entertaining) account of two very different people wandering around Dublin on 16th. June 1904, and the way in which their paths cross.
There is no reason why a hypertext should not be literature, and the objection only makes sense if you think literature is storytelling - which most of it is not.
* I know people from many other cultures have the tendency to obey orders even from crazy people, but Moby-Dick is above all an
Things like role-playing games are, in effect, hypertexts with branching narratives. The error that is made by people who write about "literature" is of confusing it with books. As Ray Bradbury observed back in Fahrenheit-451, this isn't about books but the ideas they contain.
The concept of "literature" as purely book-bound started to die when Dickens published as serials in magazines, short stores and bound novels, and also by reading extracts from his work on lecture tours. It was inevitable that ideas like hypertext would find new forms of expression. The premise of the article seems to be as if the car industry had developed by building tractor units to replace horses, and then never got around to the idea of combining them with the passenger wagon. The first motor vehicles were simply tractors. We don't look at the roads now and say "Whatever happened to the idea of pulling carts with engines?"
The simple fact, looking at my current project hierarchy, dependencies, third party libraries, product forks and the rest is that Borland could not have handled it and presented it all as a neat, easy to understand structure through which I can navigate easily. To be more provocative, a good developer today can handle a project, or set of projects, that would have required a team in 1982. That's possible largely because of the tools.
Yes those old programs were difficult. I'm relieved I don't have to use vi any more, and I actually remember people trying to write Fortran in, ffs, Edlin. But the truth is that most office workers probably need no more than Wordpad and basic spreadsheets. Which are not open to your objections.
You give yourself away by referring to "Times New Roman blandness". TNR is designed to be legible - i.e. easy to read. Conventional formatting is better for understanding large amounts of text. That's why books that people read look the way they do. Jazzy layouts often look pretty but they are actually very hard to understand properly - often the association between text and images or charts isn't clear, the actual content is dubious, the typefaces are wrong for the use case. Word and PPT makes it easy to make stuff that looks creative, but it still requires a great deal of knowledge to make stuff that is good. Electronic composition is not a substitute for understanding composition.
I can actually claim to know something about this. I know a couple of really skilled compositors/designers, and unless your kids have relevant degrees and significant postgraduate experience working alongside older and more experienced people, they simply are not going to be working at anything like that level. If you think that your kids can do "nice as books", I really sincerely doubt that you understand the skills that go into book design, or the difference between good and superficially good.
I am amazed at the number of people who post on Slashdot and assume that because their niche works like so-and-so, so does everybody else's.
Excel is fine where it's needed. So is Word. Someone has actually probably found a use for Powerpoint other that as an insomnia cure in meetings. But most Government workers are not technical specialists, and that was rather my point. That, and the tendency of people to do too much decoration.
The Sales and Marketing Department is where Office belongs. The content providers need InDesign or whatever. No argument at all. But most office workers do not work in Sales or Marketing ( which is one reason why business continues to function). Often what they actually need is Excel plus a simple, straightforward email client, and even this is really overkill.
Of course not. 99% of office users might have gone on a course of a day or so, and then they learn from other people, getting shown by example. You may remember a year or so ago the US Federal Government looked at an agency that still used more or less a text based front end to a database, running SQL queries to get reports. It was suggested they would be more productive with an Excel front end. The study concluded that it was quite easy to train people to use the SQL-based front end, which did everything necessary, and the cost of conversion simply wasn't worthwhile.
This is all about office workers perceiving that being given a program with lots of visual bling implies a higher status than a text based program, e.g. pptx > ppt > xlsx > xls.
Tell them that LaTex is a secret tool of the Illuminati and only the Chosen are allowed to use it, and they would come.
If they are any good, I suspect the Trust may fund them - you know, the wonderful organisation that funded the project to decode the human genome to prevent Craig Venter from creating a capitalist monopoly on your DNA?
The message of the central article is, basically, the same as the old mantra. Microsoft has the widest office platform with Sharepoint and Exchange, therefore it is the right answer.
What isn't being questioned is whether the question being asked is the right one. Despite the huge investment in "office" technologies, have they really increased productivity or effectiveness?
For the opposite case, look at IDEs. In only 20 years, software development has gone from something where you trod a minefield of minor issues and only the highly skilled could safely write business logic, to something where an invisible, benevolent being holds your hand at every step, autocompleting, identifying deprecations, and allowing you simply to concentrate on getting the job done. As a result, programmers are more productive. It is interesting watching new graduates and realising that they have simply never experienced a world in which you type, compile, fix, type, compile, fix....with most of fix being minor problems that the compiler complains about, and then start actually to debug. In those same 20 years, has office technology got more efficient to the same degree in terms of actual work done? No. Exactly like the medieval monks, the basic task of transcribing the Bible has barely improved (spelling and grammar checkers? Look at the frequent homophones nowadays - car breaks, loose for lose, and the rest of them) and all the effort has gone into illuminating the title page and margins. Office 2010 is basically an illuminated manuscript generator, absorbing vast amounts of effort in decorating a piece of paper or a screen to conceal the fact that the actual content is mundane and boring.
The really interesting and exciting stuff is happening in CMS-based websites where people post simple marked up text that stands or fails on the quality of its content, not whether it complies with the corporate standard for margin width and precise positioning of the logo.
The new paradigm that is increasingly expected by younger people is a refocussing on the text. Viewed on small screens, decoration isn't much use. More important is immediacy and filing, and email, IM, BBM, even Facebook and twitter, are much better at these. The Australian Government should surely be looking at, for instance, how much of the decoration and formatting, how much of the Powerpoint, are actually wasted effort.
The question isn't whether Microsoft blobXML or ODF is better; it is how many employed people actually really need to be using them at all.
Works perfectly. Tablet connected to projector or large display via HDMI, drive display through phone at other side of the room. Screen works as a mouse pad, centre button works like nipple on a Thinkpad, keyboard works like a keyboard. Tested last night at home and in the office this morning. What's more, a document on the phone can be opened on the tablet.
This is a corporate or academic feature, but some of us work, you know, for companies or academia.
The Edmunds comment does not bear out the survey. What it tells us is that the worst cars are about 4x worse than the best while in 1998 it was about 6 times.
What I would suggest from my own reading of the J D Power surveys is that the gap at the top is much narrower, with a number of high quality manufacturers including the Germans, the Japanese and a few others fighting over quite small differences. If you buy a Merc, a VW (even if it is called a Skoda), a Porsche, a BMW, a Toyota or a Honda, you're unlikely to complain. Buy a recent Korean car and the same is likely to be true. And then you get into the long tail (I may have missed some good ones, I agree).
A modern clunker is better than an old clunker, true, but the customer dissatisfaction is going to be just as great. It's all relative. In the early 80s many American cars were...well, they got traded in after a year and the next owner was the QA and rectification department. But people accepted it. When a lock fell out of the door of my boss's car - sorry, Chrysler- he just said "Well, it's 11 months old, not worth fixing". Twenty years on, a lock broke on a colleague's ten year old Merc and he complained that German engineering wasn't what it was.
There has already been a paper suggesting that SWCN may not be up to the task due to "dislocations".
No quotation marks needed. The problems in designing very strong materials have been known since WW2. The challenge can be expressed very simply: the more the strength depends on having a complete covalent structure (in CNTs the bonds have some ionic characteristic owing to the p-hybridisation but the same logic applies) , the greater the weakening effect of even a single fault. If a cosmic ray unzips a few bonds, the stresses will concentrate on the bonds on either side, and the split is likely to propagate. In strong metals we fix this with alloying components, very crudely like the gravel in concrete, which stop those dislocations from extending right through the material, but equally adding alloy components reduces the ultimately obtainable strength from a perfect structure. It is a tradeoff, as usual.
I would really want evidence for that. The power demand is not stupendous - though the electrical losses in a 96000km cable are not going to be that small - but the cable itself is going to be subject to what can best be described as interesting stresses and environmental conditions, especially up to the end of the stratosphere. Then there is the consideration of how easy it would be to destroy with even quite a low tech missile, which means that protection could be very, very expensive. Getting investors to sink huge amounts of upfront money into something that may have an unexpectedly short and fatal lifespan is going to be a challenge; nowadays even the US military budget would be stretched.
Vandalism, terrorist or not, and theft are probably the biggest issues. Carbon fibre hasn't taken over for the cables of suspension footbridges for just that reason.
Many of the system concepts of webOS were launched by Blackberry yesterday. I actually keep a Pre2 charged in my bag (and turn it on to sync and update periodically) simply because I like it so much, and if my company BB ever gives up the ghost, I have a backup while it is replaced. But the release of rev. 2 for the Playbook and the tight integration with the phone (which is where HP were going with the Pre3 and the Touchpad) is now impressive. The ability to use the phone as a remote control for the PB removes the need for a laptop for almost all presentations, as is the ability to open remote documents. The reverse process (at a desk, use the tablet as the messaging interface for the phone, providing a bigger keyboard and easier to read screen) shows that BB actually think about people over 30. The "swipe" system is actually slightly better than webOS (the off screen area being on all 4 sides, not just one).
So: my conclusion is that since yesterday someone is making use of the best concepts of webOS. Perhaps unexpectedly, it's RIM.
"Look, guys, I have to tell you the truth. To you I may be a big noise in the cocaine business, but I feel bad about not telling you I'm really an investigative journalist. Hey, I bet you're all feeling glad I got that off my chest".
When I was at University, the college chapel organ was replaced and, in the interval, the company supplied an electronic organ. The College chaplain took the organist (now a professor at Oxford), pointed at the banjo stop and said "If you ever pull that you're never going to play the organ here again!" I am pretty sure he managed it more than once without the Chaplain noticing a thing.
You are not a lawyer. And, really, it is posts like yours and some of the ones above that make me wonder if the Taliban have taken over America. It's in backward, tribal countries that the response to anything you don't like is to shoot it.
I would be very interested to know the American jurisdiction in which it is permitted to destroy anything that comes onto your land without permission. Ron Paul becoming President aside, the USA is not Somalia or the Tribal Areas, even if some of its citizens seem to think that is desirable.
They can't hire a new PR firm, because I don't think they have one to replace or add to. Any decent PR company would look at that piece on their website and cover it in red ink. It reads as if it has been written by an intern, and that may be unfair to some interns. "Their bad behaviour should be taken into account..." Obviously written by someone who has yet to meet a real, live journalist.
Those persons who posted these documents and wrote about them before we had a chance to comment on their authenticity should be ashamed of their deeds, and their bad behavior should be taken into account when judging their credibility now and in the future.
Presumably they have the same attitude to the leaked University of East Anglia emails, and have campaigned to have the people responsible for the leak, and the many, many denialists who misrepresented their contents, taken to court.
Perhaps some of their funding is under threat as the pendulum slowly moves away from anti-science craziness to wondering why the Greenland glaciers are melting and whether buying beachfront property is now only a short term investment. Perhaps, I don't know, some very rich people are looking at San****m* and Romney and thinking that, just perhaps, the time has come to start repositioning themselves as progressives, because rich people like to be on the winning side. And perhaps suing John Doe for punitive damages for commenting on a leaked document looks like a way of restoring some of that funding.
*letters omitted to protect sensitive but uninformed Slashdot readers from the effects of a Google search.
It is a real PITA to print management companies that the manufacturers do not provide the equivalent of a VIN. The serial number read by programs like PrintAudit is not necessarily the same as the brass tag, and HP are known to release evaluation printers with a serial of XXXXXX. We would actually prefer MORE traceability, not to catch dissidents but to reduce theft.
Button (F1 driver) was interviewed recently driving a new McLaren road car. He remarked that he did not want to try and operate the radio because he was unfamiliar with it, and he did not want to be distracted while driving.
Any coincidence that Button is one of the most technically polished and controlled F1 drivers (and has been world champion)?
Slashdot Mirror
One of the earliest and best counter-examples. Motteux's footnotes are hilarious and the translation is greater than the sum of its parts. I never dared ask him but I'm fairly sure Pratchettt knows it.
And in the last century, Ulysses is a work of literature in which not very much happens and there is little plot, it is just the (frequently very entertaining) account of two very different people wandering around Dublin on 16th. June 1904, and the way in which their paths cross.
There is no reason why a hypertext should not be literature, and the objection only makes sense if you think literature is storytelling - which most of it is not.
* I know people from many other cultures have the tendency to obey orders even from crazy people, but Moby-Dick is above all an
novel.
The concept of "literature" as purely book-bound started to die when Dickens published as serials in magazines, short stores and bound novels, and also by reading extracts from his work on lecture tours. It was inevitable that ideas like hypertext would find new forms of expression. The premise of the article seems to be as if the car industry had developed by building tractor units to replace horses, and then never got around to the idea of combining them with the passenger wagon. The first motor vehicles were simply tractors. We don't look at the roads now and say "Whatever happened to the idea of pulling carts with engines?"
The simple fact, looking at my current project hierarchy, dependencies, third party libraries, product forks and the rest is that Borland could not have handled it and presented it all as a neat, easy to understand structure through which I can navigate easily. To be more provocative, a good developer today can handle a project, or set of projects, that would have required a team in 1982. That's possible largely because of the tools.
You give yourself away by referring to "Times New Roman blandness". TNR is designed to be legible - i.e. easy to read. Conventional formatting is better for understanding large amounts of text. That's why books that people read look the way they do. Jazzy layouts often look pretty but they are actually very hard to understand properly - often the association between text and images or charts isn't clear, the actual content is dubious, the typefaces are wrong for the use case. Word and PPT makes it easy to make stuff that looks creative, but it still requires a great deal of knowledge to make stuff that is good. Electronic composition is not a substitute for understanding composition.
I can actually claim to know something about this. I know a couple of really skilled compositors/designers, and unless your kids have relevant degrees and significant postgraduate experience working alongside older and more experienced people, they simply are not going to be working at anything like that level. If you think that your kids can do "nice as books", I really sincerely doubt that you understand the skills that go into book design, or the difference between good and superficially good.
Excel is fine where it's needed. So is Word. Someone has actually probably found a use for Powerpoint other that as an insomnia cure in meetings. But most Government workers are not technical specialists, and that was rather my point. That, and the tendency of people to do too much decoration.
The Sales and Marketing Department is where Office belongs. The content providers need InDesign or whatever. No argument at all. But most office workers do not work in Sales or Marketing ( which is one reason why business continues to function). Often what they actually need is Excel plus a simple, straightforward email client, and even this is really overkill.
This is all about office workers perceiving that being given a program with lots of visual bling implies a higher status than a text based program, e.g. pptx > ppt > xlsx > xls.
Tell them that LaTex is a secret tool of the Illuminati and only the Chosen are allowed to use it, and they would come.
If they are any good, I suspect the Trust may fund them - you know, the wonderful organisation that funded the project to decode the human genome to prevent Craig Venter from creating a capitalist monopoly on your DNA?
What isn't being questioned is whether the question being asked is the right one. Despite the huge investment in "office" technologies, have they really increased productivity or effectiveness?
For the opposite case, look at IDEs. In only 20 years, software development has gone from something where you trod a minefield of minor issues and only the highly skilled could safely write business logic, to something where an invisible, benevolent being holds your hand at every step, autocompleting, identifying deprecations, and allowing you simply to concentrate on getting the job done. As a result, programmers are more productive. It is interesting watching new graduates and realising that they have simply never experienced a world in which you type, compile, fix, type, compile, fix....with most of fix being minor problems that the compiler complains about, and then start actually to debug. In those same 20 years, has office technology got more efficient to the same degree in terms of actual work done? No. Exactly like the medieval monks, the basic task of transcribing the Bible has barely improved (spelling and grammar checkers? Look at the frequent homophones nowadays - car breaks, loose for lose, and the rest of them) and all the effort has gone into illuminating the title page and margins. Office 2010 is basically an illuminated manuscript generator, absorbing vast amounts of effort in decorating a piece of paper or a screen to conceal the fact that the actual content is mundane and boring.
The really interesting and exciting stuff is happening in CMS-based websites where people post simple marked up text that stands or fails on the quality of its content, not whether it complies with the corporate standard for margin width and precise positioning of the logo.
The new paradigm that is increasingly expected by younger people is a refocussing on the text. Viewed on small screens, decoration isn't much use. More important is immediacy and filing, and email, IM, BBM, even Facebook and twitter, are much better at these. The Australian Government should surely be looking at, for instance, how much of the decoration and formatting, how much of the Powerpoint, are actually wasted effort.
The question isn't whether Microsoft blobXML or ODF is better; it is how many employed people actually really need to be using them at all.
-
*I made that statistic up. Does that make me an economist?
This is a corporate or academic feature, but some of us work, you know, for companies or academia.
What I would suggest from my own reading of the J D Power surveys is that the gap at the top is much narrower, with a number of high quality manufacturers including the Germans, the Japanese and a few others fighting over quite small differences. If you buy a Merc, a VW (even if it is called a Skoda), a Porsche, a BMW, a Toyota or a Honda, you're unlikely to complain. Buy a recent Korean car and the same is likely to be true. And then you get into the long tail (I may have missed some good ones, I agree).
A modern clunker is better than an old clunker, true, but the customer dissatisfaction is going to be just as great. It's all relative. In the early 80s many American cars were...well, they got traded in after a year and the next owner was the QA and rectification department. But people accepted it. When a lock fell out of the door of my boss's car - sorry, Chrysler- he just said "Well, it's 11 months old, not worth fixing". Twenty years on, a lock broke on a colleague's ten year old Merc and he complained that German engineering wasn't what it was.
No quotation marks needed. The problems in designing very strong materials have been known since WW2. The challenge can be expressed very simply: the more the strength depends on having a complete covalent structure (in CNTs the bonds have some ionic characteristic owing to the p-hybridisation but the same logic applies) , the greater the weakening effect of even a single fault. If a cosmic ray unzips a few bonds, the stresses will concentrate on the bonds on either side, and the split is likely to propagate. In strong metals we fix this with alloying components, very crudely like the gravel in concrete, which stop those dislocations from extending right through the material, but equally adding alloy components reduces the ultimately obtainable strength from a perfect structure. It is a tradeoff, as usual.
Vandalism, terrorist or not, and theft are probably the biggest issues. Carbon fibre hasn't taken over for the cables of suspension footbridges for just that reason.
and, as I note above, the tight phone integration that was also a feature of the webOS/Touchpad concept.
So: my conclusion is that since yesterday someone is making use of the best concepts of webOS. Perhaps unexpectedly, it's RIM.
"Look, guys, I have to tell you the truth. To you I may be a big noise in the cocaine business, but I feel bad about not telling you I'm really an investigative journalist. Hey, I bet you're all feeling glad I got that off my chest".
When I was at University, the college chapel organ was replaced and, in the interval, the company supplied an electronic organ. The College chaplain took the organist (now a professor at Oxford), pointed at the banjo stop and said "If you ever pull that you're never going to play the organ here again!" I am pretty sure he managed it more than once without the Chaplain noticing a thing.
I would be very interested to know the American jurisdiction in which it is permitted to destroy anything that comes onto your land without permission. Ron Paul becoming President aside, the USA is not Somalia or the Tribal Areas, even if some of its citizens seem to think that is desirable.
They can't hire a new PR firm, because I don't think they have one to replace or add to. Any decent PR company would look at that piece on their website and cover it in red ink. It reads as if it has been written by an intern, and that may be unfair to some interns. "Their bad behaviour should be taken into account..." Obviously written by someone who has yet to meet a real, live journalist.
Presumably they have the same attitude to the leaked University of East Anglia emails, and have campaigned to have the people responsible for the leak, and the many, many denialists who misrepresented their contents, taken to court.
*letters omitted to protect sensitive but uninformed Slashdot readers from the effects of a Google search.
It is a real PITA to print management companies that the manufacturers do not provide the equivalent of a VIN. The serial number read by programs like PrintAudit is not necessarily the same as the brass tag, and HP are known to release evaluation printers with a serial of XXXXXX. We would actually prefer MORE traceability, not to catch dissidents but to reduce theft.
Any coincidence that Button is one of the most technically polished and controlled F1 drivers (and has been world champion)?