I must confess I LOVE the horizontal threshold slider and MUCH prefer it to the usual vertical one. I can't wait until the kinks are worked out and it becomes the default. But I agree the disgruntled email is probably a lot funnier for the admins than for us.
Install PacketProtector directly on your wifi router. It contains Dan's Guardian, which is fairly easy to lock down. Get a USB WiFi adapter for the home computer, configure the router to only accept connections from its MAC address. When it's bedtime, pull the WiFi adapter out of the computer and lock it up in your room.
It's not perfect, but should keep an honest kid honest.
Choice is a VERY good thing, too much choice may even be perfect for those who know "exactly" what they want.
But as you say, too much choice is crippling. To quote author Madeline L'Engle: "Freedom is a terrible gift, and the theory behind all dictatorships is that 'the people' do not want freedom. They want bread and circuses. They want workman's compensation and fringe benefits and TV. Give up your free will, give up your freedom to make choices, listen to the expert, and you will have three cars in your garage, steak on the table, and you will no longer have to suffer the agony of choice."
I like games where you actually develop a motor skill by virtue of playing it.
Then you'd like X-Moto (site is down at the moment, but it's worth waiting for). In fact, I almost hesitate to recommend it because it can be so addicting.
There was, ten years ago, a shareware game called Action SuperCross. Terrible graphics, amazingly deep skill-based gameplay. The same author eventually released an updated version called ElastoMania. I'd beaten all the built-in levels, many of the add-on levels and had times close enough to the world records in some places that I was satisfied.
Anyway, I showed a friend a little ElastoMania gameplay for some nostalgia and he came back the next day with a copy of X-Moto, an open-source clone of ElastoMania with slightly different physics, a much better engine, and a whole lot more free levels. After playing it all week, I'm currently on level 17....:)
Cool! Maybe one day Macromedia will release a Linux player for version 8! And then, years later, one for 9!
This proprietary software sure is awesome! Closed source FTW! </IRONY>
Seriously, the most recent release of the Flash Player for Linux is "Flash 7.0 r63". I know that the SWF spec. has been published, so it's relatively open in some senses of the word, but it doesn't make much difference to me how many ways I can create Flash content if I can only view it using a proprietary plug-in from a vendor who obviously doesn't allocate many resources to its development.
When it was still okay for games to be 2D, then platformers were super common. Jumping about in a 2D platformer is pretty trivial, and such games are fun. The past decade (ever since Mario 64, really), most games are in 3D. Jumping about in a 3D platformer is not trivial, and even usually frustrating. So developers have to decide between making a 2D platformer: and risk looking technologically out-of-date, or making a 3D platformer that just isn't as fun to play.
Google for 'hell is full of jumping puzzles' for a related perspective.
Now, I'm not going to say that it's impossible to do 3D platformers right. Obviously there are a few out there that really pull it off. But the majority do not, in my opinion.
I really want to suggest having a careful think about the exegetical principles you propose, though. For example, try testing whether they work with other kinds of texts: does a literary work bear up under the same rules?
I think the principles do not hold up for other literary works, particularly not fiction. The principles for Biblical interpretation I use make the most sense if you presuppose that 1) God is a knowable entity, with intelligence and goals, 2) God wants His creation to know about Him, 3) the Bible is non-fiction and is the primary means God has used to reveal what He wants mankind to know about Himself.
Without those fundamental assumptions, the idea that there's a particular, correct meaning to pull out of a particular passage just falls apart, exactly as you've asserted. If there's no supreme Author with a specific agenda for the text, then who's to say what a passage is "supposed" to mean?
It's been a fun discussion. There probably aren't too many of us rational Christians on slashdot, so I feel sort-of compelled to speak up when the topic strays near something I've happened to think a lot about.
But we need to quit. These posts take me longer than I intend to spend on slashdot.
Well, bonus points for correctly using the word "exegesis". I basically agree quite a bit with your post. Here's where I take things further:
God (allegedly) told the Israelites to study the Scriptures. To remember them. To teach them to their children.
Jesus obviously knew the Scriptures very well.
The apostles continued to validate the importance of studying the "Old Testament", even as they wrote the new.
So, since I believe the claims of Christianity, I must also abide by that tradition. Thus I believe that the Bible had meaning for the ancient Hebrews, yes, but also that it has meaning for me.
So then, how do I extract that meaning? Some basic ground rules:
Genesis was written for the Israelites circa Moses first, and only secondarily for later generations. Thus, any given passage cannot be expected to largely mean something to me that it could never have meant to its original audience. What it is supposed to mean to me must necessarily flow from what it meant to them.
Since the whole Bible is (allegedly) inspired by God, then all passages point at the same truth, and you shouldn't adopt an interpretation for a passage which flies in the face of what is clearly taught by other passages.
The Bible consists of 66 books by various authors over centuries, and not every book is the same type of literature. There is poetry, historical narrative, personal letters, prophecy, songs, genealogies, etc. You must read each book with an eye to its literary type. For example, if you go into Ecclesiastes not reading it as effectively a satire, you're going to get some seriously wrong ideas.
So, I really don't disagree with your reading. I think monotheism was (and is) a pretty integral part of Christianity, and I think the Genesis creation passages set that tone early. But I do think there are rigorous ways to do textual criticism of the Bible. It's not always possible to nail down EXACTLY what a passage is supposed to mean, but you can always winnow out a lot of obvious things it DOESN'T mean, and almost always narrow it down to no more than two or so plausible meanings.
Which, of course, is one of the big factors behind different Christian denominations. Because lots of well-meaning, learned, smart people just simply disagree on the 3% of passages that can't really be nailed down. You will find, however, that even among a half dozen Christian denominations, those who've really studied their Bibles and take their faith seriously will agree on 95% of everything. They just tend to make a big deal out of the few differences, in my experience.
The New American Bible dates from the 40s. I wouldn't consider it an extremely accurate modern translation.
[King] James in his infinite wisdom had it re-worded to make both creation stories consistent.
That's an interesting theory. Too bad the phrase "had formed" doesn't appear in the King James in verse 19. The verb "formed" is in the qal imperfect tense but also has the waw prefix, which mean the prefix functions grammatically as "the waw consecutive". "If two verbs are referring to the past in one continuous narration, only the first verb is in the Perfect, while any following verb is in the Imperfect with a prefixed waw."
Does this mean that "the LORD God had formed every beast of the field" is a better translation than "the LORD God formed every beast of the field"? Heck if I know. But I'll bet tens of dollars that you don't either, which is why we have to trust translators and compare multiple translations that you know in advance are likely to differ in their approach. THe KJV and NASB, both word translations, render it "formed". The NIV, which uses dynamic equivalence, renders it "had formed". The ESV puts "formed" but then puts a footnote saying "or 'had formed'".
However, I think your main confusion (or agenda) from this passage stems from the descriptions of the plants in the beginning of chapter 2, verse 5.
In Hebrew, these are literally "plant [of] the field" and "herb [of] the field", where the word "field" is the same in both cases. The word which the KJV renders "plant" is the Hebrew word "siach", which, according to my Hebrew dictionary, is a "shrubbery, a shrub, a plant, or a bush." This word only occurs four times in the Bible.
The word rendered "herb" is the Hebrew "ehseb", which means "grass (or any tender shoot) - grass, herb". This is not the only Hebrew word for grass.
This post is taking longer to write than I wanted, so I'll just do a bit of hand-waving here. If in verse 5 it says "no field shrub on earth... had sprouted", does this mean no plants at all, or just certain types of plants (like shrubs)? In verse 6, what is the point of "watering all the surface of the ground" if there are no plants at all? In verse 8, the NAB reads "the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and he placed there the man whom he had formed." Can you put a man in a garden if there are no plants yet?
I believe that foliage was present before the appearance of man, but nothing that needed 1) rain to survive, or 2) to be cultivated. This is the additional detail I get out of Genesis chapter 2. Obviously you can read into it whatever you choose to.
I have "re-read" the Bible. I've read it cover to cover three times, in multiple translations.
In Genesis chapter 2, it does not say that man was created before the plants and animals. There's not much chronological language in Genesis 2, in fact. It says that "the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field..." (emphasis mine), which is just a reminder of the creation detailed in chapter 1.
Which version of the Bible are you reading where Genesis 2 states or even implies that man was created before plants and animals?
It must be very nice, just happening to be the person who knows which claims are crucial and which ones aren't.
I should confess that I think most people would only consider claims 1 & 3 to be crucial. It's just a personal belief of mine that eventually science will vindicate the order of things mentioned in the biblical creation account (claim 2), much in the same way that archaeologists finally found evidence of the existence of the Hebrew king David after centuries of claiming that no such evidence existed. Ditto for the city of Jericho.
It's actually not very hard to know what's important and what isn't, if you're intelligent. Can you read one of Paul Graham's essays and then of all his points, tell me which ones are crucial to his argument and which ones aren't? Sure you could. Especially if you've read several of his essays and get a feel for his personality, values and style.
It's just the same for the Bible; if you've read *all* of it and really processed what you've read, then following the flow is doable. The Bible's just four megabytes of text, whereas a PG essay is more like 30 KB. Oh, and there's a bit of historical distance between the original audience of the Bible and readers today, so a good translation and some basic interpretation rules are needed.
I don't want to be condescending, but unlike most Christians, I've actually read every word of the Bible myself. Three times, in fact, in multiple translations, and I'm working on my fourth time. Some passages I've read literally dozens of times, and probably some "popular" passages literally one hundred times.
You can't just open up the King James version of the Bible and read two paragraphs in Genesis and then throw it down, proclaiming "This stuff is stupid!" any more than I should open up a Differential Equations text, read a couple of pages in chapter 10 and give up in confusion.
There's no reason the technical details of theology should be any easier than the technical details of physics or operating systems. You understand that there are rules for literary criticism, right? That theology is a 'liberal art' with as much rigor and complexity as philosophy?
But just because it's possible to re-encode something in your head in such a way that it makes some kind of sense....
But there's no re-encoding necessary. The biblical account of creation only has a few crucial claims, IMO:
God existed before anything and created everything.
Things appeared in a certain order: the universe, later plants, later sea creatures & birds, then land creatures and finally mankind.
Men are a special act of creation, unique from animals in that they're in "God's own image."
So far, I've never learned any science that contradicts these fundamentals. Society at large used to think God created each variety of animal ex-nihilo; now the evolutionary process is commonly accepted, even by quite a lot of Christians. This "change" doesn't affect the above tenets.
This is my viewpoint, anyway, and based on what the OP said, it's his, too. I hate to add to the offtopic-ness, but I felt like clarifying.
Design News discusses Boston's Big Dig and begs the question....
No. No it does not.
"Begging the question" is the term for a logical fallacy in which one assumes the truth of the conclusion in one of the premises. The example from Wikipedia is "Only an untrustworthy person would run for office. The fact that politicians are untrustworthy is proof of this."
Acceptable phrases are "prompts the question" or "raises the question". I hate it when we lose useful specific technical phrases to incorrect common usage. Sorry to rant, but with school still out for the summer I haven't had as much chance to play grammar nazi lately....
Your point is taken; to be clear, I should have said 'web' rather than 'Internet'. That shows you I've been hanging around my students too long.
I disagree with your other assertion, however. I suspect that reading all of the text on the Internet would take much longer than similarly consuming the binary content, even if you were to factor in how much more quickly we can read.
Project Gutenberg alone contains 18,000 books. If we assume that each book contains just the equivalent of 150 "pages", that's 2.7 million pages. Now, you may read faster than I do, but it takes me about an hour to read fifty pages in your average novel. So, finishing off just the text available at that single site would take me 54,000 hours (non-stop for over six years).
YouTube, on the other hand, boasts "millions" of streaming movies. If we give a generous estimate of four minutes per clip, then watching two million videos would take me over 130,000 hours, or nearly twice as long.
Now, how many other sites like YouTube are there out there, with original content not duplicated by YouTube? MySpace? A dozen more?
On the other hand, how many large primarily-text sites are there with original content? The Wikipedia, usenet archives on Google, everything2, IMDb, Slashdot, thousands of bloggers, hundreds of newspapers and magazines, etc.
My blog alone would take require more than 500 pages if you were keen to print it out.
I believe that even if you added in the time to look at every image on Flickr for 20 seconds, listen to every song available on iTunes, and watch every movie (including porn) ever sold in DVD form (and thus available on some irc channel somewhere), that reading all the text on the Internet would still take longer by a factor of ten.
Anyone want to try to make a more accurate estimate?
Try not to make assumptions regarding posts and their posters on the basis of their literacy skills.
Hate to burst your bubble, but this Internet of ours is primarily a textual medium. As far as extrinsicethos goes, your literacy skills are all you've got. We have literally no other way to judge you as a rhetor.
You're welcome to protest that such things shouldn't be important. But they are. Sorry.
I'm just exactly the opposite of him. I ONLY play games for the 'story'.
And I'm opposite from you.
If I want a story, I'll read a book. And I liked FF-II (US) but not FF-VII, because the latter had too much plot. Diablo II was good; Metroid was good. Whereas Metal Gear Solid III was brilliant but not my style. Even a game like Half-Life has, what, maybe fifty pages' worth of story? But yet it takes me fifty hours to play, which is just an unsatisfying story::time ratio, IMO.
In this big world we live in, there is room for all sorts of gamers.
You know, I love Perl. I've been using it for CGI stuff, for system-administration stuff, etc, for six or seven years now.
In fact, the only things I haven't written in Perl during that time have been things that were either too lightweight (five line shell scripts) or too in need of structure (a free/Free clone of Advance Wars in Java).
That said, every new script I've written so far this summer has been written in Ruby. I hate to sound like a Ruby fanboy, but I think Ruby is really a better perl than Perl.
Ruby is good at everything that Perl is good at (regular expressions, CGI, process control, text munging) and has equally rich built-in libraries. However, Ruby is also good at the things that Perl isn't good at. You've got real objects when you want them. LISP-like things like iterators and closures. The works.
Ruby's only major flaws at the moment are: 1) it doesn't have anything like CPAN (yet), and 2) interpreter speed is still fairly slow relative to older, more optimized interpreted languages like Perl or Python.
I do agree that Steve Oualline is a badass, and that Perl is pretty wicked.
But you fans of Perl should give Ruby a try, especially if you know some LISP or Scheme and occasionally miss Perl's difficulty in creating something as simple and rigid as a C struct.
Now we've got one of the head guys on the Vista project going on about KLOCs.
Several others have brought up this concept. I'm not a defender of Microsoft *at all* (switched to Linux on the desktop in 2002), but 'philipsu' is not talking about KLOCs in this way.
Some companies use KLOCs as a measure of productivity, and incorrectly so. More lines of code does not mean 'better' code or better productivity.
TFA is sadly now removed by the author (does anyone have a copy in their browser cache?), but there is no evidence in it that Microsoft uses lines of code as any metric whatsoever. The author does bring up the low code output by Microsoft programmers to demonstrate empirically that their programmers (which are assumed to be talented and capable) are being hampered by a difficult task and broken system, both of which prevent the programmers from achieving code output anywhere near the industry average.
You may appreciate that I have tried to emphasize words frequently in my comment here to better match the style of the original article.:)
Yeah, I know. Underpants Gnomes. And that part about ignoring, laughing and fighting is originally a quote from Mahatma Gandhi, which is a little older than 4chan, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
True enough. Thanks, CmdrTaco, for everything.
I must confess I LOVE the horizontal threshold slider and MUCH prefer it to the usual vertical one. I can't wait until the kinks are worked out and it becomes the default. But I agree the disgruntled email is probably a lot funnier for the admins than for us.
Install PacketProtector directly on your wifi router. It contains Dan's Guardian, which is fairly easy to lock down. Get a USB WiFi adapter for the home computer, configure the router to only accept connections from its MAC address. When it's bedtime, pull the WiFi adapter out of the computer and lock it up in your room.
It's not perfect, but should keep an honest kid honest.
I'm pretty sure I already saw this movie when it was called V for Vendetta. Or was it Children of Men?
But as you say, too much choice is crippling. To quote author Madeline L'Engle: "Freedom is a terrible gift, and the theory behind all dictatorships is that 'the people' do not want freedom. They want bread and circuses. They want workman's compensation and fringe benefits and TV. Give up your free will, give up your freedom to make choices, listen to the expert, and you will have three cars in your garage, steak on the table, and you will no longer have to suffer the agony of choice."
Then you'd like X-Moto (site is down at the moment, but it's worth waiting for). In fact, I almost hesitate to recommend it because it can be so addicting.
There was, ten years ago, a shareware game called Action SuperCross. Terrible graphics, amazingly deep skill-based gameplay. The same author eventually released an updated version called ElastoMania. I'd beaten all the built-in levels, many of the add-on levels and had times close enough to the world records in some places that I was satisfied.
Anyway, I showed a friend a little ElastoMania gameplay for some nostalgia and he came back the next day with a copy of X-Moto, an open-source clone of ElastoMania with slightly different physics, a much better engine, and a whole lot more free levels. After playing it all week, I'm currently on level 17.... :)
Thank you, thank you for not saying 'this begs the question'.
That is all.
Now that's funny. And true.
Cool! Maybe one day Macromedia will release a Linux player for version 8! And then, years later, one for 9!
This proprietary software sure is awesome! Closed source FTW! </IRONY>
Seriously, the most recent release of the Flash Player for Linux is "Flash 7.0 r63". I know that the SWF spec. has been published, so it's relatively open in some senses of the word, but it doesn't make much difference to me how many ways I can create Flash content if I can only view it using a proprietary plug-in from a vendor who obviously doesn't allocate many resources to its development.
I can explain the problem in two characters: 3D.
When it was still okay for games to be 2D, then platformers were super common. Jumping about in a 2D platformer is pretty trivial, and such games are fun. The past decade (ever since Mario 64, really), most games are in 3D. Jumping about in a 3D platformer is not trivial, and even usually frustrating. So developers have to decide between making a 2D platformer: and risk looking technologically out-of-date, or making a 3D platformer that just isn't as fun to play.
Google for 'hell is full of jumping puzzles' for a related perspective.
Now, I'm not going to say that it's impossible to do 3D platformers right. Obviously there are a few out there that really pull it off. But the majority do not, in my opinion.
I think the principles do not hold up for other literary works, particularly not fiction. The principles for Biblical interpretation I use make the most sense if you presuppose that 1) God is a knowable entity, with intelligence and goals, 2) God wants His creation to know about Him, 3) the Bible is non-fiction and is the primary means God has used to reveal what He wants mankind to know about Himself.
Without those fundamental assumptions, the idea that there's a particular, correct meaning to pull out of a particular passage just falls apart, exactly as you've asserted. If there's no supreme Author with a specific agenda for the text, then who's to say what a passage is "supposed" to mean?
It's been a fun discussion. There probably aren't too many of us rational Christians on slashdot, so I feel sort-of compelled to speak up when the topic strays near something I've happened to think a lot about.
But we need to quit. These posts take me longer than I intend to spend on slashdot.
Well, bonus points for correctly using the word "exegesis". I basically agree quite a bit with your post. Here's where I take things further:
So, since I believe the claims of Christianity, I must also abide by that tradition. Thus I believe that the Bible had meaning for the ancient Hebrews, yes, but also that it has meaning for me.
So then, how do I extract that meaning? Some basic ground rules:
So, I really don't disagree with your reading. I think monotheism was (and is) a pretty integral part of Christianity, and I think the Genesis creation passages set that tone early. But I do think there are rigorous ways to do textual criticism of the Bible. It's not always possible to nail down EXACTLY what a passage is supposed to mean, but you can always winnow out a lot of obvious things it DOESN'T mean, and almost always narrow it down to no more than two or so plausible meanings.
Which, of course, is one of the big factors behind different Christian denominations. Because lots of well-meaning, learned, smart people just simply disagree on the 3% of passages that can't really be nailed down. You will find, however, that even among a half dozen Christian denominations, those who've really studied their Bibles and take their faith seriously will agree on 95% of everything. They just tend to make a big deal out of the few differences, in my experience.
The New American Bible dates from the 40s. I wouldn't consider it an extremely accurate modern translation.
That's an interesting theory. Too bad the phrase "had formed" doesn't appear in the King James in verse 19. The verb "formed" is in the qal imperfect tense but also has the waw prefix, which mean the prefix functions grammatically as "the waw consecutive". "If two verbs are referring to the past in one continuous narration, only the first verb is in the Perfect, while any following verb is in the Imperfect with a prefixed waw."
Does this mean that "the LORD God had formed every beast of the field" is a better translation than "the LORD God formed every beast of the field"? Heck if I know. But I'll bet tens of dollars that you don't either, which is why we have to trust translators and compare multiple translations that you know in advance are likely to differ in their approach. THe KJV and NASB, both word translations, render it "formed". The NIV, which uses dynamic equivalence, renders it "had formed". The ESV puts "formed" but then puts a footnote saying "or 'had formed'".
However, I think your main confusion (or agenda) from this passage stems from the descriptions of the plants in the beginning of chapter 2, verse 5.
In Hebrew, these are literally "plant [of] the field" and "herb [of] the field", where the word "field" is the same in both cases. The word which the KJV renders "plant" is the Hebrew word "siach", which, according to my Hebrew dictionary, is a "shrubbery, a shrub, a plant, or a bush." This word only occurs four times in the Bible.
The word rendered "herb" is the Hebrew "ehseb", which means "grass (or any tender shoot) - grass, herb". This is not the only Hebrew word for grass.
This post is taking longer to write than I wanted, so I'll just do a bit of hand-waving here. If in verse 5 it says "no field shrub on earth... had sprouted", does this mean no plants at all, or just certain types of plants (like shrubs)? In verse 6, what is the point of "watering all the surface of the ground" if there are no plants at all? In verse 8, the NAB reads "the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and he placed there the man whom he had formed." Can you put a man in a garden if there are no plants yet?
I believe that foliage was present before the appearance of man, but nothing that needed 1) rain to survive, or 2) to be cultivated. This is the additional detail I get out of Genesis chapter 2. Obviously you can read into it whatever you choose to.
I have "re-read" the Bible. I've read it cover to cover three times, in multiple translations.
In Genesis chapter 2, it does not say that man was created before the plants and animals. There's not much chronological language in Genesis 2, in fact. It says that "the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field..." (emphasis mine), which is just a reminder of the creation detailed in chapter 1.
Which version of the Bible are you reading where Genesis 2 states or even implies that man was created before plants and animals?
I should confess that I think most people would only consider claims 1 & 3 to be crucial. It's just a personal belief of mine that eventually science will vindicate the order of things mentioned in the biblical creation account (claim 2), much in the same way that archaeologists finally found evidence of the existence of the Hebrew king David after centuries of claiming that no such evidence existed. Ditto for the city of Jericho.
It's actually not very hard to know what's important and what isn't, if you're intelligent. Can you read one of Paul Graham's essays and then of all his points, tell me which ones are crucial to his argument and which ones aren't? Sure you could. Especially if you've read several of his essays and get a feel for his personality, values and style.
It's just the same for the Bible; if you've read *all* of it and really processed what you've read, then following the flow is doable. The Bible's just four megabytes of text, whereas a PG essay is more like 30 KB. Oh, and there's a bit of historical distance between the original audience of the Bible and readers today, so a good translation and some basic interpretation rules are needed.
I don't want to be condescending, but unlike most Christians, I've actually read every word of the Bible myself. Three times, in fact, in multiple translations, and I'm working on my fourth time. Some passages I've read literally dozens of times, and probably some "popular" passages literally one hundred times.
You can't just open up the King James version of the Bible and read two paragraphs in Genesis and then throw it down, proclaiming "This stuff is stupid!" any more than I should open up a Differential Equations text, read a couple of pages in chapter 10 and give up in confusion.
There's no reason the technical details of theology should be any easier than the technical details of physics or operating systems. You understand that there are rules for literary criticism, right? That theology is a 'liberal art' with as much rigor and complexity as philosophy?
But there's no re-encoding necessary. The biblical account of creation only has a few crucial claims, IMO:
So far, I've never learned any science that contradicts these fundamentals. Society at large used to think God created each variety of animal ex-nihilo; now the evolutionary process is commonly accepted, even by quite a lot of Christians. This "change" doesn't affect the above tenets.
This is my viewpoint, anyway, and based on what the OP said, it's his, too. I hate to add to the offtopic-ness, but I felt like clarifying.
No. No it does not.
"Begging the question" is the term for a logical fallacy in which one assumes the truth of the conclusion in one of the premises. The example from Wikipedia is "Only an untrustworthy person would run for office. The fact that politicians are untrustworthy is proof of this."
Acceptable phrases are "prompts the question" or "raises the question". I hate it when we lose useful specific technical phrases to incorrect common usage. Sorry to rant, but with school still out for the summer I haven't had as much chance to play grammar nazi lately....
Your point is taken; to be clear, I should have said 'web' rather than 'Internet'. That shows you I've been hanging around my students too long.
I disagree with your other assertion, however. I suspect that reading all of the text on the Internet would take much longer than similarly consuming the binary content, even if you were to factor in how much more quickly we can read.
Project Gutenberg alone contains 18,000 books. If we assume that each book contains just the equivalent of 150 "pages", that's 2.7 million pages. Now, you may read faster than I do, but it takes me about an hour to read fifty pages in your average novel. So, finishing off just the text available at that single site would take me 54,000 hours (non-stop for over six years).
YouTube, on the other hand, boasts "millions" of streaming movies. If we give a generous estimate of four minutes per clip, then watching two million videos would take me over 130,000 hours, or nearly twice as long.
Now, how many other sites like YouTube are there out there, with original content not duplicated by YouTube? MySpace? A dozen more?
On the other hand, how many large primarily-text sites are there with original content? The Wikipedia, usenet archives on Google, everything2, IMDb, Slashdot, thousands of bloggers, hundreds of newspapers and magazines, etc.
My blog alone would take require more than 500 pages if you were keen to print it out.
I believe that even if you added in the time to look at every image on Flickr for 20 seconds, listen to every song available on iTunes, and watch every movie (including porn) ever sold in DVD form (and thus available on some irc channel somewhere), that reading all the text on the Internet would still take longer by a factor of ten.
Anyone want to try to make a more accurate estimate?
Hate to burst your bubble, but this Internet of ours is primarily a textual medium. As far as extrinsic ethos goes, your literacy skills are all you've got. We have literally no other way to judge you as a rhetor.
You're welcome to protest that such things shouldn't be important. But they are. Sorry.
Don't you mean 'the 16-bit bus'? Eight bits make a char, not a short.
And I'm opposite from you.
If I want a story, I'll read a book. And I liked FF-II (US) but not FF-VII, because the latter had too much plot. Diablo II was good; Metroid was good. Whereas Metal Gear Solid III was brilliant but not my style. Even a game like Half-Life has, what, maybe fifty pages' worth of story? But yet it takes me fifty hours to play, which is just an unsatisfying story::time ratio, IMO.
In this big world we live in, there is room for all sorts of gamers.
You know, I love Perl. I've been using it for CGI stuff, for system-administration stuff, etc, for six or seven years now.
In fact, the only things I haven't written in Perl during that time have been things that were either too lightweight (five line shell scripts) or too in need of structure (a free/Free clone of Advance Wars in Java).
That said, every new script I've written so far this summer has been written in Ruby. I hate to sound like a Ruby fanboy, but I think Ruby is really a better perl than Perl.
Ruby is good at everything that Perl is good at (regular expressions, CGI, process control, text munging) and has equally rich built-in libraries. However, Ruby is also good at the things that Perl isn't good at. You've got real objects when you want them. LISP-like things like iterators and closures. The works.
Ruby's only major flaws at the moment are: 1) it doesn't have anything like CPAN (yet), and 2) interpreter speed is still fairly slow relative to older, more optimized interpreted languages like Perl or Python.
I do agree that Steve Oualline is a badass, and that Perl is pretty wicked.
But you fans of Perl should give Ruby a try, especially if you know some LISP or Scheme and occasionally miss Perl's difficulty in creating something as simple and rigid as a C struct.
Several others have brought up this concept. I'm not a defender of Microsoft *at all* (switched to Linux on the desktop in 2002), but 'philipsu' is not talking about KLOCs in this way.
Some companies use KLOCs as a measure of productivity, and incorrectly so. More lines of code does not mean 'better' code or better productivity.
TFA is sadly now removed by the author (does anyone have a copy in their browser cache?), but there is no evidence in it that Microsoft uses lines of code as any metric whatsoever. The author does bring up the low code output by Microsoft programmers to demonstrate empirically that their programmers (which are assumed to be talented and capable) are being hampered by a difficult task and broken system, both of which prevent the programmers from achieving code output anywhere near the industry average.
You may appreciate that I have tried to emphasize words frequently in my comment here to better match the style of the original article. :)
No, the summary is wrong. From TFA:
1000 lines per year is much, much more reasonable.
Yeah, I know. Underpants Gnomes. And that part about ignoring, laughing and fighting is originally a quote from Mahatma Gandhi, which is a little older than 4chan, I think.