Does the word 'app' mean anything at all any more?
Hardly any specialized terminology survives with its meaning intact if it falls into the vernacular. If it becomes the subject of marketing, it fares even worse. "App" is just the latest victim.
"CPU" and "hard drive" are vernacular terms for the case of a computer. "PC" ended up tied to one particular hardware/software architecture. "Cybernetic" -- which had a very well-defined meaning in terms of a now largely forgotten interdisciplinary science -- was truncated to "cyber" and then applied to all kinds of things which aren't even remotely cybernetic, all vaguely tied to computing, which was itself just a subset of actual cybernetics. The general public never was able to grasp the semantics of "upload" and "download", and now apply one or the other randomly to any kind of data transfer. I'm sure everyone here has heard someone refer to Adobe Photoshop as "Adobe", blissfully unaware that they, um, have other products. Every household networking box becomes a "router" or a "hub" or a "modem" -- regardless of their actual function, depending on which term the speaker latched onto first. A USB cable is often just a "printer cable". Every small USB video camera becomes a "webcam", and speaking of the web, the extremely clear technical distinction between the web and the Internet upon which it is implemented is entirely lost on most of the public. And then we have monstrosities like "mibibyte" for we want to refer to what "megabyte" originally meant before hard drive marketers twisted the meaning to defraud technically inept customers.
It happens all the time, and there's not much that can be done about it, except to keep using the appropriate jargon in the appropriate technical context -- i.e., amongst one's peers, professional and amateur -- and speak the vernacular around everyone else, even if it makes your skin crawl. You'll only get a glazed look if you try to explain the correct usage.
If I had any mod points right now, you'd definitely get a +1 Informative. One of the big problems with people is that most of them think that they think logically, but almost none of them actually do. No one is born thinking logically. It's an acquired skill and not a trivial one, yet we don't teach it in the schools, save for bits and pieces that are incidental to other subjects.
Is there some particular reason you trust any statement on open source that comes from Microsoft, considering it's long track record of animosity?
While the argument they present is not without merit -- who among us has not wasted time that could have been saved if some FOSS project or other had decent documentation? -- I have to wonder why anyone bothers publishing any study funded by a party that has a vested interest in the results. Even if the researchers are scrupulously honest and the research itself is done with extraordinary care and rigor, no one will trust the results.
Knowing this, as they must if they are not completely clueless, one has to wonder if they conducted this study solely because they could get a nice fat check from Microsoft. And if that's the case, I'd say a healthy degree of skepticism is warranted.
Gates' real accomplishment is being able to take other people's ideas, dumb them down, and give people a wink and a nod to make people think they are his without really lying.
Sort of. I don't think the average person cares very much about originality in the products they buy. No one buys a Toyota because they think Toyota invented the car or, for that matter, any of its principal components. We're talking about people who don't know what an operating system is in the first place. I rather suspect the average person admires Bill Gates because he became fantastically rich without running an international drug cartel, and that's about it.
That he's more popular than the Pope in a country where Catholics are a minority really shouldn't come as much of a surprise, either. Even if the church wasn't embroiled in its current set of scandals, it would be quite odd if several people weren't more popular than the Pope. You'd probably get very different results in a predominately Catholic country. Nothing shocking about that.
I have to wonder -- given their past behavior -- if GS is juggling its various independent business entities so that one entity can offer the IPO while another entity shorts the motherfucking hell out of it. The actual reality would undoubtedly be more complex than the non-gnome population could readily understand, but I wouldn't be surprised if, once all the layers of obfuscation are peeled away, that's what it boils down to.
In any case, Facebook really doesn't have a whole lot of room to grow, and it's ripe to be friendsterized by someone in the next wave of social networks. Live by the social trend, die by the social trend.
Hm, now that sounds reasonable, if somewhat weird. If it holds up under further examination and applies to polymers other than DNA, it might have some terrifically useful applications in industrial chemical synthesis.
you should just nod, smile, say "that's cool," and move on.
Which, in a nutshell, is why this is such a backward country with appallingly boring architecture.
Don't consider the long-term maintenance issues involved with the moving parts
This is already a solved problem. See railroads for more info.
the problems involved with things like plumbing and electrical service
Also a solved problem: standard connectors, valves, and switches.
or the insulation requirements of a floor raised up off the ground in a northern climate
Every floor except the first in a multistory structure is raised off the ground. So now you have to insulate one more floor. Big deal.
Don't try to think about how much simpler it would be to achieve the same goals in a passive design.
Now there you have a valid point. That said, having mobile buildings makes it much easier to solve another problem with conventional cities: they're damn hard to rearrange in response to changing conditions. Rolling buildings along a dedicated track system is probably less expensive and definitely less time-consuming than remodeling or demolishing and rebuilding. Good buildings not have to languish when the area they're stuck in goes into decline.
For me, the red flag in this scheme is seismic stability. Even if the structural integrity of the building can be assured -- as far as that can be done with any building in an earthquake -- what's the plan for getting a building back on the tracks if it's shaken off or worse, if the tracks are bent or broken?
The jury is still out on that. In China they went with regulating reproduction, but in Europe and Japan fertility rates are falling on their own.
The impression I get is that fertility rates fall with prosperity, as they have done at least from Roman times to the present. If China succeeds in creating general prosperity for its citizens, I wouldn't be surprised if their reproduction regulations become obsolete. US reproductive rates have been declining for decades, too; much of our population growth comes from immigration. It would be interesting to see how closely the population growth rates of the US, Europe, and Japan correlate with their relative wealth disparities.
Anyways, when he was younger, his dad made the comment to him that, when he got older, one would need a license to fish, hunt, and cut firewood. He also predicted that, eventually, you would only be allowed to do these things in certain, designated parts of the wilderness, rather than anywhere the road ended in bush.
Some of this is just population growth. Fishing licenses have always struck me as silly, at least for non-commercial fishermen using poles instead of nets. But when it comes to hunting and felling trees, if everyone was allowed unlimited access, we'd run out of trees and deer pretty damn quick, just like we did with the buffalo. Licensing just prevents (or at least delays) the tragedy of the commons.
If there were fewer of us, as their were in our grandparents' day, we could probably go back to having fewer restrictions. Of course, to get there, we'd need to start licensing reproduction.
The 20% of the population who are hardcore partisan douchebags like these make me sick. What we need is a process that let's the other 80% of the population [...]
While the numbers fluctuate from year to year, the percentage of the population that isn't aligned with one of the major parties is around 30%. What they have in common with the two partisan factions is that they all like to make up numbers claiming that they're the majority. If any of them really were, we'd have presidential elections with much wider margins than the 1-5% we've seen in recent elections.
And while the parties are undeniably jealous of their power and work to crush third-party opposition, the two-party system is a direct consequence of direct, first-past-the-post elections in a presidential democracy. If you want more choices, you need to push for a parliamentary democracy, not beat your head against the brick wall of independent and third party candidates.
And not that I wouldn't be entirely in favor of having a modern parliamentary system here, I wouldn't hold my breath.
To this old fart, it looks the same, just a different way to fab the thing. But hey what do I know?
It is the same thing, but the scale is far different, with much the same consequences as going from discrete transistors to nanoscale transistors etched on silicon, i.e., it can (theoretically) store more data and retrieve it faster.
About a year ago I saw the "breakthrough" development of a "plasma transistor" that I also had in a 1950's book on my shelf...
I know what you mean. I was going through a mass-market encyclopedia of science from the 1960's the other day, and stumbled across an article promising that holographic memory was right around the corner.
To be fair, though, the basic principles of most of the technology we use today were discovered decades, sometimes centuries, before their current applications. Most of the time, several technologies have to reach a certain stage of development before any of them can be given practical applications, and even then, if there's no demand for the technology at the time, it can sit on the shelf even longer. Lasers, for example, were greeted by yawns when they were first invented ("Great, it's a visible-light maser. So what?"), but now most people own multiple laser-containing devices, in addition to their use as pointers and cat toys.
The nearly endless variety of insulting phrases that begin with [name] [verb] [...] makes it impractical to register more than a tiny proportion of them, and no matter how extensive, it's easy to think of alternatives.
[name]stealsyourmoney.com comes to mind in the context of BoA long before it would occur to me to register [name]sucks.com, much less [name]sucksass.com, [name]sucksthebigone.com, and -- in the spirit of Bill Hicks -- [name]suckssatansscalycock.com.
I hate articles like this because they reduce higher education to a single metric: money. If your primary or only concern is making as much money as possible, the first thing you need to look at isn't which school you want to attend, it's your intended major. And if that major isn't business or finance, you're already off course. There are some exceptional cases where other majors lead to riches, but they are just that: exceptions. Now that that's settled, does it matter where you get your MBA? Yes, it does, not because of the quality of the education but because of the connections you'll make there. A degree from an elite university will more than pay for itself in that respect.
For anything else -- having established that making as much money as possible is not your primary goal -- you need to decide what is most important to you. Once you have a reasonably clear picture of where you want to end up in life, you'll actually have a rational basis for choosing a college to attend. That may or may not be an elite university.
But if it's just money you're after, you're going into finance, and you are interested in the school that gives you the greatest chance of being hired by Goldman Sachs.
It sure doesn't help. Neither does the overall level of apathy and lack of awareness of current events beyond the heavily filtered TV news sources.
The real killer, IMHO, is that we're so physically isolated by the oceans that relatively few Americans visit other developed countries to see how other people live. When I first spent a few months in western Europe, I felt like those Soviet soldiers in WW2 that Stalin subsequently purged because they had seen how well people lived in the West, contrary to Soviet propaganda.
Have you ever been to America? They're some of the politest and most welcoming people you'll ever meet. The dichotomy between the decency of the people there, and the corruption of the government is inexplicable.
It's not just us. Visit Italy or Kampuchea or Nigeria, among others. The average guy practically anywhere is usually pretty decent, even if his government is unbelievably corrupt. Democracy can reduce the level of official corruption, but it's not a silver bullet, e.g., Italy or Louisiana.
FWIW, America's problem is its hypertrophied nationalism. People here identify so strongly with their idealized image of their country that when someone points out flaws or misdeeds by the government, they interpret it as a personal attack.
Such math skills are needed to develop the algorithms but not to implement a provided algorithm or to verify the coded implementation.
Right. That's why theorists who understand the heart write detailed lists of instructions so that any hourly temp worker can perform heart surgery without incurring the expense of employing an actual heart surgeon with a medical degree.
Adapting theory to the complexities and irregularities of the real world does require a thorough understanding of theory. Otherwise, the moment you step outside of the ideal case -- which is nearly always -- you have no way to make the necessary adjustments, and worse, you have no way of knowing that adjustments need to be made, what they could be, or what the consequences are.
Plus, movie's for me blur the line between "art piece" and performance. How do you delineate between live music performance, and say, a live performance DVD?
This is like asking what the difference is between the detonation of a nuclear bomb and a film of the detonation. One is an event, and the other is an object. You can legitimately argue that replaying a recording is itself a performance in the sense that the condition of the viewers, the playback devices, the environment in which the playback occurs, and so on, vary from one replay to another, but that's quite different from saying that listening to a recording of Woodstock is the same as being at Woodstock. There's a similarity, which is the entire point of representation, but the differences are vastly greater than the similarities.
If we get to the point that we can produce VR that is indistinguishable from reality, then the line will blur at least from the point-of-view of the participants, but even then, there will still be an important difference between participating in the D-Day landings and participating in a 100% accurate and convincing simulation that one knows is only a simulation.
I'm used to CGI. It takes a ton to impress me. But a good motorcycle chase that isn't all CGI and blue-screen will go a lot farther because I can tell they actually did it.
There are a couple of other posts that make essentially the same point. It's a variation on the theme of the cults of personality in the art world and the disdain that some people have for a work done in Painter versus a work done with oil paint. To me, that has always seemed like mistaking an art object for a performance.
If I'm going to see a musician perform live, as opposed to just buying a recording, then it had better be one heck of a performance, especially with today's ticket prices. But if I'm going to look at a still image, I don't give a rat's ass how it was made because it simply doesn't matter. If I like it, I'd also like to know the name of the artist so I can search for more of his/her works, but other than that, the artist might as well be dead -- most of them are, anyway. My appreciation of van Gogh's "Starry Night" has next to nothing to do with van Gogh and everything to do with the way the experience of seeing the painting interacts with my nervous system. If it was revealed that "Starry Night" was a forgery or the output of a machine, it would make no difference to me.
The same applies to movies. A play in a theater is a performance. A movie is not a performance; it is a finished art object like a painting or a sculpture. It is exactly the same every time you look at it. How it was made is entirely irrelevant, and arguably meaningless, since the past does not exist. What matters is the end result: do you like it or not?
[...] why keep spending the budget on making groundhogs look at Indy or troupes of monkeys playing Tarzan in a scene that TOTALLY breaks any suspension of disbelief.
In a series of films about an archaeologist who fights Nazis, Thuggee cultists, and Soviet psychics, and keeps unleashing vast supernatural powers stored in antiques, the monkeys are what struck you as implausible?
The idea and the marketing are what makes the product successful.
As much as I agree that programmers tend to overestimate their importance -- a trait that pretty much every job category shares to one degree or another -- I think the idea is of negligible importance compared to the marketing.
A lot of people like to think that having a good idea and having it first is terribly important. And while that is occasionally true, it's mostly wishful thinking. Henry Ford didn't get rich by inventing the automobile. Someone else did that. He didn't even get rich by inventing the assembly line. Someone else did that, too. He got rich by extending credit to his customers: he invented the car payment. And once he did all this, a bunch of other companies came along and did more or less the same thing, and they made vast sums doing it, too. And the story repeats itself through the following century with radio, television, computers, refrigerators, and all the other technological advances we presently enjoy. Even with patents, inventing something and inventing it first just doesn't matter all that much. (Which is not to say that it doesn't matter at all.)
The same applies to the myth of the indispensable man (or woman). By himself, Henry Ford couldn't have done squat. He needed a considerable number of people with a broad range of skills just to get off the ground. And quite likely, any or all of them could have been replaced by other people without materially affecting the outcome.
Those of us who aren't magnates believe these myths because they allow us to believe an even bigger myth: that we can, as lone individuals, change the world. This is almost never true, allowing for rare exceptions like assassinating an Austrian archduke. Those who are magnates believe these myths because they allow magnates to believe that they are self-made men, ignoring the labor and intelligence of the thousands who helped put them there.
If good ideas were all it took to strike it rich, almost everyone would be rich already.
Wow, I wish I'd thought of that sooner. Stuffing an Arduino with a battery pack and a wifi shield up my ass and asking to use the company john was really wearing on me.
Slashdot Mirror
Does the word 'app' mean anything at all any more?
Hardly any specialized terminology survives with its meaning intact if it falls into the vernacular. If it becomes the subject of marketing, it fares even worse. "App" is just the latest victim.
"CPU" and "hard drive" are vernacular terms for the case of a computer. "PC" ended up tied to one particular hardware/software architecture. "Cybernetic" -- which had a very well-defined meaning in terms of a now largely forgotten interdisciplinary science -- was truncated to "cyber" and then applied to all kinds of things which aren't even remotely cybernetic, all vaguely tied to computing, which was itself just a subset of actual cybernetics. The general public never was able to grasp the semantics of "upload" and "download", and now apply one or the other randomly to any kind of data transfer. I'm sure everyone here has heard someone refer to Adobe Photoshop as "Adobe", blissfully unaware that they, um, have other products. Every household networking box becomes a "router" or a "hub" or a "modem" -- regardless of their actual function, depending on which term the speaker latched onto first. A USB cable is often just a "printer cable". Every small USB video camera becomes a "webcam", and speaking of the web, the extremely clear technical distinction between the web and the Internet upon which it is implemented is entirely lost on most of the public. And then we have monstrosities like "mibibyte" for we want to refer to what "megabyte" originally meant before hard drive marketers twisted the meaning to defraud technically inept customers.
It happens all the time, and there's not much that can be done about it, except to keep using the appropriate jargon in the appropriate technical context -- i.e., amongst one's peers, professional and amateur -- and speak the vernacular around everyone else, even if it makes your skin crawl. You'll only get a glazed look if you try to explain the correct usage.
All this will do is provide another data point for marketers.
If I had any mod points right now, you'd definitely get a +1 Informative. One of the big problems with people is that most of them think that they think logically, but almost none of them actually do. No one is born thinking logically. It's an acquired skill and not a trivial one, yet we don't teach it in the schools, save for bits and pieces that are incidental to other subjects.
Is there some particular reason you trust any statement on open source that comes from Microsoft, considering it's long track record of animosity?
While the argument they present is not without merit -- who among us has not wasted time that could have been saved if some FOSS project or other had decent documentation? -- I have to wonder why anyone bothers publishing any study funded by a party that has a vested interest in the results. Even if the researchers are scrupulously honest and the research itself is done with extraordinary care and rigor, no one will trust the results.
Knowing this, as they must if they are not completely clueless, one has to wonder if they conducted this study solely because they could get a nice fat check from Microsoft. And if that's the case, I'd say a healthy degree of skepticism is warranted.
Gates' real accomplishment is being able to take other people's ideas, dumb them down, and give people a wink and a nod to make people think they are his without really lying.
Sort of. I don't think the average person cares very much about originality in the products they buy. No one buys a Toyota because they think Toyota invented the car or, for that matter, any of its principal components. We're talking about people who don't know what an operating system is in the first place. I rather suspect the average person admires Bill Gates because he became fantastically rich without running an international drug cartel, and that's about it.
That he's more popular than the Pope in a country where Catholics are a minority really shouldn't come as much of a surprise, either. Even if the church wasn't embroiled in its current set of scandals, it would be quite odd if several people weren't more popular than the Pope. You'd probably get very different results in a predominately Catholic country. Nothing shocking about that.
Right on! Let's punish Facebook for denying us the chance to lose billions on their grossly overvalued stock. The bastards!
If it turns out that Facebook is a bubble[...]
If?
I have to wonder -- given their past behavior -- if GS is juggling its various independent business entities so that one entity can offer the IPO while another entity shorts the motherfucking hell out of it. The actual reality would undoubtedly be more complex than the non-gnome population could readily understand, but I wouldn't be surprised if, once all the layers of obfuscation are peeled away, that's what it boils down to.
In any case, Facebook really doesn't have a whole lot of room to grow, and it's ripe to be friendsterized by someone in the next wave of social networks. Live by the social trend, die by the social trend.
Hm, now that sounds reasonable, if somewhat weird. If it holds up under further examination and applies to polymers other than DNA, it might have some terrifically useful applications in industrial chemical synthesis.
in fact, most will be turned on, pointed at the police, should they see the police do something abusive
Except in the increasing number of places where recording the cops is a crime.
you should just nod, smile, say "that's cool," and move on.
Which, in a nutshell, is why this is such a backward country with appallingly boring architecture.
Don't consider the long-term maintenance issues involved with the moving parts
This is already a solved problem. See railroads for more info.
the problems involved with things like plumbing and electrical service
Also a solved problem: standard connectors, valves, and switches.
or the insulation requirements of a floor raised up off the ground in a northern climate
Every floor except the first in a multistory structure is raised off the ground. So now you have to insulate one more floor. Big deal.
Don't try to think about how much simpler it would be to achieve the same goals in a passive design.
Now there you have a valid point. That said, having mobile buildings makes it much easier to solve another problem with conventional cities: they're damn hard to rearrange in response to changing conditions. Rolling buildings along a dedicated track system is probably less expensive and definitely less time-consuming than remodeling or demolishing and rebuilding. Good buildings not have to languish when the area they're stuck in goes into decline.
For me, the red flag in this scheme is seismic stability. Even if the structural integrity of the building can be assured -- as far as that can be done with any building in an earthquake -- what's the plan for getting a building back on the tracks if it's shaken off or worse, if the tracks are bent or broken?
Mod parent up. Point taken, and I stand corrected and informed.
The jury is still out on that. In China they went with regulating reproduction, but in Europe and Japan fertility rates are falling on their own.
The impression I get is that fertility rates fall with prosperity, as they have done at least from Roman times to the present. If China succeeds in creating general prosperity for its citizens, I wouldn't be surprised if their reproduction regulations become obsolete. US reproductive rates have been declining for decades, too; much of our population growth comes from immigration. It would be interesting to see how closely the population growth rates of the US, Europe, and Japan correlate with their relative wealth disparities.
Anyways, when he was younger, his dad made the comment to him that, when he got older, one would need a license to fish, hunt, and cut firewood. He also predicted that, eventually, you would only be allowed to do these things in certain, designated parts of the wilderness, rather than anywhere the road ended in bush.
Some of this is just population growth. Fishing licenses have always struck me as silly, at least for non-commercial fishermen using poles instead of nets. But when it comes to hunting and felling trees, if everyone was allowed unlimited access, we'd run out of trees and deer pretty damn quick, just like we did with the buffalo. Licensing just prevents (or at least delays) the tragedy of the commons.
If there were fewer of us, as their were in our grandparents' day, we could probably go back to having fewer restrictions. Of course, to get there, we'd need to start licensing reproduction.
The 20% of the population who are hardcore partisan douchebags like these make me sick. What we need is a process that let's the other 80% of the population [...]
While the numbers fluctuate from year to year, the percentage of the population that isn't aligned with one of the major parties is around 30%. What they have in common with the two partisan factions is that they all like to make up numbers claiming that they're the majority. If any of them really were, we'd have presidential elections with much wider margins than the 1-5% we've seen in recent elections.
And while the parties are undeniably jealous of their power and work to crush third-party opposition, the two-party system is a direct consequence of direct, first-past-the-post elections in a presidential democracy. If you want more choices, you need to push for a parliamentary democracy, not beat your head against the brick wall of independent and third party candidates.
And not that I wouldn't be entirely in favor of having a modern parliamentary system here, I wouldn't hold my breath.
To this old fart, it looks the same, just a different way to fab the thing. But hey what do I know?
It is the same thing, but the scale is far different, with much the same consequences as going from discrete transistors to nanoscale transistors etched on silicon, i.e., it can (theoretically) store more data and retrieve it faster.
About a year ago I saw the "breakthrough" development of a "plasma transistor" that I also had in a 1950's book on my shelf...
I know what you mean. I was going through a mass-market encyclopedia of science from the 1960's the other day, and stumbled across an article promising that holographic memory was right around the corner.
To be fair, though, the basic principles of most of the technology we use today were discovered decades, sometimes centuries, before their current applications. Most of the time, several technologies have to reach a certain stage of development before any of them can be given practical applications, and even then, if there's no demand for the technology at the time, it can sit on the shelf even longer. Lasers, for example, were greeted by yawns when they were first invented ("Great, it's a visible-light maser. So what?"), but now most people own multiple laser-containing devices, in addition to their use as pointers and cat toys.
The nearly endless variety of insulting phrases that begin with [name] [verb] [...] makes it impractical to register more than a tiny proportion of them, and no matter how extensive, it's easy to think of alternatives.
[name]stealsyourmoney.com comes to mind in the context of BoA long before it would occur to me to register [name]sucks.com, much less [name]sucksass.com, [name]sucksthebigone.com, and -- in the spirit of Bill Hicks -- [name]suckssatansscalycock.com.
I hate articles like this because they reduce higher education to a single metric: money. If your primary or only concern is making as much money as possible, the first thing you need to look at isn't which school you want to attend, it's your intended major. And if that major isn't business or finance, you're already off course. There are some exceptional cases where other majors lead to riches, but they are just that: exceptions. Now that that's settled, does it matter where you get your MBA? Yes, it does, not because of the quality of the education but because of the connections you'll make there. A degree from an elite university will more than pay for itself in that respect.
For anything else -- having established that making as much money as possible is not your primary goal -- you need to decide what is most important to you. Once you have a reasonably clear picture of where you want to end up in life, you'll actually have a rational basis for choosing a college to attend. That may or may not be an elite university.
But if it's just money you're after, you're going into finance, and you are interested in the school that gives you the greatest chance of being hired by Goldman Sachs.
If that's actually what you really want, anyway.
It sure doesn't help. Neither does the overall level of apathy and lack of awareness of current events beyond the heavily filtered TV news sources.
The real killer, IMHO, is that we're so physically isolated by the oceans that relatively few Americans visit other developed countries to see how other people live. When I first spent a few months in western Europe, I felt like those Soviet soldiers in WW2 that Stalin subsequently purged because they had seen how well people lived in the West, contrary to Soviet propaganda.
Have you ever been to America? They're some of the politest and most welcoming people you'll ever meet. The dichotomy between the decency of the people there, and the corruption of the government is inexplicable.
It's not just us. Visit Italy or Kampuchea or Nigeria, among others. The average guy practically anywhere is usually pretty decent, even if his government is unbelievably corrupt. Democracy can reduce the level of official corruption, but it's not a silver bullet, e.g., Italy or Louisiana.
FWIW, America's problem is its hypertrophied nationalism. People here identify so strongly with their idealized image of their country that when someone points out flaws or misdeeds by the government, they interpret it as a personal attack.
Such math skills are needed to develop the algorithms but not to implement a provided algorithm or to verify the coded implementation.
Right. That's why theorists who understand the heart write detailed lists of instructions so that any hourly temp worker can perform heart surgery without incurring the expense of employing an actual heart surgeon with a medical degree.
Adapting theory to the complexities and irregularities of the real world does require a thorough understanding of theory. Otherwise, the moment you step outside of the ideal case -- which is nearly always -- you have no way to make the necessary adjustments, and worse, you have no way of knowing that adjustments need to be made, what they could be, or what the consequences are.
Plus, movie's for me blur the line between "art piece" and performance. How do you delineate between live music performance, and say, a live performance DVD?
This is like asking what the difference is between the detonation of a nuclear bomb and a film of the detonation. One is an event, and the other is an object. You can legitimately argue that replaying a recording is itself a performance in the sense that the condition of the viewers, the playback devices, the environment in which the playback occurs, and so on, vary from one replay to another, but that's quite different from saying that listening to a recording of Woodstock is the same as being at Woodstock. There's a similarity, which is the entire point of representation, but the differences are vastly greater than the similarities.
If we get to the point that we can produce VR that is indistinguishable from reality, then the line will blur at least from the point-of-view of the participants, but even then, there will still be an important difference between participating in the D-Day landings and participating in a 100% accurate and convincing simulation that one knows is only a simulation.
I'm used to CGI. It takes a ton to impress me. But a good motorcycle chase that isn't all CGI and blue-screen will go a lot farther because I can tell they actually did it.
There are a couple of other posts that make essentially the same point. It's a variation on the theme of the cults of personality in the art world and the disdain that some people have for a work done in Painter versus a work done with oil paint. To me, that has always seemed like mistaking an art object for a performance.
If I'm going to see a musician perform live, as opposed to just buying a recording, then it had better be one heck of a performance, especially with today's ticket prices. But if I'm going to look at a still image, I don't give a rat's ass how it was made because it simply doesn't matter. If I like it, I'd also like to know the name of the artist so I can search for more of his/her works, but other than that, the artist might as well be dead -- most of them are, anyway. My appreciation of van Gogh's "Starry Night" has next to nothing to do with van Gogh and everything to do with the way the experience of seeing the painting interacts with my nervous system. If it was revealed that "Starry Night" was a forgery or the output of a machine, it would make no difference to me.
The same applies to movies. A play in a theater is a performance. A movie is not a performance; it is a finished art object like a painting or a sculpture. It is exactly the same every time you look at it. How it was made is entirely irrelevant, and arguably meaningless, since the past does not exist. What matters is the end result: do you like it or not?
[...] why keep spending the budget on making groundhogs look at Indy or troupes of monkeys playing Tarzan in a scene that TOTALLY breaks any suspension of disbelief.
In a series of films about an archaeologist who fights Nazis, Thuggee cultists, and Soviet psychics, and keeps unleashing vast supernatural powers stored in antiques, the monkeys are what struck you as implausible?
The idea and the marketing are what makes the product successful.
As much as I agree that programmers tend to overestimate their importance -- a trait that pretty much every job category shares to one degree or another -- I think the idea is of negligible importance compared to the marketing.
A lot of people like to think that having a good idea and having it first is terribly important. And while that is occasionally true, it's mostly wishful thinking. Henry Ford didn't get rich by inventing the automobile. Someone else did that. He didn't even get rich by inventing the assembly line. Someone else did that, too. He got rich by extending credit to his customers: he invented the car payment. And once he did all this, a bunch of other companies came along and did more or less the same thing, and they made vast sums doing it, too. And the story repeats itself through the following century with radio, television, computers, refrigerators, and all the other technological advances we presently enjoy. Even with patents, inventing something and inventing it first just doesn't matter all that much. (Which is not to say that it doesn't matter at all.)
The same applies to the myth of the indispensable man (or woman). By himself, Henry Ford couldn't have done squat. He needed a considerable number of people with a broad range of skills just to get off the ground. And quite likely, any or all of them could have been replaced by other people without materially affecting the outcome.
Those of us who aren't magnates believe these myths because they allow us to believe an even bigger myth: that we can, as lone individuals, change the world. This is almost never true, allowing for rare exceptions like assassinating an Austrian archduke. Those who are magnates believe these myths because they allow magnates to believe that they are self-made men, ignoring the labor and intelligence of the thousands who helped put them there.
If good ideas were all it took to strike it rich, almost everyone would be rich already.
gravity is universal (which is a little preposterous / pretentious to base how the WHOLE universe works based on one tiny little planet.)
It would be, except that our observations of the effects of gravity cover countless measurements over the entire observable universe.
Wow, I wish I'd thought of that sooner. Stuffing an Arduino with a battery pack and a wifi shield up my ass and asking to use the company john was really wearing on me.