zimbabwe

First point: Just to clarify, you're calling Bacon a talentless hack? Bacon, the master of nightmarish imagery?

Second point: Define meaningful. Philosophy, science, photography, painting, all are essentially ways of passing time before death, if we want to use the cosmic scale; on the personal level each activity has different meanings to different people. I'm not a big philosopher, but I enjoy that much more than science. Science bores me.

Where is it written that philosophy can't evolve based on scientific findings? And what makes you think painting's not useful? Perhaps portraits aren't as meaningful, but even there, designing a web site for a musician I commissioned a painting of him rather than a photo. With paintings you can specify colors ahead of time and make something that fits for the design. So there's an example of an archaic medium being used for modern purposes.

I don't like very much your us-versus-them mentality here. I don't like your suggestion that there's such a thing as too much education. My policy is, to each their own. I'll continue to be fascinated by those over-educated idiots I call my friends, and you can continue to do whatever you choose with your own time.

It's unnecessary. I personally think that between an iPod touch and a Macbook, there's no issue with the currently-existing portable market. I use an iPod to read and write and browse the Internet without any complaints. For $500 especially this is nothing interesting without the controversy.

Now, that's one of the reasons I'm interested now in the Apple Tablet. I'd bet that if Apple is releasing one, it's because they've figured out something clever that I'm not seeing myself, and their product will stand out from its competitors in terms of core functionality, and I'd like to see what that is.

Fair enough.

Certainly for me, a tilted bowl of fruit that defies logic is more interesting than a boring bowl of fruit. It still doesn't fascinate me incredibly, but it at least adds something worth thinking about. I'm not that well-versed in painting, however, so perhaps somebody more enthusiastic than I can explain to both of us what makes Cezanne so awesome?

So people who do good work are never interesting? Or people with fascinating ideas never learn to polish them? I'm confused.

Wired is writing a kneejerk review. I don't trust their criticisms just as I don't trust their compliments. They simply haven't had the JooJoo for long enough.

If you're only posting to be a cunt, there's no reason to be posting at all. You're allowed to sneer on your cozy little weblog for all your friends to read. Here we're pretending to be gentlemen.

It certainly shows that he's got a good sense of perspective re: drawing bodies. And that's the suggestion Paul's making, right?, that Cezanne makes stupid goofy mistakes. The sketch here is just a sketch, but it shows he knows his shit.

Wait, what does the Kindle have to do with anything? I remember journalists loving the Kindle when it came out. There was a slight backlash months after the original sold out, but it's been very positively received by everybody but Hacker News, which still thinks Amazon is Orwellian because let's face it, we're not quite as bright as we think we are.

Are you saying JooJoo is interesting if you don't buy into the completely web-oriented whatever? Because they're not saying It won't sell for this price in your quote. They're just saying, unless your goal is to use the Internet, this isn't what you want.

Chill out, bro. You're reading way into this.

As for this tablet thing. Every person whose sources I trust have said the Apple tablet will be announced in early 2010. They've been saying early 2010 since late 2008, so I think I'm assuming that's correct. And I'm not saying it will be better than this glorified web browser, but Apple has a pretty superb track record when it comes to making new and innovative products. So there's hope that it might be really cool, as opposed to this, which is really lame.

I won't downvote you, but you're accusing a bunch of people of upvoting that comment just because it was already upvoted, then insulting those people, then sneering at them and calling them stupid. If your goal is really to reprimand the community, you don't do it by being a douchenozzle yourself.

I upvoted the comment because, for all Wired is jizzing over it, we're talking about a product that was just released. There're no really interesting information here. And from what I see of the product, it looks painfully limited. Perhaps it executes well, but it's just not doing much. Compare to Apple, which makes products that do a lot and still manage to do it well.

So when Wired mentions how it's just like the iPhone zomg!!!, I get this little voice in my head telling me the author doesn't know what he's talking about. That makes me more willing to upvote somebody making a snide comment that I agree with.

Maybe it's not the most intelligent HN comment, but how's that become groupthink to upvote it? How's it stupid or worth your losing your mojo?

Yeah, Paul is talking up his ass.

Afraid I don't know enough about programmers or painters to spout names, but in any other artistic medium you've got a mix of all types. I'll use film as my example because film's a medium in which you have a hundred people working together, and very elaborate roles evolved to let people do exactly what they want to do.

Some directors function as merely directors. They decide what they like, and they have other people execute. But other directors can and do insist on controlling other parts of the creative process. I'm not a fan of James Cameron, but the guy writes, directs, and edits his movies, and he's very involved in set design as well. Some props he insists on making himself because he doesn't trust anybody else to do it right. So there's a guy who knows what he wants to do, and is also capable of the incredible technical feats required to pull it off.

The emphasized part is a quote. It just happens to be a long blocky quote, so it looks merely like a bold post.

You need to understand that this is entirely a subjective opinion. There are forms of art where accuracy is prized, but in any kind of modern art, any rule can be broken if the result is interesting.

Are you saying you like none of Picasso's later work? Or even Dalí's?

I was.

James Joyce not being a writer till 32? The man wrote the "best" novel of all time.

Sylvester Stallone wrote Rocky in three days? Hot damn, perhaps my own situation isn't so bad.

Oh man. That actually looks pretty neat. I've got some anal dislikes, but they've removed almost all of the things that were red flags for me.

I'm just hoping they nativized the Mac version; I'd love to have a fourth major browser for tinkering with stuff.

If Bezos wanted to fuck around with his apology, he'd have used more cushiony words. "Stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles" doesn't allow for much leeway with how he views Amazon's actions here. He's saying straight out that they made a mistake.

Just to be certain, have all of you read Lockhart's Lament? Because it argues the case for teaching math more beautifully than I can.

http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

*its, not it's. :-)

Windows 7 isn't mindblowing. I actually dislike a lot about it. Microsoft doesn't have a clue regarding their design.

That said, when you plug in a mouse it works without complaining. My point was that the specific gripe ("Windows XP has a lot of noise") was taken care of in Vista and is now fairly polished for Windows 7.

Hardware in terms of ram, graphics card, hard disk: Not in a distinguishable way.

Hardware in terms of firm design, usability, compactness, and aesthetic: I can't think of anything that comes close to Apple's design. I can barely think of computers that come close to looking as good, and those are ones that don't feel good when you're actually using them.

There's a chance Ubuntu is better than the years-old operating system. I've had Ubuntu driver issues with all three of my attempted installs, but if I hadn't had those issues I might prefer it to Windows XP for some things.

That said, Windows 7 (and even most of Windows Vista) is more polished than Ubuntu in its current state, and its plug-and-play is much better.

Apple's market cap is around Google's, according to Newsweek. They make a pretty awesome profit on every product they sell.

I'll confirm product quality. It's just that right when the economy exploded there were a lot of people who were pretty snarky towards Apple, sneering at a company that dared make an expensive product. In fact, I spent this week on prog.reddit, and there are still people basically saying they'll laugh at Apple fanboys' faces when Apple collapses and they lose everything. I'm just glad that's not happening.

From anecdotal experience, every graduate at my old high school just picked up a 13" Macbook Pro. They're everywhere.

I can confirm this. In high school I hated math, planned on getting an English major, because the English teachers were so good. Previously, in middle school I hated critical analysis of books, but because my math teacher was so good I was an absolute math geek.

I remember my high school Algebra II teacher was asked, "Why should we care about what you're saying?" His answer: "You shouldn't care. You're here to get a grade. You'll never use this and it's not fun." This while my English teacher was staying an hour after class to debate Lolita, Ulysses, A Space Odyssey, and a whole ton of other stuff with basically every student willing to talk to him. There were a lot.

I'm astounded at how recession-proof Apple has made itself seem. I was hoping they'd survive without too many bruises, but it seems as if the recession is boosting their sales, if anything.

Rest in peace, Frank McCourt.

I missed Angela's Ashes, but Teacher Man looks like it would be worth the read. What a great reminder of what a good teacher is capable of.

I didn't say it was zero sum. I like Posterous quite a lot.

I'm going to have to try it out and see if it inspires me, but you win the first test, which is that this is a very, very sexy app.

I actually suffer a lot from misery that's woman-related, sometimes for months and years after something happens. Possibly that's because I'm fairly young, but also possibly it depends on the type of person and you aren't as affected as I am.

Thanks!

That makes sense. Thanks for qualifying!

I guess what I was trying to say is that it depends on what you mean by luxury. I always viewed luxury as whatever took some annoyance off my mind, so having a phone/mp3 player/camera/clock/gaming combo that syncs quickly is a luxury to me. I also really like pretty things that act very responsive, which I consider a luxury since that's not strictly a part of usability.

Keep in mind that I won't even wear a watch because I don't like dangly things, so I won't even pretend to understand what sorts of people go for the typical sorts of luxury item.