Re:pictures are the key - but even then...
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Anticryptography
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· Score: 4
Look at how difficult it is to apply icons here on earth.
Example: How do you specify "home" with an icon? Do you show balconied condo? Do you show a hut? Do you show a three-story Victorian?
Anything abstract gets tremendously difficult, such as "stop". Specifying an action through visual cues can work, but only when all the users share the same common point of reference. The combination of colors and shapes we use in the US make stop sign symbols meaningful for us, but my guess is that to most non-English-speakers it requires a moment to remember "oh, yes, that's the American stop sign".
"Forward" and "Back" symbols might very well have no meaning to an intelligence that grew up ambidextrous.
I'm not trying to be critical of the idea of sending ideograms, but the important thing to remember is that unless they're very carefully chosen to be as abstract as possible, our own cultural biases will probably render them useless to anyone but humans (or perhaps even useless to anyone but educated people from the industrialized nations).
Does anyone know if the folks at NASA checked their Voyager ideograms on folks living in remote areas, far away from most industrialized humans?
Unfortunately it just doesn't work from a financial point of view to port games to an OS with a limited user base.
I've been pining for a port of Battlezone to the Mac for years now, and it will never happen. The Mac has a vast marketshare compared to Be, and the number of games available for the Mac is pathetic if you're a hard-core gamer.
Thankfully, I'm not a hard-core gamer, so I enjoy Close Combat, Myth, Oni, and a couple of other games on my Mac and am happy.
It's one of those horrible chicken and egg things, and I do feel sorry for Be users. Maybe the best thing for games on Be would be a serious shareware developer to come out with a game or two that would exploit the power of the BeOS.
Of course, finding a developer, even of shareware, to do this is the hard part.
1) Recording artists could distribute their music online in an encrypted format of some type (MP3 or some successor with better audio fidelity).
2) Joe and Josephine User download this music and pay for it using a truly useful micropayment system (now that would be an interesting Open Source project).
3) The bulk of the micropayment goes to the actual artist, not to the media conglomerate.
4) Joe and Josephine get the music they want.
Arguments against this concept:
A) People will still find a way to beat the encryption. Of course they will, just like people burn CD copies of their music now. The music companies still make hundreds of millions of dollars every year. At least this way the artists are getting their cut.
B) Peer-to-peer technology will kill this concept because people will just slide past the encryption and then post songs on (Napster, Gnutella, whatever). Not if you make the encryption tough enough that it becomes more trouble than it's worth to hack the encryption and then post the songs on a server somewhere.
The heart of the matter is that there are three principal actors in this drama: the record labels, the consumer, and the artists. The record labels have been getting fat on profits that are based on control of the means of production (sorry, Marx). The consumer has become greedy with Napster (hey, why not get ALL of my music for free?!). The folks getting screwed are still the artists.
Let's think about the people who give us all this great music, and let's come up with something that works for them. My guess is that if it works for the artists, it will work for consumers. As for the music companies, they can choke on their own greed.
Wow. That was one of the most eye-opening posts I've seen in quite a while. You nicely exposed the kernel of the matter - it's the purpose of the endeavor that counts.
I use Covad for my residential DSL, specifically because so many of my friends have had nightmares with PacBell. I contacted Covad, and chose Fastpoint Communications as my provider. From time of call to initiation of service took a mere 14 days.
I was very impressed with the level of service I received throughout the signup process, and when I spoke with the installation guy, I thought "hey, these people are on the ball."
So I bought some stock. I'm still holding onto it in hopes that Covad will do better, but the important point here is that Covad offers excellent service. My DSL has had no problems. I've needed no technical support. Everything just works as advertised.
I have friends who are *still* having problems with their PacBell connections, months after going through nightmare installation processes.
Yet Covad is still undergoing financial troubles. Good technology and service alone aren't enough to get ahead.
Video game development is a business, and the folks who create video games aren't usually the folks who own the company.
Just as with movies, television, board games, books, or any other form of entertainment, any attempt on the part of the "creatives" (writers, artists, programmers, et. al.) to define some sort of spectrum of acceptability is doomed to failure.
One, the creatives don't hold the purse strings, and the marketing people and various VPs of this and that are really the ones in control.
Two, even if the creatives did have control and could stipulate exactly how their games are developed and what hardware/software they're targeted for, the artificiality of a set of deterministic rules for the act of creating entertainment is doomed to fail.
I could see these rules being applied, but in a different way. If the VPs actually grokked the concept, some bold company might actually decide to go after a broader slice of the market by deliberately aiming their games at a stable platform that wouldn't require constant hardware and OS upgrades.
The bottom line is always money, and the folks who hold the pursestrings will only agree to change their habits when it offers them the promise of increased profits.
Don't get disheartened, though. Creativity has a way of seeping past constraints. For example, if you haven't seen it yet, check out A-Sharp's King of Dragon Pass, which is an excellent example of innovation in gaming.
The best way to encourage innovation in gaming is to vote with your pocketbooks, because that's what the game companies will understand.
Don't you think it's a bit ironic that this guy was ordering a pair of supposedly sweatshop manufactured shoes, for the purpose of calling attention to the fact that they were manufactured in a sweatshop?
It's sorta like wearing a leather jacket with stitched on letters that say "a cow was killed so I could wear this".;-)
Innovation flows from the notion that someone can earn money off their hard work and clever ideas, but it certainly also follows that patents on basic innovations can do more damage than good. Balance. That's the key.
Very true. The European approach to most social policy tends to spread responsibility around a bit more liberally than we Americans like. Imagine if Silicon Valley had been regulated in the '80s and '90s the way most European business regions are still regulated... .
The advantages of electronic paper are numerous, to be sure. But it may be a long time before books disappear, if ever.
People have an affinity for "things", especially in the case of the written word. As much as some of us might want to live in a Bauhaus, minimalist world, there's something warm and reassuring about a shelf filled with books.
It's an ego thing as well - "see how many books I have!". If we didn't like the physical qualities of books, of having them in our own homes, we'd all use the library a lot more;-).
Finally, there's something pleasurable in a tactile and visual way about a well-designed book. That's why people love coffee-table books about Bavarian castles. It's as much the book itself as the pictures and fluff text.
Of course, I'd love to have true electronic paper. But I don't see it killing paper books. Remember how the computer was supposed to do away with paper in the office? Maybe we'll see something similar with books.
It's always nice to see talented, hardworking people confounding the skeptics. There's always someone waiting in the wings to point the finger and say "I told you so" when you screw up. In fact, they're often there saying, "Yeah, everyone knew it could be done - it's about time you did it" when you succeed.
It's easy to take shots at someone else's work, but it can be damned difficult to make a complex project succeed.
Kudos to the folks at Johns Hopkins and NASA for getting the job done.
Isn't *choice* the whole point of Open Source?
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Is BSD Dying?
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· Score: 2
I don't really understand the whole Linux/BSD conflict. If you talk to Open Source developers (real developers, not just Slashdot afficionados), they'll tell you that they're *glad* that more than one Open Source OS exists.
I know that there are different licenses, but the licenses reflect the development styles of the people involved. That's the whole idea, isn't it? If I want to use a product that was developed by a relatively small team of people working on something they love, how is that different from selecting a product built by thousands of people from all over the world?
Yes, there are performance differences, but again it's up to the user to select the OS that works best for them. The success of the BSDs and Linux go hand-in hand, because the fact that they co-exist proves that Microsoft's "own everything" style of business is not only unnecessary, but counterproductive.
I use BSD for some things and Linux for others. I'll almost certainly use OS X for some things, while continuing to use FreeBSD and Linux for other tasks. I'm sure glad I have that choice.
"Then your fonts would be too small to see, so you would have to scale them up, oh look, your fonts look like shit again."
If a monitor could display at 1200 dpi, it would actually be showing 1200 dots per inch, rather than 75 dpi like most current monitors. 1200 dpi is the resolution of high-quality print on paper.
Take a look inside a professionally-published magazine. The print is clear and sharp because paper can "display" with such clarity. The dots are smaller.
However, if we had monitors capable of 1200 dpi display, there would be no need for anti-aliasing. Our eyes can't really even distinguish the individual dots at 1200 dpi, thus 1200 dpi text is inherently smooth and crisp to the human brain.
I agree.. I used anti-aliased fonts on Mac OS 9 when it came out, but then I quickly changed back to aliased. The reason is that, for me at least, prolonged exposure to those fuzzy edges gives me a headache.
Also, I think that the aliasing actually helps to differentiate between letterforms on current monitor screens, particularly when looking at sans-serif fonts. When fonts are too fuzzy, you have to focus more intently on the actual letterfrom to discern what letter is being represented. Thus, the headache.
As far as I'm concerned, antialiasing is great in graphics apps but not all that useful as long as our screen resultions are still so horrible. Give me a monitor with 1200 dpi resolution - THAT would be progress. Antialiasing is just a workaround that just doesn't work for me.
One of the things I've found in the course of my own life, and I can only speak for my own experiences, is that obtaining domain specific knowledge is only half the battle in gaining respect.
Generally speaking, the most effective people I've encountered in any working environment are those who not only can tackle the technical aspects of the job at hand, but can also assess and deal with the human issues.
For example, as a young lieutenant in the Army, I figured I was a pretty good leader. I was young, highly trained, and smart. But now that I've been out of the Army for a few years and working in the civilian world, I've come to realize that although I did know a lot and was highly skilled, my leadership abilities are still evolving and (hopefully) getting better.
The same thing goes for my project management abilities and technical skills.
I'm in my early 30s now, and I view experience differently than I used to. Sometimes what seems like thickheadedness is actually caution born of hard-won experience. I think it's human nature to become more cautious over the years, and that translates to a lack of willingness to trust less experienced folks with important projects.
Mind you, that doesn't mean that younger people are necessarily less experienced. The human brain works by association, though, and youth is usually associated with lack of experience.
Here's how I dealt with it when I was but a young lad. Whenever I was working with someone older and and potentially biased, I watched them for a bit to discern their communication habits and how they made decisions. Does this guy decide based on facts, or on emotion? Is she concerned primarily with cost, or with performance?
Then I would buttress whatever arguments I was going to make with irrefutable facts. Find sources of information in the trade press, on Slashdot, wherever. Wherever possible, present three articles or bits of information to buttress your claims. Document everything!
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Thoroughness is not ordinarily an attribute of youth (again, a generality, but one born of observation). When you're thorough, you are presenting yourself as a professional, not just a kid with an idea.
As a matter of fact, that approach works well no matter how old you are.
I am keeping it in perspective. I think you're missing the whole point, which is that in order to have a functioning society, you need art.
I also disagree with the stipulation that because there is a finite amount of teaching that can be done in a school day, that art should be eliminated.
If mathematics, sciences, and literacy were taught in a more capable fashion, there would be room for the teaching of art. Our schools' problems are not primarily matters of limited funds or wasted time spent on art.
Having worked and volunteered at K-12 schools in Pittsburgh and DC, I can say that the quality of education received depends on ONE thing: Expectation
If we expect that our students will fail, if we don't set them up to succeed, if we don't push them hard and set high standards for them, they will fail.
Parents expect that their children will fail, and they fail. Teachers expect that the children in their classrooms will fail, so they fail. Our society as a whole says that our schools are terrible, and yet we do nothing to change the expectation for students and the schools they're in.
If we teach our children how to think critically, they will be able to adapt and learn throughout their entire lives. If we teach them the arts, they will be able to create. If we drill them to remember the exact date of the sinking of the USS Maine, or pi to the tenth digit, that may make us think we've taught them something, it may make it easier to quantify education, but it won't make them any smarter, nor will it make our society any better.
This is why you see much greater emphasis on arts and other trivial applications of human talents.
Money spent on art over the last few decades in our schools has dwindled down to next to nothing.
Art is integral to society. Let's not forget that art and technology are inextricably intertwined. When humans were running around in loincloths with spears, they were drawing on cave walls, trying to understand the world in which they lived.
Some of the greatest minds in human history - people like DaVinci and Jefferson, were versed in the arts and technology. In DaVinci's case, they were inextricable.
Without the art in industrial design, there would be no Palm devices, no military camouflage (yes, artists came up with the idea of camouflaging ships in WWI). I could go on and on about the benefits of art in practical terms, but that ignores the larger benefits.
Art is part of being a human being. Without art, without personal expression, life is soulless. Art is what makes imagination real. Greatness is not just measured by how well someone knows their multiplication tables.
I agree that we need to improve how we teach children, but rote memorization of facts at the expense of art and other "trivial" subjects (do you consider music to be art?) is not the answer.
Raskin's comments (as interpreted by Berg) are very interesting in that he states: "they keep lumbering forward with the idea that people prefer innovation and flexibility to predictability and stability."
This reminds me of the constant wrangling in the web interface community about consistency of interface between sites. How do you create a site that does what you need it to do and conveys whatever aesthetic you're after, without making the site difficult to use? To put it in application terms, how do you build an app that people will appreciate for its innovation, and be able to use the first time around?
Raskin's idea of a disappearing OS seems counter to the quote above about consistency and stability. In the *real world* companies and even Open Source projects are going to create applications that use their own metaphors for movement, action, and so on. Currently, the OS is the only thing keeping interfaces even remotely consistent.
One of the reasons the Mac has such a well-loved interface (how many PC interface zealots do you know?) is that it's consistent from app to app. Basically, you buy a new Mac app, you launch it, and you figure it out on the first try.
I just don't see how an OS-less computer would somehow make things easier for users, when every app would be allowed to have whatever interface it wanted.
Most coders I know don't even touch-type. I mean, think about it. How many geeks take typing classes in junior high school?
People may *say* they type 140 wpm, but that's actually extremely fast, and when you're coding, you're using a lot of top-row special characters, which tend to slow even skilled typists down. And remember, actual typing speed = wpm - errors.
Try this test, folks. Time yourself. Do a typing test and subtract the errors you make from your score. My guess is that most of us won't get anywhere near 140 wpm. I touch type and I still only max out at about 70 wpm - and that's when I'm typing notes like this, not coding.
I still haven't decided how I feel about voice recognition, but 60-140 seems like a tremendously inflated speed range to me.
WebObjects, FileMaker, and the NeXTies
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OS X on x86?
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· Score: 4
Apple is a systems company.
They make well-designed hardware that lasts. Case in point: in 1995 I purchased a PowerMac 8100/100. After using it for four or five years, I sold it to my dad so I could buy a rev A iMac. He used it for a couple of years. Now he's purchased a new iMac and I've got the old 8100 back. It's happily running MkLinux (I know, I know..., but it is great as a simple network server). The point is, these puppies last!
But back to my original point. Apple has some stealth revenue sources that nobody seems to remember. FileMaker (formerly Claris) is a $282 million company, and Apple owns a sizeable chunk.
WebObjects (run by the Apple Enterprise group) has been raking in money on huge contracts with big corporations and government agencies for some time. They've downplayed the Apple name until now, and have concentrated on telling customers the history of WO (developed by NeXT) and its capabilities.
Both of these sources of revenue are independent of Apple's hardware sales (FileMaker makes as much money off of sales of its Windows products as it does off Mac sales, and WO only recently became available on OS X Server).
The WO factor, in particular, points out the impact of the NeXTies and the lessons they learned. Remember, they first went the hardware/software system route, then were forced to ditch the hardware. Jobs has been much more flexible on hardware decisions of late. Note the move from ATi to nVidia. There are strong rumors that Jobs is talking to as many as five chip manufacturers to figure out a way around Motorola's failure to deliver sufficient yields.
I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Jobs came up with another rabbit out of the hat. He's become less doctrinare in his approach over the years, and more attuned to market realities.
G.W. Bush v8 has announced his candidacy for President of the United States. The current president, G.W. Bush v7, has repeatedly called his opponent "nothing more than a feeble attempt at mimicing my stand on the key issues."
But seriously, $50,000 is a helluva lot of money to 99.99% of the world's population. So the rich now not only dominate in one life, but they get to perpetuate themselves infinitely?
If you think the Kennedys are a powerful political clan now, think about what they could be like with cloning at their disposal. Imagine the hiring policies of corporations who develop techniques to determine which particular clone donors make the best cloned workers. Think about the power not of death, but of life, misapplied.
Having been involved in a few myself, on the ground and at the keyboard, military simulations are created for two reasons. Sometimes a given situation covers both reasons, sometimes only one.
1) To explore a new paradigm of potential conflict which may or may not actually manifest itself at some point in the future. The USAF simulation of satellite warfare is an example of such a simulation. We don't really know if there will ever be satellite combat, but the technology is moving in a direction that might make such combat possible in the future.
2) To prepare for combat or other operations in a known conflict paradigm. The USMC conducting war games in San Francisco recently is a good example of this. Urban warfare happens all the time - Kuwait, Bosnia, Somalia, you name it. We know we'll at some point get involved in a fight in built up terrain somewhere, so we prepare for it.
Now let's look at the role of the military. The US military's primary role is to defend US interests (the physical safety of the citizens of the United States, its economic interests, etc, depending on your political views, one could go on in many directions). The military does not decide when and where it fights. The government does.
But when the government calls on the military to fight, it had better be ready to fight, or there will be calls of "damn, we pay them all that money, and they were caught by surprise!"
Cases where simulation of type 1 followed by type 2 might have been helpful:
1: Pearl Harbor ("nobody would ever try to attack Pearl, it's armed to the teeth!")
2: The Nazis Invade Russia ("Comrade, those Germans are preoccupied with France and England. They won't be turning east for at least another couple of years!")
3: The Nazis Invade France ("We have more heavy tanks than the Germans, and we have this fantastic Maginot Line!")
There's nothing worse than saying, "Damn, we never thought that might happen!" as you bury your dead.
Slashdot Mirror
Example: How do you specify "home" with an icon? Do you show balconied condo? Do you show a hut? Do you show a three-story Victorian?
Anything abstract gets tremendously difficult, such as "stop". Specifying an action through visual cues can work, but only when all the users share the same common point of reference. The combination of colors and shapes we use in the US make stop sign symbols meaningful for us, but my guess is that to most non-English-speakers it requires a moment to remember "oh, yes, that's the American stop sign".
"Forward" and "Back" symbols might very well have no meaning to an intelligence that grew up ambidextrous.
I'm not trying to be critical of the idea of sending ideograms, but the important thing to remember is that unless they're very carefully chosen to be as abstract as possible, our own cultural biases will probably render them useless to anyone but humans (or perhaps even useless to anyone but educated people from the industrialized nations).
Does anyone know if the folks at NASA checked their Voyager ideograms on folks living in remote areas, far away from most industrialized humans?
Or not.
I've been pining for a port of Battlezone to the Mac for years now, and it will never happen. The Mac has a vast marketshare compared to Be, and the number of games available for the Mac is pathetic if you're a hard-core gamer.
Thankfully, I'm not a hard-core gamer, so I enjoy Close Combat, Myth, Oni, and a couple of other games on my Mac and am happy.
It's one of those horrible chicken and egg things, and I do feel sorry for Be users. Maybe the best thing for games on Be would be a serious shareware developer to come out with a game or two that would exploit the power of the BeOS.
Of course, finding a developer, even of shareware, to do this is the hard part.
1) Recording artists could distribute their music online in an encrypted format of some type (MP3 or some successor with better audio fidelity).
2) Joe and Josephine User download this music and pay for it using a truly useful micropayment system (now that would be an interesting Open Source project).
3) The bulk of the micropayment goes to the actual artist, not to the media conglomerate.
4) Joe and Josephine get the music they want.
Arguments against this concept:
A) People will still find a way to beat the encryption. Of course they will, just like people burn CD copies of their music now. The music companies still make hundreds of millions of dollars every year. At least this way the artists are getting their cut.
B) Peer-to-peer technology will kill this concept because people will just slide past the encryption and then post songs on (Napster, Gnutella, whatever). Not if you make the encryption tough enough that it becomes more trouble than it's worth to hack the encryption and then post the songs on a server somewhere.
The heart of the matter is that there are three principal actors in this drama: the record labels, the consumer, and the artists. The record labels have been getting fat on profits that are based on control of the means of production (sorry, Marx). The consumer has become greedy with Napster (hey, why not get ALL of my music for free?!). The folks getting screwed are still the artists.
Let's think about the people who give us all this great music, and let's come up with something that works for them. My guess is that if it works for the artists, it will work for consumers. As for the music companies, they can choke on their own greed.
I was very impressed with the level of service I received throughout the signup process, and when I spoke with the installation guy, I thought "hey, these people are on the ball."
So I bought some stock. I'm still holding onto it in hopes that Covad will do better, but the important point here is that Covad offers excellent service. My DSL has had no problems. I've needed no technical support. Everything just works as advertised.
I have friends who are *still* having problems with their PacBell connections, months after going through nightmare installation processes.
Yet Covad is still undergoing financial troubles. Good technology and service alone aren't enough to get ahead.
Just as with movies, television, board games, books, or any other form of entertainment, any attempt on the part of the "creatives" (writers, artists, programmers, et. al.) to define some sort of spectrum of acceptability is doomed to failure.
One, the creatives don't hold the purse strings, and the marketing people and various VPs of this and that are really the ones in control.
Two, even if the creatives did have control and could stipulate exactly how their games are developed and what hardware/software they're targeted for, the artificiality of a set of deterministic rules for the act of creating entertainment is doomed to fail.
I could see these rules being applied, but in a different way. If the VPs actually grokked the concept, some bold company might actually decide to go after a broader slice of the market by deliberately aiming their games at a stable platform that wouldn't require constant hardware and OS upgrades.
The bottom line is always money, and the folks who hold the pursestrings will only agree to change their habits when it offers them the promise of increased profits.
Don't get disheartened, though. Creativity has a way of seeping past constraints. For example, if you haven't seen it yet, check out A-Sharp's King of Dragon Pass, which is an excellent example of innovation in gaming.
The best way to encourage innovation in gaming is to vote with your pocketbooks, because that's what the game companies will understand.
It's sorta like wearing a leather jacket with stitched on letters that say "a cow was killed so I could wear this". ;-)
Innovation flows from the notion that someone can earn money off their hard work and clever ideas, but it certainly also follows that patents on basic innovations can do more damage than good. Balance. That's the key.
Very true. The European approach to most social policy tends to spread responsibility around a bit more liberally than we Americans like. Imagine if Silicon Valley had been regulated in the '80s and '90s the way most European business regions are still regulated... .
People have an affinity for "things", especially in the case of the written word. As much as some of us might want to live in a Bauhaus, minimalist world, there's something warm and reassuring about a shelf filled with books.
It's an ego thing as well - "see how many books I have!". If we didn't like the physical qualities of books, of having them in our own homes, we'd all use the library a lot more ;-) .
Finally, there's something pleasurable in a tactile and visual way about a well-designed book. That's why people love coffee-table books about Bavarian castles. It's as much the book itself as the pictures and fluff text.
Of course, I'd love to have true electronic paper. But I don't see it killing paper books. Remember how the computer was supposed to do away with paper in the office? Maybe we'll see something similar with books.
It's easy to take shots at someone else's work, but it can be damned difficult to make a complex project succeed.
Kudos to the folks at Johns Hopkins and NASA for getting the job done.
I know that there are different licenses, but the licenses reflect the development styles of the people involved. That's the whole idea, isn't it? If I want to use a product that was developed by a relatively small team of people working on something they love, how is that different from selecting a product built by thousands of people from all over the world?
Yes, there are performance differences, but again it's up to the user to select the OS that works best for them. The success of the BSDs and Linux go hand-in hand, because the fact that they co-exist proves that Microsoft's "own everything" style of business is not only unnecessary, but counterproductive.
I use BSD for some things and Linux for others. I'll almost certainly use OS X for some things, while continuing to use FreeBSD and Linux for other tasks. I'm sure glad I have that choice.
If a monitor could display at 1200 dpi, it would actually be showing 1200 dots per inch, rather than 75 dpi like most current monitors. 1200 dpi is the resolution of high-quality print on paper.
Take a look inside a professionally-published magazine. The print is clear and sharp because paper can "display" with such clarity. The dots are smaller. However, if we had monitors capable of 1200 dpi display, there would be no need for anti-aliasing. Our eyes can't really even distinguish the individual dots at 1200 dpi, thus 1200 dpi text is inherently smooth and crisp to the human brain.
Also, I think that the aliasing actually helps to differentiate between letterforms on current monitor screens, particularly when looking at sans-serif fonts. When fonts are too fuzzy, you have to focus more intently on the actual letterfrom to discern what letter is being represented. Thus, the headache.
As far as I'm concerned, antialiasing is great in graphics apps but not all that useful as long as our screen resultions are still so horrible. Give me a monitor with 1200 dpi resolution - THAT would be progress. Antialiasing is just a workaround that just doesn't work for me.
Generally speaking, the most effective people I've encountered in any working environment are those who not only can tackle the technical aspects of the job at hand, but can also assess and deal with the human issues.
For example, as a young lieutenant in the Army, I figured I was a pretty good leader. I was young, highly trained, and smart. But now that I've been out of the Army for a few years and working in the civilian world, I've come to realize that although I did know a lot and was highly skilled, my leadership abilities are still evolving and (hopefully) getting better.
The same thing goes for my project management abilities and technical skills.
I'm in my early 30s now, and I view experience differently than I used to. Sometimes what seems like thickheadedness is actually caution born of hard-won experience. I think it's human nature to become more cautious over the years, and that translates to a lack of willingness to trust less experienced folks with important projects.
Mind you, that doesn't mean that younger people are necessarily less experienced. The human brain works by association, though, and youth is usually associated with lack of experience.
Here's how I dealt with it when I was but a young lad. Whenever I was working with someone older and and potentially biased, I watched them for a bit to discern their communication habits and how they made decisions. Does this guy decide based on facts, or on emotion? Is she concerned primarily with cost, or with performance?
Then I would buttress whatever arguments I was going to make with irrefutable facts. Find sources of information in the trade press, on Slashdot, wherever. Wherever possible, present three articles or bits of information to buttress your claims. Document everything!
. Thoroughness is not ordinarily an attribute of youth (again, a generality, but one born of observation). When you're thorough, you are presenting yourself as a professional, not just a kid with an idea.
As a matter of fact, that approach works well no matter how old you are.
I also disagree with the stipulation that because there is a finite amount of teaching that can be done in a school day, that art should be eliminated.
If mathematics, sciences, and literacy were taught in a more capable fashion, there would be room for the teaching of art. Our schools' problems are not primarily matters of limited funds or wasted time spent on art.
Having worked and volunteered at K-12 schools in Pittsburgh and DC, I can say that the quality of education received depends on ONE thing: Expectation
If we expect that our students will fail, if we don't set them up to succeed, if we don't push them hard and set high standards for them, they will fail.
Parents expect that their children will fail, and they fail. Teachers expect that the children in their classrooms will fail, so they fail. Our society as a whole says that our schools are terrible, and yet we do nothing to change the expectation for students and the schools they're in.
If we teach our children how to think critically, they will be able to adapt and learn throughout their entire lives. If we teach them the arts, they will be able to create. If we drill them to remember the exact date of the sinking of the USS Maine, or pi to the tenth digit, that may make us think we've taught them something, it may make it easier to quantify education, but it won't make them any smarter, nor will it make our society any better.
Money spent on art over the last few decades in our schools has dwindled down to next to nothing.
Art is integral to society. Let's not forget that art and technology are inextricably intertwined. When humans were running around in loincloths with spears, they were drawing on cave walls, trying to understand the world in which they lived.
Some of the greatest minds in human history - people like DaVinci and Jefferson, were versed in the arts and technology. In DaVinci's case, they were inextricable.
Without the art in industrial design, there would be no Palm devices, no military camouflage (yes, artists came up with the idea of camouflaging ships in WWI). I could go on and on about the benefits of art in practical terms, but that ignores the larger benefits.
Art is part of being a human being. Without art, without personal expression, life is soulless. Art is what makes imagination real. Greatness is not just measured by how well someone knows their multiplication tables.
I agree that we need to improve how we teach children, but rote memorization of facts at the expense of art and other "trivial" subjects (do you consider music to be art?) is not the answer.
This reminds me of the constant wrangling in the web interface community about consistency of interface between sites. How do you create a site that does what you need it to do and conveys whatever aesthetic you're after, without making the site difficult to use? To put it in application terms, how do you build an app that people will appreciate for its innovation, and be able to use the first time around?
Raskin's idea of a disappearing OS seems counter to the quote above about consistency and stability. In the *real world* companies and even Open Source projects are going to create applications that use their own metaphors for movement, action, and so on. Currently, the OS is the only thing keeping interfaces even remotely consistent.
One of the reasons the Mac has such a well-loved interface (how many PC interface zealots do you know?) is that it's consistent from app to app. Basically, you buy a new Mac app, you launch it, and you figure it out on the first try.
I just don't see how an OS-less computer would somehow make things easier for users, when every app would be allowed to have whatever interface it wanted.
People may *say* they type 140 wpm, but that's actually extremely fast, and when you're coding, you're using a lot of top-row special characters, which tend to slow even skilled typists down. And remember, actual typing speed = wpm - errors.
Try this test, folks. Time yourself. Do a typing test and subtract the errors you make from your score. My guess is that most of us won't get anywhere near 140 wpm. I touch type and I still only max out at about 70 wpm - and that's when I'm typing notes like this, not coding.
I still haven't decided how I feel about voice recognition, but 60-140 seems like a tremendously inflated speed range to me.
They make well-designed hardware that lasts. Case in point: in 1995 I purchased a PowerMac 8100/100. After using it for four or five years, I sold it to my dad so I could buy a rev A iMac. He used it for a couple of years. Now he's purchased a new iMac and I've got the old 8100 back. It's happily running MkLinux (I know, I know..., but it is great as a simple network server). The point is, these puppies last!
But back to my original point. Apple has some stealth revenue sources that nobody seems to remember. FileMaker (formerly Claris) is a $282 million company, and Apple owns a sizeable chunk.
WebObjects (run by the Apple Enterprise group) has been raking in money on huge contracts with big corporations and government agencies for some time. They've downplayed the Apple name until now, and have concentrated on telling customers the history of WO (developed by NeXT) and its capabilities.
Both of these sources of revenue are independent of Apple's hardware sales (FileMaker makes as much money off of sales of its Windows products as it does off Mac sales, and WO only recently became available on OS X Server).
The WO factor, in particular, points out the impact of the NeXTies and the lessons they learned. Remember, they first went the hardware/software system route, then were forced to ditch the hardware. Jobs has been much more flexible on hardware decisions of late. Note the move from ATi to nVidia. There are strong rumors that Jobs is talking to as many as five chip manufacturers to figure out a way around Motorola's failure to deliver sufficient yields.
I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Jobs came up with another rabbit out of the hat. He's become less doctrinare in his approach over the years, and more attuned to market realities.
G.W. Bush v8 has announced his candidacy for President of the United States. The current president, G.W. Bush v7, has repeatedly called his opponent "nothing more than a feeble attempt at mimicing my stand on the key issues."
But seriously, $50,000 is a helluva lot of money to 99.99% of the world's population. So the rich now not only dominate in one life, but they get to perpetuate themselves infinitely?
If you think the Kennedys are a powerful political clan now, think about what they could be like with cloning at their disposal. Imagine the hiring policies of corporations who develop techniques to determine which particular clone donors make the best cloned workers. Think about the power not of death, but of life, misapplied.
1) To explore a new paradigm of potential conflict which may or may not actually manifest itself at some point in the future. The USAF simulation of satellite warfare is an example of such a simulation. We don't really know if there will ever be satellite combat, but the technology is moving in a direction that might make such combat possible in the future.
2) To prepare for combat or other operations in a known conflict paradigm. The USMC conducting war games in San Francisco recently is a good example of this. Urban warfare happens all the time - Kuwait, Bosnia, Somalia, you name it. We know we'll at some point get involved in a fight in built up terrain somewhere, so we prepare for it.
Now let's look at the role of the military. The US military's primary role is to defend US interests (the physical safety of the citizens of the United States, its economic interests, etc, depending on your political views, one could go on in many directions). The military does not decide when and where it fights. The government does.
But when the government calls on the military to fight, it had better be ready to fight, or there will be calls of "damn, we pay them all that money, and they were caught by surprise!"
Cases where simulation of type 1 followed by type 2 might have been helpful:
1: Pearl Harbor ("nobody would ever try to attack Pearl, it's armed to the teeth!")
2: The Nazis Invade Russia ("Comrade, those Germans are preoccupied with France and England. They won't be turning east for at least another couple of years!")
3: The Nazis Invade France ("We have more heavy tanks than the Germans, and we have this fantastic Maginot Line!")
There's nothing worse than saying, "Damn, we never thought that might happen!" as you bury your dead.
Imagine how powerful Tux would become! Hell, he'd even start showing up on lunch pails ;-)