There are some scary issues involved in having an easily accessible archive of someone's posting history. One is that someone may be, um, "less intelligent" at a younger age and regret things later. Routinely someone gets into Usenet for the first time and becomes a flaming idiot for a few months, disappears for a while, then returns as a much lower key citizen. I've done deja seaches on job applicants and run into more than one person who used to be a rampant software pirate at one point in his life. Maybe they got over it. But, man, does it look really bad.
Another issue is that a search can turn up personal opinions and interests that you don't necessarily want to know about, but can end up biasing your views. I did a search for postings by a programmer I respected and found all sorts of apparently serious discussion in a bestialty group. Ugh. I didn't want to know that. Or what if you find that a job applicant strongly holds views that you disagree with on abortion, gun control, government, the death penalty, or legalization of drugs? How could that not bias your opinion of that person? Yes, it *shouldn't* affect anything, but let's be realistic.
Let's look at the major methods of exchanging and viewing documents on a desktop machine:
1. Postscript (the standard for academic papers). Using Ghostscript/Ghostview these documents are almost always horribly ugly onscreen. Moving around a document with Ghostview is also extremely primitive.
2. Adobe's PDF viewer. This program is an anomaly in that no matter how much processor speed you throw at it, it the rendering speed remains impossibly slow. Like Postscript, PDF files also tend to be designed for the printed page, and are almost always a poor fit for a monitor that's wider than it is tall. People seem to always have their PDF readers configured with some huge zoom factor--so the text fills the width of the screen--or they have a difficult to read scaled page in the middle of the screen surrounded by a huge, empty border.
3. HTML. This is better than the previous two options, but a web browser is too large and unreliable an application to have open all the time just to view documentation. Having to click around with a mouse to read mostly-sequential documentation is non-intuitive. Lynx is an option, but not a pretty one.
4. TeX/DVI. Again, very oriented to the printed page.
5. Microsoft Word. Platform specific; file format changes too frequently.
The are some other schemes out there, but none that have caught on enough to be generally useful.
One of the sequels was brilliant
on
Ender's Shadow
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· Score: 1
None of the sequels were as good as the original
Speaker for the Dead was better than the original, and arguably the finest moment of Card's career. It's one of the best character-oriented SF books ever written (which might be why techie-types don't like it as much). The third book, Xenocide had much more of the "chapter in an ongoing saga" feel that the recent Alvin Maker books have; I was unimpressed enough not to want to read the fourth book.
Video was one of the things the Amiga did best. The reason it did it best was that the video chip had it's own language(the copper list), and could be made to do things when the raster reached specific locations on the screen. This makes for very smooth animation as you can guarantee the image won't be updated while it's in the middle of being drawn.
While I agree that the Amiga was a cool machine, it wasn't the copper list that made it cool. Other systems without such a feature could also get "very smooth animation," and of course copper-like features were standard in coin-op hardware of the 1970s (yes, the seventies).
What made the Amiga great was balance. It didn't just have a spectactular sound system or a spectacular graphics system, it was a good overall system. The bus was well thought out; the different chips shared system resources in a smart way; there weren't obvious heavy bottlenecks. The end result was that you could put together applications with sound, graphics, and general processing that, using late 1990s logic, shouldn't be able to run on such a lesser system. That's also been the key to console systems over the years, as opposed to "stick a top of the line graphics card in a system with a horrible bus" approach that's common on PCs.
Sedgewick basically takes a generic template and substitutes the language of the day, producing Algorithms in [Language].
Sedgewick's book is about algorithms, not languages. The book is valuable because of the explanations and diagrams, and because the code is presented in very clear, short snippets. I have the Pascal version of his book, and it makes no difference to me, as someone who programs in C and C++ professionally, that the code samples are given in Pascal.
A lot of people apparently don't want a book unless it is specifically focused on their favorite language, so Sedgewick has to keep releasing new versions of his book as language fashions change (Pascal was the teaching language of choice when the original edition was published). Shortly we'll probably see "Algorithms in Java" for just that reason.
The Amiga was a cool bit of tech, but it's dead, Gateway killed it!
Gateway picked up the pieces after the Amiga had already crumbled. Sometime in the early 90s, the spirit of the machine died, even before Commodore folded. At one time the Amiga was a hotbed for innovation. Remember games like Mind Walker? But after a point a destructive compulsion to outdo other machines (the PC, the Sega Genesis, the NES) took over, and the innovation was replaced with a "me too!" idealogy. Witness how much time has been spent showing that the Amiga can play a decent game of Doom and Quake. Before that, there was a race to show that the Amiga was better at Sonic-style platform games than the Genesis. Unfortunately the only results were to make the machine look even sadder than ever.
1. I've never read an article that claimed the PS2 would be launched as early as this one claimed. The date it's supposed to be "slipping" to, is the date I've always heard it would be released.
2. I also find it odd that Sony is called "inexperienced" with graphics chips, seeing as they've shipped 20+ million units of the PS1. And, yes, it included a graphics chip that was considered cutting edge for a consumer machine when it was designed.
3. The issue isn't with Sony designing the chip; it's with manufacturing problems. Supposedly they've been working on the chip for years now, and the design is finished. Let's not start calling them overambitious and incompetent just because they've got a better chip than can currently be used under Linux.
Star Wars was an amazing movie because it was set in another galaxy that seemed *real*. The only previous movie that came even close in terms of special effects was Kubrick's 2001 (which still holds its own today). Amazing visuals aside, Star Wars felt like a comic book, with wooden characters, grand "we must save the world from a superficial megalomaniac" plots, and, yes, corny dialog.
I saw Star Wars in theatres when I was nine, and I was blown away by it. I still have some original Star Wars trading cards around here somewhere. As the series progressed, I started seeing the flimsiness of it all: supposedly elite stormtroopers that just mindlessly run out in the line of fire and get killed, races of people who can build enormous battle cruisers but can't seem to get the hang of weapon targeting systems, the good guys making impossible escape after impossible escape. A lot of people--myself included--put down the third movie because of the obvious Ewok kiddie-bait. Now, years later, I think it's just that I wasn't nine when I saw it.
With TPM, lots of people who saw the original--either in theaters or later on video as a kid--are returning to the Star Wars universe. Many of them are putting it down as a kid's movie: sophisticated battle droids that use US-revolutionary war era tactics (march forward in a wide line so you can get mowed down), bad guys that wear corny makeup and don't take care of their teeth, etc. Truth be told, it *is* a kid's movie, and so were the other three.
From Alec Guiness's point of view, he did a bit of acting with weak material in a kids action movie. And he's had to live with it being thought of as the greatest role of his career.
Let's not get carried away. Apple isn't a couple of kids shooting a movie about a witch with a camcorder from Circuit City; they're a big company. Apple's advantage is that they have complete control over their machines, so they can make sudden changes in features (no more floppy drive) or technology (68K -> PPC) as they see fit. On the PC, harware companies are stomping all over each other to try to force their products to be a new standard, and the fallout is what makes things so messy for all of us.
The difference is that Linux fulfilled a real need--a cheap and stable alternative to MS-DOS/Windows as a desktop OS--whereas Java was a technology in search of a problem.
Computers are often badly - even unethically -- sold, with pricey and unnecessary equipment foisted on unknowing consumers
Though he was starting get carried away with himself, he's right on this point. We know how to build reliable, balanced systems. That's what consumers want as well. But that's not what a PC is about; it's about crashing on a regular basis, having to run defragmenters and disk fixers, having to deal with video driver problems, not upgrading to the latest version of Word and having other people complain that they can't read the files you send them, and so on. For example, there's no reason the TNT drivers should be as unreliable as they are. When people pay $130 for a video card, it should be stable. And now before those problems have even been fixed, we're on to the TNT2, which also has unstable drivers. Racing to the cutting edge at the cost of reliability is not a good idea.
What makes one thing popular and another thing less so is very difficult to figure. In any medium sized town you can hear half a dozen or more bands that are as good as or better than what you hear on the radio. In a big city, you'll find over a hundred. But you'll frequently find them playing in front of half-empty bookstore cafes and in dumpy bars where they're used as background noise. If one of these bands suddenly became blessed as cool and marketed in a certain way, they'd be all over the airwaves and MTV.
Once something reaches that point, you can't discuss it as if it were "underground" or some sort of special secret that only you and your friends know about. Your opinions are tainted by being a member of the group that's being marketed to, though you don't want to admit it. Yet all the time you see people latching on to music and movies that are "hip" and anti-establishment as a way of thumbing their noses at the preceding generation and society in general. High school students buy Marilyn Manson because their parents hate it. Teenagers want to see the South Park move because it's offensive. College students like to think they have cutting edge taste by listening to not-for-parents music like Chemical Brothers, Cake, and Fatboy Slim. In none of these cases is anything even remotely alternative or rebellious. They're all just buying the products that profit-aware companies were hoping they would.
BWP has crossed over the line of discussing it rationally. It's not an indie movie any more. It's not underground. It's not something only for trendy net users or under-30 radicals. It's a pop movie that's on the cover of Time and Newsweek. You can't read any more into it than that.
Not a blanket statement for all kids
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Quack!
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· Score: 1
Realize that the recommendation is that kids under three not watch TV. It has nothing to say about school-aged or even preschool-aged kids (although these days, preschool starts at 2). The people saying that kids will become attracted to what they are intentionally kept away from are missing the point completely. A two year old doesn't care if he watches TV or not.
The last few years I've gotten out of the habit of watching TV. I used to only watch daily reruns of The Simpsons and Seinfeld, then only the latter, and now I'm down to one weekly British comedy on PBS ("Last of the Summer Wine") so I don't even see commercials any more.
When I do get exposed to mainstream commercials and magazine ads, I'm completely stunned at how dumb they are. The people in them are glaringly more perfect than anyone I ever see during the week. The attempts at coolness are so obviously forced and phony (I mean really, how did people ever get convinced that wearing comically oversized pants was sexy?). Pop culture advertising is scary.
When I hear the term "geek," I don't associate it with any general set of beliefs. It's a pop culture thing. Get a group of so-called geeks together and find out how many:
* Like The Simpsons and Futurama. * Like the X-Files. * Like Star Trek and/or Babylon 5. * Dislike Microsoft. * Listen to techno/rave/electronica or bands that have a reputation as "underground" but are in amazon.com's top 1000 sellers. * Mostly read Stephenson, Brooks, Jordan, Gibson, and a few other SF/Fantasy authors. * Love action and horror movies and hate everything that gets nominated for an Oscar. * Read comic books. * Own at least one Star Wars toy.
I know this is a sterotype, but it seems to hold up as well as yuppies driving SUVs and listening to Kenny G:)
Two issues are being confused here: evolution and evolutionary theory.
No one disputes that organisms evolve. Anyone who gardens realizes this (plants that have been bred for larger yield, for example). Similarly, mutation and natural selection are also well established.
The theory, that life started as single-celled organisms and eventually evolved into humans--so called "evolutionary theory"--is a beautiful conjecture and not much more. But please realize that if it *isn't* true, that's not an argument for creationism.
With some background reading, it's easy to see how little solid ground evolutionary theory is based on. It's like reading books about how the mind supposedly works, when all we really have are some vague clues and bits of information. We can say that Animal A evolved from Animal B, but we don't really know. For a long time textbooks and musems--even into the 1990s--featured a family tree of how horses evolved. It was visually impressive, with each animal looking more horselike than it's ancestor. Unfortunately, this has been shown be completely incorrect, as the animals in the the tree aren't in any kind of chronological order. There have been other similar errors in "evidence" for evolutionary theory presented in textbooks.
Edsger Dijkstra had a great example in one of his books of an algorithm that looked easy to guess by trial and error, but was actually much different than it appeared to be. With evolutionary theory, we're taking bits of fact and trying to generalize them into a grand theory that encapsulates The Way Things Are--much like Jon Katz:) I can understand not wanting to teach something so flimsy in public schools. Heck, publich schools don't teach objectivism and other philosphies that aren't well-founded in the minds of many.
So are you shocked when you find out that other movies and books aren't real either?
This is goofy. BWP was obviously fiction from the first get-go, but some people are obviously hell-bent on making this some sort of conspiracy. Were they so swept away upon first hearing the movie's premise that they lost all sensibility and blabbed about this amazing super-secret footage to all their friends and families, then felt stupid later?
These are the same sort of people who got upset about Milli Vanilli being fake. They couldn't deal with finding out that they were listening to corporate created music, even though the music was still the same and even though that's how pop music has always been created.
Not your style? That's fine!
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· Score: 1
Criticizing Ender's Game because you only like so-called "hard"--i.e. technology oriented--science fiction isn't valid. You might as well moan about all non-SF books that are clogging up bookstores. Down with everything except Star Trek novels!:P
If there's one think the geek world could use a bit of, it's humanity. Yes, computers/Linux/astronomy/Simpsons are cool. But certainly a little more well-roundedness would be beneficial, both for the obvious reason and because one tends to get skewed opinions when living on a diet of mass market pop culture. Perhaps this is where goofy ideas like "There's no need to make Linux easier to use" come from.
Most programming work is sweatshop slop. Pick up programming from a high school class, the web, or a few books, fool around on the side for a year or so, and you're perfectly capable of handling the majority of programming jobs that require a college degree. I'm not just talking about web and database glue work either.
Most programming jobs are grunt intensive. Hire enough people and you can do all sorts of goofy things, like writing giant windowed applications in systems-level languages like C, or coding 200K line programs without any up front design. This is the norm.
It takes a few years of working to realize this. Then you start wondering what's gone wrong. Why has "Use the best language for the task" degenerated into "Use C++ for everything"? Why do we continually ignore all the lessons learned ages ago and outlined in books like The Mythical Man Month and The Psychology of Computer Programming? Why do we have to live with horrendous architecture XYZ when better alternatives have been around for twenty years?
Eventually it gets tiring, and you start to view high school-level programming as something for junior employees to do, so you can do cushier work like writing and reviewing specs and organizing projects. The problem is, if you do that for too long--more than three years--you might find it difficult to get hired elsewhere, unless you're in an industry with a lot of big players, like telecom. You're in worse shape if you completely avoid the management track before you start to tire of it all.
It also gets frustrating after a while having to always throw away a huge base of knowledge and start in on the "new" thing. "Too bad, old fart," might be a flippant reply, until you realize that what you're currently into now might be cast aside after you've spent years becoming the expert on it (Linux, Perl, CGI, Apache, whatever). Remember, UNIX was in a major downhill death slide that was only stopped by the Web. ESR and RMS have gotten their second chances.
Uh, the article was about 35-40 year old programmers, not 60+ year olds. UNIX had already been kicking for TEN YEARS when someone currently 40 graduated from college.
I've been seeing multiple comments about how home computers have always been superior to consoles and now with the PS2 this will be reversed for the first time.
This is completely wrong.
Consoles have very frequently been superior when they're first released. When the NES was released, PCs had CGA and EGA graphics running over an 8MHz bus. You were hard pressed to get a decent frame rate for *any* game, but games on the NES almost always ran at 60fps (for the NTSC model) with a lot more color and sound.
When the Super Nintendo and Genesis were new, those were the days of Michael Abrash going through all sorts of contortions to get a handful of sprites moving quickly on a VGA card. The SNES, of course, could display three different layers of graphics and 80 sprites--with a sound coprocessor that didn't interfere with the CPU--while easily clicking along at the coveted 60fps. The SNES also could do transparency in hardware.
When the 3DO first appeared in 1993, Doom hadn't even been released yet. On the 3DO you could do arbitrary (though not perspective correct) texture mapping at a decent clip. This was even before early, weak 3D cards were available for the PC, like the Virge.
When the Playstation was released, the 3D games on it were stunning compared to what you could get on the PC. Geometry acceleration was also built-in; something that has yet to show up in a real way on consumer-level PC graphics cards. In this case, though, the PC caught up relatively quickly in terms of raw capability.
Consoles being more powerful is a definite pattern.
Slashdot Mirror
There are some scary issues involved in having an easily accessible archive of someone's posting history. One is that someone may be, um, "less intelligent" at a younger age and regret things later. Routinely someone gets into Usenet for the first time and becomes a flaming idiot for a few months, disappears for a while, then returns as a much lower key citizen. I've done deja seaches on job applicants and run into more than one person who used to be a rampant software pirate at one point in his life. Maybe they got over it. But, man, does it look really bad.
Another issue is that a search can turn up personal opinions and interests that you don't necessarily want to know about, but can end up biasing your views. I did a search for postings by a programmer I respected and found all sorts of apparently serious discussion in a bestialty group. Ugh. I didn't want to know that. Or what if you find that a job applicant strongly holds views that you disagree with on abortion, gun control, government, the death penalty, or legalization of drugs? How could that not bias your opinion of that person? Yes, it *shouldn't* affect anything, but let's be realistic.
1. Postscript (the standard for academic papers). Using Ghostscript/Ghostview these documents are almost always horribly ugly onscreen. Moving around a document with Ghostview is also extremely primitive.
2. Adobe's PDF viewer. This program is an anomaly in that no matter how much processor speed you throw at it, it the rendering speed remains impossibly slow. Like Postscript, PDF files also tend to be designed for the printed page, and are almost always a poor fit for a monitor that's wider than it is tall. People seem to always have their PDF readers configured with some huge zoom factor--so the text fills the width of the screen--or they have a difficult to read scaled page in the middle of the screen surrounded by a huge, empty border.
3. HTML. This is better than the previous two options, but a web browser is too large and unreliable an application to have open all the time just to view documentation. Having to click around with a mouse to read mostly-sequential documentation is non-intuitive. Lynx is an option, but not a pretty one.
4. TeX/DVI. Again, very oriented to the printed page.
5. Microsoft Word. Platform specific; file format changes too frequently.
The are some other schemes out there, but none that have caught on enough to be generally useful.
The Atari Lynx used a 65C02 (8-bit).
Speaker for the Dead was better than the original, and arguably the finest moment of Card's career. It's one of the best character-oriented SF books ever written (which might be why techie-types don't like it as much). The third book, Xenocide had much more of the "chapter in an ongoing saga" feel that the recent Alvin Maker books have; I was unimpressed enough not to want to read the fourth book.
While I agree that the Amiga was a cool machine, it wasn't the copper list that made it cool. Other systems without such a feature could also get "very smooth animation," and of course copper-like features were standard in coin-op hardware of the 1970s (yes, the seventies).
What made the Amiga great was balance. It didn't just have a spectactular sound system or a spectacular graphics system, it was a good overall system. The bus was well thought out; the different chips shared system resources in a smart way; there weren't obvious heavy bottlenecks. The end result was that you could put together applications with sound, graphics, and general processing that, using late 1990s logic, shouldn't be able to run on such a lesser system. That's also been the key to console systems over the years, as opposed to "stick a top of the line graphics card in a system with a horrible bus" approach that's common on PCs.
Sedgewick's book is about algorithms, not languages. The book is valuable because of the explanations and diagrams, and because the code is presented in very clear, short snippets. I have the Pascal version of his book, and it makes no difference to me, as someone who programs in C and C++ professionally, that the code samples are given in Pascal.
A lot of people apparently don't want a book unless it is specifically focused on their favorite language, so Sedgewick has to keep releasing new versions of his book as language fashions change (Pascal was the teaching language of choice when the original edition was published). Shortly we'll probably see "Algorithms in Java" for just that reason.
The Amiga was a cool bit of tech, but it's dead, Gateway killed it!
Gateway picked up the pieces after the Amiga had already crumbled. Sometime in the early 90s, the spirit of the machine died, even before Commodore folded. At one time the Amiga was a hotbed for innovation. Remember games like Mind Walker? But after a point a destructive compulsion to outdo other machines (the PC, the Sega Genesis, the NES) took over, and the innovation was replaced with a "me too!" idealogy. Witness how much time has been spent showing that the Amiga can play a decent game of Doom and Quake. Before that, there was a race to show that the Amiga was better at Sonic-style platform games than the Genesis. Unfortunately the only results were to make the machine look even sadder than ever.
Of course the content of the post wasn't written by Roblimo. He just posted the answers to the questions.
1. I've never read an article that claimed the PS2 would be launched as early as this one claimed. The date it's supposed to be "slipping" to, is the date I've always heard it would be released.
2. I also find it odd that Sony is called "inexperienced" with graphics chips, seeing as they've shipped 20+ million units of the PS1. And, yes, it included a graphics chip that was considered cutting edge for a consumer machine when it was designed.
3. The issue isn't with Sony designing the chip; it's with manufacturing problems. Supposedly they've been working on the chip for years now, and the design is finished. Let's not start calling them overambitious and incompetent just because they've got a better chip than can currently be used under Linux.
Star Wars was an amazing movie because it was set in another galaxy that seemed *real*. The only previous movie that came even close in terms of special effects was Kubrick's 2001 (which still holds its own today). Amazing visuals aside, Star Wars felt like a comic book, with wooden characters, grand "we must save the world from a superficial megalomaniac" plots, and, yes, corny dialog.
I saw Star Wars in theatres when I was nine, and I was blown away by it. I still have some original Star Wars trading cards around here somewhere. As the series progressed, I started seeing the flimsiness of it all: supposedly elite stormtroopers that just mindlessly run out in the line of fire and get killed, races of people who can build enormous battle cruisers but can't seem to get the hang of weapon targeting systems, the good guys making impossible escape after impossible escape. A lot of people--myself included--put down the third movie because of the obvious Ewok kiddie-bait. Now, years later, I think it's just that I wasn't nine when I saw it.
With TPM, lots of people who saw the original--either in theaters or later on video as a kid--are returning to the Star Wars universe. Many of them are putting it down as a kid's movie: sophisticated battle droids that use US-revolutionary war era tactics (march forward in a wide line so you can get mowed down), bad guys that wear corny makeup and don't take care of their teeth, etc. Truth be told, it *is* a kid's movie, and so were the other three.
From Alec Guiness's point of view, he did a bit of acting with weak material in a kids action movie. And he's had to live with it being thought of as the greatest role of his career.
Let's not get carried away. Apple isn't a couple of kids shooting a movie about a witch with a camcorder from Circuit City; they're a big company. Apple's advantage is that they have complete control over their machines, so they can make sudden changes in features (no more floppy drive) or technology (68K -> PPC) as they see fit. On the PC, harware companies are stomping all over each other to try to force their products to be a new standard, and the fallout is what makes things so messy for all of us.
The difference is that Linux fulfilled a real need--a cheap and stable alternative to MS-DOS/Windows as a desktop OS--whereas Java was a technology in search of a problem.
You don't need a CS degree for this. That's like saying you need a BS in biology to be a dog groomer.
Though he was starting get carried away with himself, he's right on this point. We know how to build reliable, balanced systems. That's what consumers want as well. But that's not what a PC is about; it's about crashing on a regular basis, having to run defragmenters and disk fixers, having to deal with video driver problems, not upgrading to the latest version of Word and having other people complain that they can't read the files you send them, and so on. For example, there's no reason the TNT drivers should be as unreliable as they are. When people pay $130 for a video card, it should be stable. And now before those problems have even been fixed, we're on to the TNT2, which also has unstable drivers. Racing to the cutting edge at the cost of reliability is not a good idea.
Unified Memory makes things like page flipping extremely smooth.
The two have nothing to do with each other.
What makes one thing popular and another thing less so is very difficult to figure. In any medium sized town you can hear half a dozen or more bands that are as good as or better than what you hear on the radio. In a big city, you'll find over a hundred. But you'll frequently find them playing in front of half-empty bookstore cafes and in dumpy bars where they're used as background noise. If one of these bands suddenly became blessed as cool and marketed in a certain way, they'd be all over the airwaves and MTV.
Once something reaches that point, you can't discuss it as if it were "underground" or some sort of special secret that only you and your friends know about. Your opinions are tainted by being a member of the group that's being marketed to, though you don't want to admit it. Yet all the time you see people latching on to music and movies that are "hip" and anti-establishment as a way of thumbing their noses at the preceding generation and society in general. High school students buy Marilyn Manson because their parents hate it. Teenagers want to see the South Park move because it's offensive. College students like to think they have cutting edge taste by listening to not-for-parents music like Chemical Brothers, Cake, and Fatboy Slim. In none of these cases is anything even remotely alternative or rebellious. They're all just buying the products that profit-aware companies were hoping they would.
BWP has crossed over the line of discussing it rationally. It's not an indie movie any more. It's not underground. It's not something only for trendy net users or under-30 radicals. It's a pop movie that's on the cover of Time and Newsweek. You can't read any more into it than that.
Realize that the recommendation is that kids under three not watch TV. It has nothing to say about school-aged or even preschool-aged kids (although these days, preschool starts at 2). The people saying that kids will become attracted to what they are intentionally kept away from are missing the point completely. A two year old doesn't care if he watches TV or not.
The last few years I've gotten out of the habit of watching TV. I used to only watch daily reruns of The Simpsons and Seinfeld, then only the latter, and now I'm down to one weekly British comedy on PBS ("Last of the Summer Wine") so I don't even see commercials any more.
When I do get exposed to mainstream commercials and magazine ads, I'm completely stunned at how dumb they are. The people in them are glaringly more perfect than anyone I ever see during the week. The attempts at coolness are so obviously forced and phony (I mean really, how did people ever get convinced that wearing comically oversized pants was sexy?). Pop culture advertising is scary.
When I hear the term "geek," I don't associate it with any general set of beliefs. It's a pop culture thing. Get a group of so-called geeks together and find out how many:
:)
* Like The Simpsons and Futurama.
* Like the X-Files.
* Like Star Trek and/or Babylon 5.
* Dislike Microsoft.
* Listen to techno/rave/electronica or bands that have a reputation as "underground" but are in amazon.com's top 1000 sellers.
* Mostly read Stephenson, Brooks, Jordan, Gibson, and a few other SF/Fantasy authors.
* Love action and horror movies and hate everything that gets nominated for an Oscar.
* Read comic books.
* Own at least one Star Wars toy.
I know this is a sterotype, but it seems to hold up as well as yuppies driving SUVs and listening to Kenny G
Let's just drop the Amiga name from this, shall we? It doesn't do anything except attract a lot of raving idiots. I mean that seriously.
Two issues are being confused here: evolution and evolutionary theory.
:) I can understand not wanting to teach something so flimsy in public schools. Heck, publich schools don't teach objectivism and other philosphies that aren't well-founded in the minds of many.
No one disputes that organisms evolve. Anyone who gardens realizes this (plants that have been bred for larger yield, for example). Similarly, mutation and natural selection are also well established.
The theory, that life started as single-celled organisms and eventually evolved into humans--so called "evolutionary theory"--is a beautiful conjecture and not much more. But please realize that if it *isn't* true, that's not an argument for creationism.
With some background reading, it's easy to see how little solid ground evolutionary theory is based on. It's like reading books about how the mind supposedly works, when all we really have are some vague clues and bits of information. We can say that Animal A evolved from Animal B, but we don't really know. For a long time textbooks and musems--even into the 1990s--featured a family tree of how horses evolved. It was visually impressive, with each animal looking more horselike than it's ancestor. Unfortunately, this has been shown be completely incorrect, as the animals in the the tree aren't in any kind of chronological order. There have been other similar errors in "evidence" for evolutionary theory presented in textbooks.
Edsger Dijkstra had a great example in one of his books of an algorithm that looked easy to guess by trial and error, but was actually much different than it appeared to be. With evolutionary theory, we're taking bits of fact and trying to generalize them into a grand theory that encapsulates The Way Things Are--much like Jon Katz
So are you shocked when you find out that other movies and books aren't real either?
This is goofy. BWP was obviously fiction from the first get-go, but some people are obviously hell-bent on making this some sort of conspiracy. Were they so swept away upon first hearing the movie's premise that they lost all sensibility and blabbed about this amazing super-secret footage to all their friends and families, then felt stupid later?
These are the same sort of people who got upset about Milli Vanilli being fake. They couldn't deal with finding out that they were listening to corporate created music, even though the music was still the same and even though that's how pop music has always been created.
Criticizing Ender's Game because you only like so-called "hard"--i.e. technology oriented--science fiction isn't valid. You might as well moan about all non-SF books that are clogging up bookstores. Down with everything except Star Trek novels! :P
If there's one think the geek world could use a bit of, it's humanity. Yes, computers/Linux/astronomy/Simpsons are cool. But certainly a little more well-roundedness would be beneficial, both for the obvious reason and because one tends to get skewed opinions when living on a diet of mass market pop culture. Perhaps this is where goofy ideas like "There's no need to make Linux easier to use" come from.
Most programming work is sweatshop slop. Pick up programming from a high school class, the web, or a few books, fool around on the side for a year or so, and you're perfectly capable of handling the majority of programming jobs that require a college degree. I'm not just talking about web and database glue work either.
Most programming jobs are grunt intensive. Hire enough people and you can do all sorts of goofy things, like writing giant windowed applications in systems-level languages like C, or coding 200K line programs without any up front design. This is the norm.
It takes a few years of working to realize this. Then you start wondering what's gone wrong. Why has "Use the best language for the task" degenerated into "Use C++ for everything"? Why do we continually ignore all the lessons learned ages ago and outlined in books like The Mythical Man Month and The Psychology of Computer Programming? Why do we have to live with horrendous architecture XYZ when better alternatives have been around for twenty years?
Eventually it gets tiring, and you start to view high school-level programming as something for junior employees to do, so you can do cushier work like writing and reviewing specs and organizing projects. The problem is, if you do that for too long--more than three years--you might find it difficult to get hired elsewhere, unless you're in an industry with a lot of big players, like telecom. You're in worse shape if you completely avoid the management track before you start to tire of it all.
It also gets frustrating after a while having to always throw away a huge base of knowledge and start in on the "new" thing. "Too bad, old fart," might be a flippant reply, until you realize that what you're currently into now might be cast aside after you've spent years becoming the expert on it (Linux, Perl, CGI, Apache, whatever). Remember, UNIX was in a major downhill death slide that was only stopped by the Web. ESR and RMS have gotten their second chances.
Uh, the article was about 35-40 year old programmers, not 60+ year olds. UNIX had already been kicking for TEN YEARS when someone currently 40 graduated from college.
I've been seeing multiple comments about how home computers have always been superior to consoles and now with the PS2 this will be reversed for the first time.
This is completely wrong.
Consoles have very frequently been superior when they're first released. When the NES was released, PCs had CGA and EGA graphics running over an 8MHz bus. You were hard pressed to get a decent frame rate for *any* game, but games on the NES almost always ran at 60fps (for the NTSC model) with a lot more color and sound.
When the Super Nintendo and Genesis were new, those were the days of Michael Abrash going through all sorts of contortions to get a handful of sprites moving quickly on a VGA card. The SNES, of course, could display three different layers of graphics and 80 sprites--with a sound coprocessor that didn't interfere with the CPU--while easily clicking along at the coveted 60fps. The SNES also could do transparency in hardware.
When the 3DO first appeared in 1993, Doom hadn't even been released yet. On the 3DO you could do arbitrary (though not perspective correct) texture mapping at a decent clip. This was even before early, weak 3D cards were available for the PC, like the Virge.
When the Playstation was released, the 3D games on it were stunning compared to what you could get on the PC. Geometry acceleration was also built-in; something that has yet to show up in a real way on consumer-level PC graphics cards. In this case, though, the PC caught up relatively quickly in terms of raw capability.
Consoles being more powerful is a definite pattern.