Do you seriously think linux has a larger userbase than Macs have? I will say this, though- it's likely that linux has a user base with significantly more Quake-running capacity, because that level of CPU power is really pretty significant, and the Mac userbase has a substantial weighting towards housewives, Joe Sixpack et all who don't neccessarily have a machine that's recent. I think linux users are to some extent more likely than average Mac users to have a machine recent enough to run Quake. This isn't at all the same thing as claiming the group (in general) is a bigger group. How would you like it if something came out for Linux first and then NT, and all the comments were 'Of course, it's that way because Linux is insignificant, so they get the bugs out with the small group and then move on to the real group, NT'? Sorry, it's just irritating. This is EXACTLY the same attitude that has most of the world considering Linux too geeky and insignificant to matter. All things matter, and Macs are not as small a group as you think (just as, in talking to Mac folks, I would say that Linux was not as small a group as they thought). OK?
Geez, a lot of people don't have a clue... Quicktime is:
multilayer
Adobe Premiere-like transitions
rendered effects as video planes
chromakeying
semitransparency with multiple layers
same with alpha channels
same with separate tracks available for alpha channels
can mix thousands of tracks on the fly
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'? Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people? In fairness, what we're actually talking about here is a _creation_ format- though Sorenson performs amazingly well, I for one would be happy using Quicktime to _produce_ multimedia content and then for your general movie-type stuff, 'rendering' it all down to a plain data stream like MPEG. I've seen some very pretty MPEG;) But then I can- I'm dualbooting a Mac, deal with it. I like that much better than dualbooting a Windows machine and giving money to the Butcher of Redmond, rather than the apprentice butcher of cupertino which (as you _know_) may never fully gain the power to destroy which Redmond has. You can do nonlinear video editing all you like on AVI, for what it's worth. How much do you have to pay? With Quicktime (at least on the Mac) you get to do video editing at no _cost_ with MoviePlayer (granted, you're not supposed to, but guess what? The old MoviePlayer from before QT3 _still_ _works_ with QT3, and lets you do all the editing and file saving with the new codecs.) There are freeware MP3 encoders. Where's _your_ freeware nonlinear video editor? How's it for editing files by reference and working from existing HD data without generating huge amounts of new work files? I'm sorry- yes, I'd like to have a good converter for changing elaborate QT movies into MPEG, but a lot of people seem to have no idea what Quicktime is. As for AVI, basically you're talking %90 elaborate codecs explicitly made by Intel to be insurmountably difficult to translate to other processor architectures. I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada... seems like if it runs on Windows on Intel, it must be okay, eh guys? While you're ranting about how bad Apple sucks, mind getting after Intel to translate their codecs to an architecture approximately as popular as all of Linux? Geeeeez... Oh well. The most recent video I did was a rendered explosion in POV-Ray. 400x300 at millions of colors, ten seconds at 30fps, and in Sorenson it's 1.4 megs with _no_ artifacting at all. I'm always going to be concerned about compatibility, and I'll be paying attention to all discussions of multimedia formats, but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime. I _am_ on the optimal platform and processor architecture (having 32 registers and 32 FP registers rather than, uh, 4, does make a difference). I'm happy for anything Apple does to further Quicktime, and not for a minute do I believe it will fully meet the interests of the FSF for instance. But _anything_ which suppresses the tendency of (currently) Microsoft to exterminate all other choice, is good. Quicktime is good because you've got the option- deal with it. Having options is good. Having all the options on Linux would be better (+linuxPPC) but failing that, it's at least good to _have_ options out there. It's healthier. And like I said, Quicktime royally kicks butt and takes names _in_ its area of focus, primarily content creation.
I have to defend South Park here. South Park is the show where Matt and Trey, the creators, do hysterically funny and twisted (and very subtle- 'tis all in the reactions, priceless) cameos on the storebought video tapes (at least the first one). South Park is the show where Cartman, controlled by an alien anal probe, gets zapped from space and does a few bars of a weird old-fashioned song (I Love To Singa) and is zapped again, stops, and STARES for seconds. A dog barks (or something.) I'm already helpless with laughter looking at his stunned stare even before another kid goes 'Cartman, what the hell was that?' with great conviction... South Park is the show where, in the middle of all the business about four-assed monkeys (pretty lowbrow, sure), we get a brief glimpse of the result of the scientist splicing swiss cheese, chalk, and a beard. Say what? It's already gone before you can even react- but talk about a high form of dada, _where_ did they get that one? The Simpsons is almost never quite that just plain weird- the Simpsons does good jokes and cleverness, but South Park has a wild streak of madness that has nothing to do with the foul language, and it's way, way better than those idiotic Dilbert graffitiings.
I'm a musician. They'll be putting the screws to me for the encoders. 'MS Visual Audio Studio' for $500, anyone? No fscking way am I letting this company be the middleman between me and my audience. They'll bleed me dry given half a chance- even if they _don't_ charge for encoders, do you think there will be one for my Mac? Even if there is one for my Mac, do you think a year will go by without MS perverting the format so that it takes quad PIIIs running NT to compress it and play it back- and then do you think it will stay cross platform? I think you get the idea. Sorry, no fscking way, homie don't play that game: I'm with the guys saying 'resist!'. It _amazes_ me how many people are ready and willing to put their heads in a noose for short-term gain. Just say no to selling your future out for a temporary prettyshinything.
It's not just Sorenson for the video (that codec that delivers really sharp video but chokes most computers to play back)- there's also audio codecs from Qualcomm which are said to be better than MP3. Of course, I'm not using them for strictly audio, but if I can produce video I'll be using the Quicktime Sorenson and will also use their wizzy audio codecs too. The world is not only Microsoft+MP3/linux/etc. There are other people who can throw money and programmers at a problem besides just the ones in Redmond.
And I gotta blush and laugh when I realise that Slashdot has been changed and no longer permits paragraph indenting with nonbreaking spaces! *blush* well... I said I had to have humility, and by God, do I ever have to have it now;) uh, sorry about that, thought it still worked...
Yeah- I sometimes _like_ reading the arguments of idiots. I don't post to alt.flame, but I do also read some Usenet- and I don't block Jon Katz, even though I now know that would hurt him the only way he _can_ be hurt (much like newsgroup trolls with an infinite appetite for flames but no stomach for ignoring). If Jon was entirely worthless, _all_ (or maybe 50%) Slashdotters would block him. If he was any good he'd be at 80 or so with the other opinionated editors, he'd be in line with Sengan who's ruffled some feathers. The reason he's blocked by over 650 people in spite of the fact that one has to make an effort to do so _and_ choose to not even take a chance on his ever saying anything useful, is because he _almost_ never says anything useful at all. The 'gasbag' has been ditched, effectively. If he doesn't like this, he can find other forums or actually try to write something good- or at least pick good subjects and stay out of the way of them, as he managed to do with his decent profile of those two hacker kids. He should pointedly refrain from ever doing any more opinion pieces, because it would appear that almost ten times the slashdotters don't even want to hear his opinion compared with other story posters' ratios. If he can't take that advice, then he should at least work on learning to find acceptance and humility with the idea that he is not very important and people don't care what he thinks. Hell, there are very few subjects where people care what _I_ think. Jon certainly has not struck a special bargain with the Deity to be rendered more worthy of even minimal attention, so I am both amused and exasperated that this is so hard for him. In all the chasing of mountaintop enlightenment, doesn't he have the faintest notion of what humility means? Jon's enlightenment has primarily been self-realization. He grew up in a different world than the one facing kids today, one where his entire generation was demonized and canonized alternately- either they were the hope for the future, the Woodstock generation, or they were drug addicts and moral reprobates beyond any imagining. He, understandably, has a hard time fitting into a 'So what?' world, where some of us younger geeks are very accustomed to it. This is part of his continuing difficulty in holding credibility- he has a hard time coming to terms with the fact that the majority of people care nada for what he thinks, and in fact that he'd have to put a lot of work into simply getting their attention long enough for them to parse what he's saying and make up their minds whether they like it or not. On top of this he doesn't put any work into how he says it- his first and third paragraphs repeat the exact same sentence blindly, suggesting that he does not even bother to proof his writing, or that he feels he does not even owe readers the slightest consideration. It's as if his stream of consciousness is supposed to merit the level of publicity he gets. It does not. Again: attention is not a right, but Jon _feels_ worthy of it by default- and this clashes jarringly with the more Gen-X experience a lot of slashdotters grew up with, where you have to do a _lot_ more to even be heard, and even then, odds are your efforts will be in vain. The fact is, someone who lives in the latter world, who has to accept the great uncaringness of most of existence and rejoice in what little bits of it _can_ be grown and cultivated, will probably find Jon's assumption that he has a _right_ to credibility and attention, as annoying. This is one reason Jon's special status as story poster has historically rankled: this status gives him the special power to gain more attention than the average yob, and he _writes_ as if he is more enlightened and aware than us geeky masses, and the problem is he's not- he's not even smart enough to figure this out, and in spite of his continuing failure to be _more_ worthy than your average slashdotter, he _still_ _gets_ story posting privileges. Because that's CmdrTaco's privilege, it's Rob's site in the final analysis. Is it any wonder that ten times the usual number block hearing from him at all? If he had the spark of humility in his soul, things would be very different. Nobody would resent a 'kid brother' approach of the eager Linux newbie learning more and posting their experiences. Instead, even when functioning in the areas where he deserves to show the most humility, such as being a Linux amateur, he insists, is determined to, put the whole thing in the light of spiritual development ("It's a test of the human spirit")... an area where he, being a published author and an older man than your usual slashdot reader, feels he has dominance and can assert a spiritual authority. This, even in areas where humility and willingness to learn would be most fitting and even obligatory... In summary, this article perfectly epitomizes just who Jon Katz is, and throws a vivid light on why there's been so much friction. Jon's not a technical guru, has little to say on social trends, and in fact his complete innocence of the concept of humility suggests that he has little to say spiritually either. Being the ambulance watcher I am, naturally I am entertained by deconstructing him- I can't help but wonder whether this post will be elevated to high levels or forcibly moderated down to suppressed levels! But either way- _I_ do not have the luxury of ignoring humility. I'm late to post, and few people will read past the spam spouting fellow, and of those who do, few will care that much what I say. If anybody does care, they can go to my site as listed in the URL link, and read more things I've had to say. I don't have a special hotline to high-bandwidth attention, as Jon has, and in fact I couldn't tell you whether I merit one. In some areas, maybe. In other areas, certainly not. I'm content in the knowledge that, after a stressful day of web site and brochure-hacking, and being accepted within a small group of co-workers as the ranking authority on web and layout stuff, I've come to slashdot, read yet another Jon Katz expostulation, and uncovered still more of what makes the man tick, and just why he's so incredibly irritating to many Slashdotters. I'm content to know that I've worked harder on this simple reply than Jon did on his feature article- and I feel that I have more respect for Slashdot readers by doing so. Why shouldn't I revise my post and put in paragraph indents and correct typos, if I wish to register on the radar screens of Slashdot? I take the same pains with my web site. Jon doesn't seem willing to take any pains- he behaves as if he is entitled to our attention, on principle, in case he might have an idea of some sort. If it wasn't so fun studying him, it would annoy me too, but in fact it's meta-useful, in that nothing he says is significant, but studying him is very useful for understanding certain semi-pathological social dynamics. Jon, in other circumstances, could be the guy who talks too loud at parties and starts fights. Instead, he's apparently very decent and nice in person and in private- and it is his public persona that cannot stomach humility. This, though it's far from the point he wants us to listen to, is still an interesting thing to consider, and though I'm not sure CmdrTaco intends for Jon to be a study of irritants in online social constructs, nevertheless he serves as a revealing example.
Trusting soul, aren't you! I always try to figure out the most evil things I can do to my programs to make them crash and burn, and if it seems possible I'll do the error checking. Not if (2+2 = 5) but if (application is expecting to be able to get parent folderitem for itself as a folder/directory but surprise! It's at root level out of the folder it shipped in. On a Zip Disk. Which is write protected, with one of the sectors damaged >:) ) Get it? If you don't try to kill your program in horrible ways, horrible things will eventually happen anyway, and your program will faw down go boom, probably when someone needs it most. I don't care what Linus says- he can and should make the Linux kernel an intricate perfect diamond dependent only on his own code- but when I'm writing applications I assume nothing. If your app needs no error checking, you probably aren't letting users run amok enough. Saying 'don't touch anything' isn't okay. They need to get their little paws dirty and feel they can mess with whatever- and if they break your program's dependencies doing so, unless it's truly speed critical and you can't spare the check at all, you need to SAY what they did to break it so they can learn and fix it.
I just munched up a copy of SiteBotSource.txt with 'cut lines including', and got the following ratio: Source: 550 lines Comments: 235 lines This is because I needed Sitebot to work for _me_, and it calls its own routines recursively and does many strange and arcane things (if I didn't need to auto-link to a separate FX folder that's always at root level the whole thing could have been done by hand but nooooo, genius here had to come up with more complicated things to do to^H^Hwith it) //Comments rule! When coding weird stuff the most bizarre notions are likely to seem obvious, and then be totally inexplicable in a month. I like to be able to stop coding on Sitebot for a month, and then resume without spending hours figuring out what I was thinking....
What's wrong with StaticText1.text="Hello World" ? I dunno if this is the way VB does it, but it's REALbasic code, and it seems nice and straightforward. You drag the statictext onto the app window and set it up mousishly:)
The ultimate 'toy language': REALbasic for the Mac. Sort of 'Visual Basic minus as much cruft as possible' with a heavy emphasis on interfacebuilding tools: I wrote 1500 lines but the GUI code I didn't have to write would have been at least 3000 lines if not 5000:) Also, the people at REAL software have openly stated that, given the chance to add compatibility with VB, they won't add compatibility to features that suck:) Lastly, I don't count HTML as a language, and at any rate, I wrote a REALbasic program to generate my site from text and some markup, so it's moot. In all seriousness, RB will never be any good for device drivers or calculation engines, but it's at least as good as any scripting language, and by God is it quick to prototype stuff in. Whee! Also it's not really basic, just uses some similar syntax and has the reassuring name- it's quite event-driven, does thread classes, and even has a wizzy sprite engine for fooling around with games:)
I'd have sworn I wrote less than 1000 until I counted just three programs (coincedentally the ones with GPLed source available online) and found it was around 1500 lines. Not lines of C, mind you, but for 'a that still lines of GPLed code. _Mac_ code! So that's 1500 lines closer to open source setting the tone for Mac development too:)
Window Maker is easily changed so that popup menus normally produced by wizzy extra buttons can be produced by f1-f2 or whatever:) That said, I have yet to work out my xmodmap troubles, so other details like optionclicking only works with one of the option keys...
Mere Red Zone material
on
Quickielanche
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· Score: 2
I'd say this is parody, all right, just incredibly lame. The fact that it's nothing but pathetic crap doesn't change the fact that it's still parody:) Surely there's room for _bad_ parody that sucks and makes you think the 'authors' are idiot losers? I would hope so! Of course, I hardly expect to see this person given the slashdot recognition of genuinely bizarre and funny exploits like Stick Figure Death Theatre:)
That would imply mp3 and 44.1K CD _is_ serious, which is rather absurd: they aren't remotely serious, just fun and convenient. What's so wrong with that? I'm going to stick with 'as long as you're not really _serious_ about sound quality'. One doesn't have to be serious all the time...
CDs already ruin sounds like that, so MP3 isn't significantly worse. Either are more or less okay, as long as you're not really _serious_ about sound quality, and you can also pre-emphasize the input to get as much out of it as you can. For an MP3 this would definitely translate to larger file size at the same bitrate encoding- you'd be basically feeding it more detail, working the decoder like an instrument. A sample, of sorts- I can do a lot better once I build certain equipment, but that page contains an MP3 excerpt from a long musical piece I recorded.
This is heavily prior art from the Sumo Aria/Museatex Melior. I can and will furnish reference- the Sumo Aria was reviewed in The Absolute Sound, v14 #62 november/december 1989 (yes, the date written on the spine of the mag is Y2K compliant;) ) It's a very good detailed and insightful review- when I made some speakers along these lines, mine showed many of the same characteristics as the reviewed, $3000 speakers. One aspect of their claim is very strange- the vibration pattern of center-driven membranes is not remotely random. It is ripple-like, radiating from the center. If the ripples persist too much, the speaker develops unpleasant 'drumheadlike' colorations. If you drive it in lots of places you could overcome the sound pressure level limitations, but the really _phenomenal_ imaging the design can produce is hosed. All very interesting, though- I'd love to see where they place the multiple drivers they apparently use, if their reports are not misleading.
It's the same idea as the old Sumo Aria (aka Museatex Melior). I wonder if these are using stretched mylar membranes, or something semirigid like flat paper? You can make your own with stretched mylar and a central moving-coil driver. Caveats: 'wide range' means the thing _insists_ on producing super wide range even into areas where the speaker just breaks up (low frequency resonance modes esp.), and the phenomenal dispersion means the efficiency at any given point is really weak- it's just the same really weak anywhere in the room or indeed adjoining rooms- the sound 'carries' phenomenally well. Use a musical instrument speaker for efficiency and surgically remove the cone and basket as much as possible, and do not (trust me) run the little magnet wires over as moving parts- they will crack and cause the speaker to go intermittent and rasp on loud or low notes:P Also, the membrane speakers at least are bidirectional- the back wave is _out_ of phase, so you can't reasonably hang them on the wall without obliterating the low end. And, you can't simply make huge versions to get more volume- the whole thing is severely volume-limited as the entire sound output is coupled through a point attached to flexible membrane, so if you want other than ultra faint, make a sphere-like or egg-shaped driver attachment, and make the drive point a _wide_ point on the membrane, not the tip of a cone (easier to construct, but you never heard anything so faint, trust me) *blink* yeesh, suddenly I'm doing open source speaker design? Guess I'm just surprised- this principle was PATENTED I thought. I could have been making speakers of this type all this time, if only I'd known... I know, I'll write them and _ask_ if they're on solid legal ground. Maybe the Sumo/Museatex concepts failed patenting under prior art or something...
This is precisely the method used by authors at the start of the computer era such as Steven Levy, who wrote 'Hackers' on an Apple II. Back then you broke documents up into little bits so the software could deal with them. In some ways it's heartwarming to see that we're still there... ...or _you_ are. Me, I don't do 'word processors'... my text is text, and whether it's Linux tools or BBEdit Lite, the stuff _I_ use can deal with multi-meg documents without flinching. Ironically, I still like to write novels with chapters as separate files, which I guess illustrates that you _can_ fool all of the people all of the time, especially if most of them don't really care all that much, or expect any sort of progress over the years.
That's a strange viewpoint to see on Slashdot, which is very biased towards Linux, an operating system that can make old 486es hold lasting value and do useful tasks. As far as Macs, they are every bit as capable of holding value. I have a Mac Plus with 1M of RAM doing duty as a kitchen recipe book. It boots off a floppy and has no HD and is still useful (though it does consume more wattage than paper, but less than the light bulb that shines on it:) ) I have a IIcx that is destined to be the dedicated MIDI sequencer for my studio- got 20M of ram for it for free through good luck when I made it dualboot NetBSD and MacOS, but I can't do anything with NetBSD on this little machine- time to devote it to Mac-based MIDI sequencing in a big way. It will _always_ be fast enough for that. I have a Classic (like a Plus only with a HD) which is well suited to being a little bedside machine for jotting down notes on. A Mac Classic can boot in fourteen _seconds_. Wake up, boot, type, shut down, go back to sleep... I have a 9500 which I just got a Voodoo2 card for (whee!) It's my dualboot Linux/Mac box. I'm not bothering taking the CPU beyond the 200Mhz 604e, G3 wants a bus that can handle it (like the newer powermacs)... but the 9500 has _twelve_ DIMM slots and a bunch of drive bays. The 9500 is destined for lasting value as a digital audio workstation and as a rendering box when I eventually get something newer and quicker... iMacs will hold their value marvellously- and maintain their _usefulness_ even better. Aren't people talking about using them as X terminals? Talk about obscene overkill as an X terminal! Yet, when they are costing about $200 each years from now, they'll still be just as overpowered for the task as ever.
How're you going to fit a PII/PIII/Celeron, desktop DVD drive, all that ram, maybe a 3D card etc etc, SCSI, Firewire, into even a 17" case... ...without it all MELTING?
I'm serious. This is a major, major issue for this type of design, and is probably the reason the iMac uses basically a Powerbook CD-Rom (lower wattage! less heat generation).
If the PC guys _do_ manage to get the PC equivalent, even at comparable power, into a monitor casing, if it doesn't catch fire in the lab then expect all the parts to have lifetimes about 1/4 what you'd expect. If they try to go for higher power, forget it- the things won't even survive testing. Do you know the _differential_ between even fast G3 chips and Pentia, as far as heat dissipation is concerned?
...or totally intolerant. But then, Katz didn't know what he was looking at, either, so I can't blame you for his inability to explain it to you.
Apparently Katz wants to have Asperger's syndrome when he grows up.
I'm serious- just like there was the discovery years ago that there were millions of 'ambulatory schizophrenics' walking the streets, you just got a close-up look at the value system of an Asperger's person. At least one of them is, if not both- they probably don't know it because they've found niches that keep them out of the hospitals and homeless shelters by the skin of their teeth- and it's a real condition, a lifelong one with no cure, a weird other world of radically different values and priorities.
Have you ever heard the name Temple Grandin? Temple is an autistic woman and possibly the greatest designer of stockyards and livestock handling architecture the world has ever seen. She has always struggled to simply survive the world- but then on the other hand she has what she herself refers to as the 'Sun workstation' in her head, the mysterious savant-like ability to take a set of design problems, turn it over to her unusual and gifted/hobbled brain, and come out with a solution way better than normal humans could hope to find, somewhat like the 'lightning calculator' prodigies. It's a sort of geek Borg-like synthesis- people like the character Data, who can do remarkable feats of computation and even true creativity- but who are helpless at a dinner party without instructions- and who rebel at always having to be given instructions, because they are not _stupid_, just different- in some ways very different.
Is it any wonder that we retreat to the computer sphere where we can thrive and use our strengths?
Yeah, I did say 'we' for a reason- I live with Asperger's myself. It's not too much of a problem, though it is a disabling condition in most circumstances. I steer away from social interaction- unless it's with people I have something significant in common with, it wears me out absurdly fast, to the point that I develop physical symptoms of stress. I was ordered by a shrink once to go right away to the emergency room of the hospital. Why? I'd been trying to sort of 'fit in with the mainstream', in particular to get willingness to try your regular sort of people-oriented job (rather than the low-pay but geek-oriented jobs I'm doing now). I was a good boy, right up to the point where the shrink informed me the stomach pains that made me sweat and lie awake at night and guzzle Alka-seltzer over was gastric ulcer recurring on me, and that I could be dead in days if I didn't fix whatever it was that was wrong. Then I stopped being the good boy and considered the idea of just being _me_... and yes, I do have some freaky skills, the sort Jon Katz longs for. In particular, I'm right off the chart in particular types of mental modeling, the specific test being one of a set called GATB, in which you see 2D shapes and answer which, of a set of 3D shapes, the 2D shape can be deformed to. I obliterated this test, set a ten year high- and it's typically geeky that I also loved it and wanted to keep doing more of the exercises.
I don't know why I'm going to all this trouble to explain all this. Nobody really cares, least of all me- my life remains the same set of capacities and challenges whether or not you, popular head-of-his-class AC, think I'm a loser or not. In fact, since trying to measure up to your value system damned near literally killed me, I'm pointedly not interested in trading in a life where I can be healthy and accomplish things for a life where I look socially acceptable and 'play well with others' and die in a few years. I'm only reacting to this notion that, of the nerds and geeks, the reclusive ones, the ones who can't deal with eating right or hygiene (I'm borderline- having a bad, bad hair day, but not overly rancid, thanks:) ), are loser geeks, and the geeks who run the computer clubs and go to parties and have girlfriends/boyfriends and pursue a healthy active social life are _good_ geeks to be emulated and used as the yardstick.
This is not only angering, it is unfair, because historically, large numbers of nerds, geeks and other major contributors to 20th century technology- hell, any technology, ever- have been these people you scorn, geeks without social lives, sometimes without friends, but with brains that can do things like hack on code for 30 hours without rest, or mysteriously arrive at revolutionary ways of doing things.
Sounds like Ubermensch? (btw, you do know who Nietzsche is?) Well, it's more like LOSERmensch, and that changes NOTHING about it. Humans vary, and the geek/nerd is well within the overall spectrum- brings things to society that cannot be simply duplicated by masses of people putting in 9-to-5s and then going off to socialize with their circuits of social obligations- and I for one will not just sit around silently and listen to people who are kind of like me, called losers. I don't see them as losers. I'm as maladjusted as they are- except in my areas of strength, or even savantlike ability.
If you don't like the 'bad name' set by those you associate with, I'd have to suggest that you better get used to it. There's a very clear correlation between certain types of mental illness (defined as 'ill by the standards of normal society) and hacker skills. It's not just about having more time to practice, either- the extreme hacker archetype is _qualitatively_ different from your normal smart guy. There's a whole spectrum going all the way from Joe Regular Dude (who happens to be a damned good coder) to weird personalities who seem to be telnetting their thinking from the planet Neptune, to RMS (just haha-only-serious). Joe Regular _cannot_ do some of the things RMS has done, and probably can't do what the guy from Neptune can do (though Joe's a hell of a lot easier to cope with). This is not the sociological version of rocket science. This is _obvious_ to anybody who's made the slightest effort to do the research. Anyone asserting that 'shut inside low-hygeine geek losers' are a bad influence that need to be trained to act like humans... is only illustrating their inability to understand the reality of geeks, and the computer subculture, and the human mind itself.
I could log out to post this but I'm damned if I will. I'm speaking for me, others might identify with some of it or not. Clearly some will not. Not my problem- I just refuse to be blackmailed into some expectation that growth for me involves learning to act more like Joe Average, have outside interests, socialize etc. and not be 'a loser'. I rather think that, having put a lot of work into understanding this, that I'll go on being me, thank you- which will continue to be a 'me' many people would consider rather maladjusted, a 'me' which Jon Katz would appear to be blankly awed by (except I've sassed him too much), a 'me' so depersonalised by the impossible, unattainable expectations of society that for years I didn't even feel human at all- and finally, a 'me' I'm beginning to understand and accept- not on moral grounds but the sheer pragmatism of 'what works'. And being a geek, nerd, perhaps even a hacker in ways, works for me, where nothing else did.
Whether or not Katz's geeks consider themselves Asperger's people, their worldviews coincide with my own painfully-acquired one well enough that I don't accept your labels for them at all. They are not 'losers'. They're different than you. Deal with it because you can't change them: it's only fair, they've spent all their lives, as I did, not being able to change people like you.
Flame on: it'll be interesting to see who 'gets it' and who doesn't. Sounds like your mind is already made up, AC.
This is a conceptual error on ESR's part, though it's not a really _severe_ one. We do still need it all as one vast file. There have been times when I needed to basically hose my brain out with meaningless yet fun trivia, and started reading the Jargon File straight through, usually finishing it after a couple of days. I have it in eDoc format, a Mac sort of Acrobat-ish thing which I use for read-only documents sometimes. I also have lots of BOFH stories in eDoc, so I get a sense of 'reading fun stuff' when I use eDoc for anything:) The new arrangement is not designed for reading, it's designed for looking up, as if it was VERY IMPORTANT to be able to have 'kremvax' at your fingertips. Is it? It's almost as if this is the PHB version, lacking only wizzy graphic javascript mouseovers to make it The Manager's Guide To What Those Salaried Freaks Are Saying;) Hey, since obviously some people are going to turn it back into plaintext, who's up for taking it the other direction? Make a standalone Jargon File application, with lots of chrome, for suits!:) ESR has already done the hard part of turning it into the obligatory frame-oriented quick-lookup set of data files, so all that remains is to write chrome:)
It's about being a fscking masterpiece;) it's insanity blues, man, and totally authentic. And Marc Ribot's guitar solos bent my head into entirely new shapes- I'm _still_ trying to work out where that dude's coming from... I now have a note-for-weird-note Marc Ribot guitar solo and am trying to remember what Rain Dogs song it came from. Why, oh why, did I let a desperate and piteously begging Tom Waits fan trade that album away from me?
Slashdot Mirror
Do you seriously think linux has a larger userbase than Macs have?
I will say this, though- it's likely that linux has a user base with significantly more Quake-running capacity, because that level of CPU power is really pretty significant, and the Mac userbase has a substantial weighting towards housewives, Joe Sixpack et all who don't neccessarily have a machine that's recent.
I think linux users are to some extent more likely than average Mac users to have a machine recent enough to run Quake. This isn't at all the same thing as claiming the group (in general) is a bigger group.
How would you like it if something came out for Linux first and then NT, and all the comments were 'Of course, it's that way because Linux is insignificant, so they get the bugs out with the small group and then move on to the real group, NT'?
Sorry, it's just irritating. This is EXACTLY the same attitude that has most of the world considering Linux too geeky and insignificant to matter. All things matter, and Macs are not as small a group as you think (just as, in talking to Mac folks, I would say that Linux was not as small a group as they thought). OK?
Quicktime is:
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'?
Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people? In fairness, what we're actually talking about here is a _creation_ format- though Sorenson performs amazingly well, I for one would be happy using Quicktime to _produce_ multimedia content and then for your general movie-type stuff, 'rendering' it all down to a plain data stream like MPEG. I've seen some very pretty MPEG
But then I can- I'm dualbooting a Mac, deal with it. I like that much better than dualbooting a Windows machine and giving money to the Butcher of Redmond, rather than the apprentice butcher of cupertino which (as you _know_) may never fully gain the power to destroy which Redmond has.
You can do nonlinear video editing all you like on AVI, for what it's worth. How much do you have to pay? With Quicktime (at least on the Mac) you get to do video editing at no _cost_ with MoviePlayer (granted, you're not supposed to, but guess what? The old MoviePlayer from before QT3 _still_ _works_ with QT3, and lets you do all the editing and file saving with the new codecs.)
There are freeware MP3 encoders. Where's _your_ freeware nonlinear video editor? How's it for editing files by reference and working from existing HD data without generating huge amounts of new work files? I'm sorry- yes, I'd like to have a good converter for changing elaborate QT movies into MPEG, but a lot of people seem to have no idea what Quicktime is.
As for AVI, basically you're talking %90 elaborate codecs explicitly made by Intel to be insurmountably difficult to translate to other processor architectures. I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada... seems like if it runs on Windows on Intel, it must be okay, eh guys?
While you're ranting about how bad Apple sucks, mind getting after Intel to translate their codecs to an architecture approximately as popular as all of Linux? Geeeeez... Oh well. The most recent video I did was a rendered explosion in POV-Ray. 400x300 at millions of colors, ten seconds at 30fps, and in Sorenson it's 1.4 megs with _no_ artifacting at all.
I'm always going to be concerned about compatibility, and I'll be paying attention to all discussions of multimedia formats, but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime. I _am_ on the optimal platform and processor architecture (having 32 registers and 32 FP registers rather than, uh, 4, does make a difference).
I'm happy for anything Apple does to further Quicktime, and not for a minute do I believe it will fully meet the interests of the FSF for instance. But _anything_ which suppresses the tendency of (currently) Microsoft to exterminate all other choice, is good. Quicktime is good because you've got the option- deal with it. Having options is good. Having all the options on Linux would be better (+linuxPPC) but failing that, it's at least good to _have_ options out there. It's healthier.
And like I said, Quicktime royally kicks butt and takes names _in_ its area of focus, primarily content creation.
I have to defend South Park here. South Park is the show where Matt and Trey, the creators, do hysterically funny and twisted (and very subtle- 'tis all in the reactions, priceless) cameos on the storebought video tapes (at least the first one).
South Park is the show where Cartman, controlled by an alien anal probe, gets zapped from space and does a few bars of a weird old-fashioned song (I Love To Singa) and is zapped again, stops, and STARES for seconds. A dog barks (or something.) I'm already helpless with laughter looking at his stunned stare even before another kid goes 'Cartman, what the hell was that?' with great conviction...
South Park is the show where, in the middle of all the business about four-assed monkeys (pretty lowbrow, sure), we get a brief glimpse of the result of the scientist splicing swiss cheese, chalk, and a beard. Say what? It's already gone before you can even react- but talk about a high form of dada, _where_ did they get that one? The Simpsons is almost never quite that just plain weird- the Simpsons does good jokes and cleverness, but South Park has a wild streak of madness that has nothing to do with the foul language, and it's way, way better than those idiotic Dilbert graffitiings.
I'm a musician. They'll be putting the screws to me for the encoders. 'MS Visual Audio Studio' for $500, anyone? No fscking way am I letting this company be the middleman between me and my audience. They'll bleed me dry given half a chance- even if they _don't_ charge for encoders, do you think there will be one for my Mac? Even if there is one for my Mac, do you think a year will go by without MS perverting the format so that it takes quad PIIIs running NT to compress it and play it back- and then do you think it will stay cross platform?
I think you get the idea. Sorry, no fscking way, homie don't play that game: I'm with the guys saying 'resist!'. It _amazes_ me how many people are ready and willing to put their heads in a noose for short-term gain. Just say no to selling your future out for a temporary prettyshinything.
It's not just Sorenson for the video (that codec that delivers really sharp video but chokes most computers to play back)- there's also audio codecs from Qualcomm which are said to be better than MP3. Of course, I'm not using them for strictly audio, but if I can produce video I'll be using the Quicktime Sorenson and will also use their wizzy audio codecs too. The world is not only Microsoft+MP3/linux/etc. There are other people who can throw money and programmers at a problem besides just the ones in Redmond.
And I gotta blush and laugh when I realise that Slashdot has been changed and no longer permits paragraph indenting with nonbreaking spaces! *blush* well... I said I had to have humility, and by God, do I ever have to have it now ;) uh, sorry about that, thought it still worked...
Yeah- I sometimes _like_ reading the arguments of idiots. I don't post to alt.flame, but I do also read some Usenet- and I don't block Jon Katz, even though I now know that would hurt him the only way he _can_ be hurt (much like newsgroup trolls with an infinite appetite for flames but no stomach for ignoring).
If Jon was entirely worthless, _all_ (or maybe 50%) Slashdotters would block him. If he was any good he'd be at 80 or so with the other opinionated editors, he'd be in line with Sengan who's ruffled some feathers.
The reason he's blocked by over 650 people in spite of the fact that one has to make an effort to do so _and_ choose to not even take a chance on his ever saying anything useful, is because he _almost_ never says anything useful at all. The 'gasbag' has been ditched, effectively.
If he doesn't like this, he can find other forums or actually try to write something good- or at least pick good subjects and stay out of the way of them, as he managed to do with his decent profile of those two hacker kids. He should pointedly refrain from ever doing any more opinion pieces, because it would appear that almost ten times the slashdotters don't even want to hear his opinion compared with other story posters' ratios.
If he can't take that advice, then he should at least work on learning to find acceptance and humility with the idea that he is not very important and people don't care what he thinks. Hell, there are very few subjects where people care what _I_ think. Jon certainly has not struck a special bargain with the Deity to be rendered more worthy of even minimal attention, so I am both amused and exasperated that this is so hard for him. In all the chasing of mountaintop enlightenment, doesn't he have the faintest notion of what humility means?
Jon's enlightenment has primarily been self-realization. He grew up in a different world than the one facing kids today, one where his entire generation was demonized and canonized alternately- either they were the hope for the future, the Woodstock generation, or they were drug addicts and moral reprobates beyond any imagining.
He, understandably, has a hard time fitting into a 'So what?' world, where some of us younger geeks are very accustomed to it. This is part of his continuing difficulty in holding credibility- he has a hard time coming to terms with the fact that the majority of people care nada for what he thinks, and in fact that he'd have to put a lot of work into simply getting their attention long enough for them to parse what he's saying and make up their minds whether they like it or not. On top of this he doesn't put any work into how he says it- his first and third paragraphs repeat the exact same sentence blindly, suggesting that he does not even bother to proof his writing, or that he feels he does not even owe readers the slightest consideration. It's as if his stream of consciousness is supposed to merit the level of publicity he gets. It does not.
Again: attention is not a right, but Jon _feels_ worthy of it by default- and this clashes jarringly with the more Gen-X experience a lot of slashdotters grew up with, where you have to do a _lot_ more to even be heard, and even then, odds are your efforts will be in vain.
The fact is, someone who lives in the latter world, who has to accept the great uncaringness of most of existence and rejoice in what little bits of it _can_ be grown and cultivated, will probably find Jon's assumption that he has a _right_ to credibility and attention, as annoying.
This is one reason Jon's special status as story poster has historically rankled: this status gives him the special power to gain more attention than the average yob, and he _writes_ as if he is more enlightened and aware than us geeky masses, and the problem is he's not- he's not even smart enough to figure this out, and in spite of his continuing failure to be _more_ worthy than your average slashdotter, he _still_ _gets_ story posting privileges. Because that's CmdrTaco's privilege, it's Rob's site in the final analysis.
Is it any wonder that ten times the usual number block hearing from him at all? If he had the spark of humility in his soul, things would be very different. Nobody would resent a 'kid brother' approach of the eager Linux newbie learning more and posting their experiences. Instead, even when functioning in the areas where he deserves to show the most humility, such as being a Linux amateur, he insists, is determined to, put the whole thing in the light of spiritual development ("It's a test of the human spirit")... an area where he, being a published author and an older man than your usual slashdot reader, feels he has dominance and can assert a spiritual authority. This, even in areas where humility and willingness to learn would be most fitting and even obligatory...
In summary, this article perfectly epitomizes just who Jon Katz is, and throws a vivid light on why there's been so much friction. Jon's not a technical guru, has little to say on social trends, and in fact his complete innocence of the concept of humility suggests that he has little to say spiritually either.
Being the ambulance watcher I am, naturally I am entertained by deconstructing him- I can't help but wonder whether this post will be elevated to high levels or forcibly moderated down to suppressed levels! But either way- _I_ do not have the luxury of ignoring humility. I'm late to post, and few people will read past the spam spouting fellow, and of those who do, few will care that much what I say.
If anybody does care, they can go to my site as listed in the URL link, and read more things I've had to say. I don't have a special hotline to high-bandwidth attention, as Jon has, and in fact I couldn't tell you whether I merit one. In some areas, maybe. In other areas, certainly not.
I'm content in the knowledge that, after a stressful day of web site and brochure-hacking, and being accepted within a small group of co-workers as the ranking authority on web and layout stuff, I've come to slashdot, read yet another Jon Katz expostulation, and uncovered still more of what makes the man tick, and just why he's so incredibly irritating to many Slashdotters. I'm content to know that I've worked harder on this simple reply than Jon did on his feature article- and I feel that I have more respect for Slashdot readers by doing so. Why shouldn't I revise my post and put in paragraph indents and correct typos, if I wish to register on the radar screens of Slashdot? I take the same pains with my web site. Jon doesn't seem willing to take any pains- he behaves as if he is entitled to our attention, on principle, in case he might have an idea of some sort. If it wasn't so fun studying him, it would annoy me too, but in fact it's meta-useful, in that nothing he says is significant, but studying him is very useful for understanding certain semi-pathological social dynamics. Jon, in other circumstances, could be the guy who talks too loud at parties and starts fights. Instead, he's apparently very decent and nice in person and in private- and it is his public persona that cannot stomach humility.
This, though it's far from the point he wants us to listen to, is still an interesting thing to consider, and though I'm not sure CmdrTaco intends for Jon to be a study of irritants in online social constructs, nevertheless he serves as a revealing example.
Trusting soul, aren't you!
I always try to figure out the most evil things I can do to my programs to make them crash and burn, and if it seems possible I'll do the error checking.
Not if (2+2 = 5)
but if (application is expecting to be able to get parent folderitem for itself as a folder/directory but surprise! It's at root level out of the folder it shipped in. On a Zip Disk. Which is write protected, with one of the sectors damaged >:) )
Get it? If you don't try to kill your program in horrible ways, horrible things will eventually happen anyway, and your program will faw down go boom, probably when someone needs it most. I don't care what Linus says- he can and should make the Linux kernel an intricate perfect diamond dependent only on his own code- but when I'm writing applications I assume nothing.
If your app needs no error checking, you probably aren't letting users run amok enough. Saying 'don't touch anything' isn't okay. They need to get their little paws dirty and feel they can mess with whatever- and if they break your program's dependencies doing so, unless it's truly speed critical and you can't spare the check at all, you need to SAY what they did to break it so they can learn and fix it.
I just munched up a copy of SiteBotSource.txt with 'cut lines including', and got the following ratio:
//Comments rule!
Source: 550 lines
Comments: 235 lines
This is because I needed Sitebot to work for _me_, and it calls its own routines recursively and does many strange and arcane things (if I didn't need to auto-link to a separate FX folder that's always at root level the whole thing could have been done by hand but nooooo, genius here had to come up with more complicated things to do to^H^Hwith it)
When coding weird stuff the most bizarre notions are likely to seem obvious, and then be totally inexplicable in a month. I like to be able to stop coding on Sitebot for a month, and then resume without spending hours figuring out what I was thinking....
What's wrong with :)
StaticText1.text="Hello World" ?
I dunno if this is the way VB does it, but it's REALbasic code, and it seems nice and straightforward. You drag the statictext onto the app window and set it up mousishly
The ultimate 'toy language': REALbasic for the Mac. Sort of 'Visual Basic minus as much cruft as possible' with a heavy emphasis on interfacebuilding tools: I wrote 1500 lines but the GUI code I didn't have to write would have been at least 3000 lines if not 5000 :) :) :)
Also, the people at REAL software have openly stated that, given the chance to add compatibility with VB, they won't add compatibility to features that suck
Lastly, I don't count HTML as a language, and at any rate, I wrote a REALbasic program to generate my site from text and some markup, so it's moot. In all seriousness, RB will never be any good for device drivers or calculation engines, but it's at least as good as any scripting language, and by God is it quick to prototype stuff in. Whee! Also it's not really basic, just uses some similar syntax and has the reassuring name- it's quite event-driven, does thread classes, and even has a wizzy sprite engine for fooling around with games
I'd have sworn I wrote less than 1000 until I counted just three programs (coincedentally the ones with GPLed source available online) and found it was around 1500 lines. Not lines of C, mind you, but for 'a that still lines of GPLed code. _Mac_ code! So that's 1500 lines closer to open source setting the tone for Mac development too :)
Window Maker is easily changed so that popup menus normally produced by wizzy extra buttons can be produced by f1-f2 or whatever :)
That said, I have yet to work out my xmodmap troubles, so other details like optionclicking only works with one of the option keys...
Don't even bother. This is the real DFC: The Dysfunctional Family Circus :)
Inferior imitations can just stay wher they are!
I'd say this is parody, all right, just incredibly lame. The fact that it's nothing but pathetic crap doesn't change the fact that it's still parody :) :)
Surely there's room for _bad_ parody that sucks and makes you think the 'authors' are idiot losers? I would hope so!
Of course, I hardly expect to see this person given the slashdot recognition of genuinely bizarre and funny exploits like Stick Figure Death Theatre
That would imply mp3 and 44.1K CD _is_ serious, which is rather absurd: they aren't remotely serious, just fun and convenient. What's so wrong with that? I'm going to stick with 'as long as you're not really _serious_ about sound quality'. One doesn't have to be serious all the time...
CDs already ruin sounds like that, so MP3 isn't significantly worse. Either are more or less okay, as long as you're not really _serious_ about sound quality, and you can also pre-emphasize the input to get as much out of it as you can. For an MP3 this would definitely translate to larger file size at the same bitrate encoding- you'd be basically feeding it more detail, working the decoder like an instrument.
A sample, of sorts- I can do a lot better once I build certain equipment, but that page contains an MP3 excerpt from a long musical piece I recorded.
This is heavily prior art from the Sumo Aria/Museatex Melior. I can and will furnish reference- the Sumo Aria was reviewed in The Absolute Sound, v14 #62 november/december 1989 (yes, the date written on the spine of the mag is Y2K compliant ;) ) It's a very good detailed and insightful review- when I made some speakers along these lines, mine showed many of the same characteristics as the reviewed, $3000 speakers.
One aspect of their claim is very strange- the vibration pattern of center-driven membranes is not remotely random. It is ripple-like, radiating from the center. If the ripples persist too much, the speaker develops unpleasant 'drumheadlike' colorations. If you drive it in lots of places you could overcome the sound pressure level limitations, but the really _phenomenal_ imaging the design can produce is hosed.
All very interesting, though- I'd love to see where they place the multiple drivers they apparently use, if their reports are not misleading.
It's the same idea as the old Sumo Aria (aka Museatex Melior). I wonder if these are using stretched mylar membranes, or something semirigid like flat paper? :P
You can make your own with stretched mylar and a central moving-coil driver. Caveats: 'wide range' means the thing _insists_ on producing super wide range even into areas where the speaker just breaks up (low frequency resonance modes esp.), and the phenomenal dispersion means the efficiency at any given point is really weak- it's just the same really weak anywhere in the room or indeed adjoining rooms- the sound 'carries' phenomenally well. Use a musical instrument speaker for efficiency and surgically remove the cone and basket as much as possible, and do not (trust me) run the little magnet wires over as moving parts- they will crack and cause the speaker to go intermittent and rasp on loud or low notes
Also, the membrane speakers at least are bidirectional- the back wave is _out_ of phase, so you can't reasonably hang them on the wall without obliterating the low end. And, you can't simply make huge versions to get more volume- the whole thing is severely volume-limited as the entire sound output is coupled through a point attached to flexible membrane, so if you want other than ultra faint, make a sphere-like or egg-shaped driver attachment, and make the drive point a _wide_ point on the membrane, not the tip of a cone (easier to construct, but you never heard anything so faint, trust me)
*blink* yeesh, suddenly I'm doing open source speaker design? Guess I'm just surprised- this principle was PATENTED I thought. I could have been making speakers of this type all this time, if only I'd known... I know, I'll write them and _ask_ if they're on solid legal ground. Maybe the Sumo/Museatex concepts failed patenting under prior art or something...
This is precisely the method used by authors at the start of the computer era such as Steven Levy, who wrote 'Hackers' on an Apple II. Back then you broke documents up into little bits so the software could deal with them.
...or _you_ are. Me, I don't do 'word processors'... my text is text, and whether it's Linux tools or BBEdit Lite, the stuff _I_ use can deal with multi-meg documents without flinching.
In some ways it's heartwarming to see that we're still there...
Ironically, I still like to write novels with chapters as separate files, which I guess illustrates that you _can_ fool all of the people all of the time, especially if most of them don't really care all that much, or expect any sort of progress over the years.
That's a strange viewpoint to see on Slashdot, which is very biased towards Linux, an operating system that can make old 486es hold lasting value and do useful tasks. :) )
As far as Macs, they are every bit as capable of holding value. I have a Mac Plus with 1M of RAM doing duty as a kitchen recipe book. It boots off a floppy and has no HD and is still useful (though it does consume more wattage than paper, but less than the light bulb that shines on it
I have a IIcx that is destined to be the dedicated MIDI sequencer for my studio- got 20M of ram for it for free through good luck when I made it dualboot NetBSD and MacOS, but I can't do anything with NetBSD on this little machine- time to devote it to Mac-based MIDI sequencing in a big way. It will _always_ be fast enough for that.
I have a Classic (like a Plus only with a HD) which is well suited to being a little bedside machine for jotting down notes on. A Mac Classic can boot in fourteen _seconds_. Wake up, boot, type, shut down, go back to sleep...
I have a 9500 which I just got a Voodoo2 card for (whee!) It's my dualboot Linux/Mac box. I'm not bothering taking the CPU beyond the 200Mhz 604e, G3 wants a bus that can handle it (like the newer powermacs)... but the 9500 has _twelve_ DIMM slots and a bunch of drive bays. The 9500 is destined for lasting value as a digital audio workstation and as a rendering box when I eventually get something newer and quicker...
iMacs will hold their value marvellously- and maintain their _usefulness_ even better. Aren't people talking about using them as X terminals? Talk about obscene overkill as an X terminal! Yet, when they are costing about $200 each years from now, they'll still be just as overpowered for the task as ever.
How're you going to fit a PII/PIII/Celeron, desktop DVD drive, all that ram, maybe a 3D card etc etc, SCSI, Firewire, into even a 17" case...
...without it all MELTING?
I'm serious. This is a major, major issue for this type of design, and is probably the reason the iMac uses basically a Powerbook CD-Rom (lower wattage! less heat generation).
If the PC guys _do_ manage to get the PC equivalent, even at comparable power, into a monitor casing, if it doesn't catch fire in the lab then expect all the parts to have lifetimes about 1/4 what you'd expect. If they try to go for higher power, forget it- the things won't even survive testing. Do you know the _differential_ between even fast G3 chips and Pentia, as far as heat dissipation is concerned?
...or totally intolerant. But then, Katz didn't know what he was looking at, either, so I can't blame you for his inability to explain it to you.
:) ), are loser geeks, and the geeks who run the computer clubs and go to parties and have girlfriends/boyfriends and pursue a healthy active social life are _good_ geeks to be emulated and used as the yardstick.
Apparently Katz wants to have Asperger's syndrome when he grows up.
I'm serious- just like there was the discovery years ago that there were millions of 'ambulatory schizophrenics' walking the streets, you just got a close-up look at the value system of an Asperger's person. At least one of them is, if not both- they probably don't know it because they've found niches that keep them out of the hospitals and homeless shelters by the skin of their teeth- and it's a real condition, a lifelong one with no cure, a weird other world of radically different values and priorities.
Have you ever heard the name Temple Grandin? Temple is an autistic woman and possibly the greatest designer of stockyards and livestock handling architecture the world has ever seen. She has always struggled to simply survive the world- but then on the other hand she has what she herself refers to as the 'Sun workstation' in her head, the mysterious savant-like ability to take a set of design problems, turn it over to her unusual and gifted/hobbled brain, and come out with a solution way better than normal humans could hope to find, somewhat like the 'lightning calculator' prodigies. It's a sort of geek Borg-like synthesis- people like the character Data, who can do remarkable feats of computation and even true creativity- but who are helpless at a dinner party without instructions- and who rebel at always having to be given instructions, because they are not _stupid_, just different- in some ways very different.
Is it any wonder that we retreat to the computer sphere where we can thrive and use our strengths?
Yeah, I did say 'we' for a reason- I live with Asperger's myself. It's not too much of a problem, though it is a disabling condition in most circumstances. I steer away from social interaction- unless it's with people I have something significant in common with, it wears me out absurdly fast, to the point that I develop physical symptoms of stress. I was ordered by a shrink once to go right away to the emergency room of the hospital. Why? I'd been trying to sort of 'fit in with the mainstream', in particular to get willingness to try your regular sort of people-oriented job (rather than the low-pay but geek-oriented jobs I'm doing now). I was a good boy, right up to the point where the shrink informed me the stomach pains that made me sweat and lie awake at night and guzzle Alka-seltzer over was gastric ulcer recurring on me, and that I could be dead in days if I didn't fix whatever it was that was wrong. Then I stopped being the good boy and considered the idea of just being _me_... and yes, I do have some freaky skills, the sort Jon Katz longs for. In particular, I'm right off the chart in particular types of mental modeling, the specific test being one of a set called GATB, in which you see 2D shapes and answer which, of a set of 3D shapes, the 2D shape can be deformed to. I obliterated this test, set a ten year high- and it's typically geeky that I also loved it and wanted to keep doing more of the exercises.
I don't know why I'm going to all this trouble to explain all this. Nobody really cares, least of all me- my life remains the same set of capacities and challenges whether or not you, popular head-of-his-class AC, think I'm a loser or not. In fact, since trying to measure up to your value system damned near literally killed me, I'm pointedly not interested in trading in a life where I can be healthy and accomplish things for a life where I look socially acceptable and 'play well with others' and die in a few years.
I'm only reacting to this notion that, of the nerds and geeks, the reclusive ones, the ones who can't deal with eating right or hygiene (I'm borderline- having a bad, bad hair day, but not overly rancid, thanks
This is not only angering, it is unfair, because historically, large numbers of nerds, geeks and other major contributors to 20th century technology- hell, any technology, ever- have been these people you scorn, geeks without social lives, sometimes without friends, but with brains that can do things like hack on code for 30 hours without rest, or mysteriously arrive at revolutionary ways of doing things.
Sounds like Ubermensch? (btw, you do know who Nietzsche is?) Well, it's more like LOSERmensch, and that changes NOTHING about it. Humans vary, and the geek/nerd is well within the overall spectrum- brings things to society that cannot be simply duplicated by masses of people putting in 9-to-5s and then going off to socialize with their circuits of social obligations- and I for one will not just sit around silently and listen to people who are kind of like me, called losers. I don't see them as losers. I'm as maladjusted as they are- except in my areas of strength, or even savantlike ability.
If you don't like the 'bad name' set by those you associate with, I'd have to suggest that you better get used to it. There's a very clear correlation between certain types of mental illness (defined as 'ill by the standards of normal society) and hacker skills. It's not just about having more time to practice, either- the extreme hacker archetype is _qualitatively_ different from your normal smart guy. There's a whole spectrum going all the way from Joe Regular Dude (who happens to be a damned good coder) to weird personalities who seem to be telnetting their thinking from the planet Neptune, to RMS (just haha-only-serious). Joe Regular _cannot_ do some of the things RMS has done, and probably can't do what the guy from Neptune can do (though Joe's a hell of a lot easier to cope with).
This is not the sociological version of rocket science. This is _obvious_ to anybody who's made the slightest effort to do the research. Anyone asserting that 'shut inside low-hygeine geek losers' are a bad influence that need to be trained to act like humans... is only illustrating their inability to understand the reality of geeks, and the computer subculture, and the human mind itself.
I could log out to post this but I'm damned if I will. I'm speaking for me, others might identify with some of it or not. Clearly some will not. Not my problem- I just refuse to be blackmailed into some expectation that growth for me involves learning to act more like Joe Average, have outside interests, socialize etc. and not be 'a loser'. I rather think that, having put a lot of work into understanding this, that I'll go on being me, thank you- which will continue to be a 'me' many people would consider rather maladjusted, a 'me' which Jon Katz would appear to be blankly awed by (except I've sassed him too much), a 'me' so depersonalised by the impossible, unattainable expectations of society that for years I didn't even feel human at all- and finally, a 'me' I'm beginning to understand and accept- not on moral grounds but the sheer pragmatism of 'what works'. And being a geek, nerd, perhaps even a hacker in ways, works for me, where nothing else did.
Whether or not Katz's geeks consider themselves Asperger's people, their worldviews coincide with my own painfully-acquired one well enough that I don't accept your labels for them at all. They are not 'losers'. They're different than you. Deal with it because you can't change them: it's only fair, they've spent all their lives, as I did, not being able to change people like you.
Flame on: it'll be interesting to see who 'gets it' and who doesn't. Sounds like your mind is already made up, AC.
This is a conceptual error on ESR's part, though it's not a really _severe_ one. We do still need it all as one vast file. There have been times when I needed to basically hose my brain out with meaningless yet fun trivia, and started reading the Jargon File straight through, usually finishing it after a couple of days. I have it in eDoc format, a Mac sort of Acrobat-ish thing which I use for read-only documents sometimes. I also have lots of BOFH stories in eDoc, so I get a sense of 'reading fun stuff' when I use eDoc for anything :) ;) :) ESR has already done the hard part of turning it into the obligatory frame-oriented quick-lookup set of data files, so all that remains is to write chrome :)
The new arrangement is not designed for reading, it's designed for looking up, as if it was VERY IMPORTANT to be able to have 'kremvax' at your fingertips. Is it? It's almost as if this is the PHB version, lacking only wizzy graphic javascript mouseovers to make it The Manager's Guide To What Those Salaried Freaks Are Saying
Hey, since obviously some people are going to turn it back into plaintext, who's up for taking it the other direction? Make a standalone Jargon File application, with lots of chrome, for suits!
It's about being a fscking masterpiece ;) it's insanity blues, man, and totally authentic. And Marc Ribot's guitar solos bent my head into entirely new shapes- I'm _still_ trying to work out where that dude's coming from... I now have a note-for-weird-note Marc Ribot guitar solo and am trying to remember what Rain Dogs song it came from. Why, oh why, did I let a desperate and piteously begging Tom Waits fan trade that album away from me?