Good code, like good archetecture, is definately art.
Most art requires knowledge of the medium to appreciate it. Since the only people who spend a lot of time reading code are programmers, they are the only ones likely to see the artistic merits of well-crafted software.
John, you seem to miss the point. It is not the rising tide of "corporatism' (whatever the hell that is) which washed away the BBS culture of the 80's. Quite to the contrary, we did it to ourselves.
The reason why BBS junkies tended to bond as communities was because they were not "virtual" communities, they were actual communities. Before the Internet came along, free BBS's were, by necessity, local. Since you were dialing a local number to log in, and were not connected to a national network (for the most part), you could be sure that the people you were chatting with lived within about 20 miles or so. You all saw the same concert last Saturday, you are all dealing with the same weather, and you could trade Bob Dylan bootlegs by visiting each other at home. Gatherings could be frequent and informal.
That's why there is really no such thing as a "virtual community", because a community, by definition, is people living together. Anything else is (at best) a weak similacrum of a community.
Most of the BBS's either evolved into mom-and-pop ISP's, or moved to the web, or simply faded from existance... and most of us are fine with that. The old stereotype of lonely nerds gathering together via telecommunications is gone, not because it was wiped out, but because it is no longer needed. "Nerd" culture is mainstream culture these days: Larry Ellison and Bill Gates are exactly the sort of guys who regularilly had their heads shoved into toilets when they were kids, and now they take turns being the richest man in the world. Computer gaming has become a multi-billion-dollar industry. We exchange e-mail with our parents and grandparents. 65% of Americans are Star Trek fans.
The BBS's died because nobody needs them anymore. We already have friends and communities, we don't feel the need for a "virtual" one.
Oh yea... By the way, somebody should tell you this and it might as well be me: The WELL was never cool. Sorry to be the one to burst your bubble.
By "amuse", I meant "keep his mind occupied". It could be work tasks as easilly as play.
The point being that if you put somebody in an empty room for that long, it becomes an experiment in isolation and sensory deprivation, making the results completely invalid from a sleep-pattern study perspective.
If you give them a way to keep busy, the results are much more useful.
Also, it is not about wanting to stay up longer. The time spent sleeping also gets longer. (Most people would sleep 9-10 hours a day, if their lifestyle permitted it. I know I would.)
That song is a cover; they didn't write it. It was originally performed on the old children's album "Space Songs", which probably used the book you mention as its inspiration.
these people were actually programming themselves into an artificial cycle.
But with no clocks around, why did they all "program themselves" to a longer cycle, unless they were natrually inclined to do so? They could have just as easilly forced themselves into shorter days by turning the lights down earlier.
If you wanted to really nitpick, I suppose you could give them persistant low light that does not change... but living in perpetual dusk would screw with their heads far more than artificial lighting.
Your solutions puts eight days between sabbaths once every four years, violating 3 major world religions. The "seventh" day is a holy day of worship to billions of monothiests. Ignore that, and you might as well junk the 7-day week while you are at it. Any "human calendar" should take human behavior into account.
Actually, if you remove a person from clocks and sunlight, they will follow a longer cycle. Our bodies naturally want a day that is several hours longer. The sun forces the 24 hour day on us, and for whatever reason we have not evolved to like it that way.
This experiment has been done before, and is easy to repeat... just put a guy in a cave with plenty of stuff to amuse himself with for a few years, let him eat and sleep whenever he wants, and see what happends. (Alternatively, look at the lifestyle of a telecommuting programmer who's boss never calls.)
Not just Jews and Christians... there is also the Islamic Sabbath (on Friday). Between these three religions, you are talking about a huge chunk of the world that simply will not follow this calendar, no matter what some smart-ass mathematician has to say about it.
You could make a case for changing the calendar, I guess... but not to this convoluted mess, which does not even have an answer for the "leap year" problem.
If you really wanted to introduce logic to the calendar, why not eliminate the whole concept of months? Get rid of the whole mm/dd concept and replace it with a single 3-digit number for the date. (Instead of 02/14/2001; the next Valentine's Day would be 45-2001.)
The way I see it, the current calendar is really not so much of a burden to anybody. If he really wants to push for a reform in time-keeping that improves people's lives, then let's talk about banning the dated and useless concept of Daylight Saving Time!
NPR, PBS, and the local stations are all part of the lovely CPB family, and cutting off the air supply to all of them sends a much stronger message than a disgruntled letter to the NPR.
I can't choose to not support NPR, because they are tax funded via the CPB. The best I can do is refuse to support the stations that the NPR was established to promote... and while I am at it, cut off support for all public broadcasting, in order to send a stronger message to those organizations who seek to advance the cause of public broadcasting.
The message I would like them to get is: The only thing that makes public broadcasting any different from commercial broadcasting is that you claim to exist mainly serve the public good, rather than for profit. When you work against the public good, you void your mandate to even exist.
Actually, I had never heard of "Contra" prior to this series of articles. To me, the NES was for people who could not afford computers.
I played a couple games on a roommate's system, but it was cutting in to valuable Sim City time. The "maximize the taxes in December, cut them to 0% in January" hack was probably used as often by me as the "up up down whatever" was used by Contra players, but I would never suggest that there should be a place for it in the Smithsonian.
Gaming cheats like "Up, Up, Down, Down..." are techno-folklore,
John, you ignorant slut.
Gaming cheats are nothing like folklore. They are tiny little factoids that are only of interest to anybody for the two months it takes for a typical game to become obsolete (or for the players to get bored with it, whichever comes first).
As with many of your articles, it needs to be emphasized that this is nothing new. For as long as there have been problem-solving past-times, people have cheated at them. As an example, people in the 80's were taking apart their Rubics Cubes (or buying instruction books) instead of solving them.
Stop treating every little thing that geeks spend more than a few minutes a day on as if it was some kind of dramatic cultural shift. Is it really any surprise at all that kids who were playing weekend-long sessions of Dungeons & Dragons back in the late 70's would grow up to spend 20 hours a week playing Everquest or Diablo? Are they really all that different from the old ladies who spend their final years on earth playing BINGO and card games? Or people from 50 years agao playing Marbles and Dominos? The only real difference about recreation today is that we have more time for it.
Since NPR was part of the effort to block this, I suggest we stick it to them.
This time of year, Public television stations and public radio stations run a lot of "pledge drives", where they try to guilt-trip their listeners into giving them money. Why not give their waiting volunteers a friendly call, and politely explain that because NPR has chosen to prevent free and fair use of the airwaves, you would like to pledge a donation of ZERO DOLLARS to public broadcasting this year. Then follow that up with a postcard, letter, or e-mail that says the same.
NPR already enjoys the benefit of tax subsidies so they can broadcast Boston Pops concerts in Minot and "Mr. Rogers" in every remote corner of the country. If they want any further support from us, (or even if they want their current support to continue), they ought to behave in a manner that encourages more good will among us.
Yes, and you are also getting MY point across, which is that you don't need a "state of the art" $1500+ system to play the current crop of games. The fastest reccomendation you quoted to me was 450 MHz, which was impressive a year ago, but will only be found in cheap budget systems today.
Even at the "megastore", PC's are getting very cheap. For example, CompUSA, a typical megastore, sells the HP Pavillion 6736 for $549. Granted, it is probably a crummy video card, but it has an AGP slot to drop one in. It's a 667 MHz system... more than fast enough to run any game on the market smoothly.
I found that system with no comparison shopping whatsoever. I would gladly bet money that I can find a better deal yet if I look around a little.
On an unrelated note, I'm not really sure what made my last post "flamebait". I merely pointed out the FACT that somebody who shops carefully can get their hands on a decent gaming PC for under $500.
Yes, 233 is minumum box specs for most new games, which means that 400-600 is plenty enough. My game system is an old 333, and it runs every game I've installed so far with no problems whatsoever. You do not need a 1.1 GHz system just to play the latest shooter.
Well spotted. Pinky and the Brain were animaniacs. Still, both shows sucked. The best WB cartoons remain the original Looney Tunes theater shorts.
The reason I suggested that college radio no longer matters is because being a college radio "star" no longer leads to much of anything. It used to be that independant artists could build a huge following if they catch on with campus stations, but these days "alternative" is just a marketing label. MTV and corporate-owned FM radio dominates the culture.
Internet sources, like MP3.com and Wiredplanet.com, might change that, if people start listening to it. Time will tell.
1. "Perpendictular to the name of this town" does not have to mean perpendicualr to the longetude line, pointing through the center of the globe. It could be that the gun is held level, perpendicular horzontally, and shooting through the Northern Hemisphere.
2. While they are a NYC band, "this town" does not have to mean Queens. The album is called "Lincoln", so they could have meant Lincoln, Nebraska.
3. Lighten up, it doesn't matter. It is a song that ponders the possibility that the One True Love that is meant for you could live half a world away. The image of firing a gun through the globe to show "the home of the one this was written for" is a beautiful bit of poetry, even if it has trouble standing up to deconstruction from nit-pickers who have enough time on their hands to check the globe.
Actually, their appearances on Leno, Letterman, and O'Brian got them much more exposure to mass audienced, and most of the Hardcore fans were with them long before Flood was even released. They were college radio GODS back in the day when college radio actually mattered.
My first exposure to them was when I was working as a DJ at KRNR at Mankato State University. I wore every single song on their "When It Rains It Snows" EP down to the gray, especially "The Famous Polka".
(kiddies, ask your parents what an EP is)
For the record, other than "Pinky and the Brain", Tiny Toons completely and horribly sucked.
Istanbul was neither written nor performed for Tiny Tunes. It was a cover of a song written quite a long time ago, and released on the 1990 album "Flood".
One of the Tiny Toons directors thought it was cool, and decided to write a very unfunny cartoon which used the song.
TMBG not only sings the theme for Malcom in the Middle, but they also do a lot of the incidental music for it.
They also wrote and performed "Dr. Evil", for the second Austin Powers movie. In a tragic crime against humanity, the producers release the soundtrack album without this song, but you can hear it once in a while on They Might Be Giants radio (go to www.wiredplanet.com if you have not already).
"Purple Toupee" was a song which is meant to mirror the rants of somebody with a very confused reccolection of the past. It is packed with weird lines like, "I remember the book depository where they crowned the king of Cuba", to show the confused state of the storyteller. Although confirmation might not be found on the current iteration of their web page, the Johns have said as much in past interviews.
It is probably not mentioned on their current site because it is a really old song (from their second full-length album) which was not even a hit when it was new.
The album Lincoln is crammed full of these kinds of free assiciation styles.
The 1964 Chicago World's Fair is mentioned in the album, but in a different song. (from Ana Ng: "All alone at the '64 World's Fair, 80 dolls yelling Small Girl After All; Who was at the DuPont pavillion? Why was the bench still warm? Who had been there?")
Slashdot Mirror
Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Sorry. I've been watching my new DVD's of The Prisoner every day after work. :)
Good code, like good archetecture, is definately art.
Most art requires knowledge of the medium to appreciate it. Since the only people who spend a lot of time reading code are programmers, they are the only ones likely to see the artistic merits of well-crafted software.
The reason why BBS junkies tended to bond as communities was because they were not "virtual" communities, they were actual communities. Before the Internet came along, free BBS's were, by necessity, local. Since you were dialing a local number to log in, and were not connected to a national network (for the most part), you could be sure that the people you were chatting with lived within about 20 miles or so. You all saw the same concert last Saturday, you are all dealing with the same weather, and you could trade Bob Dylan bootlegs by visiting each other at home. Gatherings could be frequent and informal.
That's why there is really no such thing as a "virtual community", because a community, by definition, is people living together. Anything else is (at best) a weak similacrum of a community.
Most of the BBS's either evolved into mom-and-pop ISP's, or moved to the web, or simply faded from existance... and most of us are fine with that. The old stereotype of lonely nerds gathering together via telecommunications is gone, not because it was wiped out, but because it is no longer needed. "Nerd" culture is mainstream culture these days: Larry Ellison and Bill Gates are exactly the sort of guys who regularilly had their heads shoved into toilets when they were kids, and now they take turns being the richest man in the world. Computer gaming has become a multi-billion-dollar industry. We exchange e-mail with our parents and grandparents. 65% of Americans are Star Trek fans.
The BBS's died because nobody needs them anymore. We already have friends and communities, we don't feel the need for a "virtual" one.
Oh yea... By the way, somebody should tell you this and it might as well be me: The WELL was never cool. Sorry to be the one to burst your bubble.
Avoid odd-numbered Star Trek movies
Avoid even-numbered Microsoft Service Packs.
Most Trekkies and NT Admins will agree that following these rules is a good idea.
The point being that if you put somebody in an empty room for that long, it becomes an experiment in isolation and sensory deprivation, making the results completely invalid from a sleep-pattern study perspective.
If you give them a way to keep busy, the results are much more useful.
Also, it is not about wanting to stay up longer. The time spent sleeping also gets longer. (Most people would sleep 9-10 hours a day, if their lifestyle permitted it. I know I would.)
That song is a cover; they didn't write it. It was originally performed on the old children's album "Space Songs", which probably used the book you mention as its inspiration.
But with no clocks around, why did they all "program themselves" to a longer cycle, unless they were natrually inclined to do so? They could have just as easilly forced themselves into shorter days by turning the lights down earlier.
If you wanted to really nitpick, I suppose you could give them persistant low light that does not change... but living in perpetual dusk would screw with their heads far more than artificial lighting.
Your solutions puts eight days between sabbaths once every four years, violating 3 major world religions. The "seventh" day is a holy day of worship to billions of monothiests. Ignore that, and you might as well junk the 7-day week while you are at it. Any "human calendar" should take human behavior into account.
This experiment has been done before, and is easy to repeat... just put a guy in a cave with plenty of stuff to amuse himself with for a few years, let him eat and sleep whenever he wants, and see what happends. (Alternatively, look at the lifestyle of a telecommuting programmer who's boss never calls.)
Not just Jews and Christians... there is also the Islamic Sabbath (on Friday). Between these three religions, you are talking about a huge chunk of the world that simply will not follow this calendar, no matter what some smart-ass mathematician has to say about it.
If you really wanted to introduce logic to the calendar, why not eliminate the whole concept of months? Get rid of the whole mm/dd concept and replace it with a single 3-digit number for the date. (Instead of 02/14/2001; the next Valentine's Day would be 45-2001.)
The way I see it, the current calendar is really not so much of a burden to anybody. If he really wants to push for a reform in time-keeping that improves people's lives, then let's talk about banning the dated and useless concept of Daylight Saving Time!
I can't choose to not support NPR, because they are tax funded via the CPB. The best I can do is refuse to support the stations that the NPR was established to promote... and while I am at it, cut off support for all public broadcasting, in order to send a stronger message to those organizations who seek to advance the cause of public broadcasting.
The message I would like them to get is: The only thing that makes public broadcasting any different from commercial broadcasting is that you claim to exist mainly serve the public good, rather than for profit. When you work against the public good, you void your mandate to even exist.
I played a couple games on a roommate's system, but it was cutting in to valuable Sim City time. The "maximize the taxes in December, cut them to 0% in January" hack was probably used as often by me as the "up up down whatever" was used by Contra players, but I would never suggest that there should be a place for it in the Smithsonian.
John, you ignorant slut.
Gaming cheats are nothing like folklore. They are tiny little factoids that are only of interest to anybody for the two months it takes for a typical game to become obsolete (or for the players to get bored with it, whichever comes first).
As with many of your articles, it needs to be emphasized that this is nothing new. For as long as there have been problem-solving past-times, people have cheated at them. As an example, people in the 80's were taking apart their Rubics Cubes (or buying instruction books) instead of solving them.
Stop treating every little thing that geeks spend more than a few minutes a day on as if it was some kind of dramatic cultural shift. Is it really any surprise at all that kids who were playing weekend-long sessions of Dungeons & Dragons back in the late 70's would grow up to spend 20 hours a week playing Everquest or Diablo? Are they really all that different from the old ladies who spend their final years on earth playing BINGO and card games? Or people from 50 years agao playing Marbles and Dominos? The only real difference about recreation today is that we have more time for it.
This time of year, Public television stations and public radio stations run a lot of "pledge drives", where they try to guilt-trip their listeners into giving them money. Why not give their waiting volunteers a friendly call, and politely explain that because NPR has chosen to prevent free and fair use of the airwaves, you would like to pledge a donation of ZERO DOLLARS to public broadcasting this year. Then follow that up with a postcard, letter, or e-mail that says the same.
NPR already enjoys the benefit of tax subsidies so they can broadcast Boston Pops concerts in Minot and "Mr. Rogers" in every remote corner of the country. If they want any further support from us, (or even if they want their current support to continue), they ought to behave in a manner that encourages more good will among us.
Somebody did. I guess you missed it.
The change you suggest would save us all quite a bit of money, allowing us to buy the latest in designer ducts! :)
Yes, and you are also getting MY point across, which is that you don't need a "state of the art" $1500+ system to play the current crop of games. The fastest reccomendation you quoted to me was 450 MHz, which was impressive a year ago, but will only be found in cheap budget systems today.
I found that system with no comparison shopping whatsoever. I would gladly bet money that I can find a better deal yet if I look around a little.
On an unrelated note, I'm not really sure what made my last post "flamebait". I merely pointed out the FACT that somebody who shops carefully can get their hands on a decent gaming PC for under $500.
Yes, 233 is minumum box specs for most new games, which means that 400-600 is plenty enough. My game system is an old 333, and it runs every game I've installed so far with no problems whatsoever. You do not need a 1.1 GHz system just to play the latest shooter.
The reason I suggested that college radio no longer matters is because being a college radio "star" no longer leads to much of anything. It used to be that independant artists could build a huge following if they catch on with campus stations, but these days "alternative" is just a marketing label. MTV and corporate-owned FM radio dominates the culture.
Internet sources, like MP3.com and Wiredplanet.com, might change that, if people start listening to it. Time will tell.
Once in a while, an AC says something that makes me glad I read /. at zero. Post like your makes all the trolls worth sifting through.
2. While they are a NYC band, "this town" does not have to mean Queens. The album is called "Lincoln", so they could have meant Lincoln, Nebraska.
3. Lighten up, it doesn't matter. It is a song that ponders the possibility that the One True Love that is meant for you could live half a world away. The image of firing a gun through the globe to show "the home of the one this was written for" is a beautiful bit of poetry, even if it has trouble standing up to deconstruction from nit-pickers who have enough time on their hands to check the globe.
My first exposure to them was when I was working as a DJ at KRNR at Mankato State University. I wore every single song on their "When It Rains It Snows" EP down to the gray, especially "The Famous Polka".
(kiddies, ask your parents what an EP is)
For the record, other than "Pinky and the Brain", Tiny Toons completely and horribly sucked.
One of the Tiny Toons directors thought it was cool, and decided to write a very unfunny cartoon which used the song.
TMBG not only sings the theme for Malcom in the Middle, but they also do a lot of the incidental music for it.
They also wrote and performed "Dr. Evil", for the second Austin Powers movie. In a tragic crime against humanity, the producers release the soundtrack album without this song, but you can hear it once in a while on They Might Be Giants radio (go to www.wiredplanet.com if you have not already).
It is probably not mentioned on their current site because it is a really old song (from their second full-length album) which was not even a hit when it was new.
The album Lincoln is crammed full of these kinds of free assiciation styles.
The 1964 Chicago World's Fair is mentioned in the album, but in a different song. (from Ana Ng: "All alone at the '64 World's Fair, 80 dolls yelling Small Girl After All; Who was at the DuPont pavillion? Why was the bench still warm? Who had been there?")