...Partial source is said to be found in the Koran, but recent disputes about whether the Koran was actually written in Aramaic cast many doubts on that.
I thought the Koran was written in Visual Basic, wasn't it?
I don't know if anybody does this, but in theory I like the idea of a directory structure that mixes posix pathnames with descriptive pathnames. For example, everything could be installed into long descriptive pathnames by package, but the binaraies could all be symlinked into/bin the config files could all be symlinked into/etc and so on.
Programming as Art (NOT just games)
on
Videogames as Art
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I have long thought of programming as art. Not just game programming, which I do as a hobby, but also to a certain extent the business/database programming that I do in my day job.
Of course, I have had a hard time rationalizing this out loud or explaining it to anyone. When I sit down and write a object-oriented wrapper to procedural database commands, or write my own login/session-key code, I *feel* the same way I do when I am doin art-- Art is a big part of my life. I write and draw and sculpt all the time. Everything I truly enjoy doing is art... except programming. Why then does it feel like art when I am doing it?
Most people define art in terms of art-appreciation. Nobody ever looks at or admires the scripts I write on the company mail server. So for the longest time I rejected the idea of actually calling programming art.
But lately I have been getting a better appreciation of minimalism. I used to hate abstract art, and minimalist art, until I actually started to do a little bit of it. To the non-artist, art is in the appreciation, but to the artist, art is in the creation. Recently, a teacher of mine, Jay Mccafferty was telling me about his favoured field of art, "Process Art". If you follow the link, you will see a couple of examples of his work-- he freely admits that they don't look like much, and that if you didn't frame them and put them up in a gallery, nobody but him would know they were art, but that isn't the point. The point is the process of creation. He spends a lot of time on his art, and puts a lot of thought and emotion into them. Most of this is invisible to the causal observer. "Artistic Entropy" if you will; lost data. But the end result is still kinda pretty, isn't it? I think so anyway.
So I applied that concept to the idea of programming-as-art, and it really fit well. Nobody at work who uses my inventory control web-app is going to see any of the parts of code that I am really proud of. Things that took me days of hard work are going to flicker into their browser in a few seconds-- But that isn't the important part to me. The part that matters to me, as the programmer/artist was the process of writing it. The experience.
I work in IT for an aerospace manufacturer, and I am baffled by other company's obsession with commercial support. I feel lucky to work for an employer who isn't a stickler for it.
By far the best support I get is from newsgroups, mailing list archives, or simple RTFM'ing
A company with a boiler-room full of telephone techs simply isn't capable of providing better support than the support that the open source community already puts at my fingertips.
I kinda regret paying for the 9-year renewal last year on my.com address. Ever since then I have payed more attention to Network Solutions, and have come to the conclusion that they are NOT the kind of company I want to do any more business with than I have to.
I suppose the 9-year renewal is okay. I really do intend to keep using my domain that long, and the volume discount means less money for Network Solutions.
But 100 years? After the "site finder" mess, I certainly home Network Solutions LOSES the.com registry to some more responsible organization LONG before that.
SCO Says They'll Bite the Head Off A Hamster Tomorrow
from the couldn't-make-their-image-any-worse dept.
Bob writes "SCO intends to bite the head off a Hamster. Ordinarily, this would not be newsworthy, as they have repeatedly made similar threats, but have not followed through in the past. However, this time, they have given themselves a concrete deadline--tomorrow. While they claim that it will be a "live" hamster, and that the biting will be televised, they apparently have yet to decide which SCO representative will actually be doing the biting, Darl McBride, Chris Sontag, or someone else. IBM has countered that this sort of stunt is not actually admissable as evidence in most courts.
While not actually a tablet PC, I think the Fujitsu lifebook would be just the thing for you. I have been delighted with mine. It is very small, has excellent battery life, uses a Transmeta Crusoe processor, and runs linux like a charm
Novell, the enemy of the enemy of my enemy who is the enemy of my greater enemy, is my friend, I think.
I am glad to see SCO being struck down, but I am not happy to see Unix copyrights and contracts being used to do it. Remember this it does NOT MATTER who owns Unix, because SCO's claim that Linux is an unauthorized derivative work of Unix is B.S.
Novell may be the friend of the GNU/Linux community now, but remember, SCO was a friend of Linux once too, before they changed hands and fell under the control of scumbags. What will Novel be like 10 years from now? What will IBM be like 10 years from now? Remember that Unix ownership is NOT Linux ownership.
A particularly cool thing about the internet is the fact that you really CAN get answers to such vaguely once questions.
I once found the title and publisher of an out-of-publication 1980's russian cartoon simply asking around on newsgroups using only a vague secondhand description of one scene in the movie given to me by a friend who had only seen it once when she was like six years old. Withing 24 hours of asking, three different strangers had identified the movie and provided the information I needed to look up a used copy on amazon.com
Now, this was not a blue screen of death-- it was some other OS that I couldn't immediately identify (probably a special designed embedded system)
But anyway, I was on an American airlines flight from New York to London Heathrow. In the back of every seat they have these little touch-screens. This is where they show the in-flight entertainment, and they alos have this cool little real-time map showing the plane's position and heading.
The in-flight entertainement was all over, and we were passing over Ireland. The map of the plane over the atlantic ocean hadn't been very interesting, but now we were passing over land, and as it was too dark to see anything out the windows, many people were watching our progress on the little computerized map, myself included. As we would pass near cities it would show them as red dots on the map, and every so often it would update and show a new set of city names at a different zoom level.
Suddenly the screen glytched. The bottom half went dark, and the top half was filled with small distorted images of the map we had just seen, and there was a gigantic blocky spread-pixeled text error message wrapped a few times around the screen. I recognized it immediately! The flight map was being drawn to the screen in non-standard planar mode-X VGA, and an error message had forced the screen back into standard VGA screen 13 -- I knew this only because I have spent years programming mode-X VGA DOS games, and I know a spread-pixeled error message when I see one;)
The screen remained frozen that way for a minute or two, then the system reobooted, and when through a short startup sequence that I do not remember very well (this was over a year ago). What I do remember is that it was not Window, nor Mac, nor Linux, nor DOS. It did identify itself, and gave a version number, but I failed to write it down and forgot it:P
And a few minutes later the in-flight map resumed as if nothing had happened.
Forgive me for the double-faux-paus of off-topic posting and replying to my own post, but I found the answer to my own question, and it is to cool not to share. http://activefiremaps.fs.fed.us/ has active fire maps showing the location of all current fires which might be obstructing the sky with their nasty smoke (and heartlessly burning things too)
http://activefiremaps.fs.fed.us/large_fire/large.p hp
I am excited about the prospect of going and seeing the (possible) auroras tonight, as that is something one so rarely gets any chance to see in Los Angeles-- but so much of Southern California is on fire right now, and the air is so full of smoke and falling ash, I simply do not know which way to drive to find clear skies:(
Parallels had been drawn between appropriating the "functional structure" of a computer system and commandeering the plot of a book, the judge noted.
My writing teacher was fond of telling her class that there were only seven basic plots in existence, and ALL stories were based on one or more of them. It is not in the plot, but in the telling of the story where the creativity is.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the Koran was written in Visual Basic, wasn't it?
I don't know if anybody does this, but in theory I like the idea of a directory structure that mixes posix pathnames with descriptive pathnames. For example, everything could be installed into long descriptive pathnames by package, but the binaraies could all be symlinked into /bin the config files could all be symlinked into /etc and so on.
I have been using a one-man bugzilla installation for this very purpose for close to two years now.
I wonder if it comes with a warranty?
I have long thought of programming as art. Not just game programming, which I do as a hobby, but also to a certain extent the business/database programming that I do in my day job.
Of course, I have had a hard time rationalizing this out loud or explaining it to anyone. When I sit down and write a object-oriented wrapper to procedural database commands, or write my own login/session-key code, I *feel* the same way I do when I am doin art-- Art is a big part of my life. I write and draw and sculpt all the time. Everything I truly enjoy doing is art... except programming. Why then does it feel like art when I am doing it?
Most people define art in terms of art-appreciation. Nobody ever looks at or admires the scripts I write on the company mail server. So for the longest time I rejected the idea of actually calling programming art.
But lately I have been getting a better appreciation of minimalism. I used to hate abstract art, and minimalist art, until I actually started to do a little bit of it. To the non-artist, art is in the appreciation, but to the artist, art is in the creation. Recently, a teacher of mine, Jay Mccafferty was telling me about his favoured field of art, "Process Art". If you follow the link, you will see a couple of examples of his work-- he freely admits that they don't look like much, and that if you didn't frame them and put them up in a gallery, nobody but him would know they were art, but that isn't the point. The point is the process of creation. He spends a lot of time on his art, and puts a lot of thought and emotion into them. Most of this is invisible to the causal observer. "Artistic Entropy" if you will; lost data. But the end result is still kinda pretty, isn't it? I think so anyway.
So I applied that concept to the idea of programming-as-art, and it really fit well. Nobody at work who uses my inventory control web-app is going to see any of the parts of code that I am really proud of. Things that took me days of hard work are going to flicker into their browser in a few seconds-- But that isn't the important part to me. The part that matters to me, as the programmer/artist was the process of writing it. The experience.
Or something like that ;)
All the more reason parents need to take the initiative and teach their own children about this sort of thing before the schools brainwash them.
I work in IT for an aerospace manufacturer, and I am baffled by other company's obsession with commercial support. I feel lucky to work for an employer who isn't a stickler for it.
By far the best support I get is from newsgroups, mailing list archives, or simple RTFM'ing
A company with a boiler-room full of telephone techs simply isn't capable of providing better support than the support that the open source community already puts at my fingertips.
Yes. Sicily is going to become the East Pole after the magnetic field change
I kinda regret paying for the 9-year renewal last year on my .com address. Ever since then I have payed more attention to Network Solutions, and have come to the conclusion that they are NOT the kind of company I want to do any more business with than I have to.
I suppose the 9-year renewal is okay. I really do intend to keep using my domain that long, and the volume discount means less money for Network Solutions.
But 100 years? After the "site finder" mess, I certainly home Network Solutions LOSES the .com registry to some more responsible organization LONG before that.
SCO Says They'll Bite the Head Off A Hamster Tomorrow
from the couldn't-make-their-image-any-worse dept.Bob writes "SCO intends to bite the head off a Hamster. Ordinarily, this would not be newsworthy, as they have repeatedly made similar threats, but have not followed through in the past. However, this time, they have given themselves a concrete deadline--tomorrow. While they claim that it will be a "live" hamster, and that the biting will be televised, they apparently have yet to decide which SCO representative will actually be doing the biting, Darl McBride, Chris Sontag, or someone else. IBM has countered that this sort of stunt is not actually admissable as evidence in most courts.
While not actually a tablet PC, I think the Fujitsu lifebook would be just the thing for you. I have been delighted with mine. It is very small, has excellent battery life, uses a Transmeta Crusoe processor, and runs linux like a charm
Amen to that! Stupid virus authors, giving a bad name to all us honest respectable SCO-haters... *grumble*
I am glad to see SCO being struck down, but I am not happy to see Unix copyrights and contracts being used to do it. Remember this it does NOT MATTER who owns Unix, because SCO's claim that Linux is an unauthorized derivative work of Unix is B.S.
Novell may be the friend of the GNU/Linux community now, but remember, SCO was a friend of Linux once too, before they changed hands and fell under the control of scumbags. What will Novel be like 10 years from now? What will IBM be like 10 years from now? Remember that Unix ownership is NOT Linux ownership.
A particularly cool thing about the internet is the fact that you really CAN get answers to such vaguely once questions. I once found the title and publisher of an out-of-publication 1980's russian cartoon simply asking around on newsgroups using only a vague secondhand description of one scene in the movie given to me by a friend who had only seen it once when she was like six years old. Withing 24 hours of asking, three different strangers had identified the movie and provided the information I needed to look up a used copy on amazon.com
Now, this was not a blue screen of death-- it was some other OS that I couldn't immediately identify (probably a special designed embedded system) But anyway, I was on an American airlines flight from New York to London Heathrow. In the back of every seat they have these little touch-screens. This is where they show the in-flight entertainment, and they alos have this cool little real-time map showing the plane's position and heading. The in-flight entertainement was all over, and we were passing over Ireland. The map of the plane over the atlantic ocean hadn't been very interesting, but now we were passing over land, and as it was too dark to see anything out the windows, many people were watching our progress on the little computerized map, myself included. As we would pass near cities it would show them as red dots on the map, and every so often it would update and show a new set of city names at a different zoom level. Suddenly the screen glytched. The bottom half went dark, and the top half was filled with small distorted images of the map we had just seen, and there was a gigantic blocky spread-pixeled text error message wrapped a few times around the screen. I recognized it immediately! The flight map was being drawn to the screen in non-standard planar mode-X VGA, and an error message had forced the screen back into standard VGA screen 13 -- I knew this only because I have spent years programming mode-X VGA DOS games, and I know a spread-pixeled error message when I see one ;)
The screen remained frozen that way for a minute or two, then the system reobooted, and when through a short startup sequence that I do not remember very well (this was over a year ago). What I do remember is that it was not Window, nor Mac, nor Linux, nor DOS. It did identify itself, and gave a version number, but I failed to write it down and forgot it :P
And a few minutes later the in-flight map resumed as if nothing had happened.
Forgive me for the double-faux-paus of off-topic posting and replying to my own post, but I found the answer to my own question, and it is to cool not to share. http://activefiremaps.fs.fed.us/ has active fire maps showing the location of all current fires which might be obstructing the sky with their nasty smoke (and heartlessly burning things too) http://activefiremaps.fs.fed.us/large_fire/large.p hp
I am excited about the prospect of going and seeing the (possible) auroras tonight, as that is something one so rarely gets any chance to see in Los Angeles-- but so much of Southern California is on fire right now, and the air is so full of smoke and falling ash, I simply do not know which way to drive to find clear skies :(
And note that it is not comparing the MD5's of whole files, it is comparing MD5's of three-line "shreds" of files