This is by no means the world's most expensive Christmas card. That would be an 1843 carddesigned by English painter JC Horsley, commissioned by Sir Henry Cole, an English businessman who modernized the postal system. Only 1000 were made, and only a handful survive. One was recently auctioned for £22,250.
Solaris has been OS'ed now that it is of negligible value. Android is a lot more than just Linux - the entire OS works on up-to-date mobile devices, and works a lot better than any other Linux dist does on them. That Cyanogen and his colleagues can create fully working installations of Android without proprietary code indicates how complete it is: show me anything as lively and vital as the Android dev scene on Sun hardware.
Go isn't a toy, it's a tot. Let's see if it grows.
... while it was spiraling to its destruction. Sun's open-source epiphany struck me as an act of desperation from a doomed organization.
Anyway, I contest that claim. Android is open source. The Chrome browser is open source. The Chrome OS is open source. The Go programming language is open source (out of the box, unlike Java.)
What's not open source are either their cloud-based stuff and apps generally acquired from 3rd parties: Earth, Sketch-Up, Picasa, etc. I wouldn't say that Google is 100% committed to FOSS, but they go farther than most. And their project hosting is much nicer, IMO, than Sourceforge.
I think those things have been part of Google culture for as long as I recall. It started as a research project in Stanford in the 1990's, and has long been involved with west coast research universities. If anything, these things are becoming less true, not more.
Bell Labs was AT&T allowing a very, very small percentage of their workforce to do whatever interested them five days out of five. Google allows almost all their workforce to pursue pet projects 1 day out of 5. AT&T did this with the benefit of a protected monopoly, I might add.
I will accept that I have occasionally verged onto Google fandom, and that it can somewhat blind me to the dangers that Google can present. But I can explain why it has such appeal for many of us:
1. A deeply intellectual corporate cultural, with 70% of its workforce having PhDs (I don't know if this is still true.) This includes the "20%" concept, whereby all Google staff is given free-reign to research what interests them 1 day out of 5. Google, to me, recalls the days of business-as-research-endeavor, the era of Xerox Parc and Bell Labs and the intellectual energy they represented.
2. A friendliness to open source unmatched by any other major company.
3. A very open ecosystem, with freely available APIs. And, an absence of pretense that the ecosystem is closed or finished. I rather like that Google is in "perpetual beta" (though it can get frustrating, especially when they abandon a project.)
4. Lots of free stuff to play with. Unlike Apple, you don't need to be a well-heeled consumer to play pretty much in all parts of the Google "playground."
5. The sense that they are moving the functions of the library into the 21st century.
Nonetheless, you are right. They are gatekeepers for much of the world's information at this point. We need to be more skeptical and hold Google accountable for the considerable power they now possess.
That's very insightful. However, I think we're getting to a period of time where that's no longer the case: there are a lot more competent web developers and content managers - and more plug-and-play content management tools - than there are good writers. (Design is still a sought-after talent.)
Part of the problem was also part of Salon's strength: they were started and run by writers. Old-school, ink-and-paper writers.
And their writing was and is very good, some of the best online. They raised the bar on the quality of online writing in the late 90's. I still regularly read some of their columnists (especially Glenn Greenwald, and their film reviews are among the best anywhere.) The intersection of the literati who would follow Salon and the tech-geeks who populate Slashdot is pretty small, so I don't expect this to resonate with many of them. They haven't fallen off the web; they've largely recovered from the hemorrhaging of readers from the paywall-period, but they won't get back the revenues they've lost in the meantime.
You. aren't. reading. accurately. Your.sig ("Please read and at least attempt to understand comment before replying, kthxbye.") is extremely ironic here.
Funny how this is another difference between film and music. Popular music audiences don't really care about resolution or sound-quality - they generally want familiarity, reassurance, a sense that they're having fun and fitting in. (Adorno was right about this 70 years ago.) But when they see a film - and really, we're talking about the same people - they do what high visual resolution, excellent camera work (as they understand it), etc. Now, they may have really poor discrimination for quality in script-writing, in narratives, even in the finer aspects of cinematography - they may even be as entirely committed to cliches in film as they are in music - but they do respond positively to higher quality in the delivery medium.
Do they get into the fact the people are wasting there time and entertainment budgets on gaming?
Can't go see a movie when you are busy playing CoD:MW2 or Tekken 6 or etc.
Also at 60$ a Crack you might be hurting for expendable cash.
Different demographics for film than for gaming. Hmmn, this is good, really: if the otherwise-low-attention-span explosion-loving young-adult male demo drops out of the film market equation, then the rest of the population becomes the dominant market - which may explain why more indie films are getting produced each year.
And people who do that are generally pretty bad parents, I might add. I'm not completely anti-media for our sprog, but media-viewing needs to be something they then communicate about, that they do intelligently, etc. I understand the need to occasionally placate a rampaging toddler with singing sparkly, but I'm convinced that it's gone much too far in the last couple decades.
That word, "strawman." I do not think it means what you think it means.
Perhaps in the trailer park that you live in, children are just the accidental by-product of sex. Where I live, the children are wanted, sex is safe, and procreation is intentional.
The degree to which you "work out" your "meat" (gah, no double entendre intended, really) could be a matter of personal choice. Imagine food preparation technology that you can use at home to tone the tissue to the extent you prefer, like a rice-cooker or a yogurt-maker.
People already eat human "meat" in modern Western cultures: there are people who cook and eat the placenta of their own children ("placentophagy.") Eating cultivated "human" tissue wouldn't be a stretch.
I repeat my objection to that defense of raising livestock for meat: if I argued that I was raising children for meat, or as future sex slaves, I would not be able to defend the practice by observing that I wouldn't have had those children at all otherwise. Also, there is nothing "natural" about livestock species.
Technology has already warped the human diet beyond recognition: there's nothing natural about shipping the milk and eggs all around the world, after pasteurization, of a few animals that have been mutated into domestic livestock. Nor does cultivated corn or bananas resemble anything that was seen in nature before their cultivation. That you can have any food you pretty much want, any time of the year, is already as much of an intervention by technology into the diet as cultivated meat tissue is.
Why kill animals if you get the benefits of meat without killing them, other than pure sadism? (And the fact that livestock only exists because we raise them for slaughter isn't a valid objection: if I argued that I was having several added children to raise for meat or as future sex slaves, I would not be able to defend the practice by observing that I wouldn't have had those children at all otherwise.)
I'm not a vegetarian. I like meat and fish, and attempts to go vegetarian left me listless. And I like good food enough that I would need the flavor of such cultivated tissues to be pretty indistinguishable from those taken from living animals. But I definitely support ending the cultivation of animals for meat if we can replace them with cultivated meat tissues, especially if we can't really tell the different from animal-sourced meat or fish. (The fisheries are collapsing, by the way - you should read about the collapse of the North Atlantic cod fisheries for a great example of a tragedy of the commons.)
I think a lot of people educated in Western music over-emphasize the appreciation of the melodic line and phrase over rhythm. Western art music only caught up with polyrhythms used in other musical traditions in the beginning of the 20th century, and even now, few really do well with microtones. I did have a background in music theory and appreciation (and performance), but it took a course in Hindustani classical music for me to start to realize what I was missing.
I feel quite comfortable dumping someone for having generally (what I consider) bad taste in music, art, literature etc. Tastes reveal a lot more than you give credit for. (Granted, that's broader than "disliking one's favorite musician.")
Slashdot Mirror
... forum posting...
Does classical music still land you in a hipster fight?
I could take that card and put it in the Horsley card!
This is by no means the world's most expensive Christmas card. That would be an 1843 carddesigned by English painter JC Horsley, commissioned by Sir Henry Cole, an English businessman who modernized the postal system. Only 1000 were made, and only a handful survive. One was recently auctioned for £22,250.
More info here.
Solaris has been OS'ed now that it is of negligible value. Android is a lot more than just Linux - the entire OS works on up-to-date mobile devices, and works a lot better than any other Linux dist does on them. That Cyanogen and his colleagues can create fully working installations of Android without proprietary code indicates how complete it is: show me anything as lively and vital as the Android dev scene on Sun hardware.
Go isn't a toy, it's a tot. Let's see if it grows.
... while it was spiraling to its destruction. Sun's open-source epiphany struck me as an act of desperation from a doomed organization.
Anyway, I contest that claim. Android is open source. The Chrome browser is open source. The Chrome OS is open source. The Go programming language is open source (out of the box, unlike Java.)
What's not open source are either their cloud-based stuff and apps generally acquired from 3rd parties: Earth, Sketch-Up, Picasa, etc. I wouldn't say that Google is 100% committed to FOSS, but they go farther than most. And their project hosting is much nicer, IMO, than Sourceforge.
Perhaps you don't remember how long, and after how much fuss, it took for Sun to open up Java.
I think those things have been part of Google culture for as long as I recall. It started as a research project in Stanford in the 1990's, and has long been involved with west coast research universities. If anything, these things are becoming less true, not more.
In other words, they dare give discounts to exclusive vendors. Discounts! What treachery!
Bell Labs was AT&T allowing a very, very small percentage of their workforce to do whatever interested them five days out of five. Google allows almost all their workforce to pursue pet projects 1 day out of 5. AT&T did this with the benefit of a protected monopoly, I might add.
I will accept that I have occasionally verged onto Google fandom, and that it can somewhat blind me to the dangers that Google can present. But I can explain why it has such appeal for many of us:
1. A deeply intellectual corporate cultural, with 70% of its workforce having PhDs (I don't know if this is still true.) This includes the "20%" concept, whereby all Google staff is given free-reign to research what interests them 1 day out of 5. Google, to me, recalls the days of business-as-research-endeavor, the era of Xerox Parc and Bell Labs and the intellectual energy they represented.
2. A friendliness to open source unmatched by any other major company.
3. A very open ecosystem, with freely available APIs. And, an absence of pretense that the ecosystem is closed or finished. I rather like that Google is in "perpetual beta" (though it can get frustrating, especially when they abandon a project.)
4. Lots of free stuff to play with. Unlike Apple, you don't need to be a well-heeled consumer to play pretty much in all parts of the Google "playground."
5. The sense that they are moving the functions of the library into the 21st century.
Nonetheless, you are right. They are gatekeepers for much of the world's information at this point. We need to be more skeptical and hold Google accountable for the considerable power they now possess.
Vegetarianism isn't veganism. Replace meat with cheese, milk or eggs, and you're good.
That's very insightful. However, I think we're getting to a period of time where that's no longer the case: there are a lot more competent web developers and content managers - and more plug-and-play content management tools - than there are good writers. (Design is still a sought-after talent.)
Part of the problem was also part of Salon's strength: they were started and run by writers. Old-school, ink-and-paper writers.
And their writing was and is very good, some of the best online. They raised the bar on the quality of online writing in the late 90's. I still regularly read some of their columnists (especially Glenn Greenwald, and their film reviews are among the best anywhere.) The intersection of the literati who would follow Salon and the tech-geeks who populate Slashdot is pretty small, so I don't expect this to resonate with many of them. They haven't fallen off the web; they've largely recovered from the hemorrhaging of readers from the paywall-period, but they won't get back the revenues they've lost in the meantime.
You. aren't. reading. accurately. Your .sig ("Please read and at least attempt to understand comment before replying, kthxbye.") is extremely ironic here.
Funny how this is another difference between film and music. Popular music audiences don't really care about resolution or sound-quality - they generally want familiarity, reassurance, a sense that they're having fun and fitting in. (Adorno was right about this 70 years ago.) But when they see a film - and really, we're talking about the same people - they do what high visual resolution, excellent camera work (as they understand it), etc. Now, they may have really poor discrimination for quality in script-writing, in narratives, even in the finer aspects of cinematography - they may even be as entirely committed to cliches in film as they are in music - but they do respond positively to higher quality in the delivery medium.
Do they get into the fact the people are wasting there time and entertainment budgets on gaming?
Can't go see a movie when you are busy playing CoD:MW2 or Tekken 6 or etc.
Also at 60$ a Crack you might be hurting for expendable cash.
Different demographics for film than for gaming. Hmmn, this is good, really: if the otherwise-low-attention-span explosion-loving young-adult male demo drops out of the film market equation, then the rest of the population becomes the dominant market - which may explain why more indie films are getting produced each year.
And people who do that are generally pretty bad parents, I might add. I'm not completely anti-media for our sprog, but media-viewing needs to be something they then communicate about, that they do intelligently, etc. I understand the need to occasionally placate a rampaging toddler with singing sparkly, but I'm convinced that it's gone much too far in the last couple decades.
That word, "strawman." I do not think it means what you think it means.
Perhaps in the trailer park that you live in, children are just the accidental by-product of sex. Where I live, the children are wanted, sex is safe, and procreation is intentional.
The degree to which you "work out" your "meat" (gah, no double entendre intended, really) could be a matter of personal choice. Imagine food preparation technology that you can use at home to tone the tissue to the extent you prefer, like a rice-cooker or a yogurt-maker.
People already eat human "meat" in modern Western cultures: there are people who cook and eat the placenta of their own children ("placentophagy.") Eating cultivated "human" tissue wouldn't be a stretch.
I repeat my objection to that defense of raising livestock for meat: if I argued that I was raising children for meat, or as future sex slaves, I would not be able to defend the practice by observing that I wouldn't have had those children at all otherwise. Also, there is nothing "natural" about livestock species.
Technology has already warped the human diet beyond recognition: there's nothing natural about shipping the milk and eggs all around the world, after pasteurization, of a few animals that have been mutated into domestic livestock. Nor does cultivated corn or bananas resemble anything that was seen in nature before their cultivation. That you can have any food you pretty much want, any time of the year, is already as much of an intervention by technology into the diet as cultivated meat tissue is.
Why kill animals if you get the benefits of meat without killing them, other than pure sadism? (And the fact that livestock only exists because we raise them for slaughter isn't a valid objection: if I argued that I was having several added children to raise for meat or as future sex slaves, I would not be able to defend the practice by observing that I wouldn't have had those children at all otherwise.)
I'm not a vegetarian. I like meat and fish, and attempts to go vegetarian left me listless. And I like good food enough that I would need the flavor of such cultivated tissues to be pretty indistinguishable from those taken from living animals. But I definitely support ending the cultivation of animals for meat if we can replace them with cultivated meat tissues, especially if we can't really tell the different from animal-sourced meat or fish. (The fisheries are collapsing, by the way - you should read about the collapse of the North Atlantic cod fisheries for a great example of a tragedy of the commons.)
I think a lot of people educated in Western music over-emphasize the appreciation of the melodic line and phrase over rhythm. Western art music only caught up with polyrhythms used in other musical traditions in the beginning of the 20th century, and even now, few really do well with microtones. I did have a background in music theory and appreciation (and performance), but it took a course in Hindustani classical music for me to start to realize what I was missing.
I feel quite comfortable dumping someone for having generally (what I consider) bad taste in music, art, literature etc. Tastes reveal a lot more than you give credit for. (Granted, that's broader than "disliking one's favorite musician.")