Also, they might have been taking a lot of acid when they wrote it. Mushrooms maybe... something that induces hallucinations and the belief that you can make whole segments of an animation show without animators;)
Actually, the consciousness-altering drug of choice in the creation of Evangelion was psychoanalysis. Hideaki Anno (the creator) spent years in therapy prior to developing the show, and that was apparently one of the largest inspirations for it.
I will say from experience, though, that mushrooms are significantly more likely to induce ego-dissolving sensations of rebirth (such as that at the end of EoE) than LSD. YMMV. HAND.
I personally believe that there isn't a correct interpretation of Evangelion; instead the creators just took a normal giant robot anime and threw in a random mishmash of religious symbols so people would think it's profound.
Looking for a "correct interpretation" is usually a good way of missing the point entirely. You may find yourself getting so hung up on the symbols that you lose sight of the meaning that is there.
The symbols are not the point. The symbols are there to evoke a degree of familiarity and connection to that symbol's meaning, *not* to imply a direct connection to that symbol. Using such symbols is a way of saying "I know I'm not the first one to say all of this, but..." In my experience, knowing this helps decipher a lot of otherwise veiled meaning in all kinds of art, even if you're not familiar with the sources of the symbols.
Some people will try to imply that you are stupid for not seeing it the way they do, and list off a hundred interpretations that may or may not have any basis in reality. I am definitely not trying to do this, and I apologize if anything comes of that way.
Personally, I don't see anything wrong with "not getting it". I was 14 when I first watched NGE, and I can't say I really understood a damn bit of it, but it sure was fun watching robots fight with giant space monsters. I didn't know what I was missing.
Now, at 22, being much more educated, informed, experienced, and mature (and yet, still posting on Slashdot!), I find much more substance to most art that I take in, including the anime that I used to just watch for the visuals.
All it really took in the case of Evangelion was some familiarity with psychoanalytic theory -- the basic Freud and Jung stuff you could get in any Intro to Psych course or in any book by or about them[1] -- and an awareness that the Judeo-Christian symbols lean heavily on the Dead Sea Scrolls and Gnostic sources that most people aren't familiar with. (That is, it isn't, as some people assume "straight out of the Bible". Again, they're just symbols being used to describe something beyond themselves; it doesn't really matter where they came from if you get what they mean.)
Familiarity with these things revealed a lot more about the artist's intent and the meaning behind the story that I hadn't noticed. Now, the meaning itself isn't "new", and rarely is in art; that's not the "profound" and admirable part. It's the fact that they were able to tell a meaningful story using giant robots and space monsters and warm water penguins and the occasional dick joke. In other words, it was entertaining, in a way that Totem and Taboo or the Dead Sea Scrolls are not.
[1] I highly recommend to anyone, but especially anyone interested in the bridging of mythology/spirituality, art and psychology, Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces. It's among the most enlightening books I have ever read.
There is no real "correct" order, but watching episodes 25 and 26 of the series, mulling them over a bit, and then watching "End of Evangelion" is the most common way. It's generally accepted that they are two interpretations of the same idea -- they "overlap".
"Death and Rebirth" is kind of a summary of the series, including part of "End of Evangelion". As far as I remember, there is nothing new in it. It is not a different ending.
Quoth Wikipedia's quality entry on the series: Evangelion is an anglicised version of the Greek "?????????" (euangelion) for "good news", and is typically translated "gospel" in the Bible. Initially, the word meant "good messenger", the prefix "eu" meaning "good" and "angelion" meaning "messenger" (from the same word that means "angel"). It only came to mean "good message" or "good news" over time. This dual meaning may be the reason both the series itself and the "mecha" are called Evangelion. -- Wikipedia
I wouldn't know Greek from a hole in my head, but I've always interpreted the full title as something like "New Gospel of Creation" in describing the series to people.
Your post is as idiotic as I expect from a messianic techophile.
Perhaps, but it didn't include argumentum ad hominem. I also didn't write it with baseless expectations about your values.
I hate to break it to you, but not every painting from 500 years ago has survived. There is nothing inherent in the medium itself that lends it ultimate survivability... You are TOTALLY incorrect. A painting that is made on...has the *inherent* ability to last for well over 1000 years. There are many extant examples of such.
And yet, as I said, not all such paintings have survived. Paintings are not any more immune to the varied unpredictable hazards that might befall objects over time. Destroy a painting and it is gone. Destroy a disc containing an image and you have destroyed that copy of that image, which is no more or less value than any other copy.
I can GUARANTEE that there isn't a single hard drive or optical drive that will provide information in 37,000 years.
So, first we're talking 500 years, now we're talking 37,000?
This would be a good point if digital data were bound to the physical media on which it resides. Yes, hard drives and optical discs lose integrity and suffer mechanical failure. I never claimed they didn't. But who cares about the disks? What we're trying to preserve is the data, and as I pointed out in my previous comment, the preservation of data depends on it's redundancy and ability to be copied losslessly; not on it's substrate, which can be virtually anything.
Most that survive do so either by chance or because people actively wanted them to survive... That is s a completely different issue - the *inherent* (I use your term) survivability of a work is COMPLETELY dependent on its substrate.
Again, we're talking about the data, which is valuable, and not the substrate, which is not. There is no reason you couldn't preserve digital data by painting it on stone, lending it all of the physical survivability of cave paintings. (Of course, you'll want to bury such things in remote locations, to keep them away from the sun, erosion, backhoes, graffiti writers, and other such dangers.)
I repeat - our age is a dark age. Not from a lack of anyone writing (as in the year 490 AD in Western Europe) but because nothing we write will last.
I have yet to see how you reach this conclusion. Our age is a dark age because portions of our cultural heritage depend on impermanent media? How does this differ from any prior generation? Why is it any less likely that ours, or future generations, will preserve this heritage?
If anything, I think that ours is an age of such abundance that future archivists and historians will be overwhelmed with trying to make use of it all. Storage is the easy part.
The *only* thing that comes close is some kind of RAID, and those, even with the plummeting price of storage, are still too expensive given the needs.
Why does RAID work? Because digital data can be copied at virtually no cost. Ergo, the survivability of digital data depends on it's redundancy, which can be increased any time that it can be read.
With Video: Framerate, number of lines, colour depth, aspect ratio, file format, compression format, Operating system compatibility, etc etc etc. All of these things are variables. With Audio: sample rate, compression format, bit depth, file format, etc.
And all of those things can be reverse engineered, with or without ISO standard or patent documentation, original source code, or anything else that might be available. Any future historian who gives a damn about our pirated XviDs is going to have the patience and technology to discover how they can be decoded.
I am fairly well convinced that our age will simply disappear. They will find our garbage, the few books not pressed on acidic paper,
Few? Huge numbers of books are pressed on acid-free paper. It's very common for the first edition of a book to be on acid-free, but not subsequent or paperback editions.
our paintings (fat lot of good the abstract stuff will mean to them) and drawings, that's about it. the rest will just be shiny little bits of crap in the landfill.
No photographs? No film? No microfilm? No analog audio or video tapes?
Since we will have used up all the dense energy forms, they will be appalled at the energy requirements just to get the few remaining museum piece devices to work.
You're making several flawed assumptions here: 1) that people of the future will have no way of generating large amounts of electricity. That they will have expended all fossil fuels, all nuclear fuels, and will not have any renewable electricity infrastructure.
2) that they will balk at the few hundred watts necessary to power an early 21st-century device
3) that they will care about early 21st-century devices at all when they don't have enough electricity to power a few light bulbs
4) that they will have any reason to use early 21st-century devices at all to access the data stored on their discs. (That is, why wouldn't they build their own?)
Archiving the 21st century will be impossible.
No more impossible than archiving any other century. That is to say, the survivability of any single bit of data is pretty grim, but given the massive quantity of stuff produced, a sufficient chunk of it will survive. Who cares if the 25th century doesn't have pictures of every 21st-century person's uneventful vacations?
To the 25th century, the 21st century will be seen as a dark age but from the simple fact that very little of the information formats we are totally geared into will survive, including this note on/.
Who cares? We don't have everything ever written by everyone ever to have existed, and yet, we don't consider the entire history of civilization a dark age. Just because it could be archived doesn't mean it needs to be.
That's why I am abandoning video, and going back to painting. In 500 years, my painting CAN survive. the video simply won't.
I hate to break it to you, but not every painting from 500 years ago has survived. There is nothing inherent in the medium itself that lends it ultimate survivability. Most that survive do so either by chance or because people actively wanted them to survive.
If you want anything you create today to survive 500 years, you just have to make sure that 500 years of your decendents (either family or worldly) will want to preserve it.
Maybe its just me. But it looks like FireFox with some Longhorn UI added.:P
Uh, actually, it looks like exactly Safari with some Longhorn UI added. The filter/sort/search pane on the right is a dead giveaway. The idea of using the main browser area for showing RSS feeds is not a given -- they're definitely following Apple on this one.
The author is probably asymilating the apostle Thomas with the author of the pseudopigraphal "Gospel of Thomas," which was a gnostic document.
They are assumed to be the same. That is, whether you accept it as authentic or not, the supposed author of the text (if not the document) is the same as the doubting Thomas.
Obviously, these movies should have focused on the fight within the Matrix, that is, Neo's efforts to rally the citizenry to rise up in revolt and overthrow the machine regime controlling it all.
This would run counter to the basic mythological premise of the hero. He is the object of the story, and he must redeem and save humanity, because it cannot do it on it's own.
IMHO, the sequels were bad enough because they diverged from this. They'd have been worse if they demoted Neo to "just a leader".
But of course Hollywood isn't interested in giving anybody any ideas. We're already one spark away from mass revolt as it is. So the studio said no, and the brothers, utterly dejected, just went after the paycheck with the hope of one day being able to have final cut... maybe even remaking the sequels.
I don't know how else to explain how the first movie could be so fantastic, and the 2nd & 3rd so shitty.
I think that's a lot of conspiracy theory to cover up the possibility that the brothers are basically hacks when not following a highly traditional mythological structure. (Hey, most screenwriters are hacks, so they at lest get points for trying.)
They had a good idea (traditional heroic monomyth with a modern action-flick theme), and then pushed it way too far into pretentious pseudo-intellectual garbage without backing it up. In other words: it was obvious they had read a lot of books, it wasn't obvious that they had learned anything from them.
I personally think they got too wrapped up in making the story refer outside of itself, instead of making it's internal symbology consistent. Compare Star Wars, which is another straight up hero myth, but without all of the allusory smokescreen.
I'd never heard this before. It appears that she won, and won big: $2.5B for matrix and terminator. I'm guessing the axe that killed them was that she submitted it to "to an ad placed by the Wachowski Brothers" in the mid 80s. Wow.
$2.5B is the total gross from all of the Matrix and Terminator films. She did not win this, nor would she. Furthermore, the "official" site (linked by the parent) says that the "big" court date is set for July 2005.
What would a one week shopping list contain for less then $50.
I get by on about $50 a week, with minimal cooking, all vegetarian, and almost entirely organic/natural foods (which adds a bit). Granted, I don't eat like a king, but it's better than beer-and-pizza or ramen-and-toast. Better for my body, too.
I'm too lazy to post the entire thing, but my last bill has pretty normal stuff: sodas, frozen foods, fruit, vegetables. It's just less of the expensive stuff and more of the cheap stuff. One six pack of natural soda, but three pounds of organic apples, and so on. If you look at the price of things vs. how long they really last, you can easily cut your bill down quite a bit without completely swearing off the things you like.
Bringing this back on topic: if you know how much your budget averages out to per day ($50/w = $7.15/d), it puts your purchases in perspective. Is that CD really worth 2 days worth of food? Maybe, maybe not.
People don't mind paying for software\music etc. They just don't like being ripped off with overly inflated prices.
Your way of communicating this is to demand (i.e. buy) at a lower price. Piracy effectively removes a big part of the demand, which doesn't help bring prices down.
In other words, if you think something is too expensive, don't buy it.
Oddly enough, many people might learn that they can live without blowing all their money on huge music and DVD collections, whatever the price.
Tenfold? That's often the case with this sort of thing, but here? No way. It's not that difficult to use, say, iTunes with a computer hooked up to a TV. Or Winamp, or whatever. Just buy an IR dongle, and you're golden.
What you describe has scarcely any resemblance to the Sonos. Yes, there are a million ways to solve the problem of "playing music", but if you're trying to get the same functionality as the Sonos you're going to have to do a lot more work.
(And you've got video playback)
Who cares? You've already eliminated all of the compelling features -- adding something completely different into the mix doesn't change that.
I could buy a cheapo $299 Dell for each bedroom, network them wirelessly to a huge 300GB drive and have far more functionality than this setup. Am I wrong?
Yes. What you save in dollars you'll be spending tenfold in time.
Stop thinking of price as something only measured in dollars and you'll better understand why people buy things like this when they could have something "better".
If I were planning on doing that during the time they were still marketing PPC Macs, I'd be hesitant to buy one because I'd be worried about it becoming an orphan machine.
Apple will still be shipping PPC Macs through 2007, and actively supporting them for at least two years after that, probably more like four or five. And even then, they won't suddenly stop working. So, unless you're planning on using the same machine for the same purpose seven or more years from now, I wouldn't worry about it.
If I were planning on buying one after the transition to X86, I'd probably want to wait a while and make sure that the systems don't have any major bugs in 'em.
I have no idea what kind of "major bugs" you're anticipating, but I feel certain that any issues that would warrant putting off a purchase would be detected in a matter of weeks or months, and certainly not "3-4 years".
You appear to be suffering from two very common problems that make discussing this issue difficult. 1) You've never used Mac OS X. 2) You've become complacent with existing Linux distributions.
Your first point is that Linux distributions come with a lot of applications. I can't argue with that.
(I have even gone so far as to say that most Linux distributions suffer from having too many redundant applications. Why should a desktop install half a dozen audio players, when the user will, in all probability, only use one?)
But I strongly disagree with the idea that the all (or even a majority) of these are "quality" apps, when considered in competition with comparable free and commercial apps on Mac OS X. This is not an advantage of Linux unless you have no money, in which case your options are already limited.
not to mention the rich GNU heritage of command-line tools, a variety of programming environments, etc.
You shouldn't mention this, because Mac OS X includes this. A huge amount of a typical Linux command-line installation is included in Mac OS X, and even more available through the package managers you mentioned. It simply is not an advantage of Linux (or BSD). It is the baseline for any Unix-like OS.
Linux will run on a TON of hardware, including old hardware, which means you can use to "revitalize" existing machines and save money.
...and the Linux Desktop still sucks. Hardware is dirt cheap, and people are more obviously willing to pay for it. (Also, in my personal experience, new releases of Mac OS X are capable of running on older (Mac) hardware than new releases of Mandrake.) Yes, it runs on tons of hardware, but the question is why would you? And that remains unanswered.
(3) Linux is always uttered in the same sentence with "open source" and more particularly "open source innovation." For people who want to be a part of the open source movement, Linux (or BSDs) is the natural choice. For people who want to be free of proprietary software, to even the slightest degree, will stick with Linux.
...and the Linux Desktop still sucks. Nothing you've said here is an advantage. It's just a statement, and with notable numbers of Linux users (including the founder of this site) switching to Mac OS X, it's not all that true.
(4) Linux, as a kernel, is hyper-configurable. You can strip it down or compile everything in. Tweakers and power users like this idea.
...and the Linux Desktop still sucks. There's no particular reason you can't do this on Mac OS X. There just aren't that many reasons to do it. Yes, with Linux there are occasionally major patches that add significant performance boosts, but they're uncommon and usually rolled into the next release of whatever distro you use anyway. Still doesn't make the desktop any better.
(5) The "slick GUI" advantage of OS X will rapidly disappear over the next few years, as desktop linux developers make more progress with XOrg, composite, direct rendering, etc.
I long for the day that Linux will have a "slick GUI", but not as much as I long for Linux to have a "useful GUI". Meanwhile, Mac OS X has both, now. There is no advantage to Linux here. It is on par with Windows.
(6) Linux being used very often as a server, it's just as simple to install major server apps (Apache, Tomcat, mysql, vsftpd etc.) as other apps.
...and the Linux Desktop still sucks. These are hardly relevant for a desktop environment.
But for what it's worth, these things are no more difficult under Mac OS X. Apache is pre-installed (though you can easily substitute it). Tomcat, MySQL, and vsftpd are all in Dar
By adding 1,2, and 3, Vader really becomes the central figure in the story, but he isn't given adequate plot time in 4 and 5.
1/2/3 and 4/5/6 are two different stories within a larger mythology. The first is a fall, the second a redemption. It's only natural for them to focus on two different characters. The ~20 year gap in the story should be an indication that it doesn't pick up right where it left off, if nothing else.
Vader isn't given time in the later story because there is nothing for him to do -- he has given in to the dark side, and become the machine, only capable of following his programming. He is stuck, and needs to be saved.[1]
There isn't one solid narrative thread going throughout the series, and I seriously doubt there is meant to be. Lucas was greatly inspired by mythological archetypes (and Joseph Campbell's work in particular), and the effect can be seen throughout the series. It makes sense that he would tell his stories in the same way, and distinguish between the tragic story of Anakin's fall and the heroic story of Luke's salvation of humanity, the way true myths are composed.
[1] Consider that even when (in Empire) he tells Luke to join him so they can overthrow the Emperor and rule the galaxy, he is expressing nothing more than the same desire for power and control that made him what he is. He is incapable of thinking outside of his evil mechanical box. Only when Luke chops off his mechanical hand (in Jedi) is he free.
Paul is just pissed because......his website is hosted on the same IP address as a spammer (textileshop.com) was on yesterday, and because of that he's seeing some of his mail blocked.
Is there some reason someone shouldn't be pissed about having his legit mail blocked? Does it make his criticism less valid?
There's certainly a need for thoughtful and hopefully positive criticism of blacklist behaviour. This article is not it.
Sorry, but there's just no way to say "blacklists are broken, please stop using them, you're destroying email" in a positive way.
Changing the medium doesn't automatically make better content.
Yes, but: the medium profoundly alters the range of possibilities for communication, which enables better (and worse) content.
This is why blogs actually matter. As our means of communication change, so does our culture.
Maybe a million monkeys at typewriters can't produce Shakespeare after all. I think blogs are like almost everything on the Internet. They start out small, get hot, mainstream, and they are all the rage. Then people realize they aren't really adding value.
Ah, but they are adding value, in equal proportions with most other media. The best films are rarely the highest grossing ones. The best television is not often the most watched. The best books are rarely bestsellers. The best music doesn't top the charts. The best blogs probably aren't the ones in the Technorati Top 100.
What isn't adding value is the hype -- the pronouncements that it's "the next big thing" (as if "big" implied anything about quality or meaning), that it replaces "old media" (whatever that is). -- and the dismissiveness -- the idea that they're "nothing new", or have no value whatsoever (using the medium doesn't automatically make worse content, either.)
It is a pity that the average consumer still believes that a computer is like any other home appliance - it should last, unattended and with little regular maintenance, for years upon years.
Why shouldn't it?
Why, in this day and age, does it seem normal to rely on a device daily, and yet have to call in your son/friend/repairguy every few weeks to fix it? Or worse, to be forced to learn it's most arcane secrets (hidden away in it's dark, unfathomable corners) so you'll be able to prevent it from disintegrating yourself.
I think you're wrong that the "average consumer" believes computers are low maintenance. In fact, I think they are the ones most acutely aware of the fact that they aren't, relying, as they do, on "Mr. Fix-its and computational handymen".
"People like us" often assume that the "average" computer user is of "average" intelligence, as if our knowledge of computers afforded us an elite status, or that such knowledge was particularly difficult to obtain. In reality, it just takes experience and a degree of tolerance for poorly designed interfaces that most people don't have.
So while it's entirely reasonable to note that computers do, presently, require an unusual degree of maintenance, I think it's quite mistaken to assume that this is the way it should be, and that consumers will just have to get used it.
Some things are complex and require more knowledge to use effectively than others not because they are poorly designed but because they are much more powerful and versatile.
The problem is that the typical PC+software is both powerful and poorly designed. The standard design principle appears to be "treat the user like an idiot, lock them in to our products, and charge them for the privilege", rather than something like "make it easy for the user to learn to make use of the massive amount of computational power they've got to make their lives better".
The obvious/. response would be: put Linux and KDE (or Gnome if you swing that way) on them and the 'aren't even remotely as easy to use' complaint is solved or at least highly mitigated.
Please tell me you're joking. If you are, please make such statements clearer in the future, lest some fool on Slashdot actually argee with it.
running Firefox and Thunderbird when configured and hooked up by your friend who knows their way around Linux... about the same learning curve.
No, insteaad you're chucking the learning curve out of the window by shifting the work to someone that can tolerate crappy interfaces. In short, you're doing exactly what Microsoft, et al. are doing by pretending that computers are mystical devices that only an elite few are capable of understanding.
The path towards making computers easier to use (i.e., more useful to more people) is not through treating the user like an idiot.
Slashdot used to be a OS advocacy site for Linux. Now, Slashdot is an OS advocacy site for Apple. Of course you should care.
Perhaps you didn't realize you're reading apple.slashdot.org, and not linux.slashdot.org. If you don't want Apple news, Slashdot has plenty of ways to stop you from seeing it.
Also, I think saying that Slashdot used to be an "advocacy site for Linux" is a joke. As far back as I can remember it was more of an advocacy site for "stuff Taco and Hemos think is cool", and both of them use Macs now, IIRC. If Linux seems to get fewer posts, it probably has more to do with Linux making less news than with any evil anti-Linux conspiracy.
Yes, there's still issues with Linux audio. But whining and running off to another OS isn't going to fix them.
That's because "issues with Linux audio" is the problem of Linux audio developers, not users. His problem was getting sound to work, and switching to Mac OS X solved that.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, they might have been taking a lot of acid when they wrote it. Mushrooms maybe... something that induces hallucinations and the belief that you can make whole segments of an animation show without animators ;)
Actually, the consciousness-altering drug of choice in the creation of Evangelion was psychoanalysis. Hideaki Anno (the creator) spent years in therapy prior to developing the show, and that was apparently one of the largest inspirations for it.
I will say from experience, though, that mushrooms are significantly more likely to induce ego-dissolving sensations of rebirth (such as that at the end of EoE) than LSD. YMMV. HAND.
I personally believe that there isn't a correct interpretation of Evangelion; instead the creators just took a normal giant robot anime and threw in a random mishmash of religious symbols so people would think it's profound.
Looking for a "correct interpretation" is usually a good way of missing the point entirely. You may find yourself getting so hung up on the symbols that you lose sight of the meaning that is there.
The symbols are not the point. The symbols are there to evoke a degree of familiarity and connection to that symbol's meaning, *not* to imply a direct connection to that symbol. Using such symbols is a way of saying "I know I'm not the first one to say all of this, but..." In my experience, knowing this helps decipher a lot of otherwise veiled meaning in all kinds of art, even if you're not familiar with the sources of the symbols.
Some people will try to imply that you are stupid for not seeing it the way they do, and list off a hundred interpretations that may or may not have any basis in reality. I am definitely not trying to do this, and I apologize if anything comes of that way.
Personally, I don't see anything wrong with "not getting it". I was 14 when I first watched NGE, and I can't say I really understood a damn bit of it, but it sure was fun watching robots fight with giant space monsters. I didn't know what I was missing.
Now, at 22, being much more educated, informed, experienced, and mature (and yet, still posting on Slashdot!), I find much more substance to most art that I take in, including the anime that I used to just watch for the visuals.
All it really took in the case of Evangelion was some familiarity with psychoanalytic theory -- the basic Freud and Jung stuff you could get in any Intro to Psych course or in any book by or about them[1] -- and an awareness that the Judeo-Christian symbols lean heavily on the Dead Sea Scrolls and Gnostic sources that most people aren't familiar with. (That is, it isn't, as some people assume "straight out of the Bible". Again, they're just symbols being used to describe something beyond themselves; it doesn't really matter where they came from if you get what they mean.)
Familiarity with these things revealed a lot more about the artist's intent and the meaning behind the story that I hadn't noticed. Now, the meaning itself isn't "new", and rarely is in
art; that's not the "profound" and admirable part. It's the fact that they were able to tell a meaningful story using giant robots and space monsters and warm water penguins and the occasional dick joke. In other words, it was entertaining, in a way that Totem and Taboo or the Dead Sea Scrolls are not.
[1] I highly recommend to anyone, but especially anyone interested in the bridging of mythology/spirituality, art and psychology, Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces. It's among the most enlightening books I have ever read.
There is no real "correct" order, but watching episodes 25 and 26 of the series, mulling them over a bit, and then watching "End of Evangelion" is the most common way. It's generally accepted that they are two interpretations of the same idea -- they "overlap".
"Death and Rebirth" is kind of a summary of the series, including part of "End of Evangelion". As far as I remember, there is nothing new in it. It is not a different ending.
Quoth Wikipedia's quality entry on the series:
Evangelion is an anglicised version of the Greek "?????????" (euangelion) for "good news", and is typically translated "gospel" in the Bible. Initially, the word meant "good messenger", the prefix "eu" meaning "good" and "angelion" meaning "messenger" (from the same word that means "angel"). It only came to mean "good message" or "good news" over time. This dual meaning may be the reason both the series itself and the "mecha" are called Evangelion. -- Wikipedia
I wouldn't know Greek from a hole in my head, but I've always interpreted the full title as something like "New Gospel of Creation" in describing the series to people.
Your post is as idiotic as I expect from a messianic techophile.
..
..
Perhaps, but it didn't include argumentum ad hominem.
I also didn't write it with baseless expectations about your values.
I hate to break it to you, but not every painting from 500 years ago has survived. There is nothing inherent in the medium itself that lends it ultimate survivability.
You are TOTALLY incorrect.
A painting that is made on...has the *inherent* ability to last for well over 1000 years. There are many extant examples of such.
And yet, as I said, not all such paintings have survived. Paintings are not any more immune to the varied unpredictable hazards that might befall objects over time. Destroy a painting and it is gone. Destroy a disc containing an image and you have destroyed that copy of that image, which is no more or less value than any other copy.
I can GUARANTEE that there isn't a single hard drive or optical drive that will provide information in 37,000 years.
So, first we're talking 500 years, now we're talking 37,000?
This would be a good point if digital data were bound to the physical media on which it resides. Yes, hard drives and optical discs lose integrity and suffer mechanical failure. I never claimed they didn't. But who cares about the disks? What we're trying to preserve is the data, and as I pointed out in my previous comment, the preservation of data depends on it's redundancy and ability to be copied losslessly; not on it's substrate, which can be virtually anything.
Most that survive do so either by chance or because people actively wanted them to survive.
That is s a completely different issue - the *inherent* (I use your term) survivability of a work is COMPLETELY dependent on its substrate.
Again, we're talking about the data, which is valuable, and not the substrate, which is not. There is no reason you couldn't preserve digital data by painting it on stone, lending it all of the physical survivability of cave paintings. (Of course, you'll want to bury such things in remote locations, to keep them away from the sun, erosion, backhoes, graffiti writers, and other such dangers.)
I repeat - our age is a dark age. Not from a lack of anyone writing (as in the year 490 AD in Western Europe) but because nothing we write will last.
I have yet to see how you reach this conclusion. Our age is a dark age because portions of our cultural heritage depend on impermanent media? How does this differ from any prior generation? Why is it any less likely that ours, or future generations, will preserve this heritage?
If anything, I think that ours is an age of such abundance that future archivists and historians will be overwhelmed with trying to make use of it all. Storage is the easy part.
The *only* thing that comes close is some kind of RAID, and those, even with the plummeting price of storage, are still too expensive given the needs.
/.
Why does RAID work? Because digital data can be copied at virtually no cost. Ergo, the survivability of digital data depends on it's redundancy, which can be increased any time that it can be read.
With Video:
Framerate, number of lines, colour depth, aspect ratio, file format, compression format, Operating system compatibility, etc etc etc. All of these things are variables. With Audio:
sample rate, compression format, bit depth, file format, etc.
And all of those things can be reverse engineered, with or without ISO standard or patent documentation, original source code, or anything else that might be available. Any future historian who gives a damn about our pirated XviDs is going to have the patience and technology to discover how they can be decoded.
I am fairly well convinced that our age will simply disappear. They will find our garbage, the few books not pressed on acidic paper,
Few? Huge numbers of books are pressed on acid-free paper. It's very common for the first edition of a book to be on acid-free, but not subsequent or paperback editions.
our paintings (fat lot of good the abstract stuff will mean to them) and drawings, that's about it. the rest will just be shiny little bits of crap in the landfill.
No photographs? No film? No microfilm? No analog audio or video tapes?
Since we will have used up all the dense energy forms, they will be appalled at the energy requirements just to get the few remaining museum piece devices to work.
You're making several flawed assumptions here:
1) that people of the future will have no way of generating large amounts of electricity. That they will have expended all fossil fuels, all nuclear fuels, and will not have any renewable electricity infrastructure.
2) that they will balk at the few hundred watts necessary to power an early 21st-century device
3) that they will care about early 21st-century devices at all when they don't have enough electricity to power a few light bulbs
4) that they will have any reason to use early 21st-century devices at all to access the data stored on their discs. (That is, why wouldn't they build their own?)
Archiving the 21st century will be impossible.
No more impossible than archiving any other century. That is to say, the survivability of any single bit of data is pretty grim, but given the massive quantity of stuff produced, a sufficient chunk of it will survive. Who cares if the 25th century doesn't have pictures of every 21st-century person's uneventful vacations?
To the 25th century, the 21st century will be seen as a dark age but from the simple fact that very little of the information formats we are totally geared into will survive, including this note on
Who cares? We don't have everything ever written by everyone ever to have existed, and yet, we don't consider the entire history of civilization a dark age. Just because it could be archived doesn't mean it needs to be.
That's why I am abandoning video, and going back to painting. In 500 years, my painting CAN survive. the video simply won't.
I hate to break it to you, but not every painting from 500 years ago has survived. There is nothing inherent in the medium itself that lends it ultimate survivability. Most that survive do so either by chance or because people actively wanted them to survive.
If you want anything you create today to survive 500 years, you just have to make sure that 500 years of your decendents (either family or worldly) will want to preserve it.
Maybe its just me. But it looks like FireFox with some Longhorn UI added. :P
Uh, actually, it looks like exactly Safari with some Longhorn UI added. The filter/sort/search pane on the right is a dead giveaway. The idea of using the main browser area for showing RSS feeds is not a given -- they're definitely following Apple on this one.
The author is probably asymilating the apostle Thomas with the author of the pseudopigraphal "Gospel of Thomas," which was a gnostic document.
They are assumed to be the same. That is, whether you accept it as authentic or not, the supposed author of the text (if not the document) is the same as the doubting Thomas.
Obviously, these movies should have focused on the fight within the Matrix, that is, Neo's efforts to rally the citizenry to rise up in revolt and overthrow the machine regime controlling it all.
This would run counter to the basic mythological premise of the hero. He is the object of the story, and he must redeem and save humanity, because it cannot do it on it's own.
IMHO, the sequels were bad enough because they diverged from this. They'd have been worse if they demoted Neo to "just a leader".
But of course Hollywood isn't interested in giving anybody any ideas. We're already one spark away from mass revolt as it is. So the studio said no, and the brothers, utterly dejected, just went after the paycheck with the hope of one day being able to have final cut... maybe even remaking the sequels.
I don't know how else to explain how the first movie could be so fantastic, and the 2nd & 3rd so shitty.
I think that's a lot of conspiracy theory to cover up the possibility that the brothers are basically hacks when not following a highly traditional mythological structure. (Hey, most screenwriters are hacks, so they at lest get points for trying.)
They had a good idea (traditional heroic monomyth with a modern action-flick theme), and then pushed it way too far into pretentious pseudo-intellectual garbage without backing it up. In other words: it was obvious they had read a lot of books, it wasn't obvious that they had learned anything from them.
I personally think they got too wrapped up in making the story refer outside of itself, instead of making it's internal symbology consistent. Compare Star Wars, which is another straight up hero myth, but without all of the allusory smokescreen.
I'd never heard this before. It appears that she won, and won big: $2.5B for matrix and terminator. I'm guessing the axe that killed them was that she submitted it to "to an ad placed by the Wachowski Brothers" in the mid 80s. Wow.
$2.5B is the total gross from all of the Matrix and Terminator films. She did not win this, nor would she. Furthermore, the "official" site (linked by the parent) says that the "big" court date is set for July 2005.
Don't believe everything you read.
Repeat after me "embrace and extend" ....
I embrace your "embrace and extend" and extend it to "embrace and extend and introduce exciting new security holes"
What would a one week shopping list contain for less then $50.
I get by on about $50 a week, with minimal cooking, all vegetarian, and almost entirely organic/natural foods (which adds a bit). Granted, I don't eat like a king, but it's better than beer-and-pizza or ramen-and-toast. Better for my body, too.
I'm too lazy to post the entire thing, but my last bill has pretty normal stuff: sodas, frozen foods, fruit, vegetables. It's just less of the expensive stuff and more of the cheap stuff. One six pack of natural soda, but three pounds of organic apples, and so on. If you look at the price of things vs. how long they really last, you can easily cut your bill down quite a bit without completely swearing off the things you like.
Bringing this back on topic: if you know how much your budget averages out to per day ($50/w = $7.15/d), it puts your purchases in perspective. Is that CD really worth 2 days worth of food? Maybe, maybe not.
People don't mind paying for software\music etc. They just don't like being ripped off with overly inflated prices.
Your way of communicating this is to demand (i.e. buy) at a lower price. Piracy effectively removes a big part of the demand, which doesn't help bring prices down.
In other words, if you think something is too expensive, don't buy it.
Oddly enough, many people might learn that they can live without blowing all their money on huge music and DVD collections, whatever the price.
Tenfold? That's often the case with this sort of thing, but here? No way. It's not that difficult to use, say, iTunes with a computer hooked up to a TV. Or Winamp, or whatever. Just buy an IR dongle, and you're golden.
What you describe has scarcely any resemblance to the Sonos. Yes, there are a million ways to solve the problem of "playing music", but if you're trying to get the same functionality as the Sonos you're going to have to do a lot more work.
(And you've got video playback)
Who cares? You've already eliminated all of the compelling features -- adding something completely different into the mix doesn't change that.
I could buy a cheapo $299 Dell for each bedroom, network them wirelessly to a huge 300GB drive and have far more functionality than this setup. Am I wrong?
Yes. What you save in dollars you'll be spending tenfold in time.
Stop thinking of price as something only measured in dollars and you'll better understand why people buy things like this when they could have something "better".
If I were planning on doing that during the time they were still marketing PPC Macs, I'd be hesitant to buy one because I'd be worried about it becoming an orphan machine.
Apple will still be shipping PPC Macs through 2007, and actively supporting them for at least two years after that, probably more like four or five. And even then, they won't suddenly stop working. So, unless you're planning on using the same machine for the same purpose seven or more years from now, I wouldn't worry about it.
If I were planning on buying one after the transition to X86, I'd probably want to wait a while and make sure that the systems don't have any major bugs in 'em.
I have no idea what kind of "major bugs" you're anticipating, but I feel certain that any issues that would warrant putting off a purchase would be detected in a matter of weeks or months, and certainly not "3-4 years".
Your first point is that Linux distributions come with a lot of applications. I can't argue with that.
(I have even gone so far as to say that most Linux distributions suffer from having too many redundant applications. Why should a desktop install half a dozen audio players, when the user will, in all probability, only use one?)
But I strongly disagree with the idea that the all (or even a majority) of these are "quality" apps, when considered in competition with comparable free and commercial apps on Mac OS X. This is not an advantage of Linux unless you have no money, in which case your options are already limited.
You shouldn't mention this, because Mac OS X includes this. A huge amount of a typical Linux command-line installation is included in Mac OS X, and even more available through the package managers you mentioned. It simply is not an advantage of Linux (or BSD). It is the baseline for any Unix-like OS.
I long for the day that Linux will have a "slick GUI", but not as much as I long for Linux to have a "useful GUI". Meanwhile, Mac OS X has both, now. There is no advantage to Linux here. It is on par with Windows.
But for what it's worth, these things are no more difficult under Mac OS X. Apache is pre-installed (though you can easily substitute it). Tomcat, MySQL, and vsftpd are all in Dar
By adding 1,2, and 3, Vader really becomes the central figure in the story, but he isn't given adequate plot time in 4 and 5.
1/2/3 and 4/5/6 are two different stories within a larger mythology. The first is a fall, the second a redemption. It's only natural for them to focus on two different characters. The ~20 year gap in the story should be an indication that it doesn't pick up right where it left off, if nothing else.
Vader isn't given time in the later story because there is nothing for him to do -- he has given in to the dark side, and become the machine, only capable of following his programming. He is stuck, and needs to be saved.[1]
There isn't one solid narrative thread going throughout the series, and I seriously doubt there is meant to be. Lucas was greatly inspired by mythological archetypes (and Joseph Campbell's work in particular), and the effect can be seen throughout the series. It makes sense that he would tell his stories in the same way, and distinguish between the tragic story of Anakin's fall and the heroic story of Luke's salvation of humanity, the way true myths are composed.
[1] Consider that even when (in Empire) he tells Luke to join him so they can overthrow the Emperor and rule the galaxy, he is expressing nothing more than the same desire for power and control that made him what he is. He is incapable of thinking outside of his evil mechanical box. Only when Luke chops off his mechanical hand (in Jedi) is he free.
Paul is just pissed because......his website is hosted on the same IP address as a spammer (textileshop.com) was on yesterday, and because of that he's seeing some of his mail blocked.
Is there some reason someone shouldn't be pissed about having his legit mail blocked? Does it make his criticism less valid?
There's certainly a need for thoughtful and hopefully positive criticism of blacklist behaviour. This article is not it.
Sorry, but there's just no way to say "blacklists are broken, please stop using them, you're destroying email" in a positive way.
Changing the medium doesn't automatically make better content.
Yes, but: the medium profoundly alters the range of possibilities for communication, which enables better (and worse) content.
This is why blogs actually matter. As our means of communication change, so does our culture.
Maybe a million monkeys at typewriters can't produce Shakespeare after all. I think blogs are like almost everything on the Internet. They start out small, get hot, mainstream, and they are all the rage. Then people realize they aren't really adding value.
Ah, but they are adding value, in equal proportions with most other media. The best films are rarely the highest grossing ones. The best television is not often the most watched. The best books are rarely bestsellers. The best music doesn't top the charts. The best blogs probably aren't the ones in the Technorati Top 100.
What isn't adding value is the hype -- the pronouncements that it's "the next big thing" (as if "big" implied anything about quality or meaning), that it replaces "old media" (whatever that is). -- and the dismissiveness -- the idea that they're "nothing new", or have no value whatsoever (using the medium doesn't automatically make worse content, either.)
It is a pity that the average consumer still believes that a computer is like any other home appliance - it should last, unattended and with little regular maintenance, for years upon years.
Why shouldn't it?
Why, in this day and age, does it seem normal to rely on a device daily, and yet have to call in your son/friend/repairguy every few weeks to fix it? Or worse, to be forced to learn it's most arcane secrets (hidden away in it's dark, unfathomable corners) so you'll be able to prevent it from disintegrating yourself.
I think you're wrong that the "average consumer" believes computers are low maintenance. In fact, I think they are the ones most acutely aware of the fact that they aren't, relying, as they do, on "Mr. Fix-its and computational handymen".
"People like us" often assume that the "average" computer user is of "average" intelligence, as if our knowledge of computers afforded us an elite status, or that such knowledge was particularly difficult to obtain. In reality, it just takes experience and a degree of tolerance for poorly designed interfaces that most people don't have.
So while it's entirely reasonable to note that computers do, presently, require an unusual degree of maintenance, I think it's quite mistaken to assume that this is the way it should be, and that consumers will just have to get used it.
Some things are complex and require more knowledge to use effectively than others not because they are poorly designed but because they are much more powerful and versatile.
The problem is that the typical PC+software is both powerful and poorly designed. The standard design principle appears to be "treat the user like an idiot, lock them in to our products, and charge them for the privilege", rather than something like "make it easy for the user to learn to make use of the massive amount of computational power they've got to make their lives better".
The obvious /. response would be: put Linux and KDE (or Gnome if you swing that way) on them and the 'aren't even remotely as easy to use' complaint is solved or at least highly mitigated.
Please tell me you're joking. If you are, please make such statements clearer in the future, lest some fool on Slashdot actually argee with it.
running Firefox and Thunderbird when configured and hooked up by your friend who knows their way around Linux... about the same learning curve.
No, insteaad you're chucking the learning curve out of the window by shifting the work to someone that can tolerate crappy interfaces. In short, you're doing exactly what Microsoft, et al. are doing by pretending that computers are mystical devices that only an elite few are capable of understanding.
The path towards making computers easier to use (i.e., more useful to more people) is not through treating the user like an idiot.
Slashdot used to be a OS advocacy site for Linux. Now, Slashdot is an OS advocacy site for Apple. Of course you should care.
Perhaps you didn't realize you're reading apple.slashdot.org, and not linux.slashdot.org. If you don't want Apple news, Slashdot has plenty of ways to stop you from seeing it.
Also, I think saying that Slashdot used to be an "advocacy site for Linux" is a joke. As far back as I can remember it was more of an advocacy site for "stuff Taco and Hemos think is cool", and both of them use Macs now, IIRC. If Linux seems to get fewer posts, it probably has more to do with Linux making less news than with any evil anti-Linux conspiracy.
Yes, there's still issues with Linux audio. But whining and running off to another OS isn't going to fix them.
That's because "issues with Linux audio" is the problem of Linux audio developers, not users. His problem was getting sound to work, and switching to Mac OS X solved that.