I'm reading a great book that addresses this. Julian Jaynes' book entitled, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind works through a lot of examples to prove that nearly all human activities are done in the absence of conscious thought. The general theory he puts forth in the book is that human consciousness only happened 3,000-3,500 years ago. He suggests that before this change (over a great deal of time, not instantly) humans had split minds where one half would communicate it's type of information to the other half via auditory and visual hallucinations. To support his theories he uses early written language examples which lack the concept of free will, let alone will at all. He argues that it was much more than just a literary device, but was in fact an accurate representation of human thinking in that time.
Nice attempt. Subtle even. Still... there is no more Clippy. I just like to beat people over the head with the mistakes of Microsoft. I don't touch Windows if I can help it.
Was: "Researchers Create an Automatic Backup Band for Singers" Correct Version: "Researchers Create a BAD Automatic Backup Band for BAD Singers"
OK. That was silly of me. But, I do have to say that if all music in the future was created like this, I'd probably stab myself in the ears. It's early in this game though... I suspect that once the concepts of the software are ironed out, the addition of more interesting chord progressions will happen. I'm still wondering how real musicians would wind up finding any use for this?
I've been using computer based music sequencers since the mid 80s and I think the last thing any real musician wants to see is "Microsoft Composer". I can see it now, instead of Clippy, they'll have "Wolfy" which will be a horrid caricature of Mozart appear every time you start to create a song:
1. You make something using minor 7ths and 9ths and Wolfy shows up, "I see you're writing an 'unhappy' song, would you like to make your song happy"? 2. You start sequencing something very abstract and atonal and this is the way you've worked on music for nearly three decades, up pops Wolfy, "It looks like you're having trouble getting started, would you like me to show you how to do a basic major C chord progression"? 3. You start inputing some heavy polyrhythms, and Wolfy butts in again, "Your song appears to be too rhythmically different, do you need help with a standard 4/4 beat"?
Ugh... more and more reduction to the lowest common denominator. Back in high school a friend and I came to the conclusion that all highly popular music would eventually be one note surrounded by 4/4 beats and grunts for lyrics. This software certainly seems to be taking things in that direction.
...to FOLLOW THE FUCKING SPEED LIMIT GODDAMMIT! If you go over the speed limit, you deserve the ticket. And I don't want to hear all the lame justifications like "revenue generation" and "unreasonable speed limits". If it says drive 25 MPH, then fucking DO IT! It's not like driving 25 MPH is going to kill you now is it? And if you say that it will make you late getting to your destination, you should have accounted for that when you left and left a little earlier! God, it amazes me how people try and weasel out of REAL personal responsibility where they actually have control over something. But as soon as there is some poor soul with real problems like poverty or HIV who really needs help, those same people are saying, "She should have been personally responsible and not been born into a poor family". Or... "Serves him right for being born with the wrong gender preference" regarding HIV.
I'm trapped in the middle. I have the brain and I also have the artistic skill to make music, take a good photograph, make a good film, etc... I suspect that there are actually a lot of "whole brained" people in engineering. But we can't have those people making everyone else look bad, can we? (I jest)
Just finished reading it. The article is not talking about the technology side of things. It's talking about the business end. Since that's not of any interest to me and it's completely irrelevant when evaluating the quality of a product the article is pointless. Personally, I evaluate businesses and products by their willingness to make life better for their users. That means not just paying attention to the mainstream users who have typical habits, but paying just as much attention to the oddballs who have unusual expectations from the product. Apple and Google are good at that. This is one area where Microsoft fails miserably. They only seem to focus on the mainstream users.
The fact that they singled out "hobbyists" as an undesirable group of consumers sent a strong message that they don't care about anything but making the most money. That's all well and good, but they should then not be surprised when the users who are ignored defect to other products or free alternatives. There is no reason to remain a captive consumer when there are options. If Microsoft really wanted people like me back as customers, they'd pay attention to things like: video, audio and music production and improve the subsystems in the OS to make those uses more palatable. They'd create new licensing schemes that allow more proliferation of their software at a reasonable price. Assuming that there was decent software on the Windows platform for my needs, I'd easily run multiple copies of Windows if I knew that I could go back to them and pay $20 per extra installation for a legit license. They'd also make licenses easily transferable between machines since I tend to shift my apps and OS between machines as needs dictate (easily accomplished with Linux).
So while the article focuses on the business end, that's not really what drives the users to love or hate a business. Apple users are catered to by Apple. The day that Apple stops allowing their users to do things they've been used to doing, is the day that Apple will become the "bad guy". The same applies to Google. The day that Google offers a better search but decides to charge for it, or they reign in their GMail space, or they lose a bunch of user data and say "oh well" (a lot like Microsoft does with Hotmail), is when Google will fall from it's throne. Nothing about their profits drives the end users at all.
...I haven't read the article just yet. But, I've personally NEVER liked Bill Gates or Microsoft's products. I was an Atari ST user from 1988 to 1994. Then when I graduated from college, I couldn't afford a Mac, so I bought a PC and went with DOS/Win 3.1. It sucked ass. Windows 95 was a slight improvement but I grew tired of the unstable and backwards nature of Windows so I moved to Linux. Other than a handful of key applications that only ran on Windows (and the fact that I still can't afford a decent Mac) I was nearly 100% Windows free. Those key applications have now been replaced with good alternatives that run on Linux and now I have no need of Windows other than the occasional virtual machine session to run iTunes. I've never looked back. In my opinion, Bill Gates and Microsoft suffered one fatal flaw: they were never original or well intentioned. They still aren't.
...why is it that people are concerned with this sort of thing? Doesn't anyone see a problem that a lot of what we do as a society appears to be driven by sales? Especially when there's no real money to back up the sales? I would think that if we were a healthy society, we would encourage technologies that empower the citizens to make the best choices for themselves. Technology should be here to make the world better for everyone, not to make money for a select few.
...and will cost $500 to get in your grubby paws. That is until the amazing powers of supply and demand take effect and the price drops over an unjustifiable period of time. The demand for 5G wireless will be huge...
If you use Linux, it means nothing to you (unless you run WINE or a Windows virtual machine). I always wipe the HDs I use. And I only buy media devices that I know will work with Linux.
-- Linux on the desktop has been a reality for me since 1997
1. DRM Free and copyright/license/royalty free digital music format (Ogg Vorbis) 2. The built in convenience of being able to convert your DVD to a playable image file via a network 3. Easy export of almost any device except RAM to the network (Think X for displays, Pulse audio for sound, Sane for scanners, Xen for live migration of virtual machines) 4. Easy to hack OS (can't easily hack Mac OS X to do your bidding at all levels if you're not a coder) if you're not a coder
But, I'll also say my needs are not mainstream. I have a luxurious system completely comprised of Linux boxes at home that do so many things you just can't do in Windows or on Mac OS X. With all that, said, I'll say that Mac OS X is nice. It just doesn't work for me on a few levels.
Everyone knows that the last time there was some kind of reversal of polls on the Earth, the entire world lost electrical power for thousands of years and the whole planet was shattered into pieces!! We're lucky that gravity pulled it all together again and that electricity was discovered by Thomas Jefferson a few hundred years later. I think this is a sign of the creator's anger because we're all talking about man having come from monkeys instead of the real truth of Intelligent Design. It's a warning. If we don't get evolution theories out of the schools and replaced with science fact soon, he'll make more reversed spots on the sun and it will shatter into pieces. I don't think we'll survive that this time.
Interesting that a lot of these dreams seem to be focused on some kind of conflagration or strife. Here are a few snapshots of various dreams I've had over the years that I consider to be peaks into alternate realities along with the time frame in which I had the dreams:
1. 1992: A world where everyone was in a simulation that was created to protect our minds from the reality that our planet was literally decaying into chunks and there was nothing that could be done to save everyone. So those left behind were thrown into simulation machines that made us think that everything was normal and business as usual as the planet broke up over years. I happened to be in a simulation array that was near a fault line and was jarred awake and started prowling around the abandoned city. There was more than just me too... I found my wife, but she didn't recognize me outside of the simulation and we were caught by guards who were supposed to take us to the next available set of simulation bays. I knew that I would have my memories wiped of my life with my family. I wasn't going to let it happen and tried to take things into my own hands...
2. 1999-ish: My wife and I came back from a night out but I was still feeling a bit peckish. I told her I was going out for a snack and would be in a little later. She smiled and said OK as she went into our house. I then dropped forward onto my belly and face and slithered into the grassy field behind the parking area. I caught a rabbit and ate it whole. I then stood up, retracted my fangs and wiped the blood off of my face. I was a little annoyed that I'd chipped a tooth during the outing.
3. 1989: I was in my old bedroom in my parent's house but it looked wrong. There was more furniture in it than I normally have (I'm a minimalist) and the time period looked like a strange cross between World War II era and the 80s. There was a personal computer in my room but it had a steel case that enveloped the monitor and computer and was built as part of the desk. Think of the old 40s/50s teacher's desks to get a mental image. The ones with the rounded corners everywhere. The computer was the same design. There was also a photo of me and my girlfriend (no one I really knew). I was in uniform and it seemed like it was war time. I wasn't really in the room but was more observing the room. I could tell that I was apparently dead and had been killed in the war. I then went out into the city and saw lots of mixes of 40s and 80s style cars, clothes and street scenes.
4. 1970s (these dreams were a serial that lasted from 1974-1988). They started with me being a young child around three or four and being in a hiding spot to hide from soldiers of some kind (very Nazi looking). My parents (different from my real parents) had been killed and I was scared. Hiding in the closet. A young woman with black hair and black leather clothing ran into the closet, grabbed me and took off out of the back of the house with me. She then hopped onto a motor cycle and rode through the country side. Each time I rejoined her in the dreams we were either running away from someone, or trying to plant bombs to fight the oppressors, or she was teaching me math and language (not english and very unrecognizable characters). As I got older I grew attracted to her and the feeling became mutual (I won't "go there"). Eventually she died while we were trying to escape from our latest resistance fighting. I wasn't able to go back for her and she always told me to never sacrifice myself for anyone but the greater good which was to defeat our oppressors. I remember in the last dream that there was a wall around a city that we were trying to destroy. There was some kind of sign on one part of it in blue neon lighting. Again, it was in that strange language.
5. Early 90s: The most interesting (in my opinion) was one where I had just left a university setting that seemed like a mixture of Victorian styles with some modern electrical devices here and there (like telephones). I walked
The aborigines of Australia have got it right. Dreams are reality. Just in a different universe. Once I got that straight, it really explained why all of my dreams are so whacked and have nothing to do with real life. When you dream, you're experiencing life in a different parallel world. Simple as that. (cough)
Xmms gave way to Audacious. Which is pretty much XMMS with good layer of updates. However, I long left XMMS for Totem (Gnome's default media player) for audio and have always been a Xine fan for everything else.
Hmmm... not sure I agree with you on objects. It seems to me that it takes a LOT more work to create an object and for little return. Whereas data and a function that can be applied to it are as simple as you can get. Any takers?
Who the fuck with a brain buys ringtones? Just drop a needle, take a sample and shuttle it off to your phone via USB... Jesus the RIAA are a bunch of fuckin' morons.
I think that's exactly it. Frankly I didn't like South Park when it started and I still don't. I wanted to because Beavis and Butthead (which I thought was the pinnacle of parody) had just ended at the time. But South Park just didn't work. I think part of it is that the creators have a libertarian bent which seems to creep out in their work.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm reading a great book that addresses this. Julian Jaynes' book entitled, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind works through a lot of examples to prove that nearly all human activities are done in the absence of conscious thought. The general theory he puts forth in the book is that human consciousness only happened 3,000-3,500 years ago. He suggests that before this change (over a great deal of time, not instantly) humans had split minds where one half would communicate it's type of information to the other half via auditory and visual hallucinations. To support his theories he uses early written language examples which lack the concept of free will, let alone will at all. He argues that it was much more than just a literary device, but was in fact an accurate representation of human thinking in that time.
...Those were perfectly usable housing for the downtrodden masses of the declining United States.
Nice attempt. Subtle even. Still... there is no more Clippy. I just like to beat people over the head with the mistakes of Microsoft. I don't touch Windows if I can help it.
Was: "Researchers Create an Automatic Backup Band for Singers"
Correct Version: "Researchers Create a BAD Automatic Backup Band for BAD Singers"
OK. That was silly of me. But, I do have to say that if all music in the future was created like this, I'd probably stab myself in the ears. It's early in this game though... I suspect that once the concepts of the software are ironed out, the addition of more interesting chord progressions will happen. I'm still wondering how real musicians would wind up finding any use for this?
I've been using computer based music sequencers since the mid 80s and I think the last thing any real musician wants to see is "Microsoft Composer". I can see it now, instead of Clippy, they'll have "Wolfy" which will be a horrid caricature of Mozart appear every time you start to create a song:
1. You make something using minor 7ths and 9ths and Wolfy shows up, "I see you're writing an 'unhappy' song, would you like to make your song happy"?
2. You start sequencing something very abstract and atonal and this is the way you've worked on music for nearly three decades, up pops Wolfy, "It looks like you're having trouble getting started, would you like me to show you how to do a basic major C chord progression"?
3. You start inputing some heavy polyrhythms, and Wolfy butts in again, "Your song appears to be too rhythmically different, do you need help with a standard 4/4 beat"?
Ugh... more and more reduction to the lowest common denominator. Back in high school a friend and I came to the conclusion that all highly popular music would eventually be one note surrounded by 4/4 beats and grunts for lyrics. This software certainly seems to be taking things in that direction.
I keed I keed.
...to FOLLOW THE FUCKING SPEED LIMIT GODDAMMIT! If you go over the speed limit, you deserve the ticket. And I don't want to hear all the lame justifications like "revenue generation" and "unreasonable speed limits". If it says drive 25 MPH, then fucking DO IT! It's not like driving 25 MPH is going to kill you now is it? And if you say that it will make you late getting to your destination, you should have accounted for that when you left and left a little earlier! God, it amazes me how people try and weasel out of REAL personal responsibility where they actually have control over something. But as soon as there is some poor soul with real problems like poverty or HIV who really needs help, those same people are saying, "She should have been personally responsible and not been born into a poor family". Or... "Serves him right for being born with the wrong gender preference" regarding HIV.
I'm trapped in the middle. I have the brain and I also have the artistic skill to make music, take a good photograph, make a good film, etc... I suspect that there are actually a lot of "whole brained" people in engineering. But we can't have those people making everyone else look bad, can we? (I jest)
Just finished reading it. The article is not talking about the technology side of things. It's talking about the business end. Since that's not of any interest to me and it's completely irrelevant when evaluating the quality of a product the article is pointless. Personally, I evaluate businesses and products by their willingness to make life better for their users. That means not just paying attention to the mainstream users who have typical habits, but paying just as much attention to the oddballs who have unusual expectations from the product. Apple and Google are good at that. This is one area where Microsoft fails miserably. They only seem to focus on the mainstream users.
The fact that they singled out "hobbyists" as an undesirable group of consumers sent a strong message that they don't care about anything but making the most money. That's all well and good, but they should then not be surprised when the users who are ignored defect to other products or free alternatives. There is no reason to remain a captive consumer when there are options. If Microsoft really wanted people like me back as customers, they'd pay attention to things like: video, audio and music production and improve the subsystems in the OS to make those uses more palatable. They'd create new licensing schemes that allow more proliferation of their software at a reasonable price. Assuming that there was decent software on the Windows platform for my needs, I'd easily run multiple copies of Windows if I knew that I could go back to them and pay $20 per extra installation for a legit license. They'd also make licenses easily transferable between machines since I tend to shift my apps and OS between machines as needs dictate (easily accomplished with Linux).
So while the article focuses on the business end, that's not really what drives the users to love or hate a business. Apple users are catered to by Apple. The day that Apple stops allowing their users to do things they've been used to doing, is the day that Apple will become the "bad guy". The same applies to Google. The day that Google offers a better search but decides to charge for it, or they reign in their GMail space, or they lose a bunch of user data and say "oh well" (a lot like Microsoft does with Hotmail), is when Google will fall from it's throne. Nothing about their profits drives the end users at all.
...I haven't read the article just yet. But, I've personally NEVER liked Bill Gates or Microsoft's products. I was an Atari ST user from 1988 to 1994. Then when I graduated from college, I couldn't afford a Mac, so I bought a PC and went with DOS/Win 3.1. It sucked ass. Windows 95 was a slight improvement but I grew tired of the unstable and backwards nature of Windows so I moved to Linux. Other than a handful of key applications that only ran on Windows (and the fact that I still can't afford a decent Mac) I was nearly 100% Windows free. Those key applications have now been replaced with good alternatives that run on Linux and now I have no need of Windows other than the occasional virtual machine session to run iTunes. I've never looked back. In my opinion, Bill Gates and Microsoft suffered one fatal flaw: they were never original or well intentioned. They still aren't.
...why is it that people are concerned with this sort of thing? Doesn't anyone see a problem that a lot of what we do as a society appears to be driven by sales? Especially when there's no real money to back up the sales? I would think that if we were a healthy society, we would encourage technologies that empower the citizens to make the best choices for themselves. Technology should be here to make the world better for everyone, not to make money for a select few.
...and will cost $500 to get in your grubby paws. That is until the amazing powers of supply and demand take effect and the price drops over an unjustifiable period of time. The demand for 5G wireless will be huge...
...a $699 fee per mention of the word Linux? You cocksmoking teabaggers.
If you use Linux, it means nothing to you (unless you run WINE or a Windows virtual machine). I always wipe the HDs I use. And I only buy media devices that I know will work with Linux.
--
Linux on the desktop has been a reality for me since 1997
1. DRM Free and copyright/license/royalty free digital music format (Ogg Vorbis)
2. The built in convenience of being able to convert your DVD to a playable image file via a network
3. Easy export of almost any device except RAM to the network (Think X for displays, Pulse audio for sound, Sane for scanners, Xen for live migration of virtual machines)
4. Easy to hack OS (can't easily hack Mac OS X to do your bidding at all levels if you're not a coder) if you're not a coder
But, I'll also say my needs are not mainstream. I have a luxurious system completely comprised of Linux boxes at home that do so many things you just can't do in Windows or on Mac OS X. With all that, said, I'll say that Mac OS X is nice. It just doesn't work for me on a few levels.
Everyone knows that the last time there was some kind of reversal of polls on the Earth, the entire world lost electrical power for thousands of years and the whole planet was shattered into pieces!! We're lucky that gravity pulled it all together again and that electricity was discovered by Thomas Jefferson a few hundred years later. I think this is a sign of the creator's anger because we're all talking about man having come from monkeys instead of the real truth of Intelligent Design. It's a warning. If we don't get evolution theories out of the schools and replaced with science fact soon, he'll make more reversed spots on the sun and it will shatter into pieces. I don't think we'll survive that this time.
Interesting that a lot of these dreams seem to be focused on some kind of conflagration or strife. Here are a few snapshots of various dreams I've had over the years that I consider to be peaks into alternate realities along with the time frame in which I had the dreams:
1. 1992: A world where everyone was in a simulation that was created to protect our minds from the reality that our planet was literally decaying into chunks and there was nothing that could be done to save everyone. So those left behind were thrown into simulation machines that made us think that everything was normal and business as usual as the planet broke up over years. I happened to be in a simulation array that was near a fault line and was jarred awake and started prowling around the abandoned city. There was more than just me too... I found my wife, but she didn't recognize me outside of the simulation and we were caught by guards who were supposed to take us to the next available set of simulation bays. I knew that I would have my memories wiped of my life with my family. I wasn't going to let it happen and tried to take things into my own hands...
2. 1999-ish: My wife and I came back from a night out but I was still feeling a bit peckish. I told her I was going out for a snack and would be in a little later. She smiled and said OK as she went into our house. I then dropped forward onto my belly and face and slithered into the grassy field behind the parking area. I caught a rabbit and ate it whole. I then stood up, retracted my fangs and wiped the blood off of my face. I was a little annoyed that I'd chipped a tooth during the outing.
3. 1989: I was in my old bedroom in my parent's house but it looked wrong. There was more furniture in it than I normally have (I'm a minimalist) and the time period looked like a strange cross between World War II era and the 80s. There was a personal computer in my room but it had a steel case that enveloped the monitor and computer and was built as part of the desk. Think of the old 40s/50s teacher's desks to get a mental image. The ones with the rounded corners everywhere. The computer was the same design. There was also a photo of me and my girlfriend (no one I really knew). I was in uniform and it seemed like it was war time. I wasn't really in the room but was more observing the room. I could tell that I was apparently dead and had been killed in the war. I then went out into the city and saw lots of mixes of 40s and 80s style cars, clothes and street scenes.
4. 1970s (these dreams were a serial that lasted from 1974-1988). They started with me being a young child around three or four and being in a hiding spot to hide from soldiers of some kind (very Nazi looking). My parents (different from my real parents) had been killed and I was scared. Hiding in the closet. A young woman with black hair and black leather clothing ran into the closet, grabbed me and took off out of the back of the house with me. She then hopped onto a motor cycle and rode through the country side. Each time I rejoined her in the dreams we were either running away from someone, or trying to plant bombs to fight the oppressors, or she was teaching me math and language (not english and very unrecognizable characters). As I got older I grew attracted to her and the feeling became mutual (I won't "go there"). Eventually she died while we were trying to escape from our latest resistance fighting. I wasn't able to go back for her and she always told me to never sacrifice myself for anyone but the greater good which was to defeat our oppressors. I remember in the last dream that there was a wall around a city that we were trying to destroy. There was some kind of sign on one part of it in blue neon lighting. Again, it was in that strange language.
5. Early 90s: The most interesting (in my opinion) was one where I had just left a university setting that seemed like a mixture of Victorian styles with some modern electrical devices here and there (like telephones). I walked
Funny you should mention that. I had one on one time with Jenna Jameson back in the 90s in one of my dreams. ;P
The aborigines of Australia have got it right. Dreams are reality. Just in a different universe. Once I got that straight, it really explained why all of my dreams are so whacked and have nothing to do with real life. When you dream, you're experiencing life in a different parallel world. Simple as that. (cough)
Redundant? Come on you stupid mods! Obvious? Sure. Redundant? I think not. Personally I would have modded it +1 Funny.
Xmms gave way to Audacious. Which is pretty much XMMS with good layer of updates. However, I long left XMMS for Totem (Gnome's default media player) for audio and have always been a Xine fan for everything else.
Hmmm... not sure I agree with you on objects. It seems to me that it takes a LOT more work to create an object and for little return. Whereas data and a function that can be applied to it are as simple as you can get. Any takers?
Oblig: "I know this! This is Unix"!
Who the fuck with a brain buys ringtones? Just drop a needle, take a sample and shuttle it off to your phone via USB... Jesus the RIAA are a bunch of fuckin' morons.
I think that's exactly it. Frankly I didn't like South Park when it started and I still don't. I wanted to because Beavis and Butthead (which I thought was the pinnacle of parody) had just ended at the time. But South Park just didn't work. I think part of it is that the creators have a libertarian bent which seems to creep out in their work.
I'll second that... (Kicking those grey and purple monstrosities down the hall to the rubbish bin as I ditch iPlanet for Zimbra)
Tell that to the OpenVMS guy in the food line down the street. Did I say that out loud?