For the vast majority of that fifteen thousand years you speak of, music wasn't a service that people (regular folk, that is) provided each other at all. For the lion's share of the first 14/15ths, nearly all music was for religious purposes, so at best it was a service by people for their gods, not for each other. Music for pleasure didn't become decently commonplace until the Baroque era in the West, and even then it was a service of talented professionals for some King or Prince, not the everyday folk.
Ever heard of a bard? Geez. It's like you've never read a fantasy novel before...
And yet they would apply the same thinking. Why take a shower or brush your teeth? That just wastes time! It is far more productive to use that time to conceive of wonderously creative ways to explain to your parents why you still live in their basement.
You are assuming that the productivity gain is the *reason* why people are disorganized. When really, "disorganized" is just the way some people are and it is how they work best.
On a serious note. One can get a lot done when they don't have to deal with cleaning shit up. But there is a certain point at which the stench, impossibility of finding important items, and spousal/co-worker nagging will counter any increased productivity.
Wait a minute... "stench?" There's a big difference between having a poorly organized (to the casual observer) space and being completely disgusting an unsanitary.
And as far as not being able to find important items goes, in my "system" the important things are generally on top and easy to find. And as mentioned in TFA, having to search through stuff to find other stuff often makes one aware of what is there. Where if you everything is put neatly in its place, it can be difficult to remember that it is even there, much less remember WHERE it is. Happens to me all the time on the few occasions that I actually organize things... or worse, let my wife do it!
7: mistakenly try to compile Openoffice from source
Haha. That is so funny because I made that mistake. I had no idea what was gettign into. An hour into the build on my P4 2Ghz machine i was franticly trying to free up space on the partition where it was building just so it wouldn't fail and I'd have to start over. I eventually gave up and went back to Debian.
you wouldn't believe how much work it is testing patches and narrowing down which one broke an application.
Oh I think I woudl believe it. Troubleshooting ANY problem on Windows makes me want to tear my hair out. There isn't a whole lot you can do once you've sacrificed your last chicken to the Win32 gods hoping that the next mouse click with be the one that, for no apparent reason, makes things start working again.
No one wants to have a separate tank that we need to remember to fill-up, and the 10% increase provided by water just isn't enough.
10% is borderline, but 25% is pretty significant. I'd definitly give this serious consideration. Maybe we won't see it in "production" but certainly there'd be a market for retrofits or special orders. I'd love it if I could retrofit my Hyndai with this.
hen the same Moore's Law and other forces that create the "everything will run software and be connected" world of the future also brings a hundred million or more new potential programmers into the developed world economy (without ever leaving their local undeveloped economies) each year to meet the demand for however much new code needs to be written each year, and the job of "programmer" is going to look more and more like various factory worker jobs (the decent ones, not the dangerous ones.)
What kind of work are you thinking of, specifically? I'm having trouble imagining how programming would look as a factory worker job. Having assembly-line "programmers" as IT advances seems counterintuitive to me. Seems to me that all the real grunt work should be done by the off-the-shelf software and all the really creative/custom stuff still needs programmers.
The only real trend I can identify is an increase in high level tools/languages used. But I don't see how that makes programmers more like factory workers. Just because you're not twiddling the registers of the video card with assembler doesn't mean you don't need a solid foundatation in computer science (ok, nobody NEEDs such a foundation, but it helps).
When you pull money out of the global finance system to fix global warming, the money comes from somewhere. At the margin, the family that would have just made it with a bit of aid doesn't get the aid and people die. Don't think that people won't eventually make the calculation.
Why should I think that people would make such a calculation when they haven't done to any significant degree regarding the pouring billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of young people into Iraq? Sure, the numbers fly around, so somebody is making the calculations, but somehow it just gets glossed over because it is the military. I guess environmentalism just isn't patriotic enough.
Let me get this straight, you are seriously comparing the judicious use of resources and consideration for the global environment with.... the Crusades? Are you kidding me?
Your understanding of the word, religion, is limited at best. It has and does describe the strong belief(s) of a particular person or those shared by a group of people. Also, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, 4th Edition, one of its definitions is: "A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion." I would say that description could be aptly applied to Environmentalists and many other groups.
Exactly: "...and to many other groups." The fact that your understanding of the word religion can apply to many groups which are by most standards not at all religions means that your undersatnding too broad, if not completely wrong.
Note the order of the items in the definition. If you're only matching against a single item far down the list, you have a very poor case. I can find plenty of example of things that match the 3rd or 4th criteria of a dictionary definition which do not really fit that word at all.
I only make this point because the use of "religion" in this case is clearly derogatory and has no place in rational discussion.
Given the story you are commenting in the context of, you'd have to be amazingly, passionately, non-objective to not see how moronic you sound for asking this (rhetorical?) question.
Couldn't get more objective. I'm trying to look past the rhetoric and passion in the article. And it wasn't a rhetorical question. I was respnding to the implication that research has stopped and some totalitarian eco-fascist regime is taking over. It just isn't true nor is it objective.
Actually, it did cross my mind, but after more thought, I came to the conclusion that it isn't relevant because climate change affects all of us. You going to hell or not does not affect anyone but you. It simply doesn't make any sense to legislate belief. It makes a lot of sense, however, to regulate human environmental impact. And in fact, such regulations have shown to be very successful in the past. Seriously, have you ever been to a county/city that has little or no environmental regulation? It is appalling.
So, we have evidence that environmental regulations work without seriously hurting the economy in the long term... and evidence that humans are impacting the global climate. Seems like a fairly obvious call for action if I've ever seen one. Not that we should just stop researching climate change, of course.
How about them cursing you for having trashed the economy so their standard of living is far below that of your time - and no resources are available for solving whatever the REAL problems of their day are - while instituting a global totalitarian repression to accomplish the "better safe" goals?
Read the rest of my comment. "Global totalitarian repression" is along the lines of "violent revolution." So I would definitly say that is going too far.
What good is insurance if you spend so much on it that you have nothing left to live on? Don't you think you need to actually do enough research to have some confidence in the results before instituting such costly measures?
Did I miss something? Has research stopped? Is anyone even advocating that we stop researching climate change?
Don't you think you should at LEAST get the models working to the point that they actually track the historic record of global temperature before taking draconian measures based on their predictions of the future?
Which "draconian" measures are you talking about, exactly?
Do you even understand what a religion is? It doesn't mean "really strong beliefs about something." Religion refers to supernatural subjects and more specifically gods or God. The idea that theories of man-made climate change resemble a religion in any way is simply ridiculous. Are people worshiping smoke stacks (or rather in this case, denouncing them as actual demons?). Is there ANY hint of the supernatural or mystical influence in climate-change theories? No and no. There was no hammer and no nail and that quote. It was senseless rhetoric spouted by someone who's just pissed off that nobody will listen to him.
What if what "was done about it" was the wrong thing? And what iof nothing needs to be done about it?
Depends on what was done about it, but I can't help thinking "better safe than sorry." When our greatgrandchildren look back on this time 100 years from now, I'd rather them laugh at our paranoia (or whatever you might call incorrect and alarmist views on climate change) than lament our complacency.
That said, I don't think it is worth any kind of violent revolution or some such. That woudl certainly be something to lament.
Even just playing/usr/games/moo is probably harder than you think. Unless by "operating system" you mean something like DOS where you pretty much rely on the BIOS for disk, video, and input. And even then you still have to implement filesystem support (if only read-only), loading of executables into memory, basic system calls, etc. And if this is a statically linked Linux/BSD binary, you'll probably have to know how to switch into 32 bit mode and setup a VM.. in which case you'll lose a lot of BIOS support. Even a very basic OS is a fair amount work.
I have, and simple font rendering in a document, just like ever other modern GUI system (except maybe java), is plenty fast enough. I mean, I know what you are talking about with that initial delay before a keystroke registers in a word processor, but I have not seen that in over a decade.
OS X is "just" a BSD unix variant, and so would almost certainly use PostScript natively for printing
Maybe the lpr compatability (through CUPS) accepts postscript, but Cocoa applications (meaning nearly all graphical applications on OSX) print to PDF. BSD is just the *basis* for OS X (as in the commandline utilities and large portions of the kernel). But there is very little of BSD in the GUI parts which much more closely resemble NextStep/OpenStep. That is why when you do Cocoa programming, almost every function starts with 'NS'. As in "NextStep."
that's the unix standard. All applications expect all printers to speak PostScript; and for the ones that don't, you just run a PostScript interpreter (as likely as not, GhostScript, which is GPL) on the host computer and turn PostScript into the printer's own native control codes.
Well, that is just "unix" and not necessarily other modern systems.
Considering the way that modern printing works, yes, there are reasons why a Word Processor can't always (if ever) create editable PostScript.
Such as? (Apart from bad programming, obviously.)
Such as Cocoa applications which use PDF. Such as any application that wants to take advantage of native print rendering instead of getting bogged down in manual Postscript generation. Using libraries to print is not bad programming.
No, I'm just saying I'm hardcore:) I'd rather be working in vi than waiting for something prettier to redraw itself. When I can type faster than the screen can keep up with me, something's being too slow.
GUI's haven't been THAT slow in like 12 years.
Does anyone really need a continuous preview of what things are going to look like on the printed page?
Sometimes, yes. But the drawbacks to your system that I mentioned do not involve continuously seeing updates. Just simple convenience. It saves people a lot of time to just be able to select a type of label from a list, fill out some fields, merge in the data, and print. With your system, you have to code every feature yourself. Don't get me wrong, I understand the satisfaction involved in beign hardcore, I'm just saying that most people just want it done. They don't want to mess with Perl code or generating their own PostScript files.
You're right that not everyone has teh l33t h4x0r 5ki11z. And I'm not complaining, because it means there are opportunities for people who do have them! But there's no reason in principle why a word processor shouldn't be able to output "editable" PostScript (with macro-based rendering rather than just a static page description; PS is a computationally-complete programming language, and it's a shame to waste that).
Considering the way that modern printing works, yes, there are reasons why a Word Processor can't always (if ever) create editable PostScript. Maybe back on your old Amiga programmers had to manually generate Postscript, but these days it is all abstracted. Heck, OS X doesn't even use postscript directly. Programs generate PDF when they print, AFAIK.
You should never assume your program is the last thing between data and its destination; it's polite always to allow for post-processing.
As a programmer, you don't always have direct control over everything teh application does. Things get abstracted, programmers use libraries. And there is nothing wrong with that. It helps get things done. It helps the users by creating standards and consistency.
So what you are saying is that your solution is a lot of work and requires a high level of knowledge to accomplish... well out of reach of your average MS Office user. Honestly, what you described is a pretty good reason for people to KEEP MS Office.
Well, I just printed this page to PS (OS X save to PDF/PS from the print dialog) to see if I could find your ==PLACEHOLDER== string in there and it wasn't there. So I don't know what methods you are using which reliably preserve your placeholders. Have you tried it with Google Docs? Can you put a placeholder string in a Google Doc, print to PS, run your perl script over it, and print the results? What about if you want to print to a specific tray in the printer such as the one that holds your envelops or company letter heads? Sending to lpr is just goign to use the default tray. What if you want to print labels on Avery label sheets? You're script is useless then because it depends on documents that print on full pages. MS Word, on the other hand, handles labels w/ mail merge great and has done so for well over a decade. Word even has all the Avery label types built in so you just select which type you have, add you data place holders, select your data source, and fire away.
Maybe *you* got mail merges to work with a perl script for you, but I can tell you with a fair bit of confidence that it won't fly in a general office environment.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever heard of a bard? Geez. It's like you've never read a fantasy novel before...
-matthew
You are assuming that the productivity gain is the *reason* why people are disorganized. When really, "disorganized" is just the way some people are and it is how they work best.
-matthew
Wait a minute... "stench?" There's a big difference between having a poorly organized (to the casual observer) space and being completely disgusting an unsanitary.
And as far as not being able to find important items goes, in my "system" the important things are generally on top and easy to find. And as mentioned in TFA, having to search through stuff to find other stuff often makes one aware of what is there. Where if you everything is put neatly in its place, it can be difficult to remember that it is even there, much less remember WHERE it is. Happens to me all the time on the few occasions that I actually organize things... or worse, let my wife do it!
-matthew
Haha. That is so funny because I made that mistake. I had no idea what was gettign into. An hour into the build on my P4 2Ghz machine i was franticly trying to free up space on the partition where it was building just so it wouldn't fail and I'd have to start over. I eventually gave up and went back to Debian.
Gentoo
The turtle moves!
Together we can overthrow the Quisition!
-matthew
Oh I think I woudl believe it. Troubleshooting ANY problem on Windows makes me want to tear my hair out. There isn't a whole lot you can do once you've sacrificed your last chicken to the Win32 gods hoping that the next mouse click with be the one that, for no apparent reason, makes things start working again.
-matthew
Haha! No, I'm not a ricer. It is a Hyundai, not Honda (Civic).
-matthew
10% is borderline, but 25% is pretty significant. I'd definitly give this serious consideration. Maybe we won't see it in "production" but certainly there'd be a market for retrofits or special orders. I'd love it if I could retrofit my Hyndai with this.
-matthew
What kind of work are you thinking of, specifically? I'm having trouble imagining how programming would look as a factory worker job. Having assembly-line "programmers" as IT advances seems counterintuitive to me. Seems to me that all the real grunt work should be done by the off-the-shelf software and all the really creative/custom stuff still needs programmers.
The only real trend I can identify is an increase in high level tools/languages used. But I don't see how that makes programmers more like factory workers. Just because you're not twiddling the registers of the video card with assembler doesn't mean you don't need a solid foundatation in computer science (ok, nobody NEEDs such a foundation, but it helps).
-matthew
Why should I think that people would make such a calculation when they haven't done to any significant degree regarding the pouring billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of young people into Iraq? Sure, the numbers fly around, so somebody is making the calculations, but somehow it just gets glossed over because it is the military. I guess environmentalism just isn't patriotic enough.
-matthew
Then why'd you make such an outrageous comparison? Just trolling?
-matthew
Let me get this straight, you are seriously comparing the judicious use of resources and consideration for the global environment with.... the Crusades? Are you kidding me?
-matthew
Exactly: "...and to many other groups." The fact that your understanding of the word religion can apply to many groups which are by most standards not at all religions means that your undersatnding too broad, if not completely wrong.
Note the order of the items in the definition. If you're only matching against a single item far down the list, you have a very poor case. I can find plenty of example of things that match the 3rd or 4th criteria of a dictionary definition which do not really fit that word at all.
I only make this point because the use of "religion" in this case is clearly derogatory and has no place in rational discussion.
-matthew
Guilt? Where's the guilt? I'm simply taking a long terms perspective on behavior and how people tend to view careful decisions vs. reckless ones.
Couldn't get more objective. I'm trying to look past the rhetoric and passion in the article. And it wasn't a rhetorical question. I was respnding to the implication that research has stopped and some totalitarian eco-fascist regime is taking over. It just isn't true nor is it objective.
-matthew
I get it. You are alluding to Pascal's Wager, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_wager , And applying it to politics.
Actually, it did cross my mind, but after more thought, I came to the conclusion that it isn't relevant because climate change affects all of us. You going to hell or not does not affect anyone but you. It simply doesn't make any sense to legislate belief. It makes a lot of sense, however, to regulate human environmental impact. And in fact, such regulations have shown to be very successful in the past. Seriously, have you ever been to a county/city that has little or no environmental regulation? It is appalling.
So, we have evidence that environmental regulations work without seriously hurting the economy in the long term... and evidence that humans are impacting the global climate. Seems like a fairly obvious call for action if I've ever seen one. Not that we should just stop researching climate change, of course.
-matthew
Read the rest of my comment. "Global totalitarian repression" is along the lines of "violent revolution." So I would definitly say that is going too far.
Did I miss something? Has research stopped? Is anyone even advocating that we stop researching climate change?
Which "draconian" measures are you talking about, exactly?
-matthew
Do you even understand what a religion is? It doesn't mean "really strong beliefs about something." Religion refers to supernatural subjects and more specifically gods or God. The idea that theories of man-made climate change resemble a religion in any way is simply ridiculous. Are people worshiping smoke stacks (or rather in this case, denouncing them as actual demons?). Is there ANY hint of the supernatural or mystical influence in climate-change theories? No and no. There was no hammer and no nail and that quote. It was senseless rhetoric spouted by someone who's just pissed off that nobody will listen to him.
-matthew
Depends on what was done about it, but I can't help thinking "better safe than sorry." When our greatgrandchildren look back on this time 100 years from now, I'd rather them laugh at our paranoia (or whatever you might call incorrect and alarmist views on climate change) than lament our complacency.
That said, I don't think it is worth any kind of violent revolution or some such. That woudl certainly be something to lament.
-matthew
Even just playing /usr/games/moo is probably harder than you think. Unless by "operating system" you mean something like DOS where you pretty much rely on the BIOS for disk, video, and input. And even then you still have to implement filesystem support (if only read-only), loading of executables into memory, basic system calls, etc. And if this is a statically linked Linux/BSD binary, you'll probably have to know how to switch into 32 bit mode and setup a VM.. in which case you'll lose a lot of BIOS support. Even a very basic OS is a fair amount work.
-matthew
I have, and simple font rendering in a document, just like ever other modern GUI system (except maybe java), is plenty fast enough. I mean, I know what you are talking about with that initial delay before a keystroke registers in a word processor, but I have not seen that in over a decade.
It does not. It uses PDF. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa_(API)
Maybe the lpr compatability (through CUPS) accepts postscript, but Cocoa applications (meaning nearly all graphical applications on OSX) print to PDF. BSD is just the *basis* for OS X (as in the commandline utilities and large portions of the kernel). But there is very little of BSD in the GUI parts which much more closely resemble NextStep/OpenStep. That is why when you do Cocoa programming, almost every function starts with 'NS'. As in "NextStep."
Well, that is just "unix" and not necessarily other modern systems.
Such as Cocoa applications which use PDF. Such as any application that wants to take advantage of native print rendering instead of getting bogged down in manual Postscript generation. Using libraries to print is not bad programming.
-matthew
GUI's haven't been THAT slow in like 12 years.
Sometimes, yes. But the drawbacks to your system that I mentioned do not involve continuously seeing updates. Just simple convenience. It saves people a lot of time to just be able to select a type of label from a list, fill out some fields, merge in the data, and print. With your system, you have to code every feature yourself. Don't get me wrong, I understand the satisfaction involved in beign hardcore, I'm just saying that most people just want it done. They don't want to mess with Perl code or generating their own PostScript files.
Considering the way that modern printing works, yes, there are reasons why a Word Processor can't always (if ever) create editable PostScript. Maybe back on your old Amiga programmers had to manually generate Postscript, but these days it is all abstracted. Heck, OS X doesn't even use postscript directly. Programs generate PDF when they print, AFAIK.
As a programmer, you don't always have direct control over everything teh application does. Things get abstracted, programmers use libraries. And there is nothing wrong with that. It helps get things done. It helps the users by creating standards and consistency.
-matthew
So what you are saying is that your solution is a lot of work and requires a high level of knowledge to accomplish... well out of reach of your average MS Office user. Honestly, what you described is a pretty good reason for people to KEEP MS Office.
-matthew
And besides, everyone knows that Oracle is better than SQL Server for keeping data on citizens, all of whom could potentially be terrorists.
Well, I just printed this page to PS (OS X save to PDF/PS from the print dialog) to see if I could find your ==PLACEHOLDER== string in there and it wasn't there. So I don't know what methods you are using which reliably preserve your placeholders. Have you tried it with Google Docs? Can you put a placeholder string in a Google Doc, print to PS, run your perl script over it, and print the results? What about if you want to print to a specific tray in the printer such as the one that holds your envelops or company letter heads? Sending to lpr is just goign to use the default tray. What if you want to print labels on Avery label sheets? You're script is useless then because it depends on documents that print on full pages. MS Word, on the other hand, handles labels w/ mail merge great and has done so for well over a decade. Word even has all the Avery label types built in so you just select which type you have, add you data place holders, select your data source, and fire away.
Maybe *you* got mail merges to work with a perl script for you, but I can tell you with a fair bit of confidence that it won't fly in a general office environment.
-matthew