He appears to be based in Peru, so presumably it's peruvian branches that he's talking about. Even then, from the way he writes, I think this is a case of a somewhat youthful slashdotter getting delusions of grandeur.
"Well, I don't work alone. There's a lot of stuff in there I don't even understand. I'm really a systems management man. I farm bits and pieces out to guys who are much more brilliant than I am. I say 'Build me a laser this, design me a molecular analyzer that,' and they do, and I just stick 'em together. But none of them knows what the project really is. So..."
- The Fly
I too would recommend tea as a work drink. The five minute tea break is actually a great time to step back from debuggin a problem and *think* about what you're doing. I often come back from a tea break with the solution to whatever problem I was hacking away at.
Of course it doesn't meet the requirements of being as convenient as a canned drink, but if you want something more healthy and convenient, then you really should just get in the habit of drinking more water.
"disinterested" is not just a cool way to say "uninterested"
Actually it kind of is. I find it incredibly jarring, having been brought up - as you have - with the "not having a vested interest" interpretation. But Shakespeare used it in the "uninterested" sense, so it's actually a pretty long-standing usage.
I prefer to maintain the distinction - it's actually a more useful application of the word, since we (obviously) have a word for uninterested, and don't otherwise have one for the other sense. But it's not actually wrong.
I've never read a book that didn't use paragraphs.
I've never read a magazine article that didn't use paragraphs.
I've never read a technical paper that didn't use paragraphs.
I've never read a letter that didn't use paragraphs.
On the web I regularly see "blob[s] of text", as you put it, that make no use of paragraphs. I don't bother to read them anymore. I used to, but I found such a high correlation between "not worth reading" and "no paragraphs" that I no longer bother.
Sure, bad spelling, bad grammar, and so on are indicative, but really there's nothing as suggestive of waffling incoherence and/or insanity as the monolithic block of text.
I think I can probably afford to miss it at such time as you do, in your own words, 'find out something "valuable"'
I don't make money off my sofa either, but it still has a value.
If Java is valueless, why are the clamours for its open sourcing so loud? Are you really stupid enough to think that the rights to Java aren't worth anything? IBM or Microsoft would pay plenty for control over it.
Their competitors now have something they didn't have before. Sun have lost the opportunity to sell the exclusive rights to Java. And so on.
Sun own Java. That confers benefits. Open Sourcing it will certainly have adverse effects. The only question is whether Sun will accrue sufficient benefits to outweigh them.
If you're not addressing those issues, don't expect anyone of significance to be very interested in your views on open sourcing Java, because it's not your decision to make.
Because open source languages such as php, perl, python, ruby and C# are eating into your market share every day. People have already abandoned java for most web applications and it never even got off the ground on the desktop.
I've never seen any evidence to back that claim. If you can point me at it I'd be interested in reading it. That's evidence, note, not anecdotes.
But this argument has at least the merit that it is an argument in favour of Sun's opening up Java. I am not saying that they shouldn't. I'm saying I don't care all that much. If you want them to, you have to present them with arguments in their terms. Whereas the poster to whom I was responding had an argument amounting to "gimme".
Finally Sun does not make any money off of java. They have said so themselves.
My sofa is an asset. I do not make money off my sofa, but it doesn't follow that I should give it away.
Java is an asset. If Sun don't make money off it, it doesn't follow that they should open source it.
In my opinion it is moderately likely that Sun will eventually open source Java. But they won't do it just because some open source zealots think they should. They'll do it because they decide, in the end, that it's good for their business.
The best reason to "open source" something is purely and simply the freedom to access the code behind the software you are running; the freedom to change, or port to another platform, the software that you purchased or downloaded.
This is like arguing that I should give you my money because it gives you various freedoms that you wouldn't otherwise have. So what? It's still my money - you have to give a reason that matters to me.
Similarly, when arguing that Sun should open source Java, you'll have to present a reason that makes sense to Sun's bottom line. "Hey, it would be nice" doesn't cut it.
Yes, this is about religion. It's about an idealogical divide between people who would rather have free-as-in-beer convenient software, rather than free-as-in-freedom software that preserves your rights. Frankly, your arrogant pragmatism nauseates me.
Tough shit. Want a free Java? Write one yourself. Want Sun to give you one? Explain to them in their terms why they should.
Corporations do not get religions. Corporations that give away their assets without a damned good business reason get sued by their shareholders, and so they bloody well should.
And if you have a problem with me using free-as-in-beer software, then that's entirely your problem, because I really couldn't care less.
Well, I was never all that into IF originally; though I enjoyed it, I was never obsessively interested in it. Aside from Hitchhikers, obviously;-)
But I do find books about computer industry history particularly interesting; one I bought and read at about the same time as the Montfort book was "The Soul Of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. Very interesting, though a little depressing given that the company he wrote and enthused about (Data General) is one I'd barely even heard of. To bring this vaguely back on topic, there's a great description in there of the author's first encounter with Adventure. Very well written and I commend it to you.
I completely enjoyed Montfort's book, except for the first chapter which, I am not ashamed to admit, I am too dense to understand what he was trying to say.
Well, maybe I'm dense too. And I've lent it out, so I can't quote the passages that annoyed me specifically. But the impression I gained was: "This book was written to be cited by other academics". Fortunately the subject matter is strong enough to survive that, at least in part.
He seems at his best when he is enthusing about the games and the history of the software houses that produced them. He is at his worst when it is trying to categorise the various games into various literary theories.
Overall I would like to see another book on the same subject by a less academic author, or at least written for a less academic audience. Alternatively I would have liked to see more technical (in a software sense) discussion of how the games were actually implemented.
I recently read "Twisty Little Passages" ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262134365/ ) by Nick Montfort which despite its horribly self-consciously academic approach (it's all about developing a "theory" of IF for lit. crit. purposes) still has some interesting sections about the history of IF and comparing the various approaches to the field against each other.
It also introduced me to my favourite work of IF, "For a change" by Dan Schmidt, which is really proof that the genre has more to offer than you might have expected. He's a genius, and it's beautiful.
More famous than the malaprops generally deserve. Anyone doing public speaking will mis-speak. Bush has unfortunately acquired a reputation for this, and so he can only accumulate malapropisms and never lose the taint.
Which I guess is part of the rough and tumble of politics, and no skin off my nose. But when he actually says something perfectly reasonable and this is cast as "Bush says something stupid again" then it's kind of irritating and should be pointed out.
Hell, he's arguing "basic research is a Good Thing", which is hardly a line that the slashdot collective would reject, even if it came from the mouth of the Great Satan^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Bill Gates himself...
Maybe not outrageous, but it is (a) untrue and (b) stupid. It's ludicrous to imagine the government R&D meeting back in, say, 1994, where the director says "gentlemen, in 2001 the Apple Corporation will be releasing a product called the iPod.
You're misinterpreting this poorly typeset transliteration of his speech. Check out the actual emphasis he used here (Top right, second link, 2 minutes 8 seconds in): http://www.tuskegee.edu/Global/Category.asp?C=7907 4
The paragraph in question is about 2'08" into the second half of the speech (links top right on that page).
It's clear from his emphasis that he is using meaning (ii), and that the admittedly feeble joke was indeed the "I tune into the iPod occasionally you know?"
It was a speech. So the colon was placed there by a third party.
That could read two ways: i. They did so for one and only one reason which was... ii. They did so for one reason, but it turned out that...
Reading (ii) seems far more likely to me. It sounds more like poor phrasing than a poor joke to me (though you may well be right). But the article "helpfully" omits the broader context of the speech.
I'm no fan of the US president. But it irritates me to see the personality attacks instead of substantive policy attacks.
He didn't say "we invented the iPod". He didn't say "We invented MP3".
What he did say, according to the article, was: "the government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod."
I don't think there's anything outrageous or untrue in there. And it's so short an excerpt that it's impossible to say what the overall tone of the speech was. Quite possibly this was taken out of context.
So an obviously partisan article and an inept Slashdot summary. Don't bother to read TFA.
Since this will obviously raise the spectre of the "Al Gore invented the internet" meme, I'd like to take the opportunity to remind people that Robert Kahn and Vincent Cerf (who arguably did invent the internet) have defended Gore's actual statement, with the observation that: "No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time."
If a book gets loads of one and two star reviews from right wing evangelical nutcases who can't spell, it's probably a good book.:-)
Very true. Applies on/. too - I generally stop reading any comment as soon as I encounter a to/too, your/you're, or they're/their mistake. Or any of the ones in my sig.
I would be hard put to justify the correlation on any logical basis, but it does appear to hold true from the empirical evidence available!
Slashdot Mirror
I read point 1 and then my attention wandered...
I wouldn't worry about it so much. Assuming that it's the same guy as this:
http://slashdot.org/~osopolar
He appears to be based in Peru, so presumably it's peruvian branches that he's talking about. Even then, from the way he writes, I think this is a case of a somewhat youthful slashdotter getting delusions of grandeur.
"Well, I don't work alone. There's a lot of stuff in there I don't even understand. I'm really a systems management man. I farm bits and pieces out to guys who are much more brilliant than I am. I say 'Build me a laser this, design me a molecular analyzer that,' and they do, and I just stick 'em together. But none of them knows what the project really is. So..."
- The Fly
The late Douglas Adams' guide to making tea:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A61345
I too would recommend tea as a work drink. The five minute tea break is actually a great time to step back from debuggin a problem and *think* about what you're doing. I often come back from a tea break with the solution to whatever problem I was hacking away at.
Of course it doesn't meet the requirements of being as convenient as a canned drink, but if you want something more healthy and convenient, then you really should just get in the habit of drinking more water.
Why is ignorance and irresponsibility an excuse when it comes to computers and the 'net?
As a general rule ignorance and irresponsibility in the use of a computer is unlikely to kill someone.
"disinterested" is not just a cool way to say "uninterested"
Actually it kind of is. I find it incredibly jarring, having been brought up - as you have - with the "not having a vested interest" interpretation. But Shakespeare used it in the "uninterested" sense, so it's actually a pretty long-standing usage.
I prefer to maintain the distinction - it's actually a more useful application of the word, since we (obviously) have a word for uninterested, and don't otherwise have one for the other sense. But it's not actually wrong.
On the web I regularly see "blob[s] of text", as you put it, that make no use of paragraphs. I don't bother to read them anymore. I used to, but I found such a high correlation between "not worth reading" and "no paragraphs" that I no longer bother.
Sure, bad spelling, bad grammar, and so on are indicative, but really there's nothing as suggestive of waffling incoherence and/or insanity as the monolithic block of text.
I think I can probably afford to miss it at such time as you do, in your own words, 'find out something "valuable"'
You said it, but I thought it. Nothing says to me "not worth reading" as a lump of text unbroken by paragraphs.
I stop reading any Reg article as soon as I spot Orlowski's byline. He's their version of Katz. He has a particular bee in his bonnet about Google.
I don't make money off my sofa either, but it still has a value.
If Java is valueless, why are the clamours for its open sourcing so loud? Are you really stupid enough to think that the rights to Java aren't worth anything? IBM or Microsoft would pay plenty for control over it.
Their competitors now have something they didn't have before. Sun have lost the opportunity to sell the exclusive rights to Java. And so on.
Sun own Java. That confers benefits. Open Sourcing it will certainly have adverse effects. The only question is whether Sun will accrue sufficient benefits to outweigh them.
If you're not addressing those issues, don't expect anyone of significance to be very interested in your views on open sourcing Java, because it's not your decision to make.
Because open source languages such as php, perl, python, ruby and C# are eating into your market share every day. People have already abandoned java for most web applications and it never even got off the ground on the desktop.
I've never seen any evidence to back that claim. If you can point me at it I'd be interested in reading it. That's evidence, note, not anecdotes.
But this argument has at least the merit that it is an argument in favour of Sun's opening up Java. I am not saying that they shouldn't. I'm saying I don't care all that much. If you want them to, you have to present them with arguments in their terms. Whereas the poster to whom I was responding had an argument amounting to "gimme".
Finally Sun does not make any money off of java. They have said so themselves.
My sofa is an asset. I do not make money off my sofa, but it doesn't follow that I should give it away.
Java is an asset. If Sun don't make money off it, it doesn't follow that they should open source it.
In my opinion it is moderately likely that Sun will eventually open source Java. But they won't do it just because some open source zealots think they should. They'll do it because they decide, in the end, that it's good for their business.
The best reason to "open source" something is purely and simply the freedom to access the code behind the software you are running; the freedom to change, or port to another platform, the software that you purchased or downloaded.
This is like arguing that I should give you my money because it gives you various freedoms that you wouldn't otherwise have. So what? It's still my money - you have to give a reason that matters to me.
Similarly, when arguing that Sun should open source Java, you'll have to present a reason that makes sense to Sun's bottom line. "Hey, it would be nice" doesn't cut it.
Yes, this is about religion. It's about an idealogical divide between people who would rather have free-as-in-beer convenient software, rather than free-as-in-freedom software that preserves your rights. Frankly, your arrogant pragmatism nauseates me.
Tough shit. Want a free Java? Write one yourself. Want Sun to give you one? Explain to them in their terms why they should.
Corporations do not get religions. Corporations that give away their assets without a damned good business reason get sued by their shareholders, and so they bloody well should.
And if you have a problem with me using free-as-in-beer software, then that's entirely your problem, because I really couldn't care less.
Tracy Kidder won the Pulitzer for "The Soul of a New Machine", so I guess you, me, and the Pulitzer committee have read it as a bare minimum ;-)
It's somewhat dated, but I think it's still quite well known actually. I'd certainly heard of it quite a while before I got around to reading it.
Well, I was never all that into IF originally; though I enjoyed it, I was never obsessively interested in it. Aside from Hitchhikers, obviously ;-)
But I do find books about computer industry history particularly interesting; one I bought and read at about the same time as the Montfort book was "The Soul Of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. Very interesting, though a little depressing given that the company he wrote and enthused about (Data General) is one I'd barely even heard of. To bring this vaguely back on topic, there's a great description in there of the author's first encounter with Adventure. Very well written and I commend it to you.
I completely enjoyed Montfort's book, except for the first chapter which, I am not ashamed to admit, I am too dense to understand what he was trying to say.
Well, maybe I'm dense too. And I've lent it out, so I can't quote the passages that annoyed me specifically. But the impression I gained was: "This book was written to be cited by other academics". Fortunately the subject matter is strong enough to survive that, at least in part.
He seems at his best when he is enthusing about the games and the history of the software houses that produced them. He is at his worst when it is trying to categorise the various games into various literary theories.
Overall I would like to see another book on the same subject by a less academic author, or at least written for a less academic audience. Alternatively I would have liked to see more technical (in a software sense) discussion of how the games were actually implemented.
I recently read "Twisty Little Passages" ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262134365/ ) by Nick Montfort which despite its horribly self-consciously academic approach (it's all about developing a "theory" of IF for lit. crit. purposes) still has some interesting sections about the history of IF and comparing the various approaches to the field against each other.
It also introduced me to my favourite work of IF, "For a change" by Dan Schmidt, which is really proof that the genre has more to offer than you might have expected. He's a genius, and it's beautiful.
Give it a go online here: http://paperstack.com/for_a_change/ (requires Java) or download the ZCode files from Dan's site: http://www.dfan.org/IF/
Bush is famous for his malaprops.
More famous than the malaprops generally deserve. Anyone doing public speaking will mis-speak. Bush has unfortunately acquired a reputation for this, and so he can only accumulate malapropisms and never lose the taint.
Which I guess is part of the rough and tumble of politics, and no skin off my nose. But when he actually says something perfectly reasonable and this is cast as "Bush says something stupid again" then it's kind of irritating and should be pointed out.
Hell, he's arguing "basic research is a Good Thing", which is hardly a line that the slashdot collective would reject, even if it came from the mouth of the Great Satan^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Bill Gates himself...
Maybe not outrageous, but it is (a) untrue and (b) stupid. It's ludicrous to imagine the government R&D meeting back in, say, 1994, where the director says "gentlemen, in 2001 the Apple Corporation will be releasing a product called the iPod.
7 4
You're misinterpreting this poorly typeset transliteration of his speech. Check out the actual emphasis he used here (Top right, second link, 2 minutes 8 seconds in):
http://www.tuskegee.edu/Global/Category.asp?C=790
Yes. Footage of the speech is online here:7 4
http://www.tuskegee.edu/Global/Category.asp?C=790
The paragraph in question is about 2'08" into the second half of the speech (links top right on that page).
It's clear from his emphasis that he is using meaning (ii), and that the admittedly feeble joke was indeed the "I tune into the iPod occasionally you know?"
Oh noes, the Republican Retard fails to get his own blowup doll's joke and now he's all pissy.
I'm British, and I'm politically left wing. And you're an illiterate dickhead.
Oh right. Well, then you're just a complete dickhead. Only joking and that makes it ok, right?
It was a speech. So the colon was placed there by a third party.
That could read two ways:
i. They did so for one and only one reason which was...
ii. They did so for one reason, but it turned out that...
Reading (ii) seems far more likely to me. It sounds more like poor phrasing than a poor joke to me (though you may well be right). But the article "helpfully" omits the broader context of the speech.
I'm no fan of the US president. But it irritates me to see the personality attacks instead of substantive policy attacks.
He didn't say "we invented the iPod". He didn't say "We invented MP3".
What he did say, according to the article, was: "the government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod."
I don't think there's anything outrageous or untrue in there. And it's so short an excerpt that it's impossible to say what the overall tone of the speech was. Quite possibly this was taken out of context.
So an obviously partisan article and an inept Slashdot summary. Don't bother to read TFA.
Since this will obviously raise the spectre of the "Al Gore invented the internet" meme, I'd like to take the opportunity to remind people that Robert Kahn and Vincent Cerf (who arguably did invent the internet) have defended Gore's actual statement, with the observation that: "No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time."
If a book gets loads of one and two star reviews from right wing evangelical nutcases who can't spell, it's probably a good book. :-)
/. too - I generally stop reading any comment as soon as I encounter a to/too, your/you're, or they're/their mistake. Or any of the ones in my sig.
Very true. Applies on
I would be hard put to justify the correlation on any logical basis, but it does appear to hold true from the empirical evidence available!