As Karl Popper would say, there is nothing about the notion of a meme that can be falsified. Hence, it is not a scientific notion.
You are misusing the concept of falsification here, and Karl Popper would probably call you on this just the same as I: falsification applies to assertions or hypotheses.
But notion of a "meme" is an entity: a labled observable, so it is not even eligible for the falsification test. You can't falsify the concept of mass either...but you can falsify an assertion that involves mass, such as "eating too much can result in increasing the mass of your body".
Now, if you wish to discuss whether or not a specific claim regarding memes is falsifiable, that's possible. Take the claim that "memes cannot be propagated without using language as a vector". There's an assertion about memes that is, indeed, falsifiable: if one observes meme transfer based upon silent observation and imitation, then you will have falsified that assertion.
You are right that "memes" are unscientific. Just as "mass" is unscientific. Science is a complicated filter that we apply to assertions. There's nothing inherently scientific about any of the entities that we study, whether they be memes or mass.
either way you're going to have to deal with all sorts of objects representing things like nodes, text, etc.
True, if you're using the word "object" like a C programmer would: refering to structs on the heap that may (or may not) have function pointers for callbacks. Anyway, I should have said that my clarification wasn't meant to invalidate the point that you were making (it wasn't lost on me). I just didn't want anybody to leave this thread thinking that there were no "descent" parsing APIs for non-OO languages.
I've got news for you -- every decent XML parser library requires you to manipulate the XML tree in an object-oriented manner! It's called the Document Object Model for a reason
This isn't true. The SAX API is event-oriented, and though it may be a little bit more difficult to wield than DOM it has the advantage of giving you complete control over memory allocation. That is, you can allocate as little as you need, and only when you need it, whereas DOM libraries allocate all that is required to completely represent the entire document in memory up-front.
Every decent XML library handles XML the same way.
For what it's worth, 2.6.0 and the subsequent minor revisions have worked flawlessly for me and many associates. You seem quick to assume that they named it a "stable release" prematurely. Have you considered the altertnate hypothesis that you are in the minority of users who have encountered problems? If so, that's not a dishonorable place to be...somebody has to be the poor soul who encounters a bugs. (Thank you, by the way, I appreciate your hardship.)
How can a post that directly addresses a point brought up in the article's text be moderated as "Offtopic"? There is clearly some agenda-based moderating going on here.
The term "EDL" stands for Entry, Descent, and Landing. It is a generic term, and does not necessarily imply specific system features, such as bouncing airbags.
I suppose this is where I'm expected to say something like "No one is prevented from forming their own opinions by Pudge expressing his own. If the slashdot editors had wanted this site to feign objectivity, they would have started doing it by now."
Exchange supports SMTP AUTH. I imagine it can probably even do it over SSL.
I think the real danger is not that Exchange cannot be set up as a safe SMTP gateway, but that the administrators would refuse to do so: "Why should we open this additional service on this machine, increasing its exposure to remote exploit, just for you? Outlook is the 'standard' for email around here...if you want email, follow the 'standard.'".
I think a protocol extension is the only answer, and that SMTP+SPF is potentially the right way to go.
There is an interesting side-effect that users of free unix need to consider. In many organizations, the administrators of the IT infrastructure are a hostile entity that cannot be negotiated with. Those of us who use unix within an organization often get away with it because we are able to support ourselves. But if SMTP+SPF is adopted, we're going to need to have an official SMTP gateway within the organization for sending mail. For a company hooked on MS Koolaid, that may not be an easy thing to come by.
I'm sure it will be worth it in the long run, but it may be a bumpy ride for many of us.
While I don't disagree with you, I think Quartz is not just "slick technology X or cool feature Y"...it's about having an architecture that does things at the right level of the stack. The window server really should provide the kinds of services that Quartz offers and vanilla X does not...hopefully Cairo will bring these features to X soon so that we don't have to do ugly transparency hacks (etc...) in the application layer anymore.
I wish I had URLs to all of the paper computer magazines that I've read over the years. Just about every time they've used one product to muscle their way into another area they've resorted to this rhetoric. Two examples that I know of are including filesystem compression into windows and bundling a spreadsheet with a word processor (using success in one to propagate the use of the other.) I'm fairly confident that I heard this rhetoric back when Digital Research thought it was unfair to bundle MS-DOS with Windows (which used to be a separate product).
The phrase "open standard" never denoted that the standard belonged to some sort of bureaucratic standard's body. "Open" means that the standard is in a publicly-available document, and that anyone is allowed to create conformant implementations.
It is actually Microsoft's PR machine that planted the meme that a standard-body must somehow be involved. (It was how they deflected attention away from the real subject whenever open-systems issues entered the debate.)
Only because MS abuses the word so badly. They've been insisting that product bundling is "innovation" since the early 90's. "Look ma, I invented virtual shrinkwrap!"
I used to complain about the recycling of musical ideas up until the point where I engaged in a serious study of the theory of harmony.
It turns out that there just aren't that many ways that you can assemble the harmonic building blocks of music (in mere structural terms, that is -- the treatment of the structure is where the real variety goes). What I mean is that we have to live with the cycle of fifths, and the strong progressions that happen between chords rooted on tones that are adjacent in the cycle. Why? Because the root tones of the chords in your "key" all happen to be adjacent along the circle, as are the remaining 5 out of 12 tones that are not in your key.
The I (roman numeral one) chord has the IV chord on one side, and the V chord on the other. There's your basis for rock and blues.
On the far side of the V chord (from the I) lies the ii chord (lower-case roman numeral, denoting a minor chord). There lies your basis for jazz: the ii V I progression.
And the longest, strongest progression that contains all of the diatonic chords: IV vii iii vi ii V I (473-6251). They're all in a line along the cycle of fiths, except between the 4 and the 7, where we hide the "seam" left by restricting ourselves to the diatonic tones.
And why restrict ourselves to the diatonic system? Well, it turns out that the diatonic major scale is unique in that it can be constructed by a simple algorithm, starting with one of the 12 tones (adding to the scale as you go) and proceeding up a perfect fifth (modulo 12) until there are no more gaps left that are larger than a "whole step" (two half-steps). This is a very special scale and it amazes me how early in human history it was discovered. It's no wonder the monks thought it was god's own scale.
And don't even get me started on the golden ratio as it appears in musical architecture.
It's true that the mach server process that is the BSD kernel personality (or whatever they're calling it nowadays) resides in the kernel space, this is only an optimization to reduce context-switches. It's my understanding that this is something that they can enable/disable at build-time by setting an compilation flag...that is, the code is modular in the sense that it could run as a Mach single-server in its own address space, if one chose to not perform that particular build-time optimization.
Regardless, I don't think it's really relevant to how easy it would be to remove. The real question is what pieces really depend on the BSD layer being there, not what address space it runs in.
You raise a good point -- one that would give me reservations about buying this particular machine. On the other hand, computers have gotten to the point where I imagine that they'll retain their value for longer than most people would imagine. For example, I still have a 333Mhz G3 iMac in service on the tiny desk built into my kitchen counter. I use it to stream video from cspan.org while I'm cleaning the kitchen, and I don't feel like I really need to replace it.
I imagine that a 1.25GHz G4 will still be a comfortable machine for a long time -- for anybody who isn't intersted in cutting-edge gaming or video production, for example. There are a lot of people out there who only use a web browser and an email client.
Excuse me, but your crack habit prevented you from understanding my post. I did not compare to the i486 machine for the purposes of contrasting what Intel had available at the time. Thanks for playing.
The "Rev B" iMac that I'm responding from is maybe a month away from turning 5 years old, and I think it runs OSX just fine. It's a 333Mhz G3 with 160MB of RAM, which is an abundance of computational resources compared to the 66Mz i486 (with 16MB of RAM) that I formerly ran NeXTstep on.
I'll agree that Stallman is rational and that his views are internally consistent, but my understanding is that the word "zealot" just means a "fervent and even militant proponent of something". Synonyms include "drumbeater" and "partisan".
I realize that "zealot" is used pejoratively around here (perhaps not rightly so) but if one were to use it in a value-neutral sense, it would be a fair charaterization of Stallman.
Getting over square brackets was very easy for me, especially since the corresponding semantics in Objective-C are much nicer for writing complex programs in fewer lines of code. The resulting return type from an [object message] expression is always the generic object type, and you are free to send the resulting object any message...if it won't respond to the message, it's quiet about it...even if that object is NIL. (Thank the maker!) Of course, if you want stricter type checking, you have that option too...but at least Objective C gets out of your way when what you really want is to be maximally expressive while being minimally verbose.
I don't really see the distinction. The Variax doesn't really have an effects processor so much as digitally modelled instruments, and it does have a digital interface that one can use to send the instrument's signal directly into a digital interface on the Vetta amplifier (I have one of those; I don't have the Variax though.) While Line6 may not be attempting to establish an open-standard digital guitar/amp interface, they do have an instrument with a digital intetrface to an amp.
Moreover, iTunes isn't the only "product-placement" in this article. They claim that Gibson will release the first digital guitar in January 2004 when the Variax has been on the market for a while now.
Slashdot Mirror
You are misusing the concept of falsification here, and Karl Popper would probably call you on this just the same as I: falsification applies to assertions or hypotheses.
But notion of a "meme" is an entity: a labled observable, so it is not even eligible for the falsification test. You can't falsify the concept of mass either...but you can falsify an assertion that involves mass, such as "eating too much can result in increasing the mass of your body".
Now, if you wish to discuss whether or not a specific claim regarding memes is falsifiable, that's possible. Take the claim that "memes cannot be propagated without using language as a vector". There's an assertion about memes that is, indeed, falsifiable: if one observes meme transfer based upon silent observation and imitation, then you will have falsified that assertion.
You are right that "memes" are unscientific. Just as "mass" is unscientific. Science is a complicated filter that we apply to assertions. There's nothing inherently scientific about any of the entities that we study, whether they be memes or mass.
True, if you're using the word "object" like a C programmer would: refering to structs on the heap that may (or may not) have function pointers for callbacks. Anyway, I should have said that my clarification wasn't meant to invalidate the point that you were making (it wasn't lost on me). I just didn't want anybody to leave this thread thinking that there were no "descent" parsing APIs for non-OO languages.
This isn't true. The SAX API is event-oriented, and though it may be a little bit more difficult to wield than DOM it has the advantage of giving you complete control over memory allocation. That is, you can allocate as little as you need, and only when you need it, whereas DOM libraries allocate all that is required to completely represent the entire document in memory up-front.
Every decent XML library handles XML the same way.
Also not true; the same example suffices.
For what it's worth, 2.6.0 and the subsequent minor revisions have worked flawlessly for me and many associates. You seem quick to assume that they named it a "stable release" prematurely. Have you considered the altertnate hypothesis that you are in the minority of users who have encountered problems? If so, that's not a dishonorable place to be...somebody has to be the poor soul who encounters a bugs. (Thank you, by the way, I appreciate your hardship.)
Urinalist?
#include <advocacy/gentoo.h>
#include <advocacy/freebsd.h>
How can a post that directly addresses a point brought up in the article's text be moderated as "Offtopic"? There is clearly some agenda-based moderating going on here.
The term "EDL" stands for Entry, Descent, and Landing. It is a generic term, and does not necessarily imply specific system features, such as bouncing airbags.
I suppose this is where I'm expected to say something like "No one is prevented from forming their own opinions by Pudge expressing his own. If the slashdot editors had wanted this site to feign objectivity, they would have started doing it by now."
Exchange supports SMTP AUTH. I imagine it can probably even do it over SSL.
I think the real danger is not that Exchange cannot be set up as a safe SMTP gateway, but that the administrators would refuse to do so: "Why should we open this additional service on this machine, increasing its exposure to remote exploit, just for you? Outlook is the 'standard' for email around here...if you want email, follow the 'standard.'".I have encountered this logic many times.
I think a protocol extension is the only answer, and that SMTP+SPF is potentially the right way to go.
There is an interesting side-effect that users of free unix need to consider. In many organizations, the administrators of the IT infrastructure are a hostile entity that cannot be negotiated with. Those of us who use unix within an organization often get away with it because we are able to support ourselves. But if SMTP+SPF is adopted, we're going to need to have an official SMTP gateway within the organization for sending mail. For a company hooked on MS Koolaid, that may not be an easy thing to come by.
I'm sure it will be worth it in the long run, but it may be a bumpy ride for many of us.
While I don't disagree with you, I think Quartz is not just "slick technology X or cool feature Y"...it's about having an architecture that does things at the right level of the stack. The window server really should provide the kinds of services that Quartz offers and vanilla X does not...hopefully Cairo will bring these features to X soon so that we don't have to do ugly transparency hacks (etc...) in the application layer anymore.
I wish I had URLs to all of the paper computer magazines that I've read over the years. Just about every time they've used one product to muscle their way into another area they've resorted to this rhetoric. Two examples that I know of are including filesystem compression into windows and bundling a spreadsheet with a word processor (using success in one to propagate the use of the other.) I'm fairly confident that I heard this rhetoric back when Digital Research thought it was unfair to bundle MS-DOS with Windows (which used to be a separate product).
The phrase "open standard" never denoted that the standard belonged to some sort of bureaucratic standard's body. "Open" means that the standard is in a publicly-available document, and that anyone is allowed to create conformant implementations.
It is actually Microsoft's PR machine that planted the meme that a standard-body must somehow be involved. (It was how they deflected attention away from the real subject whenever open-systems issues entered the debate.)
Only because MS abuses the word so badly. They've been insisting that product bundling is "innovation" since the early 90's. "Look ma, I invented virtual shrinkwrap!"
I used to complain about the recycling of musical ideas up until the point where I engaged in a serious study of the theory of harmony.
It turns out that there just aren't that many ways that you can assemble the harmonic building blocks of music (in mere structural terms, that is -- the treatment of the structure is where the real variety goes). What I mean is that we have to live with the cycle of fifths, and the strong progressions that happen between chords rooted on tones that are adjacent in the cycle. Why? Because the root tones of the chords in your "key" all happen to be adjacent along the circle, as are the remaining 5 out of 12 tones that are not in your key.
The I (roman numeral one) chord has the IV chord on one side, and the V chord on the other. There's your basis for rock and blues.
On the far side of the V chord (from the I) lies the ii chord (lower-case roman numeral, denoting a minor chord). There lies your basis for jazz: the ii V I progression.
And the longest, strongest progression that contains all of the diatonic chords: IV vii iii vi ii V I (473-6251). They're all in a line along the cycle of fiths, except between the 4 and the 7, where we hide the "seam" left by restricting ourselves to the diatonic tones.
And why restrict ourselves to the diatonic system? Well, it turns out that the diatonic major scale is unique in that it can be constructed by a simple algorithm, starting with one of the 12 tones (adding to the scale as you go) and proceeding up a perfect fifth (modulo 12) until there are no more gaps left that are larger than a "whole step" (two half-steps). This is a very special scale and it amazes me how early in human history it was discovered. It's no wonder the monks thought it was god's own scale.
And don't even get me started on the golden ratio as it appears in musical architecture.
Of course music gets recycled. Deal with it.
It's true that the mach server process that is the BSD kernel personality (or whatever they're calling it nowadays) resides in the kernel space, this is only an optimization to reduce context-switches. It's my understanding that this is something that they can enable/disable at build-time by setting an compilation flag...that is, the code is modular in the sense that it could run as a Mach single-server in its own address space, if one chose to not perform that particular build-time optimization.
Regardless, I don't think it's really relevant to how easy it would be to remove. The real question is what pieces really depend on the BSD layer being there, not what address space it runs in.
You raise a good point -- one that would give me reservations about buying this particular machine. On the other hand, computers have gotten to the point where I imagine that they'll retain their value for longer than most people would imagine. For example, I still have a 333Mhz G3 iMac in service on the tiny desk built into my kitchen counter. I use it to stream video from cspan.org while I'm cleaning the kitchen, and I don't feel like I really need to replace it.
I imagine that a 1.25GHz G4 will still be a comfortable machine for a long time -- for anybody who isn't intersted in cutting-edge gaming or video production, for example. There are a lot of people out there who only use a web browser and an email client.
Excuse me, but your crack habit prevented you from understanding my post. I did not compare to the i486 machine for the purposes of contrasting what Intel had available at the time. Thanks for playing.
The "Rev B" iMac that I'm responding from is maybe a month away from turning 5 years old, and I think it runs OSX just fine. It's a 333Mhz G3 with 160MB of RAM, which is an abundance of computational resources compared to the 66Mz i486 (with 16MB of RAM) that I formerly ran NeXTstep on.
Whoa, I think this means that freebsd is dying. It's already less popular than Plan9!
I'll agree that Stallman is rational and that his views are internally consistent, but my understanding is that the word "zealot" just means a "fervent and even militant proponent of something". Synonyms include "drumbeater" and "partisan".
I realize that "zealot" is used pejoratively around here (perhaps not rightly so) but if one were to use it in a value-neutral sense, it would be a fair charaterization of Stallman.
(no disrespect intended.)
Getting over square brackets was very easy for me, especially since the corresponding semantics in Objective-C are much nicer for writing complex programs in fewer lines of code. The resulting return type from an [object message] expression is always the generic object type, and you are free to send the resulting object any message...if it won't respond to the message, it's quiet about it...even if that object is NIL. (Thank the maker!) Of course, if you want stricter type checking, you have that option too...but at least Objective C gets out of your way when what you really want is to be maximally expressive while being minimally verbose.
I don't really see the distinction. The Variax doesn't really have an effects processor so much as digitally modelled instruments, and it does have a digital interface that one can use to send the instrument's signal directly into a digital interface on the Vetta amplifier (I have one of those; I don't have the Variax though.) While Line6 may not be attempting to establish an open-standard digital guitar/amp interface, they do have an instrument with a digital intetrface to an amp.
Moreover, iTunes isn't the only "product-placement" in this article. They claim that Gibson will release the first digital guitar in January 2004 when the Variax has been on the market for a while now.