I had no idea that CL/DM was selling for so much. I just checked my shelf, I bought a copy for $18.95 in 1992 at the local university bookstore - the sticker's still on it.
I wonder why it's so expensive? The book is terrible, virtually unreadable. Ted Nelson is a nutcase by all reports.
Seriously... I checked out this book in my university library in oh, like 1987 or so (because I had heard a lot of the hype about Xanadu) and my general impression was "this is really stupid." It's got to be the most absurdly over-hyped book ever.
I call BS on the usability arguement, sorry. My Creative Zen Nano is just as easy to use as my daughter's iPod if not easier. The only reason iPods sell as well as they do is name and hype.
Maybe (hopefully) things are different these days, but the last time I looked at mp3 players (a year or two ago), it was pretty obvious why the ipod was so popular: all the models from other companies were (1) really ugly, (2) kind of flimsy feeling (apple used aluminum, others used painted plastic, usually with tacky chrome-looking plastic accents), (3) had awful UIs (hard to press and badly placed buttons etc), and (this is the part that amazes me), (4) more expensive than the ipod for the same amount of storage.
It was really kind of surreal, like the other manufacturers were living in some sort of dreamland where they had no competition and people would buy any old junk they released as long as it had the string "mp3" in its name...
No they don't. In real cities, people don't need cars at all (I don't know for sure whether Montreal is a real city, but from what I hear, it's not too bad).
Apple is clearly a bit confused by this concept (being headquartered in Cupertino, I suppose it's understandable).
Sorry folks but the answer is building green cars not in banning parking spaces.
No. The fundamental problem with cars is that they suck up space, and "green cars" do absolutely nothing to address that.
Python is a much cleaner language than both PHP and Ruby
...said egrinake, the God that Decides Which Language that Rocks More.
Seriously.
I've seen a lot of people rag on PHP, but ruby is a fine language. Only a python fanboy would call python "much cleaner" than ruby (come to think of it though, one area where python does win big is in sheer quantity of fanboys...:-).
Daniel first announced his Tux2 filesystem to the world in 2000. Makes you go "Hmmmmm" doesn't it?
No, it makes me go "Sigh, another case of our broken patent system (and the greedy corporations who abuse it) stifling progress rather than helping it."
Er, well, interfaces can be horribly designed, full of unnecessary legacy crap and artifacts of machine dependencies that nobody in their right mind would have let leak into an interface (but did). Worse, such the painful details of such insanely awful interfaces are often barely documented, if at all.
These attributes tend to to make code supporting such an interface buggy and slow.
I dunno, Eclipse is certainly bloated, but I run it on a 450MHz PIII system with 512MB of RAM, and it's perfectly usable (debugging fairly hefty programs). The only thing I found I had to disable was the "method completion" (whatever you call it). [This is on a debian system with a 2.6 kernel BTW; less sophisticated systems like windows might need more resources.]
The version of java you use to run it seems to make big different btw -- I used Sun's java 6/1.6/whatever, but earlier I accidentally tried to run it using GCJ (the java version of gcc), and that was completely unusable, mostly because my system tried to swap itself to death.
Basically, you need a target to not only know that there is a word "Engage", but that is savvy enough to understand the play on words associated with it here
Gee, I'm not sure if it's my nerdishness or my lack of savvy, but I always associated "N-Gage" with "N gauge", the model railroad size (below HO)! [The association even kind of makes sense -- N-gauge railroads are tiny, jewel-like things...]
account for franchises like "Turok - Dinosaur Hunter" or "Outpost." These games where horrible, and sold horribly too, yet they got sequels, and in Turok's case, several!
Huh? The original Turok game for the N64 was an absolutely excellent game, and sold well because of this. That's why there were several sequels (which by all accounts got increasingly bad; I've only played the original though).
Do some research, perhaps? This is not mysterious sekret info...
Standard C library functions read/etc/passwd for very innocuous reasons -- for instance, finding the name of the user.
Unfortunately many people are far quicker to cry and scream in public about things they don't understand, than put in a bit of effort trying to understand what's going on first.
Yup, same sort of thing on the Airbus (transpacific Seattle->Narita, so presumably one of the larger models) I flew on: my seat-back entertainment system was acting really weird, and then suddenly the words "Segmentation violation", and various error messages from "libSDL", appeared on top of the (now frozen) movie I had been watching!
That was always my take on the Chinese Room. The guy inside following the script isn't being intelligent, the script isn't intelligent, but as you said, the whole room + cards + rules is intelligent.
Yup, mine too. What I thought was weird was that none of the rebuttals (by some very smart people) published alongside Searle's original article seemed to make that (to my mind, pretty obvious) point...
Frankly XP was simply a better version of 2000. Yes, prettier. More user friendly. I won't say the same for Vista. At least in it's current incarnation it is not a slightly improved/prettier version of XP. It's sluggish and annoying. It's one step forward and 2 steps back. More like an improved 3.1. Maybe after SP1 comes out we will see something shine. I wouldn't give up. I just wouldn't recommend businesses upgrade right now.
I only used Vista for the first time this last weekend, on a reasonably hefty machine (Core 2 Duo, 1GB of RAM), with a fairly vanilla setup (though the owner had changed the interface to "classic mode"), and it was stunningly slow. It seemed to take half an hour to fully boot, and for a long time even the most basic tasks -- e.g. mousing to the program list in the Start menu! -- would take ages, with long and visible pauses during such events as drawing the menus.
What on earth was MS thinking when they released this?!?
The reason Mitsubishi Bank (now Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi after they merged with Tokyo Citybank) is one of the worlds largest banks is that all the Mitsubishi companies still do all their banking there.
Note that it's now "Mitsubishi-Tokyo UFJ Bank" because a couple of years ago The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi merged with UFJ bank, which was itself the result of the merger of a bunch of smaller banks (including the quite large Sanwa bank).
It seems only a matter of time before there's only one bank in Japan, with a really long and severely hyphenated name... [Apparently "MUFJ" (as they style themselves) is already the largest bank in the world!]
The reality of the situation is that once you have a serious terrorist attack or two on your soil then everything gets clamped down a bit more. No one wants to be the person who lets the next would-be terrorist into the country.
I don't think it has much to do with terrorism actually (except to the extent that "terrorism" is the current administration's general purpose excuse for just about everything).
It's really easy to get a U.S. tourist or student visa, and they're every bit as useful to a potential terrorist as a work visa. The U.S.'s stupidity with regard to work visas has far more to do with domestic politics ("protecting jobs" is a vote getter -- and most of the people who are thus disadvantaged can't vote!).
[Other countries do the same thing of course, but in my experience (having worked abroad in several different countries), the U.S. is just worse: in many first-world countries, if the company really wants to hire you, it's a pretty sure bet you'll be able to get a work visa/permit (there are typically tough sounding rules, but companies know how to deal with them); in the U.S. it's much more of a crapshoot, regardless of what the company does.]
by the time the Color Mac was out PC graphics were on par with the Mac
When?
I remember seeing an IBM demo in around 1986 of their (at that point apparently unreleased) "VGA" technology, and being amazed how real the image looked -- and a large part of the reason is that until then PC color graphics absolutely sucked donkey balls. As I recall, color macs showed up around the same time or perhaps a slight bit later, and the software support on the mac for color (and graphics in general) was of course far, far superior: the mac could actually use the new color and highish-res graphics in the interface, whereas the PC was still running DOS and could only kinda sorta use the new tech if you happened to find an app which specifically targetted it.
[Disclaimer: I've never owned a mac, nor a PC running a MS operating system.]
on the average SF weather is beautiful. The weather in Seattle is quite literally depressing - to the point of it being clinical (in combination with the lack of sunlight.)
I've never quite understand why people say this. I grew up about half and half in the SF area (when I was a younger child) and near Seattle (when I was a teenager), and the Seattle weather was really nice for the most part -- pretty sunny in the summer but not oppressively hot, with very mild winters. I'd describe Seattle weather as being "gentle." I found SF almost more depressing since the winter in SF is essentially one long period of rain (Seattle gets some snow, though nothing insane like the eastern US).
Seattle also has nice mountains (and the sound!) around it for doing outdoors stuff, and those things seem a bit more accessible than they are in SF.
OTOH: compared to NYC, Seattle is has a very "provincial" feel, and frankly is kind of boring... and that's Seattle -- the Redmond/Bellevue area (where NOA actually is) is an awful, awful place, the epitome of out-of-control sprawl and depressing generic suburban landscape: dreadfully boring, and yet not relaxing or pleasant. I can completely understand why they'd want to move a marketing department out of Redmond to a city with a pulse.
what in the fuck are 8 year olds doing wandering about in the malls and other places without a parent/guardian in the first place?
Huh? Kids have always wandered around on their own in "familiar territory", past the age of 6 or so (it's a bit depressing to think of a mall as familiar territory, but it's certainly true these days for a large portion of the population). Has American society become so insanely dysfunctional that this isn't possible anymore?!?
- these people saw a backslash ONCE in their lives while using DOS about twenty years ago, and now every time I tell them an address, it's "Is that forward slash or backslash?" This is usually followed by the question "Which one is slash?" God damn you, Paul Allen.
Whoa, the backslash is Paul Allen's fault?!?
I used to think of him as the kinder gentler MS founder, but,...surely he's going to hell for that one...
The unsprung weight has increased by less than 2 kg over the original standard Mini. This has been achieved in the first part by removal of the disc, brake caliper, half shafts and cv joints. Secondly we have designed a very light motor and electronics system. As a comparison the power electronics (included inside the wheel) is around 20 times lighter than the lightest currently available alternative! The motor is around 5 times lighter than the closest rival. So we have a 350v 400A continuously rated (0ver 600A peak rating for a few seconds, although this has so far not been used!) system which weighs less than 24kg total.
One assumes this could be improved a bit further too.
Their purpose was to provide you with well-developed characters in a solid plot, which isn't typically done well in more open-ended RPGs. In open-ended RPGs, you almost necessarily have to skimp on interactions and relationships between characters,
In theory I love the idea of plot/character-driven games, if they actually have good plots and appealing characters, but man, the characters in a typical JRPG (and Square is a major offender here) are so insanely stereotypical,, and the plots so painfully melodramatic and cheesy... (Subtlety, thy name isn't Square!)
They are typically kind of fun to start out playing, but there always seems to be a point where I think "my god, how much time have I just sunk into this mediocre retread?!?" I find that after playing for a while, it's the basic gameplay mechanics, not the story (given the story is inevitably crap with a pretty wrapper) that end up saving the game or damning it.
It's just there hasn't (for me anyway) been a *perfect* application yet. The Sony eReader came close,
Huh? The Sony e-reader was awful -- super low-speed display update, unpleasantly low contrast, weird color (monochrome) display, clunky user interface ill-fitted to the device, typical sony nutcase infatuation with drm, etc.
It seemed pretty clear that they only sold the thing because some department needed to fill its "products brought to market" quota...
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I had no idea that CL/DM was selling for so much. I just checked my shelf, I bought a copy for $18.95 in 1992 at the local university bookstore - the sticker's still on it.
I wonder why it's so expensive? The book is terrible, virtually unreadable. Ted Nelson is a nutcase by all reports.
Seriously... I checked out this book in my university library in oh, like 1987 or so (because I had heard a lot of the hype about Xanadu) and my general impression was "this is really stupid." It's got to be the most absurdly over-hyped book ever.
I call BS on the usability arguement, sorry. My Creative Zen Nano is just as easy to use as my daughter's iPod if not easier. The only reason iPods sell as well as they do is name and hype.
Maybe (hopefully) things are different these days, but the last time I looked at mp3 players (a year or two ago), it was pretty obvious why the ipod was so popular: all the models from other companies were (1) really ugly, (2) kind of flimsy feeling (apple used aluminum, others used painted plastic, usually with tacky chrome-looking plastic accents), (3) had awful UIs (hard to press and badly placed buttons etc), and (this is the part that amazes me), (4) more expensive than the ipod for the same amount of storage.
It was really kind of surreal, like the other manufacturers were living in some sort of dreamland where they had no competition and people would buy any old junk they released as long as it had the string "mp3" in its name...
People need to park in order to buy.
No they don't. In real cities, people don't need cars at all (I don't know for sure whether Montreal is a real city, but from what I hear, it's not too bad).
Apple is clearly a bit confused by this concept (being headquartered in Cupertino, I suppose it's understandable).
Sorry folks but the answer is building green cars not in banning parking spaces.
No. The fundamental problem with cars is that they suck up space, and "green cars" do absolutely nothing to address that.
Er, note that I made no attempt to claim the inverse to be true, I was simply decrying the original (silly) claim...
Seriously.
I've seen a lot of people rag on PHP, but ruby is a fine language. Only a python fanboy would call python "much cleaner" than ruby (come to think of it though, one area where python does win big is in sheer quantity of fanboys...
Daniel first announced his Tux2 filesystem to the world in 2000. Makes you go "Hmmmmm" doesn't it?
No, it makes me go "Sigh, another case of our broken patent system (and the greedy corporations who abuse it) stifling progress rather than helping it."
How can an interface be buggy and slow?
Er, well, interfaces can be horribly designed, full of unnecessary legacy crap and artifacts of machine dependencies that nobody in their right mind would have let leak into an interface (but did). Worse, such the painful details of such insanely awful interfaces are often barely documented, if at all.
These attributes tend to to make code supporting such an interface buggy and slow.
I dunno, Eclipse is certainly bloated, but I run it on a 450MHz PIII system with 512MB of RAM, and it's perfectly usable (debugging fairly hefty programs). The only thing I found I had to disable was the "method completion" (whatever you call it). [This is on a debian system with a 2.6 kernel BTW; less sophisticated systems like windows might need more resources.]
The version of java you use to run it seems to make big different btw -- I used Sun's java 6/1.6/whatever, but earlier I accidentally tried to run it using GCJ (the java version of gcc), and that was completely unusable, mostly because my system tried to swap itself to death.
Basically, you need a target to not only know that there is a word "Engage", but that is savvy enough to understand the play on words associated with it here
Gee, I'm not sure if it's my nerdishness or my lack of savvy, but I always associated "N-Gage" with "N gauge", the model railroad size (below HO)! [The association even kind of makes sense -- N-gauge railroads are tiny, jewel-like things...]
account for franchises like "Turok - Dinosaur Hunter" or "Outpost." These games where horrible, and sold horribly too, yet they got sequels, and in Turok's case, several!
Huh? The original Turok game for the N64 was an absolutely excellent game, and sold well because of this. That's why there were several sequels (which by all accounts got increasingly bad; I've only played the original though).
Do some research, perhaps? This is not mysterious sekret info...
Standard C library functions read
Unfortunately many people are far quicker to cry and scream in public about things they don't understand, than put in a bit of effort trying to understand what's going on first.
Yup, same sort of thing on the Airbus (transpacific Seattle->Narita, so presumably one of the larger models) I flew on: my seat-back entertainment system was acting really weird, and then suddenly the words "Segmentation violation", and various error messages from "libSDL", appeared on top of the (now frozen) movie I had been watching!
That was always my take on the Chinese Room. The guy inside following the script isn't being intelligent, the script isn't intelligent, but as you said, the whole room + cards + rules is intelligent.
Yup, mine too. What I thought was weird was that none of the rebuttals (by some very smart people) published alongside Searle's original article seemed to make that (to my mind, pretty obvious) point...
Frankly XP was simply a better version of 2000. Yes, prettier. More user friendly. I won't say the same for Vista. At least in it's current incarnation it is not a slightly improved/prettier version of XP. It's sluggish and annoying. It's one step forward and 2 steps back. More like an improved 3.1. Maybe after SP1 comes out we will see something shine. I wouldn't give up. I just wouldn't recommend businesses upgrade right now.
I only used Vista for the first time this last weekend, on a reasonably hefty machine (Core 2 Duo, 1GB of RAM), with a fairly vanilla setup (though the owner had changed the interface to "classic mode"), and it was stunningly slow. It seemed to take half an hour to fully boot, and for a long time even the most basic tasks -- e.g. mousing to the program list in the Start menu! -- would take ages, with long and visible pauses during such events as drawing the menus.
What on earth was MS thinking when they released this?!?
The reason Mitsubishi Bank (now Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi after they merged with Tokyo Citybank) is one of the worlds largest banks is that all the Mitsubishi companies still do all their banking there.
Note that it's now "Mitsubishi-Tokyo UFJ Bank" because a couple of years ago The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi merged with UFJ bank, which was itself the result of the merger of a bunch of smaller banks (including the quite large Sanwa bank).
It seems only a matter of time before there's only one bank in Japan, with a really long and severely hyphenated name... [Apparently "MUFJ" (as they style themselves) is already the largest bank in the world!]
The reality of the situation is that once you have a serious terrorist attack or two on your soil then everything gets clamped down a bit more. No one wants to be the person who lets the next would-be terrorist into the country.
I don't think it has much to do with terrorism actually (except to the extent that "terrorism" is the current administration's general purpose excuse for just about everything).
It's really easy to get a U.S. tourist or student visa, and they're every bit as useful to a potential terrorist as a work visa. The U.S.'s stupidity with regard to work visas has far more to do with domestic politics ("protecting jobs" is a vote getter -- and most of the people who are thus disadvantaged can't vote!).
[Other countries do the same thing of course, but in my experience (having worked abroad in several different countries), the U.S. is just worse: in many first-world countries, if the company really wants to hire you, it's a pretty sure bet you'll be able to get a work visa/permit (there are typically tough sounding rules, but companies know how to deal with them); in the U.S. it's much more of a crapshoot, regardless of what the company does.]
Not to mention that the robots are cute, and they clank, whereas the humans are odoriferous bags of meat.
by the time the Color Mac was out PC graphics were on par with the Mac
When?
I remember seeing an IBM demo in around 1986 of their (at that point apparently unreleased) "VGA" technology, and being amazed how real the image looked -- and a large part of the reason is that until then PC color graphics absolutely sucked donkey balls. As I recall, color macs showed up around the same time or perhaps a slight bit later, and the software support on the mac for color (and graphics in general) was of course far, far superior: the mac could actually use the new color and highish-res graphics in the interface, whereas the PC was still running DOS and could only kinda sorta use the new tech if you happened to find an app which specifically targetted it.
[Disclaimer: I've never owned a mac, nor a PC running a MS operating system.]
on the average SF weather is beautiful. The weather in Seattle is quite literally depressing - to the point of it being clinical (in combination with the lack of sunlight.)
I've never quite understand why people say this. I grew up about half and half in the SF area (when I was a younger child) and near Seattle (when I was a teenager), and the Seattle weather was really nice for the most part -- pretty sunny in the summer but not oppressively hot, with very mild winters. I'd describe Seattle weather as being "gentle." I found SF almost more depressing since the winter in SF is essentially one long period of rain (Seattle gets some snow, though nothing insane like the eastern US).
Seattle also has nice mountains (and the sound!) around it for doing outdoors stuff, and those things seem a bit more accessible than they are in SF.
OTOH: compared to NYC, Seattle is has a very "provincial" feel, and frankly is kind of boring... and that's Seattle -- the Redmond/Bellevue area (where NOA actually is) is an awful, awful place, the epitome of out-of-control sprawl and depressing generic suburban landscape: dreadfully boring, and yet not relaxing or pleasant. I can completely understand why they'd want to move a marketing department out of Redmond to a city with a pulse.
what in the fuck are 8 year olds doing wandering about in the malls and other places without a parent/guardian in the first place?
Huh? Kids have always wandered around on their own in "familiar territory", past the age of 6 or so (it's a bit depressing to think of a mall as familiar territory, but it's certainly true these days for a large portion of the population). Has American society become so insanely dysfunctional that this isn't possible anymore?!?
- these people saw a backslash ONCE in their lives while using DOS about twenty years ago, and now every time I tell them an address, it's "Is that forward slash or backslash?" This is usually followed by the question "Which one is slash?" God damn you, Paul Allen.
...surely he's going to hell for that one...
Whoa, the backslash is Paul Allen's fault?!?
I used to think of him as the kinder gentler MS founder, but,
According to the people who made that cool electric "Mini QED", unsprung weight isn't really a problem with their system:
One assumes this could be improved a bit further too.
Their purpose was to provide you with well-developed characters in a solid plot, which isn't typically done well in more open-ended RPGs. In open-ended RPGs, you almost necessarily have to skimp on interactions and relationships between characters,
In theory I love the idea of plot/character-driven games, if they actually have good plots and appealing characters, but man, the characters in a typical JRPG (and Square is a major offender here) are so insanely stereotypical,, and the plots so painfully melodramatic and cheesy... (Subtlety, thy name isn't Square!)
They are typically kind of fun to start out playing, but there always seems to be a point where I think "my god, how much time have I just sunk into this mediocre retread?!?" I find that after playing for a while, it's the basic gameplay mechanics, not the story (given the story is inevitably crap with a pretty wrapper) that end up saving the game or damning it.
It's just there hasn't (for me anyway) been a *perfect* application yet. The Sony eReader came close,
Huh? The Sony e-reader was awful -- super low-speed display update, unpleasantly low contrast, weird color (monochrome) display, clunky user interface ill-fitted to the device, typical sony nutcase infatuation with drm, etc.
It seemed pretty clear that they only sold the thing because some department needed to fill its "products brought to market" quota...