Mentat_Enki

Funny Story... For a good 20 some years, there was a wonderful conference dedicated to hacking on the Macintosh called 'MacHack' that was traditionally held in Dearborn, Michigan (well, it started on U of M's campus in Ann Arbor, and was on the west coast once) but eventually it found its home just outside of Detroit in a quaint little Holiday Inn. It hosted many a wonderful keynote speaker including Woz himself, and most of the original Macintosh engineering team, amongst others (Ken Arnold, Eric Raymond, David Pogue, Andy Ihnatko, to name a few...)

We'd descend on the place every summer. In the old days, we'd have a massive machine room full of macs provided by sponsors. Biggest LAN some of us yoots had ever seen, and boy did we play some Marathon on it. In later years, we took over the lobby of this place.

The Holiday Inn staff loved us. We were courteous and kept after ourselves well.

Well, they liked us so much and thought we were so upstanding, they extended welcome to other "hacker" conferences that didn't go so well (think FBI making arrests in the lobby, vandalism, general hoodlum-ry). In light of this, they approached us and eventually the conference heads folded and renamed it the ADHOC conference (Advanced Hands-On Developers Conference). There were other circumstances, but the public perception of the concept of "Hacker" is what really did the deed. It died a sad, sad death shortly afterward.

sigh ...a rose by any other name...

RIP, MacHack. sob :)

Ha indeed... Started clicking around on it expecting to edit text, or turn a page, or SOMETHING... Started looking for javascript errors thinking Safari had crapped the bed, as it is prone to do from time to time.

sigh

Post things like this once they get interesting. ;)

Never use your own money! Borrow and lose other people's money. It's the American Way! wink

(Note: I am an American, and thus reserve the right to poke myself in the eye.)

(While this was meant to be funny, it's really meant to be "ha-ha serious" not "ha-ha funny". Start-ups are by-nature risky endeavors. Putting your own financial well-being on the line in this fashion is as foolish as tight-rope walking without a net. If you've got a C-corp your personal assets should be somewhat protected. Make sure to do your homework on this...)

Oh, and last of all: Don't Panic. You can always flee to Europe or elsewhere. ;)

I think he means attempting to solve the 'symmetric multiprocessing' problem using threads, rather than using threads for sensible things like IO-forking/event-driven, asynchronous stuff.

Righty-o. Didn't mean to sound annoyed, but there has been a bit more Craigslist-y trolling-for-programmers-for-hire than usual lately it seems, and that kinda stuff needs some trouncing IMHO. :)

Also, you are going to be limited to the tools for processing images that are out there for the most part, which sadly means ImageMagick and/or GD. But not SO sadly, as both of those (while annoying to deploy, granted...) have decent bindings to everything, support a pretty good selection of images types, and have params for controlling the aspects you mentioned (except maybe smart cropping).

Everything else is arithmetic and designing a clean, RESTful URL scheme for invoking it. I guess I meant trivial in the sense that all these things are solved problems or only require a bit of time/cleverness.

I built one of these a few years ago using PHP/GD, and it performed admirably (and did everything except smart cropping in your aforementioned list...)

So, feel free to hit me up if you get stuck on any specifics. Been there done that, and can commisserate if nothing else. ;)

Was there a question being asked here? If you are looking for a programmer-for-hire, there are freelance sites for that sort of thing. This isn't even an hard/interesting problem, and anyone who could "build a mobile site/app" should be able to code up this trivial service in minutes.

malapropism... think he meant 'obscene'.

Technically, HE himself, as in Plato, first person, never says 'the physical world is bad'. However, if you study his work, you will find that this notion is indeed carried out in the words and actions of his protagonist, Socrates.

For example, and maybe the best example: Socrates, laying on his back as the numbness and cold from the hemlock worked its way from his legs upward after willingly drinking it, removed the cloth that had been laid across his face and said "Oh... don't forget to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius for me...". This phrase, which was also used by Steinbeck in "The Moon is Down" in a similar context, is taken to mean "please go an make an offering to the God of Ailments & Cures, as I have been cured of the curses of the physical world by death, and am going to a much better place..."

Also, Plato's take wasn't that the physical world was "bad" so much as it was composed of imperfect instances of the "Forms"; Reality as mere shadows and projections of purer, more abstract concepts.

I take slight issue, however, with you denigrating "secondary materials" with a broad stroke. There are some really very good, objective analyses of Plato (Vlastos, et. al.) that actually provide a great deal of insight from time to time by explaining some of the idioms and pre-conceived notions of the time and culture that are necessarily understood to be placed in the proper context to understand the dialogue.

For my 2¢, I say to the OP: Wittgenstein. The "Brown" and "Blue" books. Very interesting, modern philosophy that deals with semantic meaning and the binding of semantics to syntax and lexicon. Very intriguing stuff. Oh, and the guy was a kindergarden teacher, so you KNOW he had balls of steel. ;)

You've missed the admittedly rather subtle point I was trying to make, and have assumed I meant that iPods and iPhones were 'credible alternatives to a computer'.

The reason for my sarcastic, annoyed comment is the continual shock and disbelief that a low-cost product that completely freaking nails its intended target is outselling the recently-antiquated paradigm that is the personal computer.

People have been pining for this sort of device in their little black hearts for decades (if you want insight into the zeitgeist of a society, examine their art & culture for their hopes and dreams. Case in point: the Star Trek PADD, etc. Who could possibly NOT want one of those ;) ), and as such the "pent-up demand" comes to me as no surprise.

The iPad won't be the only one of its breed to surface in the near-future, but you can damn well better believe it will always be one of the best if not THE best-of-breed. In fact, I contend that these devices aren't "well-executed PC alternatives" so much as well-executed PC REPLACEMENTS. We may end up seeing the "personal computer" as we know it relegated back to the days of the concept of a "workstation", reserved only for those that need the on-site computing power, and the 'cloud' on the horizon seems make this even more certain.

Yes there have been other tablets. Yes there will be other tablets. "It's not the hardware, stupid!" (It's the interaction model that makes it so successful, and why Apple is miles ahead of everyone else in this respect, and will most likely remain so for the near term.)

Sorry for the rant, and of course nothing personal, just don't like the flavour of other people's words in my mouth and felt like my point was misinterpreted.

This just in: Apple ALSO selling more iPods and iPhones than Macs! Compelling! After the break: the shocking story of a Bear who shits in the woods, and is the Space Pope REALLY reptilian? Back after this...

Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu. Practical and Powerful. Great lineage. Check it out.

Scheme.

Absolutely...I mean, look how Sergei and Brin's and Steve and Steve's ventures turned out... sheesh.

Aye, and don't forget the loss of the Library at Alexandria...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_at_Alexandria

yeah perhaps I drew him into this one, but "innate quality of human organic compounds" seemed like a bit of human elitism to me. To which I say "hey buddy, just because we are (apparently) the most dominant species on the planet (which I also am not too certain I agree with), doesn't mean we are the end all be all, or worse, somehow different than all the animalia we happen to try to place ourselves "above" or something. Trust me, when humans wear out their welcome here (which seems to be coming with great alacrity with regard to cosmic timescales), the insects will be more than happy to eat our corpses and continue on happily without us. We are adaptable, but not THE MOST adaptable organism on the planet. And regarding the philosophical position business, I also call bollocks, as there was not one rational argument presented to back his premise regarding the "innate quality of organic human compounds". Is the human neuron somehow magically different than a chimp's neuron? Methinks not, i.e. it is particularly unsound to somehow make our molecules different than any other organisms molecules simply because we are human.

No, human intelligence is an emergent quality, and I fathom that even our massive representations of humanity's information (akin to what Google is compiling) will soon begin to exhibit interesting qualities of its own once it becomes complex enough to exhibit perhaps interesting, unanticipated emergent qualities (in fact, if it didn't I would be absolutely shocked). Many strange and unpredictable (or at the very least unanticipated) things arise from even the simplest of "complex systems" (Conway's game of life and some of Wolfram's automata), much less the wonderful systems detailed by our individual neural mappings and our individual genomes. (q.v. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergent_behavior)

People always think that some human will "write" an AI like HAL or the like, but it is much more likely that nature will roll its own AI once we have made a comfy enough nest for it to germinate. After all, isn't that how we got here? (from an evolutionary biologists standpoint anyhow...)

And again, sorry for being contentious. I just despise the "religious" argument (even if there is no "named religion" being expounded... Let's keep Ockham's Razor at the ready here....)

Bah....I call bullshit. This is pure anthropomorphism. Humans think they are the shit, but in fact they are only story-telling animals (which does give us an evolutionary advantage, incidentally. We are not limited in our information transfer inter-generationally by genes alone.) We are limited by the same physics as the chips we make. This innate quality you speak of is pure vapor. Even if humans were somehow able to become mentats, we'd still be limited by the tenants of information theory and what is computable. The fact that human intelligence is emergent leads me to believe that machine intelligence will be the same, albeit very different than a simian mammal's intelligence. Fish are smarter than we are at swimming. Think ants.

Can't wait... G.R.R. Martin is terrific. Heard some rumor that HBO or showtime was making a live-action series based upon the books. Love the gritty realities of his novel... Never afraid to lop the head off the main protagonist in the middle of a book. Bravo.

condolences, man...

bummer.

My Apple ][c is still kicking!