What's so impressive with this article? "Guy buys computer where things Just Work, tries it out, learns that things do indeed Just Work. Film at 11."
At my job, we have two managers with Powerbooks and these Verizon cards, and have been using them to little fanfare for perhaps a year now, maybe longer. The only glitch I can think of was that the cards didn't work with when 10.3.3 came out, but they worked fine again with 10.3.4.
Things usually just work with Macs. Why bother making a headline out of what should be obvious to anyone that uses these computers ?
I dunno, accounting -- especially professional tax preparation -- is a pretty specialized field that would have to require a well trained workforce.
Some industries can get by hiring lots of untrained workers for the busy season -- retail staff at Christmas, major league sports during the height of their season, planting & harvesting times in agriculture, etc -- but I can't see a profession as analytical as tax preparation being able to get by with just a bunch of high school students & immigrants.
The best guess I've seen is the Florida orange growers association. I have no idea if that is the correct answer (or "question" I suppose), but at least it seems to be on the right track...
de Branges has made an extraordinary claim with an extravagant paper. The community is, understandably considering how quickly counter-examples were found, skeptical. It is up to de Branges to convince the community that he is right if he wants to win this prize. So far, as far as I can tell, most of what he has had to say so far has just been hot air...
The first link on the chap's homepage is entitled "apology for the proof of the Riemann Hypothesis".
Yeah, I skimmed his paper, and noticed that as well. Apparently, "apology" in this context means a proof that has not yet been subjected to peer review, but which the author is deeply convinced is correct. Pasting some output from a dict apology, it seems:
1. Something said or written in defense or justification of what appears to others wrong, or of what may be liable to disapprobation; justification; as, Tertullian's Apology for Christianity.
[....]
Usage: An apology, in the original sense of the word, was a pleading off from some charge or imputation, by explaining and defending one's principles or conduct. It therefore amounted to a vindication. One who offers an apology, admits himself to have been, at least apparently, in the wrong, but brings forward some palliating circumstance, or tenders a frank acknowledgment, by way of reparation. [....]
[....]
2: a formal written defense of something you believe in strongly [syn: {apologia}]
Clearly, de Branges is using the term in this sense.
It doesn't really matter though, because if you actually read his paper, the first third is all incomprehensible background nonsense about the nature of the problem, while the last third is all incomprehensible arrogant nonsense about what he wants to do with his prize money. The actual meat of the paper is buried somewhere in the middle, but it's like that's all just an afterthought to the guy's mad ravings about his place in history and his imminent wealth.
He couldn't be more different than the person that seems to have solved the Poincare conjecture. Where Perelman is silent behind a paper that seems to concretely prove not just the problem at hand, but a whole broader class of problems, de Branges has this ridiculous paper that goes on and on about what a big shot he is, while stomping around his university like a little tinpot Napoleon. I'm no math whiz, but hot air isn't always hard to recognize...
Alex McLean and Ade Ward have been performing live Perl music under the name Slub for several years now. Quoting from Alex's website:
Behind the scenes, slub is a fairly idealistic project. We make music using entirely self-written software. Every aspect of slub composition and synthesis comes from our fingers. Many interoperating pieces of software work together to generate the music live, using a handmade client/server protocol. The software sampler/synth is written in C (by Ade), the server and synch code is in Perl (by me) and a whole slew of composition scripts and apps are written in Perl and RealBasic. The whole system is distributed across Ade's powerbook and my debian Linux laptop (we stopped short of writing our own operating system).
Poke around and you can probably find MP3s of their music -- it's interesting stuff.
In addition, the two of them have written some papers & software on the programmatic generation of art, whether that be music, graphic arts, software itself, etc:
Seriously, this was probably the most annoying Infocom game ever published
Oh, I don't know about that. I think Douglas Adams's other Infocom game deserves at least an honorable mention. Just consider the name he gave it: Bureaucracy...
The very first thing the game has you do is fill out a form with your name, address, previous address, etc. The insertion point jumps randomly from field to field, so you have to pay very close attention not to just start randomly typing, but actually read closely to see where the input is now. Not that it matters though, because even then the game will toss out what you typed and use random data in the dialogue that follows.
>look Front Room
This is the living room of your new house, a pretty nice room, actually. At least, it will be when all your stuff has arrived as the removals company said they would have done yesterday and now say they will do while you're on vacation. At the moment, however, it's a bit dull. Plain white, no carpets, no curtains, no furniture. A room to go bughouse in, really. Another room is visible to the west, and a closed front door leads outside.
>score [Your blood pressure is 124/82, in 2 moves. Your status is Stable. Your score is 0 out of a possible 21, making you a Victim.]
>walk west Back Room
You're in the back room of your new house, another nice room, at present suitable for lining with latex padding and bouncing off the walls, but likely to be pretty impressive and upwardly mobile once the removals men have sorted out their little problem. The exit leads east to the living room.
You see a combination telephone/answering machine and a table here. On the table you see a hacksaw, an address book, a small case, your Boysenberry computer, a letter and your passport.
The doorbell is ringing.
>answer door Front Room You open the front door.
"Hi," says the annoyingly bright young man in the doorway. "Chowmail Overnite. Are you Mr Devers, of 42 Main St?" He holds up a large burlap bag. "Here's your order of Llamex(R) brand High-Fibre Llama Treats!"
>slam door You slam the front door in the delivery man's face. You can hear him muttering a traditional llama-food delivery man's curse upon you, your family and your llamas as he walks away.
>score [Your blood pressure is 122/81, in 6 moves. Your status is Stable. Your score is 0 out of a possible 21, making you a Victim.]
>
Etc -- it just goes on and on like this -- the whole point of it all is to be frustrating. At least the Hitchhiker's game had, well, the whole Hitchhiker's thing; Bureaucracy is just a long, endless chain of pain....
Actually, on a recent-ish (past five years?) PC with a 104-key keyboard, the bottom row of the keyboard should have a context-menu key somewhere to the right of the spacebar. This key will attempt to bring up a context menu for whatever onscreen object currently has the focus, and in most cases you can move the focus around with the tab or arrow keys. In this way, not only can a Windows PC be fully (if maybe confusingly) functional with a single-button mouse, but you can even get by without using a mouse at all.
To be clear, I'm generally on your side in advocating that the Apple single button mouse is perfectly usable for working with a Mac. "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" and all that. But on the other hand, I realize that this is the minority opinion: of about a dozen Mac users at the company I work for, many of whom have been using Macs for years and years, I am the only one that actually likes using an Apple mouse -- everyone else wants a two button scroll mouse within their first ten minutes on the job, and they can't stand having to work at a machine that has the default mouse.
Moreover, I think Microsoft has done a better job of making their operating system usable for people that cannot or prefer not to use a mouse at all. I have full keyboard access turned on in OSX, but there are still cases where the only way I can perform a necessary action -- browse through menus, select interface widgets, select the non-default button on a alert window, etc -- is to reach for the mouse. With Windows, on the other hand, it's nearly always possible to reach every interface widget from the keyboard, and in most cases, most of the elements you would want to reach have clearly labelled shortcuts where you can hit [alt]+[letter] to interact with whatever widget you're interested in. Granted, these labels are turned off by default, but they're easy to activate, and once they're on then everything is always visible to you, which is unlike the full keyboard access in OSX 10.3, where there are no obvious hints showing how to access "inaccessible" parts of the GUI with the keyboard.
Note that I'm saying this with great reluctance & sadness. In most ways I think the OSX GUI runs circles around Windows (nevermind Gnome, KDE, etc which might as well not even be trying), but there are some cases -- and keyboard access is the most obvious one I know of -- where the PC is actually easier to deal with. Maybe Tiger will fix this, but for now, this is one of the few areas where Microsoft has clearly done a better job than Apple...
Yeah, the anemic default memory on Apple hardware is annoying, but they seem to have decided that they have to do this to protect their profit margins. For the amount of money that they charge to upgrade the ram, you're better off just shopping around on one of the comparison shopping sites and bringing the ram up to a reasonable level using a third party vendor.
As much as I hate to side with the company for a policy that seems so user-hostile, it doesn't seem that bad to me -- you can easily get a better price for more ram elsewhere, and it makes Apple's balance sheet (and, by extension, their ability to keep putting out interesting hardware for years to come) much stronger.
No, he said Gateway, and meant it. Gateway sold these neat little all-in-one LCD machines in the late 90s, starting not long after the original iMac came up, as the Profile series.
It looks like you can get some of the original Gateway Profile computers (15" lcd / 500mhz cpu / 128mb ram / 10gb hard drive) for around $300 on eBay now.
I remember playing with one in a Gateway store back in 1998 or so, and thinking that this was a really cool idea, but it was something like $2500, as I recall (I can't find any links about dates or prices now, but it was in that range), and as a student I just couldn't afford that.
(That and, now that I think about it, I wanted something that I'd be able to run BeOS on, and didn't think I could on these Gateway all-in-one machines -- good thing I was betting on the BeOS horse, eh? Oh well...).
But yeah, my first thought when seeing the new iMac was that Apple was ripping off the Gateway design. The Apple one was much nicer to be sure, but the basic form factor -- which predates the current notion of a tablet PC by several years -- is more or less exactly how Gateway had set up their original Profile PCs five years or more ago.
Philippe Starck did do some stuff for Target a year or two ago, but it didn't sell very well and the partnership was severed.
On the other hand, Michael Graves has had a partnership with Target for a few years now, making things like home wares & home electronics (designed by Graves, manufactured by Phillips). You're probably thinking of him, I suspect...
Microsoft, if they're really interested in getting involved in open source, should pay attention to some of the things Apple has been doing for the past few years.
Apple hasn't gotten everything right, but they have made a lot of the right moves. They built their system over CMU's Mach kernel, build everything with the GCC toolkit, and bundle a full suite of familiar tools with their products like Perl, Python, Ruby, Apache, Samba, PostgreSQL (it's embedded in their new Apple Remote Desktop), etc. They participate in the right mailing lists, and they generally try to submit useful patches -- even if those patches don't end up being accepted, they're at least putting in an effort to play nicely. They share what they've done with technologies that they either developed in house or adopted before most others, like Rendezvous (or OpenTalk or whatever it is now), Firewire, Bluetooth, 802.11, etc. All of this ends up coming back to them favorably in the long run.
That isn't to say that Microsoft should slavishly copy everything Apple has done, but they should look at how the moves Apple has made have enabled Apple to move farther much more quickly than they could have alone. Once Microsoft understands that, then they can start picking & choosing what they want to open up, what they want to pull in from outside the company, and what they want to leave unchanged. For example, Microsoft probably wouldn't gain anything if they dropped the NT kernel for Mach or Linux, but they might want to consider scrapping the IE engine for KHTML or Gecko if it's really as gnarly as some of the rumors suggest, and a lot of people would appreciate truly open & understandable file formats for Office the way Apple has done with Keynote & XML.
On a different level, the moves Apple has made have encouraged others to bring their offerings to the Mac when they never would have before. Microsoft could do the same. A lot of people would be happy if they deprecated cmd.exe and instead offered up a fully functional bash / ksh / tcsh / zsh shell, complete with all the expected command line tools and system facilities (grep, cron,/etc config files, and so on). If Microsoft made it easy for Linux software developers to port to Windows just by changing GCC's target platform, knowing that autoconf (etc) would work on Windows, they could bring in thousands of developers overnight. Moreover, if they gave away (free beer, but maybe or maybe not free speech) at least a lightweight-but-complete version of their development tools, the way Apple does with XCode, that too would encourage open source developers to start messing around on Windows in a way that they currently do not do.
Microsoft has spent the past 20 years ripping off ideas from Apple. I don't see why they're having such a mental block about doing it again now...
The parallels in ANH to Japanese cinema, especially "Hidden Fortress" and "Seven Samurai", are obvious, but that's not the only source of inspiration Lucas turned to. There's also a lot of imagery & themes taken from American Westerns, particularly John Ford's The Searchers.
The plot of ANH basically replicates this one, with the most obvious difference being that John Wayne's character has elements of both Luke Skywalker & Han Solo (but then, early drafts of ANH supposedly had these as one character as well). But then you've got the swaggering cowboy (Solo), a mute Indian sidekick (Chewbacca), a murdered family (the shot of Luke's burned out home is nearly identical to one in Searchers, down to the charred skeletons in the yard), etc.
ANH also has overtones of "The Magnificent Seven", but then that movie itself is a remake of "Seven Samurai", so it's debatable whether or not you can use that example.
It's interesting to note how both Lucas, and 20 years later, Tarantino, have played homage to both American westerns and Japanese sword movies, while recasting them as, respectively, camp sci-fi and camp crime dramas. I'm already wondering what the next grand cross-pollinator is going to come up with in another couple of decades:-)
If you read the article, they explicitly state that this model is designed to operate wirelessly -- hence small motor components and Bluetooth for control. That isn't to say that the video isn't necessarily staged -- I haven't seen it yet, so can't say one way or the other -- but they do claim that the thing is supposed to be able to work untethered...
The original article has left me a little bit confused. It is implied that the bug is with the AIM client, and not the protocol, but is that actually the case? Do we know for sure that other clients -- such as Gaim or iChat -- are not affected by the problem here?
And if the problem is just with AIM, and everyone that doesn't want to switch clients has to stay with AIM, are we really stuck with the standard AOL-IM suite that the company has been distributing lately? You know, the one that comes bundled with Weatherbug, which as far as I can tell will install itself with AIM whether or not you want it, and is damned near impossible to remove. Is that really what we're looking at here? Because that sucks big time.
If this is really the case, then hell with it, I'm going to put Gaim on everyone's desktop at work if AIM exploits become a problem. I'll bet most people probably won't notice the difference, and some will even like that it can be used to talk to the company's internal Jabber server, or other chat protocols.
But even without that, being able to avoid the mandatory spyware is fine by me...
The economics of a website like Craigslist, or your local weekly want ad flyer, is pretty interesting stuff. Both of these publications specialize in the one & only form of advertisement that people all over the place are actually interested in: classified ads. Lots of people pay for their local newspaper just to throw away everything but the jobs section, the automotive & real estate listings, the movie listings, and similar classified ads.
Publishers know and depend on this fact about their audiences, and use the revenue stream they get from these ads to help subsidize the unprofitable work they do in other areas -- journalism, for instance, or printing a dead tree newspaper every day, or running a bunch of servers.
In the case of Craigslist or the want ads, they dispense with the journalistic front matter and let the audience have the ad listings. This has the dual effect of eliminating a major cost center while also making it obvious to the public that this is a place that focuses on just the kinds of ads they like, and not those nasty popup ads or whatever that the other commercial sites all have.
The funny thing is that Craigslist has done this so well that they've been able to make a very nice living for themselves while more than covering their expenses and they haven't even had to charge most of their customers for the service.
Other publishers are aware of this phenomenon, and terrified of it.
Consider what Craigslist's competition must be thinking. Ebay skims a commission off every sale that happens on their site; Craigslist doesn't. Match.com charges a listing fee to place a personals ad; Craigslist doesn't. Monster charges a fee for job placements; Craigslist doesn't. Your local sites charge fees for real estate listings; Craigslist doesn't. All of these publishers are being completely undercut by a competitor that can afford to do for free what they're trying -- and increasingly often, failing -- to get people to pay money for.
***********
About a year ago, NPR had a All Things Considered piece on the rise of Craigslist, and how by charging only for job listings in the San Francisco Bay area, they could subsidize what they were doing everywhere else for free. Among the people interviewed for this piece was the person in charge at a major regional newspaper's website. She had some bland remarks about how what Craigslist is doing is very interesting and has really caught the attention of people in the rest of the industry. *yawn*.
A few weeks after that interview was on the air, I ran into that person in Home Depot, so I stopped to say hi and to tell her that I heard her on the radio recently, and to ask what she thought about Craigslist. Her response, roughly, was this:
Craigslist? Yeah, they are going to
kick our asses.
As you can imagine, this wasn't quite how she phrased her remarks on the radio, but it certainly expressed the same idea with a lot less ambiguity.:-)
***********
I'm not going to identify this person or the company -- you'll figure it out if you listen to the NPR piece off their web site -- but in any case the point is much broader than just with this one company.
Craigslist is doing some so radically & dangerously different than anyone else in the publishing industry that they are a major threat to all kinds of companies. That's both good and bad. Maybe we don't need to have every newspaper & tv station in the country publishing the same news wire feeds that you can get anywhere else. Maybe we can do without that. But if these companies get out of that kind of work, will they also feel they have to get out of local news coverage online? If so, where will people turn to for that -- blogs? Somehow I don't think that would work.
Moreover, is this also a threat to dead-tree publications who won't be able to depend on the classi
My first programming class in high school -- in which we were writing QuickBasic on "fancy" Mac LC 520s (the ones with shiny new tray loading CD-ROM drives and color screens) -- this was how we were taught to write brief pauses into our programs. The numbers were bigger -- loop for 10000, loop for 30000, etc -- but it was the exact same idea.
We were told even then that this was inaccurate & unreliable -- we could all see how much longer the Mac II would pause compared to the LC 520s -- but it was basically the only option available to use in QuickBasic. Even the manual suggested this idiom IIRC.
But that was the 80s, and people were all crazy back then:-)
Actually, the movie Deliverance was based in Georgia, and IIRC filmed on the Chatooga river, which runs along the Georgia / South Carolina state line. I've actually been whitewater rafting on it, and according to the tour guide, they actually do average at least one rafter fataility on the river every year. But the "squeal like a pig" guys? That's Georgia, like Newt Gingrich...:-)
Sorry, but Vorbis is not weird, and ESPECIALLY not crippled
Such things are subjective, of course, but surely you have to agree that the name -- if nothing else -- is amazingly weird. Moreover, the format is also extremely obscure, which is really what I was getting at: outside of Slashdot readers, how many people have even heard of it? Damned few, it seems.
The (arguable) technical merits of Ogg over more familiar formats like ATRAC & MP3 is more than offset by the fact that no one uses Ogg and no popular digital music playing device is capable of playing Ogg.
Command line switches are irrelevant (really -- that's a function of controller software UI, not file format merits), and so is the availablilty or otherwise of open source software to drive the format (because, again, outside of Slashdot readers, no one cares whether the music software they're using happens to have available source code, they just want it to be able to handle their music library).
I'm not sticking up for ATRAC -- I don't use it or Ogg -- but the fact that it has a huge conglomerate pushing it for something like a decade now does count for something when comparing it to Ogg, which basically has no traction and no support from anyone. Ogg is, in short, not a compelling alternative to ATRAC.
MP3, on the other hand, is a compelling alternative, and that's the one that the article and most of the commenters have been banging on about -- correctly. But the comment I was replying to was making the point that people don't want "weird, crippled formats", and as far as I can tell, to the average consumer that probably uses Windows or maybe uses a Mac, Ogg is way weirder & more crippled than ATRAC. No major music service distributes Ogg files, no popular devices can play back Ogg encoded songs, and no major music playing software pushes Ogg as a storage & playback format -- what else is there to consider? Nothing. There is nothing else. ATRAC, for all its flaws, at least has these bases covered, and Ogg doesn't, and Ogg probably never will.
Sorry, you're right, I wasn't being very nice. It was only a slight exaggeration though.
Yes, there are pockets of progressivism in Alabama and the rest of the south, just as there are pockets of conservative fundamentalism in Massachusetts and the rest of the northeast. That said though, the average person in the south is more likely than the national average to be fundamentalist christian, socially conservative, and fiscally regressive, just as the average person in the northeast is more likely to be religiously agnostic, socially progressive, and fiscally progressive.
These aren't really value judgements about which is "better" -- you're the one that said "all inbred idiots", not me, I was just playing along with a silly joke about Alabamians not having computers when obviously that isn't true -- rather, I'm just trying to make a reasonably accurate description of the basic demographics of the two regions. And since it so happens that my personal outlook on things tends to be more in line with the northeast average, yes, I was very happy to move to Massachusetts when I was finished with school.
Not that I'm as tolerant as I should be -- if I was, I wouldn't have made the earlier joke -- but remarks like "Delta's ready when you are" is exactly the sort of "you don't fit around here, do ya boy?" attitude that I was happy to get away from.
*shrug* I have no answers, mainly just snide remarks...
Oh they have plenty of computers in Alabama. The problem is that because most computers don't ship with TV cards hard-wired to watch football games, televangelists, and Fox News, the locals don't see why anyone would want to use one unless they were some kind of godless heathen communist.
As a godless heathen communist who studied computer science at a university in Alabama, this was just fine with me:-)
When will Sony (and other companies) realise that people don't want weird, crippled formats?
Ironically, Sony's indifference to Ogg Vorbis -- and for that matter, every other manufacturer's similar indifference to Ogg Vorbis -- shows clearly that, at least on some level, they are intuitively aware of this notion.
As weird & crippled as ATRAC is, it's built in to pretty much every device Sony has sold for the last few years, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that at least some of Sony's customers have agreed o be locked in to the format -- every single user of a miniDisc player, for example.
Ogg, on the other hand, is unknown & irrelevant to all save a few Slashdot readers, and Slashdot, last time I checked, has never sold (or, for that matter, given away) any kind of Ogg-capable hardware.
In the spectrum of weird, cripled, niche audio formats, ATRAC is hardly the worst example.
You're taking only part of the original quote though:
Anything you need to quanitfy can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all.
You seem to be ignoring the first part of the statement -- "anything you need to quantify" -- by pointing out that it's meaningless to compare the quantitative difference between symphonies or flavors, but these things are essentially subjective, so there's little merit in "measuring" their differences. There is no need to quantify here.
I mean, obviously Beethoven's symphonies are much better than Brahms', and there can be no question that ice cream is better than pineapple, right?:-)
Obviously, that's a silly assertion, but that's the point: by using subjective examples, you're dealing with things that can't be measured in any way that would be meaningful to more than one person, so there is no need to do so.
+++++
On the other hand, you go from there to athletes, and this one breaks down for a different reason: people quantify the attributes of athletes all the time! The whole point of being an athlete is to engage in physical competition where there are winners and losers, and there's no way to determine that without some kind of clear metrics, from simple & obvious ones like who wins more often to more complex ones like, well, all the books of statistics that baseball fans accumulate.
Therefore, sure, you can get lost in debates about whether Mays or Sosa is the better player, but this is in most ways not a subjective matter, because you have all kinds of statistics available to justify an argument for one or the other being "better". You can argue that which statistics are more or less important is a subjective matter, and that could be the case, but even still this is a realm of carefully compiled numbers, which at least provides an essentially quantitative foundation for the matter.
Arguing that Michael Jordan was a better basketball player than Larry Bird -- on grounds that he won more championships, or he had a better free throw percentage, or whatever (I'm not a sports fan, I don't actually know that Jordan had a better free throw percentage than Bird, but nevermind that) -- is, I think it's very safe to say, better than not attempting to use any kind of measurements, and just saying that Jordan was "a stronger player" or was "more telegenic" or whatever.
+++++
So, while I've never heard of this Glib's Law, it does make sense. The important thing to keep in mind is the implied caveat that most things are worth quantifying, but not all, and if you try to quantify an essentially subjective thing than you're just falling down a rabbit hole. For everything else though, it can provide a useful basis for understanding things -- maybe not a perfect one, but at least some kind of common ground for discussing things.
Yeah, no kidding. Just think about how dejected the Zope guys must feel with their nice modern system when both Ada and APL are blasting from the past ahead of all other languages. Maybe they'll try to get ahead by renaming themselves to "Aaaaaaa Zope".
Slashdot Mirror
What's so impressive with this article? "Guy buys computer where things Just Work, tries it out, learns that things do indeed Just Work. Film at 11."
At my job, we have two managers with Powerbooks and these Verizon cards, and have been using them to little fanfare for perhaps a year now, maybe longer. The only glitch I can think of was that the cards didn't work with when 10.3.3 came out, but they worked fine again with 10.3.4.
Things usually just work with Macs. Why bother making a headline out of what should be obvious to anyone that uses these computers ?
I dunno, accounting -- especially professional tax preparation -- is a pretty specialized field that would have to require a well trained workforce.
Some industries can get by hiring lots of untrained workers for the busy season -- retail staff at Christmas, major league sports during the height of their season, planting & harvesting times in agriculture, etc -- but I can't see a profession as analytical as tax preparation being able to get by with just a bunch of high school students & immigrants.
The best guess I've seen is the Florida orange growers association. I have no idea if that is the correct answer (or "question" I suppose), but at least it seems to be on the right track...
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."
de Branges has made an extraordinary claim with an extravagant paper. The community is, understandably considering how quickly counter-examples were found, skeptical. It is up to de Branges to convince the community that he is right if he wants to win this prize. So far, as far as I can tell, most of what he has had to say so far has just been hot air...
Yeah, I skimmed his paper, and noticed that as well. Apparently, "apology" in this context means a proof that has not yet been subjected to peer review, but which the author is deeply convinced is correct. Pasting some output from a dict apology, it seems:
Clearly, de Branges is using the term in this sense.
It doesn't really matter though, because if you actually read his paper, the first third is all incomprehensible background nonsense about the nature of the problem, while the last third is all incomprehensible arrogant nonsense about what he wants to do with his prize money. The actual meat of the paper is buried somewhere in the middle, but it's like that's all just an afterthought to the guy's mad ravings about his place in history and his imminent wealth.
He couldn't be more different than the person that seems to have solved the Poincare conjecture. Where Perelman is silent behind a paper that seems to concretely prove not just the problem at hand, but a whole broader class of problems, de Branges has this ridiculous paper that goes on and on about what a big shot he is, while stomping around his university like a little tinpot Napoleon. I'm no math whiz, but hot air isn't always hard to recognize...
Poke around and you can probably find MP3s of their music -- it's interesting stuff.
In addition, the two of them have written some papers & software on the programmatic generation of art, whether that be music, graphic arts, software itself, etc:
Much more of Ade's software is available from Signwave.co.uk.
Oh, I don't know about that. I think Douglas Adams's other Infocom game deserves at least an honorable mention. Just consider the name he gave it: Bureaucracy...
The very first thing the game has you do is fill out a form with your name, address, previous address, etc. The insertion point jumps randomly from field to field, so you have to pay very close attention not to just start randomly typing, but actually read closely to see where the input is now. Not that it matters though, because even then the game will toss out what you typed and use random data in the dialogue that follows.
Etc -- it just goes on and on like this -- the whole point of it all is to be frustrating. At least the Hitchhiker's game had, well, the whole Hitchhiker's thing; Bureaucracy is just a long, endless chain of pain....Actually, on a recent-ish (past five years?) PC with a 104-key keyboard, the bottom row of the keyboard should have a context-menu key somewhere to the right of the spacebar. This key will attempt to bring up a context menu for whatever onscreen object currently has the focus, and in most cases you can move the focus around with the tab or arrow keys. In this way, not only can a Windows PC be fully (if maybe confusingly) functional with a single-button mouse, but you can even get by without using a mouse at all.
To be clear, I'm generally on your side in advocating that the Apple single button mouse is perfectly usable for working with a Mac. "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" and all that. But on the other hand, I realize that this is the minority opinion: of about a dozen Mac users at the company I work for, many of whom have been using Macs for years and years, I am the only one that actually likes using an Apple mouse -- everyone else wants a two button scroll mouse within their first ten minutes on the job, and they can't stand having to work at a machine that has the default mouse.
Moreover, I think Microsoft has done a better job of making their operating system usable for people that cannot or prefer not to use a mouse at all. I have full keyboard access turned on in OSX, but there are still cases where the only way I can perform a necessary action -- browse through menus, select interface widgets, select the non-default button on a alert window, etc -- is to reach for the mouse. With Windows, on the other hand, it's nearly always possible to reach every interface widget from the keyboard, and in most cases, most of the elements you would want to reach have clearly labelled shortcuts where you can hit [alt]+[letter] to interact with whatever widget you're interested in. Granted, these labels are turned off by default, but they're easy to activate, and once they're on then everything is always visible to you, which is unlike the full keyboard access in OSX 10.3, where there are no obvious hints showing how to access "inaccessible" parts of the GUI with the keyboard.
Note that I'm saying this with great reluctance & sadness. In most ways I think the OSX GUI runs circles around Windows (nevermind Gnome, KDE, etc which might as well not even be trying), but there are some cases -- and keyboard access is the most obvious one I know of -- where the PC is actually easier to deal with. Maybe Tiger will fix this, but for now, this is one of the few areas where Microsoft has clearly done a better job than Apple...
As much as I hate to side with the company for a policy that seems so user-hostile, it doesn't seem that bad to me -- you can easily get a better price for more ram elsewhere, and it makes Apple's balance sheet (and, by extension, their ability to keep putting out interesting hardware for years to come) much stronger.
I can live with that.
No, he said Gateway, and meant it. Gateway sold these neat little all-in-one LCD machines in the late 90s, starting not long after the original iMac came up, as the Profile series.
It looks like you can get some of the original Gateway Profile computers (15" lcd / 500mhz cpu / 128mb ram / 10gb hard drive) for around $300 on eBay now.
I remember playing with one in a Gateway store back in 1998 or so, and thinking that this was a really cool idea, but it was something like $2500, as I recall (I can't find any links about dates or prices now, but it was in that range), and as a student I just couldn't afford that.
(That and, now that I think about it, I wanted something that I'd be able to run BeOS on, and didn't think I could on these Gateway all-in-one machines -- good thing I was betting on the BeOS horse, eh? Oh well...).
But yeah, my first thought when seeing the new iMac was that Apple was ripping off the Gateway design. The Apple one was much nicer to be sure, but the basic form factor -- which predates the current notion of a tablet PC by several years -- is more or less exactly how Gateway had set up their original Profile PCs five years or more ago.
Philippe Starck did do some stuff for Target a year or two ago, but it didn't sell very well and the partnership was severed.
On the other hand, Michael Graves has had a partnership with Target for a few years now, making things like home wares & home electronics (designed by Graves, manufactured by Phillips). You're probably thinking of him, I suspect...
Microsoft, if they're really interested in getting involved in open source, should pay attention to some of the things Apple has been doing for the past few years.
Apple hasn't gotten everything right, but they have made a lot of the right moves. They built their system over CMU's Mach kernel, build everything with the GCC toolkit, and bundle a full suite of familiar tools with their products like Perl, Python, Ruby, Apache, Samba, PostgreSQL (it's embedded in their new Apple Remote Desktop), etc. They participate in the right mailing lists, and they generally try to submit useful patches -- even if those patches don't end up being accepted, they're at least putting in an effort to play nicely. They share what they've done with technologies that they either developed in house or adopted before most others, like Rendezvous (or OpenTalk or whatever it is now), Firewire, Bluetooth, 802.11, etc. All of this ends up coming back to them favorably in the long run.
That isn't to say that Microsoft should slavishly copy everything Apple has done, but they should look at how the moves Apple has made have enabled Apple to move farther much more quickly than they could have alone. Once Microsoft understands that, then they can start picking & choosing what they want to open up, what they want to pull in from outside the company, and what they want to leave unchanged. For example, Microsoft probably wouldn't gain anything if they dropped the NT kernel for Mach or Linux, but they might want to consider scrapping the IE engine for KHTML or Gecko if it's really as gnarly as some of the rumors suggest, and a lot of people would appreciate truly open & understandable file formats for Office the way Apple has done with Keynote & XML.
On a different level, the moves Apple has made have encouraged others to bring their offerings to the Mac when they never would have before. Microsoft could do the same. A lot of people would be happy if they deprecated cmd.exe and instead offered up a fully functional bash / ksh / tcsh / zsh shell, complete with all the expected command line tools and system facilities (grep, cron, /etc config files, and so on). If Microsoft made it easy for Linux software developers to port to Windows just by changing GCC's target platform, knowing that autoconf (etc) would work on Windows, they could bring in thousands of developers overnight. Moreover, if they gave away (free beer, but maybe or maybe not free speech) at least a lightweight-but-complete version of their development tools, the way Apple does with XCode, that too would encourage open source developers to start messing around on Windows in a way that they currently do not do.
Microsoft has spent the past 20 years ripping off ideas from Apple. I don't see why they're having such a mental block about doing it again now...
The parallels in ANH to Japanese cinema, especially "Hidden Fortress" and "Seven Samurai", are obvious, but that's not the only source of inspiration Lucas turned to. There's also a lot of imagery & themes taken from American Westerns, particularly John Ford's The Searchers.
The plot of ANH basically replicates this one, with the most obvious difference being that John Wayne's character has elements of both Luke Skywalker & Han Solo (but then, early drafts of ANH supposedly had these as one character as well). But then you've got the swaggering cowboy (Solo), a mute Indian sidekick (Chewbacca), a murdered family (the shot of Luke's burned out home is nearly identical to one in Searchers, down to the charred skeletons in the yard), etc.
ANH also has overtones of "The Magnificent Seven", but then that movie itself is a remake of "Seven Samurai", so it's debatable whether or not you can use that example.
It's interesting to note how both Lucas, and 20 years later, Tarantino, have played homage to both American westerns and Japanese sword movies, while recasting them as, respectively, camp sci-fi and camp crime dramas. I'm already wondering what the next grand cross-pollinator is going to come up with in another couple of decades :-)
The page has melted. Here is the Google cache -- at least some of the images show up in Google's version...
If you read the article, they explicitly state that this model is designed to operate wirelessly -- hence small motor components and Bluetooth for control. That isn't to say that the video isn't necessarily staged -- I haven't seen it yet, so can't say one way or the other -- but they do claim that the thing is supposed to be able to work untethered...
The original article has left me a little bit confused. It is implied that the bug is with the AIM client, and not the protocol, but is that actually the case? Do we know for sure that other clients -- such as Gaim or iChat -- are not affected by the problem here?
And if the problem is just with AIM, and everyone that doesn't want to switch clients has to stay with AIM, are we really stuck with the standard AOL-IM suite that the company has been distributing lately? You know, the one that comes bundled with Weatherbug, which as far as I can tell will install itself with AIM whether or not you want it, and is damned near impossible to remove. Is that really what we're looking at here? Because that sucks big time.
If this is really the case, then hell with it, I'm going to put Gaim on everyone's desktop at work if AIM exploits become a problem. I'll bet most people probably won't notice the difference, and some will even like that it can be used to talk to the company's internal Jabber server, or other chat protocols.
But even without that, being able to avoid the mandatory spyware is fine by me...
Hmmm.....
The economics of a website like Craigslist, or your local weekly want ad flyer, is pretty interesting stuff. Both of these publications specialize in the one & only form of advertisement that people all over the place are actually interested in: classified ads. Lots of people pay for their local newspaper just to throw away everything but the jobs section, the automotive & real estate listings, the movie listings, and similar classified ads.
Publishers know and depend on this fact about their audiences, and use the revenue stream they get from these ads to help subsidize the unprofitable work they do in other areas -- journalism, for instance, or printing a dead tree newspaper every day, or running a bunch of servers.
In the case of Craigslist or the want ads, they dispense with the journalistic front matter and let the audience have the ad listings. This has the dual effect of eliminating a major cost center while also making it obvious to the public that this is a place that focuses on just the kinds of ads they like, and not those nasty popup ads or whatever that the other commercial sites all have.
The funny thing is that Craigslist has done this so well that they've been able to make a very nice living for themselves while more than covering their expenses and they haven't even had to charge most of their customers for the service.
Other publishers are aware of this phenomenon, and terrified of it.
Consider what Craigslist's competition must be thinking. Ebay skims a commission off every sale that happens on their site; Craigslist doesn't. Match.com charges a listing fee to place a personals ad; Craigslist doesn't. Monster charges a fee for job placements; Craigslist doesn't. Your local sites charge fees for real estate listings; Craigslist doesn't. All of these publishers are being completely undercut by a competitor that can afford to do for free what they're trying -- and increasingly often, failing -- to get people to pay money for.
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About a year ago, NPR had a All Things Considered piece on the rise of Craigslist, and how by charging only for job listings in the San Francisco Bay area, they could subsidize what they were doing everywhere else for free. Among the people interviewed for this piece was the person in charge at a major regional newspaper's website. She had some bland remarks about how what Craigslist is doing is very interesting and has really caught the attention of people in the rest of the industry. *yawn*.
A few weeks after that interview was on the air, I ran into that person in Home Depot, so I stopped to say hi and to tell her that I heard her on the radio recently, and to ask what she thought about Craigslist. Her response, roughly, was this:
As you can imagine, this wasn't quite how she phrased her remarks on the radio, but it certainly expressed the same idea with a lot less ambiguity. :-)
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I'm not going to identify this person or the company -- you'll figure it out if you listen to the NPR piece off their web site -- but in any case the point is much broader than just with this one company.
Craigslist is doing some so radically & dangerously different than anyone else in the publishing industry that they are a major threat to all kinds of companies. That's both good and bad. Maybe we don't need to have every newspaper & tv station in the country publishing the same news wire feeds that you can get anywhere else. Maybe we can do without that. But if these companies get out of that kind of work, will they also feel they have to get out of local news coverage online? If so, where will people turn to for that -- blogs? Somehow I don't think that would work.
Moreover, is this also a threat to dead-tree publications who won't be able to depend on the classi
My first programming class in high school -- in which we were writing QuickBasic on "fancy" Mac LC 520s (the ones with shiny new tray loading CD-ROM drives and color screens) -- this was how we were taught to write brief pauses into our programs. The numbers were bigger -- loop for 10000, loop for 30000, etc -- but it was the exact same idea.
We were told even then that this was inaccurate & unreliable -- we could all see how much longer the Mac II would pause compared to the LC 520s -- but it was basically the only option available to use in QuickBasic. Even the manual suggested this idiom IIRC.
But that was the 80s, and people were all crazy back then :-)
Well, right -- that's part of why it's funny. :-)
Actually, the movie Deliverance was based in Georgia, and IIRC filmed on the Chatooga river, which runs along the Georgia / South Carolina state line. I've actually been whitewater rafting on it, and according to the tour guide, they actually do average at least one rafter fataility on the river every year. But the "squeal like a pig" guys? That's Georgia, like Newt Gingrich... :-)
Such things are subjective, of course, but surely you have to agree that the name -- if nothing else -- is amazingly weird. Moreover, the format is also extremely obscure, which is really what I was getting at: outside of Slashdot readers, how many people have even heard of it? Damned few, it seems.
The (arguable) technical merits of Ogg over more familiar formats like ATRAC & MP3 is more than offset by the fact that no one uses Ogg and no popular digital music playing device is capable of playing Ogg.
Command line switches are irrelevant (really -- that's a function of controller software UI, not file format merits), and so is the availablilty or otherwise of open source software to drive the format (because, again, outside of Slashdot readers, no one cares whether the music software they're using happens to have available source code, they just want it to be able to handle their music library).
I'm not sticking up for ATRAC -- I don't use it or Ogg -- but the fact that it has a huge conglomerate pushing it for something like a decade now does count for something when comparing it to Ogg, which basically has no traction and no support from anyone. Ogg is, in short, not a compelling alternative to ATRAC.
MP3, on the other hand, is a compelling alternative, and that's the one that the article and most of the commenters have been banging on about -- correctly. But the comment I was replying to was making the point that people don't want "weird, crippled formats", and as far as I can tell, to the average consumer that probably uses Windows or maybe uses a Mac, Ogg is way weirder & more crippled than ATRAC. No major music service distributes Ogg files, no popular devices can play back Ogg encoded songs, and no major music playing software pushes Ogg as a storage & playback format -- what else is there to consider? Nothing. There is nothing else. ATRAC, for all its flaws, at least has these bases covered, and Ogg doesn't, and Ogg probably never will.
Q.E.D.
Yes, there are pockets of progressivism in Alabama and the rest of the south, just as there are pockets of conservative fundamentalism in Massachusetts and the rest of the northeast. That said though, the average person in the south is more likely than the national average to be fundamentalist christian, socially conservative, and fiscally regressive, just as the average person in the northeast is more likely to be religiously agnostic, socially progressive, and fiscally progressive.
These aren't really value judgements about which is "better" -- you're the one that said "all inbred idiots", not me, I was just playing along with a silly joke about Alabamians not having computers when obviously that isn't true -- rather, I'm just trying to make a reasonably accurate description of the basic demographics of the two regions. And since it so happens that my personal outlook on things tends to be more in line with the northeast average, yes, I was very happy to move to Massachusetts when I was finished with school.
Not that I'm as tolerant as I should be -- if I was, I wouldn't have made the earlier joke -- but remarks like "Delta's ready when you are" is exactly the sort of "you don't fit around here, do ya boy?" attitude that I was happy to get away from.
*shrug* I have no answers, mainly just snide remarks...
Oh they have plenty of computers in Alabama. The problem is that because most computers don't ship with TV cards hard-wired to watch football games, televangelists, and Fox News, the locals don't see why anyone would want to use one unless they were some kind of godless heathen communist.
As a godless heathen communist who studied computer science at a university in Alabama, this was just fine with me :-)
Ironically, Sony's indifference to Ogg Vorbis -- and for that matter, every other manufacturer's similar indifference to Ogg Vorbis -- shows clearly that, at least on some level, they are intuitively aware of this notion.
As weird & crippled as ATRAC is, it's built in to pretty much every device Sony has sold for the last few years, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that at least some of Sony's customers have agreed o be locked in to the format -- every single user of a miniDisc player, for example.
Ogg, on the other hand, is unknown & irrelevant to all save a few Slashdot readers, and Slashdot, last time I checked, has never sold (or, for that matter, given away) any kind of Ogg-capable hardware.
In the spectrum of weird, cripled, niche audio formats, ATRAC is hardly the worst example.
You're taking only part of the original quote though:
You seem to be ignoring the first part of the statement -- "anything you need to quantify" -- by pointing out that it's meaningless to compare the quantitative difference between symphonies or flavors, but these things are essentially subjective, so there's little merit in "measuring" their differences. There is no need to quantify here.
I mean, obviously Beethoven's symphonies are much better than Brahms', and there can be no question that ice cream is better than pineapple, right? :-)
Obviously, that's a silly assertion, but that's the point: by using subjective examples, you're dealing with things that can't be measured in any way that would be meaningful to more than one person, so there is no need to do so.
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On the other hand, you go from there to athletes, and this one breaks down for a different reason: people quantify the attributes of athletes all the time! The whole point of being an athlete is to engage in physical competition where there are winners and losers, and there's no way to determine that without some kind of clear metrics, from simple & obvious ones like who wins more often to more complex ones like, well, all the books of statistics that baseball fans accumulate.
Therefore, sure, you can get lost in debates about whether Mays or Sosa is the better player, but this is in most ways not a subjective matter, because you have all kinds of statistics available to justify an argument for one or the other being "better". You can argue that which statistics are more or less important is a subjective matter, and that could be the case, but even still this is a realm of carefully compiled numbers, which at least provides an essentially quantitative foundation for the matter.
Arguing that Michael Jordan was a better basketball player than Larry Bird -- on grounds that he won more championships, or he had a better free throw percentage, or whatever (I'm not a sports fan, I don't actually know that Jordan had a better free throw percentage than Bird, but nevermind that) -- is, I think it's very safe to say, better than not attempting to use any kind of measurements, and just saying that Jordan was "a stronger player" or was "more telegenic" or whatever.
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So, while I've never heard of this Glib's Law, it does make sense. The important thing to keep in mind is the implied caveat that most things are worth quantifying, but not all, and if you try to quantify an essentially subjective thing than you're just falling down a rabbit hole. For everything else though, it can provide a useful basis for understanding things -- maybe not a perfect one, but at least some kind of common ground for discussing things.
What's so objectionable about that?
:-)