posting trivial and useless opinions on fluff topics
Like dismissing an entire medium* on Slashdot? That takes a lot of work, doesn't it?
Sure, those jobs are a lot more physically difficult (with the exception of watching TV). But anyone who spends time programming, writing websites -- heck, just writing -- should recognize that mental work takes effort too. And yes, there are a lot of "fluff" blogs -- probably the majority, though that just reflects Sturgeon's Law.
Posting fluff is easy. Keeping a schedule, or trying to write something more than "OMG my team won/lost/tied!" takes time and effort, no matter what the topic.
*IMO, "blogs" are simply a subset of the web, and the label has more to do with the structure and management tools than the actual content. So I don't consider blogs to be any more or less important than the rest of the web.
Agreed. If you're not getting anything out of it, stop or take a break. If it's your hobby, let it stay your hobby. Once it becomes an obligation, it becomes a chore, and once it becomes a chore... why are you doing it in the first place?
I've got a blog which is basically a place for me to post interesting stuff or sound off. I like getting readers and comments, but that's not the purpose. I post what I want, when I want, and I haven't lost interest.
I've also got a long-running (i.e. 9.5 years now) comic book fan site. I've found that the more people ask me to add things, the less interested I am in working on it. It's a strange, somewhat perverse reaction, but I think it comes down to hobby vs. work. When I'm just doing it for myself, it's fun and I put a lot more into the site, but when it's an obligation, it's work, and I dig in my heels and spend my time doing something else. I've already got a job, why should I do more work at home?
Every time I've looked at the URL on a Google cache result, it's been hosted on a raw IP address instead of a domain name. I don't know how the current blocking works -- whether it's got a list of IPs known to serve pages from the Google cache or whether it just looks for search=q?cache -- but it seems to me that the domain itself is already irrelevant.
Of course, they could just block all requests to Google's IP space...
This got me thinking about Calvinism. I'm not sure how much influence it has on modern-day evangelical and fundamentalist churches, but one of the key tenets of Calvinism was predestination. You were either one of the "elect," who would go to heaven, or you were not. In theory, the elect were supposed to (a) be good people and (b) be rewarded by good fortune in this life as well, so if you could fake (a) and arrange for (b), people would assume you were one of them.
Obviously this conflicts with a major aspect of evangelicalism, which is to spread the gospel (what's the point if the people you talk to aren't going to be saved?), but it may contribute to the idea some people seem to have that they're already saved, so it doesn't matter how badly they treat people in this world.
It's a funny thing, but with television, radio, imusic, internet, etc. etc. etc. you see people with less time they actually devote to thinking for themselves.
What's even funnier is that all of this wouldn't be possible without a solid understandng of science. (I'm assuming you mean mass-distributed music.) The anti-intellectual climate rejects the knowledge and skills that made our level of entertainment and communication possible.
You need thinkers, and you need doers. It's an uneasy balance, but I'd guess most thinkers see the value in doers. (Even the really snobby thinkers probably think of doers as a necessary evil.) These days, I'm not so sure most doers see the value in thinkers.
Don't you know that those lowly plebs are only parroting what our competitors want them to say? People don't have opinions of their own! (Well, except for a few crackpots.) All you have to do is look at the way those people have negative things to say about us, and it's obvious they're part of a sinister conspiracy. They're probably communists. And intellectual terrorists.
You... wouldn't happen to be siding with those bloggers, now would you? Siding with terrorists?
Films' "authors" are generally the studios. Stay through the end credits and you'll usually see something like "The author of this film for copyright purposes is..." The copyrights on the Star Wars films are owned by 20th-Century Fox and Lucasfilm.
That means in the US, each film gets a flat 95 years, not a period based on Lucas' lifetime. (I'm not sure exactly how it holds up for the first movie, which was made just before the copyright laws changed in 1978.)
Incidentally, the author's life-based period is now life+70 years. I think it might still be 50 in Canada, though.
Imagine if the family of Hemmingway started releasing new versions of his novels -- either by making them up of finding an "addenum to the manuscript" in the attic.
Now if they were willing to unbundle things more, you could choose to install only the parts of the application that you actually needed to use, which would mean you'd install a Microsoft Piece of Sheet.
It's just not possible to get a movie -- or any artistic work, whether we're talking serious art or pop culture -- to the state where it's absolutely, 100% perfect. There's always some fine tuning, some tweaking, and at some point you have to say "That's it, we're done." It's not completely bug-free, but you've fixed all the big problems and you've gotta ship it sometime.
But with re-releases, DVDs, special screenings, etc. (and sufficient funding), people have the opportunity to go back and do a director's cut, or release two versions of a film (one short enough for theaters, one for people who can hit "pause" and take a bathroom break in the middle), or go back and fix that embarrasment of a first novel that you wrote when you were young and didn't understand the craft of writing as well as you do now.
Is this good or bad? I think it's neither. It's a tool. It can be used well, or used poorly. Sure, Lucas can go back and revise history so Greedo shoots first, but he can also go back and clean up the lousy compositing in the Rancor pit, fix the transparency in the Hoth battle sequences, etc.
There's even been performance improvement in step 3.
I could hardly stand to start OpenOffice in the 1.0 days. If I needed to work on a formatted document or a spreadsheet, I tried to use AbiWord or Gnumeric whenever possible, using OpenOffice only when I needed the extra features or stability... and I tried not to close it. (Gnumeric's been rock-solid, but I've had lots of problems with AbiWord crashing, losing text or formatting, etc. No, I don't remember what version it was.)
More recent versions, and especially the 1.9 series when it was first included in Fedora Core, are *much* faster, and now I have no qualms about just firing up OOo.
Re:"Essentially" the same data?
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Not sure if it's relevant, but as I recall Excel was developed outside MS and purchased to become a companion to Word. (This would explain why it's not called Microsoft Spread, as most apps that originated within Microsoft tend to use purely descriptive names like Windows, Word, Internet Explorer, Flight Simulator, etc. I never did figure out Bob, though.)
If correct, this could provide a degree of comfort to those who wish to preserve their MS-hating credentials and still admit that Excel is a damn good office app.
Ma Bell is back and you're gonna be in trouble. Hey, la! Hey, la! Ma Bell is back!
Re:"Ma Bell" should be called "Big Brother" instea
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 1
And if you don't remember the phone number for the fire department, or don't have time? You call 911. If 911 can't tell what kind of emergency you're having, they have no way of knowing whether your house is on fire, or you've just had a heart attack, or there's a home invasion robbery in progress.
Re:I don't care what they call it, it ain't Ma Bel
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 1
But where does Jackson get the "Only Official way to interpet LOTR" badge?
If they were making games based directly on the books, then yeah, there'd be no reason to get Peter Jackson involved unless they wanted to. But they made games based on his movies.
As for "he could have easily sent lawyers" -- he just as easily chose to pick his battles and vote with his wallet instead (by choosing another company the next time). Seriously, do *you* sue every business that does something you don't like? Or do you just file a complaint and take your business elsewhere?
Slashdot Mirror
posting trivial and useless opinions on fluff topics
Like dismissing an entire medium* on Slashdot? That takes a lot of work, doesn't it?
Sure, those jobs are a lot more physically difficult (with the exception of watching TV). But anyone who spends time programming, writing websites -- heck, just writing -- should recognize that mental work takes effort too. And yes, there are a lot of "fluff" blogs -- probably the majority, though that just reflects Sturgeon's Law.
Posting fluff is easy. Keeping a schedule, or trying to write something more than "OMG my team won/lost/tied!" takes time and effort, no matter what the topic.
*IMO, "blogs" are simply a subset of the web, and the label has more to do with the structure and management tools than the actual content. So I don't consider blogs to be any more or less important than the rest of the web.
About the same time they recognize the death of Apple -- uh, I mean BSD -- wait, the web -- OK, how about e-mail -- oh, nevermind.
Agreed. If you're not getting anything out of it, stop or take a break. If it's your hobby, let it stay your hobby. Once it becomes an obligation, it becomes a chore, and once it becomes a chore... why are you doing it in the first place?
I've got a blog which is basically a place for me to post interesting stuff or sound off. I like getting readers and comments, but that's not the purpose. I post what I want, when I want, and I haven't lost interest.
I've also got a long-running (i.e. 9.5 years now) comic book fan site. I've found that the more people ask me to add things, the less interested I am in working on it. It's a strange, somewhat perverse reaction, but I think it comes down to hobby vs. work. When I'm just doing it for myself, it's fun and I put a lot more into the site, but when it's an obligation, it's work, and I dig in my heels and spend my time doing something else. I've already got a job, why should I do more work at home?
I was wondering how fast someone would post a "blogging=crap" comment.
Third post -- not bad! And you even managed to use a metaphor that fit in with the pejorative!
Every time I've looked at the URL on a Google cache result, it's been hosted on a raw IP address instead of a domain name. I don't know how the current blocking works -- whether it's got a list of IPs known to serve pages from the Google cache or whether it just looks for search=q?cache -- but it seems to me that the domain itself is already irrelevant.
Of course, they could just block all requests to Google's IP space...
This got me thinking about Calvinism. I'm not sure how much influence it has on modern-day evangelical and fundamentalist churches, but one of the key tenets of Calvinism was predestination. You were either one of the "elect," who would go to heaven, or you were not. In theory, the elect were supposed to (a) be good people and (b) be rewarded by good fortune in this life as well, so if you could fake (a) and arrange for (b), people would assume you were one of them.
Obviously this conflicts with a major aspect of evangelicalism, which is to spread the gospel (what's the point if the people you talk to aren't going to be saved?), but it may contribute to the idea some people seem to have that they're already saved, so it doesn't matter how badly they treat people in this world.
I think you're reading too much into the parent post.
It's a funny thing, but with television, radio, imusic, internet, etc. etc. etc. you see people with less time they actually devote to thinking for themselves.
What's even funnier is that all of this wouldn't be possible without a solid understandng of science. (I'm assuming you mean mass-distributed music.) The anti-intellectual climate rejects the knowledge and skills that made our level of entertainment and communication possible.
You need thinkers, and you need doers. It's an uneasy balance, but I'd guess most thinkers see the value in doers. (Even the really snobby thinkers probably think of doers as a necessary evil.) These days, I'm not so sure most doers see the value in thinkers.
Shouldn't we be asking Slashdot something like, "How do we stop the insanity?"
Isn't that kind of like asking Hamlet for suggestions on how to cheer up?
Don't you know that those lowly plebs are only parroting what our competitors want them to say? People don't have opinions of their own! (Well, except for a few crackpots.) All you have to do is look at the way those people have negative things to say about us, and it's obvious they're part of a sinister conspiracy. They're probably communists. And intellectual terrorists.
You... wouldn't happen to be siding with those bloggers, now would you? Siding with terrorists?
I thought not!
Films' "authors" are generally the studios. Stay through the end credits and you'll usually see something like "The author of this film for copyright purposes is..." The copyrights on the Star Wars films are owned by 20th-Century Fox and Lucasfilm.
That means in the US, each film gets a flat 95 years, not a period based on Lucas' lifetime. (I'm not sure exactly how it holds up for the first movie, which was made just before the copyright laws changed in 1978.)
Incidentally, the author's life-based period is now life+70 years. I think it might still be 50 in Canada, though.
Imagine if the family of Hemmingway started releasing new versions of his novels -- either by making them up of finding an "addenum to the manuscript" in the attic.
Hey, if it works for L. Ron Hubbard...
No great artists continually go over the same work refiniting it forever.
What about jazz?
Should we reprint and remove or rewrite politically uncorrect sequences and dialog from Anne Frank, Huck Finn, and Uncle Tom's cabin?
Sadly, there's nothing new about the concept -- or the ability to carry it out.
Now if they were willing to unbundle things more, you could choose to install only the parts of the application that you actually needed to use, which would mean you'd install a Microsoft Piece of Sheet.
...then what is Apple charging for?
"Movies are never finished, only abandoned."
It's just not possible to get a movie -- or any artistic work, whether we're talking serious art or pop culture -- to the state where it's absolutely, 100% perfect. There's always some fine tuning, some tweaking, and at some point you have to say "That's it, we're done." It's not completely bug-free, but you've fixed all the big problems and you've gotta ship it sometime.
But with re-releases, DVDs, special screenings, etc. (and sufficient funding), people have the opportunity to go back and do a director's cut, or release two versions of a film (one short enough for theaters, one for people who can hit "pause" and take a bathroom break in the middle), or go back and fix that embarrasment of a first novel that you wrote when you were young and didn't understand the craft of writing as well as you do now.
Is this good or bad? I think it's neither. It's a tool. It can be used well, or used poorly. Sure, Lucas can go back and revise history so Greedo shoots first, but he can also go back and clean up the lousy compositing in the Rancor pit, fix the transparency in the Hoth battle sequences, etc.
There's even been performance improvement in step 3.
I could hardly stand to start OpenOffice in the 1.0 days. If I needed to work on a formatted document or a spreadsheet, I tried to use AbiWord or Gnumeric whenever possible, using OpenOffice only when I needed the extra features or stability... and I tried not to close it. (Gnumeric's been rock-solid, but I've had lots of problems with AbiWord crashing, losing text or formatting, etc. No, I don't remember what version it was.)
More recent versions, and especially the 1.9 series when it was first included in Fedora Core, are *much* faster, and now I have no qualms about just firing up OOo.
Not sure if it's relevant, but as I recall Excel was developed outside MS and purchased to become a companion to Word. (This would explain why it's not called Microsoft Spread, as most apps that originated within Microsoft tend to use purely descriptive names like Windows, Word, Internet Explorer, Flight Simulator, etc. I never did figure out Bob, though.)
If correct, this could provide a degree of comfort to those who wish to preserve their MS-hating credentials and still admit that Excel is a damn good office app.
Ma Bell is back and you're gonna be in trouble.
Hey, la! Hey, la! Ma Bell is back!
And if you don't remember the phone number for the fire department, or don't have time? You call 911. If 911 can't tell what kind of emergency you're having, they have no way of knowing whether your house is on fire, or you've just had a heart attack, or there's a home invasion robbery in progress.
Mrs. Robinson?
Some, no doubt, from crackpots and autograph collectors.
Ah, but which is worse?
But where does Jackson get the "Only Official way to interpet LOTR" badge?
If they were making games based directly on the books, then yeah, there'd be no reason to get Peter Jackson involved unless they wanted to. But they made games based on his movies.
As for "he could have easily sent lawyers" -- he just as easily chose to pick his battles and vote with his wallet instead (by choosing another company the next time). Seriously, do *you* sue every business that does something you don't like? Or do you just file a complaint and take your business elsewhere?
In connection with the previous story, it's midnight and I should really go to bed if I expect to get anything done at work tomorrow.
I seriously read the headline as "Cannon's Fuel Cell..."