...they were thinking you might want to drop him a card, stop by and visit, see if he needed a hand. That you might want to submit his story to/. did not occur to them.
I was playing videogames (first it was the Colecovision/Adam baseball game with a friend, then I switched over to Ultima IV on the Commodore 64 when he left). When I finally went to bed I smelled smoke. I went downstairs and found an apartment on fire (a burglar had apparently set it on fire to cover his robbery). Then I called the fire department and woke up the rest of the people in the building (which turns out to be kinda hard to do at 3a.m., but the 911 operator gave me some tips).
It never once occurred to me to credit the videogames. I guess that's because we were so backwards in the '80s. We didn't know we needed to come up with excuses for our addictions.
Stone's thesis was that Socrates (or maybe it was Plato, since it's hard to separate the two) used the freedoms of Golden Age Athens to criticize those freedoms and extoll the virtues of nearby totalitarian states like Sparta. Socrates eventually caused enough grief to convince the Athenians to condemn him to death (perhaps betraying their principles in the process).
I find it interesting that a modern-day fakester-griefer would choose that name for their own griefer nick.
...of people talking about things they don't understand.
The first clue was when he said the average life expectancy by 2100 will be 500 years. We currently calculate life expectancy based on how old people are when they die. So can we assume most of the people dying in 2100 were born in 1600? Obviously not. This guy hasn't thought things through. He doesn't even know what he means by "life expectancy."
Can such a person contribute meaningfully to the debate on the problems of extended life expectancy? Probably not. His next sentence assumes that none of us will be around to tell the guy who made this prediction he was wrong. So people who are 20 now won't live to be 120? That's a long way from 500, a short way from 76, and much more likely to happen. But we already know that Kristof is capable of throwing around numbers without having the slightest idea what they mean.
The truth is that people who really have the intellectual capacity to address about these issues have been thinking about them for a long time. The probability is that the advances will come more slowly than the predictions this piece advances. And the certainty is that, even if they happen faster, we will have plenty of time to address the consequences. By definition the full impact of 500-year life expectancies won't arrive for at least 425 years. The effects will dribble in and we'll take 'em as they come.
One thing is sure: Scientific illiterates like Kristof will play little role in bringing it about and small role in solving any problems.
Almost every artist who has ever portrayed him has made him the color of a blind cave fish. This directly contradicts Tolkien's unequivocal descriptions in numerous places, where he is always portrayed as completely black, with glowing green eyes.
...does not emerge from cultural relativists alone.
Some of what this poster says is easy to agree with: Tolkien was not attempting to evoke Egyptian culture in his description of the hobbits prepared for some eternal sleep in the barrow-downs. And the author of this piece deserves to be taken to task for it.
But stardeep commits the same crime of which he accuses the artist when he confuses "This reminded me of cultural relativism" with "There is definitely something relativistic about this." Then he goes way out of bounds when he says Tolkien was "certainly a cultural supremicist." Tolkien's clear-headed denunciation of the Nazis in the late '30s made it absolutely clear what he thought of cultural supremacists as well as racists.
What is particularly insidious about this particular brand of drivel is that we know precisely why Tolkien deliberately limited the cultural influences from outside Britain when he created the images he sought to portray in The Lord of the Rings. He felt the British Isles were culturally deprived by the lack of depth (in the historical sense) of their literary traditions. He actually wrote the books out of almost a cultural inferiority complex (or to overcome such). He was quite clear on this subject. The only sense he was expressing a feeling of cultural supremacy was the sense that he felt the culture he was concentrating on deserved to have a deeper tradition. It was not "supreme" but good enough to have more than it had (he associated the truncation of that tradition with the Norman invasion).
The truth (and we can talk about "truth" here...as least in the sense of the truth as Tolkien expressed it) is that Tolkien tried very hard to control the way that different cultures (such as the Egyptian and Greek cultures) influenced The Lord of the Rings. Greek myths (particularly the myth of Atlantis) had a direct impact on the stories, but he tried to keep the cultural impact limited as much as possible to the cultures most likely to have had a direct impact on the culture of the British Isles. Cultures such as the Greeks and the Egyptians were deliberately used as models as to what an historically deep culture would be like, but not as models for how bodies might look prepared for burial.
...that most of Middle Earth was conjured in the imaginations of creative readers.
In fact, Tolkien was criticized by some of the literary "experts" of his day for including so much detailed description (which had gone out of style and continues to be out of style among the even-more-attention-challenged generations spawned by TV and MTVJ). While Tolkien himself may have adopted this style to mimick the description-rich epics he was trying to evoke, he also professed a strong dislike for the visually impoverished prose of his critics.
And for those who skimmed the books too quickly to notice the lavish descriptions Tolkien even offered paintings and drawings to make clear exactly what he was talking about.
The dirty little secret of role-playing games is that most of the money is made off of supplements. While the games themselves offer players the chance for truly creative gameplay, many gamemasters (and many players) want to be led by the hand.
Perhaps this is true of freedom in general: We all want to be free, but many of us end up gravitating towards some cultural status quo.
White Wolf has always recognized this and tailored their games towards players who want hand-holding and lots of "atmospheric scene-setting" advice. At the same time, they also designed their games so anyone could play as creative a campaign as they wanted. In fact, one could argue "Mage" was less popular than "Vampire" or "Werewolf" precisely because it forced players to be a little more creative.
The not-so-dirty little secret of role-playing is that good roleplayers can have fun and be creative with any system. The best campaign I ever saw was run for years on a system which was long-since defunct by the time the campaign really got rolling.
No, WW isn't making a particularly gutsy move here. It's probably being done strictly as a marketing move. As such, it may even be successful.
...they did this before: They announced some trademarked name for 2000 ("The Year of the Apocalypse" or "The Year of the Reckoning" or some such) and said it would mean the end of the World of Darkness. And what it meant was they issued new editions for their most popular World of Darkness games.
Each game had some cataclysmic event tailored for it. In "Mage" it was the victory of the Technocracy over the Traditions. I agree with your assessment that this was not much of a departure from what went before. Instead of being the rag-tag representatives of the struggling Traditions, players were asked to be the rag-tag remnants of the dead Traditions. But it was portrayed as the end of the Traditions and, hence, part of the end of the World of Darkness. The chantries were wiped out. The Horizon Realms were no longer accessible. There were similar Armageddon scenarios for "Vampire" and "Werewolf."
All of this had a high enough Lameness Quotient that I didn't go out and buy the new edition. But that doesn't change the fact that they portrayed it at the start of the year much as they are portraying this.
...in 2000, when they did a year-long promotion, which was kinda like a long, drawn-out Y2K thing.
I sit here looking at the Mage poster on my wall: "The Traditions stand in ruins... The Technocracy has won. Join the last stand in the war for reality." (Revised Edition -- March 2000)
Just an excuse for a new edition of everything. It's sad when a once-creative company runs out of ideas. "Let's do the whole thing over again," is a sad excuse for an original concept. But "Demon," "Mummy," and "Engel" just aren't selling like "Vampire" and "Werewolf." Heck, they aren't even selling like "Mage" and "Changling."
...I was citing the ActiveState attempt as the reason some people believe the CLR doesn't support dynamic languages. I have some doubt whether this is true or not. Perl, Python and Ruby are all implemented in C, so it seems to me they ought to be able to be done in byte code. But, if ActiveState with the full cooperation of Microsoft decided it was not possible, maybe they know something I don't.
I never claimed to be doing more than repeating a rumor from a source I trust. I am certain I did not misunderstand my source as thoroughly as you misunderstood my post. Actually, I heard this from several people, although I would not rule out the possibility that it all originated from one source.
I have checked with ActiveState and found no evidence to contradict this story. They list no Perl.NET product which would disprove the rumor. Their PerlNET product does not appear to be a byte-code implementation of Perl. It appears to run a separate Perl interpreter with the ability to communicate with ASP.NET. I do not think they would be pushing this product if they thought they had a version of Perl.NET producing byte code waiting in the wings. But maybe I'm wrong.
...is offering big bucks to port Perl, Python and/or Ruby to.NET and come up with a dry well. Story is that the CLR does not allow for dynamic languages, at least that was the conclusion after an ActiveState attempt financed by Redmond failed to produce byte code with full dynamic functionality.
So, you may have put your finger on the exact source of Microsoft's concern: Linux-Apache-MySQL plus one of the dynamic, not-just-for-scripting-anymore languages. They just don't have an answer in this niche for their.NET roadmap.
...since your response was entirely too polite and reasonable for designation as a flame. I am sure Matz would have no problem with a discussion of his ideas.
"Japanese has so many characters...great invention" - There is significant evidence suggesting that phonetic alphabets (such as Hiragana) are easier to learn and extend.
I don't believe Matz would disagree with you. He only said ideographic alphabets are a "great invention," not that they were better than phonetic alphabets. He even joked about it being a defense against cultural imperialism because it is so hard for non-Japanese to learn.
"Every conversation is...stored in my brain in Japanese" - I could go into what Wittgenstein would say about that, but instead I'll just assert that conversations are not stored in plain-text, they're compressed. That's why you remember the gist long after the specific phrasing is gone.
A discussion between Wittgenstein and Matsumoto about their link through Wittgenstein pupil Alan Turing would indeed be worth considering. What Matz is saying here is that he translates English to Japanese before thinking about it or storing it in memory. The test is not whether he remembers the gist long after the phrasing is lost. The test, I suspect, is whether he can remember the English phrasing shortly after hearing it. Or does he remember it in Japanese and translate it back to English again? This would be fairly easy to test since his translations to English are imperfect (often ignoring pluralization, for instance). I imagine Wittgenstein would approve of such a test, but disapprove of drawing overly broad conclusions from the results.
"Language influence[s] human thought" - The Strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has been largely discredited.
While Babel-17 was, in fact, based on the strong form of the Whorfian hypothesis ("language determines thought"), I don't think anyone would argue that Matz's formulation ("language influence human thought") is the strong form. Many even find it hard to believe Sapir and Whorf themselves believed the strong form (although there are plenty of hints they did). But there is widespread acceptance of the weak form.
"If you are a machine...you can talk to [machines] directly" - No, you need an interchange format. I assert that programming languages are a low-bandwidth method for communicating between brain-machines and computer-machines.
Missing from the transcriptions of the talk I've found on the web was the uncanny imitation of a modem squeal Matz did after reading this quote.
I doubt Matz would disagree with your assertion. He also argues they should be optimized for the human side of the communication.
I suspect Wittgenstein would have a great deal of sympathy for some of the thinking Matz is using, but little patience for some of the ways he phrases things. I suspect "Every conversation is stored in my brain in Japanese" would set off some alarm bells in his head, prompting something along the lines of "What do we really mean when we use the language in that way?" Perhaps, though, he would attribute the awkwardness in the phrasing to the fact that he was using a second language. Wittgenstein himself gave up German when he abandoned the Vienna School and taught in English at Cambridge.
One could even argue Turing's inability to get across to Wittgenstein the gist of Goedel's proof derived in part from the fact that Goedel expressed the conclusions in a sloppy fashion before he published the actual paper. That sloppy version could easily have benefited from some good, old Wittgensteinian deconstruction.
...Onion was good, but to hear it you had to sit through five other "State of" speeches which were terminally boring. (Well, the "State of the Snake" wasn't boring, but its schizotypic references to the "Pythonic way" of doing things went a long way toward explaining why the Python community is so paranoid.)
A hidden gem appeared later in the week when Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto gave his "State of the Corundum" speech. (Actually it wasn't called that. It was called "The Power and Philosophy of Ruby.") The subtitle alone ("how to create babel-17") had the packed room buzzing before he started: "He's going to turn us into uber-assassins with no sense of self!"
The slides are available online (link above) and are definitely worth taking a look at. He's kinda sensitive about his English, so don't flame him unless your Japanese is better. Matz's philosophy is also guided by this maxim: "Be humble, be minor, be happy."
...given the fact that venture capital available that year was absurd (more was available than in all the rest of human history).
There was too much money chasing too few ideas (resulting in sock puppets selling dog food on the internet). Some of it chased games, but most people realize that VC is not suited to investment in the games industry (as pointed out in the post).
1999 was stupid and silly. I was there. I remember.
...O'Reilly's point. Commoditization is not the same as marginalization.
He is comparing the current situation to 1980 when Wang could charge $40,000 for a minicomputer word-processing system. IBM commoditized the market with an open architecture for microcomputers. Tim's saying the same thing could happen in software with its commoditization (which is coming whether programmers like it or not).
The '80s didn't produce a "marginalization" of hardware engineers (except those who insisted on continuing to sell word-processing for $10,000 a station). It produced a golden age for hardware engineers.
Tim's also noting that the ultimate winner in those hardware wars was not the company which commoditized it (IBM), nor the company which first took advantaged of the commoditization (Compaq), but the company that realized the ultimate goal of commoditization was build-to-order (Dell).
It might not be totally clear who O'Reilly's comparing to IBM in the software commoditization process (maybe he's thinking of Microsoft or even Red Hat). But he explicitly states that IBM is filling the role of Compaq with its Websphere package. And he suggests the ultimate winner will offer something like Websphere with no proprietary components and make their money customizing it to each user.
Not a bad idea. I'm putting my small personal fortune behind it and finding it's not costing much more than Michael Dell spent in his college dorm room. I hope to be announcing just the kind of product he's talking about at OSCON.
...the obvious conspiracy theory here: that MS is dropping this because they want joystick/keypad gamers to switch to the XBox.
And maybe it's a good theory to ignore. It's not much of a conspiracy theory when it's the company's official published roadmap. Why should Microsoft continue to lose money on peripherals which are used to go counter to one of their strategic goals (to get PC gamers to switch to XBox)?
...with a "k," the seeker for the Bulgarian national team? The only one who spells Krum's name with a "c" is a jealous Ron Weasley, who calls him "Vicky."
Yes, he could be considered the "Michael Jordan" of Quidditch, if Michael Jordan were 18, kind of dense, talked like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and played in a game where a single strong player at a single position (seeker) could make up for a lackluster team otherwise.
...Somebody thinks they're observing an on-going attack. What do they do? Report it to the ISP which appears to them to have had its servers compromised. Then call FBI and other responsible authorities.
99 times out of a 100 (and this may well be one if the original poster has ordinary spyware on their machine), it's a false alarm. Somebody has a virus on their machine; it's spyware they unwittingly downloaded.
But, when you're the 1 time out of 100 and you're right, who do you get at the ISP or FBI? Somebody who's used to handling the other 99 calls.
There's also a real chance you might be getting someone who doesn't care. More likely, you've got somebody who cares, but doesn't know what to do. Hopefully, the most likely scenario is that you've got someone who knows what to do. But all three of these groups are going to sound the same at first. Why? Because they're all used to handling the other 99 calls.
You need a strategy for cutting through the BS and convincing them -- quickly and concisely -- that you're not one of those 99 callers, that there's on-going crime being committed, and that potentially large amounts of money are involved.
I have had a similar kind of problem with reporting network problems on a large ISP (Qwest), and I have developed such a strategy:
1) Find out how to contact the ISP's Network Operations Center (NOC).
2) Devise a simple test which they can run at the NOC to demonstrate the problem.
3) Call the NOC and (when they start to tell you how to file a report in the morning) say, "No. You do not understand. You have a serious on-going problem here which must be resolved immediately. If you do not, [insert concise description of the damage you think is likely here]."
4) Tell them to run your test.
5) If you know the answer, tell them how to fix the problem.
I developed this when I was doing a graveyard shift on which I frequently used Qwest's San-Francisco-Seattle backbone. They had one router on the pipe which would go down every couple months. I could detect the problem every time using traceroute. The NOC's response was invariably, "Copy the traceroute into an email and somebody will fix it in the morning."
I would respond, "No. Your main pipe between Silicon Valley and Seattle is down. If all those dot-commers wake up in the morning and find you've not been passing any packets for hours, there is going to be hell to pay. Run a traceroute to amazon.com."
The response almost immediately changed to: "Oh, my God. I'll get on it right away. Thanks a lot." Then I would tell them the name of the router which had to be power-cycled. And it would be fixed in a few minutes.
Here's how you would apply this strategy to the poster's situation:
1) Find out how to contact the ISP's Network Operations Center (NOC). If you don't have a direct number, try to get it from their support people. They know it. They may not be allowed to give it to you. They may prefer to connect you themselves. Try to act knowledgeable and give them good reasons why they should put you through. Sometimes the NOC will give you their number once they know you're for real. It might help to call it that ("NOC," pronounced like "knock"), but you should probably identify it at least once as "Network Operations Center."
2) Devise a simple test which they can run at the NOC to demonstrate the problem. This is very important. Preferably a single command which will elucidate the problem unambigously. (This would have stopped this particular poster's problem at the ISP. When the poster gave his demonstration to his NOC and they got different results, he would have known the problem was on his PC.)
3) Call the NOC and (when they start to tell you how to file a report in the morning) say, "No. You do not understand. You have a serious on-going problem here which must be resolved immediately. If you do not, [insert concise description of the damage you think is likely here]." Be poli
Slashdot Mirror
...how could anyone not like the ending of "Diamond Age"?
I mean, an army of teenage girls as the cavalry, marching out of nowhere to save the day? Try making that believable. Stephenson did.
I just can't wait until some top-notch anime artist does the movie.
...but you've outdistanced me by about 20 years.
...where these two kids learned to take responsibility for their own actions.
...they were thinking you might want to drop him a card, stop by and visit, see if he needed a hand. That you might want to submit his story to /. did not occur to them.
...back in 1986.
I was playing videogames (first it was the Colecovision/Adam baseball game with a friend, then I switched over to Ultima IV on the Commodore 64 when he left). When I finally went to bed I smelled smoke. I went downstairs and found an apartment on fire (a burglar had apparently set it on fire to cover his robbery). Then I called the fire department and woke up the rest of the people in the building (which turns out to be kinda hard to do at 3a.m., but the 911 operator gave me some tips).
It never once occurred to me to credit the videogames. I guess that's because we were so backwards in the '80s. We didn't know we needed to come up with excuses for our addictions.
...at least according to I.F. Stone.
Stone's thesis was that Socrates (or maybe it was Plato, since it's hard to separate the two) used the freedoms of Golden Age Athens to criticize those freedoms and extoll the virtues of nearby totalitarian states like Sparta. Socrates eventually caused enough grief to convince the Athenians to condemn him to death (perhaps betraying their principles in the process).
I find it interesting that a modern-day fakester-griefer would choose that name for their own griefer nick.
That's different than saying, "This scene reminded me of Egyptian burials, so I decided to use an Egyptian artistic motif."
...of people talking about things they don't understand.
The first clue was when he said the average life expectancy by 2100 will be 500 years. We currently calculate life expectancy based on how old people are when they die. So can we assume most of the people dying in 2100 were born in 1600? Obviously not. This guy hasn't thought things through. He doesn't even know what he means by "life expectancy."
Can such a person contribute meaningfully to the debate on the problems of extended life expectancy? Probably not. His next sentence assumes that none of us will be around to tell the guy who made this prediction he was wrong. So people who are 20 now won't live to be 120? That's a long way from 500, a short way from 76, and much more likely to happen. But we already know that Kristof is capable of throwing around numbers without having the slightest idea what they mean.
The truth is that people who really have the intellectual capacity to address about these issues have been thinking about them for a long time. The probability is that the advances will come more slowly than the predictions this piece advances. And the certainty is that, even if they happen faster, we will have plenty of time to address the consequences. By definition the full impact of 500-year life expectancies won't arrive for at least 425 years. The effects will dribble in and we'll take 'em as they come.
One thing is sure: Scientific illiterates like Kristof will play little role in bringing it about and small role in solving any problems.
...the eternal debate about Gollum.
Almost every artist who has ever portrayed him has made him the color of a blind cave fish. This directly contradicts Tolkien's unequivocal descriptions in numerous places, where he is always portrayed as completely black, with glowing green eyes.
The translucent grey is just easier to do.
...does not emerge from cultural relativists alone.
Some of what this poster says is easy to agree with: Tolkien was not attempting to evoke Egyptian culture in his description of the hobbits prepared for some eternal sleep in the barrow-downs. And the author of this piece deserves to be taken to task for it.
But stardeep commits the same crime of which he accuses the artist when he confuses "This reminded me of cultural relativism" with "There is definitely something relativistic about this." Then he goes way out of bounds when he says Tolkien was "certainly a cultural supremicist." Tolkien's clear-headed denunciation of the Nazis in the late '30s made it absolutely clear what he thought of cultural supremacists as well as racists.
What is particularly insidious about this particular brand of drivel is that we know precisely why Tolkien deliberately limited the cultural influences from outside Britain when he created the images he sought to portray in The Lord of the Rings. He felt the British Isles were culturally deprived by the lack of depth (in the historical sense) of their literary traditions. He actually wrote the books out of almost a cultural inferiority complex (or to overcome such). He was quite clear on this subject. The only sense he was expressing a feeling of cultural supremacy was the sense that he felt the culture he was concentrating on deserved to have a deeper tradition. It was not "supreme" but good enough to have more than it had (he associated the truncation of that tradition with the Norman invasion).
The truth (and we can talk about "truth" here...as least in the sense of the truth as Tolkien expressed it) is that Tolkien tried very hard to control the way that different cultures (such as the Egyptian and Greek cultures) influenced The Lord of the Rings. Greek myths (particularly the myth of Atlantis) had a direct impact on the stories, but he tried to keep the cultural impact limited as much as possible to the cultures most likely to have had a direct impact on the culture of the British Isles. Cultures such as the Greeks and the Egyptians were deliberately used as models as to what an historically deep culture would be like, but not as models for how bodies might look prepared for burial.
...that most of Middle Earth was conjured in the imaginations of creative readers.
In fact, Tolkien was criticized by some of the literary "experts" of his day for including so much detailed description (which had gone out of style and continues to be out of style among the even-more-attention-challenged generations spawned by TV and MTVJ). While Tolkien himself may have adopted this style to mimick the description-rich epics he was trying to evoke, he also professed a strong dislike for the visually impoverished prose of his critics.
And for those who skimmed the books too quickly to notice the lavish descriptions Tolkien even offered paintings and drawings to make clear exactly what he was talking about.
..."Miguel, meet Utah. Utah, meet Miguel. We'll introduce Nat later when he takes care of the screensaver thing."
...but pragmatic.
The dirty little secret of role-playing games is that most of the money is made off of supplements. While the games themselves offer players the chance for truly creative gameplay, many gamemasters (and many players) want to be led by the hand.
Perhaps this is true of freedom in general: We all want to be free, but many of us end up gravitating towards some cultural status quo.
White Wolf has always recognized this and tailored their games towards players who want hand-holding and lots of "atmospheric scene-setting" advice. At the same time, they also designed their games so anyone could play as creative a campaign as they wanted. In fact, one could argue "Mage" was less popular than "Vampire" or "Werewolf" precisely because it forced players to be a little more creative.
The not-so-dirty little secret of role-playing is that good roleplayers can have fun and be creative with any system. The best campaign I ever saw was run for years on a system which was long-since defunct by the time the campaign really got rolling.
No, WW isn't making a particularly gutsy move here. It's probably being done strictly as a marketing move. As such, it may even be successful.
...they did this before: They announced some trademarked name for 2000 ("The Year of the Apocalypse" or "The Year of the Reckoning" or some such) and said it would mean the end of the World of Darkness. And what it meant was they issued new editions for their most popular World of Darkness games.
Each game had some cataclysmic event tailored for it. In "Mage" it was the victory of the Technocracy over the Traditions. I agree with your assessment that this was not much of a departure from what went before. Instead of being the rag-tag representatives of the struggling Traditions, players were asked to be the rag-tag remnants of the dead Traditions. But it was portrayed as the end of the Traditions and, hence, part of the end of the World of Darkness. The chantries were wiped out. The Horizon Realms were no longer accessible. There were similar Armageddon scenarios for "Vampire" and "Werewolf."
All of this had a high enough Lameness Quotient that I didn't go out and buy the new edition. But that doesn't change the fact that they portrayed it at the start of the year much as they are portraying this.
But the poster was really cool.
...in 2000, when they did a year-long promotion, which was kinda like a long, drawn-out Y2K thing.
I sit here looking at the Mage poster on my wall: "The Traditions stand in ruins... The Technocracy has won. Join the last stand in the war for reality." (Revised Edition -- March 2000)
Just an excuse for a new edition of everything. It's sad when a once-creative company runs out of ideas. "Let's do the whole thing over again," is a sad excuse for an original concept. But "Demon," "Mummy," and "Engel" just aren't selling like "Vampire" and "Werewolf." Heck, they aren't even selling like "Mage" and "Changling."
But they are selling like "Wraith."
...I was citing the ActiveState attempt as the reason some people believe the CLR doesn't support dynamic languages. I have some doubt whether this is true or not. Perl, Python and Ruby are all implemented in C, so it seems to me they ought to be able to be done in byte code. But, if ActiveState with the full cooperation of Microsoft decided it was not possible, maybe they know something I don't.
I never claimed to be doing more than repeating a rumor from a source I trust. I am certain I did not misunderstand my source as thoroughly as you misunderstood my post. Actually, I heard this from several people, although I would not rule out the possibility that it all originated from one source.
I have checked with ActiveState and found no evidence to contradict this story. They list no Perl.NET product which would disprove the rumor. Their PerlNET product does not appear to be a byte-code implementation of Perl. It appears to run a separate Perl interpreter with the ability to communicate with ASP.NET. I do not think they would be pushing this product if they thought they had a version of Perl.NET producing byte code waiting in the wings. But maybe I'm wrong.
Anonymous Cowards never are.
...is offering big bucks to port Perl, Python and/or Ruby to .NET and come up with a dry well. Story is that the CLR does not allow for dynamic languages, at least that was the conclusion after an ActiveState attempt financed by Redmond failed to produce byte code with full dynamic functionality.
.NET roadmap.
So, you may have put your finger on the exact source of Microsoft's concern: Linux-Apache-MySQL plus one of the dynamic, not-just-for-scripting-anymore languages. They just don't have an answer in this niche for their
...since your response was entirely too polite and reasonable for designation as a flame. I am sure Matz would have no problem with a discussion of his ideas.
I don't believe Matz would disagree with you. He only said ideographic alphabets are a "great invention," not that they were better than phonetic alphabets. He even joked about it being a defense against cultural imperialism because it is so hard for non-Japanese to learn.
A discussion between Wittgenstein and Matsumoto about their link through Wittgenstein pupil Alan Turing would indeed be worth considering. What Matz is saying here is that he translates English to Japanese before thinking about it or storing it in memory. The test is not whether he remembers the gist long after the phrasing is lost. The test, I suspect, is whether he can remember the English phrasing shortly after hearing it. Or does he remember it in Japanese and translate it back to English again? This would be fairly easy to test since his translations to English are imperfect (often ignoring pluralization, for instance). I imagine Wittgenstein would approve of such a test, but disapprove of drawing overly broad conclusions from the results.
While Babel-17 was, in fact, based on the strong form of the Whorfian hypothesis ("language determines thought"), I don't think anyone would argue that Matz's formulation ("language influence human thought") is the strong form. Many even find it hard to believe Sapir and Whorf themselves believed the strong form (although there are plenty of hints they did). But there is widespread acceptance of the weak form.
Missing from the transcriptions of the talk I've found on the web was the uncanny imitation of a modem squeal Matz did after reading this quote.
I doubt Matz would disagree with your assertion. He also argues they should be optimized for the human side of the communication.
I suspect Wittgenstein would have a great deal of sympathy for some of the thinking Matz is using, but little patience for some of the ways he phrases things. I suspect "Every conversation is stored in my brain in Japanese" would set off some alarm bells in his head, prompting something along the lines of "What do we really mean when we use the language in that way?" Perhaps, though, he would attribute the awkwardness in the phrasing to the fact that he was using a second language. Wittgenstein himself gave up German when he abandoned the Vienna School and taught in English at Cambridge.
One could even argue Turing's inability to get across to Wittgenstein the gist of Goedel's proof derived in part from the fact that Goedel expressed the conclusions in a sloppy fashion before he published the actual paper. That sloppy version could easily have benefited from some good, old Wittgensteinian deconstruction.
...Onion was good, but to hear it you had to sit through five other "State of" speeches which were terminally boring. (Well, the "State of the Snake" wasn't boring, but its schizotypic references to the "Pythonic way" of doing things went a long way toward explaining why the Python community is so paranoid.)
A hidden gem appeared later in the week when Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto gave his "State of the Corundum" speech. (Actually it wasn't called that. It was called "The Power and Philosophy of Ruby.") The subtitle alone ("how to create babel-17") had the packed room buzzing before he started: "He's going to turn us into uber-assassins with no sense of self!"
The slides are available online (link above) and are definitely worth taking a look at. He's kinda sensitive about his English, so don't flame him unless your Japanese is better. Matz's philosophy is also guided by this maxim: "Be humble, be minor, be happy."
...given the fact that venture capital available that year was absurd (more was available than in all the rest of human history).
There was too much money chasing too few ideas (resulting in sock puppets selling dog food on the internet). Some of it chased games, but most people realize that VC is not suited to investment in the games industry (as pointed out in the post).
1999 was stupid and silly. I was there. I remember.
...O'Reilly's point. Commoditization is not the same as marginalization.
He is comparing the current situation to 1980 when Wang could charge $40,000 for a minicomputer word-processing system. IBM commoditized the market with an open architecture for microcomputers. Tim's saying the same thing could happen in software with its commoditization (which is coming whether programmers like it or not).
The '80s didn't produce a "marginalization" of hardware engineers (except those who insisted on continuing to sell word-processing for $10,000 a station). It produced a golden age for hardware engineers.
Tim's also noting that the ultimate winner in those hardware wars was not the company which commoditized it (IBM), nor the company which first took advantaged of the commoditization (Compaq), but the company that realized the ultimate goal of commoditization was build-to-order (Dell).
It might not be totally clear who O'Reilly's comparing to IBM in the software commoditization process (maybe he's thinking of Microsoft or even Red Hat). But he explicitly states that IBM is filling the role of Compaq with its Websphere package. And he suggests the ultimate winner will offer something like Websphere with no proprietary components and make their money customizing it to each user.
Not a bad idea. I'm putting my small personal fortune behind it and finding it's not costing much more than Michael Dell spent in his college dorm room. I hope to be announcing just the kind of product he's talking about at OSCON.
So maybe I'm a little biased.
...the obvious conspiracy theory here: that MS is dropping this because they want joystick/keypad gamers to switch to the XBox.
And maybe it's a good theory to ignore. It's not much of a conspiracy theory when it's the company's official published roadmap. Why should Microsoft continue to lose money on peripherals which are used to go counter to one of their strategic goals (to get PC gamers to switch to XBox)?
...Everything up to that point is a red herring or a dead end.
...with a "k," the seeker for the Bulgarian national team? The only one who spells Krum's name with a "c" is a jealous Ron Weasley, who calls him "Vicky."
Yes, he could be considered the "Michael Jordan" of Quidditch, if Michael Jordan were 18, kind of dense, talked like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and played in a game where a single strong player at a single position (seeker) could make up for a lackluster team otherwise.
...Somebody thinks they're observing an on-going attack. What do they do? Report it to the ISP which appears to them to have had its servers compromised. Then call FBI and other responsible authorities.
99 times out of a 100 (and this may well be one if the original poster has ordinary spyware on their machine), it's a false alarm. Somebody has a virus on their machine; it's spyware they unwittingly downloaded.
But, when you're the 1 time out of 100 and you're right, who do you get at the ISP or FBI? Somebody who's used to handling the other 99 calls.
There's also a real chance you might be getting someone who doesn't care. More likely, you've got somebody who cares, but doesn't know what to do. Hopefully, the most likely scenario is that you've got someone who knows what to do. But all three of these groups are going to sound the same at first. Why? Because they're all used to handling the other 99 calls.
You need a strategy for cutting through the BS and convincing them -- quickly and concisely -- that you're not one of those 99 callers, that there's on-going crime being committed, and that potentially large amounts of money are involved.
I have had a similar kind of problem with reporting network problems on a large ISP (Qwest), and I have developed such a strategy:
1) Find out how to contact the ISP's Network Operations Center (NOC).
2) Devise a simple test which they can run at the NOC to demonstrate the problem.
3) Call the NOC and (when they start to tell you how to file a report in the morning) say, "No. You do not understand. You have a serious on-going problem here which must be resolved immediately. If you do not, [insert concise description of the damage you think is likely here]."
4) Tell them to run your test.
5) If you know the answer, tell them how to fix the problem.
I developed this when I was doing a graveyard shift on which I frequently used Qwest's San-Francisco-Seattle backbone. They had one router on the pipe which would go down every couple months. I could detect the problem every time using traceroute. The NOC's response was invariably, "Copy the traceroute into an email and somebody will fix it in the morning."
I would respond, "No. Your main pipe between Silicon Valley and Seattle is down. If all those dot-commers wake up in the morning and find you've not been passing any packets for hours, there is going to be hell to pay. Run a traceroute to amazon.com."
The response almost immediately changed to: "Oh, my God. I'll get on it right away. Thanks a lot." Then I would tell them the name of the router which had to be power-cycled. And it would be fixed in a few minutes.
Here's how you would apply this strategy to the poster's situation:
1) Find out how to contact the ISP's Network Operations Center (NOC). If you don't have a direct number, try to get it from their support people. They know it. They may not be allowed to give it to you. They may prefer to connect you themselves. Try to act knowledgeable and give them good reasons why they should put you through. Sometimes the NOC will give you their number once they know you're for real. It might help to call it that ("NOC," pronounced like "knock"), but you should probably identify it at least once as "Network Operations Center."
2) Devise a simple test which they can run at the NOC to demonstrate the problem. This is very important. Preferably a single command which will elucidate the problem unambigously. (This would have stopped this particular poster's problem at the ISP. When the poster gave his demonstration to his NOC and they got different results, he would have known the problem was on his PC.)
3) Call the NOC and (when they start to tell you how to file a report in the morning) say, "No. You do not understand. You have a serious on-going problem here which must be resolved immediately. If you do not, [insert concise description of the damage you think is likely here]." Be poli