a particular technique of display because she was doing it on a computer, on the web. She was unhappy with the way the web interface distracted from her art. She didn't want the viewer to be aware of the *web* when viewing her art. So she chose a technique she thought would make the web "invisible."
This was *her* stated goal.
I equated that in my original post with Mondrian carrying his images around the edge of the canvas and dispensing with the frame because he wanted people to see his art, *NOT* the frame. In a framed image the frame effectively becomes part of the viewer sees, and thus part of the image.
The girl and Mondrian both had the same goal. In fact, odds are, this idea came down to the girl from Mondrian in some way or other.
The difference is that Mondrian understood his medium and how to accomplish his intended goal in a way that didn't *distract* from his art. If he had just taken the frame off the canvas people would have been looking and the rough, unpainted edges of his paintings instead of the image itself. So he carried the image over the edge and to the back of the canvas. Now the whole work is visually complete. The technique *matched* the medium.
The girl, on the other hand, in trying to remove the "frame" from her image ( the web interface) did so by imposing a "rough edge" of another sort that draws even greater attention to it than the largely psychologically "invisible" web interface would have.
It's as if Mondrian had dispensed with the frame by hacking a hole in the gallery wall and hanging the painting behind it. Now the viewer on looking at the painting is distracted by this odd hole in the wall he has to look through. It wasn't part of Mondrian's "vision" to display his art through a hole in the wall, just without a frame.
The girl chose a display technique to achieve a certain *goal.* The technique wasn't supposed to be part of the art itself. If that were the case I'd simply like it or not like it. The technique was supposed to be *invisible,* so I'd only see her art. Instead I see this odd hole hacked in the web that I have to view her art through.
The girl doesn't *intend* for me to view her art through that hole as part of her work. That would be cool. The girl doesn't percieve that the hole *exists* even though it's glaringly obvious to virtually all of her viewers.
Her technique isn't bad because I find it distracting. Her technique is bad because her stated goal was * that I shouldn't be distracted.*
Stretched canvas has certain inate physical properties. They can't be ignored. You can use those properties in various ways, some of which might well be inovative, but you can't simply give it certain properties that you *wish* it had. There are things you can do on stretched canvas that you can't on the web, like carry an image around the edges. The web has no such edge.
There are certain things you can do on the web that you can't do on stretched canvas, like flash animation. But there are certain things you *can't* do on the web because of it's inate properites. A good artist understands her media and works *with* it, not against it. If you find yourself working against your media that fault is yours. You have simply chosen the wrong media to work in.
Or you have to change your technique.
Any webpage is inherently contained in a frame. It's part of the physical property of the medium. You *cannot* make it go away. What you *can* do is employ perceptual tricks to make the viewer *less concious* of it. She employed a technique that made people *more* concious of it.
Again, I've no quarrel with her doing whatever the hell she wants as part of her art. She can make any statement using any technique she wants. With regards to the artistic statement itself there is *no* objective method to draw a line between what's "right" and what's "wrong".
But if you come across someone trying to drive a Jello cube through a pepperoni with a hamster and you ask them what they're doing and they say, " Building a birdhouse," you're likely to think they're going about it the wrong way.
But if they say, " Doing my own thing man, it's, like, my vision," you won't think "right" or "wrong." Weird maybe, but not right or wrong.
Yet the only difference between the two scenes is * what the artist said.*
"The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. . . . If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go downward perpendicularly."
I fully agree.
I also fully recongnize the value of art that isn't appreciated. Van Gough is the classic case. He was speaking a language no one at the time was willing to listen to. That didn't disuade him from saying it, although he eventually appears to have become despondent enough over the fact to take his own life.
I fully recognize the value of art that *I* don't appreciate. Cubism leaves me cold. I don't know why, it just does. Maybe the "fault" is mine. Maybe I just " don't get it." Who knows? But I recognize it as legitimate art nonetheless and think of Picaso as an "artiste" arrongantly fixed on his vision. ( An arrogant jerk *otherwise,* but that's a different issue).
On the other hand I *like* Mondrian, but I'm not sure it's art. I rather think it's just pleasing graphic design. An awful lot of people don't even think it's that.
Terry Gilliam went through a nasty, vicious, personal and very public fight to get Brasil released in America but I don't think he was being an arrogant "artiste." His fight was perfectly valid. To change or delete one minute of his movie would have in some manner changed what it said. Most people think the movie is junk. A devoted few of us adore it. Gilliam knew who we were, what he wanted to say to us, and how to say it to us. He was a master of his craft who wouldn't back down when studio execs demanded he fit some form of popular mold, even if that mold was only a precise time length. I bless him for it.
On the other hand I don't know what the hell the guy who drapes miles of fabric over landscapes is up to. He seems to though, so what the hell, more power to him.
I had a photography professor once who derided Ansel Adams at every oportunity. I never really did figure out why.
Ultimately art is in the eye of the beholder, which, as it happens, is my point. When I am working as an artist I do my thing. When people like it, I like the fact. When people don't, well, ok. It's not like a personal attack or something. But what I don't do is put *unintentional* barriers between myself and my viewers because of my "vision."
The girl in question is obviously trying to present her "vision" in a particular way. She is *failing* in that attempt because of her narrow focus. It is that narrow focus that is the arrogance that is coming between us, not that I don't understand her art, but that I understand certain aspects of it *better* than she does because I understand her *medium* better than she does at the moment. When you present art on a computer you cannot make the computer, and certain aspects of its interface, just "go away." Your art *must* take that into account if you are going to present it properly. She has had this explained to her by a friend. She doesn't want to hear that so she ingnores it citing her "vision."
Ok, here's an example of art I won't like. I won't even *look* at it because the artists "vision" is one I'm not willing to deal with. My hypothetical artist paints images desinged to provoke emotional trauma. He only displays them one at a time in a tent and to get to the tent you have to walk across a field of broken glass in your bare feet so that you are in the proper state of mind when you view his painting. That is part of his "vision."
Well I'm sorry, but I'm not going to do that, BUT, I respect his vision as art and understand that *I* am the one rejecting the dialog in this case. This isn't the same as with the girl and her unintentionally annoying webpage.
I know a guy who makes fine ceramic pots, and then damages them in some way because if they are useful they aren't art.
Nonesense.
This sort of thing is just falling prey to the fallacy that just being unpopular makes it art. This fallacy is easy to fall into because so much that *is* popular is crap.
But*sometimes* the unpopular is unpopular because it legitimately *is* annoying garbage.
And you'll probably even win, after you spend a few thousand dollars to defend yourself.
That's the way it works in practice.
In my Bantam Edition of Walden they only claim actual copyright for the original introduction, but if they've used the intentional mistakes trick they'll certainly sick their lawyers on you if directly copy their pages.
The argument is it isn't the *work* that's been violated. That's in the public domain. It's the *image* of the work that's been violated. You copied the *page,* not just the words. The intentional mistakes are put there as fingerprints to show it was *their* page you imaged.
Below the copyright notice in my Walden you'll find:
"No part of this book may be reproduced in any form. .." Etc., etc., etc..
Look, they aren't concerned with other people printing copies of Walden. What they're concerned about is that someone might print copies of Walden by simply photocopying the pages of "their" book.
Most works "transcribed" for Project Gutenberg are done by *scanning* a book. i.e. making an image of the page, and then running it against an OCR program. It's the scanning part that gives publishers the willies.
Like I said, it's doofey. That's what you get when you go into the public domain. It's not like they paid anything for it. They may have spent some money on legitimate scholarship, making corrected editions and so on, but that's peanuts compared to actual author's rights.
But that's the way things are done in real life.
Ever actually read a Project Gutenberg title? They all start with pages of "small print", legal disclaimers and even a simple EULA. They at least state explicitly that you have the absolute right to use the public domain part of the text however you wish, even printing it in book form and selling it, with no permission needed or royalties due to them * so long as you remove all of their original content and make no claims that it's a Project Gutenberg(tm) text.*
Which is exactly what Adobe did, but then claim rights to.
But it's standard sports medicine. They not only talked about it during the Biathalon event TV coverage during the last winter Olympics but showed video of a shooter hooked up to an EKG.
You could actually watch the heart stop as they pulled the trigger.
I'll have a poke around and see If I can refer you to any references, on or off the web.
KFG
Ok, here's the deal, the hackers are screaming. .
on
Turn-Key Linux Audio
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· Score: 3, Interesting
to be allowed to do this. Some of them literally. Hundreds of letters have been written to the OEM's offering to write top quality drivers for free. The OEM's have, for the most part, refused, even to requests from the major distros who are legitimate firms that could be contracted with and NDA's signed.
In point of fact there is a Microsoft memo that leaked that pointed out the ease of writting hardware drivers for Linux as one of the strengths that Windows couldn't compete with. In the words of the memo "Even a complete programing novice with a copy of Writing Linux Drivers could write a driver in a couple of days."
But, writing a good driver *requires* the cooperation of the maker. Writing a good driver requires *intimate* knowledge of the *internal* design of the board.
Makers of sound and video cards consider the knowledge a trade secret. They are afraid that if they tell *anyone* how their board is put together this knowledge will make it to their competitors and they will suffer in a highly competitive market that can see the market leader be out of business a couple of years later.
Some drivers for some boards can be written to the point where they work by doing some good guessing and hacking it up as best as can be. These drivers don't work *well,* but it's a really remarkable thing that they're made to work at all.
The point is it isn't the hacker's "fault" that there are no good drivers. The OEM has to write them or offer actual support to someone else. Period. There's no other way. It *all* comes down to the willingness of the OEM to have good drivers for their own equipment.
Talk to them kid. Maybe they'll listen to you. They sure ain't listening to anyone else.
*Editions* of works in the public domain can still be copyrighted. Many publishers introduce intentional mistakes into their editions to make them "protected." This is done to prevent other publihers from simply copying their edition and printing it.
It's kinda doofey really, but that's the way it's done.
This costs the Gutenberg Project most of the money they spend. Even though they're dealing with public domain works they still need to pay lawyers to clear rights to the *particular* edition the work is being transcribed from.
In this particular case though, the edition in question *is* the Gutenberg Project's edition they are claiming rights to. They downloaded it, put it in their ebook, and claim it as their propriatary work.
That's beyond doofey. That's slimey as all hell.
KFG
But you didn't address the suggestion. . .
on
Goodbye, Liquid Audio?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
as given. The suggestion was that instead of embracing *only* the majority market they could have *widened* their appeal by embracing the niche markets as well, thus giving them more customers.
You responded with the commercial failure of a company ( which, by the way, only sold physical media, not net media) that catered *ONLY* to *one* of the niche markets, thus having the *narrowist* customer range possible.
Not the same thing at all.
Let me ask you this, have fewer people adopted the use of Shockwave or RealPlayer since they have been made available for Linux, or, perhaps, *more*?
And I've been working on a image recognition program that will handle the timing and scoring of racing events by "knowing" who/what it is that has just crossed the timing mark.
This doesn't make my computer smart. People tend to think of computers as "smart" because they can do certain things that smart people do, and do them better. Like math. Well, so can my pocket calculator, which is dumb as a rock. And so is your computer. Literally.
I like to do this when I'm teaching computers to a bunch of newbies, like I might when I volunteer at an "Senior Center." I put a piece of quartz in my pocket. As soon as someone is obviously acting like they are intimidated by the computer because it's "smarter than they are" I pull the quartz out of my pocket and ask:
"What's this?"
To which the response is almost always:
"A rock?"
"Right. In fact, this is a piece of silicon crystal. Essentially the same thing your computer's "brain" is made from. Your computer is is about the smartest rock that any human has ever seen, but that *still* means it's as dumb as a rock. Your problem isn't that the computer is smarter than you are. Your problem is that the computer is so dumb, and you are so smart, that you have a hard time being dumb enough to communicate with it on its level. It only knows a few words and has to hear them exactly right. It can't figure out what you "meant" because it isn't smart enough."
I then go on to show how a computer codes things with the handful of Othello chips I keep in my other pocket.
"See, it's just like Morse code really, except the computer is so dumb that every letter has to have 256 dots and dashes even when only one would do. It's just a bunch of switches. It isn't a "brain." Flip the switches in a certain order and computer "knows" it's an a. But it's so dumb it doesn't know that A and a are the same thing really. You have to tell it that by flipping the switches in a different order. Everything a computer does is done by flipping these switches. The computer has a *lot* of switches in it, but they're all still just switches. Some of the switches switch other switches, so it does certain things automatically, but a *human* had to tell it to do it that way. And YOU have to tell it to do what that other human told it *how* to do, or the dumb thing just sits there."
A computer is a big abacus. Nothing more, nothing less. It's not even a very good abacus because it's beads only count in binary. So we include a LOT of beads.
But it's still just a piece of rock.
I have a device in my house that has memorized Shakespeare. Every word the great Bard ever wrote is infalably etched in this device's memory. It can reproduce them at will, perfectly, ad infinitum. Any person who did this would be considered pretty damned smart, or at least a savant, but this device is no smarter than a mashed up dead tree that's had some stains spattered on it. No one has ever accused a book of being "smart" no matter what data in contains.
Because a computer is a machine, even though it's really just a big book made up of switches, it can do things " on it's own" that can appear amazing to a human onlooker. That doesn't mean it's *not* still just a machine under ultimate human control. Remember those little plastic adding machines used for grocery shopping where you pushed the buttons on top to make them work? In many repects your computer isn't quite as sophisticated as that machine. It has to make up for that lack of sophistication with a greater number of buttons.
Put in enough buttons and you can press them to produce Quake, but that's *still* all you or your computer is doing. Philosophically there's nothing to see here, move along.
The computer isn't smart. The *people* who arranged the button pushing are smart.
The human brain, although a physical device, is *not* arranged like your computer. Although it has some hard wired robotic functions ( like those that make your heart beat) it's essesntial structure is NOT an arrangment of simple binary switches, one attached to another. Neurons are often connected to several other neurons. When a neuron fires it fires through a complex chemical "soup" and it's the exact properties of that "soup" and how it reacts to and moderates the firing that determines what a firing "means."
The brain is an analog device, not digital, and a simple single neuron firing has the capacity to mean nearly and infinite number of things. Because the firing is transmitted through these chemicals neurons merely in the "neighborhood" of the firing neuron can also extract data from the firing, even though they aren't directly involved.
The complexity of data transmitable by just a few thousand neurons firing is staggering.
No computer yet devised can even come close to just a few thousand neurons. There aren't enough fundemental particles in the universe to construct such a purely switch based digital computer.
Even Deep Blue itself was a moron. It cheated. It was programed to beat a *single* human. Whereas that human ( at the time) was programed to beat *every human on earth* because it could pull a trick Deep Blue couldn't.
It could use the complexity inherent in the physical makeup of the human brain to *reprogram itself.* It can do this so well that even if certain portions of the physical brain itself are damaged it can reprogram other parts of the brain, sometimes parts that were once thought to be purely robotic in function, to take over the function of the damaged part ( there are, of course, limits to this).
It can even reprogram itself to interfere with, and conciously control, certain of the robotic functions. This is called biofeedback. Anyone can learn it ( and anyone who does can make a "lie detector" do anything they want it to. It simply takes putting in the time to learn how).
Competitive shooters take this so far that they actually *stop their hearts* while taking a shot so that its beat won't throw off their aim.
The shooter, unlike the biofeedbacker, doesn't do this conciously however. Their brain, all on it's "own," has *figured out* that for this person making a perfect shot is important, that the heartbeat interferes with that goal, and *stops the heart* for the duration needed to take the shot. (THIS is what makes the biathalon one of the hardest athletic events ever undertaken. Competitors have to go from the event requiring the greatest load on the heart known, to one which requires a ZERO heart rate, and back to maximum load, all against the clock. These athletes are just plain fucking amazing! No matter how doofey you think the event is)
No computer, no matter what sort of "amazing" mechanical stunts it pulls, comes even close to this sort of concious and *unconcious* intelligent behaviour.
It would be like part of the Northbridge going bad and spontaniously reprograming part of the Southbridge to partially take over its function and keep the machine up and running.
Does this mean I don't think we'll ever build a machine that will be truely intelligent?
No, not at all. I think we might even do it in my lifetime ( despite my advancing middle agedness), but I don't think we'll do it by *adding more beads to abacus.* Nor do I think we'll do it by making the beads switch faster.
We'll do it by making the bead/bead interaction more complex. We've entered the digital age. We'll have true AI when we, in some ways, outgrow that and go back to the analog age.
*Analog carries more information per cubic centimeter of matter than anything else.*
That's why we still use magnetic tape for backups.
Digital carries more *precise* data than analog. Your brain is analog. You forget things. You make mistakes. Maybe you could even go crazy.
*So will true AI*
Think about that. It has vast implications.
To be honest most of us don't really *want* true AI. We want "smarter" machines. We want machines that do more of we want them to without our having to tell them. In fact, we want this so much we don't insist they be intelligent so much as we demand they be clairvoyent. Like the gentleman featured here a while ago who has a vision of search engines going out on the web and not just finding the data you want but presenting to you ( or your professor) as a written paper on the subject.
That isn't AI. That's wishing you had a genie who always knew exactly what you wanted and just did it for you.
And THAT, boys and girls, fantasy.
Oh, we'll make machines that do that sort of thing better than they do now, because that's the sort of machine we're trying to make, and we can do better.
But we'll NEVER make that machine that writes your papers for you, always has the house at the right temperature at the right time, lit up just so and stocks your refridgerator with just *exactly* what you're going to want, when you want it.
Because you have a brain. You are intelligent ( although the evidence somtimes belies this statement) and intelligence is fickle and *unpredictable.* That's why Dewey didn't win ( ask your mother).
It could save us all a lot of trouble if you would all just except this fact right now and let those of us working on the problems get on with achievable, non fantasy based, goals. Really it would.
You don't believe you really don't want AI? Ok, but you think this way because you want "realistic" computer "bots" in Quake ( or because you really want that fantasy genie as mentioned above). That's not true AI, that's a *model* of AI. THAT we can do better, even with just a bank of switches.
REAL AI would get into an argument with you over whether it was going to let you play Quake right now or not. REAL AI would decide *IT* was too cold and turn up the heat in your house until you fried no matter what you did. REAL AI would decide Doritos were bad for you and refuse to place the order.
Just like your girlfriend/boyfriend/mother does now, *because* they have intelligence.
You *don't* want AI. You want clairvoyent servants. Ok, we're working on the servant part. Clairvoyence is a myth. As I said, get used to it.
For that matter it wouldn't hurt you to get up off your lazy ass and just do a few more things for yourself. Is it too hot in here. Turn down the heat. We've already given you robot that will keep it at any given temperature you *tell it to* under understandable "standard conditions."
For non standard conditions, use your own intelligence before telling the robot what to do. It won't hurt. You're all smart people. Or at least smarter than most, or you wouldn't be in this thread to begin with.
Who really wants AI? Well, for starters, the people who do things just to see if they can do them. I fall into that catagory. I think the *usefulness* of AI is highly limited, for the reasons given above and some others, but's it's a fascinating problem, isn't it? Well, let's have at it then.
Psycologists and social engineers would love to have an AI brain to pick at and prod at in the lab with no legislative or outside interference.
Certain creative endeavors actually tend to come out better not if the "machine" does it better for you, but if it *does* argue with you about *which way* is best. Sometimes AI will be right, sometimes it will be wrong, but if the person interacting with it doesn't abrogate their own intelligence to the "mechanical brain" ( as I'm afraid most do already with their dumb as rocks PC's) then the interaction will bring up new ideas and a new synthesis.
Of course you can do this with other *people* already.
And of course there is a final point to consider:
*Intelligence doesn't necessarily have to be HUMAN*
have managed the fine art of being both funny and insightful at the same time. My congratulations to you sirs.
I have in my house, not more than a couple of feet from me right now, these things called "shelves." On these shelves are these things called "books." A few of these books were written by people such as Einstein and Eddington and printed going on 100 years ago. In fact, I have a few other books nearly twice that old. The data on all of these books is still completely "readable."
What's more, I have every expectation that they will continue to be readable by my children's children and *their* children's children. Amazing, isn't it? I can pass a magnet over these books, I can douse them with water, I can infest them with mold and mildew and the books themselves may be destroyed as integral objects but the *data* will still be recoverable. They also have no EULA attached, and although I can't copy them and sell the *copies* if they are below a certain age, I can treat the physical object as my property.
What I can't do is burn them. If my house goes up in flames so do my books. They arn't perfect, but they won't just "fade away" or go "poof" in the middle of the night for no apparent reason.
All electronic and magnetic media are inherently highly volatile. That includes tape.
However, I do have, sitting right here on my desk next to my shelves, machines that can copy these books to volatile electronic and magnetic forms and *back again* to print or nonvolatile digital form. In fact, if the book is old enough, I often find that the work of converting them to magnetic and electronic media has already been done for me.( if we all did just ONE unique book that would be millions of books commonly availble in electronic form. Think about. Just one. Maybe even a short one)
In an odd twist of fate the old fiction of the Xerox commercial comes true. The best "backup device" known to man is a monk with a copy machine.
I once got modded as flamebait ( and I honestly don't know why, troll maybe, but not flamebait) for pointing out that the best PDA I knew of, and the one I personally used, was a pocket sized spiral bound notebook I got from CVS for $.69. It's cheap, nonvolatile, easily replacable anywhere in the world, has an infinite "battery" life, is fully pen compliant, can go through a metal detector without a qualm, can transfer its data to *any* computer in any data format and I've even run it through the wash and still recovered it's data. Hell, I can throw the thing against the wall as hard as I can as often as I want and the damned thing doesn't even get *scrathed* let alone lose data. I love the thing.
Pen and paper is still the optimum solution to many problems, except perhaps having a fun new toy to play with.
On my shelves, since I once worked a few days with an archeological doctoral student in Mexico, are a few bits of stone and clay with hyrogliphics on them several hundred years old. These bits of meaningful earth have been buried, rained on, trodden on, smashed, earthquaked dozens of times, burned and god knows what else, and their data is still recoverable.
Let's see your tape drive do that. I'm serious. There's a lesson to learned here.
Here's the best way to permenantly backup long term digital data. Take a giant titanium platter 5mm thick and punch 5mm holes in it for each "on" bit. On the first "track" of the platter make sure to make a code key easily decipherable by anybody with any sort of mathmatical knowledge.
There ya go. A backup that will last longer than the pyramids stand. You could even shoot it off into space, unprotected, with reasonable assurance that it would survive the trip until "someone" picked it up.
Ok, so that's not very reasonable for the average Joe who just wants to protect their mp3 collection. What has any of this got to do with you?
Plenty actually. In the first place, don't store anything in a computer format that can be more effectively stored in nonelectronic form. Except perhaps as a backup of *that* media. Books are a prime example. If your computer goes down and you need to refer to a manual to get it back up again that manual is worthless if *it's on the computer.* ( And did I mention that books have no EULA? That's a *feature*)
That isn't to say that you shouldn't have ebooks and CD based manuals, but that those are convieniences and backups. The *books* themselves are the primary data.
Don't rely on your PDA to keep critical phone numbers and such. You WILL drop it. It WILL get stolen, or have its batteries run out, or go through a *hidden* metal detector.
*Write them down* and carry the written copy. If anything happens to your PDA you're still good to go, and restore the data to your PDA/computer when time permits, like when you're just bouncing around your Days Inn room wondering what the hell there is to do in this God forsaken town anyway.
What to do about all that data that is inherently digital, or at least more viable in digital form?
Did you ever hear the phrase " The net is the computer"? Just for this once take it seriously. I've been a strong opponent of storing data on the net. Drives are big. That's why we're having this discussion in the first place, isn't it? They hold a LOT of data. Why put your sensitive personal data, data that, perhaps, could someday cause you considerable grief if it fell into the "wrong" hands ( and this doens't *necessarily* mean the FBI. Ever get divorced? Trust me, you don't want some things to be recoverable from an outside party) on the net? It makes no sense. The net is a *party line* capable of permenantly recording everything that goes across it. Certain documents belong ONLY on paper, or your own *secure* machine, or in your lawyers safe. Period. Please, take this advice very, VERY seriously. You may well have reason to thank me for it some day no matter how doofey you think it is now..NET? I'll tell you what you can do with your.NET buddy. My OS and *all it's apps* take up less than one percent of of my HD space. HD's are getting bigger in quantum leaps. Spreadsheet programs are getting bigger in tiny, tiny little increments that are slowly getting tinier. I'm not going to run my apps across the net. My data stays home. The only cache of my data is on *my* drive, which I can physically destroy if need be.
Do likewise, and it wouldn't hurt to encryt your whole bloody drive either. Just in case.
But all of that being said, do I *really* need a local backup of my files downloaded from the Gutenberg Project? They're already out there on the net. They're mirrored all the hell over the place. Someone else is already taking the trouble to swap drives, swap tapes and transfer the files to up to date media. It only takes a few minutes to download the whole bloody lot. If you lose your net connection, even permenantly, you know 20 other people who can grab it for you, and a half dozen locations where you can use a public computer to get the stuff. Even if all the mirrors to down at once, and *stay* down, you can always go on usenet and ask around. You'll find what you're looking for.
For this kind of noncritical data plastered widely across the net that you can, in all probability, recover faster from the net than from local backup ( remember, it takes *time* to find physical media, load it up, find the files you're looking for, and transfer them), simply *don't bother.*
It isn't worth it. Even if it takes slightly *longer* to do it this way than from local backup. The time you save in making the backups and keeping them up to date more than makes up for any trouble.
And remember, this sort of full backup is *disaster* recovery. Like if your house burns down/your entire system gets infected with a virus/your HD crashes/your dog eats your homework. In this sort of situation the small amount of time it takes to recover from the net is peanuts compared to the other things you're going waste time and money on. So don't sweat it.
If you take care of your system properly most of these things aren't even likely to occur,except the new HD that goes down after only one week. For the most part a *full* backup is mental insurance that your data can be recovered * somehow.* If it's on the net, and it's something like the Gutenberg Project, it's going to be there. Relax.
So, what about your mp3 collection? That took you years to build, and would take you weeks to rebuild, and maybe the RIAA will win out and the stuff will become unavailable. Well, for these you want to back them up to CD anyway, so you can play them in alternative devices, make copies for your friends, etc., right? Well there ya go. Don't bother putting this stuff on tape or anything. You've got it already. Make two copies, give one to a friend. That friend now has copies to play, and you've got off site backup. Have the friend do the same thing with HIS collection and you're BOTH protected. Well looky here, in certain cases and situations socialism DOES work ( much to the RIAA's distress).
The same goes for image files. It took you years to build up the pr0n collection. Some of it from pay sources that have gone *poof*, or that the FBI closed down. All of it from all over the place in any case. It would take you weeks to rebuild it, if you could do it at all. So sure, back this stuff local, but again, do it to do some form of digital disc ( CD or DVD). Find a friend with the same taste in pr0n and do the same as you did with the mp3's.
Repeat if you have video material.
Now take all of your system discs. OS stuff, Quake, Photoshop, etc., and copy them. Store the *original* offsite, maybe with a friend ( you do *have* friends don't you? I forgot to ask. A lawyer's safe or safe deposit box can substitute) or family member. Don't forget to write any applicable install codes *directly on* the copy.
Now if the worst comes to worst you can simply reinstall everything. You might even find that half of this shit you never even *bother* reinstalling. Go figure.
So now what are you left with? Surprisingly little in all likelihood. You're going to want to back up all of your system settings. Sure, it won't take you that long to reinstall the system itself, but the settings took you ages to do and you don't even remember them all. Back 'em up. Obvious data like your resume and thesis, software projects, financial data, Quake player data, etc..
Ok, what's left? For the average home user, and even the not so average, you may be surprised to discover you have now * done it all.*
Wait a minute, what happened to the traditional full backup?
Well, the thing you have to remember is that a *home* computer and *business* computer are inherently different when it comes to backup. When a business computer goes down it has to go back up NOW! And it has to go back up *exactly* as it was when it went down. This need makes all of those tapes backing up everying in full, right down to the most common thing they could just grab from the web, absolutely and completely necessary.
A *home* computer isn't like that. Your house has just burned down or your HD has crashed and you need to be sure you can recover everything, or even only *most* of it, within a reasonable time frame at minimal trouble and *expense.* Tapes, tape drives, and full backups all the time are, in and of themselves, trouble and expense. All against a future disaster that might well never come. You don't need to do it NOW. You just need to be able to rest assured that you *can* do it.
To hell with the full backup. Reinstall your OS and apps and restore just your settings. Sure, it takes a little longer, but that time goes against all that tape swapping and storing. You might actually come out ahead.
Now just download the stuff you can as time permits or as you need them. Get your stuff back from your friend if your local backups went up in smoke with your house ( you can live without Houses of the Holy for two days, honest, and even the jpeg of Natalie Portman's head Photoshopped onto Pamela Anderson's naked body) and you're back in business.
Now you're just left with incremental backups. For some people this might have to be done every day. For some they can legitimately wonder if every month is really just being paranoid.
Ok, so you really, really, REALLY just don't feel comfortable without a full backup? Maybe you're just the sort who really thinks he *can't* live without Houses of the Holy for even one extra minute he doesn't have to?
Ok, NOW the idea of mirroring drives for a backup makes sense because you aren't relying on it as your *primary* means of backup. You're only going to use it if your house burns down *tomorrow*, not in five years and in such a case it could save you some time. Hey, if it rows your boat, go for it Sparky.
The difference between an asshole and a troll is that an asshole is being, in some way, well, an asshole. A jerk. Being an asshole means that you have done something negative that * didn't need to be done that way.* Like swearing a lot making a point which didn't require the swearing for the point to be made. Your content was valid, even perceptive. But you were an asshole in the way you said it. You were *gratuitously* abusive.
The original poster who wanted to mod you troll was at least right in that respect in respect that some trolls should moddable UP though.
Some trolls are art and deserve to be respected and recognized as such. Right now we can only use funny for that, which isn't always accurate. A true troll has a *point.* To elicit response. Sometimes that response is baited in a way that isn't just art, it's *high* art.
Read the letters and short essays of Mark Twain. Many of them some of the finest trolls every penned.
Swift was a master of the troll. All of Gulliver's Travels is nothing but one massive, and brilliant, troll, and was treated as such at the time.
By the way, the difference between a troll and a flamebait is that the flamebait is a post specifically designed to illicit responses from assholes.
got modded as a troll too, even though, for once, the first post was on topic, mildly funny, actually had a *point*, and was labeled as facetious in the body of the text.
Go figure. Neither you nor he deserved to be modded as trolls. Troll is overused because it gets used as a catch all for various posts that the moderator finds offensive. It's perfectly possible to be offensive to someone without being a troll or flamebaiting. A subtlty that some of the moderators haven't grasped. In fact, I'm not sure some of them have even bothered to check the *definition* of the world troll and flamebait.
So, in short, you did not serve as an example of why we need the troll moderation.
You serve as an example of why we need an *asshole* moderation.
I hope that makes you feel better, have a nice day.
because you thought using the bandsaw should just be "intuitive?"
By the way, you're right, Linux isn't intuitive, neither is Windows. People have to learn Windows. They use, ummmmm, books to do it. Go into Borders and look at all the books on Windows explaining how "intuitive" it is.
"Ok, now click this, pull down that, go over to the other thing, don't ask us what it's called, we don't know either, now stick out your left elbow and scratch the cat with your right foot and chant . . . "Please don't crash again.""
Yeah, intuitive. No book reading needed here. The Video Professor must be some sort of philanthropist paying for all those ads, just for something to occupy his time, because "Windows is intuitive."
This is the single biggest load of malarky that anyone ever says about Windows, or Macs for that matter. Windows and Mac OS's are *learned.* They only seem intuitive because you've already learned them. My 70 year old mom learned KDE alongside her Mac OS8. She prefers KDE.
It's "intuitive." Or at least it was *after she had learned it for a while.*
*Linux* just works. Most of the Windows books at Borders, however, are about how to make Windows work despite itself because it's "intuitive."
Linux *at the command line* is arcane, but just works. Always.
English is arcane too but most one year olds manage to pick it up. They even resort to reading books by the time they're five or so. You should read one too. Maybe that install wouldn't have taken so long if you'ld read the bandsaw manual and had both hands to work with. My last install took about half an hour and consisted of putting the CD in the tray and clicking "Ok, whatever" a couple of times.
Wish I could do that with Windows, but the Goddamned wizards puke on drivers all the time and keep asking for second floppies that don't exist because "Windows just works" and is "intuitive." To uninstall a program cleanly I had to hack the "intuitive" registry and to make the "Start" button do something as simple as change its label I had to hack the *binary code* of the GUI shell itself because Windows "just works" and is "intuitive."
But at least people seem to have "that kind of patience" for this stuff.
Well, actually, they don't. A study about stress in the workplace revealed that the majority of stress in the workplace these days came from their computers not working right, computers running Windows, which "just works" and is "intuitive."
Am I anti MS? Damned straight. After more than a decade of being a loyal customer they damned well made me that way and they damned well deserve it.
Am I anti Windows? No. I'm writing this under W98 right now.
But it DON'T "just work." And it AIN'T "intuitive."
Tell you what, use your remaining hand to crack a a book. I'd recommend you start with Vonnegut's "Welcome to the Monkey House." From there go on to reading the bloody manual. It might save your remaining hand. And get your kids bike assembled in time for Christmas-WITHOUT any "spare parts" left over.
Unfortunately I wasted a week with maddog's Dummies book. Jon's a great guy, but a computer manual for novices author he ain't.
Then I got Running Linux. I was up and going in no time and years later I still refer to it. At this point I don't recommend *any* other book for the newbie. There's no fluff in this book. It's the straight dope, dense but completely readable, technical but not over the newbie's head (at least if they're the sort who's eyes don't glaze the second you say "compiler," but I don't think of The Screen Savers viewers in that catagory), more in depth where it needs to be than any other newbie manual I've ever seen while at the same time running a broad overview of everything you need to at least hear about ( and refering you to other great O'Reilly books that cover the subject in greater depth).
Throw in Linux in a Nutshell and the Armadillo book ( Essential System Administration) and you've pretty much covered everything you'll ever need to keep a basic Linux system ( or network) up and running in any enviroment from your home desktop to the small corporation data center.
These three books are the grand triumvirate. The first to buy, the first to read and the first you'll turn to when all others have failed you in some way. All others are but shadows on the wall of the cave.
Beyond these three the first book a newbie is going to want is a dedicated manual for his choice of text editor, that would be vi of course. Running Linux gives an overview and In a Nutshell gives a reference but nothing beats a dedicated book for learning. Once you know it pretty well you'll keep it on the shelf but really only need In a Nutshell for a quick reference. O'Reilly wins again here with their Learning the vi Editor.
Ok, ok, some wrong thinking people are going to want to go with emacs instead. For them O'Reilly has Learning GNU emacs.
Congratulations, your viewers have just gone from newbies to system admin gurus in just four short books.
Here's where I step away from the crowd a bit. I'm a firm believer that any serious Linux newbie should do a little programing right off the bat, and do it in C, on the command line. O'Reilly loses here. The two volume C For Dummies books are the ones to grab. They're the best Dummies books I've seen. They're the best newbie intro to programing books I've seen for that matter. Not for the hardcore geek, but complete, understandable and fun. They'll have grandma writting her own prank commands in a couple of hours and LIKE it!
Now we've gone up to a full library of Linux books, all the books most people will ever need, including C programing manuals, and we haven't even used up a foot of bookshelf space yet so I guess throw in the Camel book for good measure.
Done, your viewers are now Linux grandmasters and *still* have a couple inches short of a foot of bookshelf space left they can fill with whatever special interest book catches their fancy from what they learned in Running Linux.
What can you do on the show to impress people with Linux? Damned if I know. The most impressive things about Linux aren't visual. In fact the *most* impressive thing about Linux is *philosophy.* Not in the philosphical sense itself, but what that philosophy *means* to the average user. No one really explains that well.
vim doesn't break. vim doesn't change to an incompatible file format to force you to download the latest version. All files written in vim are readable by all versions of vim and *all other text/word processors.* No lock in, no lock out. Ever. If the current maintainers lose interest, because it is open source, *any* programer with the interest can just pick it up and start maintaining it-without even having to ask permission (although this is good form), let alone spend years with a room full of lawyers to make the arrangements. If you don't like something about vim and are willing to put in the work you can bloody well change it yourself, at will, again without even asking permission. YOUR vim is yours to do with as you please.
And because all of this is possible with a Linux system running GPLed software tens of thousands of programers are working at it around the clock, so even if *you* never touch a line of code you directly benifit from its openness.
This is the true power of Linux, this is the part that's truely impressive. You can't show it. You have to explain it. Explain what being ope *means,* and means to *them.*
And what it means is freedom.
What feature is more important than that? Can MS or Apple match Linux, *feature for feature?*
and almost wrote "even if that "information" is in the form of emotional content." That's why I put "information" in quotes.
I was not railing against design or art. I come from a family of artists, commercial graphic designers and marketers. My stepfather was the Sales Development Manager for all of GE Broadcasting Company and my mother has been in the Guggenheim.
I know my way around art, and I know my way around design. I've been surrounded by *good* examples of both since before birth.
Yes, good and bad are subjective, but they're also subject to "market" approval. If your market is strictly those who dig black semaphore fonts on navy blue backgrounds than your page sucks to me because I'm not your market.
If your "market" is anyone interested in your opinion on something than the above is bad because the majority of the people you are trying to reach turn away in disgust. You are not communicating with them. Communication is a *two way* interaction.
This is bad design. It does not communicate what you intended to whom you intended. You have not engaged them in the discourse.
I'm sorry, but I'll stand by my statement that most of the web sucks because it does not communicate *what* it intends to *whom* it intends and print has followed right along in its footsteps.
Of course I'm making the possibly invalid assumption the "intent" is something more than to "communicate" the money out of your pocket into theirs. That's a different topic though.
I was talking to the case at hand, the small outfit running old hardware and software from financial distress.
Having outgrown that phase I thought I was through with all that, but divorce has proven me wrong and it looks like I'll have to go through it again.:)
Ok, I'm exagerating. I got left with my personally assembled Athlon 900. As far as computing goes I'm good to go with a start over from scratch one man operation.
No, there is no such available add-in that I'm aware of. Most of the pieces are out there, but you'll have to track them down and assemble them yourself, and of course take the time to debug. Frankly right now it's probably quicker to do it from scratch than find the templates on the web.
Personally I've never let a seceratary near a spreadsheet, or write checks. My bookeepers need no training in them. Invoices are handled through the word processor, which I've never had anyone kick up a fuss over either. For a while I used StarOffice 5.2 on Linux and people in the office didn't even know they weren't using a Windows theme. That was the one great thing about the otherwise stupid desktop interface. Maybe I've just had better luck with employees.
Or maybe it's because they've actually seen me take off my tie and unstop and clean a clogged toilet myself when they were doing more valuable work that makes them more willing to go with the flow. I don't know. When I tell *my* employees they're going to train in new software they generally respond, " Cool, that makes me more marketable at your expense." Some employers might rail at this. I love it. As the boss I've never figured out why I should balk at training my people in getting things done the way *I* think is right. I consider it time and money very well spent and I prefer sharp people working for me, even if it *isn't* always to my advantage. I'm smart. Dull people bore me. I don't like my working enviroment to bore me. Want a job with me? Come to the interview with copy of Brave New World under one arm and Euripides - in Greek, under the other. Then be prepared to work as hard as I pay you, and I won't expect you to work any harder.
I make money to buy things I want. Period. I want my business the way I want it. I spend money on it. I rarely do so foolishly.
Except I did buy Quickbooks. That was foolish. I already had MS Office and Star Office. I already knew accounting. My bookeepers already knew accounting. My Front Office people already knew word processing. Piece of cake. I've never been big enough that *I* wasn't the "personel dept." and I never want to be.
Look, there is no "perfect" solution. Quickbooks is just more imperfect that any homegrown solution I've found and with homegrown, Open Source, I'm beholden to nobody. Every penny you spend training your people with Open Office goes into *your people's* skill set. Not Microsoft's or Intuit's coffers. With that comes having to take the time and responsiblility to develop it personally. If I shied from personal responsibility I wouldn't be in business in first place and the bloody janitor would unclog the toilet, it wouldn't be my job.
Maybe I should take on the task of writing up some generic "Quickbooks" Office Suite based workalike and release it open source. I don't know if I'm the right man for the job though. It always comes down to something like " How the hell do *I* know what you want your invoices to look like? *YOU* know. You have the tools, use them."
Just the way I'm made up I guess. I guess that's why I'm in business. I like to do things for myself.
And as I also said, it depends on the school, with the implication that that meant it's location.
In LA it's a different story and I've actually got a friend who enrolled in UC Berkley just for the cheap student housing. It was the only way he could afford to live in the SF area at all.
For people who live in such a situation I can comiserate, but only offer this advice:
*Going to college is your first big chance to get the hell out!*
I'm not being snide. It's the one time in your life, period, where you can go damed near anywhere in the world with social acceptability, merely on a personal whim. Maybe even get someone else ( your parents or even the taxpayers) to cover the expenses for you. Take advantage of it if you can.
was a self evident axiom. The inmates have clearly taken over the asylum. Still, that's the beauty of the web. You're free to make your own webpage, even a shitty one.
However, and no inate disrespect to your friend, but her problem isn't her "artistic vision." It's her arrogance. It's the same sort of arrogance that thinks what's on TV should meet her standards and refuses to accept the argument that she could just change the channel. Well, the arrogant "artiste" is a cultural sterotype. Some stereotypes are more stereotypical than others though. This seems to be one of them.
It doesn't have to be that way though. I know. I am closely aquainted with nationally known fine artists ( Hell, one of them bore me), some of even of relative fame, and one of the things that's always struck me about some of the best artists is that they fully understand that *their* artistic vision doesn't mean crap. Sooner or later they are going to *show* their "vision" to someone else. That someone else, like it or not, is the final arbiter of what their vision "is."
"Artistes" who so vehemently defend their artistic vision in the manner of your arrogant friend aren't artists. They're masturbaters with oil pastels. They're making artistic love to the one they love best, themselves. They'll even state that explicitly if prodded, although they have no idea that's what they're doing. You see, if asked they'll proudly state they are engaged in "self expression."
Well fine. Go ahead with your artistic therapy or Turette's Syndrome. See if care though.
Your "self expression" only becomes *art* when *I* look at it though, and I'm only willing to engage in the artistic dialog ( written as in poetry or visual imagery as in a painting), and it *IS* a dialog, if you are speaking to me. You must, at some point, not only recognize my existence, you must respect it.
You want to tell me your vision? Fine, but in exchange you have to listen to mine. Art (as opposed to talking/painting to yourself) is an *exchange.*
Your artist friend hasn't figured this out yet. If she never does she is unlikely to ever be a great artist, or human being.
Of course that doesn't mean she won't be a "sucessful" artist. There are plenty of people with money who love to be abused artistically. Go figure.
In the meantime what most of us will do when we go to her page, instead of appreciating her art ( which she may find desirable), we'll just think, "Well, that's annoying," and go away.
What's more, no matter how good her art was we'll think of her *art* as annoying, even though it was just her presentation of it.
Mondrian dispensed with the frame. Your friend seems to want to do the same, but doesn't realize that what she's *actually* done is replace it with an annoying and distracting frame because she doesn't understand her medium. Also not a good thing for an artist.
If she payed attention to her audience she'd already know this.
A webpage is *explictly* intended to be viewed by others. Why else did they bother to put the page on the web? Ignoring your audience, or outright disdaining them, is just plain doofey.
And did I mention it's arrogant?
With regards to accessability I have such an arrogant friend too. When I've suggested he could make his webpage ( an otherwise very fine one) a little more accessable to the blind, or even just Netscape users, he has replied, in essence, "Fuck 'em, they're only about 10% of the web population."
Don't be an arrogant web designer. Respect your audience. Otherwise, why the hell should they respect you or what you have to say?
10% of the web population has already told my friend, " Well fuck you too buddy," without ever reading one word of his *opinion* driven webpage.
Thank you. I was afraid no one would have the guts considering the last sentence. I thank you. My friend thanks you in absentia. He thought the whole thing was pretty funny too, even while he was dying.
these print designers are going back to their magazines and recasting them as "webpages."
The average magazine these days is mostly design and hardly any print. What's more, the design *sucks.*
I want my "old fashioned" words and pictures back. Take your design and stuff it.
What's more, I fully agree with you. On an actual webpage I want words and pictures *I* control the display of. Once again, take your "design" and stuff it - twice over.
The function of a magazine or webpage is not to be a medium for distributing "design."
*Design* is a medium for distributing information. If the "design" does not *enhance* the information in some way it's worse than a failure, it's an impediment, no matter how sucessful it may be as "art." Hell, even ART is supposed to be a medium for "information."
So inform. Don't "design."
One of the things that makes the web so powerful as a tool for distributing information is that it *allows* the user to manipulate the "design" in a way that makes the information more accesable to him/her. That's the whole bloody point!
Forcing me to read your semaphore font with black text on a tetured navy blue background doesn't make me marvel at your innovative "design." It makes me scream and go to another page.
Accesability? Hell, a good chunk of the web isn't accessable to *anyone* because it's the "designer's" brain that's disabled.
chose to live on campus, and please note that my argument for living off campus was considerably longer and better reasoned, as well as my own opinion, rather than quoting someone else's. Something that Thoreau himself always admired in a person.
I only added the notation in the form of "journalistic fairness."
And for some ( as it was for Thoreau, and I don't think ANYONE can accuse old H.D. of being toadying to clique acceptence or class structure. He *is* the author of Walden, as well as Civil Disobedience and Life Without Principal after all) it *is* a valid point.
Slashdot Mirror
a particular technique of display because she was doing it on a computer, on the web. She was unhappy with the way the web interface distracted from her art. She didn't want the viewer to be aware of the *web* when viewing her art. So she chose a technique she thought would make the web "invisible."
This was *her* stated goal.
I equated that in my original post with Mondrian carrying his images around the edge of the canvas and dispensing with the frame because he wanted people to see his art, *NOT* the frame. In a framed image the frame effectively becomes part of the viewer sees, and thus part of the image.
The girl and Mondrian both had the same goal. In fact, odds are, this idea came down to the girl from Mondrian in some way or other.
The difference is that Mondrian understood his medium and how to accomplish his intended goal in a way that didn't *distract* from his art. If he had just taken the frame off the canvas people would have been looking and the rough, unpainted edges of his paintings instead of the image itself. So he carried the image over the edge and to the back of the canvas. Now the whole work is visually complete. The technique *matched* the medium.
The girl, on the other hand, in trying to remove the "frame" from her image ( the web interface) did so by imposing a "rough edge" of another sort that draws even greater attention to it than the largely psychologically "invisible" web interface would have.
It's as if Mondrian had dispensed with the frame by hacking a hole in the gallery wall and hanging the painting behind it. Now the viewer on looking at the painting is distracted by this odd hole in the wall he has to look through. It wasn't part of Mondrian's "vision" to display his art through a hole in the wall, just without a frame.
The girl chose a display technique to achieve a certain *goal.* The technique wasn't supposed to be part of the art itself. If that were the case I'd simply like it or not like it. The technique was supposed to be *invisible,* so I'd only see her art. Instead I see this odd hole hacked in the web that I have to view her art through.
The girl doesn't *intend* for me to view her art through that hole as part of her work. That would be cool. The girl doesn't percieve that the hole *exists* even though it's glaringly obvious to virtually all of her viewers.
Her technique isn't bad because I find it distracting. Her technique is bad because her stated goal was * that I shouldn't be distracted.*
Stretched canvas has certain inate physical properties. They can't be ignored. You can use those properties in various ways, some of which might well be inovative, but you can't simply give it certain properties that you *wish* it had. There are things you can do on stretched canvas that you can't on the web, like carry an image around the edges. The web has no such edge.
There are certain things you can do on the web that you can't do on stretched canvas, like flash animation. But there are certain things you *can't* do on the web because of it's inate properites. A good artist understands her media and works *with* it, not against it. If you find yourself working against your media that fault is yours. You have simply chosen the wrong media to work in.
Or you have to change your technique.
Any webpage is inherently contained in a frame. It's part of the physical property of the medium. You *cannot* make it go away. What you *can* do is employ perceptual tricks to make the viewer *less concious* of it. She employed a technique that made people *more* concious of it.
Again, I've no quarrel with her doing whatever the hell she wants as part of her art. She can make any statement using any technique she wants. With regards to the artistic statement itself there is *no* objective method to draw a line between what's "right" and what's "wrong".
But if you come across someone trying to drive a Jello cube through a pepperoni with a hamster and you ask them what they're doing and they say, " Building a birdhouse," you're likely to think they're going about it the wrong way.
But if they say, " Doing my own thing man, it's, like, my vision," you won't think "right" or "wrong." Weird maybe, but not right or wrong.
Yet the only difference between the two scenes is * what the artist said.*
KFG
that I *don't* think of Picaso as an "artiste."
Serves me right for trying to post so late at night.
KFG
"The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. . . . If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go downward perpendicularly."
I fully agree.
I also fully recongnize the value of art that isn't appreciated. Van Gough is the classic case. He was speaking a language no one at the time was willing to listen to. That didn't disuade him from saying it, although he eventually appears to have become despondent enough over the fact to take his own life.
I fully recognize the value of art that *I* don't appreciate. Cubism leaves me cold. I don't know why, it just does. Maybe the "fault" is mine. Maybe I just " don't get it." Who knows? But I recognize it as legitimate art nonetheless and think of Picaso as an "artiste" arrongantly fixed on his vision. ( An arrogant jerk *otherwise,* but that's a different issue).
On the other hand I *like* Mondrian, but I'm not sure it's art. I rather think it's just pleasing graphic design. An awful lot of people don't even think it's that.
Terry Gilliam went through a nasty, vicious, personal and very public fight to get Brasil released in America but I don't think he was being an arrogant "artiste." His fight was perfectly valid. To change or delete one minute of his movie would have in some manner changed what it said. Most people think the movie is junk. A devoted few of us adore it. Gilliam knew who we were, what he wanted to say to us, and how to say it to us. He was a master of his craft who wouldn't back down when studio execs demanded he fit some form of popular mold, even if that mold was only a precise time length. I bless him for it.
On the other hand I don't know what the hell the guy who drapes miles of fabric over landscapes is up to. He seems to though, so what the hell, more power to him.
I had a photography professor once who derided Ansel Adams at every oportunity. I never really did figure out why.
Ultimately art is in the eye of the beholder, which, as it happens, is my point. When I am working as an artist I do my thing. When people like it, I like the fact. When people don't, well, ok. It's not like a personal attack or something. But what I don't do is put *unintentional* barriers between myself and my viewers because of my "vision."
The girl in question is obviously trying to present her "vision" in a particular way. She is *failing* in that attempt because of her narrow focus. It is that narrow focus that is the arrogance that is coming between us, not that I don't understand her art, but that I understand certain aspects of it *better* than she does because I understand her *medium* better than she does at the moment. When you present art on a computer you cannot make the computer, and certain aspects of its interface, just "go away." Your art *must* take that into account if you are going to present it properly. She has had this explained to her by a friend. She doesn't want to hear that so she ingnores it citing her "vision."
Ok, here's an example of art I won't like. I won't even *look* at it because the artists "vision" is one I'm not willing to deal with. My hypothetical artist paints images desinged to provoke emotional trauma. He only displays them one at a time in a tent and to get to the tent you have to walk across a field of broken glass in your bare feet so that you are in the proper state of mind when you view his painting. That is part of his "vision."
Well I'm sorry, but I'm not going to do that, BUT, I respect his vision as art and understand that *I* am the one rejecting the dialog in this case. This isn't the same as with the girl and her unintentionally annoying webpage.
I know a guy who makes fine ceramic pots, and then damages them in some way because if they are useful they aren't art.
Nonesense.
This sort of thing is just falling prey to the fallacy that just being unpopular makes it art. This fallacy is easy to fall into because so much that *is* popular is crap.
But*sometimes* the unpopular is unpopular because it legitimately *is* annoying garbage.
KFG
And you'll probably even win, after you spend a few thousand dollars to defend yourself.
." Etc., etc., etc..
That's the way it works in practice.
In my Bantam Edition of Walden they only claim actual copyright for the original introduction, but if they've used the intentional mistakes trick they'll certainly sick their lawyers on you if directly copy their pages.
The argument is it isn't the *work* that's been violated. That's in the public domain. It's the *image* of the work that's been violated. You copied the *page,* not just the words. The intentional mistakes are put there as fingerprints to show it was *their* page you imaged.
Below the copyright notice in my Walden you'll find:
"No part of this book may be reproduced in any form. .
Look, they aren't concerned with other people printing copies of Walden. What they're concerned about is that someone might print copies of Walden by simply photocopying the pages of "their" book.
Most works "transcribed" for Project Gutenberg are done by *scanning* a book. i.e. making an image of the page, and then running it against an OCR program. It's the scanning part that gives publishers the willies.
Like I said, it's doofey. That's what you get when you go into the public domain. It's not like they paid anything for it. They may have spent some money on legitimate scholarship, making corrected editions and so on, but that's peanuts compared to actual author's rights.
But that's the way things are done in real life.
Ever actually read a Project Gutenberg title? They all start with pages of "small print", legal disclaimers and even a simple EULA. They at least state explicitly that you have the absolute right to use the public domain part of the text however you wish, even printing it in book form and selling it, with no permission needed or royalties due to them * so long as you remove all of their original content and make no claims that it's a Project Gutenberg(tm) text.*
Which is exactly what Adobe did, but then claim rights to.
KFG
But it's standard sports medicine. They not only talked about it during the Biathalon event TV coverage during the last winter Olympics but showed video of a shooter hooked up to an EKG.
You could actually watch the heart stop as they pulled the trigger.
I'll have a poke around and see If I can refer you to any references, on or off the web.
KFG
to be allowed to do this. Some of them literally. Hundreds of letters have been written to the OEM's offering to write top quality drivers for free. The OEM's have, for the most part, refused, even to requests from the major distros who are legitimate firms that could be contracted with and NDA's signed.
In point of fact there is a Microsoft memo that leaked that pointed out the ease of writting hardware drivers for Linux as one of the strengths that Windows couldn't compete with. In the words of the memo "Even a complete programing novice with a copy of Writing Linux Drivers could write a driver in a couple of days."
But, writing a good driver *requires* the cooperation of the maker. Writing a good driver requires *intimate* knowledge of the *internal* design of the board.
Makers of sound and video cards consider the knowledge a trade secret. They are afraid that if they tell *anyone* how their board is put together this knowledge will make it to their competitors and they will suffer in a highly competitive market that can see the market leader be out of business a couple of years later.
Some drivers for some boards can be written to the point where they work by doing some good guessing and hacking it up as best as can be. These drivers don't work *well,* but it's a really remarkable thing that they're made to work at all.
The point is it isn't the hacker's "fault" that there are no good drivers. The OEM has to write them or offer actual support to someone else. Period. There's no other way. It *all* comes down to the willingness of the OEM to have good drivers for their own equipment.
Talk to them kid. Maybe they'll listen to you. They sure ain't listening to anyone else.
KFG
*Editions* of works in the public domain can still be copyrighted. Many publishers introduce intentional mistakes into their editions to make them "protected." This is done to prevent other publihers from simply copying their edition and printing it.
It's kinda doofey really, but that's the way it's done.
This costs the Gutenberg Project most of the money they spend. Even though they're dealing with public domain works they still need to pay lawyers to clear rights to the *particular* edition the work is being transcribed from.
In this particular case though, the edition in question *is* the Gutenberg Project's edition they are claiming rights to. They downloaded it, put it in their ebook, and claim it as their propriatary work.
That's beyond doofey. That's slimey as all hell.
KFG
as given. The suggestion was that instead of embracing *only* the majority market they could have *widened* their appeal by embracing the niche markets as well, thus giving them more customers.
You responded with the commercial failure of a company ( which, by the way, only sold physical media, not net media) that catered *ONLY* to *one* of the niche markets, thus having the *narrowist* customer range possible.
Not the same thing at all.
Let me ask you this, have fewer people adopted the use of Shockwave or RealPlayer since they have been made available for Linux, or, perhaps, *more*?
Which is still alive, Real, or Liquid?
KFG
And I've been working on a image recognition program that will handle the timing and scoring of racing events by "knowing" who/what it is that has just crossed the timing mark.
This doesn't make my computer smart. People tend to think of computers as "smart" because they can do certain things that smart people do, and do them better. Like math. Well, so can my pocket calculator, which is dumb as a rock. And so is your computer. Literally.
I like to do this when I'm teaching computers to a bunch of newbies, like I might when I volunteer at an "Senior Center." I put a piece of quartz in my pocket. As soon as someone is obviously acting like they are intimidated by the computer because it's "smarter than they are" I pull the quartz out of my pocket and ask:
"What's this?"
To which the response is almost always:
"A rock?"
"Right. In fact, this is a piece of silicon crystal. Essentially the same thing your computer's "brain" is made from. Your computer is is about the smartest rock that any human has ever seen, but that *still* means it's as dumb as a rock. Your problem isn't that the computer is smarter than you are. Your problem is that the computer is so dumb, and you are so smart, that you have a hard time being dumb enough to communicate with it on its level. It only knows a few words and has to hear them exactly right. It can't figure out what you "meant" because it isn't smart enough."
I then go on to show how a computer codes things with the handful of Othello chips I keep in my other pocket.
"See, it's just like Morse code really, except the computer is so dumb that every letter has to have 256 dots and dashes even when only one would do. It's just a bunch of switches. It isn't a "brain." Flip the switches in a certain order and computer "knows" it's an a. But it's so dumb it doesn't know that A and a are the same thing really. You have to tell it that by flipping the switches in a different order. Everything a computer does is done by flipping these switches. The computer has a *lot* of switches in it, but they're all still just switches. Some of the switches switch other switches, so it does certain things automatically, but a *human* had to tell it to do it that way. And YOU have to tell it to do what that other human told it *how* to do, or the dumb thing just sits there."
A computer is a big abacus. Nothing more, nothing less. It's not even a very good abacus because it's beads only count in binary. So we include a LOT of beads.
But it's still just a piece of rock.
I have a device in my house that has memorized Shakespeare. Every word the great Bard ever wrote is infalably etched in this device's memory. It can reproduce them at will, perfectly, ad infinitum. Any person who did this would be considered pretty damned smart, or at least a savant, but this device is no smarter than a mashed up dead tree that's had some stains spattered on it. No one has ever accused a book of being "smart" no matter what data in contains.
Because a computer is a machine, even though it's really just a big book made up of switches, it can do things " on it's own" that can appear amazing to a human onlooker. That doesn't mean it's *not* still just a machine under ultimate human control. Remember those little plastic adding machines used for grocery shopping where you pushed the buttons on top to make them work? In many repects your computer isn't quite as sophisticated as that machine. It has to make up for that lack of sophistication with a greater number of buttons.
Put in enough buttons and you can press them to produce Quake, but that's *still* all you or your computer is doing. Philosophically there's nothing to see here, move along.
The computer isn't smart. The *people* who arranged the button pushing are smart.
The human brain, although a physical device, is *not* arranged like your computer. Although it has some hard wired robotic functions ( like those that make your heart beat) it's essesntial structure is NOT an arrangment of simple binary switches, one attached to another. Neurons are often connected to several other neurons. When a neuron fires it fires through a complex chemical "soup" and it's the exact properties of that "soup" and how it reacts to and moderates the firing that determines what a firing "means."
The brain is an analog device, not digital, and a simple single neuron firing has the capacity to mean nearly and infinite number of things. Because the firing is transmitted through these chemicals neurons merely in the "neighborhood" of the firing neuron can also extract data from the firing, even though they aren't directly involved.
The complexity of data transmitable by just a few thousand neurons firing is staggering.
No computer yet devised can even come close to just a few thousand neurons. There aren't enough fundemental particles in the universe to construct such a purely switch based digital computer.
Even Deep Blue itself was a moron. It cheated. It was programed to beat a *single* human. Whereas that human ( at the time) was programed to beat *every human on earth* because it could pull a trick Deep Blue couldn't.
It could use the complexity inherent in the physical makeup of the human brain to *reprogram itself.* It can do this so well that even if certain portions of the physical brain itself are damaged it can reprogram other parts of the brain, sometimes parts that were once thought to be purely robotic in function, to take over the function of the damaged part ( there are, of course, limits to this).
It can even reprogram itself to interfere with, and conciously control, certain of the robotic functions. This is called biofeedback. Anyone can learn it ( and anyone who does can make a "lie detector" do anything they want it to. It simply takes putting in the time to learn how).
Competitive shooters take this so far that they actually *stop their hearts* while taking a shot so that its beat won't throw off their aim.
The shooter, unlike the biofeedbacker, doesn't do this conciously however. Their brain, all on it's "own," has *figured out* that for this person making a perfect shot is important, that the heartbeat interferes with that goal, and *stops the heart* for the duration needed to take the shot. (THIS is what makes the biathalon one of the hardest athletic events ever undertaken. Competitors have to go from the event requiring the greatest load on the heart known, to one which requires a ZERO heart rate, and back to maximum load, all against the clock. These athletes are just plain fucking amazing! No matter how doofey you think the event is)
No computer, no matter what sort of "amazing" mechanical stunts it pulls, comes even close to this sort of concious and *unconcious* intelligent behaviour.
It would be like part of the Northbridge going bad and spontaniously reprograming part of the Southbridge to partially take over its function and keep the machine up and running.
Does this mean I don't think we'll ever build a machine that will be truely intelligent?
No, not at all. I think we might even do it in my lifetime ( despite my advancing middle agedness), but I don't think we'll do it by *adding more beads to abacus.* Nor do I think we'll do it by making the beads switch faster.
We'll do it by making the bead/bead interaction more complex. We've entered the digital age. We'll have true AI when we, in some ways, outgrow that and go back to the analog age.
*Analog carries more information per cubic centimeter of matter than anything else.*
That's why we still use magnetic tape for backups.
Digital carries more *precise* data than analog. Your brain is analog. You forget things. You make mistakes. Maybe you could even go crazy.
*So will true AI*
Think about that. It has vast implications.
To be honest most of us don't really *want* true AI. We want "smarter" machines. We want machines that do more of we want them to without our having to tell them. In fact, we want this so much we don't insist they be intelligent so much as we demand they be clairvoyent. Like the gentleman featured here a while ago who has a vision of search engines going out on the web and not just finding the data you want but presenting to you ( or your professor) as a written paper on the subject.
That isn't AI. That's wishing you had a genie who always knew exactly what you wanted and just did it for you.
And THAT, boys and girls, fantasy.
Oh, we'll make machines that do that sort of thing better than they do now, because that's the sort of machine we're trying to make, and we can do better.
But we'll NEVER make that machine that writes your papers for you, always has the house at the right temperature at the right time, lit up just so and stocks your refridgerator with just *exactly* what you're going to want, when you want it.
Because you have a brain. You are intelligent ( although the evidence somtimes belies this statement) and intelligence is fickle and *unpredictable.* That's why Dewey didn't win ( ask your mother).
It could save us all a lot of trouble if you would all just except this fact right now and let those of us working on the problems get on with achievable, non fantasy based, goals. Really it would.
You don't believe you really don't want AI? Ok, but you think this way because you want "realistic" computer "bots" in Quake ( or because you really want that fantasy genie as mentioned above). That's not true AI, that's a *model* of AI. THAT we can do better, even with just a bank of switches.
REAL AI would get into an argument with you over whether it was going to let you play Quake right now or not. REAL AI would decide *IT* was too cold and turn up the heat in your house until you fried no matter what you did. REAL AI would decide Doritos were bad for you and refuse to place the order.
Just like your girlfriend/boyfriend/mother does now, *because* they have intelligence.
You *don't* want AI. You want clairvoyent servants. Ok, we're working on the servant part. Clairvoyence is a myth. As I said, get used to it.
For that matter it wouldn't hurt you to get up off your lazy ass and just do a few more things for yourself. Is it too hot in here. Turn down the heat. We've already given you robot that will keep it at any given temperature you *tell it to* under understandable "standard conditions."
For non standard conditions, use your own intelligence before telling the robot what to do. It won't hurt. You're all smart people. Or at least smarter than most, or you wouldn't be in this thread to begin with.
Who really wants AI? Well, for starters, the people who do things just to see if they can do them. I fall into that catagory. I think the *usefulness* of AI is highly limited, for the reasons given above and some others, but's it's a fascinating problem, isn't it? Well, let's have at it then.
Psycologists and social engineers would love to have an AI brain to pick at and prod at in the lab with no legislative or outside interference.
Certain creative endeavors actually tend to come out better not if the "machine" does it better for you, but if it *does* argue with you about *which way* is best. Sometimes AI will be right, sometimes it will be wrong, but if the person interacting with it doesn't abrogate their own intelligence to the "mechanical brain" ( as I'm afraid most do already with their dumb as rocks PC's) then the interaction will bring up new ideas and a new synthesis.
Of course you can do this with other *people* already.
And of course there is a final point to consider:
*Intelligence doesn't necessarily have to be HUMAN*
KFG
have managed the fine art of being both funny and insightful at the same time. My congratulations to you sirs.
.NET? I'll tell you what you can do with your .NET buddy. My OS and *all it's apps* take up less than one percent of of my HD space. HD's are getting bigger in quantum leaps. Spreadsheet programs are getting bigger in tiny, tiny little increments that are slowly getting tinier. I'm not going to run my apps across the net. My data stays home. The only cache of my data is on *my* drive, which I can physically destroy if need be.
I have in my house, not more than a couple of feet from me right now, these things called "shelves." On these shelves are these things called "books." A few of these books were written by people such as Einstein and Eddington and printed going on 100 years ago. In fact, I have a few other books nearly twice that old. The data on all of these books is still completely "readable."
What's more, I have every expectation that they will continue to be readable by my children's children and *their* children's children. Amazing, isn't it? I can pass a magnet over these books, I can douse them with water, I can infest them with mold and mildew and the books themselves may be destroyed as integral objects but the *data* will still be recoverable. They also have no EULA attached, and although I can't copy them and sell the *copies* if they are below a certain age, I can treat the physical object as my property.
What I can't do is burn them. If my house goes up in flames so do my books. They arn't perfect, but they won't just "fade away" or go "poof" in the middle of the night for no apparent reason.
All electronic and magnetic media are inherently highly volatile. That includes tape.
However, I do have, sitting right here on my desk next to my shelves, machines that can copy these books to volatile electronic and magnetic forms and *back again* to print or nonvolatile digital form. In fact, if the book is old enough, I often find that the work of converting them to magnetic and electronic media has already been done for me.( if we all did just ONE unique book that would be millions of books commonly availble in electronic form. Think about. Just one. Maybe even a short one)
In an odd twist of fate the old fiction of the Xerox commercial comes true. The best "backup device" known to man is a monk with a copy machine.
I once got modded as flamebait ( and I honestly don't know why, troll maybe, but not flamebait) for pointing out that the best PDA I knew of, and the one I personally used, was a pocket sized spiral bound notebook I got from CVS for $.69. It's cheap, nonvolatile, easily replacable anywhere in the world, has an infinite "battery" life, is fully pen compliant, can go through a metal detector without a qualm, can transfer its data to *any* computer in any data format and I've even run it through the wash and still recovered it's data. Hell, I can throw the thing against the wall as hard as I can as often as I want and the damned thing doesn't even get *scrathed* let alone lose data. I love the thing.
Pen and paper is still the optimum solution to many problems, except perhaps having a fun new toy to play with.
On my shelves, since I once worked a few days with an archeological doctoral student in Mexico, are a few bits of stone and clay with hyrogliphics on them several hundred years old. These bits of meaningful earth have been buried, rained on, trodden on, smashed, earthquaked dozens of times, burned and god knows what else, and their data is still recoverable.
Let's see your tape drive do that. I'm serious. There's a lesson to learned here.
Here's the best way to permenantly backup long term digital data. Take a giant titanium platter 5mm thick and punch 5mm holes in it for each "on" bit. On the first "track" of the platter make sure to make a code key easily decipherable by anybody with any sort of mathmatical knowledge.
There ya go. A backup that will last longer than the pyramids stand. You could even shoot it off into space, unprotected, with reasonable assurance that it would survive the trip until "someone" picked it up.
Ok, so that's not very reasonable for the average Joe who just wants to protect their mp3 collection. What has any of this got to do with you?
Plenty actually. In the first place, don't store anything in a computer format that can be more effectively stored in nonelectronic form. Except perhaps as a backup of *that* media. Books are a prime example. If your computer goes down and you need to refer to a manual to get it back up again that manual is worthless if *it's on the computer.* ( And did I mention that books have no EULA? That's a *feature*)
That isn't to say that you shouldn't have ebooks and CD based manuals, but that those are convieniences and backups. The *books* themselves are the primary data.
Don't rely on your PDA to keep critical phone numbers and such. You WILL drop it. It WILL get stolen, or have its batteries run out, or go through a *hidden* metal detector.
*Write them down* and carry the written copy. If anything happens to your PDA you're still good to go, and restore the data to your PDA/computer when time permits, like when you're just bouncing around your Days Inn room wondering what the hell there is to do in this God forsaken town anyway.
What to do about all that data that is inherently digital, or at least more viable in digital form?
Did you ever hear the phrase " The net is the computer"? Just for this once take it seriously. I've been a strong opponent of storing data on the net. Drives are big. That's why we're having this discussion in the first place, isn't it? They hold a LOT of data. Why put your sensitive personal data, data that, perhaps, could someday cause you considerable grief if it fell into the "wrong" hands ( and this doens't *necessarily* mean the FBI. Ever get divorced? Trust me, you don't want some things to be recoverable from an outside party) on the net? It makes no sense. The net is a *party line* capable of permenantly recording everything that goes across it. Certain documents belong ONLY on paper, or your own *secure* machine, or in your lawyers safe. Period. Please, take this advice very, VERY seriously. You may well have reason to thank me for it some day no matter how doofey you think it is now.
Do likewise, and it wouldn't hurt to encryt your whole bloody drive either. Just in case.
But all of that being said, do I *really* need a local backup of my files downloaded from the Gutenberg Project? They're already out there on the net. They're mirrored all the hell over the place. Someone else is already taking the trouble to swap drives, swap tapes and transfer the files to up to date media. It only takes a few minutes to download the whole bloody lot. If you lose your net connection, even permenantly, you know 20 other people who can grab it for you, and a half dozen locations where you can use a public computer to get the stuff. Even if all the mirrors to down at once, and *stay* down, you can always go on usenet and ask around. You'll find what you're looking for.
For this kind of noncritical data plastered widely across the net that you can, in all probability, recover faster from the net than from local backup ( remember, it takes *time* to find physical media, load it up, find the files you're looking for, and transfer them), simply *don't bother.*
It isn't worth it. Even if it takes slightly *longer* to do it this way than from local backup. The time you save in making the backups and keeping them up to date more than makes up for any trouble.
And remember, this sort of full backup is *disaster* recovery. Like if your house burns down/your entire system gets infected with a virus/your HD crashes/your dog eats your homework. In this sort of situation the small amount of time it takes to recover from the net is peanuts compared to the other things you're going waste time and money on. So don't sweat it.
If you take care of your system properly most of these things aren't even likely to occur,except the new HD that goes down after only one week. For the most part a *full* backup is mental insurance that your data can be recovered * somehow.* If it's on the net, and it's something like the Gutenberg Project, it's going to be there. Relax.
So, what about your mp3 collection? That took you years to build, and would take you weeks to rebuild, and maybe the RIAA will win out and the stuff will become unavailable. Well, for these you want to back them up to CD anyway, so you can play them in alternative devices, make copies for your friends, etc., right? Well there ya go. Don't bother putting this stuff on tape or anything. You've got it already. Make two copies, give one to a friend. That friend now has copies to play, and you've got off site backup. Have the friend do the same thing with HIS collection and you're BOTH protected. Well looky here, in certain cases and situations socialism DOES work ( much to the RIAA's distress).
The same goes for image files. It took you years to build up the pr0n collection. Some of it from pay sources that have gone *poof*, or that the FBI closed down. All of it from all over the place in any case. It would take you weeks to rebuild it, if you could do it at all. So sure, back this stuff local, but again, do it to do some form of digital disc ( CD or DVD). Find a friend with the same taste in pr0n and do the same as you did with the mp3's.
Repeat if you have video material.
Now take all of your system discs. OS stuff, Quake, Photoshop, etc., and copy them. Store the *original* offsite, maybe with a friend ( you do *have* friends don't you? I forgot to ask. A lawyer's safe or safe deposit box can substitute) or family member. Don't forget to write any applicable install codes *directly on* the copy.
Now if the worst comes to worst you can simply reinstall everything. You might even find that half of this shit you never even *bother* reinstalling. Go figure.
So now what are you left with? Surprisingly little in all likelihood. You're going to want to back up all of your system settings. Sure, it won't take you that long to reinstall the system itself, but the settings took you ages to do and you don't even remember them all. Back 'em up. Obvious data like your resume and thesis, software projects, financial data, Quake player data, etc..
Ok, what's left? For the average home user, and even the not so average, you may be surprised to discover you have now * done it all.*
Wait a minute, what happened to the traditional full backup?
Well, the thing you have to remember is that a *home* computer and *business* computer are inherently different when it comes to backup. When a business computer goes down it has to go back up NOW! And it has to go back up *exactly* as it was when it went down. This need makes all of those tapes backing up everying in full, right down to the most common thing they could just grab from the web, absolutely and completely necessary.
A *home* computer isn't like that. Your house has just burned down or your HD has crashed and you need to be sure you can recover everything, or even only *most* of it, within a reasonable time frame at minimal trouble and *expense.* Tapes, tape drives, and full backups all the time are, in and of themselves, trouble and expense. All against a future disaster that might well never come. You don't need to do it NOW. You just need to be able to rest assured that you *can* do it.
To hell with the full backup. Reinstall your OS and apps and restore just your settings. Sure, it takes a little longer, but that time goes against all that tape swapping and storing. You might actually come out ahead.
Now just download the stuff you can as time permits or as you need them. Get your stuff back from your friend if your local backups went up in smoke with your house ( you can live without Houses of the Holy for two days, honest, and even the jpeg of Natalie Portman's head Photoshopped onto Pamela Anderson's naked body) and you're back in business.
Now you're just left with incremental backups. For some people this might have to be done every day. For some they can legitimately wonder if every month is really just being paranoid.
Ok, so you really, really, REALLY just don't feel comfortable without a full backup? Maybe you're just the sort who really thinks he *can't* live without Houses of the Holy for even one extra minute he doesn't have to?
Ok, NOW the idea of mirroring drives for a backup makes sense because you aren't relying on it as your *primary* means of backup. You're only going to use it if your house burns down *tomorrow*, not in five years and in such a case it could save you some time. Hey, if it rows your boat, go for it Sparky.
I might even end up doing it that way myself.
KFG
The difference between an asshole and a troll is that an asshole is being, in some way, well, an asshole. A jerk. Being an asshole means that you have done something negative that * didn't need to be done that way.* Like swearing a lot making a point which didn't require the swearing for the point to be made. Your content was valid, even perceptive. But you were an asshole in the way you said it. You were *gratuitously* abusive.
The original poster who wanted to mod you troll was at least right in that respect in respect that some trolls should moddable UP though.
Some trolls are art and deserve to be respected and recognized as such. Right now we can only use funny for that, which isn't always accurate. A true troll has a *point.* To elicit response. Sometimes that response is baited in a way that isn't just art, it's *high* art.
Read the letters and short essays of Mark Twain. Many of them some of the finest trolls every penned.
Swift was a master of the troll. All of Gulliver's Travels is nothing but one massive, and brilliant, troll, and was treated as such at the time.
By the way, the difference between a troll and a flamebait is that the flamebait is a post specifically designed to illicit responses from assholes.
KFG
got modded as a troll too, even though, for once, the first post was on topic, mildly funny, actually had a *point*, and was labeled as facetious in the body of the text.
Go figure. Neither you nor he deserved to be modded as trolls. Troll is overused because it gets used as a catch all for various posts that the moderator finds offensive. It's perfectly possible to be offensive to someone without being a troll or flamebaiting. A subtlty that some of the moderators haven't grasped. In fact, I'm not sure some of them have even bothered to check the *definition* of the world troll and flamebait.
So, in short, you did not serve as an example of why we need the troll moderation.
You serve as an example of why we need an *asshole* moderation.
I hope that makes you feel better, have a nice day.
KFG
because you thought using the bandsaw should just be "intuitive?"
By the way, you're right, Linux isn't intuitive, neither is Windows. People have to learn Windows. They use, ummmmm, books to do it. Go into Borders and look at all the books on Windows explaining how "intuitive" it is.
"Ok, now click this, pull down that, go over to the other thing, don't ask us what it's called, we don't know either, now stick out your left elbow and scratch the cat with your right foot and chant . . . "Please don't crash again.""
Yeah, intuitive. No book reading needed here. The Video Professor must be some sort of philanthropist paying for all those ads, just for something to occupy his time, because "Windows is intuitive."
This is the single biggest load of malarky that anyone ever says about Windows, or Macs for that matter. Windows and Mac OS's are *learned.* They only seem intuitive because you've already learned them. My 70 year old mom learned KDE alongside her Mac OS8. She prefers KDE.
It's "intuitive." Or at least it was *after she had learned it for a while.*
*Linux* just works. Most of the Windows books at Borders, however, are about how to make Windows work despite itself because it's "intuitive."
Linux *at the command line* is arcane, but just works. Always.
English is arcane too but most one year olds manage to pick it up. They even resort to reading books by the time they're five or so. You should read one too. Maybe that install wouldn't have taken so long if you'ld read the bandsaw manual and had both hands to work with. My last install took about half an hour and consisted of putting the CD in the tray and clicking "Ok, whatever" a couple of times.
Wish I could do that with Windows, but the Goddamned wizards puke on drivers all the time and keep asking for second floppies that don't exist because "Windows just works" and is "intuitive." To uninstall a program cleanly I had to hack the "intuitive" registry and to make the "Start" button do something as simple as change its label I had to hack the *binary code* of the GUI shell itself because Windows "just works" and is "intuitive."
But at least people seem to have "that kind of patience" for this stuff.
Well, actually, they don't. A study about stress in the workplace revealed that the majority of stress in the workplace these days came from their computers not working right, computers running Windows, which "just works" and is "intuitive."
Am I anti MS? Damned straight. After more than a decade of being a loyal customer they damned well made me that way and they damned well deserve it.
Am I anti Windows? No. I'm writing this under W98 right now.
But it DON'T "just work." And it AIN'T "intuitive."
Tell you what, use your remaining hand to crack a a book. I'd recommend you start with Vonnegut's "Welcome to the Monkey House." From there go on to reading the bloody manual. It might save your remaining hand. And get your kids bike assembled in time for Christmas-WITHOUT any "spare parts" left over.
KFG
I'd rather be a sysadmim.
KFG
Unfortunately I wasted a week with maddog's Dummies book. Jon's a great guy, but a computer manual for novices author he ain't.
Then I got Running Linux. I was up and going in no time and years later I still refer to it. At this point I don't recommend *any* other book for the newbie. There's no fluff in this book. It's the straight dope, dense but completely readable, technical but not over the newbie's head (at least if they're the sort who's eyes don't glaze the second you say "compiler," but I don't think of The Screen Savers viewers in that catagory), more in depth where it needs to be than any other newbie manual I've ever seen while at the same time running a broad overview of everything you need to at least hear about ( and refering you to other great O'Reilly books that cover the subject in greater depth).
Throw in Linux in a Nutshell and the Armadillo book ( Essential System Administration) and you've pretty much covered everything you'll ever need to keep a basic Linux system ( or network) up and running in any enviroment from your home desktop to the small corporation data center.
These three books are the grand triumvirate. The first to buy, the first to read and the first you'll turn to when all others have failed you in some way. All others are but shadows on the wall of the cave.
Beyond these three the first book a newbie is going to want is a dedicated manual for his choice of text editor, that would be vi of course. Running Linux gives an overview and In a Nutshell gives a reference but nothing beats a dedicated book for learning. Once you know it pretty well you'll keep it on the shelf but really only need In a Nutshell for a quick reference. O'Reilly wins again here with their Learning the vi Editor.
Ok, ok, some wrong thinking people are going to want to go with emacs instead. For them O'Reilly has Learning GNU emacs.
Congratulations, your viewers have just gone from newbies to system admin gurus in just four short books.
Here's where I step away from the crowd a bit. I'm a firm believer that any serious Linux newbie should do a little programing right off the bat, and do it in C, on the command line. O'Reilly loses here. The two volume C For Dummies books are the ones to grab. They're the best Dummies books I've seen. They're the best newbie intro to programing books I've seen for that matter. Not for the hardcore geek, but complete, understandable and fun. They'll have grandma writting her own prank commands in a couple of hours and LIKE it!
Now we've gone up to a full library of Linux books, all the books most people will ever need, including C programing manuals, and we haven't even used up a foot of bookshelf space yet so I guess throw in the Camel book for good measure.
Done, your viewers are now Linux grandmasters and *still* have a couple inches short of a foot of bookshelf space left they can fill with whatever special interest book catches their fancy from what they learned in Running Linux.
What can you do on the show to impress people with Linux? Damned if I know. The most impressive things about Linux aren't visual. In fact the *most* impressive thing about Linux is *philosophy.* Not in the philosphical sense itself, but what that philosophy *means* to the average user. No one really explains that well.
vim doesn't break. vim doesn't change to an incompatible file format to force you to download the latest version. All files written in vim are readable by all versions of vim and *all other text/word processors.* No lock in, no lock out. Ever. If the current maintainers lose interest, because it is open source, *any* programer with the interest can just pick it up and start maintaining it-without even having to ask permission (although this is good form), let alone spend years with a room full of lawyers to make the arrangements. If you don't like something about vim and are willing to put in the work you can bloody well change it yourself, at will, again without even asking permission. YOUR vim is yours to do with as you please.
And because all of this is possible with a Linux system running GPLed software tens of thousands of programers are working at it around the clock, so even if *you* never touch a line of code you directly benifit from its openness.
This is the true power of Linux, this is the part that's truely impressive. You can't show it. You have to explain it. Explain what being ope *means,* and means to *them.*
And what it means is freedom.
What feature is more important than that? Can MS or Apple match Linux, *feature for feature?*
KFG
anybody who has ever had access to the internet is declared guilty of something, somewhere.
Film at eleven.
KFG
Guns just make bullets go really fast.
You ever try walking into a Seven-Eleven and saying," Ok buddy, give me all the money or I'll push this bullet against your forhead"?
Trust me, they just stand there with that "deer in the headlights" look on their faces.
KFG
and almost wrote "even if that "information" is in the form of emotional content." That's why I put "information" in quotes.
I was not railing against design or art. I come from a family of artists, commercial graphic designers and marketers. My stepfather was the Sales Development Manager for all of GE Broadcasting Company and my mother has been in the Guggenheim.
I know my way around art, and I know my way around design. I've been surrounded by *good* examples of both since before birth.
Yes, good and bad are subjective, but they're also subject to "market" approval. If your market is strictly those who dig black semaphore fonts on navy blue backgrounds than your page sucks to me because I'm not your market.
If your "market" is anyone interested in your opinion on something than the above is bad because the majority of the people you are trying to reach turn away in disgust. You are not communicating with them. Communication is a *two way* interaction.
This is bad design. It does not communicate what you intended to whom you intended. You have not engaged them in the discourse.
I'm sorry, but I'll stand by my statement that most of the web sucks because it does not communicate *what* it intends to *whom* it intends and print has followed right along in its footsteps.
Of course I'm making the possibly invalid assumption the "intent" is something more than to "communicate" the money out of your pocket into theirs. That's a different topic though.
KFG
I was talking to the case at hand, the small outfit running old hardware and software from financial distress.
:)
Having outgrown that phase I thought I was through with all that, but divorce has proven me wrong and it looks like I'll have to go through it again.
Ok, I'm exagerating. I got left with my personally assembled Athlon 900. As far as computing goes I'm good to go with a start over from scratch one man operation.
No, there is no such available add-in that I'm aware of. Most of the pieces are out there, but you'll have to track them down and assemble them yourself, and of course take the time to debug. Frankly right now it's probably quicker to do it from scratch than find the templates on the web.
Personally I've never let a seceratary near a spreadsheet, or write checks. My bookeepers need no training in them. Invoices are handled through the word processor, which I've never had anyone kick up a fuss over either. For a while I used StarOffice 5.2 on Linux and people in the office didn't even know they weren't using a Windows theme. That was the one great thing about the otherwise stupid desktop interface. Maybe I've just had better luck with employees.
Or maybe it's because they've actually seen me take off my tie and unstop and clean a clogged toilet myself when they were doing more valuable work that makes them more willing to go with the flow. I don't know. When I tell *my* employees they're going to train in new software they generally respond, " Cool, that makes me more marketable at your expense." Some employers might rail at this. I love it. As the boss I've never figured out why I should balk at training my people in getting things done the way *I* think is right. I consider it time and money very well spent and I prefer sharp people working for me, even if it *isn't* always to my advantage. I'm smart. Dull people bore me. I don't like my working enviroment to bore me. Want a job with me? Come to the interview with copy of Brave New World under one arm and Euripides - in Greek, under the other. Then be prepared to work as hard as I pay you, and I won't expect you to work any harder.
I make money to buy things I want. Period. I want my business the way I want it. I spend money on it. I rarely do so foolishly.
Except I did buy Quickbooks. That was foolish. I already had MS Office and Star Office. I already knew accounting. My bookeepers already knew accounting. My Front Office people already knew word processing. Piece of cake. I've never been big enough that *I* wasn't the "personel dept." and I never want to be.
Look, there is no "perfect" solution. Quickbooks is just more imperfect that any homegrown solution I've found and with homegrown, Open Source, I'm beholden to nobody. Every penny you spend training your people with Open Office goes into *your people's* skill set. Not Microsoft's or Intuit's coffers. With that comes having to take the time and responsiblility to develop it personally. If I shied from personal responsibility I wouldn't be in business in first place and the bloody janitor would unclog the toilet, it wouldn't be my job.
Maybe I should take on the task of writing up some generic "Quickbooks" Office Suite based workalike and release it open source. I don't know if I'm the right man for the job though. It always comes down to something like " How the hell do *I* know what you want your invoices to look like? *YOU* know. You have the tools, use them."
Just the way I'm made up I guess. I guess that's why I'm in business. I like to do things for myself.
KFG
And as I also said, it depends on the school, with the implication that that meant it's location.
In LA it's a different story and I've actually got a friend who enrolled in UC Berkley just for the cheap student housing. It was the only way he could afford to live in the SF area at all.
For people who live in such a situation I can comiserate, but only offer this advice:
*Going to college is your first big chance to get the hell out!*
I'm not being snide. It's the one time in your life, period, where you can go damed near anywhere in the world with social acceptability, merely on a personal whim. Maybe even get someone else ( your parents or even the taxpayers) to cover the expenses for you. Take advantage of it if you can.
KFG
was a self evident axiom. The inmates have clearly taken over the asylum. Still, that's the beauty of the web. You're free to make your own webpage, even a shitty one.
However, and no inate disrespect to your friend, but her problem isn't her "artistic vision." It's her arrogance. It's the same sort of arrogance that thinks what's on TV should meet her standards and refuses to accept the argument that she could just change the channel. Well, the arrogant "artiste" is a cultural sterotype. Some stereotypes are more stereotypical than others though. This seems to be one of them.
It doesn't have to be that way though. I know. I am closely aquainted with nationally known fine artists ( Hell, one of them bore me), some of even of relative fame, and one of the things that's always struck me about some of the best artists is that they fully understand that *their* artistic vision doesn't mean crap. Sooner or later they are going to *show* their "vision" to someone else. That someone else, like it or not, is the final arbiter of what their vision "is."
"Artistes" who so vehemently defend their artistic vision in the manner of your arrogant friend aren't artists. They're masturbaters with oil pastels. They're making artistic love to the one they love best, themselves. They'll even state that explicitly if prodded, although they have no idea that's what they're doing. You see, if asked they'll proudly state they are engaged in "self expression."
Well fine. Go ahead with your artistic therapy or Turette's Syndrome. See if care though.
Your "self expression" only becomes *art* when *I* look at it though, and I'm only willing to engage in the artistic dialog ( written as in poetry or visual imagery as in a painting), and it *IS* a dialog, if you are speaking to me. You must, at some point, not only recognize my existence, you must respect it.
You want to tell me your vision? Fine, but in exchange you have to listen to mine. Art (as opposed to talking/painting to yourself) is an *exchange.*
Your artist friend hasn't figured this out yet. If she never does she is unlikely to ever be a great artist, or human being.
Of course that doesn't mean she won't be a "sucessful" artist. There are plenty of people with money who love to be abused artistically. Go figure.
In the meantime what most of us will do when we go to her page, instead of appreciating her art ( which she may find desirable), we'll just think, "Well, that's annoying," and go away.
What's more, no matter how good her art was we'll think of her *art* as annoying, even though it was just her presentation of it.
Mondrian dispensed with the frame. Your friend seems to want to do the same, but doesn't realize that what she's *actually* done is replace it with an annoying and distracting frame because she doesn't understand her medium. Also not a good thing for an artist.
If she payed attention to her audience she'd already know this.
A webpage is *explictly* intended to be viewed by others. Why else did they bother to put the page on the web? Ignoring your audience, or outright disdaining them, is just plain doofey.
And did I mention it's arrogant?
With regards to accessability I have such an arrogant friend too. When I've suggested he could make his webpage ( an otherwise very fine one) a little more accessable to the blind, or even just Netscape users, he has replied, in essence, "Fuck 'em, they're only about 10% of the web population."
Don't be an arrogant web designer. Respect your audience. Otherwise, why the hell should they respect you or what you have to say?
10% of the web population has already told my friend, " Well fuck you too buddy," without ever reading one word of his *opinion* driven webpage.
Now that's what I call getting the word out, eh?
KFG
I mean, where else but Slashdot could you find hot grits down petrified Natalie Portman's pants?
You don't find that sort of variety just anywhere.
KFG
Thank you. I was afraid no one would have the guts considering the last sentence. I thank you. My friend thanks you in absentia. He thought the whole thing was pretty funny too, even while he was dying.
That's why he was my friend.
KFG
these print designers are going back to their magazines and recasting them as "webpages."
The average magazine these days is mostly design and hardly any print. What's more, the design *sucks.*
I want my "old fashioned" words and pictures back. Take your design and stuff it.
What's more, I fully agree with you. On an actual webpage I want words and pictures *I* control the display of. Once again, take your "design" and stuff it - twice over.
The function of a magazine or webpage is not to be a medium for distributing "design."
*Design* is a medium for distributing information. If the "design" does not *enhance* the information in some way it's worse than a failure, it's an impediment, no matter how sucessful it may be as "art." Hell, even ART is supposed to be a medium for "information."
So inform. Don't "design."
One of the things that makes the web so powerful as a tool for distributing information is that it *allows* the user to manipulate the "design" in a way that makes the information more accesable to him/her. That's the whole bloody point!
Forcing me to read your semaphore font with black text on a tetured navy blue background doesn't make me marvel at your innovative "design." It makes me scream and go to another page.
Accesability? Hell, a good chunk of the web isn't accessable to *anyone* because it's the "designer's" brain that's disabled.
And they're taking print with them.
Feh!
KFG
chose to live on campus, and please note that my argument for living off campus was considerably longer and better reasoned, as well as my own opinion, rather than quoting someone else's. Something that Thoreau himself always admired in a person.
I only added the notation in the form of "journalistic fairness."
And for some ( as it was for Thoreau, and I don't think ANYONE can accuse old H.D. of being toadying to clique acceptence or class structure. He *is* the author of Walden, as well as Civil Disobedience and Life Without Principal after all) it *is* a valid point.
Not for you. Not for me. But for some.
KFG