MacPorts is sometimes a bit flaky, but it does the job when you're looking to install unix-like utilities on OS X.
I do wish I could use it to install regular Mac software, though, and it would be nice if their X implementation didn't make X apps second-class citizens.
You're overemphasizing the effects of addiction and underestimating the effect of habit.
The high off the drug and the subsequent withdrawal are just a part of the addict's experience. It's also the partying, the danger and intrigue of procurement, the excitement of stealing or selling your body for drugs, and the ability to dawn a mantel of bravery and self-confidence at a whim which chain the addict to their drug of choice, whatever that is. And it isn't so-called junkies whose lives revolve entirely around their addiction - working addicts' (unless their drug is legal and cheap like mine, coffee!) entire lives are often simply a means to the end of getting high.
And I'm aware that users are pretty particular about what they dose themselves with, but in my mind, someone who couldn't conquer their psychological habits even after being totally cut off from cocaine would probably just switch to amphetamines or something else I'm not trendy enough to know about.
My concern is this: we (as in Westerners) are becoming a people who are used to quick and easy fixes, from weight loss pills to anti-depressants. Sure, many people will write this off as hollow rhetoric from a person successful by chance seeking to glorify his own ego. But many of these supposed fixes do not address the core issues at stake, and are thus red herrings which we continually chase rather than attacking more difficult but ultimately more useful endeavors. This includes the depressed person who refuses to make positive changes in their life (or, if their life is fine, to work on perceiving it in a better light), the fat person who refuses to eat less and exercise regularly, the bipolar person who does not try to restrain their mania, or just the normal person who wants to get better at a skill but refuses to put the time in.
Since he doesn't sell his music, he didn't get paid at all for the creative work he did. Of course, one could say that this is his fault, but I think it's important to realize that freelance artists with full ownership are in a fundamentally different situation than salaried people with no ownership. Most artists who are hoping to be discovered are going to want relatively long copyrights - longer than an appropriate product cycle for a corporation.
It requires familiarity with the industry that the company is in, but just look for any decision which potentially harms the long-term viability of the company to increase short-term profitability. Heck, anyone familiar with the tech sector for for the last five years can probably rattle off a dozen. Usually this is done under the banner of "cost cutting," but there is a distinct difference between cutting away the fat and cutting away the muscle, so to speak.
Trading awesome tech support for shitty tech support a bad connection, thus making customers less likely to make next purchase from same company.
Slashing R&D
Laying off a significant portion of the company
Shirking safety and maintenance
Of course, you can't put this all on the execs. If they were opposed by a majority group of long-term investors who were interested in viability over five, ten, or twenty years, then taking a short-term hit wouldn't be that bad. But with an over-emphasis on earnings in the very next quarter - whether it means the company is bankrupt in six months or not - executives have a mandate to effectively fuck the company to death.
And for every one of you in America, there's about fifty otherwise perfectly functional people who haven't the foggiest idea how to set up a home theater system, and cannot be educated by anyone as to how. They simply need a sales person or a nerd to tell them what to buy, and a lot of them feel downright embarrassed about asking a teenager to do it for them.
I feel you're leaving something out when you just make a blanket statement like, "Circuit City shouldn't be expected to pay its employees far in excess of industry standards."
If I reflect on that statement in isolation, it is clearly false, because there are businesses that do pay top dollar for their employees that make a killing, and if they lowered their pay, they wouldn't make as much money. For example, I heard a rather convincing argument recently that even though Costco pays more for its employees than Sam's Club, they potentially end up spending more for their employees when you factor in hiring costs and inventory shrink.
It may be that without an experienced, motivated sales staff to push inventory, they can't get the right people the right consumer electronics for their money. Electronics is fucking confusing to most people, speaking as someone who made quite a bit of money as a teenager setting up people's stereos for them. Or, it may be that the sales staff has little to do with CC's lack of success, and that it is more because of the general economic malaise. But in my non-MBA opinion, even if other companies are making the same profit paying their employees dick, it is daft to assume that applying the same strategy to your company would result in more profit, as it naively ignores the fact that both companies could be making the same profit for entirely different reasons. And it does appear that CC's execs tried to fix something that wasn't broken, and now they're in the shitter.
It should not be in the form of bitmap graphics, like wikipedia. It should be semantic web content, which can be automatically verified, and used by theorem proving programs as well as by human readers.
If I understand what you're saying, that's not entirely correct. The formulas on Wikipedia (while typically rendered as PNGs) are entered as TeX markup: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Formula.
You talk of losing your job. But, the minute you are issued a device by your employer and told to be on-call (where presumably you were working regular hours before) the expectations and structure of your job are being radically revised. When you've established that, some level of negotiation seems only fair. Once you're negotiating, you just force your boss to either make sure you do the same amount of work at the end of the week, pay you more, or admit that they want you to do more work for the same amount of money, which tastes bad in anyone's mouth.
This is all assuming your boss is not abusive or insane. In my opinion, every time you invoke, "But my boss is evil!" you've ended any reasonable debate.
Sure, but perhaps the computing space doesn't lend itself to browsing or impulse purchases. On the one hand, what you can buy is limited by slots, ports and compatibility, so you really have to know what you want ahead of time. And on the other hand, guys stereotypically make a b-line for the thing they want, buy it and leave, and computing is still kind of a guy thing.
Having had some dealings with Microsoft recently, I think it's only fair to point out that their various divisions are already run more like distinct businesses. They're encouraged to think like small businesses, to the point that they actively discourage people from having any relations whatsoever with people of different divisions.
The problem is that even though their day-to-day operations are independent of one another, they still collude to force shitty technology out the door, and their leadership is too ineffectual to maintain good quality control. I guess that makes them more akin to a loose-knit, highly corrupt cartel. So, they could also go the route of becoming a traditional, bureaucratic company.
The only areas of Bioshock which I thought were specifically dumbed-down were the stats and skills. Specifically, the fact that the system was plastic enough, and there were enough freebie upgrades, that it was difficult to make a very dumb decision when building your character with respect to gene tonics.
I also missed starting out barely able to hit the broad side of a barn with a pistol and ending the game as an expert sniper. But maybe that's something only I like about most FPS/RPG hybrids. And come to think of it, for all of the melee upgrades they have in the game, I found that the wrench is still not really a workable weapon after a certain point in the game, even against splicers.
My biggest problem is GIMP's default window management setup. Unless you set both panels to "keep above," they will invariably get lost under the window clutter. But this has its own trade-off, as you're cutting down on the amount of space you have to work with the actual image. By contrast, the dockable interface in the newest Mac version of Photoshop is pretty darn cool, and even before that the interface has always worked pretty well - mainly because they put the whole thing in its own big, ugly, gray window, which while ugly, works better.
In terms of real features that I miss when I'm using GIMP, the big ones are vector drawing and layer special effects. You can, of course, do something which results in an identical image using GIMP, but it requires many more steps and is not flexible if you ever decide to change it.
Ken Levine was the lead designer of System Shock 2 and Bioshock, and worked on Thief: The Dark Project and (I think) the original System Shock as well. I wouldn't liken him to Steve Jobs or something, but clearly the former two would've been significantly different if not for his input, if they'd happened at all.
The rumor about people being fed up with Levine is probably just a couple of people with chips on their shoulders. Someone usually thinks the manager has it in for them, regardless of whether it's true or not.
The military isn't just a fighting force, it's a gigantic bureaucracy - one famous for having rules and procedures spelled out in such painstaking detail that any person with the ability to read can follow them.
It's not the whininess that bugs me, it's the glaring lack of content. There's just not a lot there, and what is there isn't concrete enough to build an article on. It reads like an IM conversation.
All I did subscribe to http://wiitracker.com/'s RSS feed. This was about three weeks ago, IIRC. In three days I was able to get one online from Toys 'R' Us for the MSRP.
I think this is an example of a good analogy taken too far. For it to apply completely, you would somehow have to implement a screwdriver within a hammer, or perhaps assemble a virtual hammer out of screwdrivers, which is downright farcical.
And thanks, everyone who helped answer that question. It was pretty interesting.
Am I the only one who thinks it's weird to run an interpreted language inside of a virtual machine? Would there be any application to it, aside from rewriting overly-verbose Java code in a more concise language?
Growing up and understanding technology aren't necessarily related. After all, the baby boomers who hold much of the political power in the United States grew up with television, cars and telephones, but relatively few know in any great detail how a TV, an internal combustion engine or a telephone network function: those who took the time to learn.
If I were to bet, Valve probably made a pragmatic decision because they had nobody in-house who knew enough about the PS3 to do the port. Their roots are in PC gaming, and from what I understand, they have a very dedicated culture. The chances that one of their star developers would learn to write for the PS3 just for fun are slim. Then, EA says, "Oh, sure, we've got people who can do the port!" and of course, because they're a bonehead marketing company with little respect for programmers, this turns out to be an exaggeration or an outright mistake.
It's being hyped by retail interests; that's why you're hearing about it more. They're mainly doing this with traditional advertising (ad spots, mailers, etc), but media coverage can be said to be a component of that. While the 10 o'clock news is not an advertisement in the sense that an infomercial is, the news is sponsored by adverts and thus those same retailers. Thus, the media has a vested interest in trying to get people out to the malls.
Of course, the reason that retailers want to get people out to the malls in the first place is because consumer spending numbers ain't so great this year and the dollar is weak. By making an emotional appeal, they're hoping people will make hasty and imprudent decisions. They probably would make it sound less sinister than that, but I think it's the bottom line.
Eh. While interesting, psychology is a dirty trick to employ in any argument. Now, I know that you're not offering it as a genuine attack on the "Murky" or "Super" position, but I think it's immediately apparent that you can use it to put a rubber stamp on what is basically an ad hominem variant and thus indirectly discredit the opposition.
For example, I could employ exactly the same strategy and say that Brights are so irrationally afraid of the unknown that they are prone to make incomplete models of subjects we still find mysterious despite the best efforts of science and philosophy, like consciousness, claiming that they explain everything and anyone who doesn't agree with them deficient in understanding. It is our very recognition of areas as mysterious which leads us to scientific progress, and to let that fall by the wayside would, ironically, hamper science.
Of course, I wouldn't use this as a refutation of Dennett's very insightful theory of consciousness, because that would be fallacious!
Then why does America still have such close ties to China? Nixon and Kissinger really helped improve things, true; both America and China had bones against the USSR; and it's better to be at peace than at war (at least in my opinion, but why is there no strong ideological war being carried out? The real answer is that they're awesome trading partners, unlike the inefficient, walled-off USSR. I feel like I'm playing a shell game, and at some point, "democracy" was replaced with "capitalism". As was said before, now that they're pumping dinosaur juice out to the rest of the world and we can build a McDonalds in Red Square, we like Russia.
I suppose this is a trite observation. Of course democracy has been usurped by capitalism. I just hadn't really thought about it in terms of foreign policy before.
Slashdot Mirror
MacPorts is sometimes a bit flaky, but it does the job when you're looking to install unix-like utilities on OS X.
I do wish I could use it to install regular Mac software, though, and it would be nice if their X implementation didn't make X apps second-class citizens.
You're overemphasizing the effects of addiction and underestimating the effect of habit.
The high off the drug and the subsequent withdrawal are just a part of the addict's experience. It's also the partying, the danger and intrigue of procurement, the excitement of stealing or selling your body for drugs, and the ability to dawn a mantel of bravery and self-confidence at a whim which chain the addict to their drug of choice, whatever that is. And it isn't so-called junkies whose lives revolve entirely around their addiction - working addicts' (unless their drug is legal and cheap like mine, coffee!) entire lives are often simply a means to the end of getting high.
And I'm aware that users are pretty particular about what they dose themselves with, but in my mind, someone who couldn't conquer their psychological habits even after being totally cut off from cocaine would probably just switch to amphetamines or something else I'm not trendy enough to know about.
My concern is this: we (as in Westerners) are becoming a people who are used to quick and easy fixes, from weight loss pills to anti-depressants. Sure, many people will write this off as hollow rhetoric from a person successful by chance seeking to glorify his own ego. But many of these supposed fixes do not address the core issues at stake, and are thus red herrings which we continually chase rather than attacking more difficult but ultimately more useful endeavors. This includes the depressed person who refuses to make positive changes in their life (or, if their life is fine, to work on perceiving it in a better light), the fat person who refuses to eat less and exercise regularly, the bipolar person who does not try to restrain their mania, or just the normal person who wants to get better at a skill but refuses to put the time in.
Since he doesn't sell his music, he didn't get paid at all for the creative work he did. Of course, one could say that this is his fault, but I think it's important to realize that freelance artists with full ownership are in a fundamentally different situation than salaried people with no ownership. Most artists who are hoping to be discovered are going to want relatively long copyrights - longer than an appropriate product cycle for a corporation.
It requires familiarity with the industry that the company is in, but just look for any decision which potentially harms the long-term viability of the company to increase short-term profitability. Heck, anyone familiar with the tech sector for for the last five years can probably rattle off a dozen. Usually this is done under the banner of "cost cutting," but there is a distinct difference between cutting away the fat and cutting away the muscle, so to speak.
Of course, you can't put this all on the execs. If they were opposed by a majority group of long-term investors who were interested in viability over five, ten, or twenty years, then taking a short-term hit wouldn't be that bad. But with an over-emphasis on earnings in the very next quarter - whether it means the company is bankrupt in six months or not - executives have a mandate to effectively fuck the company to death.
And for every one of you in America, there's about fifty otherwise perfectly functional people who haven't the foggiest idea how to set up a home theater system, and cannot be educated by anyone as to how. They simply need a sales person or a nerd to tell them what to buy, and a lot of them feel downright embarrassed about asking a teenager to do it for them.
I think that's the kind of common sense that MBA programs spend two years beating out of people.
I feel you're leaving something out when you just make a blanket statement like, "Circuit City shouldn't be expected to pay its employees far in excess of industry standards."
If I reflect on that statement in isolation, it is clearly false, because there are businesses that do pay top dollar for their employees that make a killing, and if they lowered their pay, they wouldn't make as much money. For example, I heard a rather convincing argument recently that even though Costco pays more for its employees than Sam's Club, they potentially end up spending more for their employees when you factor in hiring costs and inventory shrink.
It may be that without an experienced, motivated sales staff to push inventory, they can't get the right people the right consumer electronics for their money. Electronics is fucking confusing to most people, speaking as someone who made quite a bit of money as a teenager setting up people's stereos for them. Or, it may be that the sales staff has little to do with CC's lack of success, and that it is more because of the general economic malaise. But in my non-MBA opinion, even if other companies are making the same profit paying their employees dick, it is daft to assume that applying the same strategy to your company would result in more profit, as it naively ignores the fact that both companies could be making the same profit for entirely different reasons. And it does appear that CC's execs tried to fix something that wasn't broken, and now they're in the shitter.
If I understand what you're saying, that's not entirely correct. The formulas on Wikipedia (while typically rendered as PNGs) are entered as TeX markup: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Formula.
You talk of losing your job. But, the minute you are issued a device by your employer and told to be on-call (where presumably you were working regular hours before) the expectations and structure of your job are being radically revised. When you've established that, some level of negotiation seems only fair. Once you're negotiating, you just force your boss to either make sure you do the same amount of work at the end of the week, pay you more, or admit that they want you to do more work for the same amount of money, which tastes bad in anyone's mouth.
This is all assuming your boss is not abusive or insane. In my opinion, every time you invoke, "But my boss is evil!" you've ended any reasonable debate.
Sure, but perhaps the computing space doesn't lend itself to browsing or impulse purchases. On the one hand, what you can buy is limited by slots, ports and compatibility, so you really have to know what you want ahead of time. And on the other hand, guys stereotypically make a b-line for the thing they want, buy it and leave, and computing is still kind of a guy thing.
Having had some dealings with Microsoft recently, I think it's only fair to point out that their various divisions are already run more like distinct businesses. They're encouraged to think like small businesses, to the point that they actively discourage people from having any relations whatsoever with people of different divisions.
The problem is that even though their day-to-day operations are independent of one another, they still collude to force shitty technology out the door, and their leadership is too ineffectual to maintain good quality control. I guess that makes them more akin to a loose-knit, highly corrupt cartel. So, they could also go the route of becoming a traditional, bureaucratic company.
The only areas of Bioshock which I thought were specifically dumbed-down were the stats and skills. Specifically, the fact that the system was plastic enough, and there were enough freebie upgrades, that it was difficult to make a very dumb decision when building your character with respect to gene tonics.
I also missed starting out barely able to hit the broad side of a barn with a pistol and ending the game as an expert sniper. But maybe that's something only I like about most FPS/RPG hybrids. And come to think of it, for all of the melee upgrades they have in the game, I found that the wrench is still not really a workable weapon after a certain point in the game, even against splicers.
My biggest problem is GIMP's default window management setup. Unless you set both panels to "keep above," they will invariably get lost under the window clutter. But this has its own trade-off, as you're cutting down on the amount of space you have to work with the actual image. By contrast, the dockable interface in the newest Mac version of Photoshop is pretty darn cool, and even before that the interface has always worked pretty well - mainly because they put the whole thing in its own big, ugly, gray window, which while ugly, works better.
In terms of real features that I miss when I'm using GIMP, the big ones are vector drawing and layer special effects. You can, of course, do something which results in an identical image using GIMP, but it requires many more steps and is not flexible if you ever decide to change it.
Ken Levine was the lead designer of System Shock 2 and Bioshock, and worked on Thief: The Dark Project and (I think) the original System Shock as well. I wouldn't liken him to Steve Jobs or something, but clearly the former two would've been significantly different if not for his input, if they'd happened at all.
The rumor about people being fed up with Levine is probably just a couple of people with chips on their shoulders. Someone usually thinks the manager has it in for them, regardless of whether it's true or not.
The military isn't just a fighting force, it's a gigantic bureaucracy - one famous for having rules and procedures spelled out in such painstaking detail that any person with the ability to read can follow them.
It's not the whininess that bugs me, it's the glaring lack of content. There's just not a lot there, and what is there isn't concrete enough to build an article on. It reads like an IM conversation.
All I did subscribe to http://wiitracker.com/'s RSS feed. This was about three weeks ago, IIRC. In three days I was able to get one online from Toys 'R' Us for the MSRP.
I think this is an example of a good analogy taken too far. For it to apply completely, you would somehow have to implement a screwdriver within a hammer, or perhaps assemble a virtual hammer out of screwdrivers, which is downright farcical.
And thanks, everyone who helped answer that question. It was pretty interesting.
Am I the only one who thinks it's weird to run an interpreted language inside of a virtual machine? Would there be any application to it, aside from rewriting overly-verbose Java code in a more concise language?
Growing up and understanding technology aren't necessarily related. After all, the baby boomers who hold much of the political power in the United States grew up with television, cars and telephones, but relatively few know in any great detail how a TV, an internal combustion engine or a telephone network function: those who took the time to learn.
If I were to bet, Valve probably made a pragmatic decision because they had nobody in-house who knew enough about the PS3 to do the port. Their roots are in PC gaming, and from what I understand, they have a very dedicated culture. The chances that one of their star developers would learn to write for the PS3 just for fun are slim. Then, EA says, "Oh, sure, we've got people who can do the port!" and of course, because they're a bonehead marketing company with little respect for programmers, this turns out to be an exaggeration or an outright mistake.
It's being hyped by retail interests; that's why you're hearing about it more. They're mainly doing this with traditional advertising (ad spots, mailers, etc), but media coverage can be said to be a component of that. While the 10 o'clock news is not an advertisement in the sense that an infomercial is, the news is sponsored by adverts and thus those same retailers. Thus, the media has a vested interest in trying to get people out to the malls.
Of course, the reason that retailers want to get people out to the malls in the first place is because consumer spending numbers ain't so great this year and the dollar is weak. By making an emotional appeal, they're hoping people will make hasty and imprudent decisions. They probably would make it sound less sinister than that, but I think it's the bottom line.
And it's just that kind of talk which will get you bad karma on slashdot. Shame on you!
Eh. While interesting, psychology is a dirty trick to employ in any argument. Now, I know that you're not offering it as a genuine attack on the "Murky" or "Super" position, but I think it's immediately apparent that you can use it to put a rubber stamp on what is basically an ad hominem variant and thus indirectly discredit the opposition.
For example, I could employ exactly the same strategy and say that Brights are so irrationally afraid of the unknown that they are prone to make incomplete models of subjects we still find mysterious despite the best efforts of science and philosophy, like consciousness, claiming that they explain everything and anyone who doesn't agree with them deficient in understanding. It is our very recognition of areas as mysterious which leads us to scientific progress, and to let that fall by the wayside would, ironically, hamper science.
Of course, I wouldn't use this as a refutation of Dennett's very insightful theory of consciousness, because that would be fallacious!
Then why does America still have such close ties to China? Nixon and Kissinger really helped improve things, true; both America and China had bones against the USSR; and it's better to be at peace than at war (at least in my opinion, but why is there no strong ideological war being carried out? The real answer is that they're awesome trading partners, unlike the inefficient, walled-off USSR. I feel like I'm playing a shell game, and at some point, "democracy" was replaced with "capitalism". As was said before, now that they're pumping dinosaur juice out to the rest of the world and we can build a McDonalds in Red Square, we like Russia.
I suppose this is a trite observation. Of course democracy has been usurped by capitalism. I just hadn't really thought about it in terms of foreign policy before.