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[rbistolfi]

Right, actually many problems of philosophy are now in hands of math, like what infinite means. Aristole's uses of ousia as the central concept of metaphysics seems to be a real turn around from the eidos concept, at least as Plato uses it, because it implies the particular being. Eidos is still there because a particular thing can't exist without the concept that define it as what it is (i.e., there is nothing  like pure matter, without form), but we always get the concept empirically, by a process of abstraction. From this point of view the particular being is always more fundamental than the concept used to think about it, since the concept would never exist without a process of abstraction from many particulars. The former concept of eidos implies a causal relation and a hierarchy where the eidos is always superior to the particular and the last exists only as a shadow of the first.
I read some where (maybe from Heidegger) that eidos and idea are originally forms related to "looking" verbs. That is, a concept is something like "what is visible in a thing", and the terms related to vision are originally related to picking with the hand, so "to pick with the soul". I dunno if there is some truth in this but it does sound interesting. The sciences related to language will soon replace many others (if they didn't already).

[gacl]

'find' is your friend

What i meant was that sometimes there's only and exe file in the CD-ROM. Or an exe file with a whole bunch of weird looking files in a bunch of folders. But then you execute the exe file (in Windows) and you get a stupid little program just to see an avi or a pdf. Do they do that just to mess with non-Windows users?

[Triarius Fidelis]

They probably just don't want people redistributing their content.

In any case, I'll bet the types can be identified pretty accurately by using 'file', which examines the content and not the name

[Triarius Fidelis]

LOL @ dis

"Having seen what happens when we pile a great many conditions on the graphs under discussion, we will now abandon the escalation of conditions and return to plain old graphs. Despite the title, crayons will not be required for this chapter [titled Coloring]."

[sledgehammer]

So, how do you apply ousia or eidos, concepts I sure don't understand, to this?

It seems that The Guy has decided that internet reading is superior, because the "author" can prevent the reader from concentrating on content.  Advertisements can easily be made to flash on the screen, lest the viewer get too comfortable.  Now, our local paper has figured out how to do roughly the same thing in print, by interspersing the content around the form of an ad.  Once was that the news was in one column.  Ads in another. No long. Now the whole page is one column filled with images from advertisers.  "News" is found in spaces which are not consumed by the image.  Pretty hard to find the news then, without seeing the ad. "Internet reading ability" may be simply the ability to concentrate on content despite the best efforts of the content provider to the contrary.

[Triarius Fidelis]

It seems that The Guy has decided that internet reading is superior, because the "author" can prevent the reader from concentrating on content.

No, on the contrary, I prefer printed reading material with one exception: it's not so good for searching. Indices are tolerable but not optimal. I read from and write on paper because it doesn't require power.

[tomh38]

I didn't want to start a new thread, since we already have this one ...

Recently a friend lent me his copy of Neal Stephenson's Anathem.  I'm not very far into it yet, but so far it's excellent.

If you're interested in science fiction, mathematics, history, philosophy ... I could go on but there's so much in this tome I can't list it all.  If you like Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, et al.) I think it likely that you would enjoy this book.

Right now Anathem is only available in hardback, so you may want to wait for the paperback, e-book, borrow it from a library or friend (as I did) or something like that.

Stephenson also wrote a piece on operating systems back in 1999 (In the Beginning... was the Command Line).  Many of you may be familiar with this piece, but for those who aren't I recommend it.  Here is a link to the full text with comments, annotations, and critique by Garrett Birkel (written with Stephenson's permission) from 2004.

Tom