The reason we propped up the Shah was wrong. Look what happened.
The reason we went into Iraq was wrong. There was no reason, only BS lies. Yes, Saddam Hussein was a murderer; there are many such murderers.
The reason we destabilized the Taliban has certain justification, but is otherwise wrong. The Afghani difficulties are long and historical; we needed to target a specific group and didn't. We had no plan, and our plans currently are dubious.
Meddling with Iran is wrong. Destabilization isn't needed; it's already tottering.
Evil is in the eye of the beholder. There is a right and wrong, and murder-- involuntary life-taking-- is wrong.
Iran, murky as it is, is a sovereign nation. Revolutions come from within, which is why we're spending trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The clue is: the iranians will figure it out. The more external influences are brought to bear, the more a subsequent government will be suspect by its people. They have to do it. We have to sit back and watch. Otherwise, it won't stick, and it will devolve into the seventh civil war in the Middle East. Here's the current list, if you're not sure: Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine, Pakistan, Somalia, Eritrea/Ethiopia. A quiet revolution makes much more sense than one that will continue to divide what were once peace-loving peoples.
I have a friend who's a dancer. Her choreographies are intense. A lot of the descriptions in the choreographies are very mechanical and are highly coordinated. I've seen CAD drawings that weren't as complex.
And she'll stomp on you if you don't consider them art. I think there are a lot of designers and coders out there that would agree with her.
Oh, sometimes the artistry is applied in different ways.
Smoothness, context switching, detail of non-focus objects, ambience, these all have artistic elements to them, and are colorations of the overall experience.
When multiplayer interactive audio was first introduced, it was primitive. Now, some users have added low-volume/background music or other audio to the experience.
Screen geometry and rendering can also add to the experience, as does the palette of characters, costuming, roles, even nervous tics. When you go to the cinema, you'll see that much has gone into believability, as well as needed exaggerations of the sets and backgrounds. Transitions can be abrupt, or can tie segments together artfully. Excellent execution of the experience provides artistic majesty, IMHO.
The Wii experience has those elements. Various interfaces have a nice 'feel' to them. This same 'feel' or touch also revolves around hardware devices, especially from Apple and Asus. The curves and heuristics have artistry, although I'm sure they can be devolved for examination in engineering terms-- they're art.
Sorry to be all McLuhanistic on you, but there is the medium, and the message.
The medium, or dev platform, enables differing kinds of user interaction.
The content (story line, user interactions, group play, value and weighting of scoring dynamics) is something else entirely.
Is it art? Sure. There's a dizzying variety of it, too. Some appealing, some clearly un-evolved, some realistic and staggeringly so. To believe that these have no artistic value is a slap in the face of designers everywhere.
That said: some designers make their livings appealing to a very violent nature based on highly animalistic behavior. But then the movies/cinema does this, too. Is this bad, this ultra-violent trend in some areas of gaming? There's no doubt that whacked people use violent entertainment sources to legitimtize their own behavior. Are we obligated to stop them from doing that by censorship? It's a good question. We're not responsible for them, but we are responsible within the constraints of a civil society to prevent others from reasonable harm. Should there be a sanity-ID card offered to buy these things? Clearly, that's not possible. Sanity is transient. The conundrum of what to do, remains.
The 256GB SSD drive of today matches the processor speed and feature set of a machine that will be a castoff in maybe three years. It's my observation that people almost never take a drive from an old machine to a new machine in notebooks.
Therefore if you liked SSD for whatever reasons, do it if the reasons are of value to you. If you need the terabyte, do it-- and be happy.
Thin is in. The vast majority of users probably don't do video or audio for a living, and only have what they consume as cache. Your next machine will have a bigger drive. It is the way of the world.
And so what happens when there's a proxy authentication spoof....
The whole system goes to hell. A jerk-in-the-middle grabs the CA call, and says, yeah, sure, he's ok, and here's a hash to prove it. This means that the hash has to be checked, and authenticated *at the root server, itself an SOA* for each TLD request and update and so on. Bah. There has to be a better way.
Still, for those that don't want to pay a measly 50e for annual SOA tickling authority-- > let's route around them. There are so many poisoning problems, (d)DoS attacks, and plan fudgery that it's a freaking wonder than DNS hasn't been shot dead long ago. And don't get me started on BIND.
I would say that Internet conversations are highly overrated, but then here we are. And I read Michael Moore's poignant letter "Goodbye GM" on hufffpost this morning and it made my day, perhaps week.
Some of my best recent conversations were at a local afternoon party, sipping cold ones with engineers from a graphics card designer. It cost a six pack, and the conversations pierced through Von Neumann's state machine theories thru to fractal prediction and onto why bras ought to be designed with visually enhancing threads for a visual boob job. Then we opened up another round.
The locus would be here.... but could easily be applied to other places, of course.
There is something to be said for democracy, although those living in most places, including the US, live in a quasi-benevolent autocracy. The joy of blather is an innate human quality, and is not to be dismissed, rather, when everyone shouts at once, no one is heard.
No one should be denied free speech, IMHO. Rather, we should all have the pleasure of a volume control. I read over on huffpost, Michael Moore's letter about GM this morning. He's but one voice of many, yet his observations are poignant and his oratory concise and gifted. There is signal among the noise. Discrimination takes effort. Now I'll sit down and shutup and let others take the dais.
I suppose there are various elements of ego or sense of responsibility that motivate people to blog. As a species, we got where we are by communicating and learning from what was said.
But bloggorhea, twitterheads, and the strong extroverts of new media dominate, for better and worse, the signal. The signal turns to noise, and discrimination of which is what becomes more difficult and multitudinous. The (casual) observer then has to decide what to really do with their time. Seems you've made a good choice.
You're supposed to react with your gut, prejudices, and empirical sense of I'm smarter-than-you tact here.
Failing that, say something funny or troll with goatse.
Failing that, add in something pithy, or something that whores karma points.
TFA makes the improper assumption that in various contexts, people give a crap what you think. They blurt out stuff randomly, and look for allies to justify their boorishness and prattle. Having found a mob or a tribe, they then evolve the idea in to a cult like status, reveling in the success of whatever their pseudo-punditry delivers. Blather at best. Hate at worst. Then the idea must be defended, and everything mushrooms with chest pounding and the attempt to stick other crap to the original idea to make it have gravity.
Welcome my friends, to the show that never ends. Come on in, come on in, come on in.
1. WordStar/WordPerfect/Word 2. Visicalc/SuperCalc/123/Multiplan-Excel 3. AutoCad 4. dBase/Oracle7/MySQL 5. Duke Nukem/Wolfenstein 3D/Quake 6. Zelda.....WoW....etc with a branch to Second Life 7. Mozilla/Apache/Tomcat/II6 ad naseum 8. C/Java/php (note the absence of VB) 9. Napster/xTorrent/Amazon/iTunes/eBay/and other Business Distribution online apps 10. McAfee/Norton/AVG/etc.
Ten is too short a number for categories, but these IMHO all started billion dollar industry segments
Consider the history of the Eee and Asus, and of the Eee's Linux origins, the statements made by Asus about their distro, their drivers, and all the good stuff that they put into it.
Give them some Microsoft marketing money, and suddenly, well, "It's better with Windows". The incongruity cited is both valid and while it might meet expectation, the expectation is summarily lowered as a result. Were OS/2 or Solaris ported, would the same marketing $$ then cough: It's better with Solaris?
The factual matter of the statement isn't in question. What I question, and seemingly others within this thread, is the incongruous pimping of Windows.
Semantics, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, all subjects with which I'm well familiar.
I also have my own bias. In this case, the bias concludes that Asus will take Microsoft marketing money, then allow their own messages to be queered by it. The results are: Asus drops several notches on my good-guy-scale.
Certainly they're taking Microsoft marketing money; there is little question of that. However, you've succumbed to the message, which in and of itself, is deceptive.
Along the way, I've found that trust-based relationships can be made. Often, it's more with individuals than the organizations that they represent. You build mutual trust, then go from there.
Without trust, we're a bunch of warring autonomous micro-nations.
For many of us, integrity is above making a buck. Yes, we have to survive, but we can do so without lip farting, lies, FUD, and so on. The gift of communications has incumbent upon the gift, the onus and responsibility to do the best to speak the truth.
In this context, Asus has demonstrated their sense of that responsibility. In turn, we take note of that. We file that information for decisions made later. Perhaps they'll listen that we now categorize them as lackey sycophants of Microsoft. Perhaps not.
There are some people that would like to take an organization's word for what the words mean. Asus made their own cut of Linux to work with the Eee and now they've caved to Microsoft pressure to eat their own words. Worse, it's a lie.
The integrity of such an organization then becomes suspect, as if they lied about this, then what else did they lie about? Trust is broken. And we then know them for what they are: an organization that will capitulate, lie, send mixed messages, all in the names of sales desparation. Too bad about Asus....
If you change the semantics just slightly, you can get rid of the boogeyman of 'communism' and instead, understand what's really going on: we behave like tribes. We are tribes, we will always be tribes, herds, or whatever you want to call them. This kind of behavior underlies most of what we do, mostly on a subconscious level. We're social beings, and that's how we've evolved when we're not killing each other.
Government is also somewhat natural; there are alphas, betas, just as there are in bird, dog, and other animal behaviors. None of this is new. The word 'communal' is just distracting.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason we propped up the Shah was wrong. Look what happened.
The reason we went into Iraq was wrong. There was no reason, only BS lies. Yes, Saddam Hussein was a murderer; there are many such murderers.
The reason we destabilized the Taliban has certain justification, but is otherwise wrong. The Afghani difficulties are long and historical; we needed to target a specific group and didn't. We had no plan, and our plans currently are dubious.
Meddling with Iran is wrong. Destabilization isn't needed; it's already tottering.
Evil is in the eye of the beholder. There is a right and wrong, and murder-- involuntary life-taking-- is wrong.
Iran, murky as it is, is a sovereign nation. Revolutions come from within, which is why we're spending trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The clue is: the iranians will figure it out. The more external influences are brought to bear, the more a subsequent government will be suspect by its people. They have to do it. We have to sit back and watch. Otherwise, it won't stick, and it will devolve into the seventh civil war in the Middle East. Here's the current list, if you're not sure: Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine, Pakistan, Somalia, Eritrea/Ethiopia. A quiet revolution makes much more sense than one that will continue to divide what were once peace-loving peoples.
No. The machine followed instructions from a human. The program is a manifestation of the programmer's artistry.
I have a friend who's a dancer. Her choreographies are intense. A lot of the descriptions in the choreographies are very mechanical and are highly coordinated. I've seen CAD drawings that weren't as complex.
And she'll stomp on you if you don't consider them art. I think there are a lot of designers and coders out there that would agree with her.
Oh, sometimes the artistry is applied in different ways.
Smoothness, context switching, detail of non-focus objects, ambience, these all have artistic elements to them, and are colorations of the overall experience.
When multiplayer interactive audio was first introduced, it was primitive. Now, some users have added low-volume/background music or other audio to the experience.
Screen geometry and rendering can also add to the experience, as does the palette of characters, costuming, roles, even nervous tics. When you go to the cinema, you'll see that much has gone into believability, as well as needed exaggerations of the sets and backgrounds. Transitions can be abrupt, or can tie segments together artfully. Excellent execution of the experience provides artistic majesty, IMHO.
The Wii experience has those elements. Various interfaces have a nice 'feel' to them. This same 'feel' or touch also revolves around hardware devices, especially from Apple and Asus. The curves and heuristics have artistry, although I'm sure they can be devolved for examination in engineering terms-- they're art.
Sorry to be all McLuhanistic on you, but there is the medium, and the message.
The medium, or dev platform, enables differing kinds of user interaction.
The content (story line, user interactions, group play, value and weighting of scoring dynamics) is something else entirely.
Is it art? Sure. There's a dizzying variety of it, too. Some appealing, some clearly un-evolved, some realistic and staggeringly so. To believe that these have no artistic value is a slap in the face of designers everywhere.
That said: some designers make their livings appealing to a very violent nature based on highly animalistic behavior. But then the movies/cinema does this, too. Is this bad, this ultra-violent trend in some areas of gaming? There's no doubt that whacked people use violent entertainment sources to legitimtize their own behavior. Are we obligated to stop them from doing that by censorship? It's a good question. We're not responsible for them, but we are responsible within the constraints of a civil society to prevent others from reasonable harm. Should there be a sanity-ID card offered to buy these things? Clearly, that's not possible. Sanity is transient. The conundrum of what to do, remains.
Sorry, your comparison's based on erroneous information.
Think long term.
The 256GB SSD drive of today matches the processor speed and feature set of a machine that will be a castoff in maybe three years. It's my observation that people almost never take a drive from an old machine to a new machine in notebooks.
Therefore if you liked SSD for whatever reasons, do it if the reasons are of value to you. If you need the terabyte, do it-- and be happy.
Thin is in. The vast majority of users probably don't do video or audio for a living, and only have what they consume as cache. Your next machine will have a bigger drive. It is the way of the world.
We motorcyclists just love gravel. What with the dust, the bad traction, it's just wonderful!
NO.
Equally possible is that a Russian sub brought it down.
Or that a lego piece was used in the rear lavatory, clogged it, and the pipe burst, shorting out the controls, causing a tail spin.
The aircraft is currently in the 11th dimension, along with an appendage of Dwayne Hoobler.
And so what happens when there's a proxy authentication spoof....
The whole system goes to hell. A jerk-in-the-middle grabs the CA call, and says, yeah, sure, he's ok, and here's a hash to prove it. This means that the hash has to be checked, and authenticated *at the root server, itself an SOA* for each TLD request and update and so on. Bah. There has to be a better way.
Still, for those that don't want to pay a measly 50e for annual SOA tickling authority-- > let's route around them. There are so many poisoning problems, (d)DoS attacks, and plan fudgery that it's a freaking wonder than DNS hasn't been shot dead long ago. And don't get me started on BIND.
I would say that Internet conversations are highly overrated, but then here we are. And I read Michael Moore's poignant letter "Goodbye GM" on hufffpost this morning and it made my day, perhaps week.
Some of my best recent conversations were at a local afternoon party, sipping cold ones with engineers from a graphics card designer. It cost a six pack, and the conversations pierced through Von Neumann's state machine theories thru to fractal prediction and onto why bras ought to be designed with visually enhancing threads for a visual boob job. Then we opened up another round.
The locus would be here.... but could easily be applied to other places, of course.
There is something to be said for democracy, although those living in most places, including the US, live in a quasi-benevolent autocracy. The joy of blather is an innate human quality, and is not to be dismissed, rather, when everyone shouts at once, no one is heard.
No one should be denied free speech, IMHO. Rather, we should all have the pleasure of a volume control. I read over on huffpost, Michael Moore's letter about GM this morning. He's but one voice of many, yet his observations are poignant and his oratory concise and gifted. There is signal among the noise. Discrimination takes effort. Now I'll sit down and shutup and let others take the dais.
Well done!
And I do have a supple wrist...
I suppose there are various elements of ego or sense of responsibility that motivate people to blog. As a species, we got where we are by communicating and learning from what was said.
But bloggorhea, twitterheads, and the strong extroverts of new media dominate, for better and worse, the signal. The signal turns to noise, and discrimination of which is what becomes more difficult and multitudinous. The (casual) observer then has to decide what to really do with their time. Seems you've made a good choice.
Nothing is perfect. But a good belly-laugh can suffice for what isn't.
But that's not often the ethos here.
You're supposed to react with your gut, prejudices, and empirical sense of I'm smarter-than-you tact here.
Failing that, say something funny or troll with goatse.
Failing that, add in something pithy, or something that whores karma points.
TFA makes the improper assumption that in various contexts, people give a crap what you think. They blurt out stuff randomly, and look for allies to justify their boorishness and prattle. Having found a mob or a tribe, they then evolve the idea in to a cult like status, reveling in the success of whatever their pseudo-punditry delivers. Blather at best. Hate at worst. Then the idea must be defended, and everything mushrooms with chest pounding and the attempt to stick other crap to the original idea to make it have gravity.
Welcome my friends, to the show that never ends. Come on in, come on in, come on in.
1. WordStar/WordPerfect/Word
2. Visicalc/SuperCalc/123/Multiplan-Excel
3. AutoCad
4. dBase/Oracle7/MySQL
5. Duke Nukem/Wolfenstein 3D/Quake
6. Zelda.....WoW....etc with a branch to Second Life
7. Mozilla/Apache/Tomcat/II6 ad naseum
8. C/Java/php (note the absence of VB)
9. Napster/xTorrent/Amazon/iTunes/eBay/and other Business Distribution online apps
10. McAfee/Norton/AVG/etc.
Ten is too short a number for categories, but these IMHO all started billion dollar industry segments
Consider the history of the Eee and Asus, and of the Eee's Linux origins, the statements made by Asus about their distro, their drivers, and all the good stuff that they put into it.
Give them some Microsoft marketing money, and suddenly, well, "It's better with Windows". The incongruity cited is both valid and while it might meet expectation, the expectation is summarily lowered as a result. Were OS/2 or Solaris ported, would the same marketing $$ then cough: It's better with Solaris?
The factual matter of the statement isn't in question. What I question, and seemingly others within this thread, is the incongruous pimping of Windows.
Ah, but I do understand the human mind.
Semantics, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, all subjects with which I'm well familiar.
I also have my own bias. In this case, the bias concludes that Asus will take Microsoft marketing money, then allow their own messages to be queered by it. The results are: Asus drops several notches on my good-guy-scale.
Was the Kool Aid tasty when you swallowed it?
Certainly they're taking Microsoft marketing money; there is little question of that. However, you've succumbed to the message, which in and of itself, is deceptive.
Along the way, I've found that trust-based relationships can be made. Often, it's more with individuals than the organizations that they represent. You build mutual trust, then go from there.
Without trust, we're a bunch of warring autonomous micro-nations.
For many of us, integrity is above making a buck. Yes, we have to survive, but we can do so without lip farting, lies, FUD, and so on. The gift of communications has incumbent upon the gift, the onus and responsibility to do the best to speak the truth.
In this context, Asus has demonstrated their sense of that responsibility. In turn, we take note of that. We file that information for decisions made later. Perhaps they'll listen that we now categorize them as lackey sycophants of Microsoft. Perhaps not.
Or perhaps they have an expectation of truth and honesty, and not finding that, believe that integrity is in question.
Naivety, once vanquished, leads to skepticism. Skepticism leads doubts, doubts make us look somewhere else for truth.
... it's just marketing....
There are some people that would like to take an organization's word for what the words mean. Asus made their own cut of Linux to work with the Eee and now they've caved to Microsoft pressure to eat their own words. Worse, it's a lie.
The integrity of such an organization then becomes suspect, as if they lied about this, then what else did they lie about? Trust is broken. And we then know them for what they are: an organization that will capitulate, lie, send mixed messages, all in the names of sales desparation. Too bad about Asus....
If you change the semantics just slightly, you can get rid of the boogeyman of 'communism' and instead, understand what's really going on: we behave like tribes. We are tribes, we will always be tribes, herds, or whatever you want to call them. This kind of behavior underlies most of what we do, mostly on a subconscious level. We're social beings, and that's how we've evolved when we're not killing each other.
Government is also somewhat natural; there are alphas, betas, just as there are in bird, dog, and other animal behaviors. None of this is new. The word 'communal' is just distracting.