It's not simply "the shape of a building". The architecture determines the limits of the function, which limits the activities of the people. Good architecture is well understood to strongly influence the overall tendencies of the activities of the people who use it. Architecture puts its users into a frame of mind, which can strongly influence social attitudes and behaviors well beyond its walls.
Universities don't address problems with themselves or the world around them? Did you graduate from Apex Tech or something?
People in (American) universities often learn that our government is the people organized to do things to protect our rights. People these universities produce are more likely to actually vote and otherwise participate in public life. And are more likely to learn history and reason which tell us that without government, we get anarchy that corporations (and their version without state limits) quickly fill.
The review doesn't say the grass and trees are bad. It says that the fact that workers will see only Apple's grass and trees is bad. It's the disconnection, not the greenery that's bad. And the review explains why, in brief but meaningful detail.
The critique didn't say anything about "the hood", by which you mean some ghetto. Cupertino doesn't have "the hood". The "collective metropolitan realm" is lots of other rich, high-end IT corporations and the other businesses that support them. But that realm has some diversity: other people who aren't working on Apple's stuff. Not getting Apple's specific corporate values or outlook. It might or might not have dirty manmade surfaces, concrete and steel. It doesn't really have density, except in the corporate arcologies like Apple's. It does have other people, with other points of view. Which is healthy. Monoculture isn't healthy, no matter how green it is.
Why do you fear the hood, that you surely have managed to avoid without an Apple architect, so much that you see it lurking in the shadows of an architecture review that doesn't have it? Is it your guilt over not fixing it? Because the only place your complaint could have come from is inside your own psychology. Not the review you're using as a way to get it out there in front of us.
There are other ways to avoid needing a car on a campus other than including a monorail. Good architects these days notice immediately the transportation requirements created by the architecture, because of the energy, pollution, time, social and beauty degradation that cars bring. Creating a need for cars is certainly not green.
Jobs deserves and gets plenty of kudos for his tech and biz achievements. But when his perhaps final achievement has problems, especially one at odds with the humanist image his whole career has cultivated, that doesn't deserve kudos. It deserves criticism that points out where the architecture doesn't live up to the standards Jobs created.
But then, your ramble winds into an early eulogy. You're not talking about architecture. You're just an Anonymous fanboy Coward who detected less than total worship of Steve, and jumped in to save the day.
The purpose of the critique was to discuss, and to generate more discussion, by someone who knows architecture. Clearly the purpose was also to help architecture serve people better, by improving architecture.
Your critique does nothing but try to bring yourself more attention. It does nothing to improve anyone or anything. You're projecting.
There is no grit, dirt or crime in Cupertino, or anywhere near it, until you get to East Palo Alto or downtown San Jose. A more open Apple campus interconnected with the rest of its neighborhood would get more clean, shiny, happy people. But at least people from outside Apple, tired for different reasons. With some different perspectives, some of which might not even be IT. Some might not even be corporate. That exposure would humanize the day, not corporatize it in every way.
And since Apple's products are so personal, more diversity in the environment its people produce from would also inform the products we get from it.
But then, this is the company that gave us the white head wires that indicate the wearer is in their own personal universe, totally tailored by and for themselves.
Apple has become "narcissism for the rest of us", in a society increasingly insistent in seeing nothing but itself in a retouched mirror. The subtitle to this story shows the fear of the outside that nerds have raised to a high art.
Power Demand From US Homes Expected To Fall For a Decade We hear all the time that household energy consumption is rising, both in the U.S. and around the world. [...] the rate of growth [...] is expected to decline slightly over the next 10 years.
When the rate of growth of a value declines, that value doesn't fall. It continues to rise. When the rate declines slightly, it continues to rise nearly as fast as it did before. It doesn't fall.
How stupid are the people writing these headlines? These are the people giving you news for nerds. Stupid people.
Who cares how their lawyers "feel" about a dictionary word that's marketing a structured programming language, not a software package, that no one in the market will be confused by? Nobody, except maybe some other lawyers looking for more gravy.
All of those things can be changed simply by an interested user contributing documentation, alternative meta packages, or both.
My point is that Linux isn't just an alternative OS. It's an alternative way of computing: community based. Not distantly based, but really community based. That the large majority of changes to the kernel are made by interested corporations doesn't change the community basis. Those people in those corps are part of the community, and there are plenty of others who are really independents. But in Windows or MacOS there is no such thing.
So whining about how "Linux has lost its way" because of some configuration inadequacies, however real, is just that: whining. If 1% of the whining time were spent documenting, organizing and even coding, Linux would be way better. If people aren't going to be constructive, they should at least shut up.
You vote for Republicans. You're a Republican. I don't care if you call your self "libertarian" or whatever. You're a Republican.
Which is why you can't understand that spending all our money on the military forces us to cut education. Because you don't want to understand. What you want is to destroy. Which is why you're a Republican.
But yes, economic problems, especially ones created by robbery, does kill people. Usually by reducing services that could protect them from death. But it's not "printing money from thin air" that does it. All means of managing currency does it. What kills more is unjust distribution. Like when bankers rob an economy until they go broke, then hold the economy hostage until they're made rich again - twice at everyone else's expense. Which blood is on the hands of the bankers, and of the governors who serve them.
But fiat currency is like what Churchill said about democracy: it's a terrible system, but it's the only one that ever worked. Fiat currency also, for economies the size, complexity and growth rate we've got.
In the US, you primary new candidates, then run them against the incumbents, and take over the government. It takes only 2 years to completely change the House of Representatives, which can block the government from doing anything, and which can impeach any judge, congressmember or executive. It takes only 4 years to do that plus change the majority of the Senate, which can convict on impeachment and remove the guilty official, and change the president. After which the new government can then do new things.
That is America's democratic republic. We saw it exercised in 2010 by the Teabagger Republicans. Which demonstrates that the people must also use the media to inform themselves and others about how reliable the candidates are, and who else is supporting them. When Republicans insisted that corporations get "rights" to spend unlimited and anonymous money electing their chosen representatives, the people should have refused to vote for Republicans. And no, Democrats are not "just as bad", even if there are a minority of Democrats who are just as bad. Republicans have a smaller minority who aren't. The choice is excruciatingly clear.
So the question really is: "what happens when that group is the people?" Because enough Americans are slavish mob wives that we are repeatedly stuck with mobsters in government.
You nuke fetishists are predictably absolutist. "Then they must support this technology" is the knee-jerk bottom line of all you nuke fetishists, no matter what the new nuke technology announced.
You're also completely crazy, "Mensa (insecure and medium IQ) Babe". You don't care about CO2 because plants breathe it, and you want climate change, but you're more enviro than thou?
I'm sure you've been corrected many times before. Just shut up already. Your privilege of posting in public doesn't entitle you to yammer like a moron. It does require you listen to what people say when you do it. Shut up.
This is excellent research. I noticed in the picture of the MSU research team that they're all women. I hope they can inspire more women to join the scientific research community. We need more people in it, and women are the majority of people. Without getting closer to 50:50 gender parity, we're losing the talent and hard work of a large fraction of the people pool we need to draw from. More role models will get more women to follow suit, just as they do for men.
A lot of that "bloat" is useful to one user or another. Not all of the bloat is useful to any one person, but combine it all for everyone and there's bloat.
Which is exactly what's wrong with other OSes (and apps), especially Windows. The scale economy of billions of users means giving them everything that the largest collection of them wants, even if none of them wants it all.
The difference with Linux is that you do not have to install anything you don't want. You can select what you want, at any level. Hell, you can even edit the kernel and rebuild it without code you don't want. But just configuring which SW is installed is easy enough that anyone concerned with bloat can do it, or have someone else do it. Without relying on OS marketers to decide or do it.
Indeed that kind of configurability, mainly through APT (though yum and other package managers also do the job), is only recently a completely standard part of Linux, and inspired app stores in the other OSes. So Linux has found its way, not lost it, as usual.
Who has lost their way? Sounds like you have. Why don't you use a package manager, or an OS configurer, or pick a different distro, if you think the default is too bloated? And if it's not bloat, but compatibility with older HW, that you're disappointed in, why don't you do something to encourage the support of old HW in new versions, instead of just complaining about it or prophecying the end of Linux? Linux is different because people like you can change it. If you don't do that, you've lost it. Linux still has it, for the people who use it right.
As B- as Obama is, some Christian theocrat Republican would be an F-. Bush/Cheney was an F, and you voted for them twice. You never voted for Obama. You're just a Republican troll trying to get some Christian theocrat Republican elected.
Money is voodoo. It's a completely abstract promise that someone will do something for you in the future, because someone else did something for you in the past. Whether it's printed according to some government formula, or passed around from rare materials gradually mined from the ground, or carved into huge stone discs, creating money is always based on some willingness to believe something that can be proven only by waiting and seeing.
That is not what mobsters do. Mobsters don't deal in abstractions. They rob, wound and kill in a very immediate demonstration of value given and taken.
No, it's been proven over and again that group crimes are different, and usually worse, than crimes by an individual. It's been proven for a long time that when groups attack people and our rights, the law must attack the group - not just members of the group. It's necessary.
No, you have to be caught doing a crime. Being a mobster means your mob stops people from talking to the law about your crimes, and stops judges from saying something bad about your crimes. Capone kept people shut up, but his books were captured in a raid that implicated him. Tax evasion was a good way to bust a serious criminal who was such a bad guy that people were afraid to bust him.
Mobsters don't usually deliver the paid-for product, except when the customer is another mobster, backing up their orders with a gun. Mobsters do go out of their way to start gunfights with uninvolved parties. Because mobsters are assholes.
You've got to stop thinking mobsters are Al Pacino and Marlon Brando. They're the thugs downtown and behind the gate in the suburb who rob and kill for business, and who also rob and kill on their way up for fun. Living in and around NYC and New Orleans, I've seen the real thing. You evidently haven't.
As for raising taxes on the rich, the government's failure to tax the rich isn't cutting into the C-130s the Bush/Cheney government "lost" (to some mobster). Those flights will continue forever, so long as Republicans like you keep voting for Republicans like them. But without raising taxes on the rich what gets cut off is education of everyone but the rich, investments in science that keep the US ahead of our competitors and worth believing in, and enforcing laws that put some limits on how the rich abuse you. How surprising that Warren Buffet knows this, but you - some random Slashdotter - don't.
We are run by the people you Republicans keep electing. Yes, idiots. But not the kind you see on Fox. The kind you see in the mirror.
Slashdot Mirror
The critic doesn't say that the campus should have less green space or more downtown core.
And N California downtown cores don't suck. Just because yours does doesn't mean others' do.
It's not simply "the shape of a building". The architecture determines the limits of the function, which limits the activities of the people. Good architecture is well understood to strongly influence the overall tendencies of the activities of the people who use it. Architecture puts its users into a frame of mind, which can strongly influence social attitudes and behaviors well beyond its walls.
Finally some real Teabagger anarchism.
Universities don't address problems with themselves or the world around them? Did you graduate from Apex Tech or something?
People in (American) universities often learn that our government is the people organized to do things to protect our rights. People these universities produce are more likely to actually vote and otherwise participate in public life. And are more likely to learn history and reason which tell us that without government, we get anarchy that corporations (and their version without state limits) quickly fill.
You seem to be living in a cocoon yourself.
The review doesn't say the grass and trees are bad. It says that the fact that workers will see only Apple's grass and trees is bad. It's the disconnection, not the greenery that's bad. And the review explains why, in brief but meaningful detail.
The critique didn't say anything about "the hood", by which you mean some ghetto. Cupertino doesn't have "the hood". The "collective metropolitan realm" is lots of other rich, high-end IT corporations and the other businesses that support them. But that realm has some diversity: other people who aren't working on Apple's stuff. Not getting Apple's specific corporate values or outlook. It might or might not have dirty manmade surfaces, concrete and steel. It doesn't really have density, except in the corporate arcologies like Apple's. It does have other people, with other points of view. Which is healthy. Monoculture isn't healthy, no matter how green it is.
Why do you fear the hood, that you surely have managed to avoid without an Apple architect, so much that you see it lurking in the shadows of an architecture review that doesn't have it? Is it your guilt over not fixing it? Because the only place your complaint could have come from is inside your own psychology. Not the review you're using as a way to get it out there in front of us.
There are other ways to avoid needing a car on a campus other than including a monorail. Good architects these days notice immediately the transportation requirements created by the architecture, because of the energy, pollution, time, social and beauty degradation that cars bring. Creating a need for cars is certainly not green.
Jobs deserves and gets plenty of kudos for his tech and biz achievements. But when his perhaps final achievement has problems, especially one at odds with the humanist image his whole career has cultivated, that doesn't deserve kudos. It deserves criticism that points out where the architecture doesn't live up to the standards Jobs created.
But then, your ramble winds into an early eulogy. You're not talking about architecture. You're just an Anonymous fanboy Coward who detected less than total worship of Steve, and jumped in to save the day.
The purpose of the critique was to discuss, and to generate more discussion, by someone who knows architecture. Clearly the purpose was also to help architecture serve people better, by improving architecture.
Your critique does nothing but try to bring yourself more attention. It does nothing to improve anyone or anything. You're projecting.
There is no grit, dirt or crime in Cupertino, or anywhere near it, until you get to East Palo Alto or downtown San Jose. A more open Apple campus interconnected with the rest of its neighborhood would get more clean, shiny, happy people. But at least people from outside Apple, tired for different reasons. With some different perspectives, some of which might not even be IT. Some might not even be corporate. That exposure would humanize the day, not corporatize it in every way.
And since Apple's products are so personal, more diversity in the environment its people produce from would also inform the products we get from it.
But then, this is the company that gave us the white head wires that indicate the wearer is in their own personal universe, totally tailored by and for themselves.
Apple has become "narcissism for the rest of us", in a society increasingly insistent in seeing nothing but itself in a retouched mirror. The subtitle to this story shows the fear of the outside that nerds have raised to a high art.
When the rate of growth of a value declines, that value doesn't fall. It continues to rise. When the rate declines slightly, it continues to rise nearly as fast as it did before. It doesn't fall.
How stupid are the people writing these headlines? These are the people giving you news for nerds. Stupid people.
Who cares how their lawyers "feel" about a dictionary word that's marketing a structured programming language, not a software package, that no one in the market will be confused by? Nobody, except maybe some other lawyers looking for more gravy.
All of those things can be changed simply by an interested user contributing documentation, alternative meta packages, or both.
My point is that Linux isn't just an alternative OS. It's an alternative way of computing: community based. Not distantly based, but really community based. That the large majority of changes to the kernel are made by interested corporations doesn't change the community basis. Those people in those corps are part of the community, and there are plenty of others who are really independents. But in Windows or MacOS there is no such thing.
So whining about how "Linux has lost its way" because of some configuration inadequacies, however real, is just that: whining. If 1% of the whining time were spent documenting, organizing and even coding, Linux would be way better. If people aren't going to be constructive, they should at least shut up.
You vote for Republicans. You're a Republican. I don't care if you call your self "libertarian" or whatever. You're a Republican.
Which is why you can't understand that spending all our money on the military forces us to cut education. Because you don't want to understand. What you want is to destroy. Which is why you're a Republican.
You're a Teabagger.
Suicide blood is on the hands of the suicider.
But yes, economic problems, especially ones created by robbery, does kill people. Usually by reducing services that could protect them from death. But it's not "printing money from thin air" that does it. All means of managing currency does it. What kills more is unjust distribution. Like when bankers rob an economy until they go broke, then hold the economy hostage until they're made rich again - twice at everyone else's expense. Which blood is on the hands of the bankers, and of the governors who serve them.
But fiat currency is like what Churchill said about democracy: it's a terrible system, but it's the only one that ever worked. Fiat currency also, for economies the size, complexity and growth rate we've got.
In the US, you primary new candidates, then run them against the incumbents, and take over the government. It takes only 2 years to completely change the House of Representatives, which can block the government from doing anything, and which can impeach any judge, congressmember or executive. It takes only 4 years to do that plus change the majority of the Senate, which can convict on impeachment and remove the guilty official, and change the president. After which the new government can then do new things.
That is America's democratic republic. We saw it exercised in 2010 by the Teabagger Republicans. Which demonstrates that the people must also use the media to inform themselves and others about how reliable the candidates are, and who else is supporting them. When Republicans insisted that corporations get "rights" to spend unlimited and anonymous money electing their chosen representatives, the people should have refused to vote for Republicans. And no, Democrats are not "just as bad", even if there are a minority of Democrats who are just as bad. Republicans have a smaller minority who aren't. The choice is excruciatingly clear.
So the question really is: "what happens when that group is the people?" Because enough Americans are slavish mob wives that we are repeatedly stuck with mobsters in government.
+1: Correct application of Godwin's Law :)
You nuke fetishists are predictably absolutist. "Then they must support this technology" is the knee-jerk bottom line of all you nuke fetishists, no matter what the new nuke technology announced.
You're also completely crazy, "Mensa (insecure and medium IQ) Babe". You don't care about CO2 because plants breathe it, and you want climate change, but you're more enviro than thou?
I'm sure you've been corrected many times before. Just shut up already. Your privilege of posting in public doesn't entitle you to yammer like a moron. It does require you listen to what people say when you do it. Shut up.
This is excellent research. I noticed in the picture of the MSU research team that they're all women. I hope they can inspire more women to join the scientific research community. We need more people in it, and women are the majority of people. Without getting closer to 50:50 gender parity, we're losing the talent and hard work of a large fraction of the people pool we need to draw from. More role models will get more women to follow suit, just as they do for men.
A lot of that "bloat" is useful to one user or another. Not all of the bloat is useful to any one person, but combine it all for everyone and there's bloat.
Which is exactly what's wrong with other OSes (and apps), especially Windows. The scale economy of billions of users means giving them everything that the largest collection of them wants, even if none of them wants it all.
The difference with Linux is that you do not have to install anything you don't want. You can select what you want, at any level. Hell, you can even edit the kernel and rebuild it without code you don't want. But just configuring which SW is installed is easy enough that anyone concerned with bloat can do it, or have someone else do it. Without relying on OS marketers to decide or do it.
Indeed that kind of configurability, mainly through APT (though yum and other package managers also do the job), is only recently a completely standard part of Linux, and inspired app stores in the other OSes. So Linux has found its way, not lost it, as usual.
Who has lost their way? Sounds like you have. Why don't you use a package manager, or an OS configurer, or pick a different distro, if you think the default is too bloated? And if it's not bloat, but compatibility with older HW, that you're disappointed in, why don't you do something to encourage the support of old HW in new versions, instead of just complaining about it or prophecying the end of Linux? Linux is different because people like you can change it. If you don't do that, you've lost it. Linux still has it, for the people who use it right.
As B- as Obama is, some Christian theocrat Republican would be an F-. Bush/Cheney was an F, and you voted for them twice. You never voted for Obama. You're just a Republican troll trying to get some Christian theocrat Republican elected.
Because printing money doesn't kill people.
Money is voodoo. It's a completely abstract promise that someone will do something for you in the future, because someone else did something for you in the past. Whether it's printed according to some government formula, or passed around from rare materials gradually mined from the ground, or carved into huge stone discs, creating money is always based on some willingness to believe something that can be proven only by waiting and seeing.
That is not what mobsters do. Mobsters don't deal in abstractions. They rob, wound and kill in a very immediate demonstration of value given and taken.
No, it's been proven over and again that group crimes are different, and usually worse, than crimes by an individual. It's been proven for a long time that when groups attack people and our rights, the law must attack the group - not just members of the group. It's necessary.
No, you have to be caught doing a crime. Being a mobster means your mob stops people from talking to the law about your crimes, and stops judges from saying something bad about your crimes. Capone kept people shut up, but his books were captured in a raid that implicated him. Tax evasion was a good way to bust a serious criminal who was such a bad guy that people were afraid to bust him.
Mobsters don't usually deliver the paid-for product, except when the customer is another mobster, backing up their orders with a gun. Mobsters do go out of their way to start gunfights with uninvolved parties. Because mobsters are assholes.
You've got to stop thinking mobsters are Al Pacino and Marlon Brando. They're the thugs downtown and behind the gate in the suburb who rob and kill for business, and who also rob and kill on their way up for fun. Living in and around NYC and New Orleans, I've seen the real thing. You evidently haven't.
As for raising taxes on the rich, the government's failure to tax the rich isn't cutting into the C-130s the Bush/Cheney government "lost" (to some mobster). Those flights will continue forever, so long as Republicans like you keep voting for Republicans like them. But without raising taxes on the rich what gets cut off is education of everyone but the rich, investments in science that keep the US ahead of our competitors and worth believing in, and enforcing laws that put some limits on how the rich abuse you. How surprising that Warren Buffet knows this, but you - some random Slashdotter - don't.
We are run by the people you Republicans keep electing. Yes, idiots. But not the kind you see on Fox. The kind you see in the mirror.
You voted for Bush and Cheney twice, Teabagger. And your local Republican who voted for all their lies and crimes.
We're just living with the consequences of your insanity.