It really depends on what your software is going to do. If you're writing desktop business apps, performance is definitely not a concern. Most of their processing power is lost as waste heat anyway, so play it fast and loose. However, I think you can get pretty damn fast by avoiding silly mistakes that betray a general ignorance of the way computers actually work, and that is valuable in most settings - especially if you're going to be reusing that code, right?
Also, do the naysayers not get that it's about FRINGE SCIENCE? You know: wacky, experimental science performed by drugged-out pervs [Walter] that the mainstream doesn't take seriously. Could it be intentional that the show is a bit off?
I love Fringe. It's like the science fiction equivalent of junk food - horrible for you, and DELICIOUS.
Also, I know they're made by the same people, but people have been trying to get me to watch Lost for years, and I absolutely can't stand that obtuse, schizophrenic rudderless speedboat. Already, I am happy to point out that Fringe has more cohesion than that drivel:)
Before you get too excited, there are some screen tearing issues with the 9400M. They're very sporadic, and it's not really certain whether it's dodgy chips, dodgy drivers, or an interaction of the two. Fortunately, Apple is not being tight-fisted about servicing them. Just make sure you get that extended warranty.
From a certain very jaded standpoint, the most commercially relevant feature of a game IS the graphics. Traditionally, companies dupe people into buying games because of impressive graphics and promotion, so graphics drive game sales, and people buy consoles because the games on it have impressive graphics, because that's the only differentiating feature of consoles. I"m talking here about your middle-of-the-road developers here, the ones with soulless executives who only see the bottom line, and inspired staff who'd rather make a fun game but are often not allowed to.
That's why the Wii is so disruptive, and that is why so many developers (more specifically, their managers and execs) dislike it. It is not graphically competitive, but has a fun and intuitive controller. While you can reliably make a game pretty by throwing artists and shader programmers at it, you cannot reliably make a game fun. Or perhaps you can make any game fun *eventually*, but you can't always predict how long that will be. And, by the way, the best game designers and production houses in the business are ALL notorious for delays - Miyamoto, Blizzard, Valve, etc.
You've gotta be kidding. You have a Wii and you haven't bought Super Mario Galaxy? That's so absurd I don't even have a snarky remark for it. Quit reading Slashdot and buy Super Mario Galaxy (and maybe Super Paper Mario) now.
I agree with your overall sentiment, though. The Wii isn't just a fun system for party games and sports - it's also got a very good shooter interface, better than consoles, and certainly more intuitive than a mouse and keyboard. I wouldn't play Unreal Tournament with it, but for the aforementioned RE4 and MP3 it's ludicrously fun.
That said, I can't help but look at most of the blockbuster games (i.e., the ones that rise to the top on Metacritic) for the Xbox and PS3 and think, "Well, I already beat that on my computer, with a better control setup." And I just got a new laptop, so I don't see much sense in getting one of the other consoles.
With that kind of argument, you could prove that the Germans couldn't lose World War I, because they won the Franco-Prussian War and had Pickelhauben both times. The Mac Clones of the 90's established that "openness" (i.e., licensing) is not an unqualified good because it can debase your platform, and a lack of openness is not an unqualified evil. After all, people still buy console games, right? And the iPod's still doing really well, right?
Then the system looks at the files' hash, a unique identifying code used to coordinate the simultaneous download of hundreds of file fragments by different users. If a hash matches any stored in a database of prohibited hashes, then the system will make a record of the transfer and store the network addresses involved.
I mean, you could easily scrape some torrent sites for hashes, but it seems like this system would be fairly easy to circumvent. All you'd have to do is come of with some system for changing the hash on a peer-specific basis.
Every time I format someone's system these days I install a small Linux partition on it (and ntfsclone the Windows partition onto it in case I need to recover the same system in the future). And I say, "I installed Linux on a small portion of your hard drive. If Windows ever gets screwed up and nobody's around to fix it, just reset and boot into Linux, and you can at least access the Internet and access your documents." It goes over really well. I even leave Ubuntu Live CD's with people now so they can have them around as a backup. One of my clients used it for a few days - she had business to take care of and couldn't part with her box - and was acceptably happy with it.
So, while most people still prefer Windows, business types A) Have a vague idea of what Linux is and B) See the value of having a very stable OS with fewer of the features they're used to around for emergencies.
Fortunately, soon enough, the Baby Boomers, the generation who both fought against nuclear power and have proven time and time again to be happy to fuck over their children and grandchildren so they can indulge in the present, will all either be senile or dead. Then, we can stop banking on some tech riding in on a white horse to save us all and talk about a real solution to our energy needs.
You're also getting at something important: the process of copy editing/production is completely separate from actual writing. While it's entirely possible to just pull up a vi/emacs and write straight Docbook or LaTeX - and I've done it for some documents - I find it tends to have a chilling effect on both my creativity and my attention to content detail if I'm trying to think about content and presentation/formatting at the same time.
It's the same reason that brainstorming should be a totally separate process from welding your fleshed-out thoughts into professional writing. If you try and force your thoughts to be concise and professional too quickly - unless it's something you're really good at - usually you'll be filtering yourself too much to produce ANYTHING good. If you're thinking about formatting when you're editing the content, your mind is trying to do too much at once and so it does both things badly. Try to do all three at once and you'll probably be horrible at all three. Of course, there are jobs which require you to integrate several processes into one, but integration is itself a wholly separate task, and, again, it should be dealt with separately from each constituent process.
When I am responsible for the whole thing, from beginning to end, I generally only do one activity (writing a rough draft, editing the draft, and finally formatting it) on any given day, as much as time allows. And if I don't have that luxury, I run around the block or lift weights between tasks to clear my head. This singlemindedness might just be my personal quirks, but I have a job where I wear about fifteen different hats and am constantly pulled in different directions - the kind of job where "strong multitasker" would be in the requirements - and I manage it by organizing my deadlines, planning, and doing one thing at a time. Since I don't believe in multitasking (at least as most people do it - doing ten things in parallel and accomplishing little in any one area), I can't decide if this makes me a great multitasker or a horrible multitasker, but I seem to be doing alright.
As John Searle says, you don't need to exhaustively define soul (or consciousness, for a less charged term) to be able to ask questions about it and maybe come up with some answers. It's kind of fallacious, actually: regardless of conjectures about what might happen after death, when he says 'soul' I absolutely know what he's talking about, because I have a conscious experience too, presumably very similar to his.
Anyone who doesn't absolutely know what he's talking about, well, you might have taken too many drugs. Or just enough.
My intuition is that there's no reason why machines can't have consciousness. And if they can't, the reason why not would no doubt shed some light on our own predicament as sentient beings. And furthermore, I should think that the question of whether there is something essential (i.e., a soul, immortal or not) to the conscious experience which separates otherwise identical conscious and non-conscious entities is VERY intriguing, especially if you're an atheist!
. . . and, if anything finally proves that Bush is an idiot, it was his utter failure to see that if he had claimed responsibility for this mess, then he could have also claimed responsibility for its successes, thus accepting the social goodness of putting 50 million people into homes.
Except that now home ownership rates are back at the same place they were in the beginning of his administration. So, really, he can only claim to have temporarily put people in homes, and - unlike what Tennyson said about love - buying a house only to lose it a few years later is probably worse than never having bought it in the first place.
US Corporations shouldn't have to pay taxes. It's clear that those corporations which are paying money to Uncle Sam like the "little people" haven't been paying their bribes^D^D^D^D^D^Dcampaign contributions to ensure they get plenty of tax breaks, subsidies, and no-bid government contracts.
Which is supported by the fact that many of their successfulproducts were not created in-house, but acquired and then polished internally. Jobs would have to be one helluva creative guy if he could be the creative force behind something without actually having contact with anyone working on it.
It's like Wikipedia but without the open collaboration which made Wikipedia successful.
It's also a Wikipedia without editors. And I mean real editors, the kind of people who turn the gibberish that some brilliant professors reduce their prose to after they get tenure and stop giving a shit into something resembling standard formal English. It's a Wikipedia that's oblivious to the fact that many "experts" can't (to give a totally contrived example that is obviously not drawn from my work experience) be trusted to write an obituary for someone they've known for 40 years without flagrant spelling errors and grammar so fast and loose you'd swear it was some blonde Hollywood starlet going commando to a discoteca.
It sounds like you're referencing laws against "handling stolen property" - that is, being a fence. In most jurisdictions, you can only be found guilty of that if you knew it was stolen, or should've suspected it was stolen. To prove you guilty of handling the People have to prove that you suspected, or should've suspected. If they can't prove that, the original owner can only sue the thief for the value of the item stolen.
Then again, in some states there is no such requirement, and anyone in possession of stolen goods can be found guilty of handling. Personally, I find that kinda scary.
Moral of the story: get insurance, back up your data. That's really all you can do. The police, in most cases, will not care.
As far as I'm concerned, it's good ol' fashioned groupthink.
Mind you, there's "environmentalists" and then there's "Environmentalists." Small e environmentalists are people from all walks of life who give a rat's ass about our planet and are willing to make changes to support it. But big E environmentalists, people who actually have jobs at environmental organizations, are pretty homogeneous in terms of beliefs. They are all vegetarians or vegans. They are all anti-nuclear and anti-fossil fuel. Most of them have a stick up their ass about animal rights too. They date and marry other anti-meat anti-nuclear anti-fossil fuel people, and most of their friends will generally fall into this category too.
It sounds a little bit extreme, but I watched someone fall in hard with this crowd and it's kinda scary. Reading Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer" really shed some light on the psychology at work. They typically start out with low self-esteem and little sense of purpose, and maybe some green leanings. Then, they find that if they shape their opinions to conform to some radical group that they get immediate acceptance and love (often by people exactly like themselves), and any attack on their doctrine threatens their entire social life. So, when you talk to an Environmentalist about nuclear power, for them to change their opinion they'd risk losing their love, job, and friends, which is why they cling irrationally to outmoded doctrines.
Of course, I'm not saying that every anti-nuclear person is like this - many are just normal, ignorant people. But I've observed that many of the people who form the core of the Green Movement are, and that's one of the reasons why they haven't changed.
If by "point" you mean there's some large, enduring justification for doing something, then yes, nothing has a point because we, the planet, and the universe will die. But if you mean ANY justification, things can most certainly have points. I don't need any better reason than pleasure and love to have sex, even though pleasure is fleeting, love is fragile, and eventually I'll die. Likewise, I play video games to have fun, pointless as it may be. And I stopped playing WoW because it stopped being fun.
If I might wax philosophical myself, it would seem that different activities have different reward patterns. Arts, sciences, sports, and skills in general tend to have scant rewards at first, but become more enjoyable and more rewarding as you begin to get better. Conversely, traditional MMOs (like recreational drugs) are really fun in the beginning, and the rewards taper out after a certain amount of use. More and more effort is required to achieve the same reward. There's a ton of stuff to do in the beginning, but as you approach the endgame, content gets harder, more people are required to be more focused, and payoffs are much more scarce - all designed to trickle out those last few drops that you need to feel like you've completed the game. And this isn't really a problem in most games, except that WoW tries very hard to become the last game you ever play.
So, it would seem that in terms of long-term appreciation, we would be well-advised to take up a few things which are open-ended, as things like drugs and MMOs eventually peter out, or only focus on short-term, non-addicting games.
It's more similar to Python in my mind. It's a post-Perl interpreted language that attempts to have better object-orientation while not being overly restrictive. It inherits a lot more from Perl than Python does, so you can accomplish most tasks in a variety of ways. Neither is anywhere near as rigid as Java - you don't have to catch or throw every exception, you don't have to make ten subclasses and an interface to write Hello World, etc.
I get into these kinds of discussions with my boss all the time. He looks at Java as the ultimate golden hammer, and I tend to use a variety of languages. There are a bunch of little syntactic things I love about Ruby, but in the end it's mostly a question of style, politics and library support.
I'd say drug abuse definitely has a victim. In fact, anyone who's seen pictures of Amy Winehouse's skin condition has grounds to sue for emotional distress.
Slashdot Mirror
It really depends on what your software is going to do. If you're writing desktop business apps, performance is definitely not a concern. Most of their processing power is lost as waste heat anyway, so play it fast and loose. However, I think you can get pretty damn fast by avoiding silly mistakes that betray a general ignorance of the way computers actually work, and that is valuable in most settings - especially if you're going to be reusing that code, right?
Also, do the naysayers not get that it's about FRINGE SCIENCE? You know: wacky, experimental science performed by drugged-out pervs [Walter] that the mainstream doesn't take seriously. Could it be intentional that the show is a bit off?
I love Fringe. It's like the science fiction equivalent of junk food - horrible for you, and DELICIOUS.
Also, I know they're made by the same people, but people have been trying to get me to watch Lost for years, and I absolutely can't stand that obtuse, schizophrenic rudderless speedboat. Already, I am happy to point out that Fringe has more cohesion than that drivel:)
Before you get too excited, there are some screen tearing issues with the 9400M. They're very sporadic, and it's not really certain whether it's dodgy chips, dodgy drivers, or an interaction of the two. Fortunately, Apple is not being tight-fisted about servicing them. Just make sure you get that extended warranty.
From a certain very jaded standpoint, the most commercially relevant feature of a game IS the graphics. Traditionally, companies dupe people into buying games because of impressive graphics and promotion, so graphics drive game sales, and people buy consoles because the games on it have impressive graphics, because that's the only differentiating feature of consoles. I"m talking here about your middle-of-the-road developers here, the ones with soulless executives who only see the bottom line, and inspired staff who'd rather make a fun game but are often not allowed to.
That's why the Wii is so disruptive, and that is why so many developers (more specifically, their managers and execs) dislike it. It is not graphically competitive, but has a fun and intuitive controller. While you can reliably make a game pretty by throwing artists and shader programmers at it, you cannot reliably make a game fun. Or perhaps you can make any game fun *eventually*, but you can't always predict how long that will be. And, by the way, the best game designers and production houses in the business are ALL notorious for delays - Miyamoto, Blizzard, Valve, etc.
You've gotta be kidding. You have a Wii and you haven't bought Super Mario Galaxy? That's so absurd I don't even have a snarky remark for it. Quit reading Slashdot and buy Super Mario Galaxy (and maybe Super Paper Mario) now.
I agree with your overall sentiment, though. The Wii isn't just a fun system for party games and sports - it's also got a very good shooter interface, better than consoles, and certainly more intuitive than a mouse and keyboard. I wouldn't play Unreal Tournament with it, but for the aforementioned RE4 and MP3 it's ludicrously fun.
That said, I can't help but look at most of the blockbuster games (i.e., the ones that rise to the top on Metacritic) for the Xbox and PS3 and think, "Well, I already beat that on my computer, with a better control setup." And I just got a new laptop, so I don't see much sense in getting one of the other consoles.
With that kind of argument, you could prove that the Germans couldn't lose World War I, because they won the Franco-Prussian War and had Pickelhauben both times. The Mac Clones of the 90's established that "openness" (i.e., licensing) is not an unqualified good because it can debase your platform, and a lack of openness is not an unqualified evil. After all, people still buy console games, right? And the iPod's still doing really well, right?
From the article:
Then the system looks at the files' hash, a unique identifying code used to coordinate the simultaneous download of hundreds of file fragments by different users. If a hash matches any stored in a database of prohibited hashes, then the system will make a record of the transfer and store the network addresses involved.
I mean, you could easily scrape some torrent sites for hashes, but it seems like this system would be fairly easy to circumvent. All you'd have to do is come of with some system for changing the hash on a peer-specific basis.
Every time I format someone's system these days I install a small Linux partition on it (and ntfsclone the Windows partition onto it in case I need to recover the same system in the future). And I say, "I installed Linux on a small portion of your hard drive. If Windows ever gets screwed up and nobody's around to fix it, just reset and boot into Linux, and you can at least access the Internet and access your documents." It goes over really well. I even leave Ubuntu Live CD's with people now so they can have them around as a backup. One of my clients used it for a few days - she had business to take care of and couldn't part with her box - and was acceptably happy with it.
So, while most people still prefer Windows, business types A) Have a vague idea of what Linux is and B) See the value of having a very stable OS with fewer of the features they're used to around for emergencies.
That's what revolutions are for.
Fortunately, soon enough, the Baby Boomers, the generation who both fought against nuclear power and have proven time and time again to be happy to fuck over their children and grandchildren so they can indulge in the present, will all either be senile or dead. Then, we can stop banking on some tech riding in on a white horse to save us all and talk about a real solution to our energy needs.
You're also getting at something important: the process of copy editing/production is completely separate from actual writing. While it's entirely possible to just pull up a vi/emacs and write straight Docbook or LaTeX - and I've done it for some documents - I find it tends to have a chilling effect on both my creativity and my attention to content detail if I'm trying to think about content and presentation/formatting at the same time.
It's the same reason that brainstorming should be a totally separate process from welding your fleshed-out thoughts into professional writing. If you try and force your thoughts to be concise and professional too quickly - unless it's something you're really good at - usually you'll be filtering yourself too much to produce ANYTHING good. If you're thinking about formatting when you're editing the content, your mind is trying to do too much at once and so it does both things badly. Try to do all three at once and you'll probably be horrible at all three. Of course, there are jobs which require you to integrate several processes into one, but integration is itself a wholly separate task, and, again, it should be dealt with separately from each constituent process.
When I am responsible for the whole thing, from beginning to end, I generally only do one activity (writing a rough draft, editing the draft, and finally formatting it) on any given day, as much as time allows. And if I don't have that luxury, I run around the block or lift weights between tasks to clear my head. This singlemindedness might just be my personal quirks, but I have a job where I wear about fifteen different hats and am constantly pulled in different directions - the kind of job where "strong multitasker" would be in the requirements - and I manage it by organizing my deadlines, planning, and doing one thing at a time. Since I don't believe in multitasking (at least as most people do it - doing ten things in parallel and accomplishing little in any one area), I can't decide if this makes me a great multitasker or a horrible multitasker, but I seem to be doing alright.
As John Searle says, you don't need to exhaustively define soul (or consciousness, for a less charged term) to be able to ask questions about it and maybe come up with some answers. It's kind of fallacious, actually: regardless of conjectures about what might happen after death, when he says 'soul' I absolutely know what he's talking about, because I have a conscious experience too, presumably very similar to his.
Anyone who doesn't absolutely know what he's talking about, well, you might have taken too many drugs. Or just enough.
My intuition is that there's no reason why machines can't have consciousness. And if they can't, the reason why not would no doubt shed some light on our own predicament as sentient beings. And furthermore, I should think that the question of whether there is something essential (i.e., a soul, immortal or not) to the conscious experience which separates otherwise identical conscious and non-conscious entities is VERY intriguing, especially if you're an atheist!
. . . and, if anything finally proves that Bush is an idiot, it was his utter failure to see that if he had claimed responsibility for this mess, then he could have also claimed responsibility for its successes, thus accepting the social goodness of putting 50 million people into homes.
Except that now home ownership rates are back at the same place they were in the beginning of his administration. So, really, he can only claim to have temporarily put people in homes, and - unlike what Tennyson said about love - buying a house only to lose it a few years later is probably worse than never having bought it in the first place.
Doh, wrong control character.
US Corporations shouldn't have to pay taxes. It's clear that those corporations which are paying money to Uncle Sam like the "little people" haven't been paying their bribes^D^D^D^D^D^Dcampaign contributions to ensure they get plenty of tax breaks, subsidies, and no-bid government contracts.
Which is supported by the fact that many of their successful products were not created in-house, but acquired and then polished internally. Jobs would have to be one helluva creative guy if he could be the creative force behind something without actually having contact with anyone working on it.
*whoosh*
It's like Wikipedia but without the open collaboration which made Wikipedia successful.
It's also a Wikipedia without editors. And I mean real editors, the kind of people who turn the gibberish that some brilliant professors reduce their prose to after they get tenure and stop giving a shit into something resembling standard formal English. It's a Wikipedia that's oblivious to the fact that many "experts" can't (to give a totally contrived example that is obviously not drawn from my work experience) be trusted to write an obituary for someone they've known for 40 years without flagrant spelling errors and grammar so fast and loose you'd swear it was some blonde Hollywood starlet going commando to a discoteca.
It sounds like you're referencing laws against "handling stolen property" - that is, being a fence. In most jurisdictions, you can only be found guilty of that if you knew it was stolen, or should've suspected it was stolen. To prove you guilty of handling the People have to prove that you suspected, or should've suspected. If they can't prove that, the original owner can only sue the thief for the value of the item stolen.
Then again, in some states there is no such requirement, and anyone in possession of stolen goods can be found guilty of handling. Personally, I find that kinda scary.
Moral of the story: get insurance, back up your data. That's really all you can do. The police, in most cases, will not care.
My IT job is plenty spicy after I figured out how to make my desktop loop Destination Calabria.
As far as I'm concerned, it's good ol' fashioned groupthink.
Mind you, there's "environmentalists" and then there's "Environmentalists." Small e environmentalists are people from all walks of life who give a rat's ass about our planet and are willing to make changes to support it. But big E environmentalists, people who actually have jobs at environmental organizations, are pretty homogeneous in terms of beliefs. They are all vegetarians or vegans. They are all anti-nuclear and anti-fossil fuel. Most of them have a stick up their ass about animal rights too. They date and marry other anti-meat anti-nuclear anti-fossil fuel people, and most of their friends will generally fall into this category too.
It sounds a little bit extreme, but I watched someone fall in hard with this crowd and it's kinda scary. Reading Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer" really shed some light on the psychology at work. They typically start out with low self-esteem and little sense of purpose, and maybe some green leanings. Then, they find that if they shape their opinions to conform to some radical group that they get immediate acceptance and love (often by people exactly like themselves), and any attack on their doctrine threatens their entire social life. So, when you talk to an Environmentalist about nuclear power, for them to change their opinion they'd risk losing their love, job, and friends, which is why they cling irrationally to outmoded doctrines.
Of course, I'm not saying that every anti-nuclear person is like this - many are just normal, ignorant people. But I've observed that many of the people who form the core of the Green Movement are, and that's one of the reasons why they haven't changed.
If by "point" you mean there's some large, enduring justification for doing something, then yes, nothing has a point because we, the planet, and the universe will die. But if you mean ANY justification, things can most certainly have points. I don't need any better reason than pleasure and love to have sex, even though pleasure is fleeting, love is fragile, and eventually I'll die. Likewise, I play video games to have fun, pointless as it may be. And I stopped playing WoW because it stopped being fun.
If I might wax philosophical myself, it would seem that different activities have different reward patterns. Arts, sciences, sports, and skills in general tend to have scant rewards at first, but become more enjoyable and more rewarding as you begin to get better. Conversely, traditional MMOs (like recreational drugs) are really fun in the beginning, and the rewards taper out after a certain amount of use. More and more effort is required to achieve the same reward. There's a ton of stuff to do in the beginning, but as you approach the endgame, content gets harder, more people are required to be more focused, and payoffs are much more scarce - all designed to trickle out those last few drops that you need to feel like you've completed the game. And this isn't really a problem in most games, except that WoW tries very hard to become the last game you ever play.
So, it would seem that in terms of long-term appreciation, we would be well-advised to take up a few things which are open-ended, as things like drugs and MMOs eventually peter out, or only focus on short-term, non-addicting games.
It's more similar to Python in my mind. It's a post-Perl interpreted language that attempts to have better object-orientation while not being overly restrictive. It inherits a lot more from Perl than Python does, so you can accomplish most tasks in a variety of ways. Neither is anywhere near as rigid as Java - you don't have to catch or throw every exception, you don't have to make ten subclasses and an interface to write Hello World, etc.
I get into these kinds of discussions with my boss all the time. He looks at Java as the ultimate golden hammer, and I tend to use a variety of languages. There are a bunch of little syntactic things I love about Ruby, but in the end it's mostly a question of style, politics and library support.
I'd say drug abuse definitely has a victim. In fact, anyone who's seen pictures of Amy Winehouse's skin condition has grounds to sue for emotional distress.