That's exactly my point. The diagnosis itself is meaningless, but because society demands some sort of "excuse" to be who you are, it fills that spot nicely. It'd be nice if we didn't need it, but we do.
It also is crucial in getting accomodations at school. Some schools will not take you seriously when trying to get an IEP/504 plan unless you have some sort of diagnosis. Try trying to get accomodations in a public school with "Oh, he's just a pain in the ass.".
Ideally, we wouldn't have to make up conditions/disorders/diseases for these sort of things. But with the state of society, it's needed. People aren't willing to just accept someone with the sort of symptoms that Asperger's people generally have or allow them any kind of understanding without a nice label/box like that.
That's what's great about emoticons. A simple sequence of ascii characters is a hell of a lot easier to figure out than real people. Even graphical smilies are decent if you get used to the same set. I had made that remark to a friend of mine and he said something like " ':-)' is meaningless", but I was quick to say that people's fake acts are just as meaningless. I like online communication a lot better, though. It gives me a better chance to articulate my thoughts and figure out what people are saying, without all that other stuff.
I co-founded WrongPlanet.net along with the interviewer, and like Alex, I have Asperger's myself. I've separated myself from the site since, and I'm sure glad I made Alex get his own webhost before the slashdotting:-D.
Anyway, I'd like to respond to some of the comments here.
First, I want to clarify some of the things people say about Asperger's that irritate me and some of the Aspergers community. One thing that's irritating is when people say that there's an 'epidemic' of autism -- as if we're all some horrible thing that should never come into existance. Some of history's most brilliant minds have supposedly had Asperger's (see 'Diagnosing Jefferson', etc). People with Asperger's can often live perfectly normal lives. There even was some controversy at one point over the word "disorder" on WrongPlanet a while back, but I don't take it that far.
Another point is that autism is a spectrum disorder. Sometimes people with it have it milder or worse than others diagnosed. And also that it's an incredibly diverse bunch of people. It's hard to make generalizations. I like to think that most people with Asperger's have very redeeming qualities -- but the fact of the matter is that some aspies are normal intelligence. Some are brilliant, and some are, what others categorize as being "assholes".
One person here made a comment about people using Asperger's as some kind of excuse for something, like sometimes people claim dyslexia if they can't read well. I don't think that's the case for many people with AS, and I take some offense to that, but the poster brings up an interesting point. The reality is you shouldn't have to have an excuse to be who you are. But it certainly feels better to have one, doesn't it?
It so happens that people like myself and many others who have Asperger's have the particular general set of symptoms required for diagnosis. And even then, many of us a hard time gaining acceptance in the world, and finding people who are tolerant. It's hard enough with a diagnosis. And even if you have to explain it to someone (which I try to avoid doing myself, unless it's particularly relevant), their reaction is they either become more distant because they don't know how to deal with you, or they have precisely that reaction.
I guess the point I'm making here is that, especially in high schools, people are prejudiced and biased towards Aspies and others -- regardless of their official diagnosis (which they don't know) or any of that arbitrary stuff. The old slashdot article "Voices from the Hellmouth sums this up very well.
But don't get me wrong. I think that people who have Asperger's (and similar people in general) do have some obligation to try to overcome their problems. It's not good to chalk it up to autism and be a dick to everyone. But, again, a large part of it is how willing society is to accept people who aren't even necessarily rude or anything, but are just plain different. There's a certain amount of work that people with AS need to take, and a certain amount of work that society needs to take.
If anybody wants to talk to me about these issues, I'd be happy to do so and point you to some good resources and information.
I dunno, maybe *you* make friends. I don't. So I have the option of going to school and having to watch everybody else socialize and stuff and get rejected all the time, or I can just save a lot of trouble and do the same work at home with independent study classes.
That said, there is an advantage in having a disciplined, structured class that has deadlines and everything. Makes the work go faster and easier. And the expectations (in some instances) can be clearer.
Why not use Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombich software instead of the official OS X installer? I'm surprised no one's suggested this (from what i've seen).
Actually, there's a really nifty device called the AlphaSmart which is very similar to this. It runs on four AA batteries, has a tiny screen like that, does word processing. They last much longer than laptops for that sort of thing. I used to use one. http://www2.alphasmart.com/
Some of the newer ones have spell checking, which is nifty. And some of them will run PalmOS I think, but that kinda makes it less simple than it should be.
Regarding spending more on design because of money saved with cheap labor....I'm not sure about that.
I think often times big corporations will reduce costs primarily to increase their profit margin on things. That's kinda what Nike does. There's really no guarantee what they'll do with the extra money. But if there's not any pressing demand for better design, or any imminent threat that the neglect of above average design would bring about......I would doubt they would spend it on that.
Firefox is neat and all, and I'm glad it's taking over on the Windows side, but the form widgets that Firefox uses are horrible and ugly looking. It alwaus throws me off every time I want to switch to Firefox from Safari, those horrible, custom, non-standard form widgets. Call me weird, but that alone would get me to switch.
Right, but I can't make a virtual host on a shared host. At work, we can easily do that, because they're our servers. But if I wanted to run my own Zope site on a shared hosting server, I can't, because I would have to have access to http.d, let alone not being able to install it and run it in the first place (unless I had SSH access).
Working at the RS/GIS Center at CRREL (a US army engineer research and development lab), I was asked to make a brand new website for the building, since the current one stinks. My boss was set on me using Plone/Zope, which I had mixed feelings about.
Plone is a very nice CMS. It has a special wysywig editor for Internet Explorer and is very user friendly. The default skin (and this, I guess, was the reason for choosing it) looks pretty nice and is pretty elegantly coded. The template system that it uses is really cool and XML-based. It can run on any major OS, but there are some issues in moving a site across systems/OSes.
However, the problem is that you can't just run it straight on Apache, like you could with a PHP/MySQL application. It runs its very own web server. So you have to make an entry in your httpd.conf to make a virtual host that goes to the port that the Zope server is running on (which the system admin doesn't want to do). It's actually gonna be hosted on its own server, just to make sure it doesn't upset any of the dependencies that their mission-critical stuff has. So if I wanted to use it for my own purposes on a shared server, I can't.
One problem for me was that making custom content types required knowledge of Python, which I was able to fake my way through somewhat. This is made much easier with something called Archetypes, a bunch of classes and functions that does stuff for you.
I guess the biggest thing that made me uncomfortable with it was that it uses a custom database format and a custom format for storing all the site's files inside of one actual file. And you can't just move that one file, there's other dependency issues and problems with paths if you move it to a different location or OS.
I was, however, to develop the site much quicker with Plone/Zope than I would with developing my own CMS for that purpose or using an existing PHP one. And the end result is pretty nice. It's going to be very impressive. Once a co-worker finishes adding all the content to it, the new site will be up and tunneled from the location I linked to in this article.
See, when Walt Disney started Disney, he had a lot of creative and innovative ideas. Granted, there were some less-than-desirable aspects about the man, but he was passionate, creative, and innovative. He invented ways to show depth in cartoons, and the storyboarding process (I learned today). His studios, for a time, made some really clever and fun films. Roy Disney was his brother who was more on the left-brain side of things and did a lot of the business.
Now, Michael Eisner is at the helm, and Disney is just riding on brand recognition. Granted, there is a lot of creativity and passion still in the company, but it's overshadowed by the sheer shamelessness they have in business. Their films in the last six years or so, with some exceptions, have been crap. Gimmicky, overcommercialized crap. The Disney corporation has stooped to new lows. It's all brand recognition that's keeping Disney alive. There have been some scathing reviews of recent Disney films, and yet unwitting parents really don't care, since little kids can't really realize the poor quality of Disney's stuff.
At Pixar, there's a company that, like Disney did in the beginning, knows how to use technology and creativity to make great stuff. It's got people like Steve Jobs and John Lassater there who can think outside the box. They've got some amazing 3D technologies, some great talent there, and a lot of experience under their belt.
I think if Pixar is going to not sign a new contract with Disney (which I hope will happen, somebody correct me if I don't know something), then they need to get some people who are good at the distribution aspect, marketing, and commercializing. Not quite as unscrupulous as the folks at Disney, but something that can give their films the sucess they deserve.
As has been pointed out, Pixar is bound to have some cruddy films. But it seems like if there's a movie that you spend 2-3 years working on, there are a lot of people who are going to want to make sure the movie is worth the amount of time and money put into it. If you're going to spend that much time and resources to sculpt such a large thing, you've got incentive to make sure it comes out right.
That said, though, 3D animation could just as much be the next big thing as a fad. Pixar's sucess may be attributed to how relatively new computer animation is to the feature film industry. There are some appealing aspects to the style of 2D animation, if it's good 2D animation. But even bad animation can be carried along well by good writing. With all the technological advances, a good story is still the most important in my eyes.
Pixar may need to reinvent itself down the road. One competitor that I think is a serious threat to them is Dreamworks. I really like Dreamworks, their 3D animation is probably the best I've seen, besides the Final Fantasy movie. As is their 2D animation. The Iron Giant, The Prince of Egypt, Spirit, and others were amazing. It's important to have a visual flair to movies, be it in the general style or specific elements of the movie.
Pixar's great, but there's a lot of hurdles they'll have to overcome.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly my point. The diagnosis itself is meaningless, but because society demands some sort of "excuse" to be who you are, it fills that spot nicely. It'd be nice if we didn't need it, but we do. It also is crucial in getting accomodations at school. Some schools will not take you seriously when trying to get an IEP/504 plan unless you have some sort of diagnosis. Try trying to get accomodations in a public school with "Oh, he's just a pain in the ass.". Ideally, we wouldn't have to make up conditions/disorders/diseases for these sort of things. But with the state of society, it's needed. People aren't willing to just accept someone with the sort of symptoms that Asperger's people generally have or allow them any kind of understanding without a nice label/box like that.
I co-founded WrongPlanet.net along with the interviewer, and like Alex, I have Asperger's myself. I've separated myself from the site since, and I'm sure glad I made Alex get his own webhost before the slashdotting :-D.
Anyway, I'd like to respond to some of the comments here.
First, I want to clarify some of the things people say about Asperger's that irritate me and some of the Aspergers community. One thing that's irritating is when people say that there's an 'epidemic' of autism -- as if we're all some horrible thing that should never come into existance. Some of history's most brilliant minds have supposedly had Asperger's (see 'Diagnosing Jefferson', etc). People with Asperger's can often live perfectly normal lives. There even was some controversy at one point over the word "disorder" on WrongPlanet a while back, but I don't take it that far.
Another point is that autism is a spectrum disorder. Sometimes people with it have it milder or worse than others diagnosed. And also that it's an incredibly diverse bunch of people. It's hard to make generalizations. I like to think that most people with Asperger's have very redeeming qualities -- but the fact of the matter is that some aspies are normal intelligence. Some are brilliant, and some are, what others categorize as being "assholes".
One person here made a comment about people using Asperger's as some kind of excuse for something, like sometimes people claim dyslexia if they can't read well. I don't think that's the case for many people with AS, and I take some offense to that, but the poster brings up an interesting point. The reality is you shouldn't have to have an excuse to be who you are. But it certainly feels better to have one, doesn't it?
It so happens that people like myself and many others who have Asperger's have the particular general set of symptoms required for diagnosis. And even then, many of us a hard time gaining acceptance in the world, and finding people who are tolerant. It's hard enough with a diagnosis. And even if you have to explain it to someone (which I try to avoid doing myself, unless it's particularly relevant), their reaction is they either become more distant because they don't know how to deal with you, or they have precisely that reaction.
I guess the point I'm making here is that, especially in high schools, people are prejudiced and biased towards Aspies and others -- regardless of their official diagnosis (which they don't know) or any of that arbitrary stuff. The old slashdot article "Voices from the Hellmouth sums this up very well.
But don't get me wrong. I think that people who have Asperger's (and similar people in general) do have some obligation to try to overcome their problems. It's not good to chalk it up to autism and be a dick to everyone. But, again, a large part of it is how willing society is to accept people who aren't even necessarily rude or anything, but are just plain different. There's a certain amount of work that people with AS need to take, and a certain amount of work that society needs to take.
If anybody wants to talk to me about these issues, I'd be happy to do so and point you to some good resources and information.
welcome our ad-beaming overlords.
I dunno, maybe *you* make friends. I don't. So I have the option of going to school and having to watch everybody else socialize and stuff and get rejected all the time, or I can just save a lot of trouble and do the same work at home with independent study classes.
That said, there is an advantage in having a disciplined, structured class that has deadlines and everything. Makes the work go faster and easier. And the expectations (in some instances) can be clearer.
Why not use Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombich software instead of the official OS X installer? I'm surprised no one's suggested this (from what i've seen).
Actually, there's a really nifty device called the AlphaSmart which is very similar to this. It runs on four AA batteries, has a tiny screen like that, does word processing. They last much longer than laptops for that sort of thing. I used to use one. http://www2.alphasmart.com/
Some of the newer ones have spell checking, which is nifty. And some of them will run PalmOS I think, but that kinda makes it less simple than it should be.
Or my banana phone?
Naw. In Korea, only old people play video games.
Or a Beowulf cluster of disected, overclocked, Mac Minis.
Regarding spending more on design because of money saved with cheap labor....I'm not sure about that.
I think often times big corporations will reduce costs primarily to increase their profit margin on things. That's kinda what Nike does. There's really no guarantee what they'll do with the extra money. But if there's not any pressing demand for better design, or any imminent threat that the neglect of above average design would bring about......I would doubt they would spend it on that.
But what do I know?
Firefox is neat and all, and I'm glad it's taking over on the Windows side, but the form widgets that Firefox uses are horrible and ugly looking. It alwaus throws me off every time I want to switch to Firefox from Safari, those horrible, custom, non-standard form widgets. Call me weird, but that alone would get me to switch.
Right, but I can't make a virtual host on a shared host. At work, we can easily do that, because they're our servers. But if I wanted to run my own Zope site on a shared hosting server, I can't, because I would have to have access to http.d, let alone not being able to install it and run it in the first place (unless I had SSH access).
Working at the RS/GIS Center at CRREL (a US army engineer research and development lab), I was asked to make a brand new website for the building, since the current one stinks. My boss was set on me using Plone/Zope, which I had mixed feelings about.
Plone is a very nice CMS. It has a special wysywig editor for Internet Explorer and is very user friendly. The default skin (and this, I guess, was the reason for choosing it) looks pretty nice and is pretty elegantly coded. The template system that it uses is really cool and XML-based. It can run on any major OS, but there are some issues in moving a site across systems/OSes.
However, the problem is that you can't just run it straight on Apache, like you could with a PHP/MySQL application. It runs its very own web server. So you have to make an entry in your httpd.conf to make a virtual host that goes to the port that the Zope server is running on (which the system admin doesn't want to do). It's actually gonna be hosted on its own server, just to make sure it doesn't upset any of the dependencies that their mission-critical stuff has. So if I wanted to use it for my own purposes on a shared server, I can't.
One problem for me was that making custom content types required knowledge of Python, which I was able to fake my way through somewhat. This is made much easier with something called Archetypes, a bunch of classes and functions that does stuff for you.
I guess the biggest thing that made me uncomfortable with it was that it uses a custom database format and a custom format for storing all the site's files inside of one actual file. And you can't just move that one file, there's other dependency issues and problems with paths if you move it to a different location or OS.
I was, however, to develop the site much quicker with Plone/Zope than I would with developing my own CMS for that purpose or using an existing PHP one. And the end result is pretty nice. It's going to be very impressive. Once a co-worker finishes adding all the content to it, the new site will be up and tunneled from the location I linked to in this article.
See, when Walt Disney started Disney, he had a lot of creative and innovative ideas. Granted, there were some less-than-desirable aspects about the man, but he was passionate, creative, and innovative. He invented ways to show depth in cartoons, and the storyboarding process (I learned today). His studios, for a time, made some really clever and fun films. Roy Disney was his brother who was more on the left-brain side of things and did a lot of the business. Now, Michael Eisner is at the helm, and Disney is just riding on brand recognition. Granted, there is a lot of creativity and passion still in the company, but it's overshadowed by the sheer shamelessness they have in business. Their films in the last six years or so, with some exceptions, have been crap. Gimmicky, overcommercialized crap. The Disney corporation has stooped to new lows. It's all brand recognition that's keeping Disney alive. There have been some scathing reviews of recent Disney films, and yet unwitting parents really don't care, since little kids can't really realize the poor quality of Disney's stuff. At Pixar, there's a company that, like Disney did in the beginning, knows how to use technology and creativity to make great stuff. It's got people like Steve Jobs and John Lassater there who can think outside the box. They've got some amazing 3D technologies, some great talent there, and a lot of experience under their belt. I think if Pixar is going to not sign a new contract with Disney (which I hope will happen, somebody correct me if I don't know something), then they need to get some people who are good at the distribution aspect, marketing, and commercializing. Not quite as unscrupulous as the folks at Disney, but something that can give their films the sucess they deserve. As has been pointed out, Pixar is bound to have some cruddy films. But it seems like if there's a movie that you spend 2-3 years working on, there are a lot of people who are going to want to make sure the movie is worth the amount of time and money put into it. If you're going to spend that much time and resources to sculpt such a large thing, you've got incentive to make sure it comes out right. That said, though, 3D animation could just as much be the next big thing as a fad. Pixar's sucess may be attributed to how relatively new computer animation is to the feature film industry. There are some appealing aspects to the style of 2D animation, if it's good 2D animation. But even bad animation can be carried along well by good writing. With all the technological advances, a good story is still the most important in my eyes. Pixar may need to reinvent itself down the road. One competitor that I think is a serious threat to them is Dreamworks. I really like Dreamworks, their 3D animation is probably the best I've seen, besides the Final Fantasy movie. As is their 2D animation. The Iron Giant, The Prince of Egypt, Spirit, and others were amazing. It's important to have a visual flair to movies, be it in the general style or specific elements of the movie. Pixar's great, but there's a lot of hurdles they'll have to overcome.