Software is, if it doesn't suck ass, functional. Ergo, it ain't high art. And no, what nerds consider to be unspeakably cool does not constitute high art.
At best, that's a disingenuous statistic. When we hear about someone making twenty bucks a week in Calcutta, we forget that the cost of living is concomitantly lower there. A dollar here ain't worth much. A dollar in Calcutta will support someone in a nontrivial manner.
Hell, think about a job making $50k a year in Nowhere, Flyover State versus the same job in the Bay Area. You can live like a king in a small town for what a shoebox in Manhattan costs.
Are you sure it's history and not political science? To be sure, the latter touches on the former a great deal, but they're not equivalent. Maybe it depends on the university.
If you've ever seen a sociology (or literary criticism) journal, then "Fibonacci-based fractal waves of human social behavior" looks like plain English. ("Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", anyone?)
Funny how sociologists write about how scientists use jargon to create a cult-like atmosphere impenetrable to outsiders while doing so themselves.
And how exactly is sociology a science? What theories does it have, and what predictions has it made that have come true?
Red herring? GM food is terribly expensive to develop. No one's going to release it out of the goodness of their hearts. Ergo, IP issues are inextricably tied to the use of GM food, as the multinational corps that created them have to make a profit on all their hard work.
My complaint, of course, is about IP laws and what looks to be a scummy gambit by Monsanto to make a large portion of the Third World entirely dependent on them, if not for the air they breathe, then at least for the staple foods they eat.
GM foods in general are another issue, one which I'm in no way qualified to discuss.
(3) Knuth doesn't use the internet any more (except to occasionally update his website). He's holed up in an undisclosed location working on TAoCP Volume 4. He has grad students slip him errata emails through a slot under the door, and that's about it.
(2) The text in this comment, as well as that in your userinfo, is cut-and-pasted from Knuth's website.
(1) Donald Knuth has never, to my knowledge, used LaTeX. All of his papers, preprints and books use his own homebrewed set of macros.
Besides which, the comment doesn't actually say anything. Dude, get your own handle. It's only cute to be an impostor if the imposted party actually has an account here.
Are there conceivable benefits? Sure. Is it worth having a single multinational owning---in what sense, exactly, is the rice grown owned by Monsanto? I'm not exactly clear on this---the food stock of an impoverished nation, capable of threatening famine to beat another few bucks out of the country.
Where did you get the idea that Heinlein ever had tuberculosis? He had a debilitating stroke, but surgery helped him to recover until he finally died in 1988 of heart failure on a Sunday.
Some of his work was fuzzy and incomprehensible while he was recovering from his stroke, but he was just as bright and lucid in his waning years as he had been earlier... that is, if you can stand what a dirty old man he was...
What will everyone do when 3/4 of the world is no longer struggling to obtain the basic needs in life?
You know, people keep asking that, and we still have vast misery, poverty and hunger in this world. I think we'll deal with the problem of arbitrary abundance when we get to it.
On the other hand, for someone in this county, food, shelter and clothing can be taken care of by someone working minimum wage. If you make an order of magnitude more than that, you spend it on gadgetry, larger versions of everything that wage-slave owns, entertainment of various sorts and broadband.
Oh, and big SUVs.
Don't fool yourself; we will always have a way to set the haves apart from the have-nots.
To be fair, you probably don't hear the readers of Wired saying much of anything, since a magazine is by nature a one-direction medium. Letters to the editor notwithstanding, that is.
Y'know, I think Berke Breathed was the last person to really have an ensemble strip. Usually the rule of thumb is to have no more than five regular characters, but he had Bill, Opus, Steve Dallas, Milo Bloom, Binkley, Oliver, Portnoy...
It's kind of sad he's not doing a daily, though I suppose it'd be a lot of pressure for a postage-stamp strip. I miss the biting satire and such...
Senate Committee Woman 1: Well, Mr Dallas... we've heard your smut masquerading as songs and we've also heard how teen prostitution, pregnancy, drug use, cults, runaways, suicide and poor hygiene are sweeping this nation. We though you might like to share with the committee any particular CAUSES you might see for those latter problems. Steve Dallas: I dunno. Maybe the proliferation of narrow, suffocating zealotry masquerading as PARENTING in this country. Senate Committee Woman 1: Off with his head! Senate Committee Woman 2: We can't DO that, Tippy...
*snrrfle* I hope he bitch-slaps the stupid and avaricious. His style of satire somehow seems clearer, more biting and funnier than Boondocks. Though Non Sequitur is the best thing left on the page, and it tends to do rather well.
Goddamn it, Alan Moore must have seen what Hollywood did to his work last time (with LXG). Maybe he'll retain creative control and keep it from sucking. Or maybe it'll chow ass like the last one.
The terrible truth is: we won, and it's a pyrrhic victory. Foundation magazine in England said, look around. The movies that have been the biggest money-makers in the last 15 or 20 years have all been fantasy and science fiction. The best parts of science fiction and fantasy have all been subsumed into contemporary fiction. We won, in that respect. But all the crap is now called sci-fi? -- Battlestar Galaxative, Independence Day, and all these dumb movies. (But then, movies are almost always dumb.) I suppose it's like catching a downfield pass for 75 yards and running into the end zone which is at the lip of an abyss, and as you make the touchdown, you fall over and go directly to the innermost circle of Hell and burn forever.
Yes, it said "Battlestar Galaxitive". From A HREF="http://www.locusmag.com/2001/Issue07/Ellison.html">this page.
Why use open source as a medical record system? Why use the open source model? As one of the replying pundits put it "move out of mom's house and get a real job".
The reason for using open source software is that it is indeed a collaborative effort. For those of you that think that this is one setup shopping, its time to look at the serious projects that have made some inroads and continue to develop.
The business model for open source, indeed for those of us who remember a time before the internet (yes there WAS that time), when software started to be packaged with machines. Why, one might ask should one pay for software when it comes for free? Today $450 but tomrrow it's packaged. For those of us who watched carefully we knew that the real money to be made in the world of software would be in support and support applications. To a certain extent those who continue with proprietary and exculsionary sorts of software may well find themselves moved over because of freely available and very robust software.
The advance of linux and linux clones is such an example of the incursion of open source software. Free? Hardly. Freely available? Always.
From a standpoint of software design and development, the open source model gives those of us who wish not to be constantly hit up for nickles and dimes... actually the SCO model for those of you who remember SCO in its heyday before barritry became popular... a place to find some security. More important is that from a physician standpoint what could be better than CQI, continuous quality improvement. The open source channel makes that not only possible, but nearly mandatory.
So, those of you who have regarded the only path to enlightenment that of the Gates family or Big Blue, look again at some of the companies doing open source development.
As for the question about grant seeking; The FreeMED Software Foundation is seeking grants to employ coders and others to better the software. Since the Foundation is a non profit, seeking the development, promulgation and distribution of opensource software, people who are motivated to see better software development can contribute to the making of better software. In a way, donated dollars dictate direction.
There is much more about the open source movement and the intellectual freedoms that such development permits. Check them out. Check out the FreeMED Software Foundation (www.freemedsoftware.com) or the open source news list at LinuxMedNews (www.linnuxmednews.org).
Freely Submitted:
Irving J. Buchbinder aka DrGnu FreeMED Software Foundation
You know, the $150k/song figure is really just a cap. That's right, it's an upper bound on the amount that can be awarded by a judge for that particular kind of civil suit. It means that they can't seek more than that in "actual damages".
If this were a sane legal system, attempts to penalize Vanessa the N'sync fan with the same kind of penalties that Julius the mass-producer of pirated CDs would get would be laughed out of the courtroom. But then again, it's not a sane legal system. Fooey.
I think that's what they said, actually. It made no bloody sense to me. I'm pretty sure they didn't key into rooms and attempt to patch the machines. But then again, what's the point in unplugging the machines if the user can plug a crapflooding box right back into the network?
Maybe the whole thing is some sort of dastardly cover-up. I dunno.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure he's just spending the year dead for tax reasons.
--grendel drago
Software is, if it doesn't suck ass, functional. Ergo, it ain't high art. And no, what nerds consider to be unspeakably cool does not constitute high art.
--grendel drago
At best, that's a disingenuous statistic. When we hear about someone making twenty bucks a week in Calcutta, we forget that the cost of living is concomitantly lower there. A dollar here ain't worth much. A dollar in Calcutta will support someone in a nontrivial manner.
Hell, think about a job making $50k a year in Nowhere, Flyover State versus the same job in the Bay Area. You can live like a king in a small town for what a shoebox in Manhattan costs.
--grendel drago
Are you sure it's history and not political science? To be sure, the latter touches on the former a great deal, but they're not equivalent. Maybe it depends on the university.
--grendel drago
If you've ever seen a sociology (or literary criticism) journal, then "Fibonacci-based fractal waves of human social behavior" looks like plain English. ("Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", anyone?)
Funny how sociologists write about how scientists use jargon to create a cult-like atmosphere impenetrable to outsiders while doing so themselves.
And how exactly is sociology a science? What theories does it have, and what predictions has it made that have come true?
--grendel drago
Red herring? GM food is terribly expensive to develop. No one's going to release it out of the goodness of their hearts. Ergo, IP issues are inextricably tied to the use of GM food, as the multinational corps that created them have to make a profit on all their hard work.
My complaint, of course, is about IP laws and what looks to be a scummy gambit by Monsanto to make a large portion of the Third World entirely dependent on them, if not for the air they breathe, then at least for the staple foods they eat.
GM foods in general are another issue, one which I'm in no way qualified to discuss.
--grendel drago
Top three reasons you're not Donald Knuth:
(3) Knuth doesn't use the internet any more (except to occasionally update his website). He's holed up in an undisclosed location working on TAoCP Volume 4. He has grad students slip him errata emails through a slot under the door, and that's about it.
(2) The text in this comment, as well as that in your userinfo, is cut-and-pasted from Knuth's website.
(1) Donald Knuth has never, to my knowledge, used LaTeX. All of his papers, preprints and books use his own homebrewed set of macros.
Besides which, the comment doesn't actually say anything. Dude, get your own handle. It's only cute to be an impostor if the imposted party actually has an account here.
--grendel drago
The third world needs patents on its food supply like a moose needs a hatrack.
Are there conceivable benefits? Sure. Is it worth having a single multinational owning---in what sense, exactly, is the rice grown owned by Monsanto? I'm not exactly clear on this---the food stock of an impoverished nation, capable of threatening famine to beat another few bucks out of the country.
--grendel drago
I would slit my butt-cheeks with a razor-blade and sit in a bowl of rum before I would recommend using it for UI app
Thank you. That's going in my quotefile.
--grendel drago
So... what are Vernor Vinge, Iain M. Banks and Neal Stephenson producing vague imitations of that was cutting-edge in the 1940s and 1950s?
--grendel drago
Bah. Shows what I get for posting quickly and angrily. Heinlein did have TB; it caused him to get booted from the Navy in the mid-1930s.
--grendel drago
Where did you get the idea that Heinlein ever had tuberculosis? He had a debilitating stroke, but surgery helped him to recover until he finally died in 1988 of heart failure on a Sunday.
Some of his work was fuzzy and incomprehensible while he was recovering from his stroke, but he was just as bright and lucid in his waning years as he had been earlier... that is, if you can stand what a dirty old man he was...
--grendel drago
What will everyone do when 3/4 of the world is no longer struggling to obtain the basic needs in life?
You know, people keep asking that, and we still have vast misery, poverty and hunger in this world. I think we'll deal with the problem of arbitrary abundance when we get to it.
On the other hand, for someone in this county, food, shelter and clothing can be taken care of by someone working minimum wage. If you make an order of magnitude more than that, you spend it on gadgetry, larger versions of everything that wage-slave owns, entertainment of various sorts and broadband.
Oh, and big SUVs.
Don't fool yourself; we will always have a way to set the haves apart from the have-nots.
--grendel drago
To be fair, you probably don't hear the readers of Wired saying much of anything, since a magazine is by nature a one-direction medium. Letters to the editor notwithstanding, that is.
--grendel drago
Damn fine article. Thanks!
--grendel drago
Amen! I miss Milo Bloom more than Bill or Opus.
Y'know, I think Berke Breathed was the last person to really have an ensemble strip. Usually the rule of thumb is to have no more than five regular characters, but he had Bill, Opus, Steve Dallas, Milo Bloom, Binkley, Oliver, Portnoy...
It's kind of sad he's not doing a daily, though I suppose it'd be a lot of pressure for a postage-stamp strip. I miss the biting satire and such...
Senate Committee Woman 1: Well, Mr Dallas... we've heard your smut masquerading as songs and
we've also heard how teen prostitution, pregnancy, drug use, cults, runaways,
suicide and poor hygiene are sweeping this nation. We though you might like to
share with the committee any particular CAUSES you might see for those latter
problems.
Steve Dallas: I dunno. Maybe the proliferation of narrow, suffocating zealotry
masquerading as PARENTING in this country.
Senate Committee Woman 1: Off with his head!
Senate Committee Woman 2: We can't DO that, Tippy...
*snrrfle* I hope he bitch-slaps the stupid and avaricious. His style of satire somehow seems clearer, more biting and funnier than Boondocks. Though Non Sequitur is the best thing left on the page, and it tends to do rather well.
--grendel drago
Goddamn it, Alan Moore must have seen what Hollywood did to his work last time (with LXG). Maybe he'll retain creative control and keep it from sucking. Or maybe it'll chow ass like the last one.
--grendel drago
I didn't know there were any Alyson Hannigan nude scenes! Gimme gimme!
Guh. I should know better than to fail to preview at eight in the morning.
The page is here.
--grendel drago
The terrible truth is: we won, and it's a pyrrhic victory. Foundation magazine in England said, look around. The movies that have been the biggest money-makers in the last 15 or 20 years have all been fantasy and science fiction. The best parts of science fiction and fantasy have all been subsumed into contemporary fiction. We won, in that respect. But all the crap is now called sci-fi? -- Battlestar Galaxative, Independence Day, and all these dumb movies. (But then, movies are almost always dumb.) I suppose it's like catching a downfield pass for 75 yards and running into the end zone which is at the lip of an abyss, and as you make the touchdown, you fall over and go directly to the innermost circle of Hell and burn forever.
n .html">this page.
Yes, it said "Battlestar Galaxitive". From A HREF="http://www.locusmag.com/2001/Issue07/Elliso
--grendel drago
Why use open source as a medical record system? Why use the open source model? As one of the replying pundits put it "move out of mom's house and get a real job".
... actually the SCO model for those of you who remember SCO in its heyday before barritry became popular ... a place to find some security. More important is that from a physician standpoint what could be better than CQI, continuous quality improvement. The open source channel makes that not only possible, but nearly mandatory.
The reason for using open source software is that it is indeed a collaborative effort. For those of you that think that this is one setup shopping, its time to look at the serious projects that have made some inroads and continue to develop.
The business model for open source, indeed for those of us who remember a time before the internet (yes there WAS that time), when software started to be packaged with machines. Why, one might ask should one pay for software when it comes for free? Today $450 but tomrrow it's packaged. For those of us who watched carefully we knew that the real money to be made in the world of software would be in support and support applications. To a certain extent those who continue with proprietary and exculsionary sorts of software may well find themselves moved over because of freely available and very robust software.
The advance of linux and linux clones is such an example of the incursion of open source software. Free? Hardly. Freely available? Always.
From a standpoint of software design and development, the open source model gives those of us who wish not to be constantly hit up for nickles and dimes
So, those of you who have regarded the only path to enlightenment that of the Gates family or Big Blue, look again at some of the companies doing open source development.
As for the question about grant seeking; The FreeMED Software Foundation is seeking grants to employ coders and others to better the software. Since the Foundation is a non profit, seeking the development, promulgation and distribution of opensource software, people who are motivated to see better software development can contribute to the making of better software. In a way, donated dollars dictate direction.
There is much more about the open source movement and the intellectual freedoms that such development permits. Check them out. Check out the FreeMED Software Foundation (www.freemedsoftware.com) or the open source news list at LinuxMedNews (www.linnuxmednews.org).
Freely Submitted:
Irving J. Buchbinder aka DrGnu
FreeMED Software Foundation
I think it was Harlan Ellison, but I can't back that up.
You know, the $150k/song figure is really just a cap. That's right, it's an upper bound on the amount that can be awarded by a judge for that particular kind of civil suit. It means that they can't seek more than that in "actual damages".
If this were a sane legal system, attempts to penalize Vanessa the N'sync fan with the same kind of penalties that Julius the mass-producer of pirated CDs would get would be laughed out of the courtroom. But then again, it's not a sane legal system. Fooey.
--grendel drago
I think that's what they said, actually. It made no bloody sense to me. I'm pretty sure they didn't key into rooms and attempt to patch the machines. But then again, what's the point in unplugging the machines if the user can plug a crapflooding box right back into the network?
Maybe the whole thing is some sort of dastardly cover-up. I dunno.
--grendel drago
No, he's talking about episode 3x09, "The Wish". The one with evil vampire Xander.
*snif* I miss the series the way it used to be. Too bad the animated version got axed.
--grendel drago