One funny section from 'The Soul of a New Machine' (Tracey Kidder, 1982 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction) details how IBM instructed their sales staff to warn customers about Data General.
According to staff at Data General this was the best advertising they had ever had (and they had some good advertising). As they told the story, quite a lot of IBM's customers straightaway came over to chat, saying, "IBM warned us about you guys; you must be doing something we ought to know about."
As Kidder put it, it was like: "Where is this 'Data General'? -- so we can be sure not to go there. What's their phone number? -- so we can be sure not to call it!"
Driving 'round Australia-Konigsberg Bridge problem
on
LA to Oregon at Mach 9
·
· Score: 2, Funny
One more good reason to drive round Australia! Only 16,000 kms if I ferry the car across to Tasmania as well.
Alice Springs (and Ayer's Rock, the Olga's, Katherine Gorge, etc) creates a Konigsberg Bridge problem, however, since I won't be departing from either Darwin or Adelaide, but would like to do a north-south traversal as well.
Darn graph theory...
1. Coin the phrase 'Mugnet', being an abbreviation of 'Mugger Magnet'
2. Laugh kind of like Ernie from Sesame Street at your own cleverness, while walking around.
3. Thereby give every appearance of being at least as crazy and unhinged as anyone else out there
4. Survive your trip to work (can anyone else see where this is going?)
5. Profit!!!
Just because trade unions became their own special class of power-mongering hypocrites on many occassions, doesn't mean they didn't *also* provide a necessary counterbalance to company and management abuses. We all now benefit enormously from what they achieved; I feel sorry for countries like China which will probably industrialize without them.
Also, on the issue of purely US-centric news, perhaps these items need their own little section (or at least a distinguishing category/graphic). I'm sure this news is very important to some of you, but it's also pretty much irrelevant to everyone else.
Say I had complete faith in Jesus, If I raped and killed your mother, could I still go to heaven?
I'm not sure why this kind of issue ever comes up in discussions that are supposedly about Christian belief; It's a straw man argument unless you're referring to the several marginal sects of protestantism which articulate a 'No Lordship' theology.
To give merely one common response to this question, Philip Melanchthon once memorably wrote that while faith alone saves, a saving faith is never alone (see the comment on the Book of James, above). That is to say that a theoretical commitment to God that does not manifest itself in action is suspect for that reason. Hence Jesus: "By their fruits you will know them. Do you gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles?" (Matt 7:16), or Paul: "What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? May it never be! We who died to sin, how could we live in it any longer?" (Rom. 6:1).
Now I don't expect non-Christians to take much of an interest in biblical theology. But those who are willing to comment on it will frequently display a bizarre readiness to assume that everyone involved has been a more-or-less complete imbecile from the very outset.
It's the old "Well I'm certainly not aware of any objections to my argument" problem.
There is, of course, an existing tradition of Christian thought on extraterrestrial life.
C.S. Lewis' Cosmic Trilogy is probably the best known example: Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra took H.G. Wells as its point of departure and speculated upon other world in which the corruption and redemption of humanity and nature had followed different courses. (I never got far into Vol. 3, so I can't recommend it.) Probably both are in a library near you.
Going back a little farther, the poetry of the Catholic writer Alice Meynell (1847-1922) touched on a few of these themes, e.g. in 'Christ in the Universe':
Nor, in our little day May his devices with the heavens be guessed, His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way Or his bestowals there be manifest.
But in the eternities, Doubtless we shall compare together, hear A million alien Gospels, in what guise, He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.
The larger the company the more time they generally spend {wasting money, wasting time, shuffling deckchairs, etc} by changing direction all the time. To save face they never explain to outsiders (in this case, their constituency) how the high-level managers responsible have {impossible work constraints, petty political agendas, no idea}. If they were watched the way sports teams are, they might behave a little differently.
But as it is, so many companies seem incapable of simply choosing one competent and respected project manager, with a generally known and respected vision, and simply backing them for a twelve-month period. It's not like there aren't enough such people in the FLOSS community. But that's just not how business works, most of the time.
I remember hearing Tim Costello (Australian social activist, lawyer, pastor) speak here in Sydney a few years ago. He said two amusing things:
1. He and his wife had been at Uni in the 70's, and recently talked about how they all believed then that in 20 years the biggest problems we'd have would be working out what to do with all the leisure time created by technology (you know the stuff...).
2. (Off-topic, but also amusing) That morning he'd been in Melbourne speaking at his church, and afterward had given two elderly ladies a lift home. They were two sisters now aged in their nineties. When they heard he was flying up to Sydney that afternoon, they recalled "Ah, we went to Sydney once" and it turned out that they were there in their late teens. "We understand," they said, "that it's a lot better now that they have the bridge there."
Now correct me if I'm not understanding this right:
AXA own axa.com
AXA choose not to USE axa.com, but to forward it to AXAonline.com
AXA likewise do not put the word 'AXA' in the title of their homepage, but
rather 'AXAonline'.
AXA then somehow find the temerity to moan about their poor performance in search
engine queries involving the term 'AXA'.
If these are the premises, then the conclusion must be that AXA are suing
on the grounds of their own baseline incompetence in web-promotion.
The issue now is DTD'd browser editing
on
JOE Hits 3.0
·
· Score: 3, Funny
There was a thread months back about getting a package picked up by the major Linux distro's. The funniest response said "Write a text editor, man -- there just aren't enough text editors in Linux".
After 300 odd posts, the only point worth saving that I've thus far seen is that Joe is friendly to people who still think in terms of some program they used in the eighties.
So how about somebody writes the kind of editor we need NOW?
The biggest challenge over the past few years has been editing *ML text on servers via browsers, and making it BOTH XHTML (or some subset
thereof) and user-friendly. I've seen 20-odd attempts to do something *like* this, but nothing that actually puts the two together.
IMHO then, the #1 most helpful thing that could be written at the moment is a browser-mod for Mozilla that would allow a web form to attach a DTD (and a stylesheet) to a TextArea, which the browser would then respect by firing up an XML editor that followed the given XML definition. Xopus could be a good model for how this might work.
I won't say there hasn't been progress -- I'm writing and spellchecking this HTML in gVim via Mozex at this moment. We're getting there! But the DTD linking can only really occur in the browser.
(Write it myself, I hear you say? I don't have 3 months free to get my C up to speed. Anyone want to code this in exchange for a website?):D
17. Well it's MINE, innit? Says so in the name. _MY_ sql. Ya gotta like that!
Seriously, I think a good name is half the battle with acceptance. If Postgres had called themselves MySQL -- rather than "Huh?" as most people understood them to mean by their Ingres-derived title -- and then produced some half-decent documentation occassionally...
The 'Puritan conspiracy' theory (us vs. them) is less useful here than the 'Alcohol analogy', IMHO. Alcohol can be consumed legally in moderation, but extreme use needs to be policed precisely becuase it is an addictive substance: it interferes with the end user's ability to self-regulate its use.
In the case of pr0n, people get addicted to the 'hyperreal' (ie. exageratedly artificial) presentation of sex, and it undermines their relationships with others (who can become permanently objectified), their self-esteem, and their bank balance. (Wo, nearly thought I mistyped 'bonk balance' for a minute there... but if their capacity for relationships suffers, then that's a point as well.)
For these kind of reasons, bars in the western world are not legally allowed to sell alcohol to someone who is drunk. When will the pr0n conglomerates take similar reponsibility for their 'customers' (if they wish to use the term with any credibility at all)?
As long as there are men making weapons, there will be war.
So your argument is what? -- That defenselessness will always lead to peace and never function (as it has historically) as a magnet for risk-free aggression? "Those that will not bear swords can still die on them" (Tolkien)
The guys (above) questioning whether PHP needs a separate templating engine are right on the money.
Like every man and his dog, I wrote my own a year or two back (I think half the appeal of templates comes from the fun they are to write, which then raises the problem of finding a use for them), and I've used Smarty (for a project which was using Xoops), plus a few of the smaller systems.
In my view simple PHP is (1) just as fast and easy to maintain, (2) more flexible by far, (3) a more portable skill than HTML drone-work, (4) an educational experience (it's not like programming is some kind of black art anymore; designers need to know it to get anywhere in the industry), and (5) a consistently *fast* development solution. Templating is a way of coding, not a level of abstraction.
To make my point more concrete: Most of my day-to-day code looks a lot like this:
$result = $db->query("SELECT * FROM table WHERE some_condition=1 ORDER BY something DESC;");
$nr = count($result);
if ($nr > 0) { ....echo "<ul>\n"; ....foreach ($result as $row) { ........stripslashes_from_array($row); ........echo "<li>".ucwords($row['title'])."</li>\n"; ....} ....echo "</ul>\n";
}
Now obviously, I can make big HTML blocks and add the vars with <?= $var ?> if I feel something approaching template layout is helpful at some stage. But whether I do or not, the simple PHP is strong and sparse, and most importantly, it's in ONE FILE.
The fundamental templating mistake is that it's somehow elegant to have to find and change two or more files for every single functional alteration you ever have to make to a script. Such separation decreases code comprehensibility (and so, maintainability) on the PHP side, by removing its best documentation mechanism (it's HTML, whether internationalized or not). I've seen nothing in templating that can improve on the above kind of coding for speed of deployment and ease of maintainability.
And for my time (and money and satisfaction), that's what this language is really all about.
In the full and more illuminating form, from the 'open source' World English Bible (Daniel ch. 5)...
25 This is the writing that was inscribed: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. 26 This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God has numbered your kingdom, and brought it to an end; 27 TEKEL; you are weighed in the balances, and are found wanting. 28 PERES; your kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.
In the passage, a hand has appeared and written this message on a wall during a royal feast; hence the origin of the phrase, the writing is on the wall.
Great quote for those big-picture technology meetings. Right up there with Well, I must defer to your greater schiolism on that point.
An infinite number is uncountable by definition. For the universe to be infinitely old would mean that there was a time in the past unreachable by counting (of arbitrary time units, e.g. earth years). How that could be possible represents an interesting mental exercise.
Things like this, 'Hilberts Hotel', etc, seem to me to demonstrate conceptual problems with the idea of infinity, which makes it throw contradictions where ever it is introduced. Then again, IANAMathematician, just a finitely puzzled observer.
IIRC, Tracy Kidder's 81/2 book 'The Soul of a New Machine' relates how IBM actively warned their customers against Data General's business practices. One of the execs from DG is quoted as saying how well this worked...
People were asking "Where is this 'Data General' so that I can be sure not to go there? What is their number so I can be sure not to call it?" They'd come across to us and say "IBM warned us about you guys; you must be doing something we need to know about."
This demonstrates the opposite of the kind of bias The Enquirer was alleging...
Is Microsoft limiting Windows search results to only 'approved pages'? How can there be only 700 pages dealing with Microsoft Windows? Unless they're truly *ridiculously* incompetent, which I don't buy. Or unless they are losing some serious market share to Debian!
Does anyone know of reasonably detailed online resources on exactly how sexual reproduction is believed to have evolved? I've always thought hermaphrodites (which I understand would have to occur first) would have been a better option in terms of simple survivability.
(There's a lot of dross to sort through in a web search on the subject, hence this qn.)
Heck yeah! Where IS Mozilla. It's by far the easiest-to-understand argument for open source.
Better overall email and browsing than ANY closed source product. Exhibit as Firebird/Thunderbird on Mac, PC and Linux side-by-side for maximum effect. Demonstrate the click-a-link skins and extensions (for gestures!), tabbed browsing (multi-page homepages), integrated searching, mouse-free navigation, bayesian spam filtering, quirks-mode for all of IE's layout bugs, -- heck even some CSS3 already.
The only closed-source thing it still needs is the CodeWeavers QuickTime plug-in, sadly (AFAIK -- I'd be happy to find I'm wrong on this).
If a video game is like a movie, a MUD is like a novel: The video card, as the saying goes, is your imagination. This means there are fewer limits to the world (and the self) you can describe: words are cheap, while polygons require an expert to arrange them.
For people who are more writers than gamers, MUDs are unlikely to ever be surpassed as an immersive medium for self-expression: you get a body to express yourself with, but everything is still expressed in text...
Slashdot Mirror
One funny section from 'The Soul of a New Machine' (Tracey Kidder, 1982 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction) details how IBM instructed their sales staff to warn customers about Data General.
According to staff at Data General this was the best advertising they had ever had (and they had some good advertising). As they told the story, quite a lot of IBM's customers straightaway came over to chat, saying, "IBM warned us about you guys; you must be doing something we ought to know about."
As Kidder put it, it was like: "Where is this 'Data General'? -- so we can be sure not to go there. What's their phone number? -- so we can be sure not to call it!"
One more good reason to drive round Australia! Only 16,000 kms if I ferry the car across to Tasmania as well. Alice Springs (and Ayer's Rock, the Olga's, Katherine Gorge, etc) creates a Konigsberg Bridge problem, however, since I won't be departing from either Darwin or Adelaide, but would like to do a north-south traversal as well. Darn graph theory...
1. Coin the phrase 'Mugnet', being an abbreviation of 'Mugger Magnet'
2. Laugh kind of like Ernie from Sesame Street at your own cleverness, while walking around.
3. Thereby give every appearance of being at least as crazy and unhinged as anyone else out there
4. Survive your trip to work (can anyone else see where this is going?)
5. Profit!!!
Just because trade unions became their own special class of power-mongering hypocrites on many occassions, doesn't mean they didn't *also* provide a necessary counterbalance to company and management abuses. We all now benefit enormously from what they achieved; I feel sorry for countries like China which will probably industrialize without them.
Also, on the issue of purely US-centric news, perhaps these items need their own little section (or at least a distinguishing category/graphic). I'm sure this news is very important to some of you, but it's also pretty much irrelevant to everyone else.
I'm not sure why this kind of issue ever comes up in discussions that are supposedly about Christian belief; It's a straw man argument unless you're referring to the several marginal sects of protestantism which articulate a 'No Lordship' theology.
To give merely one common response to this question, Philip Melanchthon once memorably wrote that while faith alone saves, a saving faith is never alone (see the comment on the Book of James, above). That is to say that a theoretical commitment to God that does not manifest itself in action is suspect for that reason. Hence Jesus: "By their fruits you will know them. Do you gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles?" (Matt 7:16), or Paul: "What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? May it never be! We who died to sin, how could we live in it any longer?" (Rom. 6:1).
Now I don't expect non-Christians to take much of an interest in biblical theology. But those who are willing to comment on it will frequently display a bizarre readiness to assume that everyone involved has been a more-or-less complete imbecile from the very outset.
It's the old "Well I'm certainly not aware of any objections to my argument" problem.
There is, of course, an existing tradition of Christian thought on extraterrestrial life.
C.S. Lewis' Cosmic Trilogy is probably the best known example: Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra took H.G. Wells as its point of departure and speculated upon other world in which the corruption and redemption of humanity and nature had followed different courses. (I never got far into Vol. 3, so I can't recommend it.) Probably both are in a library near you.
Going back a little farther, the poetry of the Catholic writer Alice Meynell (1847-1922) touched on a few of these themes, e.g. in 'Christ in the Universe':
Meynell's works are available online.
The larger the company the more time they generally spend {wasting money, wasting time, shuffling deckchairs, etc} by changing direction all the time. To save face they never explain to outsiders (in this case, their constituency) how the high-level managers responsible have {impossible work constraints, petty political agendas, no idea}. If they were watched the way sports teams are, they might behave a little differently.
But as it is, so many companies seem incapable of simply choosing one competent and respected project manager, with a generally known and respected vision, and simply backing them for a twelve-month period. It's not like there aren't enough such people in the FLOSS community. But that's just not how business works, most of the time.
I remember hearing Tim Costello (Australian social activist, lawyer, pastor) speak here in Sydney a few years ago. He said two amusing things:
1. He and his wife had been at Uni in the 70's, and recently talked about how they all believed then that in 20 years the biggest problems we'd have would be working out what to do with all the leisure time created by technology (you know the stuff...).
2. (Off-topic, but also amusing) That morning he'd been in Melbourne speaking at his church, and afterward had given two elderly ladies a lift home. They were two sisters now aged in their nineties. When they heard he was flying up to Sydney that afternoon, they recalled "Ah, we went to Sydney once" and it turned out that they were there in their late teens. "We understand," they said, "that it's a lot better now that they have the bridge there."
Dang... just thought about that. OK, you win.
That only *produces* a 5-7 poem, however. Where's your 'Haiku program' that ALSO outputs a Haiku? Hmmm? Well?
Now correct me if I'm not understanding this right:
If these are the premises, then the conclusion must be that AXA are suing on the grounds of their own baseline incompetence in web-promotion.
There was a thread months back about getting a package picked up by the major Linux distro's. The funniest response said "Write a text editor, man -- there just aren't enough text editors in Linux".
After 300 odd posts, the only point worth saving that I've thus far seen is that Joe is friendly to people who still think in terms of some program they used in the eighties.
So how about somebody writes the kind of editor we need NOW?
The biggest challenge over the past few years has been editing *ML text on servers via browsers, and making it BOTH XHTML (or some subset thereof) and user-friendly. I've seen 20-odd attempts to do something *like* this, but nothing that actually puts the two together.
IMHO then, the #1 most helpful thing that could be written at the moment is a browser-mod for Mozilla that would allow a web form to attach a DTD (and a stylesheet) to a TextArea, which the browser would then respect by firing up an XML editor that followed the given XML definition. Xopus could be a good model for how this might work.
I won't say there hasn't been progress -- I'm writing and spellchecking this HTML in gVim via Mozex at this moment. We're getting there! But the DTD linking can only really occur in the browser.
(Write it myself, I hear you say? I don't have 3 months free to get my C up to speed. Anyone want to code this in exchange for a website?) :D
17. Well it's MINE, innit? Says so in the name. _MY_ sql. Ya gotta like that!
Seriously, I think a good name is half the battle with acceptance. If Postgres had called themselves MySQL -- rather than "Huh?" as most people understood them to mean by their Ingres-derived title -- and then produced some half-decent documentation occassionally...
But they didn't.
The 'Puritan conspiracy' theory (us vs. them) is less useful here than the 'Alcohol analogy', IMHO. Alcohol can be consumed legally in moderation, but extreme use needs to be policed precisely becuase it is an addictive substance: it interferes with the end user's ability to self-regulate its use.
In the case of pr0n, people get addicted to the 'hyperreal' (ie. exageratedly artificial) presentation of sex, and it undermines their relationships with others (who can become permanently objectified), their self-esteem, and their bank balance. (Wo, nearly thought I mistyped 'bonk balance' for a minute there... but if their capacity for relationships suffers, then that's a point as well.)
For these kind of reasons, bars in the western world are not legally allowed to sell alcohol to someone who is drunk. When will the pr0n conglomerates take similar reponsibility for their 'customers' (if they wish to use the term with any credibility at all)?
So your argument is what? -- That defenselessness will always lead to peace and never function (as it has historically) as a magnet for risk-free aggression? "Those that will not bear swords can still die on them" (Tolkien)
The guys (above) questioning whether PHP needs a separate templating engine are right on the money.
Like every man and his dog, I wrote my own a year or two back (I think half the appeal of templates comes from the fun they are to write, which then raises the problem of finding a use for them), and I've used Smarty (for a project which was using Xoops), plus a few of the smaller systems.
In my view simple PHP is (1) just as fast and easy to maintain, (2) more flexible by far, (3) a more portable skill than HTML drone-work, (4) an educational experience (it's not like programming is some kind of black art anymore; designers need to know it to get anywhere in the industry), and (5) a consistently *fast* development solution. Templating is a way of coding, not a level of abstraction.
To make my point more concrete: Most of my day-to-day code looks a lot like this:
$result = $db->query("SELECT * FROM table WHERE some_condition=1 ORDER BY something DESC;");
....echo "<ul>\n";
....foreach ($result as $row) {
........stripslashes_from_array($row);
........echo "<li>".ucwords($row['title'])."</li>\n";
....}
....echo "</ul>\n";
$nr = count($result);
if ($nr > 0) {
}
Now obviously, I can make big HTML blocks and add the vars with <?= $var ?> if I feel something approaching template layout is helpful at some stage. But whether I do or not, the simple PHP is strong and sparse, and most importantly, it's in ONE FILE.
The fundamental templating mistake is that it's somehow elegant to have to find and change two or more files for every single functional alteration you ever have to make to a script. Such separation decreases code comprehensibility (and so, maintainability) on the PHP side, by removing its best documentation mechanism (it's HTML, whether internationalized or not). I've seen nothing in templating that can improve on the above kind of coding for speed of deployment and ease of maintainability.
And for my time (and money and satisfaction), that's what this language is really all about.
EOL more like.
In the full and more illuminating form, from the 'open source' World English Bible (Daniel ch. 5)...
In the passage, a hand has appeared and written this message on a wall during a royal feast; hence the origin of the phrase, the writing is on the wall.
Great quote for those big-picture technology meetings. Right up there with Well, I must defer to your greater schiolism on that point.
An infinite number is uncountable by definition. For the universe to be infinitely old would mean that there was a time in the past unreachable by counting (of arbitrary time units, e.g. earth years). How that could be possible represents an interesting mental exercise.
Things like this, 'Hilberts Hotel', etc, seem to me to demonstrate conceptual problems with the idea of infinity, which makes it throw contradictions where ever it is introduced. Then again, IANAMathematician, just a finitely puzzled observer.
IIRC, Tracy Kidder's 81/2 book 'The Soul of a New Machine' relates how IBM actively warned their customers against Data General's business practices. One of the execs from DG is quoted as saying how well this worked...
(quoting from memory -- not exact)
It is just me, or does anyone else think that The Earthsea Quartet by Ursula le Guin would be a good next step?
Seems everything old is Jung again...
The Enquirer completely missed the real story. Try searching on more specific terms:
:)
google.com.au:
'Microsoft Windows' ~= 7,560,000
'Debian Linux' ~= 3,900,000
search.msn.com:
'Debian Linux' ~= 793,659
'Microsoft Windows' ~= 713 (!)
This demonstrates the opposite of the kind of bias The Enquirer was alleging...
Is Microsoft limiting Windows search results to only 'approved pages'? How can there be only 700 pages dealing with Microsoft Windows? Unless they're truly *ridiculously* incompetent, which I don't buy. Or unless they are losing some serious market share to Debian!
Now there's a happy thought.
Does anyone know of reasonably detailed online resources on exactly how sexual reproduction is believed to have evolved? I've always thought hermaphrodites (which I understand would have to occur first) would have been a better option in terms of simple survivability.
(There's a lot of dross to sort through in a web search on the subject, hence this qn.)
Heck yeah! Where IS Mozilla. It's by far the easiest-to-understand argument for open source.
Better overall email and browsing than ANY closed source product. Exhibit as Firebird/Thunderbird on Mac, PC and Linux side-by-side for maximum effect. Demonstrate the click-a-link skins and extensions (for gestures!), tabbed browsing (multi-page homepages), integrated searching, mouse-free navigation, bayesian spam filtering, quirks-mode for all of IE's layout bugs, -- heck even some CSS3 already.
The only closed-source thing it still needs is the CodeWeavers QuickTime plug-in, sadly (AFAIK -- I'd be happy to find I'm wrong on this).
If a video game is like a movie, a MUD is like a novel: The video card, as the saying goes, is your imagination. This means there are fewer limits to the world (and the self) you can describe: words are cheap, while polygons require an expert to arrange them.
For people who are more writers than gamers, MUDs are unlikely to ever be surpassed as an immersive medium for self-expression: you get a body to express yourself with, but everything is still expressed in text...