Rubbish. I have a Mac (among various other computers), and I'm an ugly, stodgy, cowardly bastard who slithers beneath the layers of what others regard as the dregs of humanity.
Which proves that the American Heritage Dictionary is a piece of revisionist crap. Fascism was invented by Mussolini (who coined the name from a "fasci", a small staff of office used in ancient Rome), and his fascism had no element of racism in it (Mussolini's wife was a Jew). The dictionary is describing Hitler's National Socialism, which has much in common with fascism, but also contains a number of elements that are not in themselves part of it.
NB: I am not an advocate for, or defender of, fascism.
Most name-brand manufacturers gouge customers for RAM upgrades, not just Apple. And it's not as if you have to buy Mac-compatible RAM from them: Googling for "Mac RAM" produces a fair number of people who will sell it to you at a lot less than Apple charge.
"I don't think this distinction will get you far, nail and glue are components, but if you don't have a hammer, the nails are useless... so I think that distinction just won't take you far."
Not all components require tools, though. And some of those that do can be used with improvised ones: a carefully selected rock can pound nails into wood, for example.
"components are built to the tools and vice versa"
Some are, some aren't. As I said, not all components require tools, and not all tools are applied to components; some tools are mainly used to fashion components that may or may not require other tools to be used effectively, while others are applied directly to things that occur in the world around us (saws, axes, pick-axes, sledge-hammers, spades, etc.). The problem with with trying to make any statement about tools in general is that there are so many categories of them: some are enablers without which a particular job cannot be done at all (you cannot make certain types of pottery without a kiln that can reach and maintain a particular temperature); other types allow us to work more quickly, or with greater accuracy; still others are skill-levellers; etc., etc., etc.
"many of the tools we have are not considered good because of the quality of the result, but because they are time savers though they degrade the quality".
And time is precious. Henry Ford is often credited with inventing mass production, yet it actually goes back a lot further: Neanderthals had production lines to make stone tools and hunting implements; the Egyptians used them, as did the Romans; and mediaeval armourers, bowyers, and ship-builders had them too. We don't tend to see much of the early mass-produced stuff because it got thrown away when there was no further use for it, unlike the exquisite hand-crafted one-offs made for extremely wealthy people who could afford to pay master craftsmen for several years of painstaking work.
"My only point is that out of all of this, the tools remain important, and they do have an affect of their own".
Which is something I never disputed. My point was that the passion and pride any true craftsman has for their work is derived from the results they get, not the tools that were used to realise them.
Nails, glue, and tape are components, not tools. Obviously, better components will produce better results: I can build a better house given bricks and cement than even the best builder armed with a bucket of water, irrespective of relative skill levels (near zero in my case) or the tools being used.
I refute your assertion that craftsmen collect tools, because most of the ones I've met (and that's quite a lot) have no more than they actually require. Skilled professionals do not waste time and money on things they don't need, and will hire rather than buy stuff that will only be used occasionally, because that makes better financial sense (unless said item is very cheap, which is not usually the case with professional quality tools). Yes, they appreciate good tools, but purely as a means to an end, not as an object of adoration or veneration in themselves.
Finally, you should consider the fact that some of the most astounding examples of craftsmanship in the world were made by people who had access to what we would consider quite rudimentary tools. Stradivarius and Guarnarius for example made musical instruments in the 1600s that have never been bettered even today, despite our amazing tools and immeasurably superior knowledge of the physics of sound.
Craftsmanship depends on factors above and beyond the tools that are used. An excellent carpenter will produce better results with a Swiss army knife than a poor one in a shed full of the most expensive tools in the world.
My feelings for someone who believes that _any_ programming language is sexy are the same as I would have for one who said that wrenches or shovels are sexy, i.e. a genuine and profound sense of sadness.
Perl code is a nice way of showing the youngsters what happened when you tried to send a file over an RS-232 link to a computer that was running at a different baud rate.
No. There was a condition which stated that the Congress Party and Muslim League must resolve their differences, but how they did this was left to them.
It definitely comes with the character version because I just fired up a terminal window on my iMac, typed "emacs" into it, and up it came. Version 21.2.1.
"Already there are more factories than there is demand for their products"
Their capacity is greater than the fixed quotas imposed on them by some of the markets they export to. This is not the same as producing more than consumers would buy if such government imposed quotas did not exist.
Microsoft also have the X-Box locked down, and are willing to take people to court who try to unlock it (selling mod chips is illegal in the UK because they did this). MS also make money on all the software that runs on it, because anybody who makes software for the thing has to pay royalties to Microsoft for each copy they sell. So your moral argument for pirating Office has absolutely no weight if you're going to buy an X-Box, because you'll still be pumping money into Microsoft's coffers for a locked-down proprietary system, and they'll get even more money every time you buy a game or accessory for it.
IMO the reason you are considering ripping MS off for Office is simply because Office can be copied easily, whereas X-Boxes can't, so the only way to avoid paying them for one of those is by physically stealing it. Which is precisely the argument that the pro-DRM lobby are making to governments all over the world: if we had a way to stop people from copying our stuff, then they'd have to buy it, and posts like yours provide them with plenty of ammunition.
"(This one applies to music) How much of this actually goes to the artist?"
A lot more than they get from an illegal download, which is nothing. No need to make educated guesses or fudge figures here, because it is easy to demonstrate that the amount an artist gets from an illegally downloaded copy of their work precisely zilch.
Everything in computing is based on something from Microsoft. A tiny sprinkling of the milestones that those innovate(R)(TM)ive fellows at MS have made to the world of computing follow: Babbage's difference engine was actually based on the Microsoft's Differentiator(TM), which Gates and Allen were marketing in the 1780s (little known fact: Ada Lovelace was having a secret affair with Gates, and was the real inventor of Microsoft BASIC); electro-mechanical tabulators were copies of the MS Tablows system; Colussus was a rip-off of Colusdos; the Manchester Baby of MS Babcel; UNIVAC plagiarised VALVEDOS; and UNIX was a direct copy of XENIX.
The Normans weren't French, though -- they were a bunch of Scandinavians who'd "settled" in northern France about 150 years before they "settled" in England. Edward the Confessor, Harold's predecessor and normally counted among Saxon kings was in fact raised in Normandy, and was a distant cousin of William. Note that Normans were also "settling" parts of Italy during William's tenure as Duke Of Normandy, and had previously "settled" in various other bits of Europe.
"And I would hazard a guess and say the armies of America or Britain would have been just as ineffectual against the Blitzkreig if they were in place of the French then"
The British Expeditionary Force was in France at the time, and got its backside kicked to the point where it had to be evacuated by sea, abandoning a massive amount of equipment in the process. This was not a small force, either: a total of nine British divisions were deployed in France and Belgium.
Then why bother claiming that it's for end users and that it has free support? If the Ubuntu guys just want to piss around, then they should tell people that in the first place:
Ubuntu Linux
We put this distro together because we get hard-ons doing that sort of thing. Anyone who was thinking of contacting us with a suggestion or a complaint should consider that sad, pathetic individuals usually become extremely hostile when responding to any form of criticism, no matter how mild. Add to this the fact that we are also seething with resentment because we have to do all this quality work for free and pay our way by flipping burgers, while talentless bozos are earning fat salaries at Microsoft and Apple, and you will see why learning C and fixing any problems yourself is preferable to interacting with such profoundly disturbed excuses for people.
Selling shoddy rubbish that doesn't do what it says on the box did not start with the advent of the computer industry -- it is a practice that's probably as old as commerce itself. And even if we restrict ourselves to computing, there were plenty of bits of crapware before the 1990s. IBM's OS for the 370 mainframe is an excellent example: the initial release was both notoriously buggy and lacked many of the features that were promised for it, and it was the end-user community that eventually did most of the work of getting it into a reasonable state. This work was not paid for by IBM (in fact, said community were paying IBM for the privilege of doing their development for them), but IBM were the ones who benefited from it by ending up with a much better OS than the one they'd originally written, and therefore a more stable, capable, and salable computer system.
Baloney. Ever heard of "DLL hell?" It refers to Windows applications installing new (or is some cases old) versions of dynamic link libraries that break other applications, including Windows itself. It was so problematic at one time that sysadmins had to adopt a policy of reformatting every machine after a certain period of time had elapsed (6 months was common), and reinstalling the OS and all applications software to prevent repeated system crashes, slow responses, and many of the things we now more commonly associate with bots etc.
The good news is that things improved with Windows-XP. But there is also bad news, like for example service packs that break a raft of applications (including Microsoft's own ones), the rather large collection of commercial applications that require administrator mode to run, all those that (for example) will only work on Windows-XP Pro or Server-2003, plus many written for prior systems that won't run at all or run poorly under XP no matter how much you tweak the compatibility wizard (and I'm not talking about DOS software here).
Extremely dumb attitudes towards binaries are therefore alive and well in the proprietary Windows world, and have been for many years. Note though that I do not claim that this excuses open source developers, who should aim to be better than the Windows world rather than merely no worse.
"I think you must be working with a drastically oversimplified version of Kuhn's theory."
No, I am working with the complete one. An important point in Kuhn's writings is his rejection of Popper's assertion that a single reproducible anomalous event is enough to falsify a theory. Kuhn claims that during normal science, scientists neither test nor seek to confirm the guiding theories of their "disciplinary matrix" (which he also sometimes refers to as a "paradigm"). Yet there are many cases where this is precisely what occurred, a famous one being the steady-state universe, which fell out of favour after the discovery of cosmic background radiation, which it could not explain (the discovery of Qasars shortly after was simply another nail in a coffin that background radiation had already built and sealed).
"You seem to have the same rosey view of science as these text-books. That science is fundamentally unchanged and will always correct its own errors as time goes by."
I cannot see anything in my post that makes such a claim.
"The fact that some theories have been overthrown within the context of a continuous scientific tradition is utterly insufficient to prove Kuhn's theory"
A single example is enough to falsify Kuhn's assertion that scientists do not test or confirm the central theories of their disciplinary matrix during normal science. His theory must stand in its entirety, not be cherry-picked for the bits that still sound plausible while ignoring the stuff that's wrong, i.e. precisely what Kuhn accuses scientists of doing.
"The paradigm itself is not subject to the kind of continuous, one-dimensional progress you think it is".
Again, I fail to see where I made any such claim. You are tilting at straw men.
"There are plenty of dogmatic scientists. Even mathematicians have occaisionally been dogmatic throughout history."
This was particularly true of science in its early days, when it had some of the traits that we associate with the worst aspects of certain (but by no means all) religions: adherence to dogma, semi-worship of authority figures, etc. For example, challenging anything Newton had written was treated like heresy for many years -- even pointing out mistakes he'd made was completely unacceptable.
"Give science a few hundred years, and I wouldn't be that surprised to see more people attempting to hijack the institutions for their own political gain just as has been done to religions for thousands of years."
It doesn't tend to work as well with scientific institutions because scientists are used to arguing about nearly everything. The religions that tended to get successfully "hijacked" were those with strong hierarchical structures based on unquestioning obedience, not ones such as the Quakers, which are decentralised and have no human authority figures.
Slashdot Mirror
Rubbish. I have a Mac (among various other computers), and I'm an ugly, stodgy, cowardly bastard who slithers beneath the layers of what others regard as the dregs of humanity.
Which proves that the American Heritage Dictionary is a piece of revisionist crap. Fascism was invented by Mussolini (who coined the name from a "fasci", a small staff of office used in ancient Rome), and his fascism had no element of racism in it (Mussolini's wife was a Jew). The dictionary is describing Hitler's National Socialism, which has much in common with fascism, but also contains a number of elements that are not in themselves part of it.
NB: I am not an advocate for, or defender of, fascism.
Most name-brand manufacturers gouge customers for RAM upgrades, not just Apple. And it's not as if you have to buy Mac-compatible RAM from them: Googling for "Mac RAM" produces a fair number of people who will sell it to you at a lot less than Apple charge.
>Nails, glue, and tape are components, not tools.
"I don't think this distinction will get you far, nail and glue are components, but if you don't have a hammer, the nails are useless... so I think that distinction just won't take you far."
Not all components require tools, though. And some of those that do can be used with improvised ones: a carefully selected rock can pound nails into wood, for example.
"components are built to the tools and vice versa"
Some are, some aren't. As I said, not all components require tools, and not all tools are applied to components; some tools are mainly used to fashion components that may or may not require other tools to be used effectively, while others are applied directly to things that occur in the world around us (saws, axes, pick-axes, sledge-hammers, spades, etc.). The problem with with trying to make any statement about tools in general is that there are so many categories of them: some are enablers without which a particular job cannot be done at all (you cannot make certain types of pottery without a kiln that can reach and maintain a particular temperature); other types allow us to work more quickly, or with greater accuracy; still others are skill-levellers; etc., etc., etc.
"many of the tools we have are not considered good because of the quality of the result, but because they are time savers though they degrade the quality".
And time is precious. Henry Ford is often credited with inventing mass production, yet it actually goes back a lot further: Neanderthals had production lines to make stone tools and hunting implements; the Egyptians used them, as did the Romans; and mediaeval armourers, bowyers, and ship-builders had them too. We don't tend to see much of the early mass-produced stuff because it got thrown away when there was no further use for it, unlike the exquisite hand-crafted one-offs made for extremely wealthy people who could afford to pay master craftsmen for several years of painstaking work.
"My only point is that out of all of this, the tools remain important, and they do have an affect of their own".
Which is something I never disputed. My point was that the passion and pride any true craftsman has for their work is derived from the results they get, not the tools that were used to realise them.
Nails, glue, and tape are components, not tools. Obviously, better components will produce better results: I can build a better house given bricks and cement than even the best builder armed with a bucket of water, irrespective of relative skill levels (near zero in my case) or the tools being used.
I refute your assertion that craftsmen collect tools, because most of the ones I've met (and that's quite a lot) have no more than they actually require. Skilled professionals do not waste time and money on things they don't need, and will hire rather than buy stuff that will only be used occasionally, because that makes better financial sense (unless said item is very cheap, which is not usually the case with professional quality tools). Yes, they appreciate good tools, but purely as a means to an end, not as an object of adoration or veneration in themselves.
Finally, you should consider the fact that some of the most astounding examples of craftsmanship in the world were made by people who had access to what we would consider quite rudimentary tools. Stradivarius and Guarnarius for example made musical instruments in the 1600s that have never been bettered even today, despite our amazing tools and immeasurably superior knowledge of the physics of sound.
Craftsmanship depends on factors above and beyond the tools that are used. An excellent carpenter will produce better results with a Swiss army knife than a poor one in a shed full of the most expensive tools in the world.
My feelings for someone who believes that _any_ programming language is sexy are the same as I would have for one who said that wrenches or shovels are sexy, i.e. a genuine and profound sense of sadness.
Perl code is a nice way of showing the youngsters what happened when you tried to send a file over an RS-232 link to a computer that was running at a different baud rate.
No. There was a condition which stated that the Congress Party and Muslim League must resolve their differences, but how they did this was left to them.
Indeed. But it happened under his watch, not while the British were running things.
It definitely comes with the character version because I just fired up a terminal window on my iMac, typed "emacs" into it, and up it came. Version 21.2.1.
"Oh and who created the situation between India and Pakistan"
That was Ghandi. Neither Pakistan nor Bangladesh existed when India was under British rule.
"Already there are more factories than there is demand for their products"
Their capacity is greater than the fixed quotas imposed on them by some of the markets they export to. This is not the same as producing more than consumers would buy if such government imposed quotas did not exist.
Microsoft also have the X-Box locked down, and are willing to take people to court who try to unlock it (selling mod chips is illegal in the UK because they did this). MS also make money on all the software that runs on it, because anybody who makes software for the thing has to pay royalties to Microsoft for each copy they sell. So your moral argument for pirating Office has absolutely no weight if you're going to buy an X-Box, because you'll still be pumping money into Microsoft's coffers for a locked-down proprietary system, and they'll get even more money every time you buy a game or accessory for it.
IMO the reason you are considering ripping MS off for Office is simply because Office can be copied easily, whereas X-Boxes can't, so the only way to avoid paying them for one of those is by physically stealing it. Which is precisely the argument that the pro-DRM lobby are making to governments all over the world: if we had a way to stop people from copying our stuff, then they'd have to buy it, and posts like yours provide them with plenty of ammunition.
"(This one applies to music) How much of this actually goes to the artist?"
A lot more than they get from an illegal download, which is nothing. No need to make educated guesses or fudge figures here, because it is easy to demonstrate that the amount an artist gets from an illegally downloaded copy of their work precisely zilch.
Everything in computing is based on something from Microsoft. A tiny sprinkling of the milestones that those innovate(R)(TM)ive fellows at MS have made to the world of computing follow: Babbage's difference engine was actually based on the Microsoft's Differentiator(TM), which Gates and Allen were marketing in the 1780s (little known fact: Ada Lovelace was having a secret affair with Gates, and was the real inventor of Microsoft BASIC); electro-mechanical tabulators were copies of the MS Tablows system; Colussus was a rip-off of Colusdos; the Manchester Baby of MS Babcel; UNIVAC plagiarised VALVEDOS; and UNIX was a direct copy of XENIX.
The Normans weren't French, though -- they were a bunch of Scandinavians who'd "settled" in northern France about 150 years before they "settled" in England. Edward the Confessor, Harold's predecessor and normally counted among Saxon kings was in fact raised in Normandy, and was a distant cousin of William. Note that Normans were also "settling" parts of Italy during William's tenure as Duke Of Normandy, and had previously "settled" in various other bits of Europe.
"And I would hazard a guess and say the armies of America or Britain would have been just as ineffectual against the Blitzkreig if they were in place of the French then"
The British Expeditionary Force was in France at the time, and got its backside kicked to the point where it had to be evacuated by sea, abandoning a massive amount of equipment in the process. This was not a small force, either: a total of nine British divisions were deployed in France and Belgium.
Then why bother claiming that it's for end users and that it has free support? If the Ubuntu guys just want to piss around, then they should tell people that in the first place:
Ubuntu Linux
We put this distro together because we get hard-ons doing that sort of thing.
Anyone who was thinking of contacting us with a suggestion or a complaint
should consider that sad, pathetic individuals usually become extremely hostile
when responding to any form of criticism, no matter how mild. Add to this the
fact that we are also seething with resentment because we have to do all this
quality work for free and pay our way by flipping burgers, while talentless bozos
are earning fat salaries at Microsoft and Apple, and you will see why learning C
and fixing any problems yourself is preferable to interacting with such profoundly
disturbed excuses for people.
We hope you enjoy Ubuntu Linux,
the Ubuntu Team.
Selling shoddy rubbish that doesn't do what it says on the box did not start with the advent of the computer industry -- it is a practice that's probably as old as commerce itself. And even if we restrict ourselves to computing, there were plenty of bits of crapware before the 1990s. IBM's OS for the 370 mainframe is an excellent example: the initial release was both notoriously buggy and lacked many of the features that were promised for it, and it was the end-user community that eventually did most of the work of getting it into a reasonable state. This work was not paid for by IBM (in fact, said community were paying IBM for the privilege of doing their development for them), but IBM were the ones who benefited from it by ending up with a much better OS than the one they'd originally written, and therefore a more stable, capable, and salable computer system.
"And pre OS-X, scripting on the Mac was mostly non-existent."
Macs have had AppleScript since 1993.
Baloney. Ever heard of "DLL hell?" It refers to Windows applications installing new (or is some cases old) versions of dynamic link libraries that break other applications, including Windows itself. It was so problematic at one time that sysadmins had to adopt a policy of reformatting every machine after a certain period of time had elapsed (6 months was common), and reinstalling the OS and all applications software to prevent repeated system crashes, slow responses, and many of the things we now more commonly associate with bots etc.
The good news is that things improved with Windows-XP. But there is also bad news, like for example service packs that break a raft of applications (including Microsoft's own ones), the rather large collection of commercial applications that require administrator mode to run, all those that (for example) will only work on Windows-XP Pro or Server-2003, plus many written for prior systems that won't run at all or run poorly under XP no matter how much you tweak the compatibility wizard (and I'm not talking about DOS software here).
Extremely dumb attitudes towards binaries are therefore alive and well in the proprietary Windows world, and have been for many years. Note though that I do not claim that this excuses open source developers, who should aim to be better than the Windows world rather than merely no worse.
"I think you must be working with a drastically oversimplified version of Kuhn's theory."
No, I am working with the complete one. An important point in Kuhn's writings is his rejection of Popper's assertion that a single reproducible anomalous event is enough to falsify a theory. Kuhn claims that during normal science, scientists neither test nor seek to confirm the guiding theories of their "disciplinary matrix" (which he also sometimes refers to as a "paradigm"). Yet there are many cases where this is precisely what occurred, a famous one being the steady-state universe, which fell out of favour after the discovery of cosmic background radiation, which it could not explain (the discovery of Qasars shortly after was simply another nail in a coffin that background radiation had already built and sealed).
"You seem to have the same rosey view of science as these text-books. That science is fundamentally unchanged and will always correct its own errors as time goes by."
I cannot see anything in my post that makes such a claim.
"The fact that some theories have been overthrown within the context of a continuous scientific tradition is utterly insufficient to prove Kuhn's theory"
A single example is enough to falsify Kuhn's assertion that scientists do not test or confirm the central theories of their disciplinary matrix during normal science. His theory must stand in its entirety, not be cherry-picked for the bits that still sound plausible while ignoring the stuff that's wrong, i.e. precisely what Kuhn accuses scientists of doing.
"The paradigm itself is not subject to the kind of continuous, one-dimensional progress you think it is".
Again, I fail to see where I made any such claim. You are tilting at straw men.
"There are plenty of dogmatic scientists. Even mathematicians have occaisionally been dogmatic throughout history."
This was particularly true of science in its early days, when it had some of the traits that we associate with the worst aspects of certain (but by no means all) religions: adherence to dogma, semi-worship of authority figures, etc. For example, challenging anything Newton had written was treated like heresy for many years -- even pointing out mistakes he'd made was completely unacceptable.
"Give science a few hundred years, and I wouldn't be that surprised to see more people attempting to hijack the institutions for their own political gain just as has been done to religions for thousands of years."
It doesn't tend to work as well with scientific institutions because scientists are used to arguing about nearly everything. The religions that tended to get successfully "hijacked" were those with strong hierarchical structures based on unquestioning obedience, not ones such as the Quakers, which are decentralised and have no human authority figures.
My post should have been under theStorminMormon, not this one. My bad.