An incredibly naive view. To materially participate in our society today, you must own a television. Otherwise, you don't know how or where to vote, who's running, whether there's a tornado in your neighborhood, what is now legal or illegal, whether gas is being rationed, whether you can light a fire in your fireplace, whether the roads are closed, whether the tax rate has increased...
For any sociologist worth his or her salt, poverty is not simply a state of general lack. Poverty is the state at which one no longer feels a sufficient connection to or investment in society to abide by the laws of the social contract. Poverty is the point at which someone will commit a crime, despite the potential consequences, to have something that the vast majority of others in the social group tell him or her can be taken for granted.
Sure, there will always be criminals. But what you are suggesting is that there is no such thing as poverty or economic crime. After all, bugs are free; someone could simply live on grasshoppers and flies. Water is free; someone could simply drink from the sewer. Shelter is everywhere; anyone could simply wrap him or herself in cardboard from a dumpster and sleep under the cars on a Wal-Mart parking lot. A house--luxury! A car--luxury! A television--luxury! A telephone--luxury! Packaged and processed food--luxury!
But believe what you will, the view doesn't help you to prevent crime. If it makes you feel better to say that someone who steals to keep a television set is not different from someone who steals to sell a television set, fine. But it won't stop anyone without a television set from thinking about stealing yours.
And if enough people don't have one, but feel that they should have one because of the way in which social interaction and literacy are constituted, then you'll have a revolution on your hands. And when they win, they'll get to decide what's "legal" and what's "crime" and you may suddenly find yourself knitted into a DeFarge scarf.
If that makes you feel warm and fuzzy and moral, fine. Cool. It doesn't me. I'd sooner pay some percentage of my income to aid those that have a much smaller (or absent) one.
Call it what you will. Call it bribing the poor to remain rich. That's all any government or any social order has ever done anyway--bribe the masses to hold off the revolution for another year. And historically thus far, they have all eventually become cocky and cocksure of their laws and their police and their tanks and their big television sets, and then... Rome falls, the royal family is killed, the Soviet Union fragments.
And they come and take your television set, and your wife and children, anyway.
If you have one, why should they not have one, assuming that they want to work and do their best to do so? You may not like the question, but they will ask it, and there are always more of "them" (the entirety of the rest of society) than there are of "you" (the individual seeking to place individual rights at the apex).
You can complain about it all you want, but it won't stop you from suffering the consequences. Lots of homelessness+unemployment=lots of crime. That's not an edict from any social policy group or something that the bleeding heart liberals have set into motion by secretly convincing all of the people on the low end of the socioeconomic ladder that they have to eat even if they can't afford it. History tells us that it's true. It's emperical and no exceptions in urban modernity exist. Living things want to eat. Hungry living things will use their muscles and their will to try to make sure it happens.
If you think that's not how it "should" be, that's completely fair and I won't argue with you a bit. But yes, I'll hand over my money to social services to avoid having to hand it over at gunpoint. You may think that you have more control than me over the fabric of the causal nexus, but I'm just not that omnipotent. I understand and have to face that so long as I have things that other people feel that they need as much or more than me, sooner or later I'm gonna hand some of it over somehow whether I like it or not, while alive or over my dead body, and there are more safe (through secure public institutions) and less safe (in alleyways) places to make the exchange.
I mean, I think that tigers "should" let us walk into the jungle and pet them. That fur looks really soft. But in general, despite what I think about the big cats and what they ought to be like, I'm gonna give 'em a wide berth. Same goes for electricity. Why the hell is it so dangerous to run 50A through your body? Something ought to be done. Why should we continue to surrender to the tyranny of physics?
Right, and then those people will have children that go hungry while at the same time they're stealing your car radio and mugging your wife after she gets off work in the evening because they're unable to both look for work and keep a roof over their kids' heads at the same time.
Welcome to reality, where criminals are real people and economic crime doesn't stop just because you say "Hey, wait, it's a free market! This isn't fair! Why don't you get a job?"
Um, if you'll check the parent to which I replied, you'll find that the question was about "the best way to learn."
That's why. Because that's the question I was answering. If the question was about the best way to fix a flat or eat a cake, we wouldn't even be here.
If you want to challenge the assumption that learning is a good thing, be my guest. But I wasn't even considering the value statement, just explaining why a CLI is a better place to learn than a GUI, in response to someone else's question about the best place to learn.
Becuase users are already familiar with pretty GUIs, and the things that they always need help with are outside of pretty GUIs.
Therefore, when they just use the pretty GUI, they don't actually learn anything, whereas when they struggle to use the command line and eventually master it, they have learned something.
Oh I don't know, project CHILDKILL, funded to the tune of $200bn, was implemented to research the most efficient and risk-free methods for implating shrapnel into the skulls of Iraqi children and to link this research to a desired increase in the base of international terrorism.
The project has been successful beyond its wildest dreams; numerous new methods for high-accurace at-distance decapitation and shrapnel implantation have been discovered (the spinoffs from which we no doubt won't fully understand for decades), and in the meantime, the more general goal of an increase in international terrorism to aid in the justification for establishment of a western capitalist theocracy has also been achieved, according to most objective observers.
$200bn well-spent. Yes, it could have gone to the space program I suppose, but project CHILDKILL was (and still is) widely regarded to be the at the forefront of American science.
As someone who once a very long time ago owned a software company that dealt in networking products (back in the days when UUCP and KA9Q were common), I'd suggest that *real* engineers basically cum in their pants when technical challenges are presented and they can't wait to get out of the room, get back to the screen, and *make it work*.
Problem-solving in software development is like a drug for the desirable class of engineers. In a lot of industries it's okay to have a "good enough" attitude, but in any kind of engineering (be it software, network, civil-structural, or aeronautical) I want to see people on the job who do it because they can't help themselves, because it's in their blood to make rock-solid cool things, not simply because they're drawing a paycheck and meeting deadlines.
I guess it all depends on what you mean by "real engineers" and how you think real engineers approach real problems.
Love solving problems = no red face, great product Just get paid = red face, late (broken) product
Re #1: Done. You just lost one hell of an employee, who may go straight to your competitor.
Re #2: Notify your potential hires of the importance that you place on your dress code. If they stay around long enough to say they won't follow, don't hire them. Problem solved. See #1.
Re #3: You're trying to use "corporate" as a selling point? More to the point, do you care about the sensitivities of tattoed people? No? You think they're stupid? Why should they care about you?
Re #4: People who get tattoos are following the crowd but people who wear ties aren't? Come on my friend, by speaking English or indeed any language you're just following the crowd. The whole point of human interaction is to be a part of the crowd. Are you seriously contending that to spot a tie is to spot a leader? And what's with the gasoline trope? This is pretty violent and gory, and is definitely troubling to my sensibilities, since it bespeaks a certain tendency toward sociopathy.
Your post does not inspire confidence in your business. I probably wouldn't put too much faith in your products or your word, for that matter.
I might be concerned that your personal preferences would conflict with your professional conduct in future
Exactly. This is what I don't get.
You are suggesting that both parties might be unsatisfied with this employemnt transaction. In that case, why is it better that the person hides his/her tattoos?
If the personal values and preferences of the employee conflict with those of the company, both parties should want to know that up-front, so that the company doesn't get an employee they aren't satisfied with and the person doesn't end up not believing in or liking their work.
It's so ass-backward that the employee tries to hide his/her personal preferences in order to get the job. You'd better like your fscking job, you're gonna spend most of your waking life doing it!
My attorney does have a visible tattoo and two piercings. And my girlfriend has a giant tattoo on her back and earlobe plugs over an inch in diameter.
They are not "strange," they are attractive.
All three of us make very good money and have graduate degrees from top-five institutions.
A certain category of people are determined to repeat the "grow up, you're not being individuals, you're just letting a different set of people tell you how to look" argument, but it doesn't impress or bother me. My girlfriend and I both began with degrees in cultural anthropology, so rather than being bewildered by the notion of body modification, it seemed something amusing and natural to us, a biy of useful "tweaking" that we could apply to the other people in the western marketplace who instead of having spent their time learning about the history and ways of mankind as a whole, had spent much of their time learning how to make a buck and play the "free market" (that somehow isn't so terribly free) game, and who were less likely to have value systems tolerably compatible with our own.
I don't expect the average lawyer to understand that American "reality" isn't actually "reality" at all but is just its own particular manifestation of capitalist protestantism located in a fairly small time and place, as tiny and restrictive as any other cultural framework anyone can name. But I also don't expect to employ an average lawyer. I'll let you have those.
You miss the point: I didn't get the tattoo for fashion. It's hardly fashion, it's not a tattoo of anything, it's just a big ink dot about two inches across.
I got it to ensure to myself that I would never be hired by any company that would sooner look at my skin than look at my capabilities. That was the point, the entire reason that I got the tattoo: so that I would never accidentally wind up working for someone like you.
If you think so highly of yourself that you're not a "commodity" or that you don't have to impress your [potential] new employer, you're either: a) naive; and have never been 'unemployed' b) fresh out of school in your first job c) some rich kid who's daddy will get him a job d) just plain stupid
By your reckoning, d) is me. Yes, I have been unemployed. After finishing my first three degrees, I had bills piled up to my ears and told creditors "You can call me all you want, but you won't get blood from a stone; I make nothing and I have nothing, having already sold it all to try to pay bills." I moved into a friend's back yard in the country and kept looking for work using his PC and laundry facilities during the day and eating little more than salad and oatmeal. Even then I'd already decided that I'd rather have bad credit and no money than have to take a job that I didn't believe in.
I find it truly remarkable that we live in a society in which anyone who is determined to feel that they express themselves and their lives through their labor is characterized as either naive, borgeious, or stupid. Do you really believe in the marketplace and money that much -- that anyone who doesn't worship it or sacrifice themselves to it simply isn't worthy of any kind of consideration?
This is your life we're talking about. Any time you spend working is time you won't get back, and it becomes the stuff that you are made of, or on the day you die, who you were. I won't burn my hours and minutes doing something I don't believe in or enjoy. Better to spend the time in prison reading great works of fiction and learning to sketch. Better to be a prisoner of conscience than a prisoner of the capital markets.
And "professional" and "mature" would be what? Indifferentiability. It's not about personal expression or the lack thereof, it's about whether labor is personal or commoditized. I refuse to make myself a commodity. Years ago I went out and got a prominent tattoo on the outer side of my wrist precisely because as I was entering my twenties I began to feel as though the very notion of "profssionalism" was really code for "you must sublimate your identity to the company, and credit to it any personal triumphs you would otherwise have had."
Any company that I want to work for needs to want me just as badly. Not "some random worker who looks generally professional," not someone who's ph 7 and completely neutral, but me. I kick asses and make waves. If a process is wrong or a product sucks, I'm going to do my damndest to fix it, to talk to the board about it, put together a team to fix it, or even pull it if necessary, because any project that passes over my desk is a reflection on me and I'm not going to hide behind the company name. I take it personally, and my identity will never be second to that of the "team," who I also hope to be made of unique and powerful minds, not just a bunch of ants or yes-men.
If I'm not valuable enough to a company to cause them to keep me regardless of inoffensive (doesn't smell bad, doesn't hurt others) variations in my appearance, chances are that I'll eventually be treated very badly by them anyway, since they'll want me as nothing more than an interchangeable part in the machine and I'm not one. For some companies, the employee who owns his work is a definite asset, and I think you're more likely to get that in people who have a more personalized appearance.
As a part of my job (editor for a major nonfiction publisher), I now review piles and piles of resumes for various kinds of posts. Maybe this only happens in the creative community, but I find that there are at least as many times when a person's "unique" attributes excite me as there are when they turn me off.
Usually it has to do with competence: those that come across as smart and competent while having things like tattoos and piercings I tend to see as even better candidates because of their ability to pull of an unorthodox look while kicking ass. Those that come across as less than ideal skills wise tend to look even more foolish with tattoos and piercings.
So maybe the truth is that green hair or giant earlobe plugs aren't so much indicators as they are exaggerators: they make the worse look worse, and the better look better.
I'm using Fedora Core, and all of the things you mention just work.
After making sure it was in the list of supported printers, I ran out and bought a Brother 20ppm laser printer. Plugged it in to my usb port, opened up the printer tool (in the menu) and added it by model name. Works like a charm.
As does suspend/resume.
As does audio.
Sounds like you need to get a laptop with better Linux support. No, I'm serious, and this is not such a strange idea. After all, would you buy a laptop (say, an iBook) that didn't support Windows, then complain when it didn't work?
If your goal is to use Linux, just buy hardware that's Linux compatible. Duh.
Everybody has this odd perspective that Linux has some sort of "goal," that it's a sentient, driven being that really wants to dominate the desktop computing market.
Not true. Linux is an ad-hoc association of developers and a playground where all of the most important software of the last decade has been developed, tested, and proven before being ported to other platforms like Mac and Windows. It's a development platform, a development community, and a development mindset.
Linux isn't a Porsche, it's a Porsche shop where Porsches can be dissected, rebuilt, and reassembled before being sent back to the marketplace.
I don't know why everyone is obsessed with the notion that "Linux wants to be gramma's!"
That's what Mac users do. That's what Windows users do. Now it's true that you're not going to be able to pick up a box and read "Supports Debian Sarge, Fedora Core 3, etc." BUT any veteran Linux user can in 30 seconds run off for you a list of supported components that will be automatically detected and supported tweak-free by any of these, or at worst by running a driver install (i.e. Nvidia).
And anyone who responds now with "but the Nvidia driver isn't open source" or complains about another vendor driver that installs and works equally well is comparing apples to goats. Most Mac and all Windows drivers are non-open-source. You can't complain on the one hand that Linux drivers are harder to use than Windows drivers and on the other hand say that you won't use vendor drivers because they're closed source and that's a requirement for Linux even though it isn't for Windows.
I have a loaded system that I recently built: dual Athlon, hardware RAID, Geforce4, excellent audio, trackball w/scroll wheel, 17" LCD display, wireless net. I bought supported hardware, and as a result, after a vanilla install of Fedora Core 3 and two vendor driver installs that were as easy as download, set permission to execute, and double-click on icon from the root account, I have a running system with all devices supported, no tweaks needed. It screams, it's stable, and it makes Linux look//really// good.
Did you actually read the paper, and are you qualified to analyze it on the merits?
I am an anthropologist and I actually did get one of my degrees in anthropology from the University of Utah (research institution in question) where I did some amount work in genetic demography and biological anthropology.
I haven't yet read the paper and won't be able to get to it until much later today, but Henry Harpending is a pretty bright bulb and I hesitate to believe he'd attach his name to any "bogus" research.
Controversial, sure. The field itself is controversial, mainly for PC reasons--the notion of genes is something that still troubles most people, since it smacks of a kind of determinism, especially to laypersons. But I'd be shocked if, while reading it later today, I decide that it's just "bogus."
After reading this again, I think I'd better rephrase it. Only UCB actually sent me a letter. The others have just had massive security breeches in recent days while holding on to my personal data; I don't know whether I personally have been compromised or not. I don't even know if there's a way for me to find out.
And how here I sit posting an addendum for fear of getting sued for making misstatements by the same institutions that may be making me ID-theft-fodder. Something is backward.
I'd argue that this, too, is a meaningless question.
If we did, we would. If not, we wouldn't. If nobody anywhere is moved by it, then it's not art, not matter how much of it there is. Conversely, if there's an endless stream of works, more than anyone could ever see or hear in a lifetime, but each one moves anyone who comes in contact with it to tears, then I'd have to say that it's still very much appreciated even if it isn't scarce.
Really, my personal guess is that a relativistic evaluation is intrinsic to the sphere of art; that is to say that some percentage of works are always the most important because they stand head and shoulders above the rest. Thus, no matter how many works or how amazing they are, there will always be a certain few that simply stand above the rest.
Of course, one can ask the rhetorical question "but what if they're all completely entirely perfect in every way" but that's sort of what we're talking about here: it isn't possible. There's no way for any computer or artist to develop a "technically perfect range of deep emotions, experiences and memories from which to draw technically perfect emotive artworks or performances" for the very same reasons of subjectivity I posted with in the first place: subjectivity. A part of the definition of perfection of performance or perfection of work is the fact that it embodies a communication and shared experience between a particular performer/artist and a particular audience in a particular context. (The Mona Lisa is the Mona Lisa, but as a piano performance, an example of digital raytracing, or a Russian folk cuisine exposition, it's relatively poor to meaningless.) Part of the greatness of the work is the degree to which it encompasses, connects, and embodies performer/artist, audience, and context/temporality. No work is the "perfect work of art" for all audiences or all observers at all times; a given work can only aspire or hope to be the perfect work of art for one subject, or at best, for one small audience, or one population, at one moment. The farther any of these diverge from the work, the less impressive it becomes (even it it remains very impressive on the whole). And similarly, the wider the appeal, the less depth it necessarily will have for any given subject in the audience. It's an asymtotic curve.
Personally I think much of the beauty of art is sociological.
Absolutely! "Beauty" is not a physical or objective quality or quantity that can be measured (or even defined--"what does it mean to be 'beautiful'?") outside of the context of human interaction and meaning-making.
We know beauty only by its meaning-making effects--by how it causes us to feel or what it causes us to think or remember, all quantities that themsevles are intimately and inextricably linked to each personal history of social interaction.
That's why one person can look at a work and say "God that's the deepest painting I've ever seen." and another person can look at it and say "Um, it's just squiggly lines. What's it supposed to be?" It's also why it's much tougher to find an American audience that will be enthralled by a Bunraku tableaux than a Japanese audience that will enjoy same.
It's not at all an attack on the concept of "beauty" to suggest that it's socially determined. Indeed, that's the heart of what beauty is: when an artist sets out to make something 'beautiful,' that's precisely what the artist is setting out to do: make something that is able to (and designed to) directly nudge at a basic level the socially constructed meaning-making processes of its audience. If the artist and audience share similar backgrounds, experiences, or at least a given time and place, this will be much more easily done than if they share nothing at all.
And of course, computers are not currently able to traffic in "meaning," "experience," or "identity" in any way that humans find to be believable. Once they are, they'll start being able to regularly turn out works and performances that will wow us emotionally, but until then for the most part they're limited to being able to wow us intellectually.
It's not a different tangent at all, and none of what I'm suggesting is at all radical, so you may be not quite understanding, I'm not sure. Certainly most people, critics or non-critics, cannot explain in the terms that you suggest (attack and decay timings and intensities, pauses, any number of other ways in which instruments can be physically manipulated), on a note-by-note basis, how each second of a performance, or each half-second, or each measure, or however you want to slice it, specifically corresponds to a given impression or sense of the performance, or to the state of mind of the performer, though it may be possible to suggest some of these properties in general terms or at times to pick one or two of them out. This is not at all remarkable unless you are completely unfamiliar with concepts such as the unconscious and subconscious, nonverbal communication, etc.
Yes, relative to a live human performacne, to some extent recorded music lacks a communicative topicality or immediacy, but it is also beyond what a computer is currently capable of because it is internally consistent in the sense that its totality was produced by a single Subject (note capital 'S') whose conceptual or meaning-making framework can be assumed to be instinctively (i.e. using innate biological tools in concert with a socially constructed set of parameters or fundamentals) decipherable to those who share a similar one. The computer is not a Subject per se and thus is incapable of producing such a totality that seems similarly meaningful, consistent, or coherent to unconscious or subconscious meaning-making/perceptive processes.
I didn't say that computers were fundamentally incapable of it. I just said that they'd have to feel first. Maybe that was a sloppy way of saying things, because there are methodological problems in spades with trying to define "feeling" and what it is or isn't. Let me instead say that before computers do this, they will have to be able to a) sense environmental and experiential stimuli along a similiar subset of material events as do humans (and this is bigger than one might think, i.e. sensing the "wetness" of rain isn't easy without the entire denotative-structural or phenomenological framework that provides a conceptual sense for "wet," or the absence of a family member without not only the physical relationships implied by "family" but also a similar set of meaning frameworks thus related), b) assemble a record of environmental and experiential stimuli and refer to/employ this record in the same way when performing the conclusion/behavior-making process, c) be affected by the mix of material cultural-behavioral and rote physiological determinism that proceeds from this record and its application to meaning-making in the same ways that humans are.
I hate to return to a problem formulation, but it seems to once again that another simpler way of saying all of this is probably just to say that around the same time most humans begin to be sure that computers are "conscious" and that they "feel" and "remember" and "want" or "intend" things, around the same time that humans begin to attribute to computers meaningful "personal histories" and contextualizable "selves," is when computers will also begin to make performances that cricits laud as being "moving" and "classic" in their own right. I certainly don't suggest that this is impossible. All I suggest is that we're certainly not there yet and likely won't be for a few years to come.
Ah, but I said that these factors in the performer's life "affect" the performance, not that the performance conveys this information. Anyone who has attended their share of performances knows, without being about to explain precisely why, when the tenor of a performance is unexpectedly "dark" or "brooding" or on the other hand unusually "airy" or sometimes just "too cerebral."
Just what in the performance these characterizations refer to in mechanical terms may not always be clear, but there are times when these things are unmistakable nonetheless and are agreed upon by multiple reviewers independently.
Slashdot Mirror
An incredibly naive view. To materially participate in our society today, you must own a television. Otherwise, you don't know how or where to vote, who's running, whether there's a tornado in your neighborhood, what is now legal or illegal, whether gas is being rationed, whether you can light a fire in your fireplace, whether the roads are closed, whether the tax rate has increased...
For any sociologist worth his or her salt, poverty is not simply a state of general lack. Poverty is the state at which one no longer feels a sufficient connection to or investment in society to abide by the laws of the social contract. Poverty is the point at which someone will commit a crime, despite the potential consequences, to have something that the vast majority of others in the social group tell him or her can be taken for granted.
Sure, there will always be criminals. But what you are suggesting is that there is no such thing as poverty or economic crime. After all, bugs are free; someone could simply live on grasshoppers and flies. Water is free; someone could simply drink from the sewer. Shelter is everywhere; anyone could simply wrap him or herself in cardboard from a dumpster and sleep under the cars on a Wal-Mart parking lot. A house--luxury! A car--luxury! A television--luxury! A telephone--luxury! Packaged and processed food--luxury!
But believe what you will, the view doesn't help you to prevent crime. If it makes you feel better to say that someone who steals to keep a television set is not different from someone who steals to sell a television set, fine. But it won't stop anyone without a television set from thinking about stealing yours.
And if enough people don't have one, but feel that they should have one because of the way in which social interaction and literacy are constituted, then you'll have a revolution on your hands. And when they win, they'll get to decide what's "legal" and what's "crime" and you may suddenly find yourself knitted into a DeFarge scarf.
If that makes you feel warm and fuzzy and moral, fine. Cool. It doesn't me. I'd sooner pay some percentage of my income to aid those that have a much smaller (or absent) one.
Call it what you will. Call it bribing the poor to remain rich. That's all any government or any social order has ever done anyway--bribe the masses to hold off the revolution for another year. And historically thus far, they have all eventually become cocky and cocksure of their laws and their police and their tanks and their big television sets, and then... Rome falls, the royal family is killed, the Soviet Union fragments.
And they come and take your television set, and your wife and children, anyway.
If you have one, why should they not have one, assuming that they want to work and do their best to do so? You may not like the question, but they will ask it, and there are always more of "them" (the entirety of the rest of society) than there are of "you" (the individual seeking to place individual rights at the apex).
You can complain about it all you want, but it won't stop you from suffering the consequences. Lots of homelessness+unemployment=lots of crime. That's not an edict from any social policy group or something that the bleeding heart liberals have set into motion by secretly convincing all of the people on the low end of the socioeconomic ladder that they have to eat even if they can't afford it. History tells us that it's true. It's emperical and no exceptions in urban modernity exist. Living things want to eat. Hungry living things will use their muscles and their will to try to make sure it happens.
If you think that's not how it "should" be, that's completely fair and I won't argue with you a bit. But yes, I'll hand over my money to social services to avoid having to hand it over at gunpoint. You may think that you have more control than me over the fabric of the causal nexus, but I'm just not that omnipotent. I understand and have to face that so long as I have things that other people feel that they need as much or more than me, sooner or later I'm gonna hand some of it over somehow whether I like it or not, while alive or over my dead body, and there are more safe (through secure public institutions) and less safe (in alleyways) places to make the exchange.
I mean, I think that tigers "should" let us walk into the jungle and pet them. That fur looks really soft. But in general, despite what I think about the big cats and what they ought to be like, I'm gonna give 'em a wide berth. Same goes for electricity. Why the hell is it so dangerous to run 50A through your body? Something ought to be done. Why should we continue to surrender to the tyranny of physics?
Right, and then those people will have children that go hungry while at the same time they're stealing your car radio and mugging your wife after she gets off work in the evening because they're unable to both look for work and keep a roof over their kids' heads at the same time.
Welcome to reality, where criminals are real people and economic crime doesn't stop just because you say "Hey, wait, it's a free market! This isn't fair! Why don't you get a job?"
Um, if you'll check the parent to which I replied, you'll find that the question was about "the best way to learn."
That's why. Because that's the question I was answering. If the question was about the best way to fix a flat or eat a cake, we wouldn't even be here.
If you want to challenge the assumption that learning is a good thing, be my guest. But I wasn't even considering the value statement, just explaining why a CLI is a better place to learn than a GUI, in response to someone else's question about the best place to learn.
Becuase users are already familiar with pretty GUIs, and the things that they always need help with are outside of pretty GUIs.
Therefore, when they just use the pretty GUI, they don't actually learn anything, whereas when they struggle to use the command line and eventually master it, they have learned something.
Duh.
Oh I don't know, project CHILDKILL, funded to the tune of $200bn, was implemented to research the most efficient and risk-free methods for implating shrapnel into the skulls of Iraqi children and to link this research to a desired increase in the base of international terrorism.
The project has been successful beyond its wildest dreams; numerous new methods for high-accurace at-distance decapitation and shrapnel implantation have been discovered (the spinoffs from which we no doubt won't fully understand for decades), and in the meantime, the more general goal of an increase in international terrorism to aid in the justification for establishment of a western capitalist theocracy has also been achieved, according to most objective observers.
$200bn well-spent. Yes, it could have gone to the space program I suppose, but project CHILDKILL was (and still is) widely regarded to be the at the forefront of American science.
As someone who once a very long time ago owned a software company that dealt in networking products (back in the days when UUCP and KA9Q were common), I'd suggest that *real* engineers basically cum in their pants when technical challenges are presented and they can't wait to get out of the room, get back to the screen, and *make it work*.
Problem-solving in software development is like a drug for the desirable class of engineers. In a lot of industries it's okay to have a "good enough" attitude, but in any kind of engineering (be it software, network, civil-structural, or aeronautical) I want to see people on the job who do it because they can't help themselves, because it's in their blood to make rock-solid cool things, not simply because they're drawing a paycheck and meeting deadlines.
I guess it all depends on what you mean by "real engineers" and how you think real engineers approach real problems.
Love solving problems = no red face, great product
Just get paid = red face, late (broken) product
Re #1: Done. You just lost one hell of an employee, who may go straight to your competitor.
Re #2: Notify your potential hires of the importance that you place on your dress code. If they stay around long enough to say they won't follow, don't hire them. Problem solved. See #1.
Re #3: You're trying to use "corporate" as a selling point? More to the point, do you care about the sensitivities of tattoed people? No? You think they're stupid? Why should they care about you?
Re #4: People who get tattoos are following the crowd but people who wear ties aren't? Come on my friend, by speaking English or indeed any language you're just following the crowd. The whole point of human interaction is to be a part of the crowd. Are you seriously contending that to spot a tie is to spot a leader? And what's with the gasoline trope? This is pretty violent and gory, and is definitely troubling to my sensibilities, since it bespeaks a certain tendency toward sociopathy.
Your post does not inspire confidence in your business. I probably wouldn't put too much faith in your products or your word, for that matter.
I might be concerned that your personal preferences would conflict with your professional conduct in future
Exactly. This is what I don't get.
You are suggesting that both parties might be unsatisfied with this employemnt transaction. In that case, why is it better that the person hides his/her tattoos?
If the personal values and preferences of the employee conflict with those of the company, both parties should want to know that up-front, so that the company doesn't get an employee they aren't satisfied with and the person doesn't end up not believing in or liking their work.
It's so ass-backward that the employee tries to hide his/her personal preferences in order to get the job. You'd better like your fscking job, you're gonna spend most of your waking life doing it!
My attorney does have a visible tattoo and two piercings. And my girlfriend has a giant tattoo on her back and earlobe plugs over an inch in diameter.
They are not "strange," they are attractive.
All three of us make very good money and have graduate degrees from top-five institutions.
A certain category of people are determined to repeat the "grow up, you're not being individuals, you're just letting a different set of people tell you how to look" argument, but it doesn't impress or bother me. My girlfriend and I both began with degrees in cultural anthropology, so rather than being bewildered by the notion of body modification, it seemed something amusing and natural to us, a biy of useful "tweaking" that we could apply to the other people in the western marketplace who instead of having spent their time learning about the history and ways of mankind as a whole, had spent much of their time learning how to make a buck and play the "free market" (that somehow isn't so terribly free) game, and who were less likely to have value systems tolerably compatible with our own.
I don't expect the average lawyer to understand that American "reality" isn't actually "reality" at all but is just its own particular manifestation of capitalist protestantism located in a fairly small time and place, as tiny and restrictive as any other cultural framework anyone can name. But I also don't expect to employ an average lawyer. I'll let you have those.
You miss the point: I didn't get the tattoo for fashion. It's hardly fashion, it's not a tattoo of anything, it's just a big ink dot about two inches across.
I got it to ensure to myself that I would never be hired by any company that would sooner look at my skin than look at my capabilities. That was the point, the entire reason that I got the tattoo: so that I would never accidentally wind up working for someone like you.
It has served me well.
If you think so highly of yourself that you're not a "commodity" or that you don't have to impress your [potential] new employer, you're either:
a) naive; and have never been 'unemployed'
b) fresh out of school in your first job
c) some rich kid who's daddy will get him a job
d) just plain stupid
By your reckoning, d) is me. Yes, I have been unemployed. After finishing my first three degrees, I had bills piled up to my ears and told creditors "You can call me all you want, but you won't get blood from a stone; I make nothing and I have nothing, having already sold it all to try to pay bills." I moved into a friend's back yard in the country and kept looking for work using his PC and laundry facilities during the day and eating little more than salad and oatmeal. Even then I'd already decided that I'd rather have bad credit and no money than have to take a job that I didn't believe in.
I find it truly remarkable that we live in a society in which anyone who is determined to feel that they express themselves and their lives through their labor is characterized as either naive, borgeious, or stupid. Do you really believe in the marketplace and money that much -- that anyone who doesn't worship it or sacrifice themselves to it simply isn't worthy of any kind of consideration?
This is your life we're talking about. Any time you spend working is time you won't get back, and it becomes the stuff that you are made of, or on the day you die, who you were. I won't burn my hours and minutes doing something I don't believe in or enjoy. Better to spend the time in prison reading great works of fiction and learning to sketch. Better to be a prisoner of conscience than a prisoner of the capital markets.
And "professional" and "mature" would be what? Indifferentiability. It's not about personal expression or the lack thereof, it's about whether labor is personal or commoditized. I refuse to make myself a commodity. Years ago I went out and got a prominent tattoo on the outer side of my wrist precisely because as I was entering my twenties I began to feel as though the very notion of "profssionalism" was really code for "you must sublimate your identity to the company, and credit to it any personal triumphs you would otherwise have had."
Any company that I want to work for needs to want me just as badly. Not "some random worker who looks generally professional," not someone who's ph 7 and completely neutral, but me. I kick asses and make waves. If a process is wrong or a product sucks, I'm going to do my damndest to fix it, to talk to the board about it, put together a team to fix it, or even pull it if necessary, because any project that passes over my desk is a reflection on me and I'm not going to hide behind the company name. I take it personally, and my identity will never be second to that of the "team," who I also hope to be made of unique and powerful minds, not just a bunch of ants or yes-men.
If I'm not valuable enough to a company to cause them to keep me regardless of inoffensive (doesn't smell bad, doesn't hurt others) variations in my appearance, chances are that I'll eventually be treated very badly by them anyway, since they'll want me as nothing more than an interchangeable part in the machine and I'm not one. For some companies, the employee who owns his work is a definite asset, and I think you're more likely to get that in people who have a more personalized appearance.
As a part of my job (editor for a major nonfiction publisher), I now review piles and piles of resumes for various kinds of posts. Maybe this only happens in the creative community, but I find that there are at least as many times when a person's "unique" attributes excite me as there are when they turn me off.
Usually it has to do with competence: those that come across as smart and competent while having things like tattoos and piercings I tend to see as even better candidates because of their ability to pull of an unorthodox look while kicking ass. Those that come across as less than ideal skills wise tend to look even more foolish with tattoos and piercings.
So maybe the truth is that green hair or giant earlobe plugs aren't so much indicators as they are exaggerators: they make the worse look worse, and the better look better.
I'm using Fedora Core, and all of the things you mention just work.
After making sure it was in the list of supported printers, I ran out and bought a Brother 20ppm laser printer. Plugged it in to my usb port, opened up the printer tool (in the menu) and added it by model name. Works like a charm.
As does suspend/resume.
As does audio.
Sounds like you need to get a laptop with better Linux support. No, I'm serious, and this is not such a strange idea. After all, would you buy a laptop (say, an iBook) that didn't support Windows, then complain when it didn't work?
If your goal is to use Linux, just buy hardware that's Linux compatible. Duh.
These stories always make me wonder about people.
Everybody has this odd perspective that Linux has some sort of "goal," that it's a sentient, driven being that really wants to dominate the desktop computing market.
Not true. Linux is an ad-hoc association of developers and a playground where all of the most important software of the last decade has been developed, tested, and proven before being ported to other platforms like Mac and Windows. It's a development platform, a development community, and a development mindset.
Linux isn't a Porsche, it's a Porsche shop where Porsches can be dissected, rebuilt, and reassembled before being sent back to the marketplace.
I don't know why everyone is obsessed with the notion that "Linux wants to be gramma's!"
Buy supported hardware.
//really// good.
That's what Mac users do. That's what Windows users do. Now it's true that you're not going to be able to pick up a box and read "Supports Debian Sarge, Fedora Core 3, etc." BUT any veteran Linux user can in 30 seconds run off for you a list of supported components that will be automatically detected and supported tweak-free by any of these, or at worst by running a driver install (i.e. Nvidia).
And anyone who responds now with "but the Nvidia driver isn't open source" or complains about another vendor driver that installs and works equally well is comparing apples to goats. Most Mac and all Windows drivers are non-open-source. You can't complain on the one hand that Linux drivers are harder to use than Windows drivers and on the other hand say that you won't use vendor drivers because they're closed source and that's a requirement for Linux even though it isn't for Windows.
I have a loaded system that I recently built: dual Athlon, hardware RAID, Geforce4, excellent audio, trackball w/scroll wheel, 17" LCD display, wireless net. I bought supported hardware, and as a result, after a vanilla install of Fedora Core 3 and two vendor driver installs that were as easy as download, set permission to execute, and double-click on icon from the root account, I have a running system with all devices supported, no tweaks needed. It screams, it's stable, and it makes Linux look
"Two things only the people anxiously desire: bread and the Circus games." -- Juvenal (Roman poet and satirist, est. 60-140)
Did you actually read the paper, and are you qualified to analyze it on the merits?
I am an anthropologist and I actually did get one of my degrees in anthropology from the University of Utah (research institution in question) where I did some amount work in genetic demography and biological anthropology.
I haven't yet read the paper and won't be able to get to it until much later today, but Henry Harpending is a pretty bright bulb and I hesitate to believe he'd attach his name to any "bogus" research.
Controversial, sure. The field itself is controversial, mainly for PC reasons--the notion of genes is something that still troubles most people, since it smacks of a kind of determinism, especially to laypersons. But I'd be shocked if, while reading it later today, I decide that it's just "bogus."
After reading this again, I think I'd better rephrase it. Only UCB actually sent me a letter. The others have just had massive security breeches in recent days while holding on to my personal data; I don't know whether I personally have been compromised or not. I don't even know if there's a way for me to find out.
And how here I sit posting an addendum for fear of getting sued for making misstatements by the same institutions that may be making me ID-theft-fodder. Something is backward.
Jesus, in recent days I've taken it in the teeth by the failure of institutions to protect my personal data.
:-(
UC Berkeley sent me a letter telling me they failed to protect my data. University of Chicago came next. And now Citigroup.
I'm picking far too many winners lately...
I'd argue that this, too, is a meaningless question.
If we did, we would. If not, we wouldn't. If nobody anywhere is moved by it, then it's not art, not matter how much of it there is. Conversely, if there's an endless stream of works, more than anyone could ever see or hear in a lifetime, but each one moves anyone who comes in contact with it to tears, then I'd have to say that it's still very much appreciated even if it isn't scarce.
Really, my personal guess is that a relativistic evaluation is intrinsic to the sphere of art; that is to say that some percentage of works are always the most important because they stand head and shoulders above the rest. Thus, no matter how many works or how amazing they are, there will always be a certain few that simply stand above the rest.
Of course, one can ask the rhetorical question "but what if they're all completely entirely perfect in every way" but that's sort of what we're talking about here: it isn't possible. There's no way for any computer or artist to develop a "technically perfect range of deep emotions, experiences and memories from which to draw technically perfect emotive artworks or performances" for the very same reasons of subjectivity I posted with in the first place: subjectivity. A part of the definition of perfection of performance or perfection of work is the fact that it embodies a communication and shared experience between a particular performer/artist and a particular audience in a particular context. (The Mona Lisa is the Mona Lisa, but as a piano performance, an example of digital raytracing, or a Russian folk cuisine exposition, it's relatively poor to meaningless.) Part of the greatness of the work is the degree to which it encompasses, connects, and embodies performer/artist, audience, and context/temporality. No work is the "perfect work of art" for all audiences or all observers at all times; a given work can only aspire or hope to be the perfect work of art for one subject, or at best, for one small audience, or one population, at one moment. The farther any of these diverge from the work, the less impressive it becomes (even it it remains very impressive on the whole). And similarly, the wider the appeal, the less depth it necessarily will have for any given subject in the audience. It's an asymtotic curve.
Tautological.
I'm saying "computers will not be able to generate artistic masterworks until they have meaning, experience, and identity"
and you are saying "when computers are able to generate artistic masterworks, we'll know they have meaning, experience, and identity"
essentially the same statement.
Personally I think much of the beauty of art is sociological.
Absolutely! "Beauty" is not a physical or objective quality or quantity that can be measured (or even defined--"what does it mean to be 'beautiful'?") outside of the context of human interaction and meaning-making.
We know beauty only by its meaning-making effects--by how it causes us to feel or what it causes us to think or remember, all quantities that themsevles are intimately and inextricably linked to each personal history of social interaction.
That's why one person can look at a work and say "God that's the deepest painting I've ever seen." and another person can look at it and say "Um, it's just squiggly lines. What's it supposed to be?" It's also why it's much tougher to find an American audience that will be enthralled by a Bunraku tableaux than a Japanese audience that will enjoy same.
It's not at all an attack on the concept of "beauty" to suggest that it's socially determined. Indeed, that's the heart of what beauty is: when an artist sets out to make something 'beautiful,' that's precisely what the artist is setting out to do: make something that is able to (and designed to) directly nudge at a basic level the socially constructed meaning-making processes of its audience. If the artist and audience share similar backgrounds, experiences, or at least a given time and place, this will be much more easily done than if they share nothing at all.
And of course, computers are not currently able to traffic in "meaning," "experience," or "identity" in any way that humans find to be believable. Once they are, they'll start being able to regularly turn out works and performances that will wow us emotionally, but until then for the most part they're limited to being able to wow us intellectually.
It's not a different tangent at all, and none of what I'm suggesting is at all radical, so you may be not quite understanding, I'm not sure. Certainly most people, critics or non-critics, cannot explain in the terms that you suggest (attack and decay timings and intensities, pauses, any number of other ways in which instruments can be physically manipulated), on a note-by-note basis, how each second of a performance, or each half-second, or each measure, or however you want to slice it, specifically corresponds to a given impression or sense of the performance, or to the state of mind of the performer, though it may be possible to suggest some of these properties in general terms or at times to pick one or two of them out. This is not at all remarkable unless you are completely unfamiliar with concepts such as the unconscious and subconscious, nonverbal communication, etc.
Yes, relative to a live human performacne, to some extent recorded music lacks a communicative topicality or immediacy, but it is also beyond what a computer is currently capable of because it is internally consistent in the sense that its totality was produced by a single Subject (note capital 'S') whose conceptual or meaning-making framework can be assumed to be instinctively (i.e. using innate biological tools in concert with a socially constructed set of parameters or fundamentals) decipherable to those who share a similar one. The computer is not a Subject per se and thus is incapable of producing such a totality that seems similarly meaningful, consistent, or coherent to unconscious or subconscious meaning-making/perceptive processes.
I didn't say that computers were fundamentally incapable of it. I just said that they'd have to feel first. Maybe that was a sloppy way of saying things, because there are methodological problems in spades with trying to define "feeling" and what it is or isn't. Let me instead say that before computers do this, they will have to be able to a) sense environmental and experiential stimuli along a similiar subset of material events as do humans (and this is bigger than one might think, i.e. sensing the "wetness" of rain isn't easy without the entire denotative-structural or phenomenological framework that provides a conceptual sense for "wet," or the absence of a family member without not only the physical relationships implied by "family" but also a similar set of meaning frameworks thus related), b) assemble a record of environmental and experiential stimuli and refer to/employ this record in the same way when performing the conclusion/behavior-making process, c) be affected by the mix of material cultural-behavioral and rote physiological determinism that proceeds from this record and its application to meaning-making in the same ways that humans are.
I hate to return to a problem formulation, but it seems to once again that another simpler way of saying all of this is probably just to say that around the same time most humans begin to be sure that computers are "conscious" and that they "feel" and "remember" and "want" or "intend" things, around the same time that humans begin to attribute to computers meaningful "personal histories" and contextualizable "selves," is when computers will also begin to make performances that cricits laud as being "moving" and "classic" in their own right. I certainly don't suggest that this is impossible. All I suggest is that we're certainly not there yet and likely won't be for a few years to come.
Ah, but I said that these factors in the performer's life "affect" the performance, not that the performance conveys this information. Anyone who has attended their share of performances knows, without being about to explain precisely why, when the tenor of a performance is unexpectedly "dark" or "brooding" or on the other hand unusually "airy" or sometimes just "too cerebral."
Just what in the performance these characterizations refer to in mechanical terms may not always be clear, but there are times when these things are unmistakable nonetheless and are agreed upon by multiple reviewers independently.