I repeat... hackers don't behave maliciously, cept for good political reasons.
There are people out there who have massive political disagreements with you; do you think this should give them carte blanche to rewrite your web site in protest? Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
You don't understand. If you *like* breaking into systems and gaining expertise in that area, you're a CRACKER, whether you think of yourself as a hacker or not. It's the difference between a car thief and an auto mechanic.
You're claiming that so long as the thief only breaks in but doesn't steal the car, he's a mechanic.
Why don't you stop pretending to be an expert about computer culture and go pretend to be an expert about something else?
For comparison's sake: 28140 pgf 0 0 1096 728 468 S 0 0.0 2.3 0:05 WindowMaker Of course, I'm running a gaggle of gnome stuff at the same time. What's the figures for E? (Although I suspect if Dave were reading this he'd tell me something about how innacurate top can sometimes be.) Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
Now, lets apply these to people. Possibly the least intellectually oriented people on the surface of the earth: Rednecks (american southerners for those of you not familiar with the term. see also: trailer trash, hick). Now, i'm pretty sure none of us want to be such, so lets examine their motivations.
I'm pretty sure you'd get culture shock if you ever found out that Southerners in general don't match your stereotype, or possibly have a similar stereotype about you. . Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
I'm halfway reminded of the division of personality types based on Tolkien's races in _Cryptonomicon_.
I wonder what personality type Babylon 5 fans are supposed to have. Would there be two basic types, one for the Vorlons, and one for the Shadows? Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
So your basic answer is, if someone doesn't like it, that they need to watch it a couple more times? Get a life. Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
I find your references to 'synthetic mythology' disturbing. Your brief comments leave the appearance that you believe the Star Wars tales to be some combination of earlier, unacknowledged, works, and, by inference, that this synthesis is "bad". Yet you do not acknowledge that earlier works (in particular, Manes' doctrine that Light=Good, Dark=Evil) are in themselves combinations of earlier works (in particular, an amalgamation of Christianity with Zoroastrianism).
I can almost hear Darth saying "I find your lack of faith disturbing..."
Perhaps I should be more specific. I doubt Mani made a concious decision to "cut and paste" this bit from Zoroasterism, that bit from Gnosticism, a little from Christianity, some from Judaism, etc., and come up with a marketable "movement." However, Lucas has been quite aboveground about how he's retelling the Hero's Quest.
Perhaps the best thing I could say is that the process doesn't seem organic to me. People write books or make movies with elements of the Hero's Quest (and notice how strongly we've abstracted away mythology into generic Hero's Quests and the like, thanks to Lucas and even Cambell; I'm not convinced this is good) all the time, while managing to maintain an organic process.
Alternatively, look at Babylon 5: the story line for John Sheridan is weak and ineffective because it follows the Great Mythic Hero Cookie-Cutter plot, but the story line for G'Kar and Londo was much stronger, because even though it drew from earlier stories, etc., yada yada, it did so in an original way and not in a cookie-cutter fashion. Phil
I find myself in disagreement with John Katz much of the time, on a wide variety of subjects, but this time I would have to say I agree with much of what he's saying in this article.
I saw Star Wars when it first came out; I was nine years old at the time. I liked it, and liked Empire a bit more. I disliked ROTJ. As I grew older, and read more books, both science-fiction and non-science-fiction, I started to become more and more disenchanted with the Star Wars movies.
I am especially dubious about the Star Wars movies because of their attempts to push their synthetic mythology on people. I have actually gained familiarity with the original stories and myths, and philosophies, that Lucas drew on to create his stories, and frankly, the original myths are much better. The whole mythos of the Force, which seems like an attempt to weld together Manicheism and Taoism in an inappropriate fashion, is IMHO very misguided.
I think most of the people here are perfectly capable of reading about Taoism or Christianity or Homer or what have you on their own, and will find it more fulfilling than Lucas' synthetic feel-good attempt to combine all of them.
Personally, I think there's only one really good movie in recent years about mythology and "mythic themes," and I would recommend that everyone here see it: The Secret of Roan Inish.
And although I didn't agree with everything in the essay, Neal Stephenson's In The Beginning Was The Command Line has many interesting observations on the Synthetic Culture business. He also touches on a lot of the same topics in Cryptonomicon, which I'm currently reading.
ps: Jon, thanks for finally coming through and validating my decision not to put you in my Slashdot "kill-file" equivalent.
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
Re:The odds of caring about H. Stern's review...
on
More Star Wars Hype
·
· Score: 1
What do you mean, you don't think Hamill has talent? He's great as the Joker on Batman:TAS... Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
OK, people, time to move. Someone got a PAC converter and player yet?
You don't understand. It's the great Bell Labs tradition to invent great technology and bury it. AT&T pretty much did that with Unix, except universities using it for research got it over the hump, as it were, to the next level of development, and companies like Sun went and ran with it.
One of the great reasons for Linux's success is that it implied that Unix was more than a server OS to be kept in a rackmount somewhere. It could be used by at first sophisticated users, and then maybe even consumers. It went out and put the technology into the hands of people.
If Lucent follows the previous patterns regarding PAC, universities may be able to see the algorithm or source, but they won't allow open source implementations of either, and they won't try to market it.
Today, of course, Microsoft is around and aggressively trying to compete; it's not like it'll work in spite of a lack of dedicated marketing by commercial firms, or advocacy by free software advocates and programmers.
What this means about Thomson's Linux comments, I don't know.
Why limit the use of settlement money to operating systems on X86? Why not attack both monopolies at the same time? Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
One thing I miss in the ASCII editors for Linux I've looked at so far is the ability to mark a block for copying/cutting by holding down the shift key while using the cursor control keys.
On my system, the program gxedit has this feature. I'm checking to see whether gEdit does too... yes, it does. I don't know if KDE has anything similar, because I haven't used it, but I suspect if you looked, you'd find it. Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
Hah... they're not paid very much. The earth's asteroid early-warning system is woefully inadequate, and it's not their fault - the corrupt government + major corporations prefer profit-making ventures for investment, and happily spend billions on defense, while a few million goes the early warning network's way.
To speak in the military's defense... they want to be involved in both asteroid defense and developing significant new technologies; this has been opposed by the Clinton administration. The military only gets something like 1/6 of the federal budget, and it's been going down through Clinton's whole administration. His "who are we going to declare war on this week" habits have only made preparedness, and money for tech development, even more scarce.
A lot of the criticism you made of the military can be placed firmly at its commander-in-chief, who we were stupid enough to elect. We get a chance to get a new one at the end of next year. If we're not all killed by Y2K, that is. Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
At the moment I'm not saying anything pro or con about the GOP, even though I don't really like the Dems; I'm waiting to see who gets nominated.
But please keep in mind the GOP has _very_ slim majorities in both houses, and isn't very united, which makes things worse. Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
Remember though that they are a hardware company, so they are not going to give all their software for free, and they are not going to develop software for competing platforms.
Apple's main problem is that when it comes to letting you run non-Apple OS's on their hardware they act like the hardware sales are unimportant compared to their software sales, and when it comes to running their software on someone else's hardware, they act as if the software sale is unimportant compared to the hardware.
In a way, this gives them the worst of both worlds... all the liabilities of both and advantages of neither.
Cutting off cloning is vastly inconsistent with their decision to not be friendly to alternate OS's running on their hardware. Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
I suppose it is because Linux itself is processor agnostic and large amounts of the more valuable software that runs under Linux is available as source code and not just Intel binaries.
I'm not sure whether or not the concern about Melissa might be actually justified. IMHO, the environment many people use these days for computing is responsible for a lot of the ease with which things like Melissa spread.
Believe it or not, viruses are something that have to be taken very seriously. Especially by the people who build OS's or distributions. If they're negligent, however, no amount of panic from anyone else is going to stop things.
I don't think Linux is virus-proof, but at least it isn't a "hey look at all these macros!" sort of petri dish... Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
Well, to name just _one_ area where free software has "failed:"
Handheld devices.
Personally, I don't care if it takes free software, commercial software, or some combination of the two, but I really want to see a handheld/pda-type computer still available a couple years from now besides one based on Windows CE. After the Steve-ing of the Newton, and the relative lack of progress on the Pilot, I'm not sure it'll be there.
I say this not as criticism of free software, just a statement of something we need but don't yet have.
(Although you could say the suspicious events surrounding the Newton's cancellation is an advertisement for free or open source software if you want. It almost makes me think that proprietary software licenses should "expire" or become free software after a certain period of time, or if the manufacturer discontinues the project.
I don't know if anyone's reading down this far, but thanks for the relatively stimulating and flame-free discussion thus far. Most of the time there's economics here, it quickly degrades into an inflammatory mess. Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
You either have apps or you don't, and so far, gang, you don't.
So you're saying we don't have applications for Linux? Hmm. Do you mean free or commercial applications? I can't speak for the existance of free applications, even though I have many, but I can at least provide copies of the receipts of software I purchased for business use on Linux...
Should I ask you for a rebate? Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
Slashdot Mirror
I was _so_ hoping Opera would do the smart thing and code their browser for gtk/gnome...
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
Heck, there are lots of chemical reactions where metals, once ignited, would burn underwater...
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
There are people out there who have massive political disagreements with you; do you think this should give them carte blanche to rewrite your web site in protest?
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
You don't understand. If you *like* breaking into systems and gaining expertise in that area, you're a CRACKER, whether you think of yourself as a hacker or not. It's the difference between a car thief and an auto mechanic.
You're claiming that so long as the thief only breaks in but doesn't steal the car, he's a mechanic.
Why don't you stop pretending to be an expert about computer culture and go pretend to be an expert about something else?
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
For comparison's sake:
28140 pgf 0 0 1096 728 468 S 0 0.0 2.3 0:05 WindowMaker
Of course, I'm running a gaggle of gnome stuff at the same time. What's the figures for E?
(Although I suspect if Dave were reading this he'd tell me something about how innacurate top can sometimes be.)
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
I'm pretty sure you'd get culture shock if you ever found out that Southerners in general don't match your stereotype, or possibly have a similar stereotype about you. .
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
I'm halfway reminded of the division of personality types based on Tolkien's races in _Cryptonomicon_.
I wonder what personality type Babylon 5 fans are supposed to have. Would there be two basic types, one for the Vorlons, and one for the Shadows?
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
Also, I *think* gnumeric is written in python.
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
Lawrence? Heck, I thought that was Cronan's department!
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
So your basic answer is, if someone doesn't like it, that they need to watch it a couple more times?
Get a life.
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
Yes, I know, it's horrible, and I was being cynical about Star Wars yesterday, but it had to be done...
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
I can almost hear Darth saying "I find your lack of faith disturbing..."
Perhaps I should be more specific. I doubt Mani made a concious decision to "cut and paste" this bit from Zoroasterism, that bit from Gnosticism, a little from Christianity, some from Judaism, etc., and come up with a marketable "movement." However, Lucas has been quite aboveground about how he's retelling the Hero's Quest.
Perhaps the best thing I could say is that the process doesn't seem organic to me. People write books or make movies with elements of the Hero's Quest (and notice how strongly we've abstracted away mythology into generic Hero's Quests and the like, thanks to Lucas and even Cambell; I'm not convinced this is good) all the time, while managing to maintain an organic process.
Alternatively, look at Babylon 5: the story line for John Sheridan is weak and ineffective because it follows the Great Mythic Hero Cookie-Cutter plot, but the story line for G'Kar and Londo was much stronger, because even though it drew from earlier stories, etc., yada yada, it did so in an original way and not in a cookie-cutter fashion.
Phil
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
I find myself in disagreement with John Katz much of the time, on a wide variety of subjects, but this time I would have to say I agree with much of what he's saying in this article.
I saw Star Wars when it first came out; I was nine years old at the time. I liked it, and liked Empire a bit more. I disliked ROTJ. As I grew older, and read more books, both science-fiction and non-science-fiction, I started to become more and more disenchanted with the Star Wars movies.
I am especially dubious about the Star Wars movies because of their attempts to push their synthetic mythology on people. I have actually gained familiarity with the original stories and myths, and philosophies, that Lucas drew on to create his stories, and frankly, the original myths are much better. The whole mythos of the Force, which seems like an attempt to weld together Manicheism and Taoism in an inappropriate fashion, is IMHO very misguided.
I think most of the people here are perfectly capable of reading about Taoism or Christianity or Homer or what have you on their own, and will find it more fulfilling than Lucas' synthetic feel-good attempt to combine all of them.
Personally, I think there's only one really good movie in recent years about mythology and "mythic themes," and I would recommend that everyone here see it: The Secret of Roan Inish.
And although I didn't agree with everything in the essay, Neal Stephenson's In The Beginning Was The Command Line has many interesting observations on the Synthetic Culture business. He also touches on a lot of the same topics in Cryptonomicon, which I'm currently reading.
ps: Jon, thanks for finally coming through and validating my decision not to put you in my Slashdot "kill-file" equivalent.
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
What do you mean, you don't think Hamill has talent? He's great as the Joker on Batman:TAS...
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
You don't understand. It's the great Bell Labs tradition to invent great technology and bury it. AT&T pretty much did that with Unix, except universities using it for research got it over the hump, as it were, to the next level of development, and companies like Sun went and ran with it.
One of the great reasons for Linux's success is that it implied that Unix was more than a server OS to be kept in a rackmount somewhere. It could be used by at first sophisticated users, and then maybe even consumers. It went out and put the technology into the hands of people.
If Lucent follows the previous patterns regarding PAC, universities may be able to see the algorithm or source, but they won't allow open source implementations of either, and they won't try to market it.
Today, of course, Microsoft is around and aggressively trying to compete; it's not like it'll work in spite of a lack of dedicated marketing by commercial firms, or advocacy by free software advocates and programmers.
What this means about Thomson's Linux comments, I don't know.
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
Why limit the use of settlement money to
operating systems on X86? Why not attack both
monopolies at the same time?
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
On my system, the program gxedit has this feature. I'm checking to see whether gEdit does too... yes, it does. I don't know if KDE has anything similar, because I haven't used it, but I suspect if you looked, you'd find it.
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
To speak in the military's defense... they want to be involved in both asteroid defense and developing significant new technologies; this has been opposed by the Clinton administration. The military only gets something like 1/6 of the federal budget, and it's been going down through Clinton's whole administration. His "who are we going to declare war on this week" habits have only made preparedness, and money for tech development, even more scarce.
A lot of the criticism you made of the military can be placed firmly at its commander-in-chief, who we were stupid enough to elect. We get a chance to get a new one at the end of next year. If we're not all killed by Y2K, that is.
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
At the moment I'm not saying anything pro
or con about the GOP, even though I don't
really like the Dems; I'm waiting to see
who gets nominated.
But please keep in mind the GOP has _very_
slim majorities in both houses, and isn't
very united, which makes things worse.
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
Apple's main problem is that when it comes to letting you run non-Apple OS's on their hardware they act like the hardware sales are unimportant compared to their software sales, and when it comes to running their software on someone else's hardware, they act as if the software sale is unimportant compared to the hardware.
In a way, this gives them the worst of both worlds... all the liabilities of both and advantages of neither.
Cutting off cloning is vastly inconsistent with their decision to not be friendly to alternate OS's running on their hardware.
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
I suppose it is because Linux itself is processor agnostic and large amounts of the more valuable software that runs under Linux is available as source code and not just Intel binaries.
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
I'm not sure whether or not the concern about
Melissa might be actually justified. IMHO, the
environment many people use these days for computing is responsible for a lot of the ease
with which things like Melissa spread.
Believe it or not, viruses are something that
have to be taken very seriously. Especially by
the people who build OS's or distributions. If
they're negligent, however, no amount of panic
from anyone else is going to stop things.
I don't think Linux is virus-proof, but
at least it isn't a "hey look at all these
macros!" sort of petri dish...
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
You don't understand what I mean.
For the intended market for Merced, i.e.
servers, being able to handle multi-threaded
applications would help a lot.
This also holds true for consumer OS's, otherwise
M$ wouldn't be quite so concerned about Be.
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
Handheld devices.
Personally, I don't care if it takes free software, commercial software, or some combination of the two, but I really want to see a handheld/pda-type computer still available a couple years from now besides one based on Windows CE. After the Steve-ing of the Newton, and the relative lack of progress on the Pilot, I'm not sure it'll be there.
I say this not as criticism of free software, just a statement of something we need but don't yet have.
(Although you could say the suspicious events surrounding the Newton's cancellation is an advertisement for free or open source software if you want. It almost makes me think that proprietary software licenses should "expire" or become free software after a certain period of time, or if the manufacturer discontinues the project.
I don't know if anyone's reading down this far, but thanks for the relatively stimulating and flame-free discussion thus far. Most of the time there's economics here, it quickly degrades into an inflammatory mess.
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
So you're saying we don't have applications for Linux? Hmm. Do you mean free or commercial applications? I can't speak for the existance of free applications, even though I have many, but I can at least provide copies of the receipts of software I purchased for business use on Linux ...
Should I ask you for a rebate?
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita