Re:Where is everybody? The above is funny. Laugh.
on
Technoromanticism
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· Score: 1
As a regular Katz-flamer who shakes my head sadly, points out where he is wrong, and calls him an idiot every time he rears his empty head, I think I can explain. The article itself is shaking its head sadly and branding its author an idiot more effectively than I, or any other Katz-mocker, can. Except for its brevity, it's the perfect send-up of Katz. It says nothing, repeatedly, in a solipsistic, self-congratulatory way; it doesn't know what it thinks, but it agrees with this new book here; it revels in its own lack of interest. Frankly, post-Columbine, I, tech-savvy cyberlibertarian, don't know what, interactively, the hell(mouth) to do, peer-to-peer. And I'm its target demographic!
Re: the hard reset button (which you need on the mac) is on the bottom of the box so you have to lift the thing, put the top on a soft surface (don't want to scratch the lucite) and pop the button. Not cool.
If you're not running it already, you should install MacsBug (easy to find via google.com/mac, for example). In "hard reset" conditions, it drops you into an ugly-ass shell and you can, 99+% of the time, type your way out of it. I don't even know where the reset button on my box is.
You can also send prolix AppleEvent commands from MacsBugApp instead of using your Finder menus, if you're into that dorky sort of thing. I am, sometimes. In fact, my "version" of MacOS is customized enough that I get confused when I have to use the standard setup. Don't let/. or the lame Mac sites fool you; you, too, can be a crash-free (well, sort of) prompt-jockey, even with OS 8 & 9.
Virtual desktops exist in the Mac world, too. Search, boy! Search!
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius's style is influenced not by its author's immersion in a world of "interactive" whatever-buzzwordy-thing-you-said, but by his having read the works of Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, William Gass, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, John Barth, Gilbert Sorrentino, Mark Leyner, Don DeLillo, Thomas PynchonÑetc, etc; this list could go on for daysÑall of whom wrote a hell of a lot like Eggers (but mostly better) many, many, many years before there was any "interactive" whatever to give them their ideas. Writers read books. You should try it.
I just realized I didn't answer your question, which part of your comment I thought was wrong, directly.
It was the thing about the toddlers. It seemed to imply that we show them pictures to help them understand things. I think that we show them pictures to *limit* their understanding of things (like "home" and "love" above).
The "I think you're wrong" part was just a hastily-worded aside. "Wrong" isn't the right word. Probably sounded a little bitchy. What I meant was this: I think pictures are a hindrance to *understanding* computers, however helpful they may be in getting us started *using* them, and I agree with the article's author that understanding them is important (and that "ease" is the ground of an ideological battle).
I don't think that the difference between information conveyed via text vs. pictures is a difference in quantity, but in kind, and, in this case, in unconscious motivation. Abstractions that are "unnatural"Ñlike the workings of computers and the structure of internet, or complex political/ideological concepts, or poetryÑcan't be conveyed in pictures without stripping them of most of their meaning. A picture meant to represent "home" or "love" can work because we all have ideas of "love" and "home" in our heads, or we know what most people mean to convey when they show pictures of those things, because we've seen their pictures a million times already. Since not too many of us have "FTP" or "Frankfurt School Marxism" or "Your mouth is like Columbus Day" worked out so clearly in our heads, pictures can't convey them honestly to us, and relying on others' pictures of them puts us at a knowledge-disadvantage to the picture-makers (who are working from ideology, however unconscious). Computer interface is a metonym of this problem, and what I think you're "wrong" about is the innocent helpfulness of pictures on our screens. Not that words are any "better," generally. In the case of computers, though, I think they are, because they give us *more.*
I should have finished school and become a professor; I'd be really good at faking this po-mo stuff for money [smiley].
What you argue against isn't what he's arguing for (I also think you're wrong, but that doesn't matter).
An example: Right now, off in the bottom right-hand corner of my "desktop," there's an icon for a.lisp file. It looks like a bunch of parenthesized lines nested within each other on a page. Good icon. Makes sense even without its file extension exposed. But where is it? My GUI metaphor (it's MacOS) tells me it's "on my desktop." But the "desktop" is just a default-invisible, always-open directory of the HD. But that information isn't available graphically. The HD and the desktop seem utterly separate; I mean, there are two different pictures, so they must be two different things. I wouldn't be making an obvious mistake if I zeroed the data on my HD and expected the.lisp file not to be destroyed. I know better, but only because I'm a dork, not because the picture gave me the right "thousand words." The metaphor is easy, but it's a lie, or at least an obfuscation.
What he's saying is that concealing the artificiality of the systemÑthe fact that it's a computer, not a deskÑin such a way may be a mistake. In my example, if I act based on the "desktop" lie , I may act against my own interests. Or, at the very least, I won't really know what I'm doing. He thinks people should know what they're doing.
You design a program (or whatever) with a goal in mind: It should enable you to do X. Constraining that goal to "It must enable you to do X easily" tends to limit the scope of X (by making it more rigid), and "easily" tends to drag other, negative conditions in with it, like "more slowly," "less securely," and "without understanding." Given that, should "easily" be a part of your primary aim?
He doesn't think so. But he's not just talking about computers. That annoys and confuses the slashmonkeys.
Napster Co., however, does. They claim not to have a business plan. BS. Their business plan is to get bought out byÑor made the royalty-receiving default file-exchange protocol ofÑ"The Industry" as part of a settlement of this suit, which they knew was inevitable. e-Xtortion.
Napster's users can go to Gnutella. Only Lars cares. Napster Co. should go to jail. Yes, all of them.
While Carnivore itself isn't likely to ruin my life (because I don't use email for anything interesting), the "your crime will be tattooed on your hard drive/TCP logs; all we have to do is read it and lock you up" attitude behind it could.
If you looked at a list of my HTTP requests for the last week or so, you'd find me to have visited sites by/about serial killers and rapists, borderline child pornographers and NAMBLA types, fake-ass 31337 hax0rs, and computer security experts. Now why would I be doing that if I'm not planning to, say, stalk and kill some 13yo hotties by IRCing them up, getting their IPs, cracking their mommies' b0x0rs, hex-dumping their Passport binaries in search of an address, etc.? It looks like that's what I've got in mind, right? Better keep an eye on me.
The thing is, all I'm doing is trying to learn how these highly specialized "creeps" talkÑtheir speech patterns, jargon, cant, the frequency with which they end their sentences with prepositions, their favored emoticons, etc.Ñso I can write a character who's easily mistaken by readers for today's favorite boogie/bogeymen (hackers and child predators), because he talks the talk. [Is that ironic?]
Explaining an as-yet-unwritten section of a complex "avant-garde" book to the FBI would not be fun. For all their alleged smarts, they have a hard time with this artsy crap, and all I have now is potentially damning notes and web archives. Not that they'd ask me anyway. They'd just question my neighbors about the lurking predator on the block, ask them what suspicious behavior the skinny [drugs?] Jewish [conspiracy?] guy [penis?] with the shaved head [a Nazi Jew? is he schizophrenic?] down the street has been up toÑthings like being up all night sitting in front of his computer [writing], drinking [coffee], with his hand in his lap [broken right wrist]Ñand let them ruin my life. Certainly been done before.
Point: FBInet bad, Freenet good. It's not only criminals who think so.
And VINTCERF's name looks like an acronym for a CIA plot to assassinate Castro [winky smiley].
We don't hire serial killers to catch serial killers, do we?
"Hire," no. But, for example, the investigators looking for the so-called Green River Killer in/around Seattle, when they were stumped, went and asked Ted Bundy for insight into the GRK's methods and advice in apprehending him. It didn't work because they didn't listen to him. There's a book about it, called The Riverman, by Robert Keppel, one of the detectives. It's an accidental case study in cop psychology, showing how their badge-flashing, domineering personalities make them unsuited for dealing with cases involving complex characters like Bundy, who comes off as a weirdly (sym)pathetic antihero, shouting the truth at a brick wall. An odd book.
So, yes, "we" do "hire" serial killersÑwithout paying them; they tend to be very chatty, and love hearing about the 'sploits of others in the field, and getting to hear and talk about it is payment enoughÑto catch serial killers.
I'd add one more to your list: Things that are a lot more complicated than they seem.
This is an area where Adobe, Macromedia, Avid, etc. probably have things locked up for the next, oh, ten years (wild guess). Photoshop/GIMP is the best (tired) comparison. There are dozens of little, unsexy features of Photoshop that GIMP users/developers don't seem even to be aware of the existence of, let alone the difficulty/boringness of cloning. In fact, most Photoshop users don't even know about them, so they don't notice the absence of them in GIMP, but bitchy "professional" types can't/won't do without them. And it'll be quite awhile before someone gets around to coding them, because the "itch" isn't developers' (who have what they want already--nice web graphics, cool scripting), it's graphics "power users'" (too busy to learn how to code it themselves).
OSes with non-"office" niche focuses (eg: Mac, Be, Irix) might take awhile to fake convincingly, too. (Same reason, pretty much.)
. . . come to me, punto...i have seventy-five million copies of "genie in a bottle" for you . . .
. . . i t ' l l b e j u s t l i k e h a v i n g a h u n d r e d a n d f i f t y m i l l i o n r u b b e r y s e v e n t e e n y e a r o l d b u t t c h e e k s o n y o u r h a r d d r i v e i f y o u g e t m y m e a n i n g f o r f r e e f r e e f r e e . . .
. . . p u n t o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o . . . .
Say you want to meet a major candidate, briefly, to get a feel for the guy beyond his clammy handshake--y'know, MEET the guy, get a first impression, see if he strikes you as an honest man or as a smarmy bastard.
For example, we've all heard from those "in the loop" that Al Gore is this brilliant, fun, goofy dude we'd love to party with and lose to at Trivial Pursuit, right? But unless we pay the DNC at least $50,000 for the guy to pose for a picture with us, forget finding out if that might be true.
Not that I'd vote for the censorious doofus anyway, but still. Politicians are harder to "know" than rock stars, now that there are so many layers of image, intervention, and spin-control between us (who aren't famous and/or rich) and them.
I get the impression that, back in the day, I (well, maybe not me; I'm Jewish) could go up to Thomas Jefferson, say "Hey, Mr. J, I'm me," offer to buy him a beer, hang out for a few minutes, ask him if he thinks that chick over there is hot, and go home with a better sense of what the man's all about. I could be mistaken, of course.
On-topic bit: This alienation from the machinery of power is not the kind of problem to which there's a technological solution, unless amorphous "technology" can be made to take the form of some kind of peasant revolt. Which it likely can't. Rifles were the last revolutionary tech simple enough to be used effectively by whatever random pissed-off subject could get his hands on one.
Please refrain from pointing out the stunning failure of our systems of "higher education," as exemplified by the parent post. There is no evidence that said exemplary post wasn't written by a six-year-old, or by the funniest troll ever, or by a six-year-old who will grow up to be the funniest troll ever.
(And what you do is you stare at the thesis for a long time, then suddenly it's a library. Haven't you studied biology? I did, with the Distinguished Prof. D. Copperfield, MD, PhD, BSOD, FUFME.)
Based on what the article says, I'd expect Torn and Eno to be lumped in with Yanni and Tesh. The "amplitude fractals"--or whatever they're calling them--would be about the same.
But, if they combined the amplitude analysis with something that could determine harmonic relationships between simultaneously occurring tones, they might spot the difference (Eno and Torn being "uglier" to most people's ears, because they use more complex, close-on-the-scale voicings, generally). But it still wouldn't know the difference between the new Deftones album and the second Sunny Day Real Estate record, based on that.
So, if you can hear the difference between, say, John Fahey and Roy Clark, something like this would be useless to you. Probably a near-"true AI" problem, if they were bothering to get it right (like, identifying the guys in Birdsongs as members of Mission of Burma based on their styles). Which they aren't. They're just whoring for VCs by using obfuscatory tech-talk to hide the uselessness of their allegedly existing product.
And, when you go to the DGM site, make sure you check out Fripp's diary postings for the last week or so (links are embedded in Javascript junk, and I don't have time to go source-fishing just now)--interesting commentary on Napster and related nonsense from a guy who, unlike Courtney Love, is scary-smart (if a tad "mystical" sometimes), and doesn't plagiarize Steve Albini.
As to the question of why? Many many mac power users are quite versed with Unix and use a mac in addition to Unix because in their opinion all of the available Unix desktop environments suck.
I think this is an insight the questioner might miss. Being an alleged "power user," my perspective is this: A console application is fine; a Mac GUI application is fine--these are both good, useful UIs--anything else is likely to be horrible. Provide either (or both) of those, and your PUs will line up. Don't try to stick any of the "Unix desktop environment"--nasty, misshapen widgets or thoughtlessly copied Windowsisms--on anyone's OSX box.
You should have seen the look of horror on my face the first time the default GNOME/Enlightenment and KDE desktops appeared on my cute little Mac. Not happy. Then, I tried to use them. Not even possible. I've been dual-booting Mac OS and a no-X, no-DE Linux ever since. The two combined is what we PUs want. Don't port anything "ugly" (in any sense), or we'll say nasty things about you on Slashdot.
I admit I didn't read the whole chapter from this guy's (expensive) book, because what little I did read was shitty. However, he seems to have missed something that, to me, is important.
Copyright laws prevent Knopf or Grove or pick-your-own-huge-ass-risk-averse-allegedly-cutti ng-edge-literary-publishing-corp. from waiting for me to get a "buzz" around the next weird, arty book I write, buying a copy of it, making 50,000 more copies of it, and keeping 100% of the proceeds from the sale of said 50,000.
It is good that they can't do that without asking poor little me and my respectable little money-losing publisher first.
If not for this IP protection, I'd be writing copy for Encarta, because I might as well get a weekly check for being hosed by some monstrous corporation.
[ASCII Robin Hood smiling in agreement goes here.]
I'm not a programmer. I'm just a guy who's not scared of his computer. A while back, I got an idea for a simple, small application that I knew no one else was going to write, because only I would have a use for it. I went looking for a language to learn. My only criteria for choosing which language were 1) Is there a free implementation of it on any of the platforms I have lying around the house (since I'm only going to write this one stupid thing)? and 2) Can I read other people's code, without knowing the language, and understand how it works and what it's doing (because I want to learn it quickly)? So I went and rounded up a few hundred k of sample code in Perl, Python, LISP, C, and a bunch more I don't remember now, because there's so damn many and they're mostly indistinguishable from each other (to me).
Not surprisingly, reading Perl and C code confused me. It was like a Pierre Guyotat book--piles of random but related half-words and clauses without verbs, punctuated automatically by Microsoft's famously moronic grammar checker. Neat, but not my bag. Python seemed a lot cleaner; I couldn't guess what the code was doing (semantically), but I could see how it was doing it (syntactically). Not bad, but still not quite it. Then I saw some LISP code and my whole brain smiled. I've since seen some obfuscated, nasty crap written in LISP, but the samples I got made perfect sense to me. And I love parentheses. What they do is obvious to anyone who's ever written a sentence. LISP works like my brain works, but better.
So I bought some books. It took weeks to root them out in the metric tons of C++ and Java books at all the stores, but I found a couple. And "development" is chugging along, slowly--not because it's difficult, but because I'm very lazy and stupid in the summertime.
The point: I have no idea. I told you it was a tedious personal anecdote.
My apologies to any innocent John Katzes who may have felt maligned by the above. I was talking about the crazy guy who writes for Slashdot, Jon Katz, not you.
Slashdot Mirror
Some goofy-looking fake PDP8 code for the greybeards in the house (to be sung to the tune of "The Way We Were"):
01.05 T !" TOWERS OF HANOI."!;E
01.10 A " NO. OF DISKS? "N,!
01.20 F I=1,N;S SS(I)=I
01.30 S SO=1;S SI=3
01.40 S NO=N;S NI=N;S I=0
01.45 A "MOVES#0, PLOTS#1 ? "MOVE,!
01.46 IF (MOVE)ERR,1.47; DO 23
01.47 ASK "AUTO#0, MANUAL#1 ? ",A,!
01.50 I (-A)5.1;D 2;T !!"DONE !"!!;Q
02.20 I [SS]ER,2.95;
02.30 S I=I+1;S NO(I)=NO;S SO(I)=SO;S SI(I)=SI
02.50 S SI=6-SO-SI;S NO=NO-1;D 3;S TE(I)=NI;D 2
02.60 S SI=SI(I);S NO=NO+1;D 3; D 6
02.70 S SO=6-SO-SI;S NO=TE(I); DO 3; DO 2
02.80 S SI=SI(I);S SO=SO(I);S NO=NO(I);S I=I-1
02.90 R
02.95 D 3;D 6;R
03.10 S NI=N
03.20 I [SS((SI-1)*N+NI)]ER,3.3;S NI=NI-1;G 3.2
03.30 R
05.10 A ? SO NO ?!? SI NI ?!;D 6
05.30 S A=0
05.40 F I=1,N*2;S A=A+SS(I)
05.50 I (-A) 5.1;T !"WELL DONE!"!;Q
06.10 S DO=(SO-1)*N+NO
06.20 S DI=(SI-1)*N+NI
06.30 S SS(DI)=SS(DO)
06.40 S SS(DO)=0
06.50 I (MOVE)E,6.7;DO 23;R
06.70 T !%2,?SO, NO,!SI, NI,?!
23.10 F J=1,N;T !;F K=0,70;DO 23.3
23.20 T !!!!;R
23.30 IF [K-15+SS(J)*2]23.6;IF [-K+15+SS(J)*2]23.6;T "#
23.60 IF [K-35+SS(J+N)*2]23.7;IF [-K+35+SS(J+N)*2]23.7;T "#
23.70 IF [K-55+SS(J+N+N)*2]23.8;IF [-K+55+SS(J+N+N)*2]23.77;T "#
23.77 S K=100;R
23.80 T " "
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As a regular Katz-flamer who shakes my head sadly, points out where he is wrong, and calls him an idiot every time he rears his empty head, I think I can explain. The article itself is shaking its head sadly and branding its author an idiot more effectively than I, or any other Katz-mocker, can. Except for its brevity, it's the perfect send-up of Katz. It says nothing, repeatedly, in a solipsistic, self-congratulatory way; it doesn't know what it thinks, but it agrees with this new book here; it revels in its own lack of interest. Frankly, post-Columbine, I, tech-savvy cyberlibertarian, don't know what, interactively, the hell(mouth) to do, peer-to-peer. And I'm its target demographic!
Re: the hard reset button (which you need on the mac) is on the bottom of the box so you have to lift the thing, put the top on a soft surface (don't want to scratch the lucite) and pop the button. Not cool.
If you're not running it already, you should install MacsBug (easy to find via google.com/mac, for example). In "hard reset" conditions, it drops you into an ugly-ass shell and you can, 99+% of the time, type your way out of it. I don't even know where the reset button on my box is.
You can also send prolix AppleEvent commands from MacsBugApp instead of using your Finder menus, if you're into that dorky sort of thing. I am, sometimes. In fact, my "version" of MacOS is customized enough that I get confused when I have to use the standard setup. Don't let
Virtual desktops exist in the Mac world, too. Search, boy! Search!
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius's style is influenced not by its author's immersion in a world of "interactive" whatever-buzzwordy-thing-you-said, but by his having read the works of Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, William Gass, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, John Barth, Gilbert Sorrentino, Mark Leyner, Don DeLillo, Thomas PynchonÑetc, etc; this list could go on for daysÑall of whom wrote a hell of a lot like Eggers (but mostly better) many, many, many years before there was any "interactive" whatever to give them their ideas. Writers read books. You should try it.
-1, Flamebait
I just realized I didn't answer your question, which part of your comment I thought was wrong, directly.
It was the thing about the toddlers. It seemed to imply that we show them pictures to help them understand things. I think that we show them pictures to *limit* their understanding of things (like "home" and "love" above).
Sorry. Having too much fun babblin' like a troll.
The "I think you're wrong" part was just a hastily-worded aside. "Wrong" isn't the right word. Probably sounded a little bitchy. What I meant was this: I think pictures are a hindrance to *understanding* computers, however helpful they may be in getting us started *using* them, and I agree with the article's author that understanding them is important (and that "ease" is the ground of an ideological battle).
I don't think that the difference between information conveyed via text vs. pictures is a difference in quantity, but in kind, and, in this case, in unconscious motivation. Abstractions that are "unnatural"Ñlike the workings of computers and the structure of internet, or complex political/ideological concepts, or poetryÑcan't be conveyed in pictures without stripping them of most of their meaning. A picture meant to represent "home" or "love" can work because we all have ideas of "love" and "home" in our heads, or we know what most people mean to convey when they show pictures of those things, because we've seen their pictures a million times already. Since not too many of us have "FTP" or "Frankfurt School Marxism" or "Your mouth is like Columbus Day" worked out so clearly in our heads, pictures can't convey them honestly to us, and relying on others' pictures of them puts us at a knowledge-disadvantage to the picture-makers (who are working from ideology, however unconscious). Computer interface is a metonym of this problem, and what I think you're "wrong" about is the innocent helpfulness of pictures on our screens. Not that words are any "better," generally. In the case of computers, though, I think they are, because they give us *more.*
I should have finished school and become a professor; I'd be really good at faking this po-mo stuff for money [smiley].
What you argue against isn't what he's arguing for (I also think you're wrong, but that doesn't matter).
An example: Right now, off in the bottom right-hand corner of my "desktop," there's an icon for a
What he's saying is that concealing the artificiality of the systemÑthe fact that it's a computer, not a deskÑin such a way may be a mistake. In my example, if I act based on the "desktop" lie , I may act against my own interests. Or, at the very least, I won't really know what I'm doing. He thinks people should know what they're doing.
Right. He's asking a simple question:
You design a program (or whatever) with a goal in mind: It should enable you to do X. Constraining that goal to "It must enable you to do X easily" tends to limit the scope of X (by making it more rigid), and "easily" tends to drag other, negative conditions in with it, like "more slowly," "less securely," and "without understanding." Given that, should "easily" be a part of your primary aim?
He doesn't think so. But he's not just talking about computers. That annoys and confuses the slashmonkeys.
Napster's users don't matter.
Napster Co., however, does. They claim not to have a business plan. BS. Their business plan is to get bought out byÑor made the royalty-receiving default file-exchange protocol ofÑ"The Industry" as part of a settlement of this suit, which they knew was inevitable. e-Xtortion.
Napster's users can go to Gnutella. Only Lars cares. Napster Co. should go to jail. Yes, all of them.
-1, Troll
Indeed.
While Carnivore itself isn't likely to ruin my life (because I don't use email for anything interesting), the "your crime will be tattooed on your hard drive/TCP logs; all we have to do is read it and lock you up" attitude behind it could.
If you looked at a list of my HTTP requests for the last week or so, you'd find me to have visited sites by/about serial killers and rapists, borderline child pornographers and NAMBLA types, fake-ass 31337 hax0rs, and computer security experts. Now why would I be doing that if I'm not planning to, say, stalk and kill some 13yo hotties by IRCing them up, getting their IPs, cracking their mommies' b0x0rs, hex-dumping their Passport binaries in search of an address, etc.? It looks like that's what I've got in mind, right? Better keep an eye on me.
The thing is, all I'm doing is trying to learn how these highly specialized "creeps" talkÑtheir speech patterns, jargon, cant, the frequency with which they end their sentences with prepositions, their favored emoticons, etc.Ñso I can write a character who's easily mistaken by readers for today's favorite boogie/bogeymen (hackers and child predators), because he talks the talk. [Is that ironic?]
Explaining an as-yet-unwritten section of a complex "avant-garde" book to the FBI would not be fun. For all their alleged smarts, they have a hard time with this artsy crap, and all I have now is potentially damning notes and web archives. Not that they'd ask me anyway. They'd just question my neighbors about the lurking predator on the block, ask them what suspicious behavior the skinny [drugs?] Jewish [conspiracy?] guy [penis?] with the shaved head [a Nazi Jew? is he schizophrenic?] down the street has been up toÑthings like being up all night sitting in front of his computer [writing], drinking [coffee], with his hand in his lap [broken right wrist]Ñand let them ruin my life. Certainly been done before.
Point: FBInet bad, Freenet good. It's not only criminals who think so.
And VINTCERF's name looks like an acronym for a CIA plot to assassinate Castro [winky smiley].
We don't hire serial killers to catch serial killers, do we?
"Hire," no. But, for example, the investigators looking for the so-called Green River Killer in/around Seattle, when they were stumped, went and asked Ted Bundy for insight into the GRK's methods and advice in apprehending him. It didn't work because they didn't listen to him. There's a book about it, called The Riverman, by Robert Keppel, one of the detectives. It's an accidental case study in cop psychology, showing how their badge-flashing, domineering personalities make them unsuited for dealing with cases involving complex characters like Bundy, who comes off as a weirdly (sym)pathetic antihero, shouting the truth at a brick wall. An odd book.
So, yes, "we" do "hire" serial killersÑwithout paying them; they tend to be very chatty, and love hearing about the 'sploits of others in the field, and getting to hear and talk about it is payment enoughÑto catch serial killers.
Go to google.com/mac
Type in something like "emacs PPC" or "xemacs," then hit RETURN or ENTER.
Click on the links that pop up. Some of them will take you to magical lands where there is an emacs (and an xemacs that's better) for MacOS.
Or go to jmac.org and click on some of those links. Same deal.
Jeez. This is not difficult.
Other common UNIXalike shell utils can be found by substituting "Filter Top" for "emacs" in the above instructions.
Jeez.
Yep. I, too, won't stand for anything less than a shit-powered car.
"Used vegetable oil?" Let's not be euphemistic. We have to mine the Burger King restrooms. "Biodiesel?" I prefer "Green-Apple Splatters," myself.
Out of fuel? Have a cigarette! There's gotta be something stuck in there!
And of course: See
Insert your own shitfuel joke here:"___________________!" HA! That's shitulous!
Bowie says things that make
And he's kind of bitchy. But he's not a Real Programmer, so it doesn't matter what he says.
Twinge.
Bero@RHAT will get his (5, Insightful) shortly, and all will be well.
Twinge.
I'd add one more to your list: Things that are a lot more complicated than they seem.
This is an area where Adobe, Macromedia, Avid, etc. probably have things locked up for the next, oh, ten years (wild guess). Photoshop/GIMP is the best (tired) comparison. There are dozens of little, unsexy features of Photoshop that GIMP users/developers don't seem even to be aware of the existence of, let alone the difficulty/boringness of cloning. In fact, most Photoshop users don't even know about them, so they don't notice the absence of them in GIMP, but bitchy "professional" types can't/won't do without them. And it'll be quite awhile before someone gets around to coding them, because the "itch" isn't developers' (who have what they want already--nice web graphics, cool scripting), it's graphics "power users'" (too busy to learn how to code it themselves).
OSes with non-"office" niche focuses (eg: Mac, Be, Irix) might take awhile to fake convincingly, too. (Same reason, pretty much.)
. . . p u n t o . . .
. . . p u n t o . . .
. . . come to me, punto...i have seventy-five million copies of "genie in a bottle" for you . . .
. . . i t ' l l b e j u s t l i k e h a v i n g a h u n d r e d a n d f i f t y m i l l i o n r u b b e r y s e v e n t e e n y e a r o l d b u t t c h e e k s o n y o u r h a r d d r i v e i f y o u g e t m y m e a n i n g f o r f r e e f r e e f r e e . . .
. . . p u n t o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o . . . .
Not only that.
Say you want to meet a major candidate, briefly, to get a feel for the guy beyond his clammy handshake--y'know, MEET the guy, get a first impression, see if he strikes you as an honest man or as a smarmy bastard.
For example, we've all heard from those "in the loop" that Al Gore is this brilliant, fun, goofy dude we'd love to party with and lose to at Trivial Pursuit, right? But unless we pay the DNC at least $50,000 for the guy to pose for a picture with us, forget finding out if that might be true.
Not that I'd vote for the censorious doofus anyway, but still. Politicians are harder to "know" than rock stars, now that there are so many layers of image, intervention, and spin-control between us (who aren't famous and/or rich) and them.
I get the impression that, back in the day, I (well, maybe not me; I'm Jewish) could go up to Thomas Jefferson, say "Hey, Mr. J, I'm me," offer to buy him a beer, hang out for a few minutes, ask him if he thinks that chick over there is hot, and go home with a better sense of what the man's all about. I could be mistaken, of course.
On-topic bit: This alienation from the machinery of power is not the kind of problem to which there's a technological solution, unless amorphous "technology" can be made to take the form of some kind of peasant revolt. Which it likely can't. Rifles were the last revolutionary tech simple enough to be used effectively by whatever random pissed-off subject could get his hands on one.
Please refrain from pointing out the stunning failure of our systems of "higher education," as exemplified by the parent post. There is no evidence that said exemplary post wasn't written by a six-year-old, or by the funniest troll ever, or by a six-year-old who will grow up to be the funniest troll ever.
(And what you do is you stare at the thesis for a long time, then suddenly it's a library. Haven't you studied biology? I did, with the Distinguished Prof. D. Copperfield, MD, PhD, BSOD, FUFME.)
Yours in shared despair,
Just Another Dropout
Based on what the article says, I'd expect Torn and Eno to be lumped in with Yanni and Tesh. The "amplitude fractals"--or whatever they're calling them--would be about the same.
But, if they combined the amplitude analysis with something that could determine harmonic relationships between simultaneously occurring tones, they might spot the difference (Eno and Torn being "uglier" to most people's ears, because they use more complex, close-on-the-scale voicings, generally). But it still wouldn't know the difference between the new Deftones album and the second Sunny Day Real Estate record, based on that.
So, if you can hear the difference between, say, John Fahey and Roy Clark, something like this would be useless to you. Probably a near-"true AI" problem, if they were bothering to get it right (like, identifying the guys in Birdsongs as members of Mission of Burma based on their styles). Which they aren't. They're just whoring for VCs by using obfuscatory tech-talk to hide the uselessness of their allegedly existing product.
And, when you go to the DGM site, make sure you check out Fripp's diary postings for the last week or so (links are embedded in Javascript junk, and I don't have time to go source-fishing just now)--interesting commentary on Napster and related nonsense from a guy who, unlike Courtney Love, is scary-smart (if a tad "mystical" sometimes), and doesn't plagiarize Steve Albini.
As to the question of why? Many many mac power users are quite versed with Unix and use a mac in addition to Unix because in their opinion all of the available Unix desktop environments suck.
I think this is an insight the questioner might miss. Being an alleged "power user," my perspective is this: A console application is fine; a Mac GUI application is fine--these are both good, useful UIs--anything else is likely to be horrible. Provide either (or both) of those, and your PUs will line up. Don't try to stick any of the "Unix desktop environment"--nasty, misshapen widgets or thoughtlessly copied Windowsisms--on anyone's OSX box.
You should have seen the look of horror on my face the first time the default GNOME/Enlightenment and KDE desktops appeared on my cute little Mac. Not happy. Then, I tried to use them. Not even possible. I've been dual-booting Mac OS and a no-X, no-DE Linux ever since. The two combined is what we PUs want. Don't port anything "ugly" (in any sense), or we'll say nasty things about you on Slashdot.
I admit I didn't read the whole chapter from this guy's (expensive) book, because what little I did read was shitty. However, he seems to have missed something that, to me, is important.
Copyright laws prevent Knopf or Grove or pick-your-own-huge-ass-risk-averse-allegedly-cutt
It is good that they can't do that without asking poor little me and my respectable little money-losing publisher first.
If not for this IP protection, I'd be writing copy for Encarta, because I might as well get a weekly check for being hosed by some monstrous corporation.
[ASCII Robin Hood smiling in agreement goes here.]
[Napster comment redacted.]
I'm not a programmer. I'm just a guy who's not scared of his computer. A while back, I got an idea for a simple, small application that I knew no one else was going to write, because only I would have a use for it. I went looking for a language to learn. My only criteria for choosing which language were 1) Is there a free implementation of it on any of the platforms I have lying around the house (since I'm only going to write this one stupid thing)? and 2) Can I read other people's code, without knowing the language, and understand how it works and what it's doing (because I want to learn it quickly)? So I went and rounded up a few hundred k of sample code in Perl, Python, LISP, C, and a bunch more I don't remember now, because there's so damn many and they're mostly indistinguishable from each other (to me).
Not surprisingly, reading Perl and C code confused me. It was like a Pierre Guyotat book--piles of random but related half-words and clauses without verbs, punctuated automatically by Microsoft's famously moronic grammar checker. Neat, but not my bag. Python seemed a lot cleaner; I couldn't guess what the code was doing (semantically), but I could see how it was doing it (syntactically). Not bad, but still not quite it. Then I saw some LISP code and my whole brain smiled. I've since seen some obfuscated, nasty crap written in LISP, but the samples I got made perfect sense to me. And I love parentheses. What they do is obvious to anyone who's ever written a sentence. LISP works like my brain works, but better.
So I bought some books. It took weeks to root them out in the metric tons of C++ and Java books at all the stores, but I found a couple. And "development" is chugging along, slowly--not because it's difficult, but because I'm very lazy and stupid in the summertime.
The point: I have no idea. I told you it was a tedious personal anecdote.
Yes. No.
Not yet. Kinda.
No. No.
xappeal.org
My apologies to any innocent John Katzes who may have felt maligned by the above. I was talking about the crazy guy who writes for Slashdot, Jon Katz, not you.