You have a point, but at any point that the writer actually is specific about anything, he mentions the name Derrida. The rest is too vague to criticize (and too vague to be a critique), although I disagree with most of that as well. Deconstruction is one of the philosophical "schools" that have been too popular for their own good: many of its followers don't understand what they think they support, and many of its opponents only understand that. Personally, I don't find that quite as interesting as the theories. (I'm much more familiar with Paul de Man than with Derrida, by the way.)
Discussing deconstruction from the basis of wannabe lit crit snobs, nihilists, and stupid people in general, is like discussing the pros and cons of Linux from the fact that many geeks lack social skills. It doesn't help you understand anything at all, and it doesn't take the topic seriously.
The difference between this case and the MS/Corel case is that Corel hadn't sued IBM for $3 billion, and I guess the lawsuit MS settled with Borland was between Borland and MS? And MS buying the stock was part of a settlement between the companies? It would be quite different if Google bought stock from SCO. That would relate to both the SCO vs IBM case, SCO's claims about Linux in general, to Google's IPO, and in the end also to SCO's stock price. Which again also would have effects on Google's IPO, and this is the part I think may be illegal.
You may or may not be right it's not fraud, but it's definately not a very honest way of doing business. And the fact that Google has an IPO coming up makes it risky. Until now, Google has perhaps the best image of any tech company, SCO is hated by everyone who knows how to spell their name.
My point is that while your idea is interesting, I don't think it's very likely. In the end it may hurt Google bad, even if it is legal.
No, it's not a win-win situation for Google to take part in a stock scam immediately before their IPO. Issuing a press release claiming they've paid license fees (and that SCO owns Linux) is certain to boost SCO's stock price, and when they actually have bought stock, that is nothing short of fraud. It would seriously hurt Google if they tried to do anything like that, and I don't think it's legal to even try doing it shortly before an IPO (they're supposed to keep quiet for a while aren't they? I don't know US stock trading laws).
[Re: convention vs artificiality, etc.]
Hm. I'm not sure what differences you're pointing out here.
I'm not pointing out any differences. My point is that neither does the author of the article, yet his argument rests on the same confusion. Deconstruction does not confuse the terms. Actually, convention is what makes (albeit an uncertain) understanding of the artificial language possible. Something can be both unconventional and artificial, and something can be conventional and un-artificial, like love, which brings me to:
> What we think of the world is not the world
Well... er... sure. However, this moves towards what C.S. Lewis called "nothing buttery" - that is, "that no smoking sign is nothing but ink on paper, so I'll keep on smoking."
No, it does not. Just like all writing and thinking about love is artificial, yet love itself isn't (I hope): the sign doesn't mean that you're not smoking, it means that you should not. It's conventional, and it's artificial. If you're unconventional, you can puff smoke all you want in spite of it, so it's obviously artificial as well. But this has nothing to do with deconstruction: If there's any ethics in deconstruction at all (and I sincerely think there is), it would be that understanding is hard (total understanding impossible), and you should respect other people's right to (mis)interpret. Which means you should ask the nothing-buttering asshole who continues to smoke yet again, in a different way (he might be blind, after all), before you get a bucket of water. Deconstructionism doesn't say you can do anything you want, and that other people are illusions. It's not an insane school of thought.
Perhaps another way to state his idea is "I cannot utter a word of English and have anyone understand what I am trying to say"? I'm not sure how his idea is either bad logic or bad rhetoric.
Perhaps, but it's still not an adequate understanding of Derrida. But as both I and Derrida have said, understanding is difficult. Understanding Derrida is probably impossible. That "linuguistic meaning is fundamentally uncertain" is a statement that illustrates its own uncertainty. It has to, or it would be self-contradicory in a different way. The statement "Linguistic meaning is certain" is self-contradictory by having many possible meanings (it has, just read it over and over again until you don't understand it!), but it lacks the virtue of being self-explanatory in all interpretations I can think of.
(Oh, and BTW: my definition of the word "tenet" was taken from WordNet 2.0.)
I don't agree with your analysis, but if it's true, then he'd truly be "deconstructing deconstructionism with deconstructionism":-)
No, he doesn't. He tries to apply simple R.A.A.-tests (Reductio Ad Absurdum) to Derrida's writing (and various claims that I've no idea where are taken from), but he doesn't do it well, as logic actually demands precise definitions, and Dr. Tom Snyder needs confusion of terms to do his logic tricks.
Deconstruction would show how the text's own logic creates the confusion of terms; how metonymy becomes or undermines metaphor, and vice versa. It's not the statement that linguistic meaning is uncertain that is interesting, it's how the indetermination is demonstrated, and of course the indetermination of the demonstration.
I assume you're referring to this line from the article: "Either there is one way to God or there is no one way to God". I don't understand - do you feel this is a false assertion? How is it false?
I don't claim it's false, I claim that it's not epistemologically self-evident that there is one way to God, and that in claiming so, he shows his agenda.
I'm not a card-carrying follower of the Church of Deconstruction, but I've studied it a bit, and tried to understand it. It's true that deconstruction would state that no statement is true. And that's a contradicion. But that doesn't mean it's not true. Or wait, it does. The point is, it doesn't make deconstruction less interesting. Deconstruction demonstrates how language fails, how logic is undermined by rhetoric and vice versa. The statements people draw from it are far less interesting than the thinking that leads to them. Like in all kinds of philosophy.
First, the usual disclaimer: This is a tough subject, and English is not my native language. All errors in logic and expression result from that.:-)
That article you linked to is terrible, and the logic behind it is false or non-existant. And apparently not very honest: The author attacks deconstruction for confusing artificiality with convention and deceptive and false. However, his own argument against it is dependent on the same confusion.
Even if "all language systems are conventional" (this can't be called a "major tenet of deconstruction," as the author claims. The major tenet would be that all language is artificial, and that's something completely different.) necessarily must be a conventional statement if the statement is true, wouldn't in itself make it a self-contradictory statement. It would merely make it part of the same hermetic, conventional, language system. Now, this language system might be quite self-contradictory, and deconstruction is the philosophy of self-contradicion in the language systems, so the author isn't so far off. He just avoids the real issues of deconstruction, which have nothing to do with convention, and everything to do with artificiality.
Ferdinand de Saussure is important here, but not in the way the author thinks. The idea that the relationship between signifier (expression) and signified (meaning) is arbitrary does not lead to that meaning has "nothing to do with reality," but it does lead to the obvious fact that the two (meaning/reality) are different. What we think of the world is not the world. That should be pretty obvious: The word "I" is not the same as the person who utters "I." That a word is a fact about language, and not a fact about the world, follows from this. "Falsely," the author claims, but without any argument.
He goes on to state that Derrida's "most controversial idea," that "linguistic meaning is fundamentally indeterminate," means the same as "I cannot utter a word of English." This is plain bad logic, and also not very good rhetoric. A better analogue would be "You don't understand a word of what Derrida is saying," and that statement would be true (if said to the author of the article).
This article's main tenet (n : a religious doctrine that is proclaimed as true without proof), is as you quote: Deconstruction is a theory that is beyond being intellectually bankrupt -- it is intellectually meaningless and thus had no intellectual capital to begin with!, and the author goes out to scare people away from those who do not share that doctrine by spewing a lot of nonsense.
His main argument seems to be that Derrida doesn't follow his "master" Saussure in everything, and that is somehow "illogical", then he rounds off with concluding that "there is indeed one way to God," which he also means is "epistemologically self-evident." This article is just a bunch of anti-anti-religious propaganda. He's scared that deconstruction will destroy Authority, not truth.
I've played Pirates! a lot in the Amiga emulator UAE. It's actually one of the few really old games that I've spent serious time with. That is, old enough to need an emulator. UAE needs a bit more work than Frodo does; you'll have to get hold of a Workbench ROM for the Amiga.
SCO has had a lot of press releases that apparently have nothing to do with the case. They sued IBM for breach of contract and copyright infringement. "Lots of Unix code has gone into Linux." That is the file system JFS, NUMA and RCU, and some SMP stuff.
JFS was originally written for AIX, then rewritten from scratch for OS/2, and then ported to both AIX and Linux. So it's the OS/2 version we have in Linux now. I can't see how SCO is going to pull this, and I don't think they know themselves. If the court decides SCO owns the rights to JFS, it would be like IBM worked for SCO under a slave contract (do slaves have contracts?). Everything that touches Unix would be the property of SCO. They would never sell another license if that happened -- if the GPL is viral, SCO's license would be alienesque (like Ridley Scott's Alien, that is).
So SCO is threatening everyone else too. They want $3.50. I mean $699. If anything that has touched Unix in some way is their code, the fact that IBM has dumped some such code into Linux would make Linux their code too. So the case is absurd. Or it seems to be. It looks like Nigerian scam-spam: It's far too good to be true (for SCO's investors: if they win, they own the world), and it probably isn't. But with the media coverage SCO gets, at least some people will be stupid enough to buy stock.
In the meantime, maybe SCO actually has a few extra cards up their asses^H^H^H^H^Hsleaves, and maybe they actually have a case. But it's not the same case they play through the media.
Democratic intervention? What are you talking about? The people we officially send to the WTO are selected by our democratically-elected leaders.
I'm talking about the fact that the voters have no idea about what the people our democratically elected leaders have selected try to accomplish when they have their meetings behind closed doors. It's secret. That's why WTO and organisations like it are anti-democratic. It's outside democratic control. If you can't control what your democratically elected leaders do, you don't have democracy. You have voters and leaders. Just like in most modern dictatorships.
Of course people who oppose WTO can be anti-democratic as well, but opposition to WTO does not need to be based on anti-democratic sentiments at all. There are many reasons to be against the organisation. Some stupid reasons, some good reasons. If you think the only reason to protest something is because it can't be affected through elections, you're just not listening to any others than your leaders. You're being manipulated. That's not very democratic either.
Re:norway laws will change because of this
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DVD-Jon Completely Clear
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· Score: 4, Informative
Wrong. Norway isn't in the EU.
Not wrong. Norway isn't a member of the EU, but implements most of the laws passed in the EU due to its membership in the EEA (European Economic Area). It has the right to veto these laws, but that's never going to happen.
Re:norway laws will change because of this
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DVD-Jon Completely Clear
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Wrong. The laws would change anyway, because Norway has to implement EUCD, the EU counterpart to DMCA. Not that EU has that much to do with the law, I think WTO decided most of it without any democratic intervention. You have to love the new global economy: After the US Congress or Senate or whatever was bought off, the rest of the world has to follow, since the USA controls the WTO.
Yes, but he's right. Graphics almost have to be technically impressive to be good, whereas music often is better when it's a bit primitive. An old synth can still be used as an instrument, and the SID chip in the C64 was often used far more effectively than the orchestras they can use in modern game scores.
This has nothing to do with nostalgia, it has to do with the different media: Graphics are usually supposed to mimic the world (mimesis), music rarely does that. Any sound can be used to make music. If it sounds good, it's perfect.
I've been addicted to coffee since I was about 16 years old. I'm still addicted, but it's not a real problem (except when I should wake up, but I never do that anyway). I lived just fine without coffee for about a month when I started studying (I'm 28 now, and I lived without coffee for weeks when I was 19). One of my problems was that I was often tired. I got a pair of well adjusted glasses, and I didn't get tired so soon. So I advise you to check your eyes.
If you've got a problem with your eyes, it will be much easier to cope with a caffeine withdrawal when your eye-sight is back to normal. You just won't need the extra energy. And you'll be happier oherwise. And your headaches may come from other things you try to compensate for with coffee.
No matter what: If you've got a problem with your eyes, it may cause an excessive coffee-drinking because of exhaustion, and that's a problem you might want to fix first.
Yeah, but they used MSN, so they didn't find any, apart from Amazon's sponsored links (The Complete Idiot's Guide to Building WMDs and others). MSN's search doesn't yet support searches outside corporate America. If GWB and his henchmen only knew...
The main reason seemed to be that if your framebuffer dies, you're in deep shit; while if X dies, you still have your virtual consoles to work with.
Which, unfortunately, isn't true. The virtual console has been painfully broken for a long time in the 2.6.0-test kernels, and I believe it still is (it's on Andrew Morton's must-fix-list). Most of the time, it won't survive a restart of my X-server at all. Old text will just scroll randomly over my screen when I try to read the output of a simple 'ls', and if I type something, the text will appear far away from my cursor if it appears at all. I don't think there's any way to restart the console, but if the framebuffer is garbled for some reason, I can often fix it by changing the resolution with 'fbset'. But the framebuffer hasn't worked at all in the late 2.6.0-kernels for Radeon, so it doesn't really matter. I only use X anyway, and it works well for me.
Thanks. It's always nice to wake up with a mild hangover, read slashdot and discover I've posted a comment that isn't just some insane drivel about Guinnes or whisky, but somewhat comprehensible, and even rated '5, informative'. I'd impress myself, if I didn't know that I write slowly and proof-read a bit before I submit.
BTW, my friend claims he later rejected the woman for political reasons, so he's obviously got his own built-in cock-blocker.
are replies to trolls, I think I should try to make a serious post. But in the christmas spirit, I have to admit that I'm very drunk at the moment, so most spelling mistakes are the results of being non-English and very drunk. And having just seen a friend run off with the only good-looking woman in the pub, and she wasn't that good looking anyway. But I'm not complaining, so this should be worth at least +2 informative anyways (at least, I'm not going to say that *BSD is dead). Alright, here goes:
I tried PCLinuxOS a couple of weeks go. It's a live CD a la Knoppix, but based on Mandrake instead of Debian. What I liked about the distro was that it found all the hardware, like Knoppix. I also liked the fact that it was really simple to find various apps in the menues, but that's not very unlike Knoppix, is it? I use Debian ayway, so Knoppix feels quite all right to me. PCLinuxOS is good in most of the ways that Knoppix are.
However, PCLinux were (at the time I used it, in the beginning of December) not very well localized. I'm used to Norwegian keyboard lay-out, and when I can't find the '|' and '@' symbols, I'm pretty much fucked (especially the latter. Try connecting to an email-address or a Jabber-account without '@'!). What I'm trying to say, is that it's not quite as well localized as Knoppix is. Most programmers (who use US lay-out anyway) or Americans wouldn't notice, but persoally, I get confused. In Knoppix, I just choose my keyboard lay-out by right-clicking on the flag in the system tray, and I type '@' by pressing '@'. PCLinuxOS just doesn't have that option, so it's obviously a very American product, although based on the French Mandrake. That's one point in favour of Knoppix. Oh, and when you exit Knoppix, it will eject the CD and ask you to hit ENTER before the computer turns off, as if by magic (but by ACPI/APM).
So, personally, I don't see any reason to use PCLinuxOS instead of Knoppix, but if you use Mandrake or Red Hat, it's probably the rescue CD you want. Or if you use American keyboard layout. No matter what, PCLinuxOS has very good hardware detection, so if you can't be bothered to make your own rescue CD, you might just as well use that as anything else. It's good. Submit bug reports. I know I should have.
And it has many of the apps you want to demonstrate to most wannabee nerds.
Yeah, it was supposed to be a joke. Too bad nobody else thought it was funny. But that's what you get after an all night hacking session. Or so I've heard. I was, of course, only playing games.
But it doesn't say anything about Open Source software in general. Hell, my open source Hello World app is 500 lines of code, and it doesn't even compile.
#include <stdio.h>
main() 10 print "hello world" 20 Come on. Say it, bitch! 30 Don't make me force you... 40 That's it! You're asking for it! 50... and so on
Well, I just posted a comment about this here, but I've been digging a little more. (Oh, and BTW, he said he used the same numbers, not that he took a copy of the file from Minix. Not that it would make any difference whatsoever, as every line is like '#define EBADF 9')
From Linux 0.01 to Linux 1.0, errno.h got from 60 lines to 132, and the comment at the top of the file was removed. Also, each error number got a comment. Apart from that, they are mostly the same, listed from 1 to 39 (the last one in 0.0.1, 1.0 goes to 122, and has numbers 512-514 as well). In 2.6.0, the file has split into errno-base.h and errno.h, in include/asm-generic/, and errno-base.h is virtually identical to errno.h in 1.0 from 1 to 34 (the word 'arg' has been expanded to 'argument', and errno.h takes over from errno-generic.h in 2.6.0). In errno.h in 2.6.0, EDEADLOCK has been redefined from the number 58 to the letters EDEADLK, there are two new numbers, and 512-514 have been removed. That's from 1.0 to 2.6.0, virtually unchanged after almost 10 years in developement, and with a very clear resemblance to a file last modified 1991-09-17, that openly states that most of this is taken from Minix. Even my/. posts change more from 'Preview' to 'Submit'. (Yes, even this one, but I changed it back, and added this sentence.)
SCO's claims are getting extremely strange lately. Yes, removing these files, if they were infringing on SCO's copyright, would be quite difficult. You can't live without error messages, can you? But proving the genealogy of these files is just so trivially easy, that SCO hardly can have checked at all. Other files they've mentioned, like include/linux/a.out.h, are also very much the same from 1.0 to 2.4.20 and 2.6.0 (there are some more changes in that file, so I'm not listing them. There are more similarities than differences, however.) I've looked a bit at include/linux/stat.h as well, and 2.6.0 still has plenty of stuff that was there already in Linux 1.0. Most of the files SCO has listed are old, and they are very much Linux.
I compared errno.h in Linux versions 1.0 (from 1994) and 2.4.20, and they're practically the same. Some additions have come in the later version, but a diff shows that only 8 lines were changed between the two versions, for a file originally 132 lines long. At least when it comes to errno.h, SCO is pulling stuff out of its arse.
Linus also had some interesting things to say on the LKML:
For example, SCO lists the files "include/linux/ctype.h" and "lib/ctype.h", and some trivial digging shows that those files are actually there in the original 0.01 distribution of Linux (ie September of 1991). And I can state
- I wrote them (and looking at the original ones, I'm a bit ashamed: the "toupper()" and "tolower()" macros are so horribly ugly that I wouldn't admit to writing them if it wasn't because somebody else claimed to have done so;)
- writing them is no more than five minutes of work (you can verify that with any C programmer, so you don't have to take my word for it) - the details in them aren't even the same as in the BSD/UNIX files (the approach is the same, but if you look at actual implementation details
you will notice that it's not just that my original "tolower/toupper" were embarrassingly ugly, a number of other details differ too). In short: for the files where I personally checked the history, I can definitely say that those files are trivially written by me personally, with no copying from any UNIX code _ever_.
It's rather long, so read the rest at http://lkml.org/lkml/2003/12/22/137
No, it didn't. At least not in the way the article describes. Playing mp3s went quite well when I started using Linux, back in 1999 (Red Hat 6.0, Linux 2.2.5, on a 166 MHz Pentium MMX). The OSS sound drivers weren't great, but they were enough to let an IT manager listen to System Of A Down, even though their debut album from 1998 wasn't quite as good as Toxicity (2001). mp3 folks shouldn't notice much of a difference, despite what TFA says.
ALSA is a good architecture, with a proper API, and should provide better support for the kind of audio musicians need: lower latency, better mixing, MIDI control, and so on. It should be used in conjunction with JACK, the low latency audio server, for that kind of application. Yes, for real multi-media work, ALSA is a lot better than OSS, and probably a necessity, but OSS was quite reliable for just playing or recording sound.
I know about Fink, and it sounds interesting. But how well does it handle packages from various sources, i.e. Apple's own X11 is part of Panther, but Fink uses XFree86, doesn't it? I guess I'll look into it during the holidays. (My sister lives in another town, so I can't play with her iBook yet. But of course I'll install both Fink and Debian on it when I get the chance.)
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But aren't there more lawyers than people in the US as well?
You have a point, but at any point that the writer actually is specific about anything, he mentions the name Derrida. The rest is too vague to criticize (and too vague to be a critique), although I disagree with most of that as well. Deconstruction is one of the philosophical "schools" that have been too popular for their own good: many of its followers don't understand what they think they support, and many of its opponents only understand that. Personally, I don't find that quite as interesting as the theories. (I'm much more familiar with Paul de Man than with Derrida, by the way.)
Discussing deconstruction from the basis of wannabe lit crit snobs, nihilists, and stupid people in general, is like discussing the pros and cons of Linux from the fact that many geeks lack social skills. It doesn't help you understand anything at all, and it doesn't take the topic seriously.
The difference between this case and the MS/Corel case is that Corel hadn't sued IBM for $3 billion, and I guess the lawsuit MS settled with Borland was between Borland and MS? And MS buying the stock was part of a settlement between the companies? It would be quite different if Google bought stock from SCO. That would relate to both the SCO vs IBM case, SCO's claims about Linux in general, to Google's IPO, and in the end also to SCO's stock price. Which again also would have effects on Google's IPO, and this is the part I think may be illegal.
You may or may not be right it's not fraud, but it's definately not a very honest way of doing business. And the fact that Google has an IPO coming up makes it risky. Until now, Google has perhaps the best image of any tech company, SCO is hated by everyone who knows how to spell their name.
My point is that while your idea is interesting, I don't think it's very likely. In the end it may hurt Google bad, even if it is legal.
No, it's not a win-win situation for Google to take part in a stock scam immediately before their IPO. Issuing a press release claiming they've paid license fees (and that SCO owns Linux) is certain to boost SCO's stock price, and when they actually have bought stock, that is nothing short of fraud. It would seriously hurt Google if they tried to do anything like that, and I don't think it's legal to even try doing it shortly before an IPO (they're supposed to keep quiet for a while aren't they? I don't know US stock trading laws).
I'm not pointing out any differences. My point is that neither does the author of the article, yet his argument rests on the same confusion. Deconstruction does not confuse the terms. Actually, convention is what makes (albeit an uncertain) understanding of the artificial language possible. Something can be both unconventional and artificial, and something can be conventional and un-artificial, like love, which brings me to:
No, it does not. Just like all writing and thinking about love is artificial, yet love itself isn't (I hope): the sign doesn't mean that you're not smoking, it means that you should not. It's conventional, and it's artificial. If you're unconventional, you can puff smoke all you want in spite of it, so it's obviously artificial as well. But this has nothing to do with deconstruction: If there's any ethics in deconstruction at all (and I sincerely think there is), it would be that understanding is hard (total understanding impossible), and you should respect other people's right to (mis)interpret. Which means you should ask the nothing-buttering asshole who continues to smoke yet again, in a different way (he might be blind, after all), before you get a bucket of water. Deconstructionism doesn't say you can do anything you want, and that other people are illusions. It's not an insane school of thought.
Perhaps, but it's still not an adequate understanding of Derrida. But as both I and Derrida have said, understanding is difficult. Understanding Derrida is probably impossible. That "linuguistic meaning is fundamentally uncertain" is a statement that illustrates its own uncertainty. It has to, or it would be self-contradicory in a different way. The statement "Linguistic meaning is certain" is self-contradictory by having many possible meanings (it has, just read it over and over again until you don't understand it!), but it lacks the virtue of being self-explanatory in all interpretations I can think of.
(Oh, and BTW: my definition of the word "tenet" was taken from WordNet 2.0.)
No, he doesn't. He tries to apply simple R.A.A.-tests (Reductio Ad Absurdum) to Derrida's writing (and various claims that I've no idea where are taken from), but he doesn't do it well, as logic actually demands precise definitions, and Dr. Tom Snyder needs confusion of terms to do his logic tricks.
Deconstruction would show how the text's own logic creates the confusion of terms; how metonymy becomes or undermines metaphor, and vice versa. It's not the statement that linguistic meaning is uncertain that is interesting, it's how the indetermination is demonstrated, and of course the indetermination of the demonstration.
I don't claim it's false, I claim that it's not epistemologically self-evident that there is one way to God, and that in claiming so, he shows his agenda.
I'm not a card-carrying follower of the Church of Deconstruction, but I've studied it a bit, and tried to understand it. It's true that deconstruction would state that no statement is true. And that's a contradicion. But that doesn't mean it's not true. Or wait, it does. The point is, it doesn't make deconstruction less interesting. Deconstruction demonstrates how language fails, how logic is undermined by rhetoric and vice versa. The statements people draw from it are far less interesting than the thinking that leads to them. Like in all kinds of philosophy.
:-)
First, the usual disclaimer: This is a tough subject, and English is not my native language. All errors in logic and expression result from that.
That article you linked to is terrible, and the logic behind it is false or non-existant. And apparently not very honest: The author attacks deconstruction for confusing artificiality with convention and deceptive and false. However, his own argument against it is dependent on the same confusion.
Even if "all language systems are conventional" (this can't be called a "major tenet of deconstruction," as the author claims. The major tenet would be that all language is artificial, and that's something completely different.) necessarily must be a conventional statement if the statement is true, wouldn't in itself make it a self-contradictory statement. It would merely make it part of the same hermetic, conventional, language system. Now, this language system might be quite self-contradictory, and deconstruction is the philosophy of self-contradicion in the language systems, so the author isn't so far off. He just avoids the real issues of deconstruction, which have nothing to do with convention, and everything to do with artificiality.
Ferdinand de Saussure is important here, but not in the way the author thinks. The idea that the relationship between signifier (expression) and signified (meaning) is arbitrary does not lead to that meaning has "nothing to do with reality," but it does lead to the obvious fact that the two (meaning/reality) are different. What we think of the world is not the world. That should be pretty obvious: The word "I" is not the same as the person who utters "I." That a word is a fact about language, and not a fact about the world, follows from this. "Falsely," the author claims, but without any argument.
He goes on to state that Derrida's "most controversial idea," that "linguistic meaning is fundamentally indeterminate," means the same as "I cannot utter a word of English." This is plain bad logic, and also not very good rhetoric. A better analogue would be "You don't understand a word of what Derrida is saying," and that statement would be true (if said to the author of the article).
This article's main tenet (n : a religious doctrine that is proclaimed as true without proof), is as you quote: Deconstruction is a theory that is beyond being intellectually bankrupt -- it is intellectually meaningless and thus had no intellectual capital to begin with!, and the author goes out to scare people away from those who do not share that doctrine by spewing a lot of nonsense.
His main argument seems to be that Derrida doesn't follow his "master" Saussure in everything, and that is somehow "illogical", then he rounds off with concluding that "there is indeed one way to God," which he also means is "epistemologically self-evident." This article is just a bunch of anti-anti-religious propaganda. He's scared that deconstruction will destroy Authority, not truth.
I've played Pirates! a lot in the Amiga emulator UAE. It's actually one of the few really old games that I've spent serious time with. That is, old enough to need an emulator. UAE needs a bit more work than Frodo does; you'll have to get hold of a Workbench ROM for the Amiga.
SCO has had a lot of press releases that apparently have nothing to do with the case. They sued IBM for breach of contract and copyright infringement. "Lots of Unix code has gone into Linux." That is the file system JFS, NUMA and RCU, and some SMP stuff.
JFS was originally written for AIX, then rewritten from scratch for OS/2, and then ported to both AIX and Linux. So it's the OS/2 version we have in Linux now. I can't see how SCO is going to pull this, and I don't think they know themselves. If the court decides SCO owns the rights to JFS, it would be like IBM worked for SCO under a slave contract (do slaves have contracts?). Everything that touches Unix would be the property of SCO. They would never sell another license if that happened -- if the GPL is viral, SCO's license would be alienesque (like Ridley Scott's Alien, that is).
So SCO is threatening everyone else too. They want $3.50. I mean $699. If anything that has touched Unix in some way is their code, the fact that IBM has dumped some such code into Linux would make Linux their code too. So the case is absurd. Or it seems to be. It looks like Nigerian scam-spam: It's far too good to be true (for SCO's investors: if they win, they own the world), and it probably isn't. But with the media coverage SCO gets, at least some people will be stupid enough to buy stock.
In the meantime, maybe SCO actually has a few extra cards up their asses^H^H^H^H^Hsleaves, and maybe they actually have a case. But it's not the same case they play through the media.
I'm talking about the fact that the voters have no idea about what the people our democratically elected leaders have selected try to accomplish when they have their meetings behind closed doors. It's secret. That's why WTO and organisations like it are anti-democratic. It's outside democratic control. If you can't control what your democratically elected leaders do, you don't have democracy. You have voters and leaders. Just like in most modern dictatorships.
Of course people who oppose WTO can be anti-democratic as well, but opposition to WTO does not need to be based on anti-democratic sentiments at all. There are many reasons to be against the organisation. Some stupid reasons, some good reasons. If you think the only reason to protest something is because it can't be affected through elections, you're just not listening to any others than your leaders. You're being manipulated. That's not very democratic either.
Wrong. The laws would change anyway, because Norway has to implement EUCD, the EU counterpart to DMCA. Not that EU has that much to do with the law, I think WTO decided most of it without any democratic intervention. You have to love the new global economy: After the US Congress or Senate or whatever was bought off, the rest of the world has to follow, since the USA controls the WTO.
Yes, but he's right. Graphics almost have to be technically impressive to be good, whereas music often is better when it's a bit primitive. An old synth can still be used as an instrument, and the SID chip in the C64 was often used far more effectively than the orchestras they can use in modern game scores.
This has nothing to do with nostalgia, it has to do with the different media: Graphics are usually supposed to mimic the world (mimesis), music rarely does that. Any sound can be used to make music. If it sounds good, it's perfect.
I've been addicted to coffee since I was about 16 years old. I'm still addicted, but it's not a real problem (except when I should wake up, but I never do that anyway). I lived just fine without coffee for about a month when I started studying (I'm 28 now, and I lived without coffee for weeks when I was 19). One of my problems was that I was often tired. I got a pair of well adjusted glasses, and I didn't get tired so soon. So I advise you to check your eyes.
If you've got a problem with your eyes, it will be much easier to cope with a caffeine withdrawal when your eye-sight is back to normal. You just won't need the extra energy. And you'll be happier oherwise. And your headaches may come from other things you try to compensate for with coffee.
No matter what: If you've got a problem with your eyes, it may cause an excessive coffee-drinking because of exhaustion, and that's a problem you might want to fix first.
Yeah, but they used MSN, so they didn't find any, apart from Amazon's sponsored links (The Complete Idiot's Guide to Building WMDs and others). MSN's search doesn't yet support searches outside corporate America. If GWB and his henchmen only knew...
Which, unfortunately, isn't true. The virtual console has been painfully broken for a long time in the 2.6.0-test kernels, and I believe it still is (it's on Andrew Morton's must-fix-list). Most of the time, it won't survive a restart of my X-server at all. Old text will just scroll randomly over my screen when I try to read the output of a simple 'ls', and if I type something, the text will appear far away from my cursor if it appears at all. I don't think there's any way to restart the console, but if the framebuffer is garbled for some reason, I can often fix it by changing the resolution with 'fbset'. But the framebuffer hasn't worked at all in the late 2.6.0-kernels for Radeon, so it doesn't really matter. I only use X anyway, and it works well for me.
Why this sudden obsession with being taken seriously? It's all fun and games for us.
Thanks. It's always nice to wake up with a mild hangover, read slashdot and discover I've posted a comment that isn't just some insane drivel about Guinnes or whisky, but somewhat comprehensible, and even rated '5, informative'. I'd impress myself, if I didn't know that I write slowly and proof-read a bit before I submit.
BTW, my friend claims he later rejected the woman for political reasons, so he's obviously got his own built-in cock-blocker.
are replies to trolls, I think I should try to make a serious post. But in the christmas spirit, I have to admit that I'm very drunk at the moment, so most spelling mistakes are the results of being non-English and very drunk. And having just seen a friend run off with the only good-looking woman in the pub, and she wasn't that good looking anyway. But I'm not complaining, so this should be worth at least +2 informative anyways (at least, I'm not going to say that *BSD is dead). Alright, here goes:
I tried PCLinuxOS a couple of weeks go. It's a live CD a la Knoppix, but based on Mandrake instead of Debian. What I liked about the distro was that it found all the hardware, like Knoppix. I also liked the fact that it was really simple to find various apps in the menues, but that's not very unlike Knoppix, is it? I use Debian ayway, so Knoppix feels quite all right to me. PCLinuxOS is good in most of the ways that Knoppix are.
However, PCLinux were (at the time I used it, in the beginning of December) not very well localized. I'm used to Norwegian keyboard lay-out, and when I can't find the '|' and '@' symbols, I'm pretty much fucked (especially the latter. Try connecting to an email-address or a Jabber-account without '@'!). What I'm trying to say, is that it's not quite as well localized as Knoppix is. Most programmers (who use US lay-out anyway) or Americans wouldn't notice, but persoally, I get confused. In Knoppix, I just choose my keyboard lay-out by right-clicking on the flag in the system tray, and I type '@' by pressing '@'. PCLinuxOS just doesn't have that option, so it's obviously a very American product, although based on the French Mandrake. That's one point in favour of Knoppix. Oh, and when you exit Knoppix, it will eject the CD and ask you to hit ENTER before the computer turns off, as if by magic (but by ACPI/APM).
So, personally, I don't see any reason to use PCLinuxOS instead of Knoppix, but if you use Mandrake or Red Hat, it's probably the rescue CD you want. Or if you use American keyboard layout. No matter what, PCLinuxOS has very good hardware detection, so if you can't be bothered to make your own rescue CD, you might just as well use that as anything else. It's good. Submit bug reports. I know I should have.
And it has many of the apps you want to demonstrate to most wannabee nerds.
I got two bottles of whisky. For some reason, now I've got a headache and my condoms are gone.
Yeah, it was supposed to be a joke. Too bad nobody else thought it was funny. But that's what you get after an all night hacking session. Or so I've heard. I was, of course, only playing games.
Well, I just posted a comment about this here, but I've been digging a little more. (Oh, and BTW, he said he used the same numbers, not that he took a copy of the file from Minix. Not that it would make any difference whatsoever, as every line is like '#define EBADF 9')
/. posts change more from 'Preview' to 'Submit'. (Yes, even this one, but I changed it back, and added this sentence.)
From Linux 0.01 to Linux 1.0, errno.h got from 60 lines to 132, and the comment at the top of the file was removed. Also, each error number got a comment. Apart from that, they are mostly the same, listed from 1 to 39 (the last one in 0.0.1, 1.0 goes to 122, and has numbers 512-514 as well). In 2.6.0, the file has split into errno-base.h and errno.h, in include/asm-generic/, and errno-base.h is virtually identical to errno.h in 1.0 from 1 to 34 (the word 'arg' has been expanded to 'argument', and errno.h takes over from errno-generic.h in 2.6.0). In errno.h in 2.6.0, EDEADLOCK has been redefined from the number 58 to the letters EDEADLK, there are two new numbers, and 512-514 have been removed. That's from 1.0 to 2.6.0, virtually unchanged after almost 10 years in developement, and with a very clear resemblance to a file last modified 1991-09-17, that openly states that most of this is taken from Minix. Even my
SCO's claims are getting extremely strange lately. Yes, removing these files, if they were infringing on SCO's copyright, would be quite difficult. You can't live without error messages, can you? But proving the genealogy of these files is just so trivially easy, that SCO hardly can have checked at all. Other files they've mentioned, like include/linux/a.out.h, are also very much the same from 1.0 to 2.4.20 and 2.6.0 (there are some more changes in that file, so I'm not listing them. There are more similarities than differences, however.) I've looked a bit at include/linux/stat.h as well, and 2.6.0 still has plenty of stuff that was there already in Linux 1.0. Most of the files SCO has listed are old, and they are very much Linux.
Linus also had some interesting things to say on the LKML:
It's rather long, so read the rest at http://lkml.org/lkml/2003/12/22/137
No, it didn't. At least not in the way the article describes. Playing mp3s went quite well when I started using Linux, back in 1999 (Red Hat 6.0, Linux 2.2.5, on a 166 MHz Pentium MMX). The OSS sound drivers weren't great, but they were enough to let an IT manager listen to System Of A Down, even though their debut album from 1998 wasn't quite as good as Toxicity (2001). mp3 folks shouldn't notice much of a difference, despite what TFA says.
ALSA is a good architecture, with a proper API, and should provide better support for the kind of audio musicians need: lower latency, better mixing, MIDI control, and so on. It should be used in conjunction with JACK, the low latency audio server, for that kind of application. Yes, for real multi-media work, ALSA is a lot better than OSS, and probably a necessity, but OSS was quite reliable for just playing or recording sound.
I know about Fink, and it sounds interesting. But how well does it handle packages from various sources, i.e. Apple's own X11 is part of Panther, but Fink uses XFree86, doesn't it? I guess I'll look into it during the holidays. (My sister lives in another town, so I can't play with her iBook yet. But of course I'll install both Fink and Debian on it when I get the chance.)