I don't think I would have purchased an iPad Mini if it had been first—and I certainly wouldn't have discovered it as a work machine (contrary to popular opinion).
Now I have both a smaller tablet-like device (Galaxy Note phablet) and an iPad 2. The smaller one is my content consumption and carry-around device, for the most part, but I use the iPad 2 for a lot of my work, over and above my Macbook Pro, and wouldn't want to try to do it on the smaller screen or on the larger one.
In order to build the new set of use cases, rather than simply place devices into existing categories, Apple had to hit just the right spot. The 10" device that was too big to be a phone or PDA but had an operating system that made it clearly not a desktop or like previous Windows tablets was exactly that spot.
Everybody took this as a weakness ("WTF is this supposed to be? What is it for?") but that is precisely evidence that you're opening up a new market that people haven't yet imagined. If people had immediately known what it was for, that would have been a sign that it had fallen into a previous category, and sales would have been limited to those already buying or looking in that category, excluding anyone that had already decided that they didn't need (for example) an iPhone or PDA on the one end, or a "tablet computer" on the other end.
I'm a member and yet they're totally untransparent about how the digital library works and what limits exist for downloading from it.
I've been trying to download several sets of conference proceedings—a couple thousand articles (two conferences, less than 10 years each)—to do some analysis on them for a research project.
Trying to play the good guy, I asked how they'd prefer me to do this and/or whether they could supply a better means for obtaining these. "Manually" was the only answer I got. So I did. Click, click, click in my browser. Incredibly labor intensive. Before I was even 10 percent done, an hour in, I got blocked and a warning email. Asked again. "Manually" was the answer that came back again. I said I was doing it manually; asked what daily limits (files, bandwidth, whatever) they'd prefer I stay under. "Manually" was the terse and non-sequitur answer.
Basically, this is emblematic. I am a paying member. I have legitimate access under terms of service. I'm a researcher. I have a narrow and well-defined need and purpose for downloading a narrow and well-defined set of articles. And I'm already doing it fscking manually.
I am unable to find out how to get them without running afoul of some hidden threshold, and unable to find out what this threshold is so as to stay under it. It won't make me stop trying to assemble the conference proceedings I need, but it may cause me to stop paying for ACM membership next year.
As an academic, I also have access to many of the same repositories as do others. But the Aaron Swartz case and my own experience with the ACM (who I've previously been fond of) tells me that the current academic publishing model is inherently antagonistic toward openness. It is not just about practical constraints to encourage production and discourage abuse; it is about ensuring that knowledge is a black box only available to the anointed, with rules and properties only available to the anointed. It is about restricting access for reasons other than mundane, practical ones, and about ensuring that even the nature of the restrictions is hidden so that ideological "threats" to the system can be dealt with arbitrarily, which wouldn't be possible with open rules.
It's time to publish on open systems and let peer review happen in the open as well. And I say this as someone that is published in journals and that sat as managing editor for a Springer journal for some time.
For a full two months I just used my iPad 2 and Google Voice on speaker for phone calls (my longtime number was ported to my Google Voice account ages ago, so I didn't have to switch numbers or anything).
I *strongly* considered just sticking to the iPad for phoning and being done with it.
In the end, I decided to get a dedicated device, but screen size is a big deal for me—the iPhones are just too small. I was trying to decide between an iPad Mini and a Galaxy Note II as my primary phone.
Finally decided on the Note.
But I can totally see how for some people an iPad might be a perfectly acceptable phone.
the latest version of Android. And I wasn't running the latest version of iOS when I switched because there wasn't yet a jailbreak for iOS 6 available (though there is now). I got tired of that game.
To some extent, your'e right—what's better, seeing no updates for your device (the Android risk, though not the certainty) or seeing updates around for months and months without being able to use them (because there's no jailbreak) but having to watch obsessively for a jailbreak because once it's released, you have two weeks to update to the latest version and jailbreak before Apple patches the vulnerability and stops signing vulnerable versions?
Maybe it all comes out in the wash. But add in the fact that those features are just *there* in whatever version of Android I'm using, latest or no, and that I can get a larger screen, and I decided to go Android.
And I have looked back...about every 10 minutes. And yet the advantages of iPhone are so tempered by disadvantages that I can't be bothered to switch back. In short, my general response to both platforms right now is a decided "meh," which is a damned shame considering the coolness of the technology's capabilities (I cut my teeth on computing when networks ran over AUI ports and operating systems shipped on DC600 cartridges—this stuff could be so damned more than it is right now, it's almost sick).
get with the program. I don't have a problem with a secured OS that can't be jailbroken.
But I do have a problem with the way in which Android offers compelling features that Apple doesn't—like applets that display information on the launcher screen, and a notification system that doesn't suck. All of which are only available to iOS through Cydia. Grrrr.
I also wish Apple would release a phablet-sized iPhone.
I'm caught between two worlds. I'm a Mac user and an iPad user and until recently an iPhone user. But I switched to Android because it did things that iOS simply doesn't do right now without jailbreaking (which I get tired of—I want OS updates *and* features, not a choice between the two), and because Apple seems dead set against a phone with a large display.
But now, with a Galaxy Note II, I'm stuck with the crashiness, laggishness, UI inconsistency, and comparatively crappy apps available for Android. It's a no-win situation.
There's no comparison between iOS and Android when it comes to UI consistency and the smoothness and transparency of the system, or the app store. iOS wins hands down, and it isn't even close.
But there's also no comparison between iOS and Android when it comes to features, flexibility, and form factor. Android wins hands down.
But I hate having to choose between these when it's clearly technically possible for humans to build a great device with great UI consistency, smoothness, and transparency, great apps, and great features, flexibility, and form factor.
As a user, it's like being caught in a battle between two self-centered idiots.
experiment (since IANAP), I do want to say that there seems to be a troubling trend amongst the best and the brightest in many STEM fields to mistake theory for reality. Theory is great and proceeds under the scientific method from empirical observation, but as we've seen throughout history, new phenomena and corner cases to arise and require theory to be amended.
It's fine to say "this is clearly unlikely to work under current theoretical understandings" but let's also refine and do the experiments to the best of our ability so that science remains scientific (i.e. nominally empirical and ultimately practical in nature). There's a difference between taking "current theory suggests this is likely to fail" as a statement of fact and mistaking theory instead to be *evidence* about experimental outcomes.
No theoretical argument can be evidence for the reality or unreality of phenomena, no matter how well-formed. That's not to say that we ought to mistake the phenomena at issue—it's obviously critical to be able to understand, rather than misconstrue, the reality that we observe—only that sometimes a generation or two of scientists seem to get complacent and imagine that they've got the world all figured out after all.
Let's continue to do, and—to the best of our ability and within reason (but with "within reason" here broadly defined—allocate resources for, actual experimentation and empirical observation of the world around us.
Not that we don't—but to my eye, the attitude that if theory doesn't support it, it's always a waste of money to test it out experimentally, is a dangerous one for the future of a science that is far less uniform, linear, and accumulative in its progress than we often tend to remember.
is instructive (though still not very readable) here.
The founding ethnomethodologist, Garfinkel argued that much of science depends on practical assumptions and habits of which researchers are only vaguely aware, leading to the "loss" of the phenomenon.
This is both good and bad. On the one hand, it means that a phenomenon is real, with real implications (useless theory and tautology are marked by the difficulty of losing the phenomenon), but on the other hand it means that what is said about the phenomenon is often missing the most critical bits of information, unbeknownst to the PIs themselves because they are unaware of practical (embedded in the practice of) assumptions and habits, something that makes it seem likely that many scientific truths are either solidified far later than they might otherwise have been or incorrectly lost to falsification rather than pursued.
(I switched to MacOS in 2009 and my old Linux home folder now only exists in.tar.gz files on my backup raid).
Now that I think about it, I had two "scripts," one that dumped the files as.wavs using cdparanoia and renamed them and all of that (the one that ran while loops for each drive) and a separate "script" that ran in a separate terminal and was just something like:
while true; do find/path/to/rips -name '*.wav' | while read music; do lame --r3mix "$music"; done; sleep 1; done
Or something to that effect (it's been a long time since I had to recall how lame handles command-line arguments).
Then I think I actually ran one pass at the very end of the entire ripping process, again just a command-line, not actually saved as a script, with the id3 tagger that just traversed the whole tree and tagged each track as disc name "folder" and track name "file."
It wasn't fancy. It was just to get the job done. Honestly the scripting was like three minutes; getting all of the drives in place and compiling in the extra kernel code for both controllers and creating the nodes in/dev and searching freshmeat for the tools I wanted were the bigger pains; that prep work took an afternoon, but I was determined to do it all in one weekend and be done with it.
The "main" script was less than a screenful of inelegant stuff handed off to bash.
Years ago when I had to rip all of my CDs to MP3s, I had about 500 to go through. I was a Linux user, so take this with a grain of salt if you're not one, but I simply went to the local university surplus yard, picked up 12 2x SCSI CDs for about $5 each, and connected them to some spare SCSI adapters and powered them with junk PC power supplies and 4-pin Y-cables. I'm sure you could cook up something similar these days with SATA or even USB and cheap eBay bare-board SATA->USB adapters. You could probably piece together at least a 4-6 drive solution for less than $100.
Then, I wrote a shell script that leveraged some basic shell tools. I don't remember what they were (I haven't done this for years), but one was cddb-something (queried online CD databases) and of course cdparanoia and lame and I think one called id3tag.
I scripted things up with the following logic, run on all drives simultaneously:
While (forever): Poll drive for inserted CD. If one is in, query cddb, save names in shell variables. Rip using cdparanoia and default filenames, encode with lame. Rename all files using track names in shell variables and folder using album and artist in shell variables. Use id3tag to tag MP3 files according to file and folder names. Eject disc. End while.
Ran this on all 12 drives simultaneously in a terminal. Whenever a tray popped out, I took out the CD that had just been ripped and tossed it in the "done, recycle plastic medium" pile, and then stuck in the next CD in the queue and closed the tray.
With all drives cranking, it took no more than a couple days' intermittent CD-inserting (in the midst of doing whatever else I was working on--browsing the web, writing, studying, etc.) to move through the queue. And then I was done.
When I was done, I stuck all of the basically valueless drives in the garage, and I think years later they ended up at the dump.
If I'd had to nurse along a single drive, I don't think I'd be done to this day. Too big a PITA. 12 slow drives with an automated script > 1 fast drive by hand.
Bog-standard Windows PCs at big-box store. One says "Includes over 50 programs and supports millions of Windows applications" on the box. The other says "Windows PC" on the box.
Uncle no-name: "Well, I'll take this one because it includes tons of software and is compatible with millions of programs. The other one isn't."
Me: "Those programs are all worthless, and the other one supports just as much software. They're both Windows PCs."
Uncle no-name: "Hey, free is free. And if the other one really could support millions of programs, they would have put it on the box. That's an important feature! You're so gullible, no wonder the younger generation is gets such bad value out of everything."
No, not games, but I've never known anyone that stayed away from Linux as a primary platform because of games. I have known many, though, that needed a handful of specific apps that simply didn't exist on Linux and that didn't run well in emulation.
between the iOS ecosystem and device quality and the Android feature set.
In particular, the Galaxy Note series is haunting my dreams. I was a pen user (Newton 2x00, mostly) for many years, but Apple long ago decided that that wasn't the way. In general I've been happy with Apple, but on this they've left me cold.
The Galaxy Note looks great, has the right features, and a reasonable price. But the device quality isn't quite the same and I'm really happy with the iOS ecosystem (and wasn't with Android at least as recently as 2011).
Frustrating. But I could see myself switching at some point if I continue to ogle the Galaxy Note, my big fear being that I'd switch back eventually to have the iOS world of apps back.
First time voting in Utah since moving here from NY.
The poll workers here are all 95 years old and very, very slow. They had 12 machines at my polling place but struggled to keep one of them peopled. Very little diversity—all white, all over 40, mostly Mormon (the discussion up and down the line was jovial, but completely about church, and they all knew each other—brother so-and-so and sister so-and-so and a couple of Mormon bishops were going up and down the line shaking hands and "ministering" to the crowd, I suppose).
To be expected, I guess.
I tried to early vote, but when I showed last week at opening time and saw a line stretching out the building and was told it was a four hour wait, I decided to try my luck on election day instead.
and the Apple ecosystem (for the last three years) and that has worried about Apple without Jobs (and even more after the maps fiasco), this reassures me. Love the move, and just saw Tim Cook climb on my respect ladder.
APIs, UIs, regulatory regimes (channels, frequencies, law) are all abstractions.
Machines have gone from the Mumfordian account of the machine to automatons. Rather than a lever being a mechanical process through which we apply bodily force to accomplish a task with cybernetic applied force feedback, a lever instead (through a force unrelated to the actual work being done) communicates an abstracted imperative to a machine that then carries out the task independently of us (and whose processes we must understand and anticipate, rather than experience phenomenologically), and that then reports back to us in equally abstracted fashion.
We don't start the boiler by shoveling coal and turning valves, we start it by sending it symbolic commands using one interface or another. We don't observe the water level by looking through a window, we "observe" it by noting the numbers on a display that it "reports" to us. The step that says that what we're doing when we start and monitor the boiler actually has something to do with water inside a tank is now entirely conceptual.
This goes 1000x for computing and network technology, which today is all about marrying the outputs of A to the inputs of B, and the outputs of C to the inputs of D, fitting A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, etc. in place between A and B or between B and C in order to translate said outputs to inputs appropriately.
To make these heuretic systems work (your iPhone connected to the network, the app store connected to your iPhone, the app connected to the app store, Dropbox connected to your app, your computer connected to Dropbox, and your iPhone connected to your computer, etc.) we have to be able to traffic quickly and accurately in abstractions.
These are what we loosely term "scientific reasoning" skills and "technological literacy" skills today. They're the primary intellectual and practical (as in relating to everyday practice) currencies of our age.
There was much less use for this stuff a century ago, unless you happened to be a scientist working in a few narrow areas.
You cite meaningfulness and utility as two things that a randomly generated paper lacks.
Yet that is precisely what is at issue here, and what was at issue in Social Text—someone found these randomly assembled texts to be nominally meaningful, and the value of "meaningfulness" (bringing meaning to life, understanding the meaning of the universe, making the 9/11 deaths meaningful, etc.) is not zero, hence we can assume that meaningfulness is a dimension of some understandings of "utility."
Despite the intent of these kinds of papers, they appear instead to confirm at least some of the postmodernist argument: that in practice for humans, meaning and utility do not necessarily not vary either directly or inversely with enlightenment-style formal logic and or empiricist epistemology (whatever our ideals or desires), but instead that there appears to be a strong dimension of social construction involved in discerning meaning and utility, and conversely, that in many cases the things that we construct become by definition meaningful and useful in some sense as a matter of someone having constructed them, the awareness of this, and the reliance of these constructions on existing worlds of taken-for-granted meaning (language, culture, etc.)
This is not to say that "all things are equally true" or "all things can be equally true" but rather that "practical truths in social existence are never merely empirical substances" and we would do well to understand this if we want to understand/influence/improve society.
that Microsoft's constituency doesn't buy on quality, they buy on workplace utility and/or price (i.e. a fairly lean cost-benefit analysis).
Microsoft sells to premium-averse households and to the enterprise.
Neither is the right market for a BMW or a Rolls Royce; they're the market for a Ford, whether we're talking station wagon or pickup truck.
Good marketing doesn't happen in a vacuum; it understands something about the market in question as well. Sure, it can be oriented toward the development of new market segments, but as you have so clearly explained, other likely market segments are already occupied and Microsoft is ceding them almost from the start.
It's a dumb move. Microsoft won't get the high-end consumers, because Microsoft's track record doesn't support their making that choice. Why take a risk and pay even more for Microsoft (with whom they've traditionally been dissatisfied) when they can spend less and get Apple (with whom they're already satisfied)? It's a limited market from the start, and now Microsoft is pricing higher than Apple?
I just don't see the victory here. The Android market may have lower margins, but it's potentially much, much larger and in that market Microsoft could leverage existing customer goodwill (since Microsoft has traditionally met these customers' needs). Sure, there are some success stories with this strategy, but there are far, far more "new luxury product ships no volume" stories.
At the high end, branding is everything, and Microsoft already has a low-end brand.
the search for legitimacy of their own leads them to ultimately consider only papers that completely agree with conventional wisdom and support the already big names and big theories.
Not to mention that the reviewers that are willing to review for smaller journals are usually in the same boat—younger faculty trying to get a leg up—and subject to the same pressures and tendencies.
But even at the large and important journals, there is a tendency to dismiss really interesting papers unless they come from a large name / large name school. You'd better have a long track record and big names behind you or you won't get serious consideration, even if your work is sound and earth-shattering. It's just a matter of the probability of returns on the investment of labor.
I say all of this as someone that did sit as a managing editor on an academic journal and that has been a part of the review process for any number of articles.
There are serious inherent biases built into the system, both for good and for bad.
Much more important to my eye is the fact that this is all free labor but earns the publishers huge profits and costs the schools huge dollars. It's only a matter of time before the current system is overturned. Right now, schools pay money to faculty to write papers, pay money to faculty to review papers, then pay lots of money for the journals. Yet all of the authority of the paper comes from the faculty and from the institution, and circulation is limited to academics because articles run $30-$60 a pop for public access. It's only a matter of time until they cut out the middleman, save tons of costs, and grow their audience at the same time.
coordinator, and the nuttiness is basically what ended the relationship (got worse and worse until I couldn't handle it anymore).
The position inside PETA is that owning pets is wrong. They don't adopt this position in public for "companion animals" (they see the word "pets" as a form of prejudice and discrimination) because they know it's a loser with the public, but inside you'll hear them wish that all pets could be euthanized because being a pet is an inhuman existence yet there's no place for domesticated animals in the wild.
This activity is entirely consistent with PETA's actual value system, which is more philosophical (but also far more radical) than they're given credit for. They see most forms of domestic animal existence as equivalent to Nazi concentration camps, but with more naive, innocent prisoners that are incapable of having the mental and emotional self-protection tools that humans have.
I absolutely don't agree (I think it's worse if you're conscious and intelligent, and that pets are actually, for the most part, quite content in most households), but PETA kills pets not because they're hypocrites but because they think that death is preferable to "suffering" and that all domesticated animals are by nature "suffering" all of the time (in fact, they would prefer that all domesticated breeds be allowed to disappear by attrition and euthanasia).
Slashdot Mirror
From the summary, it sounds as though what they mean is that nearly every NYC *prosecution* involves computer-based *evidence*.
That's very different from saying that every *crime* (i.e. criminal act) involves computers.
I'd bet that there aren't too many people being murdered by Macbook Pros as blunt force objects.
I don't think I would have purchased an iPad Mini if it had been first—and I certainly wouldn't have discovered it as a work machine (contrary to popular opinion).
Now I have both a smaller tablet-like device (Galaxy Note phablet) and an iPad 2. The smaller one is my content consumption and carry-around device, for the most part, but I use the iPad 2 for a lot of my work, over and above my Macbook Pro, and wouldn't want to try to do it on the smaller screen or on the larger one.
In order to build the new set of use cases, rather than simply place devices into existing categories, Apple had to hit just the right spot. The 10" device that was too big to be a phone or PDA but had an operating system that made it clearly not a desktop or like previous Windows tablets was exactly that spot.
Everybody took this as a weakness ("WTF is this supposed to be? What is it for?") but that is precisely evidence that you're opening up a new market that people haven't yet imagined. If people had immediately known what it was for, that would have been a sign that it had fallen into a previous category, and sales would have been limited to those already buying or looking in that category, excluding anyone that had already decided that they didn't need (for example) an iPhone or PDA on the one end, or a "tablet computer" on the other end.
I'm a member and yet they're totally untransparent about how the digital library works and what limits exist for downloading from it.
I've been trying to download several sets of conference proceedings—a couple thousand articles (two conferences, less than 10 years each)—to do some analysis on them for a research project.
Trying to play the good guy, I asked how they'd prefer me to do this and/or whether they could supply a better means for obtaining these.
"Manually" was the only answer I got.
So I did. Click, click, click in my browser. Incredibly labor intensive.
Before I was even 10 percent done, an hour in, I got blocked and a warning email.
Asked again.
"Manually" was the answer that came back again.
I said I was doing it manually; asked what daily limits (files, bandwidth, whatever) they'd prefer I stay under.
"Manually" was the terse and non-sequitur answer.
Basically, this is emblematic. I am a paying member. I have legitimate access under terms of service. I'm a researcher. I have a narrow and well-defined need and purpose for downloading a narrow and well-defined set of articles. And I'm already doing it fscking manually.
I am unable to find out how to get them without running afoul of some hidden threshold, and unable to find out what this threshold is so as to stay under it. It won't make me stop trying to assemble the conference proceedings I need, but it may cause me to stop paying for ACM membership next year.
As an academic, I also have access to many of the same repositories as do others. But the Aaron Swartz case and my own experience with the ACM (who I've previously been fond of) tells me that the current academic publishing model is inherently antagonistic toward openness. It is not just about practical constraints to encourage production and discourage abuse; it is about ensuring that knowledge is a black box only available to the anointed, with rules and properties only available to the anointed. It is about restricting access for reasons other than mundane, practical ones, and about ensuring that even the nature of the restrictions is hidden so that ideological "threats" to the system can be dealt with arbitrarily, which wouldn't be possible with open rules.
It's time to publish on open systems and let peer review happen in the open as well. And I say this as someone that is published in journals and that sat as managing editor for a Springer journal for some time.
last year and sold it.
For a full two months I just used my iPad 2 and Google Voice on speaker for phone calls (my longtime number was ported to my Google Voice account ages ago, so I didn't have to switch numbers or anything).
I *strongly* considered just sticking to the iPad for phoning and being done with it.
In the end, I decided to get a dedicated device, but screen size is a big deal for me—the iPhones are just too small. I was trying to decide between an iPad Mini and a Galaxy Note II as my primary phone.
Finally decided on the Note.
But I can totally see how for some people an iPad might be a perfectly acceptable phone.
the latest version of Android. And I wasn't running the latest version of iOS when I switched because there wasn't yet a jailbreak for iOS 6 available (though there is now). I got tired of that game.
To some extent, your'e right—what's better, seeing no updates for your device (the Android risk, though not the certainty) or seeing updates around for months and months without being able to use them (because there's no jailbreak) but having to watch obsessively for a jailbreak because once it's released, you have two weeks to update to the latest version and jailbreak before Apple patches the vulnerability and stops signing vulnerable versions?
Maybe it all comes out in the wash. But add in the fact that those features are just *there* in whatever version of Android I'm using, latest or no, and that I can get a larger screen, and I decided to go Android.
And I have looked back...about every 10 minutes. And yet the advantages of iPhone are so tempered by disadvantages that I can't be bothered to switch back. In short, my general response to both platforms right now is a decided "meh," which is a damned shame considering the coolness of the technology's capabilities (I cut my teeth on computing when networks ran over AUI ports and operating systems shipped on DC600 cartridges—this stuff could be so damned more than it is right now, it's almost sick).
the market at work.
And whomever pulls their act together first will most assuredly get my business.
See how that works?
get with the program. I don't have a problem with a secured OS that can't be jailbroken.
But I do have a problem with the way in which Android offers compelling features that Apple doesn't—like applets that display information on the launcher screen, and a notification system that doesn't suck. All of which are only available to iOS through Cydia. Grrrr.
I also wish Apple would release a phablet-sized iPhone.
I'm caught between two worlds. I'm a Mac user and an iPad user and until recently an iPhone user. But I switched to Android because it did things that iOS simply doesn't do right now without jailbreaking (which I get tired of—I want OS updates *and* features, not a choice between the two), and because Apple seems dead set against a phone with a large display.
But now, with a Galaxy Note II, I'm stuck with the crashiness, laggishness, UI inconsistency, and comparatively crappy apps available for Android. It's a no-win situation.
There's no comparison between iOS and Android when it comes to UI consistency and the smoothness and transparency of the system, or the app store. iOS wins hands down, and it isn't even close.
But there's also no comparison between iOS and Android when it comes to features, flexibility, and form factor. Android wins hands down.
But I hate having to choose between these when it's clearly technically possible for humans to build a great device with great UI consistency, smoothness, and transparency, great apps, and great features, flexibility, and form factor.
As a user, it's like being caught in a battle between two self-centered idiots.
I still have a Sun SparcStation 20 with 2 SM71s in my closet with SunOS on it.
Until last year, I had the IPC on an AUI adapter on a nonprofit network I manage acting as a public terminal.
And yet it's funny how even post-2000 machines have already become so obsolete as to be silly, especially in the server space.
experiment (since IANAP), I do want to say that there seems to be a troubling trend amongst the best and the brightest in many STEM fields to mistake theory for reality. Theory is great and proceeds under the scientific method from empirical observation, but as we've seen throughout history, new phenomena and corner cases to arise and require theory to be amended.
It's fine to say "this is clearly unlikely to work under current theoretical understandings" but let's also refine and do the experiments to the best of our ability so that science remains scientific (i.e. nominally empirical and ultimately practical in nature). There's a difference between taking "current theory suggests this is likely to fail" as a statement of fact and mistaking theory instead to be *evidence* about experimental outcomes.
No theoretical argument can be evidence for the reality or unreality of phenomena, no matter how well-formed. That's not to say that we ought to mistake the phenomena at issue—it's obviously critical to be able to understand, rather than misconstrue, the reality that we observe—only that sometimes a generation or two of scientists seem to get complacent and imagine that they've got the world all figured out after all.
Let's continue to do, and—to the best of our ability and within reason (but with "within reason" here broadly defined—allocate resources for, actual experimentation and empirical observation of the world around us.
Not that we don't—but to my eye, the attitude that if theory doesn't support it, it's always a waste of money to test it out experimentally, is a dangerous one for the future of a science that is far less uniform, linear, and accumulative in its progress than we often tend to remember.
is instructive (though still not very readable) here.
The founding ethnomethodologist, Garfinkel argued that much of science depends on practical assumptions and habits of which researchers are only vaguely aware, leading to the "loss" of the phenomenon.
This is both good and bad. On the one hand, it means that a phenomenon is real, with real implications (useless theory and tautology are marked by the difficulty of losing the phenomenon), but on the other hand it means that what is said about the phenomenon is often missing the most critical bits of information, unbeknownst to the PIs themselves because they are unaware of practical (embedded in the practice of) assumptions and habits, something that makes it seem likely that many scientific truths are either solidified far later than they might otherwise have been or incorrectly lost to falsification rather than pursued.
(I switched to MacOS in 2009 and my old Linux home folder now only exists in .tar.gz files on my backup raid).
Now that I think about it, I had two "scripts," one that dumped the files as .wavs using cdparanoia and renamed them and all of that (the one that ran while loops for each drive) and a separate "script" that ran in a separate terminal and was just something like:
while true; do find /path/to/rips -name '*.wav' | while read music; do lame --r3mix "$music"; done; sleep 1; done
Or something to that effect (it's been a long time since I had to recall how lame handles command-line arguments).
Then I think I actually ran one pass at the very end of the entire ripping process, again just a command-line, not actually saved as a script, with the id3 tagger that just traversed the whole tree and tagged each track as disc name "folder" and track name "file."
It wasn't fancy. It was just to get the job done. Honestly the scripting was like three minutes; getting all of the drives in place and compiling in the extra kernel code for both controllers and creating the nodes in /dev and searching freshmeat for the tools I wanted were the bigger pains; that prep work took an afternoon, but I was determined to do it all in one weekend and be done with it.
The "main" script was less than a screenful of inelegant stuff handed off to bash.
Years ago when I had to rip all of my CDs to MP3s, I had about 500 to go through. I was a Linux user, so take this with a grain of salt if you're not one, but I simply went to the local university surplus yard, picked up 12 2x SCSI CDs for about $5 each, and connected them to some spare SCSI adapters and powered them with junk PC power supplies and 4-pin Y-cables. I'm sure you could cook up something similar these days with SATA or even USB and cheap eBay bare-board SATA->USB adapters. You could probably piece together at least a 4-6 drive solution for less than $100.
Then, I wrote a shell script that leveraged some basic shell tools. I don't remember what they were (I haven't done this for years), but one was cddb-something (queried online CD databases) and of course cdparanoia and lame and I think one called id3tag.
I scripted things up with the following logic, run on all drives simultaneously:
While (forever):
Poll drive for inserted CD.
If one is in, query cddb, save names in shell variables.
Rip using cdparanoia and default filenames, encode with lame.
Rename all files using track names in shell variables and folder using album and artist in shell variables.
Use id3tag to tag MP3 files according to file and folder names.
Eject disc.
End while.
Ran this on all 12 drives simultaneously in a terminal. Whenever a tray popped out, I took out the CD that had just been ripped and tossed it in the "done, recycle plastic medium" pile, and then stuck in the next CD in the queue and closed the tray.
With all drives cranking, it took no more than a couple days' intermittent CD-inserting (in the midst of doing whatever else I was working on--browsing the web, writing, studying, etc.) to move through the queue. And then I was done.
When I was done, I stuck all of the basically valueless drives in the garage, and I think years later they ended up at the dump.
If I'd had to nurse along a single drive, I don't think I'd be done to this day. Too big a PITA. 12 slow drives with an automated script > 1 fast drive by hand.
This remains much of my extended family.
Bog-standard Windows PCs at big-box store. One says "Includes over 50 programs and supports millions of Windows applications" on the box. The other says "Windows PC" on the box.
Uncle no-name: "Well, I'll take this one because it includes tons of software and is compatible with millions of programs. The other one isn't."
Me: "Those programs are all worthless, and the other one supports just as much software. They're both Windows PCs."
Uncle no-name: "Hey, free is free. And if the other one really could support millions of programs, they would have put it on the box. That's an important feature! You're so gullible, no wonder the younger generation is gets such bad value out of everything."
No, not games, but I've never known anyone that stayed away from Linux as a primary platform because of games. I have known many, though, that needed a handful of specific apps that simply didn't exist on Linux and that didn't run well in emulation.
between the iOS ecosystem and device quality and the Android feature set.
In particular, the Galaxy Note series is haunting my dreams. I was a pen user (Newton 2x00, mostly) for many years, but Apple long ago decided that that wasn't the way. In general I've been happy with Apple, but on this they've left me cold.
The Galaxy Note looks great, has the right features, and a reasonable price. But the device quality isn't quite the same and I'm really happy with the iOS ecosystem (and wasn't with Android at least as recently as 2011).
Frustrating. But I could see myself switching at some point if I continue to ogle the Galaxy Note, my big fear being that I'd switch back eventually to have the iOS world of apps back.
First time voting in Utah since moving here from NY.
The poll workers here are all 95 years old and very, very slow. They had 12 machines at my polling place but struggled to keep one of them peopled. Very little diversity—all white, all over 40, mostly Mormon (the discussion up and down the line was jovial, but completely about church, and they all knew each other—brother so-and-so and sister so-and-so and a couple of Mormon bishops were going up and down the line shaking hands and "ministering" to the crowd, I suppose).
To be expected, I guess.
I tried to early vote, but when I showed last week at opening time and saw a line stretching out the building and was told it was a four hour wait, I decided to try my luck on election day instead.
and the Apple ecosystem (for the last three years) and that has worried about Apple without Jobs (and even more after the maps fiasco), this reassures me. Love the move, and just saw Tim Cook climb on my respect ladder.
APIs, UIs, regulatory regimes (channels, frequencies, law) are all abstractions.
Machines have gone from the Mumfordian account of the machine to automatons. Rather than a lever being a mechanical process through which we apply bodily force to accomplish a task with cybernetic applied force feedback, a lever instead (through a force unrelated to the actual work being done) communicates an abstracted imperative to a machine that then carries out the task independently of us (and whose processes we must understand and anticipate, rather than experience phenomenologically), and that then reports back to us in equally abstracted fashion.
We don't start the boiler by shoveling coal and turning valves, we start it by sending it symbolic commands using one interface or another. We don't observe the water level by looking through a window, we "observe" it by noting the numbers on a display that it "reports" to us. The step that says that what we're doing when we start and monitor the boiler actually has something to do with water inside a tank is now entirely conceptual.
This goes 1000x for computing and network technology, which today is all about marrying the outputs of A to the inputs of B, and the outputs of C to the inputs of D, fitting A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, etc. in place between A and B or between B and C in order to translate said outputs to inputs appropriately.
To make these heuretic systems work (your iPhone connected to the network, the app store connected to your iPhone, the app connected to the app store, Dropbox connected to your app, your computer connected to Dropbox, and your iPhone connected to your computer, etc.) we have to be able to traffic quickly and accurately in abstractions.
These are what we loosely term "scientific reasoning" skills and "technological literacy" skills today. They're the primary intellectual and practical (as in relating to everyday practice) currencies of our age.
There was much less use for this stuff a century ago, unless you happened to be a scientist working in a few narrow areas.
nature exists and has a nature.
But the fact that "truth" is said to inhere in nature results from humans, not nature, since "truth" is a human construction.
knowledge.
You cite meaningfulness and utility as two things that a randomly generated paper lacks.
Yet that is precisely what is at issue here, and what was at issue in Social Text—someone found these randomly assembled texts to be nominally meaningful, and the value of "meaningfulness" (bringing meaning to life, understanding the meaning of the universe, making the 9/11 deaths meaningful, etc.) is not zero, hence we can assume that meaningfulness is a dimension of some understandings of "utility."
Despite the intent of these kinds of papers, they appear instead to confirm at least some of the postmodernist argument: that in practice for humans, meaning and utility do not necessarily not vary either directly or inversely with enlightenment-style formal logic and or empiricist epistemology (whatever our ideals or desires), but instead that there appears to be a strong dimension of social construction involved in discerning meaning and utility, and conversely, that in many cases the things that we construct become by definition meaningful and useful in some sense as a matter of someone having constructed them, the awareness of this, and the reliance of these constructions on existing worlds of taken-for-granted meaning (language, culture, etc.)
This is not to say that "all things are equally true" or "all things can be equally true" but rather that "practical truths in social existence are never merely empirical substances" and we would do well to understand this if we want to understand/influence/improve society.
I really hate the dancing logo business, and now it's making its way into comment meta in unrelated stories.
Note to self: One more reason to pull back on Slashdot even more.
that Microsoft's constituency doesn't buy on quality, they buy on workplace utility and/or price (i.e. a fairly lean cost-benefit analysis).
Microsoft sells to premium-averse households and to the enterprise.
Neither is the right market for a BMW or a Rolls Royce; they're the market for a Ford, whether we're talking station wagon or pickup truck.
Good marketing doesn't happen in a vacuum; it understands something about the market in question as well. Sure, it can be oriented toward the development of new market segments, but as you have so clearly explained, other likely market segments are already occupied and Microsoft is ceding them almost from the start.
It's a dumb move. Microsoft won't get the high-end consumers, because Microsoft's track record doesn't support their making that choice. Why take a risk and pay even more for Microsoft (with whom they've traditionally been dissatisfied) when they can spend less and get Apple (with whom they're already satisfied)? It's a limited market from the start, and now Microsoft is pricing higher than Apple?
I just don't see the victory here. The Android market may have lower margins, but it's potentially much, much larger and in that market Microsoft could leverage existing customer goodwill (since Microsoft has traditionally met these customers' needs). Sure, there are some success stories with this strategy, but there are far, far more "new luxury product ships no volume" stories.
At the high end, branding is everything, and Microsoft already has a low-end brand.
the search for legitimacy of their own leads them to ultimately consider only papers that completely agree with conventional wisdom and support the already big names and big theories.
Not to mention that the reviewers that are willing to review for smaller journals are usually in the same boat—younger faculty trying to get a leg up—and subject to the same pressures and tendencies.
But even at the large and important journals, there is a tendency to dismiss really interesting papers unless they come from a large name / large name school. You'd better have a long track record and big names behind you or you won't get serious consideration, even if your work is sound and earth-shattering. It's just a matter of the probability of returns on the investment of labor.
I say all of this as someone that did sit as a managing editor on an academic journal and that has been a part of the review process for any number of articles.
There are serious inherent biases built into the system, both for good and for bad.
Much more important to my eye is the fact that this is all free labor but earns the publishers huge profits and costs the schools huge dollars. It's only a matter of time before the current system is overturned. Right now, schools pay money to faculty to write papers, pay money to faculty to review papers, then pay lots of money for the journals. Yet all of the authority of the paper comes from the faculty and from the institution, and circulation is limited to academics because articles run $30-$60 a pop for public access. It's only a matter of time until they cut out the middleman, save tons of costs, and grow their audience at the same time.
The Linux promise: It will work someday, when the entire world arrives at a place of utopian freedom.
The Linux apology: We're sorry that it doesn't work now; just wait for someday.
coordinator, and the nuttiness is basically what ended the relationship (got worse and worse until I couldn't handle it anymore).
The position inside PETA is that owning pets is wrong. They don't adopt this position in public for "companion animals" (they see the word "pets" as a form of prejudice and discrimination) because they know it's a loser with the public, but inside you'll hear them wish that all pets could be euthanized because being a pet is an inhuman existence yet there's no place for domesticated animals in the wild.
This activity is entirely consistent with PETA's actual value system, which is more philosophical (but also far more radical) than they're given credit for. They see most forms of domestic animal existence as equivalent to Nazi concentration camps, but with more naive, innocent prisoners that are incapable of having the mental and emotional self-protection tools that humans have.
I absolutely don't agree (I think it's worse if you're conscious and intelligent, and that pets are actually, for the most part, quite content in most households), but PETA kills pets not because they're hypocrites but because they think that death is preferable to "suffering" and that all domesticated animals are by nature "suffering" all of the time (in fact, they would prefer that all domesticated breeds be allowed to disappear by attrition and euthanasia).
Like I said, nuts.