Somedays I'm more optimistic. Today's one of those days (tomorrow may not be 'cause I'm digging deeper into IE's weird-ass DOM than I usually care to). But...
Most web developers that have been around for a while would rather code to standards than to marketshare. Standards give you the promise of backward, and more importantly, forward, compatibility. It's also a helluva lot easier to sort out your code when a client asks for a redesign in a year or two if you've been conscious of more than just "making it look right" in the popular browser of the day.
Markup designed for IE only often does truly evil things on other platforms - there's going to be more cellphones and PDAs accessing web pages, not fewer. There are also serious organizational advantages to coding to standards - more tools for handling your pages, it's easier to whip up a quick perl script to process standards compliant HTML...the list of advantages is long.
Just like any other field, there's a trickle-down effect. Not everyone will write good, W3C compliant code, but more will, more often. And despite their megalithic, feudal mentality, Microsoft will have to pay attention. IE6 is still a long ways away from adhering to standards, but it's much, much closer than IE4 was. This seems to have been in large part a reaction to developers bitching about their lack of compliance. I'm hopeful the trend will continue.
Re:Are you sure of what you want?
on
Storefront-in-a-Box
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Self-hosting probably wouldn't be what I'd recommend either (having credit card numbers on my server makes me nervous, but then I'm not qualified to admin an e-commerce server). But, whatever you do, for your sanity, don't go near Yahoo! Stores. I've developed a couple, and I've been admining a quite busy one for nearly a year now and it's utter hell. If you don't care what the site looks like, you can use one of their pre-built catalog template thingies and probably be ok, but if you want to do anything remotely customized, you'll be delving into RTML. RTML is it's own little hell - the lispish syntax is kinda nice, but doing server side programming by pointing and clicking through forms (no, you can't just type the code in) is insanely time consuming, and hard on the mouse wrist.
An extra joy when I first worked on it was that RTML wasn't actually documented anywhere, if by documentation you mean any kind of explanation or example of how to use a particular construct. I understand there's a book available now, but I can't vouch for it as I haven't read it.
Further, the fact that little bits of HTML and javascript and what have you end up scattered across various forms will make hunting for that particular menu graphic that you need to change a real treat. You'll start out with the best of intentions - keeping all your pieces nicely organized and in their proper locations. But the tools are simply not designed for ease of administration and the onset of entropy will be swift.
Finally, while you can do things like download your catalog from the server, you can't actually get at any other part of the site. There's no template you can store locally and just upload for handy updates. And when you finally get tired of spending two or three times as long doing simple tasks and decide to move, you'll find that you need to build the site from scratch again, because it won't run anywhere else. You can't just grab your site and upload it to another server. You're trapped.
I'll stop ranting now - I just can't begin to tell you how much time I've wasted dealing with Yahoo! Stores. My time has meant client's money, and the only one winning is Yahoo!
I'd like a perl only magazine - I used haunt the local comp bookstore everytime I knew a new TPJ was coming out. I like dead-tree publications, and I honestly don't understand the "why pay for something I can get free online" crowd for the whole list of usual reasons.
But, I'm not signing up for TPJ this time around. Why?
the way it suddenly vanished last time, to be replaced by SysAdmin subs. I've picked up a couple issues of SysAdmin, and it never had enough that was relevant to me.
I respect everything Jon Orwant has done to keep TPJ alive, but the light descriptions I've heard of the new TPJ just doesn't sound like the publication it used to be.
(much to my chagrin), I'm not doing much perl work lately, which means it would be in the strictly recreational category for me. If I had time for recreational programming these days, that would be great. I don't.
Strangely enough, for these reasons (especially the last one), I probably would subscribe to "The Scripting Journal." It would have some perl in it it give me that warm fuzzy feeling, and enough other stuff that I do currently work with daily to allow me to justify the time. I enjoy scripting languages, so something like that would be a nice combination of work and play. I fear it's never to be, though, and that I'm stuck with online-only publications.
I know that's a joke, but just in case someone decides to take it seriously....
This is one of those persistent myths. Darwin apparently did dislike the way certain atheists tried to appropriate his work as a theological agrument, but there's no proof he ever disavowed evolution or converted back to Christianity at the end of his life. (Review: The Darwin Legend by James Moore)
That said, evolution and theology have little to do with each other. If you believe in God (or some version thereof), there's no reason to disbelieve that she/he/it used evolution as a mechanism of creation. Personally, I think a supreme being is an unnecessary complication, but that's not related to evolution either.
That's typical of Wrox books in general. Good way to inflate the page count. Their author lists generally look impressive, too (oooh! ten people wrote this, each one in their specialty!), but you end up with a book that has no coherence. The handful of Wrox books that I picked up (before giving up) often repeated the same information many times; a result, I imagine, of each author not knowing what the other is doing and hasty editing. And their bindings sucked. Hefty page counts need good binding for what I put my books through.
I thought a better title for the article would have been Scientific Method Works!, or even (if you're going for real sensationalism) Scientific Method Triumphs Over Capitalist Temptation!
When you boil it down you have a) someone publishing (possibly) bogus results, b) peer reviewers becoming suspicious and finally, c) someone asking hard questions because the data is public, so you can check these things. It sounds a lot like a process that's evolved to, in part, balance the quest for prestige and grant money had a hard fight, but ultimately won.
I guess Eggheads You Don't Understand Are Screwing You Over makes better press.
I'd even go a bit further and say I'd refuse a job that an evaluation like this was required for. It's highly unlikely that an employer will get this kind of study right (the usual "Fifty Questions to Understand You!" isn't it), and I'd rather not work for someone with such poor critical skills, if at all possible.
Agreed. It was only in the last decade that my job/career/whatever (web developer) even existed. Could never have planned that, and when I was in my early twenties certainly never would have imagined I would be starting a business. But here I am, with a web company, and happy.
I've always had an aversion to long-term goal setting. I'm not really concerned about where I'll be when I'm 50 (or 60, or 40). I'll know when I get there. No matter how many goals I might have achieved at those points, they'll be empty accomplishments if I haven't enjoyed the journey.
Concentrate on the small things, on how you're getting wherever you're going. It's whether you enjoy life, not how many points you score.
(And read Robert Pirsig).
Re:Atlas Shrugged. - OT reply to parent post
on
Dystopic Novels?
·
· Score: 2
Sorry to nitpick, but the Bible never advocates stoning homosexuals...
Heh. That's ok, please feel free.
I have to admit, I don't have a reference for that. I just went to try to dig up my rather hefty concordance, but it looks like it's in storage with too many of my other books. I may have been mistaken with that comment. I was pretty sure that was found in Leviticus, where a lot of stoning is advocated, but I could easily be wrong. (hmmm...maybe it was a law about sodomy? That would make more sense with your comment).
It did come as a surprise to me that Christ advocated putting anyone to death, although he picked a good group to go after. (Also, for the record, I'm not one of those who confuses what Christ said with what the "Bible says." I've always been fascinated with the path that various ancient texts followed to end up as this one canonical text).
As for why the post you were replying to was taking "potshots" at religious texts, it should come as no surprise. He's an Ayn Rand fan, and Rand hated religion almost as much as communism. She saw it as just another tool to keep the '1337 individualists of the world down.
It's true...considering how much she went on about the culture of complaint, she did a lot of it herself, just dressed up as a critique of society. Funny, that.
(btw, your sig made me spit coffee on my keyboard. heh).
(Sorry about the delay in responding. My week hasn't allowed for slashdot time).
I have examined her logic carefully, and I have not found any faults with it.
Then I doubt anything I say will convince you otherwise. Ayn Rand has been the subject of many crtiques.
There's a lot more there than I'd every be able to sum up. (Actually, it looks like some very interesting reading. It might be time to for me to bone up on this subject again. It's been a while). If I was to do something so potentially dangerous as sum up my rejection of Rand's philosophy in a sentence, it would be something like "Based too much on a priori assumptions, applied with too wide a brush and with too little considerations of the subtleties that make us human." That's a criticism that can be leveled at many thinkers, not just Rand. I tend to believe that dogmatic philosophies are essentially flawed. And, again, I'm not here to convince you. The basic thesis of my orignal post was that Rand was a better story teller than philosopher, and that her stories suffered because of the latter.
That you say the vast majority of people cannot live up to their potential startles me.
That startles me, too. I think you may have misinterpretted this sentence:
Her compassion was very specific. It was the compassion for people unable to reach their full potential, for those held back by an incompetent majority.
What I meant was that her compassion was not for all of humanity, but only for those she considered to be held back by the views of the majority. One would be hard pressed to find any compassion for, say, a priest, in her writing.
For what it's worth, I'm as leary of other popular philosophies as I am of objectivism. "Philosophies" tend to want to shape all of humanity into a particular mold, with more regard for the mold than for the people. I'll confess to a strong humanist bent, but that's as close to an -ism as I'm likely to get.
I'm not going to get into the whole vegetarian vs. meat eater debate in this post, but there's a rather glaring flaw in your argument - your friend has a genetic disorder, and when she eats fish, she's ok. "Therefore all healthy people should also eat meat to stay healthy" is not a valid conclusion from that. Even "all people with this genetic disorder should eat fish" is probably pushing it. You have one anecdote, about one person and provide no further environmental or dietary information.
In short, even if (if) I was to grant that eating meat is the only way to maintain a healthy diet, your argument would not support that conclusion.
Actually, she's the most compassionate person I can think of. And she advocates far more compassion than, say, the Bible.
If compassion is "Deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the wish to relieve it.", then Ayn Rand could be considered compassionate, in a way. Her compassion was very specific. It was the compassion for people unable to reach their full potential, for those held back by an incompetent majority. This is at once a deeply idealistic view, and a deeply cynical one. Her compassion did not extend to humanity as a whole. I'm not sure how a philosophy which excludes the majority of mankind can be considered humane or compassionate.
(As an aside, cheap potshots at religious texts rarely strenghten your argument. I'm not a christian by any stretch, but parts of the bible are very humane. Parts advocate things like stoning homosexuals, but your statement was over-broad).
If you don't take her "too seriously" you are avoiding the philosophy.
Yes, well, rather the point. Her reasoning really isn't that good. If you avoid her ill-thought out philosophy, there's a decent writer under there, with good stories.
...then goes to prove its correctness.
Well, no. It doesn't. Ayn Rand was a weak philosopher. She had a habit of making a handful of a priori statements and then constructing arguments which jumped to unfounded conclusions. (I realize that sentence will convince you of nothing, but it's a bigger topic than I really have time for in a/. post. Just accept it as my opinion - the reason I said to skip the philosophy). Perhaps a better example of strong philosophy presented as narrative, while still being an excellent read, is Albert Camus. You can't say "The Outsider is a good book, but skip that part in the middle where he's thinking in his cell." This is because, unlike Rand's work, the whole story hangs together. You can excise entire passages from Atlas Shrugged and not harm the narrative. If she'd worked with a good editor, it would have helped her immensely.
That majesty you admire is a quality you can have if you want it.
This just sounds like zealotry (and illustrates exactly what I mean when I say you shouldn't take her too seriously). I hear the same thing from [insert flavour of religious believer here] if I comment on some aspect of their belief I appreciate. I like her heroes. I like the big trains and steel foundries. I also like Soviet propaganda posters of the thirties. It's an aesthetic appreciation. I have no desire to be John Galt.
334, Camp Concentration - Thomas Disch (already mentioned, but worth repeating).
A Scanner Darkly, The Man in the High Castle - Phillip K. Dick. (He wrote lots of them, but those are my two favorites). Although The Man in the High Castle is more properly alternate history...but whatever. I liked it.
J.G. Ballard - most of what he's written has been about the world falling apart in some way. Hello, America is an almost comic novel about an expedition across the fallen United States.
Dhalgren - Samual R. Delany. Beautiful, surreal, and even though it takes place in one city, sealed off from the rest of the world, huge in scope.
Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up - John Brunner. I believe Stand on Zanzibar was one of the first books about the perils of over-population. The Sheep Look Up focuses on pollution and disease.
I was lucky, I read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged before I knew about her philosophies (although there was little doubt about them by the time I was finished those) or her generally uncritical followers. Atlas Shrugged would have done well with a good editor, but aside from the occasional diatribe (skip the 30 page radio screed in the middle of the book), it's quite a good book. I liked the Fountainhead better - it's more focused, and less strident, but Atlas Shrugged is worthwhile. There is something rather majestic about her single-minded women and strong-jawed men gazing into the future. And for all her lack of compassion, there is some redemption in her belief in (at least some of) mankind. Just don't take her too seriously.
Let me second that one. A friend recommended it to me for years before I got around to reading it this winter. It's haunting, one of my new favorites. Interesting to see, too, how much
I've been a Phil Dick fan for years, ever since I read A Scanner Darkly. There are definitely resemblances in Murakami - a feeling of dissociation from the world, a sense that you can peel back it's surface and find something totally different. Murakami is, I think, a more subtle writer, and his characterizations are stronger than Dick's (although character wasn't the focus of Dick's work in the way that it is in Murakami). If I have to compare his writing to another writer's, I usually think of Raymond Carver (whose writing he's translated into Japanese).
But it is probably safe to say that if you enjoy Phil Dick, you'll like Haruki Murakami.
I was surprised - I didn't hate Minority Report. I thought it was a credible job, and Tom Cruise only annoyed me for the first half hour. I haven't read the story that the movie was based on, but I got the sense that Spielberg didn't capture the kind of perspective shifting that Dick did so well. As a movie, I enjoyed it, but I'm still waiting for someone to bring Phil Dick to the screen properly.
Obviously, it was generated in an entirely different way. If, for instance, your patent is for the tree-in-an-empty-forest method and they utilized the more esoteric clapping-with-one-hand method, they haven't violated your patent.
Actually, despite the tone of my earlier message (more beer == more cynical), I tend to think it's a fair trade as well. A good site with good content isn't cheap, and you need some kind of business model. What I'd really like to see is enough clueful users that they're careful about who they hand their info to, and exactly what they reveal. I'm also optimistic that, given time, sites that are overly intrusive, or abuse their users' trust, will slowly see their hits dropping. Maybe it just requires time. Even though it feels old, this whole 'net thing is new in a lot of ways. It will take time for the average user and the average business to find a workable common ground.
I don't like site registration, probably for an amalgam of reasons similar to the majority of/. readers - I don't like giving out personal info, I don't like getting spam, and it's a hassle to maintain registrations and logins. The latter can be solved by technology in five billion ways, but it's still a nuisance, and unless it's really special content, I'm not going to bother. I have a NY Times login out there somewhere, but damned if I can remember what it is, or what email address I used. And, yes, all the info I entered was bogus.
I do have a handful of registrations on sites that I consider worth it, and that I trust. I'm very careful about who gets my email address (only a few sites that send mailouts - use.perl, slashdot, freshmeat, o'reilly) and I get maybe five spams a week, usually from people who obviously got it from whois. Not much I can do about that.
However, I also don't have a problem with sites that require registration. I understand their reasons for it. At the moment, I tell clients (I'm a web developer and consultant) that they're better off not collecting personal info, and much better off not sending random spam to people who sign up. What really sucks is that may have to change someday soon.
The reasons are very straight forward - first, sites need to make money. Whether by being able to tell advertisers where their impressions are going or outright selling email addresses to SpamCo., if it's viable, I have a responsibility to tell them about it. (Although things haven't gotten to the point yet where I haven't been able to look a client in the eye and tell them spamming will kill them, thank $diety). Second, users don't care. They don't value their privacy, they don't understand why personal data is personal, and some of them honestly think it's a fair trade.
What I'm hoping is that enough people get online fast enough, and enough of them understand why privacy is important, and enough of them care, that they won't register with just any site that asks for your address and what car they own. Sounds sort of like the Drake equation. (I'm optimistic on both counts).
Actually, they get a lot of mostly-accurate data. I've participated in the development of more than a a few sites that had some form of registration - either for community sites or for sites where you get extra stuff if you provide a bit of personal info. The amount of legit info you get is much greater than the number of "booger@nose.net" addresses that show up.
Fact is, most people are one, or some of:
new to being online (~50% of anyone surfing today started within the last year) and don't realize what happens when their email address gets out.
don't realize that spam isn't just a force of nature, and that how much they get is increased by how often they hand out their email address. They think it just happens.
don't value their privacy in the same way that you and I do. They consider handing over where they live, who they are and whether they were boxers or briefs to be par for the course
consider it an equitable trade. It's just information, after all.
don't care. Gimme more cheez whiz.
On the plus side, most sites don't seem to do much with the data they have, but that won't last.
It's unfortunate, but the vast majority of people don't realize the commercial trends they're enabling when they give in to this kind of thing. I'm facing the day when I have to start telling clients "it's a great idea to get people's addresses and then email them as much crap as you can" because it will be good business sense.
God, I hate that phrase. Probably time for me to get into landscaping.
It's not the artist's vision that's important, but conveying the company's vision.
I'd argue that there is an art to that - putting across the company's vision in an aesthetically pleasing way, without sacrificing functionaliy or straying outside the bounds of good website design (accessibility, download times, cross-browser compatibility, etc...). Our designer has an excellent grasp of these things, and has an ability to capture a companies "feel" that really amazes me. She's a pleasure to work with.
On the other hand, nothing bothers me so much as so-called designers that insist on gratiutous elemements that impede usability and add nothing to the site. Some of our clients have had very bad experiences with previous companies, and it made it very hard to get them to trust us at first. Of course, now they're loyal clients who say nice things about us, so maybe it all works out;)
Anyway, I'm agreeing with you, just expanding on how I'd define "art" in terms of commercial web development.
I haven't tried Gnome2 out yet (and I'm not likely to use it, given my preference for blackbox), but based on this review, I'd at least look at it to recommend to others.
Any review of a desktop environment that complains how "unintuitive" it is (read: I wouldn't do it that way), declares broadly what UI designers will think of it (when the writer obviously isn't one, or he wouldn't be complaining about lack of configuration options or new gee-whiz features) is wholly untrustworthy, and probably 180 degress from what I'll think of it. So now I'm curious.
Couldn't agree more....I don't understand the whole desktop environment obsession thing. I don't work more effeciently with them, and they clutter my screen.
I used to have little time for file managers either until I discovered Rox. Which you've probably tried, because it does seem to be all the rage lately, but if you havne't, do. I didn't think anything would get me using a graphical file manager again, but this did.
(crap - I know I'm missing some important reference with the first sentence, but even google couldn't help me fake it).
Slashdot Mirror
Somedays I'm more optimistic. Today's one of those days (tomorrow may not be 'cause I'm digging deeper into IE's weird-ass DOM than I usually care to). But...
Most web developers that have been around for a while would rather code to standards than to marketshare. Standards give you the promise of backward, and more importantly, forward, compatibility. It's also a helluva lot easier to sort out your code when a client asks for a redesign in a year or two if you've been conscious of more than just "making it look right" in the popular browser of the day.
Markup designed for IE only often does truly evil things on other platforms - there's going to be more cellphones and PDAs accessing web pages, not fewer. There are also serious organizational advantages to coding to standards - more tools for handling your pages, it's easier to whip up a quick perl script to process standards compliant HTML...the list of advantages is long.
Just like any other field, there's a trickle-down effect. Not everyone will write good, W3C compliant code, but more will, more often. And despite their megalithic, feudal mentality, Microsoft will have to pay attention. IE6 is still a long ways away from adhering to standards, but it's much, much closer than IE4 was. This seems to have been in large part a reaction to developers bitching about their lack of compliance. I'm hopeful the trend will continue.
Self-hosting probably wouldn't be what I'd recommend either (having credit card numbers on my server makes me nervous, but then I'm not qualified to admin an e-commerce server). But, whatever you do, for your sanity, don't go near Yahoo! Stores. I've developed a couple, and I've been admining a quite busy one for nearly a year now and it's utter hell. If you don't care what the site looks like, you can use one of their pre-built catalog template thingies and probably be ok, but if you want to do anything remotely customized, you'll be delving into RTML. RTML is it's own little hell - the lispish syntax is kinda nice, but doing server side programming by pointing and clicking through forms (no, you can't just type the code in) is insanely time consuming, and hard on the mouse wrist.
An extra joy when I first worked on it was that RTML wasn't actually documented anywhere, if by documentation you mean any kind of explanation or example of how to use a particular construct. I understand there's a book available now, but I can't vouch for it as I haven't read it.
Further, the fact that little bits of HTML and javascript and what have you end up scattered across various forms will make hunting for that particular menu graphic that you need to change a real treat. You'll start out with the best of intentions - keeping all your pieces nicely organized and in their proper locations. But the tools are simply not designed for ease of administration and the onset of entropy will be swift.
Finally, while you can do things like download your catalog from the server, you can't actually get at any other part of the site. There's no template you can store locally and just upload for handy updates. And when you finally get tired of spending two or three times as long doing simple tasks and decide to move, you'll find that you need to build the site from scratch again, because it won't run anywhere else. You can't just grab your site and upload it to another server. You're trapped.
I'll stop ranting now - I just can't begin to tell you how much time I've wasted dealing with Yahoo! Stores. My time has meant client's money, and the only one winning is Yahoo!
I'd like a perl only magazine - I used haunt the local comp bookstore everytime I knew a new TPJ was coming out. I like dead-tree publications, and I honestly don't understand the "why pay for something I can get free online" crowd for the whole list of usual reasons.
But, I'm not signing up for TPJ this time around. Why?
Strangely enough, for these reasons (especially the last one), I probably would subscribe to "The Scripting Journal." It would have some perl in it it give me that warm fuzzy feeling, and enough other stuff that I do currently work with daily to allow me to justify the time. I enjoy scripting languages, so something like that would be a nice combination of work and play. I fear it's never to be, though, and that I'm stuck with online-only publications.
I know that's a joke, but just in case someone decides to take it seriously....
This is one of those persistent myths. Darwin apparently did dislike the way certain atheists tried to appropriate his work as a theological agrument, but there's no proof he ever disavowed evolution or converted back to Christianity at the end of his life. (Review: The Darwin Legend by James Moore)
That said, evolution and theology have little to do with each other. If you believe in God (or some version thereof), there's no reason to disbelieve that she/he/it used evolution as a mechanism of creation. Personally, I think a supreme being is an unnecessary complication, but that's not related to evolution either.
That's typical of Wrox books in general. Good way to inflate the page count. Their author lists generally look impressive, too (oooh! ten people wrote this, each one in their specialty!), but you end up with a book that has no coherence. The handful of Wrox books that I picked up (before giving up) often repeated the same information many times; a result, I imagine, of each author not knowing what the other is doing and hasty editing. And their bindings sucked. Hefty page counts need good binding for what I put my books through.
I thought a better title for the article would have been Scientific Method Works!, or even (if you're going for real sensationalism) Scientific Method Triumphs Over Capitalist Temptation!
When you boil it down you have a) someone publishing (possibly) bogus results, b) peer reviewers becoming suspicious and finally, c) someone asking hard questions because the data is public, so you can check these things. It sounds a lot like a process that's evolved to, in part, balance the quest for prestige and grant money had a hard fight, but ultimately won.
I guess Eggheads You Don't Understand Are Screwing You Over makes better press.
I'd even go a bit further and say I'd refuse a job that an evaluation like this was required for. It's highly unlikely that an employer will get this kind of study right (the usual "Fifty Questions to Understand You!" isn't it), and I'd rather not work for someone with such poor critical skills, if at all possible.
Agreed. It was only in the last decade that my job/career/whatever (web developer) even existed. Could never have planned that, and when I was in my early twenties certainly never would have imagined I would be starting a business. But here I am, with a web company, and happy.
I've always had an aversion to long-term goal setting. I'm not really concerned about where I'll be when I'm 50 (or 60, or 40). I'll know when I get there. No matter how many goals I might have achieved at those points, they'll be empty accomplishments if I haven't enjoyed the journey.
Concentrate on the small things, on how you're getting wherever you're going. It's whether you enjoy life, not how many points you score.
(And read Robert Pirsig).
Heh. That's ok, please feel free.
I have to admit, I don't have a reference for that. I just went to try to dig up my rather hefty concordance, but it looks like it's in storage with too many of my other books. I may have been mistaken with that comment. I was pretty sure that was found in Leviticus, where a lot of stoning is advocated, but I could easily be wrong. (hmmm...maybe it was a law about sodomy? That would make more sense with your comment).
It did come as a surprise to me that Christ advocated putting anyone to death, although he picked a good group to go after. (Also, for the record, I'm not one of those who confuses what Christ said with what the "Bible says." I've always been fascinated with the path that various ancient texts followed to end up as this one canonical text).
It's true...considering how much she went on about the culture of complaint, she did a lot of it herself, just dressed up as a critique of society. Funny, that.
(btw, your sig made me spit coffee on my keyboard. heh).
(Sorry about the delay in responding. My week hasn't allowed for slashdot time).
Then I doubt anything I say will convince you otherwise. Ayn Rand has been the subject of many crtiques. There's a lot more there than I'd every be able to sum up. (Actually, it looks like some very interesting reading. It might be time to for me to bone up on this subject again. It's been a while). If I was to do something so potentially dangerous as sum up my rejection of Rand's philosophy in a sentence, it would be something like "Based too much on a priori assumptions, applied with too wide a brush and with too little considerations of the subtleties that make us human." That's a criticism that can be leveled at many thinkers, not just Rand. I tend to believe that dogmatic philosophies are essentially flawed. And, again, I'm not here to convince you. The basic thesis of my orignal post was that Rand was a better story teller than philosopher, and that her stories suffered because of the latter.
That startles me, too. I think you may have misinterpretted this sentence:
What I meant was that her compassion was not for all of humanity, but only for those she considered to be held back by the views of the majority. One would be hard pressed to find any compassion for, say, a priest, in her writing.
For what it's worth, I'm as leary of other popular philosophies as I am of objectivism. "Philosophies" tend to want to shape all of humanity into a particular mold, with more regard for the mold than for the people. I'll confess to a strong humanist bent, but that's as close to an -ism as I'm likely to get.
I'm not going to get into the whole vegetarian vs. meat eater debate in this post, but there's a rather glaring flaw in your argument - your friend has a genetic disorder, and when she eats fish, she's ok. "Therefore all healthy people should also eat meat to stay healthy" is not a valid conclusion from that. Even "all people with this genetic disorder should eat fish" is probably pushing it. You have one anecdote, about one person and provide no further environmental or dietary information.
In short, even if (if) I was to grant that eating meat is the only way to maintain a healthy diet, your argument would not support that conclusion.
(oo...look, I fed a troll)
If compassion is "Deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the wish to relieve it.", then Ayn Rand could be considered compassionate, in a way. Her compassion was very specific. It was the compassion for people unable to reach their full potential, for those held back by an incompetent majority. This is at once a deeply idealistic view, and a deeply cynical one. Her compassion did not extend to humanity as a whole. I'm not sure how a philosophy which excludes the majority of mankind can be considered humane or compassionate.
(As an aside, cheap potshots at religious texts rarely strenghten your argument. I'm not a christian by any stretch, but parts of the bible are very humane. Parts advocate things like stoning homosexuals, but your statement was over-broad).
Yes, well, rather the point. Her reasoning really isn't that good. If you avoid her ill-thought out philosophy, there's a decent writer under there, with good stories.
Well, no. It doesn't. Ayn Rand was a weak philosopher. She had a habit of making a handful of a priori statements and then constructing arguments which jumped to unfounded conclusions. (I realize that sentence will convince you of nothing, but it's a bigger topic than I really have time for in a /. post. Just accept it as my opinion - the reason I said to skip the philosophy). Perhaps a better example of strong philosophy presented as narrative, while still being an excellent read, is Albert Camus. You can't say "The Outsider is a good book, but skip that part in the middle where he's thinking in his cell." This is because, unlike Rand's work, the whole story hangs together. You can excise entire passages from Atlas Shrugged and not harm the narrative. If she'd worked with a good editor, it would have helped her immensely.
This just sounds like zealotry (and illustrates exactly what I mean when I say you shouldn't take her too seriously). I hear the same thing from [insert flavour of religious believer here] if I comment on some aspect of their belief I appreciate. I like her heroes. I like the big trains and steel foundries. I also like Soviet propaganda posters of the thirties. It's an aesthetic appreciation. I have no desire to be John Galt.
334, Camp Concentration - Thomas Disch (already mentioned, but worth repeating).
A Scanner Darkly, The Man in the High Castle - Phillip K. Dick. (He wrote lots of them, but those are my two favorites). Although The Man in the High Castle is more properly alternate history...but whatever. I liked it.
J.G. Ballard - most of what he's written has been about the world falling apart in some way. Hello, America is an almost comic novel about an expedition across the fallen United States.
Dhalgren - Samual R. Delany. Beautiful, surreal, and even though it takes place in one city, sealed off from the rest of the world, huge in scope.
Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up - John Brunner. I believe Stand on Zanzibar was one of the first books about the perils of over-population. The Sheep Look Up focuses on pollution and disease.
I was lucky, I read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged before I knew about her philosophies (although there was little doubt about them by the time I was finished those) or her generally uncritical followers. Atlas Shrugged would have done well with a good editor, but aside from the occasional diatribe (skip the 30 page radio screed in the middle of the book), it's quite a good book. I liked the Fountainhead better - it's more focused, and less strident, but Atlas Shrugged is worthwhile. There is something rather majestic about her single-minded women and strong-jawed men gazing into the future. And for all her lack of compassion, there is some redemption in her belief in (at least some of) mankind. Just don't take her too seriously.
Let me second that one. A friend recommended it to me for years before I got around to reading it this winter. It's haunting, one of my new favorites. Interesting to see, too, how much
- 1984
drew from it.I've been a Phil Dick fan for years, ever since I read A Scanner Darkly. There are definitely resemblances in Murakami - a feeling of dissociation from the world, a sense that you can peel back it's surface and find something totally different. Murakami is, I think, a more subtle writer, and his characterizations are stronger than Dick's (although character wasn't the focus of Dick's work in the way that it is in Murakami). If I have to compare his writing to another writer's, I usually think of Raymond Carver (whose writing he's translated into Japanese). But it is probably safe to say that if you enjoy Phil Dick, you'll like Haruki Murakami.
I was surprised - I didn't hate Minority Report. I thought it was a credible job, and Tom Cruise only annoyed me for the first half hour. I haven't read the story that the movie was based on, but I got the sense that Spielberg didn't capture the kind of perspective shifting that Dick did so well. As a movie, I enjoyed it, but I'm still waiting for someone to bring Phil Dick to the screen properly.
Is that the Seuss version?
Obviously, it was generated in an entirely different way. If, for instance, your patent is for the tree-in-an-empty-forest method and they utilized the more esoteric clapping-with-one-hand method, they haven't violated your patent.
Actually, despite the tone of my earlier message (more beer == more cynical), I tend to think it's a fair trade as well. A good site with good content isn't cheap, and you need some kind of business model. What I'd really like to see is enough clueful users that they're careful about who they hand their info to, and exactly what they reveal. I'm also optimistic that, given time, sites that are overly intrusive, or abuse their users' trust, will slowly see their hits dropping. Maybe it just requires time. Even though it feels old, this whole 'net thing is new in a lot of ways. It will take time for the average user and the average business to find a workable common ground.
I hope so, 'cause I do enjoy working here.
I don't like site registration, probably for an amalgam of reasons similar to the majority of /. readers - I don't like giving out personal info, I don't like getting spam, and it's a hassle to maintain registrations and logins. The latter can be solved by technology in five billion ways, but it's still a nuisance, and unless it's really special content, I'm not going to bother. I have a NY Times login out there somewhere, but damned if I can remember what it is, or what email address I used. And, yes, all the info I entered was bogus.
I do have a handful of registrations on sites that I consider worth it, and that I trust. I'm very careful about who gets my email address (only a few sites that send mailouts - use.perl, slashdot, freshmeat, o'reilly) and I get maybe five spams a week, usually from people who obviously got it from whois. Not much I can do about that.
However, I also don't have a problem with sites that require registration. I understand their reasons for it. At the moment, I tell clients (I'm a web developer and consultant) that they're better off not collecting personal info, and much better off not sending random spam to people who sign up. What really sucks is that may have to change someday soon.
The reasons are very straight forward - first, sites need to make money. Whether by being able to tell advertisers where their impressions are going or outright selling email addresses to SpamCo., if it's viable, I have a responsibility to tell them about it. (Although things haven't gotten to the point yet where I haven't been able to look a client in the eye and tell them spamming will kill them, thank $diety). Second, users don't care. They don't value their privacy, they don't understand why personal data is personal, and some of them honestly think it's a fair trade.
What I'm hoping is that enough people get online fast enough, and enough of them understand why privacy is important, and enough of them care, that they won't register with just any site that asks for your address and what car they own. Sounds sort of like the Drake equation. (I'm optimistic on both counts).
Actually, they get a lot of mostly-accurate data. I've participated in the development of more than a a few sites that had some form of registration - either for community sites or for sites where you get extra stuff if you provide a bit of personal info. The amount of legit info you get is much greater than the number of "booger@nose.net" addresses that show up.
Fact is, most people are one, or some of:
On the plus side, most sites don't seem to do much with the data they have, but that won't last.
It's unfortunate, but the vast majority of people don't realize the commercial trends they're enabling when they give in to this kind of thing. I'm facing the day when I have to start telling clients "it's a great idea to get people's addresses and then email them as much crap as you can" because it will be good business sense.
God, I hate that phrase. Probably time for me to get into landscaping.
heh. Excellent comment. Now we just need to convince the rest of the industry...
I'd argue that there is an art to that - putting across the company's vision in an aesthetically pleasing way, without sacrificing functionaliy or straying outside the bounds of good website design (accessibility, download times, cross-browser compatibility, etc...). Our designer has an excellent grasp of these things, and has an ability to capture a companies "feel" that really amazes me. She's a pleasure to work with.
On the other hand, nothing bothers me so much as so-called designers that insist on gratiutous elemements that impede usability and add nothing to the site. Some of our clients have had very bad experiences with previous companies, and it made it very hard to get them to trust us at first. Of course, now they're loyal clients who say nice things about us, so maybe it all works out ;)
Anyway, I'm agreeing with you, just expanding on how I'd define "art" in terms of commercial web development.
I haven't tried Gnome2 out yet (and I'm not likely to use it, given my preference for blackbox), but based on this review, I'd at least look at it to recommend to others.
Any review of a desktop environment that complains how "unintuitive" it is (read: I wouldn't do it that way), declares broadly what UI designers will think of it (when the writer obviously isn't one, or he wouldn't be complaining about lack of configuration options or new gee-whiz features) is wholly untrustworthy, and probably 180 degress from what I'll think of it. So now I'm curious.
Couldn't agree more....I don't understand the whole desktop environment obsession thing. I don't work more effeciently with them, and they clutter my screen.
I used to have little time for file managers either until I discovered Rox. Which you've probably tried, because it does seem to be all the rage lately, but if you havne't, do. I didn't think anything would get me using a graphical file manager again, but this did.
(crap - I know I'm missing some important reference with the first sentence, but even google couldn't help me fake it).