...although their services may not be what you need.
I was running a small business which did about 10,000 minutes a month on its 800 number and had relatively modest data requirements. They split a T-1 (half voice lines, half data) and gave me a good price for three services (local phone, data and long-distance). The quality was far superior to what we had been getting from our Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) provider (Qwest).
If they offer what you need in your area, I would definitely recommend checking them out.
...there are occasionally companies looking for ideas. Not good companies. Not companies that make good games. But lousy companies with more money than sense.
Think Simon & Schuster.
You don't want them messing up your beautiful idea. Among the really creative, ideas are a dime a dozen. There's a story about starving pulp writers playing poker for story ideas because they had no pennies. I believe Frederic Brown was involved.
My favorite desperate publisher was someone who got the license for M*A*S*H and then realized they had no ideas. They released a bad console game (I believe it was for Intellivision) and offered a prize for the best idea for a sequel. I don't think any sequel was ever published, but somebody probably got the prize.
...anyone who says (or implies in this case) "Shakespeare said, 'First, kill the lawyers'," always draws the Shakespeare-didn't-say-it-one-of-his-characters-sa id-it response from some lawyer. (I assume they're lawyers, since no one else would draw such a distinction.)
Have you ever heard someone say, "Shakespeare didn't say, 'A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,' he had one of his characters say it"? Have you ever heard anyone say, "The Shakespeare character who said, 'There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at its flood leads on to fortune' was a murdering traitor who was about to be killed for making the mistake of taking one particular tide at its flood? Or how about, "The Shakespeare character who said, 'A rose by any other name would smell as sweet' was a suicide, guilty of a grave crime against God"?
Actually this particular character was a petty thief with pretensions of being a revolutionary. He may have dreamed of being a tyrant; he may even have been a petty tyrant in his petty gang. But he was no tyrant in the usual sense.
But Shakespeare often put his own beliefs in the words of his characters. He was a playwright, after all. Except for the sonnets, all of the "Shakespeare said" things we know are spoken by his characters. Even some of the sonnets seem to be written in another voice. "First, we kill all the lawyers" was an applause line, thrown in to get a cheer out of the crowd. The fact that it gets quoted so often reflects the fact that we all feel that way at one time or another. Probably Shakespeare did, too.
All playwrights put their ideas in the mouths of their characters. Shakespeare often put stirring words and noble sentiments in the mouths of traitors and murderers. In fact, since most of his characters were in some way flawed, he often put moving statements in the mouths of less-than-perfect characters. But that doesn't mean he didn't see value in the statements. And it doesn't mean he wasn't above throwing in a crowd-pleaser here and there to boost ticket sales.
If this barrister-esque AC is suggesting that politicians who use this kind of crowd-pleasing lawyer baiting to boost themselves are undermining some of the founding principles of the USA and other rule-of-law-based republics, I agree with the underlying meaning behind this post, but I think only a lawyer would advance the idea that the distinction between what Shakespeare said and what his characters said has any meaning in the real world.
Lots of things to say...
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Saving MUDs?
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...about MUDs.
First off, the basic premise of this post is wrong. MUDs were always a niche type of thing. There were a few 10 years ago when the Internet was small. There are a lot now that the Internet is big. It's hard to say which has grown faster.
Of course, there are many more long-running MUDs today than there were 10 years ago. When a favorite goes dark, it doesn't mean they are fading away (although it may SEEM like it at the time). When Cats closed, it didn't mean Broadway theater was dead.
More relevant question: Why haven't MUDs broken out of their niche?
Answer #1: They did. EverQuest was an LPC MUD with a graphical front end pasted on it. Some MUDders see EQ as a diabolical competitor leeching away the potential users of "true" MUDs; others see it as the logical next step.
Answer #2: The amount of creativity to keep a MUD lively doesn't scale well. The number of people people creating new content for MUDs eventually defines the size of the niche which will be supported by their creativity. The FaerieMUD Consortium has an interesting solution to this: using the creativity of players themselves to generate new content for their MUD. This is an extension of the long tradition of wizards, immortals and promotion to coders in the MUD community. We have been working on this for a long time, but it is not quite there yet.
Another interesting question: Are there common problems faced by all MUD-coders for which pooled solutions are possible in Open Source?
Two obvious places for this are: A general-purpose backend server for hosting MUDs (the ability to scale might be nice, too); and a graphical front end.
The MUES Project on Source Forge has recently posted Alpha code for the first of these. Severalprojects have code up on SourgeForge for the second. It's my personal opinion that MUDs will never break out of the niche until these types of problems are well-solved by Open Source software. It's also going to be important to do it right. I can say from personal experience that getting all the things people are looking for in the next-generation MUD is no simple task. The discussion in this paper on CME (Coolest MUD Ever) is very informative.
I think most people are missing the point...
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Hijacking .NET
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...here. What this book seems to be saying is twofold:
.NET takes approach perl OO originally took to "private data members." I don't remember if it was Tom Christiansen or Larry Wall who said, "Perl doesn't think you should break into its house, but it's not going to rig up a shotgun to shoot you if you try." Or something like that.
Sometimes you can save a bunch of hassle (and maybe even make your code run faster) if you break into MS's house and use some of the internals they're hiding from you.
Now, I don't think breaking encapsulation is a good idea if you want to write robust code. And I agree security should not depend on the rigorousness of the enforcement of encapsulation.
But the two items listed above do raise questions about whether one should use.NET.
Suppose you have an idea for a killer app you think will be the Next Big Thing. You decide to write it in C# on.NET (hey, that VisualStudio.NET is a nice IDE). You decide not use cheesy tricks like accessing MS's private variables to improve the performance of your program because you don't want to create a fragile program which will break on the next C# upgrade. You release your program and it takes off. Microsoft decides to compete with you and writes a C# program that does the same thing as yours does, but in order to make theirs "better" they cheat and use direct access to private variables. (They don't have to worry about C# upgrades. They can walk across the hallway and ask the C# people not to change the internals. In fact, they can ask the C# people to declare the hidden variable as a public variable in the next release.) You lose everything as the VCs run for the hills.
Since MS has been known to use this kind of tactic with the Win32 API, this is not an unreasonable set of conjectures.
The guy who wrote this book seems to be arguing the way to avoid this is to create fragile apps using undocumented hidden variables. I would argue it's better to use a language which a potential competitor cannot manipulate to gain competitive advantage. But that's just my personal preference.
Sometimes he tells us we're fools for really believing his "exaggerations" were intended to be taken literally. Sometimes he defends hopelessly foolish exaggerations as if they should have been taken literally.
But mostly he relies on ad hominem attacks like this:
"You my friend, display the self delusion typical of your kind. You are supremely arrogant, unjustly certain in your own ideas, and intolerant of differing opinions. That a innocent post offered in the midst of a busy day can elicit such a response is a grave indictment of your character."
Nowhere in the post of the person he's attacking is there anything like the arrogance and self-delusion which springs from every word of that paragraph.
For the record: _Das Kapital_ is about 400 pages; The Dialogues of Plato (rendered in the same typeface and page size) are about twice that. There are more paragraphs in Plato and more footnotes (usually rendered in smaller type) in Marx. This results in approximately 4 percent more words per square inch in Marx, which is hardly enough to make up for the vastly larger page count in Plato. (no amazon searches required)
wc and the internet: easy tools for getting things right.
I'm not surprised you didn't learn a thing. I'm not even surprised you're proud of it.
I own a copy of Das Kapital and a copy of the complete works of Plato, published by the same publisher on identical size pages and in identical size type. The Marx book runs about 411 pages, including a very lengthy index. Plato's dialogues run 799, with "The Seventh Letter" adding a bunch more. (I don't know if this is a complete list of all of Plato's writings, but I suspect it is.)
Plato is easier to read, but just as full of grand pronouncements that are clearly wrong as Marx.
I first tried to read Das Kapital in 10th grade and found the style too turgid to plow through. The sentences are long and complicated. The ideas range from the trivial to the absurd. He is clearly trying to express his political ideas in a form which is complete and irrefutable, kind of like a Principia Mathematica for economics.
It is hard reading, but by no means impossible. I would not recommend it in a world where some of the main ideas would be accepted by almost no one (including most leftists and communists).
The idea that Plato and Aristotle are given short shrift in universities which over-emphasize Descartes, Kant and Marx is ludicrous in the extreme. Over half of the Ancient and Medieval Philosophy class I took was devoted to the two of them.
Aristotles (his works outweigh Plato's, by the way) may get less credit than he deserves because Newton chose to blame him for the mistakes of the medieval monks who misinterpreted him. But that simply means his best work is used only for theology, when it should be viewed as the foundation of science.
Plato probably gets more coverage than he deserves, given how few of his ideas could reasonably be accepted as true by most people. But he did pretty much define what philosophers would be discussing for the following 2500 years. So it's hard to say he should be covered less thoroughly.
Descartes not only made major contributions to philosophy, but also to science and math. And his books were never long.
I'm a partisan of Kant and can't help wondering what he would have contributed to ethics and political philosophy if Frederick the Great's father hadn't forbidden him to publish in those fields. He wrote some very long books and some very short books. He used long sentences. But, hey, that's German for you. Long sentences; long words. Sometimes long sentences made up of long words. True for Marx and Kant; true for Nietzsche, too. Hey, if Alan Turing had been German, programs would probably have fewer lines, but they'd probably be a lot longer.
To say Nietzsche isn't covered enough in modern schools of philosophy is just silly. There are probably more classes devoted to him than any other single philosopher. He's fun. He said some cool things. But he didn't push the ideas ahead much. Not on the important issues. My Nietzsche collection isn't complete but it's enough to know that, if it were, it would have more pages than Das Kapital
One thing I have to agree with you on, though: "In most cases, I don't believe a man's self esteem will allow him to read a book for a year and say afterwards 'That was a load of crap'." I suspect that helps explain a lot of things: from George W. Bush to Scientology.
But I doubt any undergraduate course will ever require Das Kapital. And, if it does, I suspect it will get few enrollees and even fewer completes.
...like me: Didn't Ducati have an ad in the 1950s in which a sweater-girl wearing a blindfold is doing a Evel-Kneivel-style jump on a Ducati (no-hands, no less) with a guy hanging on behind her?
I suppose only another old geek could answer that one.
I know some Italian motorcycle company had such an ad. I just don't remember if it was Ducati.
I can't help wondering if the Wachowski Brothers were deliberately telling a joke based on that ad when they showed Trinity jumping a Ducati with the keymaster hanging on behind.
...(the parent and the grandparent) have the right idea. The problem with doggy names is that after you see the same thing all the time, you stop seeing it. A long-established principle of sensory psychology.
What you want is distinctive borders, chosen by the user (or picked randomly for those who don't choose). Sort of a CSS-style security setting.
The only advantage of the MS system is that anyone who puts a random dog list on the border of a web page is putting up a sign that says, "I am a crook," as surely as someone who mutilates their fingerprints.
...in which the hero is a game programmer caught between the switch from Commodore 64 and the PC. It's out of his usual sci-fi range, being pure horror. Well, pure Christian horror, anyway.
...out of the genre. Too much popularity, too fast, not enough game. Non-gamers flocked to it; game companies tried to clone it (incredible graphics on a relatively small number of screens, who needs characters anyway); more interesting projects in the genre couldn't get funding if they couldn't prove they were "the next Myst."
It's a familiar story. MS sucked the oxygen out of "push technology" with a bad implementation forced on all its OS users, but PointCast was a good idea.
Then something interesting happened: "The Longest Journey," "Syberia," "Zak McCracken II," "Sam & Max" getting ready to hit the road again. And then there was a bunch of guys setting up SCUMM-engine web sites and amateur-publishing efforts.
Anytime that happens, you know the genre's never gonna die. Just ask Neil Young.
...for over a century. Markets overly skewed towards growth stocks have been a problem for only a small percentage of that time.
The parent is quite correct in two of his assumptions: The problem was a market which cared too much about asset-appreciation and not enough about dividends; and taxation of dividends does skew the market towards growth stocks and away from dividend stocks.
But the skewing towards growth by taxing dividends is small (increasing the value of a growth stock by 6-10 percent). In order to have a bubble/crash cycle you have to have a much great skewing, which usually requires two things: Too much money looking for a place to be invested and a means of getting around regulatory restrictions on misstating money received as investment as income.
In the '90s we had both. Baby-boomers were entering their post-childraising-pre-retirement years (the period when most people have the most to invest). And a few companies figured out a way to use stock options to distort their financials. This skewed dot-com results, but the two companies which used it the most were Microsoft and Enron.
The poster of the parent obviously has a political axe to grind and a policy agenda. But the truth is that both parties have their hands dirty on this one. Sen. Joe Lieberman and Pres. George W. Bush should be the poster children of the Crash of 2001. (Phil and Wendy Gramm were so conspicuous in their corruption that it's hard to believe they didn't believe everything they were saying. Never assume venality when incompetence suffices.)
"Double" taxation is not uncommon. If you follow a dollar long enough, it will be taxed more than once. And, if you have an agenda against one of those taxes, you can call it "double taxation." Everyone reading this pays income tax when they earn their money and sales tax when they spend some of it. Opponents of "double" taxation would be far better off advocating the end to sales and value-added taxes than taxes on dividends.
If you end taxes on dividends, you create a class of people who pay no taxes on their income. Do you really believe that a trust-funder playboy who does no productive work should pay fewer taxes than you do? The wealthy have options which allow them to have some of their income come to them in dividends (some more than others, but ordinary people have almost no option in this regard).
It is true that taxing dividends skews the markets toward growth stocks. But this also skews them toward growth. Which is a good thing. They can become overly skewed toward growth, but don't blame dividend taxes. Blame investors who don't watch the fundamentals and congresscritters who chastise regulators for trying to enforce valid accounting procedures. Blame politicians who tax capital gains at a lower rate than dividends.
BTW, the IRS never allowed the misstating of income the SEC was forced to accept. So, those companies reporting outrageously overstated profits in the '90s never paid taxes on the "profits" they reported to Wall Street. (Well, "never allowed" is sort of overstating the matter. Of course, the companies never tried to overstate their profits on their tax returns.)
...idea of psychohistory: Asimov postulated that, once human populations reached sufficiently large numbers, we could use the techniques of statistical analysis to model history in much the same way statistical mechanics allow us to model thermodynamics.
In the article, Murray quotes Lord Rutherford as saying that "If you need to use statistics, then you should design a better experiment."
The key is to watch, anticipate, and adjust accordingly. Does the value of a house drop in a hyperinflationary environment? No - it stays flat. If you anticipate hyperinflation, sell paper assets (stocks/bonds), get rid of paper liabilities (rent) and buy hard assets (houses, gold, jewelry).
Depressions can be caused by lots of people doing just that with their money. And depressions often bring deflation, which hurts hard-asset purchasers especially hard.
The right conditions can reduce almost any financial plan to rubble. Call it "the government" or "the invisible hand of Adam Smith," almost anything you do can backfire (or can produce outrageously good results). Diversification and asset allocation are the only ways to reduce the odds of backfire, but they also reduce the odds of outrageously good results. Longer time frames tend to make it easier, not harder. An ethicist who gave seminars at Enron reports the employees who are now complaining about their lost 401(k)s were fond of just the kind of pronouncements you are posting. They thought only the government could take away their security.
...the Hoover administration (in the U.S.) made two colossal errors which turned a recession/stock-crash/run-on-the-banks into a full-scale worldwide depression:
They cut taxes on corporations hurting from the stock-market crash.
They paid for this by raising tariffs (triggering a trade war that spread the problem worldwide)
The corporations didn't have anything to do with the extra money (there was a recession, after all), but their stock prices were depressed. So, they decided to boost their share prices by announcing larger-than-expected dividends (paid primarily to rich people). Rich people behaved as rich people are likely to do in a recession: They put the money away, playing it conservatively.
Since the Bush administration has decided not to risk the chance that corporations will avoid depression-producing behavior by requiring them to pay dividends for their stockholders to receive the latest round of tax cuts, we have to ask, "Will this cause a depression?" We have to consider the possibility of at least a '90s-Japan style depression (if not a Great Depression like the '30s).
One thing which always reassured me was the fact that no one seems likely to repeat the mistakes of the Trade War of the Early '30s. Now I'm beginning to wonder if DMCA- and WIPO-style intellectual-property regimes may serve a Trade-War-like function today. Like trade wars, they spread from country to country, stifling economic growth (trade wars do it more directly, but the DMCA does it by hamstringing innovation).
We may have discovered the missing ingredient in our depression recipe.
All your next-generation secure computing base...
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Palladium Changes Name
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...are belong to us.
Think about it. What is a "computing base"? I'm not sure these guys even know what they mean when they talk about Palladium, so what does it matter what they call it. Probably vapor, until they think of a DRM strategy.
The next-generation-secure-computing-base memo/PR bulletin mentions a "nexus and nexus agents." Does anyone know what this means? Do they?
BTW, the pedantic grammarian in me wants to point out that the hyphen in "next-generation secure computing base" is superfluous. "Next" is an adjective and knows perfectly well what it's supposed to modify without being told.
...a company which had GOP connections which was given taxpayer money to eliminate ineligible voters from the voting lists. They explored the possibility of getting lists of convicted felons from other states and crossing those names off the eligible voter lists in Florida. Most states balked at such a process because it was so hard to tell whether the voter was the convicted felon or just somebody with the same name. A small number of states (including Texas, with the biggest list) went along.
The company told Florida they didn't think the names should be eliminated without adequate safeguards to make sure eligible voters were not eliminated. Florida didn't want to spend the money to verify. So the names were eliminated. The affected voters didn't find out 'til Election Day.
(Note that the company demonstrated some Republicans are not as corrupt as the Bushes and their cronies.)
The 2000 election showed that Bush was out of touch with half the voters and Gore was out of touch with half the voters. Democrats were out of touch with Katherine Harris and the U.S. Supreme Court. That's why they lost.
Anyone who claims the 2000 election was some mandate for their ideas (on either side) deserves to have all their ideas treated with as much respect as the rest of this post deserves.
...always leave out the mass destruction caused by the auto accidents which happened when 30,000 voters on their way to the polls simultaneously decided not to vote and pulled u-turns in the span of 5 seconds.
The truth: The networks called the Florida result before the polls closed in upstate Florida. This was a stupid mistake entirely unrelated to the bad calls made that night. It probably had a small impact on turnout that night (you have to assume it meant that lots of Bush voters totally believed the pollsters and made their decisions on voting on what the networks say; they might be stupid, but they're not that stupid). Whatever the impact, it was dwarfed by the corrupt and dishonest removal of black voters' names from the voter lists engineered by Jeb Bush and the Texas Department of Prisons.
...in three or four sentences what the academics in this paper failed to explain in several paragraphs. Short sentences, at that.
The truth is that both of the behaviors are useful. And they are not mutually exclusive. I have proposed for some time the following compromise:
The Back button should retain its current behavior. This is an easily understood behavior which makes sense to most of us. The Alt-Left-Arrow shortcut should also be retained. When the user goes Back using either method and starts another branch by clicking on another link (or typing in a URL or using a bookmark or any other method), the entire history should be recorded (not just the current branch).
But the logical data structure to record it is not a longer stack with multiple duplicate pages in it (which seems to be the suggestion of the authors of this paper). The logical structure for such data is a tree (implemented as a hash of hashes or whatever). And the logical way of accessing other branches of the tree is by means of the Alt-Up-Arrow and Alt-Down-Arrow key combinations. In other words, Alt-Up-Arrow would take you to the previous branch of the tree. The logical position on that branch would either be the end of the branch or the same level of depth as the user's position on the current branch.
This might be a little confusing for those who use the Back button rather than the Alt-Left-Arrow. But the logical place to put the interface for them would be in the drop-down menu for histories next to the Forward and Back buttons. We know how to display trees as indented lists. We know how to condense them with plus-or-minus boxes. This would have the added benefit of helping people to understand the lists as trees, thus enabling them to better understand the Alt-Up-Arrow and Alt-Down-Arrow options.
Alt-Up-Arrow should go back to the most recent branch point and continue through the various branches starting from the most recently created branch. Repeated presses of Alt-Up-Arrow should continue to explore the branches which start from that branch point. When those are exhausted, further Alt-Up-Arrow presses would explore earlier branch points. When the user has exhausted all previous branches, further presses of Alt-Up should cycle through to the most recent branch at the most recent branch point. Alt-Down-Arrow should produce the inverse of this cycle (i.e., start with the oldest branch at the oldest branch point if Alt-Up has not been used previously).
Alt-Left-Arrow and Alt-Right-Arrow can thus be seen as moving further in and further out on the current branch. Alt-Right should choose the most recently visited branch if the current node is a branch point (mirroring its current behavior). The Back button and the Forward button should continue to duplicate this behavior.
I've suggested this before on/. Perhaps I should choose a more authoritative forum.
...for the lions and tigers they had jumping out of the screen at the audience. They shot it with circus animals which were trained to jump over a pole strung between the two cameras, which were spaced between four to six feet apart during filming.
Unfortunately, depth of field is not the only information our brains derive from stereoscopic visual data. In fact, the depth of field information is not just relative (this is closer than that, etc), it is also absolute. In other words, we can tell how far away things are. Absolute depth plus visual size gives us absolute size. In other words, if the lion looks like he's four feet away and he fills up half our vision, we know he's a big cat. Good 3D camerawork requires that the two lenses be separated by approximately the same distance as the average human eyeballs are separated.
Consequently, when Bwana Devil set up their cameras so widely spaced (so the cats could jump between them), they messed with everybody's size perceptions. The lions looked like kittens made up to look like lions. Tigers looked like painted cats. To audiences Robert Stack didn't look like Robert Stack. He looked like a Robert-Stack doll. Instead of having audiences leaving the theater saying, "Wasn't it incredible the way the lions jumped out of the screen?" they had: "Wasn't it amazing the way they made the cats look like miniature lions?" Think of it as if the audience was turned into giants whose heads were so big their eyes were five feet apart.
To my knowledge no one made use of this effect for cinematic purposes before the Honey, I Shrunk the Audience 3D show at Disney World.
...go through a period where they are overused (or just used to impress audiences). Then filmmakers begin to discover ways to use the new technology cinematically to better tell a story. That's when the new technology really takes off.
Hitchcock considered 3D to be a gimmick, but was forced by the studio to use it in Dial M for Murder. In spite of this, this was the movie which moved 3D into the cinematic. Hitchcock tried to improve the storytelling with 3D in three scenes:
The Phone Call -- Grace Kelly's husband and the guy he hires to strangle her make a miscalculation. The husband's phone call is used to lure her to the curtain where the strangler hides. But, when she picks up the phone, she inadvertently protects her neck with her arm. Hitchcock shot it to make the audience feel they were standing as close to the two of them as they were to each other.
The Desk Scene -- Once she set down the phone and is attacked, Kelly falls on her back on a nearby desk. Hitchcock shot this so that when she falls on the desk her arm reaches out of the screen, desperately seeking help (as if the help was being sought from the audience).
The Courtroom Scene -- Hitchcock shot this as a surrealistic montage of lights swirling around Kelly as snippets of courtroom dialogue are played.
The first two worked; the third didn't. Hitchcocks seems to have realized that we not only figure out where other things are (in a 3D environment) using our stereoscopic vision, but also where we are. He also seems to have understood that we are not afraid for ourselves in the movies, but for characters we care about but are helpless to help. (Other 3D filmmakers have never seemed to learn this and are constantly firing flaming arrows - or something - out of the screen at us.) He shot the phone call so it feels like we are standing close enough to interfere. And he shot the desk scene so it looks like she's reaching out to us for help. Just as we see the scissors, her hand finds them. It almost feels like we have put them in her hand.
The phone call works in both 3D and 2D. The desk scene looks strange in 2D, but works in 3D. The courtroom scene doesn't work either way.
This was a classic movie-for-kids that Disney has been marketing well for decades. They knew fully well it should not have been released in the art houses. When I saw it there wasn't a single child in the audience.
The dub was great. They re-synched the mouths to the English words. Could have been a breakthrough movie for Disney. They screwed it up and promoted the heck out of "Lilo and Stitch," a stinker based on "The Ugly Duckling" with five good jokes.
I just hope "Treasure Planet" is as good as it looks, not as bad as these morons keep trying to make their movies.
My protest: I'm going to see "Solaris" instead of "Treasure Planet" today.
Slashdot Mirror
...although their services may not be what you need.
I was running a small business which did about 10,000 minutes a month on its 800 number and had relatively modest data requirements. They split a T-1 (half voice lines, half data) and gave me a good price for three services (local phone, data and long-distance). The quality was far superior to what we had been getting from our Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) provider (Qwest).
If they offer what you need in your area, I would definitely recommend checking them out.
...there are occasionally companies looking for ideas. Not good companies. Not companies that make good games. But lousy companies with more money than sense.
Think Simon & Schuster.
You don't want them messing up your beautiful idea. Among the really creative, ideas are a dime a dozen. There's a story about starving pulp writers playing poker for story ideas because they had no pennies. I believe Frederic Brown was involved.
My favorite desperate publisher was someone who got the license for M*A*S*H and then realized they had no ideas. They released a bad console game (I believe it was for Intellivision) and offered a prize for the best idea for a sequel. I don't think any sequel was ever published, but somebody probably got the prize.
That's about the most you can hope for.
...anyone who says (or implies in this case) "Shakespeare said, 'First, kill the lawyers'," always draws the Shakespeare-didn't-say-it-one-of-his-characters-sa id-it response from some lawyer. (I assume they're lawyers, since no one else would draw such a distinction.)
Have you ever heard someone say, "Shakespeare didn't say, 'A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,' he had one of his characters say it"? Have you ever heard anyone say, "The Shakespeare character who said, 'There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at its flood leads on to fortune' was a murdering traitor who was about to be killed for making the mistake of taking one particular tide at its flood? Or how about, "The Shakespeare character who said, 'A rose by any other name would smell as sweet' was a suicide, guilty of a grave crime against God"?
Actually this particular character was a petty thief with pretensions of being a revolutionary. He may have dreamed of being a tyrant; he may even have been a petty tyrant in his petty gang. But he was no tyrant in the usual sense.
But Shakespeare often put his own beliefs in the words of his characters. He was a playwright, after all. Except for the sonnets, all of the "Shakespeare said" things we know are spoken by his characters. Even some of the sonnets seem to be written in another voice. "First, we kill all the lawyers" was an applause line, thrown in to get a cheer out of the crowd. The fact that it gets quoted so often reflects the fact that we all feel that way at one time or another. Probably Shakespeare did, too.
All playwrights put their ideas in the mouths of their characters. Shakespeare often put stirring words and noble sentiments in the mouths of traitors and murderers. In fact, since most of his characters were in some way flawed, he often put moving statements in the mouths of less-than-perfect characters. But that doesn't mean he didn't see value in the statements. And it doesn't mean he wasn't above throwing in a crowd-pleaser here and there to boost ticket sales.
If this barrister-esque AC is suggesting that politicians who use this kind of crowd-pleasing lawyer baiting to boost themselves are undermining some of the founding principles of the USA and other rule-of-law-based republics, I agree with the underlying meaning behind this post, but I think only a lawyer would advance the idea that the distinction between what Shakespeare said and what his characters said has any meaning in the real world.
...about MUDs.
First off, the basic premise of this post is wrong. MUDs were always a niche type of thing. There were a few 10 years ago when the Internet was small. There are a lot now that the Internet is big. It's hard to say which has grown faster.
Of course, there are many more long-running MUDs today than there were 10 years ago. When a favorite goes dark, it doesn't mean they are fading away (although it may SEEM like it at the time). When Cats closed, it didn't mean Broadway theater was dead.
More relevant question: Why haven't MUDs broken out of their niche?
Answer #1: They did. EverQuest was an LPC MUD with a graphical front end pasted on it. Some MUDders see EQ as a diabolical competitor leeching away the potential users of "true" MUDs; others see it as the logical next step.
Answer #2: The amount of creativity to keep a MUD lively doesn't scale well. The number of people people creating new content for MUDs eventually defines the size of the niche which will be supported by their creativity. The FaerieMUD Consortium has an interesting solution to this: using the creativity of players themselves to generate new content for their MUD. This is an extension of the long tradition of wizards, immortals and promotion to coders in the MUD community. We have been working on this for a long time, but it is not quite there yet.
Another interesting question: Are there common problems faced by all MUD-coders for which pooled solutions are possible in Open Source?
Two obvious places for this are: A general-purpose backend server for hosting MUDs (the ability to scale might be nice, too); and a graphical front end.
The MUES Project on Source Forge has recently posted Alpha code for the first of these. Several projects have code up on SourgeForge for the second. It's my personal opinion that MUDs will never break out of the niche until these types of problems are well-solved by Open Source software. It's also going to be important to do it right. I can say from personal experience that getting all the things people are looking for in the next-generation MUD is no simple task. The discussion in this paper on CME (Coolest MUD Ever) is very informative.
...here. What this book seems to be saying is twofold:
Now, I don't think breaking encapsulation is a good idea if you want to write robust code. And I agree security should not depend on the rigorousness of the enforcement of encapsulation.
But the two items listed above do raise questions about whether one should use .NET.
Suppose you have an idea for a killer app you think will be the Next Big Thing. You decide to write it in C# on .NET (hey, that VisualStudio.NET is a nice IDE). You decide not use cheesy tricks like accessing MS's private variables to improve the performance of your program because you don't want to create a fragile program which will break on the next C# upgrade. You release your program and it takes off. Microsoft decides to compete with you and writes a C# program that does the same thing as yours does, but in order to make theirs "better" they cheat and use direct access to private variables. (They don't have to worry about C# upgrades. They can walk across the hallway and ask the C# people not to change the internals. In fact, they can ask the C# people to declare the hidden variable as a public variable in the next release.) You lose everything as the VCs run for the hills.
Since MS has been known to use this kind of tactic with the Win32 API, this is not an unreasonable set of conjectures.
The guy who wrote this book seems to be arguing the way to avoid this is to create fragile apps using undocumented hidden variables. I would argue it's better to use a language which a potential competitor cannot manipulate to gain competitive advantage. But that's just my personal preference.
...deeper into his factual errors hole.
Sometimes he tells us we're fools for really believing his "exaggerations" were intended to be taken literally. Sometimes he defends hopelessly foolish exaggerations as if they should have been taken literally.
But mostly he relies on ad hominem attacks like this:
"You my friend, display the self delusion typical of your kind. You are supremely arrogant, unjustly certain in your own ideas, and intolerant of differing opinions. That a innocent post offered in the midst of a busy day can elicit such a response is a grave indictment of your character."
Nowhere in the post of the person he's attacking is there anything like the arrogance and self-delusion which springs from every word of that paragraph.
For the record: _Das Kapital_ is about 400 pages; The Dialogues of Plato (rendered in the same typeface and page size) are about twice that. There are more paragraphs in Plato and more footnotes (usually rendered in smaller type) in Marx. This results in approximately 4 percent more words per square inch in Marx, which is hardly enough to make up for the vastly larger page count in Plato. (no amazon searches required)
wc and the internet: easy tools for getting things right.
I'm not surprised you didn't learn a thing. I'm not even surprised you're proud of it.
...can you jam into one post?
I own a copy of Das Kapital and a copy of the complete works of Plato, published by the same publisher on identical size pages and in identical size type. The Marx book runs about 411 pages, including a very lengthy index. Plato's dialogues run 799, with "The Seventh Letter" adding a bunch more. (I don't know if this is a complete list of all of Plato's writings, but I suspect it is.)
Plato is easier to read, but just as full of grand pronouncements that are clearly wrong as Marx.
I first tried to read Das Kapital in 10th grade and found the style too turgid to plow through. The sentences are long and complicated. The ideas range from the trivial to the absurd. He is clearly trying to express his political ideas in a form which is complete and irrefutable, kind of like a Principia Mathematica for economics.
It is hard reading, but by no means impossible. I would not recommend it in a world where some of the main ideas would be accepted by almost no one (including most leftists and communists).
The idea that Plato and Aristotle are given short shrift in universities which over-emphasize Descartes, Kant and Marx is ludicrous in the extreme. Over half of the Ancient and Medieval Philosophy class I took was devoted to the two of them.
Aristotles (his works outweigh Plato's, by the way) may get less credit than he deserves because Newton chose to blame him for the mistakes of the medieval monks who misinterpreted him. But that simply means his best work is used only for theology, when it should be viewed as the foundation of science.
Plato probably gets more coverage than he deserves, given how few of his ideas could reasonably be accepted as true by most people. But he did pretty much define what philosophers would be discussing for the following 2500 years. So it's hard to say he should be covered less thoroughly.
Descartes not only made major contributions to philosophy, but also to science and math. And his books were never long.
I'm a partisan of Kant and can't help wondering what he would have contributed to ethics and political philosophy if Frederick the Great's father hadn't forbidden him to publish in those fields. He wrote some very long books and some very short books. He used long sentences. But, hey, that's German for you. Long sentences; long words. Sometimes long sentences made up of long words. True for Marx and Kant; true for Nietzsche, too. Hey, if Alan Turing had been German, programs would probably have fewer lines, but they'd probably be a lot longer.
To say Nietzsche isn't covered enough in modern schools of philosophy is just silly. There are probably more classes devoted to him than any other single philosopher. He's fun. He said some cool things. But he didn't push the ideas ahead much. Not on the important issues. My Nietzsche collection isn't complete but it's enough to know that, if it were, it would have more pages than Das Kapital
One thing I have to agree with you on, though: "In most cases, I don't believe a man's self esteem will allow him to read a book for a year and say afterwards 'That was a load of crap'." I suspect that helps explain a lot of things: from George W. Bush to Scientology.
But I doubt any undergraduate course will ever require Das Kapital. And, if it does, I suspect it will get few enrollees and even fewer completes.
...like me: Didn't Ducati have an ad in the 1950s in which a sweater-girl wearing a blindfold is doing a Evel-Kneivel-style jump on a Ducati (no-hands, no less) with a guy hanging on behind her?
I suppose only another old geek could answer that one.
I know some Italian motorcycle company had such an ad. I just don't remember if it was Ducati.
I can't help wondering if the Wachowski Brothers were deliberately telling a joke based on that ad when they showed Trinity jumping a Ducati with the keymaster hanging on behind.
...(the parent and the grandparent) have the right idea. The problem with doggy names is that after you see the same thing all the time, you stop seeing it. A long-established principle of sensory psychology.
What you want is distinctive borders, chosen by the user (or picked randomly for those who don't choose). Sort of a CSS-style security setting.
The only advantage of the MS system is that anyone who puts a random dog list on the border of a web page is putting up a sign that says, "I am a crook," as surely as someone who mutilates their fingerprints.
...in which the hero is a game programmer caught between the switch from Commodore 64 and the PC. It's out of his usual sci-fi range, being pure horror. Well, pure Christian horror, anyway.
...out of the genre. Too much popularity, too fast, not enough game. Non-gamers flocked to it; game companies tried to clone it (incredible graphics on a relatively small number of screens, who needs characters anyway); more interesting projects in the genre couldn't get funding if they couldn't prove they were "the next Myst."
It's a familiar story. MS sucked the oxygen out of "push technology" with a bad implementation forced on all its OS users, but PointCast was a good idea.
Then something interesting happened: "The Longest Journey," "Syberia," "Zak McCracken II," "Sam & Max" getting ready to hit the road again. And then there was a bunch of guys setting up SCUMM-engine web sites and amateur-publishing efforts.
Anytime that happens, you know the genre's never gonna die. Just ask Neil Young.
...for over a century. Markets overly skewed towards growth stocks have been a problem for only a small percentage of that time.
The parent is quite correct in two of his assumptions: The problem was a market which cared too much about asset-appreciation and not enough about dividends; and taxation of dividends does skew the market towards growth stocks and away from dividend stocks.
But the skewing towards growth by taxing dividends is small (increasing the value of a growth stock by 6-10 percent). In order to have a bubble/crash cycle you have to have a much great skewing, which usually requires two things: Too much money looking for a place to be invested and a means of getting around regulatory restrictions on misstating money received as investment as income.
In the '90s we had both. Baby-boomers were entering their post-childraising-pre-retirement years (the period when most people have the most to invest). And a few companies figured out a way to use stock options to distort their financials. This skewed dot-com results, but the two companies which used it the most were Microsoft and Enron.
The poster of the parent obviously has a political axe to grind and a policy agenda. But the truth is that both parties have their hands dirty on this one. Sen. Joe Lieberman and Pres. George W. Bush should be the poster children of the Crash of 2001. (Phil and Wendy Gramm were so conspicuous in their corruption that it's hard to believe they didn't believe everything they were saying. Never assume venality when incompetence suffices.)
"Double" taxation is not uncommon. If you follow a dollar long enough, it will be taxed more than once. And, if you have an agenda against one of those taxes, you can call it "double taxation." Everyone reading this pays income tax when they earn their money and sales tax when they spend some of it. Opponents of "double" taxation would be far better off advocating the end to sales and value-added taxes than taxes on dividends.
If you end taxes on dividends, you create a class of people who pay no taxes on their income. Do you really believe that a trust-funder playboy who does no productive work should pay fewer taxes than you do? The wealthy have options which allow them to have some of their income come to them in dividends (some more than others, but ordinary people have almost no option in this regard).
It is true that taxing dividends skews the markets toward growth stocks. But this also skews them toward growth. Which is a good thing. They can become overly skewed toward growth, but don't blame dividend taxes. Blame investors who don't watch the fundamentals and congresscritters who chastise regulators for trying to enforce valid accounting procedures. Blame politicians who tax capital gains at a lower rate than dividends.
BTW, the IRS never allowed the misstating of income the SEC was forced to accept. So, those companies reporting outrageously overstated profits in the '90s never paid taxes on the "profits" they reported to Wall Street. (Well, "never allowed" is sort of overstating the matter. Of course, the companies never tried to overstate their profits on their tax returns.)
...idea of psychohistory: Asimov postulated that, once human populations reached sufficiently large numbers, we could use the techniques of statistical analysis to model history in much the same way statistical mechanics allow us to model thermodynamics.
In the article, Murray quotes Lord Rutherford as saying that "If you need to use statistics, then you should design a better experiment."
...almost all of Microsoft's profits over the last 20 years have been the result of accounting irregularities.
Wall Street made that money appear. They can take it away quite quickly.
The right conditions can reduce almost any financial plan to rubble. Call it "the government" or "the invisible hand of Adam Smith," almost anything you do can backfire (or can produce outrageously good results). Diversification and asset allocation are the only ways to reduce the odds of backfire, but they also reduce the odds of outrageously good results. Longer time frames tend to make it easier, not harder. An ethicist who gave seminars at Enron reports the employees who are now complaining about their lost 401(k)s were fond of just the kind of pronouncements you are posting. They thought only the government could take away their security.
They were wrong.
...the Hoover administration (in the U.S.) made two colossal errors which turned a recession/stock-crash/run-on-the-banks into a full-scale worldwide depression:
The corporations didn't have anything to do with the extra money (there was a recession, after all), but their stock prices were depressed. So, they decided to boost their share prices by announcing larger-than-expected dividends (paid primarily to rich people). Rich people behaved as rich people are likely to do in a recession: They put the money away, playing it conservatively.
Since the Bush administration has decided not to risk the chance that corporations will avoid depression-producing behavior by requiring them to pay dividends for their stockholders to receive the latest round of tax cuts, we have to ask, "Will this cause a depression?" We have to consider the possibility of at least a '90s-Japan style depression (if not a Great Depression like the '30s).
One thing which always reassured me was the fact that no one seems likely to repeat the mistakes of the Trade War of the Early '30s. Now I'm beginning to wonder if DMCA- and WIPO-style intellectual-property regimes may serve a Trade-War-like function today. Like trade wars, they spread from country to country, stifling economic growth (trade wars do it more directly, but the DMCA does it by hamstringing innovation).
We may have discovered the missing ingredient in our depression recipe.
...are belong to us.
Think about it. What is a "computing base"? I'm not sure these guys even know what they mean when they talk about Palladium, so what does it matter what they call it. Probably vapor, until they think of a DRM strategy.
The next-generation-secure-computing-base memo/PR bulletin mentions a "nexus and nexus agents." Does anyone know what this means? Do they?
BTW, the pedantic grammarian in me wants to point out that the hyphen in "next-generation secure computing base" is superfluous. "Next" is an adjective and knows perfectly well what it's supposed to modify without being told.
...a company which had GOP connections which was given taxpayer money to eliminate ineligible voters from the voting lists. They explored the possibility of getting lists of convicted felons from other states and crossing those names off the eligible voter lists in Florida. Most states balked at such a process because it was so hard to tell whether the voter was the convicted felon or just somebody with the same name. A small number of states (including Texas, with the biggest list) went along.
The company told Florida they didn't think the names should be eliminated without adequate safeguards to make sure eligible voters were not eliminated. Florida didn't want to spend the money to verify. So the names were eliminated. The affected voters didn't find out 'til Election Day.
(Note that the company demonstrated some Republicans are not as corrupt as the Bushes and their cronies.)
The 2000 election showed that Bush was out of touch with half the voters and Gore was out of touch with half the voters. Democrats were out of touch with Katherine Harris and the U.S. Supreme Court. That's why they lost.
Anyone who claims the 2000 election was some mandate for their ideas (on either side) deserves to have all their ideas treated with as much respect as the rest of this post deserves.
...Bush voters aren't as idiotic as Rush Limbaugh says they are? Who would know better?
...always leave out the mass destruction caused by the auto accidents which happened when 30,000 voters on their way to the polls simultaneously decided not to vote and pulled u-turns in the span of 5 seconds.
The truth: The networks called the Florida result before the polls closed in upstate Florida. This was a stupid mistake entirely unrelated to the bad calls made that night. It probably had a small impact on turnout that night (you have to assume it meant that lots of Bush voters totally believed the pollsters and made their decisions on voting on what the networks say; they might be stupid, but they're not that stupid). Whatever the impact, it was dwarfed by the corrupt and dishonest removal of black voters' names from the voter lists engineered by Jeb Bush and the Texas Department of Prisons.
...in three or four sentences what the academics in this paper failed to explain in several paragraphs. Short sentences, at that.
/. Perhaps I should choose a more authoritative forum.
The truth is that both of the behaviors are useful. And they are not mutually exclusive. I have proposed for some time the following compromise:
The Back button should retain its current behavior. This is an easily understood behavior which makes sense to most of us. The Alt-Left-Arrow shortcut should also be retained. When the user goes Back using either method and starts another branch by clicking on another link (or typing in a URL or using a bookmark or any other method), the entire history should be recorded (not just the current branch).
But the logical data structure to record it is not a longer stack with multiple duplicate pages in it (which seems to be the suggestion of the authors of this paper). The logical structure for such data is a tree (implemented as a hash of hashes or whatever). And the logical way of accessing other branches of the tree is by means of the Alt-Up-Arrow and Alt-Down-Arrow key combinations. In other words, Alt-Up-Arrow would take you to the previous branch of the tree. The logical position on that branch would either be the end of the branch or the same level of depth as the user's position on the current branch.
This might be a little confusing for those who use the Back button rather than the Alt-Left-Arrow. But the logical place to put the interface for them would be in the drop-down menu for histories next to the Forward and Back buttons. We know how to display trees as indented lists. We know how to condense them with plus-or-minus boxes. This would have the added benefit of helping people to understand the lists as trees, thus enabling them to better understand the Alt-Up-Arrow and Alt-Down-Arrow options.
Alt-Up-Arrow should go back to the most recent branch point and continue through the various branches starting from the most recently created branch. Repeated presses of Alt-Up-Arrow should continue to explore the branches which start from that branch point. When those are exhausted, further Alt-Up-Arrow presses would explore earlier branch points. When the user has exhausted all previous branches, further presses of Alt-Up should cycle through to the most recent branch at the most recent branch point. Alt-Down-Arrow should produce the inverse of this cycle (i.e., start with the oldest branch at the oldest branch point if Alt-Up has not been used previously).
Alt-Left-Arrow and Alt-Right-Arrow can thus be seen as moving further in and further out on the current branch. Alt-Right should choose the most recently visited branch if the current node is a branch point (mirroring its current behavior). The Back button and the Forward button should continue to duplicate this behavior.
I've suggested this before on
...for the lions and tigers they had jumping out of the screen at the audience. They shot it with circus animals which were trained to jump over a pole strung between the two cameras, which were spaced between four to six feet apart during filming.
Unfortunately, depth of field is not the only information our brains derive from stereoscopic visual data. In fact, the depth of field information is not just relative (this is closer than that, etc), it is also absolute. In other words, we can tell how far away things are. Absolute depth plus visual size gives us absolute size. In other words, if the lion looks like he's four feet away and he fills up half our vision, we know he's a big cat. Good 3D camerawork requires that the two lenses be separated by approximately the same distance as the average human eyeballs are separated.
Consequently, when Bwana Devil set up their cameras so widely spaced (so the cats could jump between them), they messed with everybody's size perceptions. The lions looked like kittens made up to look like lions. Tigers looked like painted cats. To audiences Robert Stack didn't look like Robert Stack. He looked like a Robert-Stack doll. Instead of having audiences leaving the theater saying, "Wasn't it incredible the way the lions jumped out of the screen?" they had: "Wasn't it amazing the way they made the cats look like miniature lions?" Think of it as if the audience was turned into giants whose heads were so big their eyes were five feet apart.
To my knowledge no one made use of this effect for cinematic purposes before the Honey, I Shrunk the Audience 3D show at Disney World.
...go through a period where they are overused (or just used to impress audiences). Then filmmakers begin to discover ways to use the new technology cinematically to better tell a story. That's when the new technology really takes off.
Hitchcock considered 3D to be a gimmick, but was forced by the studio to use it in Dial M for Murder. In spite of this, this was the movie which moved 3D into the cinematic. Hitchcock tried to improve the storytelling with 3D in three scenes:
The first two worked; the third didn't. Hitchcocks seems to have realized that we not only figure out where other things are (in a 3D environment) using our stereoscopic vision, but also where we are. He also seems to have understood that we are not afraid for ourselves in the movies, but for characters we care about but are helpless to help. (Other 3D filmmakers have never seemed to learn this and are constantly firing flaming arrows - or something - out of the screen at us.) He shot the phone call so it feels like we are standing close enough to interfere. And he shot the desk scene so it looks like she's reaching out to us for help. Just as we see the scissors, her hand finds them. It almost feels like we have put them in her hand.
The phone call works in both 3D and 2D. The desk scene looks strange in 2D, but works in 3D. The courtroom scene doesn't work either way.
...for a children's movie?
This was a classic movie-for-kids that Disney has been marketing well for decades. They knew fully well it should not have been released in the art houses. When I saw it there wasn't a single child in the audience.
The dub was great. They re-synched the mouths to the English words. Could have been a breakthrough movie for Disney. They screwed it up and promoted the heck out of "Lilo and Stitch," a stinker based on "The Ugly Duckling" with five good jokes.
I just hope "Treasure Planet" is as good as it looks, not as bad as these morons keep trying to make their movies.
My protest: I'm going to see "Solaris" instead of "Treasure Planet" today.
...who are afraid of commitment so they only fall in love with gay guys?