"There are too many crappy animators out there who don't know how to do anything but linear motion with no timing."
There are also too many crappy animators out there who have so many tools up their butt they don't know which one to vibrate first.
Tools aren't art. Sure, they help. But the competition will get fiercer as more and more people get their hands on the tools. Any tools.
There are people out there who can be more artistic with a pencil than Gee Whiz Joe with his IRIX, Stereoscopic glasses, and ergonomic swivel chair can dream of. I can't wait to see what these people do as professional quality tools become more readily available.
Gee Whiz Joe's world is going to become a lot more competitive in the not-so-distant future. (And not just in the world of animation.) You better hope you have real artistic talent under your belt, not just a bigger budget.
Don't discuss, just do. Is that what you're saying? Don't discuss politics, become a politician. Don't discuss entertainment, become an entertainer. Don't discuss programming unless you're going to write the program you talking about yourself. Nevermind your career, supporting your family, etc. The important thing is to back up any assertion with lots of chest thumping and semen.
Sorry to be so vitrolic, but this tired laymo kind of response gets gets posted over and over and over and over. "Nya nya, why don't you DO it then? Bleh." It's a stupid mindless retort that serves only to illustrate the unimaginitiveness of the poster.
Other posts I see regarding GNUStep seem to indicate I'm not alone in thinking it would be nice to port applications written for the Mac. I don't know much about GNUStep (so I should just keep my mouth shut), but I hope it, or some other portable non-proprietary GUI toolkit, develops a high enough degree of polish that developers find it an attractive way to package their ideas.
You're right. I'm not a developer. I'm a user. And I'm sick and tired of being held hostage by proprietary software. I've found a number of free alternatives to proprietary lock-ins. What a breath of fresh air! I want more.
And don't tell me I can't say so because I'm not a developer.
Forgive me for being leery of Apple's newfound open-source religion. It's not really that open now, anyway, is it? How many times do you have get stood up before you stop playing the fool?
Apple's strategy is just embrace and extend all over again.
You'd hope. What would it take for someone to reverse engineer Apple's GUI and port it to Linux or FreeBSD, say? Then any application written for a Mac could be compiled and run on a free operating system, with little or no effort.
Or are people so bedazzled by Steve's transluscent plastic and the Motorola factory's prowess that they'd rather bow down and worship than stand up for themselves?
Does anyone remember Apples open hardware specifications, and what happened to all the suckers who supported it?
Greedy corporate pig-dogs. Apple is and should remain an anachronism.
"I do, however, think that man will find a way to write a one and zero on something that will last longer than a cave painting, and soon."
That's all I'm saying. Just the future tense, because we're not there yet. Cave paintings have lasted a very long time.
Personally, I think it's networking, as much as any physical media, that will enable digital longevity. Particularly concepts like those espoused by Freenet, which maintains multiple independant copies in proportion to a file's popularity. I.E. - the ability of a file to survive long term will depend on some kind of evolutionary "fitness" measure.
And to tie this in to the subject being discussed, umm, Freenet uses computers, as does DVD decryption, umm, yeah. That's it...
Sure, but 80 is really not a very big number. (BTW, why are you backing up and restoring SP 80 times?)
And if there _were_ a problem, in your situation you would probably just try again.
But what if the medium is in a vault, and no-one touches it for years?
Depending on the data format, a single bit-flip could be catastrophic. Try munging a compressed tar archive sometime, then try to recover. Possible, perhaps, but a royal pain.
If you notice something like this at the time you make a copy, you can fix it. A la TCP every second of the day, for example.
But what do you do when the original is gone?
If you have, say, a billion bits, and one goes bad, you have to check a billion bits. If two go bad, you have to pick two out of a billion. If three go bad... You get the idea.
Digital - especially highly compressed digital, like audio, video, etc. - does not degrade nicely. The problem is that although the probability of an error may be very low, the consequences may be great.
"...disks now that will last over 10,000 years" - Under what conditions?
I suppose I'm coming off sounding like a Luddite, but I'm still not convinced digital has solved it's durability problems. But I'd be happy if you could convince me otherwise.
"Digital formats will last. The medium will change, but things can be copied from disk to disk. The quality will never go down."
Question: How sure can we really be that a digital copy will last? This has been discussed ad infinitum, but I still don't feel like I really know the answer.
The trouble, I think, is that there is no _perfect_ method of copying digital data. A bit might flip. Maybe you notice and try again. Maybe you don't. You can check and recheck and and compare and so on, but this takes time, effort, processor cycles, bandwidth, whatever. So sometimes things get fudged a little.
And what do you compare the copy to? The bitstream it was copied from? How do you know where that came from? How do you verify the original's data integrity? For all you know, you have a perfect copy of an imperfect copy.
You don't notice a scratch on the negative. Instead you get bizarre, perhaps very subtle, digital artifacts.
I suppose I'm being a little off-topic. And I'm not arguing analog copies are as good as digital. I just think that there may be a mistaken notion that digital is _perfect_. And that somewhere down the road, this may make it difficult to identify which information sources most accurately represent the original source.
Maybe not next year, but how about a thousand years from now. We still have original texts _much_ older than that. Is anyone really so confident in our digital system?
"If Corel weren't involved in linux..." That's exactly right. But they are involved with Linux.
So your point seems to be that with Cowpland in charge, we can't trust that they will continue to support Linux. Based on what? "First WordPerfect..." - excuse me - still WordPerfect. Java? Gee, they made a valient effort to support a fledgling technology, but failed to fall victim to the Concord fallacy when the technology failed to live up to its promises.
Talk is cheap. Meanwhile, Corel is out on a limb, trying to make a go of it. I really wish the backseat drivers among us would stop jeering and throwing fruit, and instead suggest what they would do differently.
I think what you're talking about is a problem with branding. It's not so much what Corel *does*, it how people *percieve* the company.
"rescued orphanware, shovelware,...high-end software that only amateurs buy."
Image matters, and Corel's isn't so hot.
But do perceptions match reality? I would argue that they don't. I've used Wordperfect, Coreldraw, and Corelpaint. I've also used their competitive cousins. Sure, you can tick off products feature by feature, bug by bug, and you will find differences - on both sides of the fence.
I would submit that Corel has an excellent stable of products, for excellent prices. The irony is that that is not enough, because people are dumb herd animals who rarely act independantly of their peers. "There must be reason everyone uses Photoshop, right?" Bzzzt - wrong. Everyone uses Photoshop (or Word, or Freehand, et al.) because they don't have the time, patience, inclination, or ability to think for themselves. No, I'm not knocking you for using these products. I'm just saying that most people never even consider that it might be worthwhile to try something else. Why bother?
Just look at how bad Microsoft's products and behaviour had to get before people started to wake up to the realization that "hmm, maybe there are alternatives".
Great products with "ugly ads, ugly packaging, and lowball pricing". And that's enough to tank them. Very sad. And probably very true.
So what's the moral of this story? What do we learn? Overcharge, because you will gain customer confidence? Don't develop products that only work w/ 95% of the consumer base? Throw struggling products, projects, and developers in the garbage? If you can't obtain majority market share, don't even bother? If you can't become a billionare, resign and go sell insurance? Please Wall Street or die? If your neighbor's in trouble, look the other way? Actually, no, maybe kick him in the shins?
Number one lesson of the day: Make sure you have pleasing packaging.
Why are people so sad that Linux shows aren't just like Wintel shows? That Linux apps aren't just like Windows apps? That Linux stocks aren't as successful as Oracle's stock?
Yeah, sure, Linux is the Next Big Thing. But guess what, greedy corporate pig-dogs, you're not invited to the party. It's not the same game, with a different team. It's a different game.
I could give a rat's ass whether Linux trade shows attract huge corporate sponsors and wall-to-wall crowds. Are these trade show failures supposed to imply impending doom for Linux? Hardly. They simply imply failure for business as usual.
Guess what, you won't become a billionare by using or distributing Linux. But it will proliferate regardless. If you don't get it, go ahead and ask your company to continue subsidizing the airline and travel industry by sending you to stupid trade shows.
"These SNP and the multiple cousins will define the range of being human and the range of genetic disease."
Not necessarily. Consider the process of aging, which is generally regarded as a genetic defect(s). The idea is simple: evolution does not select against defects which manifest themselves after reproduction. In other words, there may be genetic "defects" that we all share. Personally, I think it would be nice to find them, but that may be rather difficult.
Speaking of difficult, anyone know how many single spot differences are expected? It's then rather simple to do some combinatorics to get a rough idea of how difficult the task of interpreting the genome will be. (Hint: boggles the mind).
What's your point? Your point seems to be that you're not quite sure of Katz's point. Or is it that he's underestimating his audience? Or is it that you don't like to see writers embellish their subject with flourishes? Or that you just don't like Katz's flourishes?
In short, you seem to be victim of the very crime you apparently disparage: bad writing.
I'm not going to give anyone any lessons on how to write well. God knows I'm the last person you'd want to ask for polished prose.
I just hope your not trying to say that there's some objectively pure manner in which good prose should be written, or that the only point of writing is to make a point.
What's the "point" of a book such as "Lolita"? I hope you agree that there's a place in writing for stylistic flourish. (No, I'm not comparing Katz to Nabokov. Please.) (Do you think the bard at the weblog is... TADA! Jon Katz?;-)
Does JK write poorly. Perhaps. I'm just not sure why you got your panties in such a bunch. What do you propose be done about this horrible situation? You end your posting sounding somewhat like a stalker. Should we have all potential Slashdot articles pre-moderated by the style marshalls? Would you like to volunteer? Do you secretly wish that you were Roblimo?
Do liberal arts majors make you nauseaus? All you computer geeks out there better thank your lucky stars that some people have other interests, or you wouldn't have a job. Not to mention a mother and a father. If your idea of heaven is a island full of Linux geeks, free solar power, and honking network, you need to go outside and get some sunshine.
It is exactly for reasons like this that I don't buy products from Apple. Love their hardware. Looking forward to OSX. Their emphasis on consumer multi-media is right on target.
But I won't do business with a company that makes fruit colored plastic a higher priority than customer relations.
Maybe I'm a lone maverick, but I doubt it.
If Steve & Co. are happy to make what money they can by overcharging their faithful loyalists, good for them.
They could make more if they would simply stop being so prickish.
In addition to your suggested remedies, I would add that I think one of the most effective ways to limit Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior would be to require them to make public all the data formats they use. This would not only include the formats for such ubiquitous file types as Word or Excel, but also interapplication and networking data streams as well.
Microsoft has generously offered to open their application API's, at least some of them. What a sham! This is just another way to encourage people to develop application which rely on Microsoft products.
Exposing the data, however, would make it easier for people to sidestep Microsoft entirely. One of the biggest problems here is that the ubiquity of Microsoft products is self sustaining. People use Office because everyone else uses office. People (MSN, perhaps?) create web sites that cater to specific browser features, so people use Explorer. Someone wants to use Kerberos, and gets tricked into implementing Microsoft's version, which compels future migration to more Microsoft products.
These kinds of self-sustaining hooks would be much more difficult to perpetuate if the software development community at large had access to Microsoft's data formats. This would make it easier for anyone with the inclination to produce compatible software without the enormous expense, inaccuracy, and delay inherent to reverse engineering.
No one here is arguing that telemarketing or other forms of communication should be BANNED. But regulated, yes.
Justice is a balancing act. Freedom of speech is not the ultimate distillation of good society. Its importance cannot be overstated, but it does not overarch all other rights and obligations.
The problem is one of scale. As it exists now, anyone with an iota of enterprise can blast their way into your conscious life, like it or not. Multiply by a billion and this becomes more than "inconvenient". It should be unlawful for the same reason that it is unlawful for me to stand outside your house with a bullhorn and shout all night. It disturbs the peace.
Unsolicited bulk email should be taxed. Illegal SPAM should be canned.
Is saying something you disagree with a nuisance? Is shouting it in your ear a nuisance?
Freedom is a two way street. I should free to speak my mind. You should be free to ignore me.
Freedom begins with the right to privacy. I do not want my private life to be dominated by crass commercialism.
I can't hardly think of a song I really like that doesn't remind me of some kind of detergent, cereal, beverage, etc. Beautiful mountain scenery reminds me of Coors, or the Marlborogh Man.
Red Hat's marketing department just dropped their account. Good. Good Riddance. The Red Hat logo is cool enough. I don't need to have it shoved in my face every time I turn my head. If Red Hat makes amends with their marketing gurus, I'll stop buying anything from Red Hat.
Not every "nuisance" requires legislation, I agree. But when organizations overstep their boundaries and impose on my personal space, legislate them into oblivion, I say.
Laws are necessary. A necessary evil, perhaps, bu necessary none the less.
At least that is my opinion, and I will vote for those people who represent the belief that advertising pollution is a nuisance.
Did you happened to watch the New Year's Eve festivities from around the world broadcast by PBS? There were spectacular celebrations in major cities all around the world. Very beautiful. My favorite was the fireworks display in Paris. Wow!
And then there was Times Square. A guady patchwork of billboards and neon punctuated by the golden arches.
Gross. The public environment belongs to all of us. Crass corporate pollution of our sensoroy environment CAN be stopped. And SHOULD be stopped. And only our elected government has the authority to do so.
So yes, there SHOULD be laws. There MUST be laws, or we are destined to have our attention distracted every waking moment by greedy corporate commercial interests. Because they want to, and they can.
A law should be passed that requires anyone sending unsolicited bulk email to pay postage to the U.S. Government.
This would be relatively easy to regulate and enforce. You (spammer) pay the postage. Prorate according to message size in bytes. The government gives you a bunch of unique codes. Each message you send must contain a code. You (recipient) could challenge whether the sender of an email has paid postage by forwarding the mail to the governent. If it's an unauthorized or duplicate (or nonexistent) mail code, the spammer gets canned. Maybe someone has a better idea than this, but the main point is that it shouldn't be hard to enforce such an obligation.
The government gets an Internet tax.
The spammer gets to send mail.
You and I may get some junk mail sometimes, but we don't have to worry about the Internet email system simply collapsing from abuse.
Of course, you retain the right to reject your mail outright. Just because someone puts a stamp on something doesn't mean you're obliged to open and read their message.
Is walking "intuitive"? After you know how, yes. Beforehand, no.
The number one misperception about the computer industry at large is that computers should make people's lives easier.
They won't.
Did the mechanization of farming make farmer's lives easier? No. There just aren't as many farmers anymore.
Computers might make the job you _used_ to do easier. But they simultaneously change the nature of your work. If you can't adapt, you're out on your ear.
As far as I'm concerned, all the hubbub about "intuitive" is just a lame excuse for being out of touch and irrevelant. "It's not intuitive enough", they whine. You're not relevant enough, I say. Get with the program or get out of the way.
Is this more "embrace and extend"?
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I like Mac OS X. Or I should say, I would like to. A friendly face, a solid OS, and a super CPU.
But I notice references on the developer website to things like the Kernel Extension SDK. What's this?
On the one hand, I hear Apple singing the praise of open source, POSIX, etc. But forgive me if I cynically wonder if perhaps they're only attract talented programmers into their honeypot, only then to reveal they must use proprietary hooks to run their applications efficiently on the Mac OS.
It's a slipperly slope. Why be open and free? It's so much easier to cheat just a little. Then Apple, and only Apple, will benefit from your work.
Does anyone have any experience with these? I think the idea is terrific, but of course implementation is everything. Can you reach anything even approaching the input rate of a regular keyboard?
I don't mean to take one position or the other. But I'm a little confused. I just really don't get it. Could someone please help me with this: How is XML better than SQL?
They are both well defined open standards.
SQL doesn't handle variable depth tree structures very well. So XML has a leg up there.
But isn't the next version of the SQL standard going to address that? Recursive structures and all that?
There is a real mathematical rigor and some very important underlying theory behind the relational database model. A lot of that theory has important performance consequences. Has that theory simply been superceded, made irrelevant, by this new model?
What is XML providing besides a natural ability to create outlines? And why not just extend the SQL standard to deal with that deficiency?
Now as far as *presentation* of data goes, that's not really XML. That's XSL, DOM, or some other formatting model. I certainly see the need to have a well-defined open standard for presentation.
XML is one of these words everybody's talking about yet no-one really knows how to use it in specific applications or server technologies
I disagree. Check out the W3C's SVG standard. This is for real.
If you've ever had to muck about with all of the different proprietary flavors of vector graphics formats, you know what a great thing this will be.
That said, I personally *don't* believe in across-the-board XML standardization panacea. Some things deserve standardization, others don't.
Accountants all adhere to accepted standard accounting practices. This is what makes it possible to encapsulate their work into shrink-wrapped database products that pretty much any accountant can use. But this only works because the process is so well known.
So I disagree vehemently that business-to-business transactions, for example, are ripe for XML standardization. Why? Because who the heck is such an expert on these kinds of transactions to be telling everyone else how to do it? There's a lot of trial-and-error to go through before anyone should start proposing standards.
Slashdot Mirror
"There are too many crappy animators out there who don't know how to do anything but linear motion with no timing."
There are also too many crappy animators out there who have so many tools up their butt they don't know which one to vibrate first.
Tools aren't art. Sure, they help. But the competition will get fiercer as more and more people get their hands on the tools. Any tools.
There are people out there who can be more artistic with a pencil than Gee Whiz Joe with his IRIX, Stereoscopic glasses, and ergonomic swivel chair can dream of. I can't wait to see what these people do as professional quality tools become more readily available.
Gee Whiz Joe's world is going to become a lot more competitive in the not-so-distant future. (And not just in the world of animation.) You better hope you have real artistic talent under your belt, not just a bigger budget.
Don't discuss, just do. Is that what you're saying? Don't discuss politics, become a politician. Don't discuss entertainment, become an entertainer. Don't discuss programming unless you're going to write the program you talking about yourself. Nevermind your career, supporting your family, etc. The important thing is to back up any assertion with lots of chest thumping and semen.
Sorry to be so vitrolic, but this tired laymo kind of response gets gets posted over and over and over and over. "Nya nya, why don't you DO it then? Bleh." It's a stupid mindless retort that serves only to illustrate the unimaginitiveness of the poster.
Other posts I see regarding GNUStep seem to indicate I'm not alone in thinking it would be nice to port applications written for the Mac. I don't know much about GNUStep (so I should just keep my mouth shut), but I hope it, or some other portable non-proprietary GUI toolkit, develops a high enough degree of polish that developers find it an attractive way to package their ideas.
You're right. I'm not a developer. I'm a user. And I'm sick and tired of being held hostage by proprietary software. I've found a number of free alternatives to proprietary lock-ins. What a breath of fresh air! I want more.
And don't tell me I can't say so because I'm not a developer.
Forgive me for being leery of Apple's newfound open-source religion. It's not really that open now, anyway, is it? How many times do you have get stood up before you stop playing the fool?
Apple's strategy is just embrace and extend all over again.
You'd hope. What would it take for someone to reverse engineer Apple's GUI and port it to Linux or FreeBSD, say? Then any application written for a Mac could be compiled and run on a free operating system, with little or no effort.
Or are people so bedazzled by Steve's transluscent plastic and the Motorola factory's prowess that they'd rather bow down and worship than stand up for themselves?
Does anyone remember Apples open hardware specifications, and what happened to all the suckers who supported it?
Greedy corporate pig-dogs. Apple is and should remain an anachronism.
"You and I should agree to disagree."
I think we actually probably agree. See below.
"I do, however, think that man will find a way to write a one and zero on something that will last longer than a cave painting, and soon."
That's all I'm saying. Just the future tense, because we're not there yet. Cave paintings have lasted a very long time.
Personally, I think it's networking, as much as any physical media, that will enable digital longevity. Particularly concepts like those espoused by Freenet, which maintains multiple independant copies in proportion to a file's popularity. I.E. - the ability of a file to survive long term will depend on some kind of evolutionary "fitness" measure.
And to tie this in to the subject being discussed, umm, Freenet uses computers, as does DVD decryption, umm, yeah. That's it...
Sure, but 80 is really not a very big number. (BTW, why are you backing up and restoring SP 80 times?)
And if there _were_ a problem, in your situation you would probably just try again.
But what if the medium is in a vault, and no-one touches it for years?
Depending on the data format, a single bit-flip could be catastrophic. Try munging a compressed tar archive sometime, then try to recover. Possible, perhaps, but a royal pain.
If you notice something like this at the time you make a copy, you can fix it. A la TCP every second of the day, for example.
But what do you do when the original is gone?
If you have, say, a billion bits, and one goes bad, you have to check a billion bits. If two go bad, you have to pick two out of a billion. If three go bad... You get the idea.
Digital - especially highly compressed digital, like audio, video, etc. - does not degrade nicely. The problem is that although the probability of an error may be very low, the consequences may be great.
"...disks now that will last over 10,000 years" - Under what conditions?
I suppose I'm coming off sounding like a Luddite, but I'm still not convinced digital has solved it's durability problems. But I'd be happy if you could convince me otherwise.
"Digital formats will last. The medium will change, but things can be copied from disk to disk. The quality will never go down."
Question: How sure can we really be that a digital copy will last? This has been discussed ad infinitum, but I still don't feel like I really know the answer.
The trouble, I think, is that there is no _perfect_ method of copying digital data. A bit might flip. Maybe you notice and try again. Maybe you don't. You can check and recheck and and compare and so on, but this takes time, effort, processor cycles, bandwidth, whatever. So sometimes things get fudged a little.
And what do you compare the copy to? The bitstream it was copied from? How do you know where that came from? How do you verify the original's data integrity? For all you know, you have a perfect copy of an imperfect copy.
You don't notice a scratch on the negative. Instead you get bizarre, perhaps very subtle, digital artifacts.
I suppose I'm being a little off-topic. And I'm not arguing analog copies are as good as digital. I just think that there may be a mistaken notion that digital is _perfect_. And that somewhere down the road, this may make it difficult to identify which information sources most accurately represent the original source.
Maybe not next year, but how about a thousand years from now. We still have original texts _much_ older than that. Is anyone really so confident in our digital system?
"If Corel weren't involved in linux..." That's exactly right. But they are involved with Linux.
So your point seems to be that with Cowpland in charge, we can't trust that they will continue to support Linux. Based on what? "First WordPerfect..." - excuse me - still WordPerfect. Java? Gee, they made a valient effort to support a fledgling technology, but failed to fall victim to the Concord fallacy when the technology failed to live up to its promises.
Talk is cheap. Meanwhile, Corel is out on a limb, trying to make a go of it. I really wish the backseat drivers among us would stop jeering and throwing fruit, and instead suggest what they would do differently.
I think what you're talking about is a problem with branding. It's not so much what Corel *does*, it how people *percieve* the company.
...high-end software that only amateurs buy."
"rescued orphanware, shovelware,
Image matters, and Corel's isn't so hot.
But do perceptions match reality? I would argue that they don't. I've used Wordperfect, Coreldraw, and Corelpaint. I've also used their competitive cousins. Sure, you can tick off products feature by feature, bug by bug, and you will find differences - on both sides of the fence.
I would submit that Corel has an excellent stable of products, for excellent prices. The irony is that that is not enough, because people are dumb herd animals who rarely act independantly of their peers. "There must be reason everyone uses Photoshop, right?" Bzzzt - wrong. Everyone uses Photoshop (or Word, or Freehand, et al.) because they don't have the time, patience, inclination, or ability to think for themselves. No, I'm not knocking you for using these products. I'm just saying that most people never even consider that it might be worthwhile to try something else. Why bother?
Just look at how bad Microsoft's products and behaviour had to get before people started to wake up to the realization that "hmm, maybe there are alternatives".
Great products with "ugly ads, ugly packaging, and lowball pricing". And that's enough to tank them. Very sad. And probably very true.
So what's the moral of this story? What do we learn? Overcharge, because you will gain customer confidence? Don't develop products that only work w/ 95% of the consumer base? Throw struggling products, projects, and developers in the garbage? If you can't obtain majority market share, don't even bother? If you can't become a billionare, resign and go sell insurance? Please Wall Street or die? If your neighbor's in trouble, look the other way? Actually, no, maybe kick him in the shins?
Number one lesson of the day: Make sure you have pleasing packaging.
My mind feels numb.
Why are people so sad that Linux shows aren't just like Wintel shows? That Linux apps aren't just like Windows apps? That Linux stocks aren't as successful as Oracle's stock?
Yeah, sure, Linux is the Next Big Thing. But guess what, greedy corporate pig-dogs, you're not invited to the party. It's not the same game, with a different team. It's a different game.
I could give a rat's ass whether Linux trade shows attract huge corporate sponsors and wall-to-wall crowds. Are these trade show failures supposed to imply impending doom for Linux? Hardly. They simply imply failure for business as usual.
Guess what, you won't become a billionare by using or distributing Linux. But it will proliferate regardless. If you don't get it, go ahead and ask your company to continue subsidizing the airline and travel industry by sending you to stupid trade shows.
The GPL is NOT ABOUT MONEY, STUPID!!!
"These SNP and the multiple cousins will define the range of being human and the range of genetic disease."
Not necessarily. Consider the process of aging, which is generally regarded as a genetic defect(s). The idea is simple: evolution does not select against defects which manifest themselves after reproduction. In other words, there may be genetic "defects" that we all share. Personally, I think it would be nice to find them, but that may be rather difficult.
Speaking of difficult, anyone know how many single spot differences are expected? It's then rather simple to do some combinatorics to get a rough idea of how difficult the task of interpreting the genome will be. (Hint: boggles the mind).
What's your point? Your point seems to be that you're not quite sure of Katz's point. Or is it that he's underestimating his audience? Or is it that you don't like to see writers embellish their subject with flourishes? Or that you just don't like Katz's flourishes?
... TADA! Jon Katz? ;-)
In short, you seem to be victim of the very crime you apparently disparage: bad writing.
I'm not going to give anyone any lessons on how to write well. God knows I'm the last person you'd want to ask for polished prose.
I just hope your not trying to say that there's some objectively pure manner in which good prose should be written, or that the only point of writing is to make a point.
What's the "point" of a book such as "Lolita"? I hope you agree that there's a place in writing for stylistic flourish. (No, I'm not comparing Katz to Nabokov. Please.) (Do you think the bard at the weblog is
Does JK write poorly. Perhaps. I'm just not sure why you got your panties in such a bunch. What do you propose be done about this horrible situation? You end your posting sounding somewhat like a stalker. Should we have all potential Slashdot articles pre-moderated by the style marshalls? Would you like to volunteer? Do you secretly wish that you were Roblimo?
Do liberal arts majors make you nauseaus? All you computer geeks out there better thank your lucky stars that some people have other interests, or you wouldn't have a job. Not to mention a mother and a father. If your idea of heaven is a island full of Linux geeks, free solar power, and honking network, you need to go outside and get some sunshine.
Lars isn't "the brightest man I've even run across" or "ever run across"?
Don't you just hate it when the spell-checker doesn't give your intellect a big enough boost?
Just a thought...
Could the RIAA cartel/consortium/oligarchy be justifiably accused of price-fixing?
It is exactly for reasons like this that I don't buy products from Apple. Love their hardware. Looking forward to OSX. Their emphasis on consumer multi-media is right on target.
But I won't do business with a company that makes fruit colored plastic a higher priority than customer relations.
Maybe I'm a lone maverick, but I doubt it.
If Steve & Co. are happy to make what money they can by overcharging their faithful loyalists, good for them.
They could make more if they would simply stop being so prickish.
(Has anyone patented fruit colored plastic yet?)
In addition to your suggested remedies, I would add that I think one of the most effective ways to limit Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior would be to require them to make public all the data formats they use. This would not only include the formats for such ubiquitous file types as Word or Excel, but also interapplication and networking data streams as well.
Microsoft has generously offered to open their application API's, at least some of them. What a sham! This is just another way to encourage people to develop application which rely on Microsoft products.
Exposing the data, however, would make it easier for people to sidestep Microsoft entirely. One of the biggest problems here is that the ubiquity of Microsoft products is self sustaining. People use Office because everyone else uses office. People (MSN, perhaps?) create web sites that cater to specific browser features, so people use Explorer. Someone wants to use Kerberos, and gets tricked into implementing Microsoft's version, which compels future migration to more Microsoft products.
These kinds of self-sustaining hooks would be much more difficult to perpetuate if the software development community at large had access to Microsoft's data formats. This would make it easier for anyone with the inclination to produce compatible software without the enormous expense, inaccuracy, and delay inherent to reverse engineering.
And so are the slashdot moderators of the day.
Your arguments are oversimple.
No one here is arguing that telemarketing or other forms of communication should be BANNED. But regulated, yes.
Justice is a balancing act. Freedom of speech is not the ultimate distillation of good society. Its importance cannot be overstated, but it does not overarch all other rights and obligations.
The problem is one of scale. As it exists now, anyone with an iota of enterprise can blast their way into your conscious life, like it or not. Multiply by a billion and this becomes more than "inconvenient". It should be unlawful for the same reason that it is unlawful for me to stand outside your house with a bullhorn and shout all night. It disturbs the peace.
Unsolicited bulk email should be taxed. Illegal SPAM should be canned.
Is saying something you disagree with a nuisance? Is shouting it in your ear a nuisance?
Freedom is a two way street. I should free to speak my mind. You should be free to ignore me.
Freedom begins with the right to privacy. I do not want my private life to be dominated by crass commercialism.
I can't hardly think of a song I really like that doesn't remind me of some kind of detergent, cereal, beverage, etc. Beautiful mountain scenery reminds me of Coors, or the Marlborogh Man.
Red Hat's marketing department just dropped their account. Good. Good Riddance. The Red Hat logo is cool enough. I don't need to have it shoved in my face every time I turn my head. If Red Hat makes amends with their marketing gurus, I'll stop buying anything from Red Hat.
Not every "nuisance" requires legislation, I agree. But when organizations overstep their boundaries and impose on my personal space, legislate them into oblivion, I say.
Laws are necessary. A necessary evil, perhaps, bu necessary none the less.
At least that is my opinion, and I will vote for those people who represent the belief that advertising pollution is a nuisance.
Did you happened to watch the New Year's Eve festivities from around the world broadcast by PBS? There were spectacular celebrations in major cities all around the world. Very beautiful. My favorite was the fireworks display in Paris. Wow!
And then there was Times Square. A guady patchwork of billboards and neon punctuated by the golden arches.
Gross. The public environment belongs to all of us. Crass corporate pollution of our sensoroy environment CAN be stopped. And SHOULD be stopped. And only our elected government has the authority to do so.
So yes, there SHOULD be laws. There MUST be laws, or we are destined to have our attention distracted every waking moment by greedy corporate commercial interests. Because they want to, and they can.
A law should be passed that requires anyone sending unsolicited bulk email to pay postage to the U.S. Government.
This would be relatively easy to regulate and enforce. You (spammer) pay the postage. Prorate according to message size in bytes. The government gives you a bunch of unique codes. Each message you send must contain a code. You (recipient) could challenge whether the sender of an email has paid postage by forwarding the mail to the governent. If it's an unauthorized or duplicate (or nonexistent) mail code, the spammer gets canned. Maybe someone has a better idea than this, but the main point is that it shouldn't be hard to enforce such an obligation.
The government gets an Internet tax.
The spammer gets to send mail.
You and I may get some junk mail sometimes, but we don't have to worry about the Internet email system simply collapsing from abuse.
Of course, you retain the right to reject your mail outright. Just because someone puts a stamp on something doesn't mean you're obliged to open and read their message.
Is walking "intuitive"? After you know how, yes. Beforehand, no.
The number one misperception about the computer industry at large is that computers should make people's lives easier.
They won't.
Did the mechanization of farming make farmer's lives easier? No. There just aren't as many farmers anymore.
Computers might make the job you _used_ to do easier. But they simultaneously change the nature of your work. If you can't adapt, you're out on your ear.
As far as I'm concerned, all the hubbub about "intuitive" is just a lame excuse for being out of touch and irrevelant. "It's not intuitive enough", they whine. You're not relevant enough, I say. Get with the program or get out of the way.
I like Mac OS X. Or I should say, I would like to. A friendly face, a solid OS, and a super CPU.
But I notice references on the developer website to things like the Kernel Extension SDK. What's this?
On the one hand, I hear Apple singing the praise of open source, POSIX, etc. But forgive me if I cynically wonder if perhaps they're only attract talented programmers into their honeypot, only then to reveal they must use proprietary hooks to run their applications efficiently on the Mac OS.
It's a slipperly slope. Why be open and free? It's so much easier to cheat just a little. Then Apple, and only Apple, will benefit from your work.
Disabuse me, please.
Does anyone have any experience with these? I think the idea is terrific, but of course implementation is everything. Can you reach anything even approaching the input rate of a regular keyboard?
I don't mean to take one position or the other. But I'm a little confused. I just really don't get it. Could someone please help me with this: How is XML better than SQL?
They are both well defined open standards.
SQL doesn't handle variable depth tree structures very well. So XML has a leg up there.
But isn't the next version of the SQL standard going to address that? Recursive structures and all that?
There is a real mathematical rigor and some very important underlying theory behind the relational database model. A lot of that theory has important performance consequences. Has that theory simply been superceded, made irrelevant, by this new model?
What is XML providing besides a natural ability to create outlines? And why not just extend the SQL standard to deal with that deficiency?
Now as far as *presentation* of data goes, that's not really XML. That's XSL, DOM, or some other formatting model. I certainly see the need to have a well-defined open standard for presentation.
Help please?
XML is one of these words everybody's talking about yet no-one really knows how to use it in specific applications or server technologies
I disagree. Check out the W3C's SVG standard. This is for real.
If you've ever had to muck about with all of the different proprietary flavors of vector graphics formats, you know what a great thing this will be.
That said, I personally *don't* believe in across-the-board XML standardization panacea. Some things deserve standardization, others don't.
Accountants all adhere to accepted standard accounting practices. This is what makes it possible to encapsulate their work into shrink-wrapped database products that pretty much any accountant can use. But this only works because the process is so well known.
So I disagree vehemently that business-to-business transactions, for example, are ripe for XML standardization. Why? Because who the heck is such an expert on these kinds of transactions to be telling everyone else how to do it? There's a lot of trial-and-error to go through before anyone should start proposing standards.
And remember: "You can't vote for anarchy". ;~)