Rules for Radicals, by Saul Alinsky. Way more applicable for someone just coming into a new situation than anything written by Machiavelli.
While it was written as a handbook for social action, it's all about organizing people. And there are plenty of pragmatic tips on how to get people to work outside of their experience. Also, a good discussion of lines of power and degrees of separation. Basically, if Machiavelli left the dark side he would become Saul Alinsky.
What's disturbing is that the files visible in the Desktop aren't synched completely with the files actually there -- if I wget a file from the command line, it' doesn't show up in the finder. What's up with that?//rp
isometric.spaceninja.com
That's an interesting comment. What real advantage does m/kb have over an analog controller? You can get quite good with those things, and in many ways the cross-pad is better for moving around than the standard ADWS keys.
//rp
Check out Battle Angel, by Yukito Kishiro. Amazing quality animation, great martial-arts sequences, and an interesting philosophical bent... although that comes through more in the Manga than in the Anime.
I think what I like best about Battle Angel is the view that the body is just a tool; the dichotomy between machine and human; and the idea that the real human is somehow immaterial.
Yeah, and if you're going to write a GUI pipe, write a GUI RegEx. I want to drag and drop iconic representations of the various RegEx pattern elements *!$^ to string together my expression.
I also to feed someone else's incomprehensible RegEx into the parser and have it visualise the thing for me.
Does nobody remember the hyperbolic trees slashdot article? An interesting tool for visualising and navigating hierarchies like www sites and filesystems.
Also, coders of apps where the user tries to get into a rhythm and work quickly ( like desktop environments, GIMP, Starcraft...) should get over to doxpara and check out Associative Key Arrays. They're cool.
I don't think any of the new GUI stuff we're seeing with OS X (for example) takes advantage of the processor power of modern machines in new ways. So what if it's transparent and jiggly!! I want to be able to see more and work faster!
MacOS 1-9 all put text under their icons in every piece of Apple software I've seen. The OS X dock, however, is indeed nasty. I hope Apple rethinks it somewhat...//rp
People complaining about the absence of a real revolution are looking for material change. While we do have businesses like Kozmo and HomeGrocer, and print-on-demand publishing, the real change is cultural. How much of your personal schtick comes off the internet? When, before the last 5 years, could we have had a Mahir? Eh?? (not that that's necessarily a good thing...)
That said, I think the change is/has been/will be too gradual to be called a revolution. People only call it a revolution because they haven't been paying attention to what was going on and didn't know what a "Modem" was until 1999. It's an evolution.//rp isometric.spaceninja.com
Who's talking about a hundred years ago? Think fifty to twenty years ago. Let me quote William Upski Wimsatt:
"What's the most fun you guys have on the block?" I asked a racially mixed group of four boys whose parents have just purchased them a portable basketball hoop.
"Three summers ago, we had so much fun. We used to play kickball in the alley every night, and basketball and baseball."
It's as if the only way to have fun is to play sports.
When I was a kid growing up, way back in the '80's, sports weren't the only thing for kids in Hyde Park to do. On my block, we had:
Trees to climb and rooftops on which to build clubhouses. Gangways, alleys, and yards to play all-block tag in. Garbage chutes to slide down. Tourists at the Museum of Science and Industry to mess with. Mulberry trees and grape vines to eat off. Drunks to play tricks on. Other kids to meet and play with just walking around. Water to squirt, mud to make mud castles, warm tar to have tar fights. Pedestrians to sell lemonade to. Lobbies to read people's magazines in.
Who needed toys? We had imaginations. We had a neighborhood. The tar pit was replaced by a parking lot. Mulberry trees and vines got cut. Our rooftop clubhouses got barb-wired. Abandoned garages were razed, ganways sealed, fences erected, and buzzer systems switched to outer doors of lobbies. The museum charges admission now, and the block next to ours is gated off. The block next to ours is a gated community! You have to have a special key card just to walk down what used to be a public sidewalk. I used to play in their park. Now, I have to go all the way around the block and hop a fence. They call it urban renewal. I call it nailing shut the window of communication between urban kids and adults, rich and poor, whites and blacks. The city that created people like me doesn't exist anymore.
The politics of fear that was pushed on us all throughout the 80's, and to this day, created an urban environment that was hostile to anyone who was just there, who wasn't about some stated business. Working, sleeping, or spending, like the man said.
And there are other causes. New zoning laws destroyed the mixed-use blocks (businesses on ground level, apartments on top) that helped to create vibrant urban neighborhoods. Here in the States, we expend about twice as much energy per person as in Europe -- just travelling around, going to the distant supermarket, the distant job, the distant barbershop or whatever.
None of these things just happened. People and corporations made them happen for their own economic gain. Public transportation didn't disappear, it was undercut by the auto industry. Trace things back to their sources. A couple of hours' research on the Net, at the library, or in Lexis-Nexis' databases (free access at the University library, hell yeah) can work wonders. RP
There is not one single straight punch in this movie. I mean, geez. It's a fun movie the first time, but I think it would be unwatchable more than once. Not enough plot depth for a repeat viewing... Not enough variety to the fights either: kick, kick, kick...
Where is the outrage over the HTTP standard being encoded to tell the next website you visit where you came from (and what you were searching for if you used a search engine like altavista, google, any "directory-like" service like yahoo, etc)?
Seems like it would be a pretty easy hack to Mozilla to drop this information when following links. I mean, sheesh, if it bothers you that much, (click) "copy link location" and paste it into the address line. //rp
If students really want to resist WAVE, there's an obvious method: spam the hell out of it. If everyone reports on everyone, the informational value of WAVE's database drops to zero. As far as I can tell, WAVE's structure of anonymity for the snitches makes it completely vulnerable to spamming. Nice design flaw. For that matter, all the Goth kids at the school should immediately join SAVE, wave's "student-group-in-a-can," (http://www.waveamerica.com/save/save.htm) to make it useless as well. They can pass around copies of Orwell's 1984... oh, wait, "reading" isn't on SAVE's list of reccomended Meeting Ideas. But you can:
Sponsor a kid photo/fingerprint booth at a local crime prevention fair or mall expo.The School Resource Officer should be able to help in getting the equipment.
Actually, this could be a GREAT movie! The director/writer should just play it as a straight Action flick. Forget all the heavily-researched stuff about mesopotamia and just put in all the cool stuff. The Kouriers, the Deliverator, the sword fights both real and virtual. And have Hiro played by Vin Diesel from Pitch Black!
"Sir, I gotta say this," the salesman says. "You look like one bad motherfucker."
Slashdot Mirror
Check it out. It's no joke.
While it was written as a handbook for social action, it's all about organizing people. And there are plenty of pragmatic tips on how to get people to work outside of their experience. Also, a good discussion of lines of power and degrees of separation. Basically, if Machiavelli left the dark side he would become Saul Alinsky.
What's disturbing is that the files visible in the Desktop aren't synched completely with the files actually there -- if I wget a file from the command line, it' doesn't show up in the finder. What's up with that? //rp
isometric.spaceninja.com
Yes, but can I throw it to defeat my enemies in the Game Grid? //rp
That's an interesting comment. What real advantage does m/kb have over an analog controller? You can get quite good with those things, and in many ways the cross-pad is better for moving around than the standard ADWS keys.
//rp
FPS comic
Check out Battle Angel, by Yukito Kishiro. Amazing quality animation, great martial-arts sequences, and an interesting philosophical bent... although that comes through more in the Manga than in the Anime.
I think what I like best about Battle Angel is the view that the body is just a tool; the dichotomy between machine and human; and the idea that the real human is somehow immaterial.
That, and all the plasma-cutter kung-fu.
//rp
Yeah, and if you're going to write a GUI pipe, write a GUI RegEx. I want to drag and drop iconic representations of the various RegEx pattern elements *!$^ to string together my expression.
I also to feed someone else's incomprehensible RegEx into the parser and have it visualise the thing for me.
Make the difficult things easy.
//rp
Also, coders of apps where the user tries to get into a rhythm and work quickly ( like desktop environments, GIMP, Starcraft...) should get over to doxpara and check out Associative Key Arrays. They're cool.
I don't think any of the new GUI stuff we're seeing with OS X (for example) takes advantage of the processor power of modern machines in new ways. So what if it's transparent and jiggly!! I want to be able to see more and work faster!
//rp
MacOS 1-9 all put text under their icons in every piece of Apple software I've seen. The OS X dock, however, is indeed nasty. I hope Apple rethinks it somewhat... //rp
That said, I think the change is/has been/will be too gradual to be called a revolution. People only call it a revolution because they haven't been paying attention to what was going on and didn't know what a "Modem" was until 1999. It's an evolution. //rp isometric.spaceninja.com
The politics of fear that was pushed on us all throughout the 80's, and to this day, created an urban environment that was hostile to anyone who was just there, who wasn't about some stated business. Working, sleeping, or spending, like the man said.
And there are other causes. New zoning laws destroyed the mixed-use blocks (businesses on ground level, apartments on top) that helped to create vibrant urban neighborhoods. Here in the States, we expend about twice as much energy per person as in Europe -- just travelling around, going to the distant supermarket, the distant job, the distant barbershop or whatever.
None of these things just happened. People and corporations made them happen for their own economic gain. Public transportation didn't disappear, it was undercut by the auto industry. Trace things back to their sources. A couple of hours' research on the Net, at the library, or in Lexis-Nexis' databases (free access at the University library, hell yeah) can work wonders.
RP
There is not one single straight punch in this movie. I mean, geez. It's a fun movie the first time, but I think it would be unwatchable more than once. Not enough plot depth for a repeat viewing... Not enough variety to the fights either: kick, kick, kick...
Seems like it would be a pretty easy hack to Mozilla to drop this information when following links. I mean, sheesh, if it bothers you that much, (click) "copy link location" and paste it into the address line.
Actually, this could be a GREAT movie! The director/writer should just play it as a straight Action flick. Forget all the heavily-researched stuff about mesopotamia and just put in all the cool stuff. The Kouriers, the Deliverator, the sword fights both real and virtual. And have Hiro played by Vin Diesel from Pitch Black!
"Sir, I gotta say this," the salesman says. "You look like one bad motherfucker."
//rp