You're not getting old. The conditioning to be a consumer instead of a producer is working on you is all.
More accurately, he is producing enough in his specialization that he doesn't need to do everything for himself. I'm sure he doesn't always bake his own bread from scratch, or get milk from a cow every morning, or perhaps doesn't even change his own oil.
It's what happens when you reach a certain age: Your time becomes worth more than the money you would save by giving it up on such tasks.
My HDTV home theater build was not as simple as his, but still much simpler than the linked article:
Step 1: Set up a Mac with EyeTV 500 and the Keyspan Remote Control sensor Step 2: Hook it up to a projection system via DVI-HDMI connector Step 3: There's no step three
Did I spend more than a '1337 hax0r spent on a comparable Linux-based system? Yeah, probably.
Speaking as one who finally got bored with WoW content, I would probably go back to CoH if they did a Mac port.... as long as it isn't a separate Mac Ghetto like Sony did with Everquest. If I can't play the MMORPG along with my Windows-owning friends, then no dice.
CoH is a great game, but now that my Mac is running the media room (and I have no desire to keep a second computer hooked up to my projector), I've got pretty much zero interest in PC-only games. If it ain't on either the Mac or a console, I'll do without.
Then again, when the Intel Macs start trickling out out next year, I might consider either dual-booting to Windows or going with some kind of WINE-like solution... for the sake of playing CoH and no other reason.:)
a 2" by 3" screen could still be 1600 x 1200 pixels which would maintain most of the detail
For 90% of the video content out there, you would need far less resolution than that!
Most of America is still watching everything they own (or rent; or tune in) on 480 interlaced horzontal lines at less than 30 FPS. For wide-screen presentation, their actual viewable resolution is even lower.
By today's standards, that's considered kind of pathetic for a pocket graphing calculator.
I guess it depends on your assignment. If you are going to be spending a lot of time off the base in short stretches, I would think a hand-held battery media device would be pretty cool to have. You would just charge it and/or swap files around on it each time you got back.
If you mostly stay put in one location, then yeah, you're probably better off with a small DVD player and an AC adapter.
Good luck out there, by the way. You're a hero. Don't let anybody tell you any different.
Would a larger screen on an iPod-sized device really make it any easier to watch video on it? No matter how you design things, it's a tiny tiny display.
Have any family photos in your wallet? How big are they?
A TV screen that small is probably not as unwatchable as you think, given current LCD technology. If people can enjoy playing games on a small hand-held device, they can probably also enjoy watching archives of "CSI" (or whatever) using headphones and a 2" x 3" screen.
portable mini-LCD DVD players spend more time on family room shelves than in-use.
That might be true in the circles you are in, but business travellers and various other frequent-flyer types LOVE portable DVD players. Not only for passing time between flight connections, but for late evenings on the road when you don't feel like going out or trying to find something on the hotel TV.
Not to mention damn near every last grunt in Iraq. There's a lot of "down-time" involved in occupation efforts, and folks like us mailing DVD's out to them is one of their main sources of entertainment out there.
These groups of people would probably go bananas over a video iPod, if it was done right.
What's more... it doesn't really matter who is producing it.
There has never been a good movie made based on a video game.
Never.
I'm going to wait until they actually make a film worth watching, just once, before I ever give a damn about pre-release hype involving a video game movie.
Besides, I'm too busy watching "Serenity" over and over right now.
Master Chief will be written out to make way for a Tom Bombadil character, in order to finally quell all those whining LOTR poetry nerds. (That's right, all six of them.)
So an individual in a HG society......is generally healthier than the subsistance farmer. On the flipside there is a higher infant mortality rate...
Wilco Charlie Foxtrot
If you have an alarminlgy high number of babies dying in your society, that means that the people in your society are NOT healty. The life expectancy for a large percentage of them is several minutes.
Of course all the adult hunter-gatherers dug up by anthropologists are fine speciments of health. The sick and the weak all died off as infants or children! That's hardly evidence of a superior lifestyle.
It was the AC who you were defending who said, "We turned our back on utopia when we took plow to earth".
Since you took up the position of defending his view against the critics who followed, and were writing with the same "I saw two PBS specials and therefore am an expert in antropology, so how dare anybody argue with me" tone, it was an easy mistake to make.
I'm sure there were areas where the whole idea of farming started where it worked better than gathering in that area, but how interesting is that?
How interesting is that, you ask?
It's the whole point which kicked off this entire thread. Farming was clearly a better way to feed people than gathering.
Not just in some areas. The reason why farming encouraged higher population densities is because the land simply can only support so many open grazers before they start suffering from starvation, disease, and excessive predators. Gatherers frequently had to flat-out give up on their weaker children, assuming they were even able to keep themselves alive. They were basically living as little more than tool-wielding animals who couldn't move as fast as most of the creatures that surrounded them. Hardly the lost paradise you implied in your original post.
There's nothing that employees like less than a boss demands more of them than he does of himself.
That's completely backwards.
I never want a boss who works harder than me. People like that feel no shame about demanding I cancel family dinners and sex-filled vacations for the sake of putting in 56 hours a week at work, because after all they are not asking me to do any more than them... though they are working 70 hours a week and being sued for divorce by their neglected spouses, and will probably lose custody of the children who barely know them.
If at all possible, I want my boss to be a total slacker who barely manages to squeeze in 22 hours a week, less during golf season, and utterly marvels at my willingness to say as late as 4:15 in the afternoon, day in and day out, while only taking an hour and a half for lunch.
The second point is related to the fact that humanity doesn't have centuries of time ahead of it......A few decades after we mostly stop dying we will ascend to the posthuman level...
Up until right around here, your argument was fairly sound. Then you had to throw your religious dogma at us.
All this "posthuman" "transhuman" "neo-human" crap is downright silly. I don't look much like the men who built the ancient city of Ur, and even less like their great-grandparents, but I'm still human. Likewise, my descendants might (for all I know) choose to engineer themselves into flying, genderless, half-robot people who communicate telepathically and compose artistic works directed at senses that I don't even have... but they will also still be human. Besides, they might not. They may very well conclude (again, for all I know... and for all you, for that matter) that those people who built Ur are actually the highest ideal of humanity, and genetically build their way back to being just like them, cheerfully living in little huts in the desert and eating off pottery they made themselves.
The one thing we can be fairly certain of, based on all forcasts of today which were made by people in the recent past, is that most (if not all) current pictures of what the future will be like are almost certainly wrong.
I'll leave you to argue with whoever wrote that post you're reading.
Hey, don't get mad at him. You're the one who idiotically described the forlorn, short, and brutal life of the prehistoric hunter/gatherer as a lost utopia. Read your post again. That's exactly what you said.
I maintain my previous assertion. If it was so wonderful, feel free to return to it any time you like. There are not many spots left in the world where one can do so, but they do exist.
In order to dominate by force, he has to have that army to begin with.
A bunch of malnurished, force-marched soldiers stand no chance against your idealized meat-eating, lion-killing hunters unless they've already managed to thrive as a society to the point that they can overwhelm them with numbers.
We're not talking about how civilization grew here. We're talking about how it started in the first place. Somebody had to decide that planting food was a better idea than pathetically scrounging for it, and that somebody had to be right, or your viscious warrior chief never had the opportunity to exist in the first place.
Except said cheiftan has no hope of attracting farmers to live under his mighty thumb in the first place if they are better off out in the jungle. And what you are talking about could not possibly have been established until after farming had caught on as a lifestyle anyway.
People started planting stuff because they, as individuals, made the choice that it was a better way to live than going out into the wild and looking for it. You still haven't established how there could possibly be any room for debate whatsoever on this point.
(And why do some people find the cordwood/simulator model to be so offensive? If it could be perfected, I'd go for it, depending on the controls I'd get. A world minus physical limitations? Go for it!)
I'm 100% with you in the "blue pill" camp. The physical world is overrated. Come up with something better, and I'll get in line for it.
Hell, as a programmer, I can even do my job entirely from a simulated environment, allowing me to fund the needed life support and network bandwidth for as long as my "brain jar" can maintain my virtual awareness.
That's a common misunderstanding. Farming was better for a society, as it supported higher population densities and therefore larger armies. People who didn't farm got absorbed by those who did, one way or another. That doesn't mean it was a better deal for the individual.
Actually, it does.
The only way you get higher populations is by having more people surviving and having babies, and more of those babies surviving to have babies of their own.
When you are talking about ancient tribes where "property" is a brand-new concept, survival and procreation is really the only meaningful metric for evaluating prosperity, and the fact that farm populations boomed while hunter/gatherer tribes were gradually pushed out of existance is solid evidence that individuals were better off on farms.
I'm not even going to bother with some of the other silly assertions in this thread about farming resulting in less leasure time. That person has obviously never tried living off the land before, for even a day or two. There's a reason why civilization didn't begin until farming was invented. Nobody had time to come up with things like wheels.
The final nail in the coffin on the argument that individuals in hunter/gatherer tribes were better off than farmers: The farmers invented beer.
Hop over to the next reply, and I think you will find that FrostedChaos debunks your posistion a little more effectively than the parent AC did, but they are both correct. Farming created population density problems precisely because they were so vastly more successful at feeding people than hunting & gathering.
It sucked to be a poor farmer (especially a slave) in an early agricultural society, but it sucked a lot more to be one of the hunter/gatherers who did not survive due to a shortage of wild plants and animals. If it didn't, said peasant farmer would have simply dropped his plow and abandoned his overlord's farm.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not getting old. The conditioning to be a consumer instead of a producer is working on you is all.
More accurately, he is producing enough in his specialization that he doesn't need to do everything for himself. I'm sure he doesn't always bake his own bread from scratch, or get milk from a cow every morning, or perhaps doesn't even change his own oil.
It's what happens when you reach a certain age: Your time becomes worth more than the money you would save by giving it up on such tasks.
My HDTV home theater build was not as simple as his, but still much simpler than the linked article:
Step 1: Set up a Mac with EyeTV 500 and the Keyspan Remote Control sensor
Step 2: Hook it up to a projection system via DVI-HDMI connector
Step 3: There's no step three
Did I spend more than a '1337 hax0r spent on a comparable Linux-based system? Yeah, probably.
Do I give a shit? No, not really.
Speaking as one who finally got bored with WoW content, I would probably go back to CoH if they did a Mac port. ... as long as it isn't a separate Mac Ghetto like Sony did with Everquest. If I can't play the MMORPG along with my Windows-owning friends, then no dice.
:)
CoH is a great game, but now that my Mac is running the media room (and I have no desire to keep a second computer hooked up to my projector), I've got pretty much zero interest in PC-only games. If it ain't on either the Mac or a console, I'll do without.
Then again, when the Intel Macs start trickling out out next year, I might consider either dual-booting to Windows or going with some kind of WINE-like solution... for the sake of playing CoH and no other reason.
Does anyone know of any previous cases where companies have taken fairly successful desktop applications and made them accessible on the web?
Sure. Hotmail.
I guess this mean's Microsoft will now buy Google, and then proceed to completely fuck it up.
a 2" by 3" screen could still be 1600 x 1200 pixels which would maintain most of the detail
For 90% of the video content out there, you would need far less resolution than that!
Most of America is still watching everything they own (or rent; or tune in) on 480 interlaced horzontal lines at less than 30 FPS. For wide-screen presentation, their actual viewable resolution is even lower.
By today's standards, that's considered kind of pathetic for a pocket graphing calculator.
I guess it depends on your assignment. If you are going to be spending a lot of time off the base in short stretches, I would think a hand-held battery media device would be pretty cool to have. You would just charge it and/or swap files around on it each time you got back.
If you mostly stay put in one location, then yeah, you're probably better off with a small DVD player and an AC adapter.
Good luck out there, by the way. You're a hero. Don't let anybody tell you any different.
Would a larger screen on an iPod-sized device really make it any easier to watch video on it? No matter how you design things, it's a tiny tiny display.
Have any family photos in your wallet? How big are they?
A TV screen that small is probably not as unwatchable as you think, given current LCD technology. If people can enjoy playing games on a small hand-held device, they can probably also enjoy watching archives of "CSI" (or whatever) using headphones and a 2" x 3" screen.
portable mini-LCD DVD players spend more time on family room shelves than in-use.
That might be true in the circles you are in, but business travellers and various other frequent-flyer types LOVE portable DVD players. Not only for passing time between flight connections, but for late evenings on the road when you don't feel like going out or trying to find something on the hotel TV.
Not to mention damn near every last grunt in Iraq. There's a lot of "down-time" involved in occupation efforts, and folks like us mailing DVD's out to them is one of their main sources of entertainment out there.
These groups of people would probably go bananas over a video iPod, if it was done right.
Tomb Raider was half decent.
I must have missed that half.
What's more... it doesn't really matter who is producing it.
There has never been a good movie made based on a video game.
Never.
I'm going to wait until they actually make a film worth watching, just once, before I ever give a damn about pre-release hype involving a video game movie.
Besides, I'm too busy watching "Serenity" over and over right now.
Master Chief will be written out to make way for a Tom Bombadil character, in order to finally quell all those whining LOTR poetry nerds. (That's right, all six of them.)
So an individual in a HG society... ...is generally healthier than the subsistance farmer. On the flipside there is a higher infant mortality rate...
Wilco
Charlie
Foxtrot
If you have an alarminlgy high number of babies dying in your society, that means that the people in your society are NOT healty. The life expectancy for a large percentage of them is several minutes.
Of course all the adult hunter-gatherers dug up by anthropologists are fine speciments of health. The sick and the weak all died off as infants or children! That's hardly evidence of a superior lifestyle.
Anybody who thinks he knows the fate of mankind as a rigid fact, that is religion, whether there is a god of some sort involved or not.
I stand corrected.
It was the AC who you were defending who said, "We turned our back on utopia when we took plow to earth".
Since you took up the position of defending his view against the critics who followed, and were writing with the same "I saw two PBS specials and therefore am an expert in antropology, so how dare anybody argue with me" tone, it was an easy mistake to make.
I'm sure there were areas where the whole idea of farming started where it worked better than gathering in that area, but how interesting is that?
How interesting is that, you ask?
It's the whole point which kicked off this entire thread. Farming was clearly a better way to feed people than gathering.
Not just in some areas. The reason why farming encouraged higher population densities is because the land simply can only support so many open grazers before they start suffering from starvation, disease, and excessive predators. Gatherers frequently had to flat-out give up on their weaker children, assuming they were even able to keep themselves alive. They were basically living as little more than tool-wielding animals who couldn't move as fast as most of the creatures that surrounded them. Hardly the lost paradise you implied in your original post.
There's nothing that employees like less than a boss demands more of them than he does of himself.
That's completely backwards.
I never want a boss who works harder than me. People like that feel no shame about demanding I cancel family dinners and sex-filled vacations for the sake of putting in 56 hours a week at work, because after all they are not asking me to do any more than them... though they are working 70 hours a week and being sued for divorce by their neglected spouses, and will probably lose custody of the children who barely know them.
If at all possible, I want my boss to be a total slacker who barely manages to squeeze in 22 hours a week, less during golf season, and utterly marvels at my willingness to say as late as 4:15 in the afternoon, day in and day out, while only taking an hour and a half for lunch.
The second point is related to the fact that humanity doesn't have centuries of time ahead of it... ...A few decades after we mostly stop dying we will ascend to the posthuman level...
Up until right around here, your argument was fairly sound. Then you had to throw your religious dogma at us.
All this "posthuman" "transhuman" "neo-human" crap is downright silly. I don't look much like the men who built the ancient city of Ur, and even less like their great-grandparents, but I'm still human. Likewise, my descendants might (for all I know) choose to engineer themselves into flying, genderless, half-robot people who communicate telepathically and compose artistic works directed at senses that I don't even have... but they will also still be human. Besides, they might not. They may very well conclude (again, for all I know... and for all you, for that matter) that those people who built Ur are actually the highest ideal of humanity, and genetically build their way back to being just like them, cheerfully living in little huts in the desert and eating off pottery they made themselves.
The one thing we can be fairly certain of, based on all forcasts of today which were made by people in the recent past, is that most (if not all) current pictures of what the future will be like are almost certainly wrong.
I'll leave you to argue with whoever wrote that post you're reading.
Hey, don't get mad at him. You're the one who idiotically described the forlorn, short, and brutal life of the prehistoric hunter/gatherer as a lost utopia. Read your post again. That's exactly what you said.
I maintain my previous assertion. If it was so wonderful, feel free to return to it any time you like. There are not many spots left in the world where one can do so, but they do exist.
In order to dominate by force, he has to have that army to begin with.
A bunch of malnurished, force-marched soldiers stand no chance against your idealized meat-eating, lion-killing hunters unless they've already managed to thrive as a society to the point that they can overwhelm them with numbers.
We're not talking about how civilization grew here. We're talking about how it started in the first place. Somebody had to decide that planting food was a better idea than pathetically scrounging for it, and that somebody had to be right, or your viscious warrior chief never had the opportunity to exist in the first place.
Except said cheiftan has no hope of attracting farmers to live under his mighty thumb in the first place if they are better off out in the jungle. And what you are talking about could not possibly have been established until after farming had caught on as a lifestyle anyway.
People started planting stuff because they, as individuals, made the choice that it was a better way to live than going out into the wild and looking for it. You still haven't established how there could possibly be any room for debate whatsoever on this point.
(And why do some people find the cordwood/simulator model to be so offensive? If it could be perfected, I'd go for it, depending on the controls I'd get. A world minus physical limitations? Go for it!)
I'm 100% with you in the "blue pill" camp. The physical world is overrated. Come up with something better, and I'll get in line for it.
Hell, as a programmer, I can even do my job entirely from a simulated environment, allowing me to fund the needed life support and network bandwidth for as long as my "brain jar" can maintain my virtual awareness.
That's a common misunderstanding. Farming was better for a society, as it supported higher population densities and therefore larger armies. People who didn't farm got absorbed by those who did, one way or another. That doesn't mean it was a better deal for the individual.
Actually, it does.
The only way you get higher populations is by having more people surviving and having babies, and more of those babies surviving to have babies of their own.
When you are talking about ancient tribes where "property" is a brand-new concept, survival and procreation is really the only meaningful metric for evaluating prosperity, and the fact that farm populations boomed while hunter/gatherer tribes were gradually pushed out of existance is solid evidence that individuals were better off on farms.
I'm not even going to bother with some of the other silly assertions in this thread about farming resulting in less leasure time. That person has obviously never tried living off the land before, for even a day or two. There's a reason why civilization didn't begin until farming was invented. Nobody had time to come up with things like wheels.
The final nail in the coffin on the argument that individuals in hunter/gatherer tribes were better off than farmers: The farmers invented beer.
QED
Hop over to the next reply, and I think you will find that FrostedChaos debunks your posistion a little more effectively than the parent AC did, but they are both correct. Farming created population density problems precisely because they were so vastly more successful at feeding people than hunting & gathering.
It sucked to be a poor farmer (especially a slave) in an early agricultural society, but it sucked a lot more to be one of the hunter/gatherers who did not survive due to a shortage of wild plants and animals. If it didn't, said peasant farmer would have simply dropped his plow and abandoned his overlord's farm.
Perhaps even more importantly, desire, and the realization of our desires, is fun.
Rig up some kind of gizmo which nourishes me while preventing hunger, and I will probably miss both the hunger and the eating a little bit.
I think the grandparent post needs get out to the theaters as watch "Serenity." It happens to touch on the very issue of Desire Management.
Does anyone else believe there are only so many "real" viruses out there? The rest are engineered by the virus scan companies?
Yes. Next question.
I'd rather live 10 glorious years of love and apotheosis in a Cebu City garbage heap than eek out 100 years of misery and decay in a Soho townhouse.
Does the misery and decay in the Soho townhouse get cable?