"hand" yourself, settle down. I wasn't trolling. I'd misread the details of the exploit. you were right, I was completely wrong, and my original post should be modded down (would do it myself if I could).
mozilla 0.6.1/win2k does NOT truncate the actual domain.
my surprise was that it didn't alert (the way opera reportedly does). but the behavior under discussion was the truncating, which it does not exhibit.
kudos for digging into it to get at the truth. but not bothering w capitalization is unrelated to trollishness! this was an honest (albeit stupid) mistake.
last point: I AM glad I responded, b/c it led to the truth -- something I value much more than being right.
Yes, I know you're a troll. But I figured anybody who might be fooled by your outstanding writing should be able to click on a link and test their own browsers.
I shouldn't dignify this with a response. I did test it, with mozilla firebird 0.6.1 on win2k.
(2) interesting idea. however, "politics" is hard to differentiate from "philosophy" or "worldview" which is intrinsic to nearly every/. discussion. also, a new category for "politics" would imply a level of specificity that would logically lead to many other such categories as well.... interesting anyway.
also note, technology embodies politics. e.g. nuclear power will *always* lead to centralized authority, whereas solar power is by its nature decentralized. there are myriad similar examples. so when we discuss technology, political issues are inherent and inevitable./$0.02
["America is, after all, the only society that does not define its citizens substantially in ethnic terms.".]
Yea, I wave my flag around a little too much for some, but even I know that is certainly not true..
I disagree. His comment doesn't imply that there is not racism, but rather more specifically that in the US, ethnicity is not tightly coupled with nationality.
German-Americans, Scots-Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, etc. are all equally American. (These groups and others are not always treated the same socially, but the idea that, say, Americans of Irish descent are more or less "American" than those of Italian descent is simply not tenable.)
It's true that newer ethnic arrivals to this country (e.g. Russians, Vietnamese, etc) as well as historically oppressed groups (African-Americans, Latinos, etc) face discrimination. But -- unlike in virtually every other country in the world -- defining the ethnic characteristics of an "American" is impossible. Even if you picture a WASPish blond/blue Euro-American (which represents 50% of the country, and less than 25% in urban areas) you still can't tie this archtype to a particular ethnicity, with any sort of consistency or validity. (Compare this to, say, Germany, or Japan, or Norway, or Italy, or Nigeria... you get my point.)
bTW, I do agree with your complaint wrt "education is the answer" -- some of the commentary following his article (in the same pg) addresses this quite well, too.
I found the commentary following Delong's essay to be as worthwhile as the original text. Stephenson's The Diamond Age plays out some of these ideas in more detail, for those interested in possible ramifications of nanotech. That fraction of the/. readership who haven't already may enjoy that as well. (I did.)
Sigh. I do program. I've been doing so professionally for over 6 years. I'm completely familiar with web standards, and I'm not any kind of idiot (beyond the fact that I'm actually replying to AC flamebait).
There's no need to get nasty.
Your question, "how is this any different from any individual site having its own design and navigation"? is legitimate, but answerable. There is a fundamental difference between a navigational framework or mechanism, and the particular usage of such a mechanism. Browser toolbars and hyperlinks within a page are two such mechanisms. Mouse gestures are a third. But whereas the first two are stable and knowable by a user (thanks to familiarity w one's browser of choice, and the basic workings of hyperlinks, respectively), the per-site implementation implicit in Javascript-based gestures introduces a completely different level of uncertainty and instability into the picture. A primary reason the web took off the way it did was that sites all behaved more or less the same. Using Javascript mouse gestures or any other site-specific navigation mechanism is at odds with this consistency.
Mouse gestures may well have their place in web navigation, but they belong at the browser level and in formal standards, not in the chaos of individual implementations.
This is an opinion based on the principle of the idea, not on the merits of a particular implementation, however graceful, intuitive or cool it may be.
Anyway, you should note that your ideas will generally carry more weight if you ar slower to jump to conclusions, stop posting anonymously and exhibit more restraint by refraining from unneccessary aggressive insults.
This whole bill is a waste of time, for any of several reasons you've elcidated. Additionally, note that the limited jurisdiction of US Law (ie, the United States) makes this even more worthless.
It belabors the obvious to point out that this will never be implemented my more than a tiny fraction of sites, that it actively interferes with normal point/click/drag behaviors (like highlighting text? click, drag left->right?) and that learning PER-SITE navigation is simply ridiculous.
It's not that no-one's thought of it before, it's that it's a bad idea on the face of it.
I'm the lead web developer for a large website (over 1,000 jsps, over 4 million registered members). We serve our images,.css and.js files from external servers at a separate domain, which removes load from our small server farm, and greatly speeds up response times for our users. If Norton or other popular consumer tools start blocking images not stored on the same server as the original request, they will not see any images, stylesheets, or javascript. Blocking popups on other servers is one thing, but preventing the use of an image server is just plain stupid. Gotta leave control in the hands of the user. This is the domain of the browser and its configuration. (as an aside, if one browser *koff* mozilla firebird *koff* happens to be better at this than others, perhaps users will have YARTDIE (yet another reason to drop IE)....
my brother david weekly had this to say about it, which I found interesting:
This message was posted on a mailing list in response to a post
that claimed that IPv6 would be widespread by 2005 due to an IPv4
address shortage
NATs, unfortunately, made a need to switch over to IPv6 wholly
unnecessary. Such a switchover will probably not happen for at least
another ten years. Even ten years ago, we were "running out of" IPv4
space due to incredibly inefficient allocations using the "class based
addressing" method - by which your network was deemed to either to
likely possess 253 computers, 65,533 computers, or 16,777,213
computers. A specific network was identified by 24, 16, or 8
bits. (The more bits it takes to identify a network, the more networks
can exist but at the expense of having fewer unique addresses per
network.)
This was quickly determined to be an inordinate waste of
addresses and as early as the early 90's folks were predicting we'd
rapidly run out of addresses. So class allocations changed a little,
and instead of giving an organization with 1000 computers a class B
(with 65,533 useable addresses), they'd give them four class C's (with
1012 addresses). This helped stem the tide for a bit and arguably
saved the Internet's ass, but it was clear that a more elegant system
for identifying networks was needed.
After some backbone technology re-architecting, a new scheme called
Classless Internet Domain Routing, or CIDR was introduced, which
allowed bit-sized granularity, meaning that a network was identified
by exactly as many bits as you needed. Your network could possess 13
computers, or 16,381 computers, and the system could deal with that
efficiently. CIDR definitely also helped save the Internet's ass. But
the addresses kept on coming; that dang Internet was getting popular
very quickly! Pundits started talking about The Great IPv6 changeover,
despite the fact that less than one person in 100 on the Internet had
an IPv6-enabled operating system.
Then came NATs. While Network Address Translation had been used in
many environments, it hadn't really taken off tremendously. Then
Linksys released a rather affordable cute little blue box. This piece
of hardware let home users plug in several computers to the blue box,
configure it with a web interface, jack in their cable/DSL connection
and suddenly be sharing Internet access easily with everyone in the
house, using one IP address and so fooling the ISP into thinking that
there was only one computer using the Internet (many ISPs either don't
permit or don't have the infrastructure to give out multiple addresses
to a customer). These NATs had a secondary benefit, which was that by
default, all incoming connections from the outside are dropped on the
floor. I'm not sure Linksys had such "firewalling" in mind when
originally designing the device - it's purely a practical issue. I
mean, if someone says to a NAT "here's this piece of information" - to
who which of the four connected computers should the NAT send it? By
default, the NAT will give up and just drop the sorry packet. This
means that when you're behind a NAT, you're protected from a whole
class of Internet attacks. This realization further drove adoption.
Companies with low IT budgets realized that they wouldn't have to buy
extra IP addresses from their ISP (which often came at a premium) and
that they could have simple firewalling without a complex
configuration. Both companies and people could not see the inherent
value in having each of their computers have an Internet-deliverable
address, and there was real value (protection) to be had in NOT be
addressable from the Internet.
This, again, saved the Internet's ass. Instead of an organization of
1000 needing a class B, wasting hundreds of thousands of IPs, or even
four Class Cs, this organization now only needs a single IP address to
cover all of its desktops. Now instead of thinking about IP addresses
as computer addresses, they have started to become network addresses,
which is to say,
I studied human perceptual mechanisms as an undergraduate. In particular I recall an advanced seminar on perception (which included cognitive psychology and neurobiology as prerequisite courses) in which the issue of driverless cars was discussed at some length. One particularly illustrative example of the challenges faced by developers of such a vehicle involved a box falling off a truck on the highway. A human driver could judge in under a second, from the way the box bounced, whether it was a heavy and potentially deadly obstacle requiring severe action, or an empty cardboard box not justifying dangerous evasive maneuvers. At the time (circa 1995), the most current best-of-breed computer visual systems could not distinguish between a log blocking the road and the shadow cast by a telephone pole. How much more difficult, then, must the bouncing box problem be?
I bring this up not to discredit the idea that driverless cars will likely someday be a (very useful) reality. I am sure that enormous progress is being made in this kind of endeavor. I simply wish to point out that even after this race, there will still be a long way to go before Hal drives Ms Daisy out for groceries.
As an aside, I am very curious as to the percentage of the participating vehicles that will succeed in crossing the finish line at all...
Xen only requires the OS *kernel* to be ported, not apps. For most users this is more than "good enough"... and makes it a viable replacement for vmware, especially given the reported (tiny) resource overhead.
I couldn't disagree more. How about a fundamental understanding of cookies? From the text:
Although cookies are most often described in conversation as if they are entities (for example, "a Web server sends you a cookie"), they are much easier to understand at a functional level if you consider them an extension of the HTTP protocol, which is actually more correct."
(Shiflett goes on to describe the Set-Cookie and Cookie headers.)
Relying on a given scripting language's manipulation of HTTP requests/responses without understanding what's actually going over the wire is a mistake.
By the same reasoning, it's also a mistake for a web developer to use WYSIWYG HTML editor like Dreamweaver, without understanding the markup that's being generated...
For your average web developer, reading this book (which should take just a couple sittings over one weekend) would be a worthwhile investment.
this was a great book as an overview, and as a quick reference for details on http headers.
it's eminently readable, and while I agree w the reviewer that it's light on examples, the writing is clear enough that in most cases, examples would be redundant.
very little filler and very readable, easy to read in 1 or 2 sittings and come away with a much better handle on the underpinnings and details of the request/response model. the web is not as well understood by page authors / web developers as it should be, and this is an excellent book to help remedy the situation.
I give it a solid 7/10 and am glad I read it. it's within easy reach on my shelf....
cheaper? arguably. 35% of the work for 35% of the cost != cheaper.
better? hardly. you get what you pay for. the lgsofts, wipros and other major overseas software vendors know how to peddle solutions for large companies with stable processes, handling repetitive tasks, and to some degree basic J2EE web services -- but in my experience the percentage of offshore engineers who are able to think creatively, act on their own initiative and produce quality software is remarkably low.
...and in the long run, for the US to allow a massive brain drain, to lose its position as a leader in technology, is short-sighted and potentially disastrous. Yes it's a good thing for India and other such countries to have a healthy middle class... but if we stop producing good career paths for engineers at home, we do ourselves a great disservice.
the point for me (and most of etree) is to create the highest-possible quality CD's of live recordings by taper-friendly bands. if I were only listening to these concerts on my computer, of course mp3 is preferable, for the reasons you cited. but burning a CD that is a PERFECT CLONE of a first-gen digital source guarantees that when I *do* play it in a friend's $10,000 sicko home stereo system, I'm getting the whole shebang.
Equally (or perhaps even more) important: with a higher barrier to entry (e.g., new codecs like SHN and FLAC, and higher bandwidth costs) you end up with a self-selecting community of audiophiles who by definition are more concerned with the initial quality of the SOURCE recording.
FLAC and SHN are for the real audiophiles/geeks, and this leads to all kinds of side-effect goodness.
I disagree with both the style and the substance of your argument.
"I find, as a graduate English student, [As if this status had any bearing on your expertise in the subject at hand? Get off it! You're probably not even aware of how obnoxious and pompous this is, so I'm telling you here. If you were my little brother I'd smack you in the back of the head for trying to use this to manipulate others' perceptions of your credibility.]
"...that I can't really think of any generation or era where the intellectual art has really lasted well." [Try harder: Dostoevsky, Pynchon, Delillo, Escher, Picasso, etc.... if this is the kind of thing you meant by 'intellectual art'. If not, please define it. Good luck.]
"The popular stuff tends to be what survives," [Actually the quality 'stuff' tends to survive. Look at recent American jazz music history: Miles, Coltrane, Ellington and Mingus are remembered and celebrated, as they likely will be for centuries. Who can name the 'Kenny G' of the 50's? I can't even cite proper counterexamples, precisely because pop trash falls by the wayside the moment the fad has run its course. As with music, so it is with literature and other forms of art. (Shakespeare may be a notable exception.) Those who maintain the legacies of Art History, Music History, and Literature are generally interested in preserving the best works in their fields, not the ones that were most popular at the time.]
"...largely because it was actually designed for people to enjoy, rather than praise." [Huh? Are you really claiming to know the design motives of a given game's developers, and to be able to categorize them accordingly? So what is an example of a deep, contemplative game designed for the purpose of garnering praise? What a ridiculous proposition.]
"...basic tests of art, which is survivability" [Art by whose definition? There are countless phenomenal but temporal works of art which defy this weak attempt at limiting what is called 'Art'. As for game technology change leading to extinction of playable games, so far MAME and similar emulators, combined with an increasing interest in preserving and archiving older hardware and software, suggest the opposite. Feel like playing Joust or Pong?]
in fact I'd go so far as to say this applies to virtually everything that is manufactured, from printers to stereos to cars and kitchen appliances... it's economies of scale dictating the corner-cutting, cost-saving, "it's good enough" approach to material goods. anecdotally, my sailboat's 16-hp yanmar diesel engine was built in 1979, and it is sturdier and more reliable than you'd believe. I've trusted my life to it, and it's probably got another 20 years of good service. also my parents' moritz stereo receiver component is about 30 years old, and works as well as it did when they got it. compare that to the lightweight plastic garbage w a 2-year shelf life selling in stores today.
I wonder if this shift towards more temporary purchases is fueled in part by the speed with which computers become obsolete. as consumers expect to replace a computer at *least* every 3 years, perhaps they/we become less averse to sacrificing quality for new features?
whatever the reason, I wish it were easier to find things built to last..../$0.02
Slashdot Mirror
they posted the wrong images, this is more like it:
more interesting pics
I have one.
pretty convenient, to have ability to pay for gas and food even if you lose your wallet.
I'm a privacy bigot, but to me this is acceptable.
I KNOW they're tracking these purchases (they have to for it to work) and their ppolicy is fine.
cheapass.com
these guys understand games and just sell you what you need. (my personal favorite is 'kill dr lucky' -- hilarious, with high replay value)
anyway this doesn't directly address your question but it's relevant, and you could get some good ideas wrt saving materials costs etc...
"hand" yourself, settle down.
I wasn't trolling. I'd misread the details of the exploit. you were right, I was completely wrong, and my original post should be modded down (would do it myself if I could).
mozilla 0.6.1/win2k does NOT truncate the actual domain.
my surprise was that it didn't alert (the way opera reportedly does). but the behavior under discussion was the truncating, which it does not exhibit.
kudos for digging into it to get at the truth.
but not bothering w capitalization is unrelated to trollishness! this was an honest (albeit stupid) mistake.
last point: I AM glad I responded, b/c it led to the truth -- something I value much more than being right.
I shouldn't dignify this with a response.
I did test it, with mozilla firebird 0.6.1 on win2k.
http://www.slashdot.org%01@www.cnn.com/
displays the cnn homepg.
try it on firebird 0.6.1, then eat your shoe.
not just IE6!
IE5.5, IE6, firebird0.61....
those berating ms should set about fixing it in their beloved OSS browser first. interesting to see whose fix comes out first.
because they can. (boring).
next issue?
(1) sure, agreed
/. discussion. also, a new category for "politics" would imply a level of specificity that would logically lead to many other such categories as well.... interesting anyway.
/$0.02
(2) interesting idea. however, "politics" is hard to differentiate from "philosophy" or "worldview" which is intrinsic to nearly every
also note, technology embodies politics. e.g. nuclear power will *always* lead to centralized authority, whereas solar power is by its nature decentralized. there are myriad similar examples.
so when we discuss technology, political issues are inherent and inevitable.
I disagree. His comment doesn't imply that there is not racism, but rather more specifically that in the US, ethnicity is not tightly coupled with nationality.
German-Americans, Scots-Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, etc. are all equally American. (These groups and others are not always treated the same socially, but the idea that, say, Americans of Irish descent are more or less "American" than those of Italian descent is simply not tenable.)
It's true that newer ethnic arrivals to this country (e.g. Russians, Vietnamese, etc) as well as historically oppressed groups (African-Americans, Latinos, etc) face discrimination. But -- unlike in virtually every other country in the world -- defining the ethnic characteristics of an "American" is impossible.
Even if you picture a WASPish blond/blue Euro-American (which represents 50% of the country, and less than 25% in urban areas) you still can't tie this archtype to a particular ethnicity, with any sort of consistency or validity. (Compare this to, say, Germany, or Japan, or Norway, or Italy, or Nigeria... you get my point.)
bTW, I do agree with your complaint wrt "education is the answer" -- some of the commentary following his article (in the same pg) addresses this quite well, too.
I found the commentary following Delong's essay to be as worthwhile as the original text. Stephenson's The Diamond Age plays out some of these ideas in more detail, for those interested in possible ramifications of nanotech. /. readership who haven't already may enjoy that as well. (I did.)
That fraction of the
when will they bring it back?
why isn't it available (in its entirety) on dvd?
sigh.
Sigh. I do program. I've been doing so professionally for over 6 years. I'm completely familiar with web standards, and I'm not any kind of idiot (beyond the fact that I'm actually replying to AC flamebait).
There's no need to get nasty.
Your question, "how is this any different from any individual site having its own design and navigation"? is legitimate, but answerable.
There is a fundamental difference between a navigational framework or mechanism, and the particular usage of such a mechanism. Browser toolbars and hyperlinks within a page are two such mechanisms. Mouse gestures are a third. But whereas the first two are stable and knowable by a user (thanks to familiarity w one's browser of choice, and the basic workings of hyperlinks, respectively), the per-site implementation implicit in Javascript-based gestures introduces a completely different level of uncertainty and instability into the picture. A primary reason the web took off the way it did was that sites all behaved more or less the same. Using Javascript mouse gestures or any other site-specific navigation mechanism is at odds with this consistency.
Mouse gestures may well have their place in web navigation, but they belong at the browser level and in formal standards, not in the chaos of individual implementations.
This is an opinion based on the principle of the idea, not on the merits of a particular implementation, however graceful, intuitive or cool it may be.
Anyway, you should note that your ideas will generally carry more weight if you ar slower to jump to conclusions, stop posting anonymously and exhibit more restraint by refraining from unneccessary aggressive insults.
Have a nice day.
Thank you for that, eaolson.
This whole bill is a waste of time, for any of several reasons you've elcidated. Additionally, note that the limited jurisdiction of US Law (ie, the United States) makes this even more worthless.
This is inane.
Repeat after me:
"Web Standards."
It belabors the obvious to point out that this will never be implemented my more than a tiny fraction of sites, that it actively interferes with normal point/click/drag behaviors (like highlighting text? click, drag left->right?) and that learning PER-SITE navigation is simply ridiculous.
It's not that no-one's thought of it before, it's that it's a bad idea on the face of it.
I'm the lead web developer for a large website (over 1,000 jsps, over 4 million registered members). We serve our images, .css and .js files from external servers at a separate domain, which removes load from our small server farm, and greatly speeds up response times for our users. If Norton or other popular consumer tools start blocking images not stored on the same server as the original request, they will not see any images, stylesheets, or javascript. Blocking popups on other servers is one thing, but preventing the use of an image server is just plain stupid. Gotta leave control in the hands of the user. This is the domain of the browser and its configuration. (as an aside, if one browser *koff* mozilla firebird *koff* happens to be better at this than others, perhaps users will have YARTDIE (yet another reason to drop IE)....
now I'm rambling.
This message was posted on a mailing list in response to a post that claimed that IPv6 would be widespread by 2005 due to an IPv4 address shortage
NATs, unfortunately, made a need to switch over to IPv6 wholly unnecessary. Such a switchover will probably not happen for at least another ten years. Even ten years ago, we were "running out of" IPv4 space due to incredibly inefficient allocations using the "class based addressing" method - by which your network was deemed to either to likely possess 253 computers, 65,533 computers, or 16,777,213 computers. A specific network was identified by 24, 16, or 8 bits. (The more bits it takes to identify a network, the more networks can exist but at the expense of having fewer unique addresses per network.)
This was quickly determined to be an inordinate waste of addresses and as early as the early 90's folks were predicting we'd rapidly run out of addresses. So class allocations changed a little, and instead of giving an organization with 1000 computers a class B (with 65,533 useable addresses), they'd give them four class C's (with 1012 addresses). This helped stem the tide for a bit and arguably saved the Internet's ass, but it was clear that a more elegant system for identifying networks was needed.
After some backbone technology re-architecting, a new scheme called Classless Internet Domain Routing, or CIDR was introduced, which allowed bit-sized granularity, meaning that a network was identified by exactly as many bits as you needed. Your network could possess 13 computers, or 16,381 computers, and the system could deal with that efficiently. CIDR definitely also helped save the Internet's ass. But the addresses kept on coming; that dang Internet was getting popular very quickly! Pundits started talking about The Great IPv6 changeover, despite the fact that less than one person in 100 on the Internet had an IPv6-enabled operating system.
Then came NATs. While Network Address Translation had been used in many environments, it hadn't really taken off tremendously. Then Linksys released a rather affordable cute little blue box. This piece of hardware let home users plug in several computers to the blue box, configure it with a web interface, jack in their cable/DSL connection and suddenly be sharing Internet access easily with everyone in the house, using one IP address and so fooling the ISP into thinking that there was only one computer using the Internet (many ISPs either don't permit or don't have the infrastructure to give out multiple addresses to a customer). These NATs had a secondary benefit, which was that by default, all incoming connections from the outside are dropped on the floor. I'm not sure Linksys had such "firewalling" in mind when originally designing the device - it's purely a practical issue. I mean, if someone says to a NAT "here's this piece of information" - to who which of the four connected computers should the NAT send it? By default, the NAT will give up and just drop the sorry packet. This means that when you're behind a NAT, you're protected from a whole class of Internet attacks. This realization further drove adoption.
Companies with low IT budgets realized that they wouldn't have to buy extra IP addresses from their ISP (which often came at a premium) and that they could have simple firewalling without a complex configuration. Both companies and people could not see the inherent value in having each of their computers have an Internet-deliverable address, and there was real value (protection) to be had in NOT be addressable from the Internet.
This, again, saved the Internet's ass. Instead of an organization of 1000 needing a class B, wasting hundreds of thousands of IPs, or even four Class Cs, this organization now only needs a single IP address to cover all of its desktops. Now instead of thinking about IP addresses as computer addresses, they have started to become network addresses, which is to say,
I bring this up not to discredit the idea that driverless cars will likely someday be a (very useful) reality. I am sure that enormous progress is being made in this kind of endeavor. I simply wish to point out that even after this race, there will still be a long way to go before Hal drives Ms Daisy out for groceries.
As an aside, I am very curious as to the percentage of the participating vehicles that will succeed in crossing the finish line at all...
read the article.
Xen only requires the OS *kernel* to be ported, not apps. For most users this is more than "good enough"... and makes it a viable replacement for vmware, especially given the reported (tiny) resource overhead.
How about a fundamental understanding of cookies?
From the text:
(Shiflett goes on to describe the Set-Cookie and Cookie headers.)
Relying on a given scripting language's manipulation of HTTP requests/responses without understanding what's actually going over the wire is a mistake.
By the same reasoning, it's also a mistake for a web developer to use WYSIWYG HTML editor like Dreamweaver, without understanding the markup that's being generated...
For your average web developer, reading this book (which should take just a couple sittings over one weekend) would be a worthwhile investment.
this was a great book as an overview, and as a quick reference for details on http headers.
it's eminently readable, and while I agree w the reviewer that it's light on examples, the writing is clear enough that in most cases, examples would be redundant.
very little filler and very readable, easy to read in 1 or 2 sittings and come away with a much better handle on the underpinnings and details of the request/response model. the web is not as well understood by page authors / web developers as it should be, and this is an excellent book to help remedy the situation.
I give it a solid 7/10 and am glad I read it.
it's within easy reach on my shelf....
"...cheaper and better"...
...and in the long run, for the US to allow a massive brain drain, to lose its position as a leader in technology, is short-sighted and potentially disastrous. Yes it's a good thing for India and other such countries to have a healthy middle class... but if we stop producing good career paths for engineers at home, we do ourselves a great disservice.
yeah right.
I've got experience managing offshore resources.
cheaper? arguably. 35% of the work for 35% of the cost != cheaper.
better? hardly. you get what you pay for. the lgsofts, wipros and other major overseas software vendors know how to peddle solutions for large companies with stable processes, handling repetitive tasks, and to some degree basic J2EE web services -- but in my experience the percentage of offshore engineers who are able to think creatively, act on their own initiative and produce quality software is remarkably low.
the point for me (and most of etree) is to create the highest-possible quality CD's of live recordings by taper-friendly bands. if I were only listening to these concerts on my computer, of course mp3 is preferable, for the reasons you cited. but burning a CD that is a PERFECT CLONE of a first-gen digital source guarantees that when I *do* play it in a friend's $10,000 sicko home stereo system, I'm getting the whole shebang.
Equally (or perhaps even more) important:
with a higher barrier to entry (e.g., new codecs like SHN and FLAC, and higher bandwidth costs) you end up with a self-selecting community of audiophiles who by definition are more concerned with the initial quality of the SOURCE recording.
FLAC and SHN are for the real audiophiles/geeks, and this leads to all kinds of side-effect goodness.
I disagree with both the style and the substance of your argument.
"I find, as a graduate English student,
[As if this status had any bearing on your expertise in the subject at hand? Get off it! You're probably not even aware of how obnoxious and pompous this is, so I'm telling you here. If you were my little brother I'd smack you in the back of the head for trying to use this to manipulate others' perceptions of your credibility.]
"...that I can't really think of any generation or era where the intellectual art has really lasted well."
[Try harder: Dostoevsky, Pynchon, Delillo, Escher, Picasso, etc.... if this is the kind of thing you meant by 'intellectual art'. If not, please define it.
Good luck.]
"The popular stuff tends to be what survives,"
[Actually the quality 'stuff' tends to survive. Look at recent American jazz music history: Miles, Coltrane, Ellington and Mingus are remembered and celebrated, as they likely will be for centuries. Who can name the 'Kenny G' of the 50's? I can't even cite proper counterexamples, precisely because pop trash falls by the wayside the moment the fad has run its course. As with music, so it is with literature and other forms of art. (Shakespeare may be a notable exception.) Those who maintain the legacies of Art History, Music History, and Literature are generally interested in preserving the best works in their fields, not the ones that were most popular at the time.]
"...largely because it was actually designed for people to enjoy, rather than praise."
[Huh? Are you really claiming to know the design motives of a given game's developers, and to be able to categorize them accordingly? So what is an example of a deep, contemplative game designed for the purpose of garnering praise? What a ridiculous proposition.]
"...basic tests of art, which is survivability"
[Art by whose definition? There are countless phenomenal but temporal works of art which defy this weak attempt at limiting what is called 'Art'. As for game technology change leading to extinction of playable games, so far MAME and similar emulators, combined with an increasing interest in preserving and archiving older hardware and software, suggest the opposite. Feel like playing Joust or Pong?]
Ok that's enough said.
offtopic:
per your sig, the dump story is hilrious.
also your 3d artwork is impressive, nice website.
have a nice day
chris
in fact I'd go so far as to say this applies to virtually everything that is manufactured, from printers to stereos to cars and kitchen appliances... it's economies of scale dictating the corner-cutting, cost-saving, "it's good enough" approach to material goods. anecdotally, my sailboat's 16-hp yanmar diesel engine was built in 1979, and it is sturdier and more reliable than you'd believe. I've trusted my life to it, and it's probably got another 20 years of good service. also my parents' moritz stereo receiver component is about 30 years old, and works as well as it did when they got it. compare that to the lightweight plastic garbage w a 2-year shelf life selling in stores today.
/$0.02
I wonder if this shift towards more temporary purchases is fueled in part by the speed with which computers become obsolete. as consumers expect to replace a computer at *least* every 3 years, perhaps they/we become less averse to sacrificing quality for new features?
whatever the reason, I wish it were easier to find things built to last....