No I did not mean imply you said otherwise, I was just reiterating a point.
I actaully think we are all saying very nearly the same thing. And I agree,
one will never (?) get a computer to be as creative as a human.

As for guitars, if left to my own ear to tune, my guitar will usually sound
horrible, however with a tuning aid I can quickly get it in tune and do what
what I want to do which is play music. If I didn't have to tune it I could
just play music. much better.

Now if a song needs to be played in a different tuning than standard, having
a guitar that only tunes itself to standard tuning will indeed prevent me
playing some songs. So then I may need to have a manual override to allow
for alternate tuning. but wouldn't it be better if I could just say "tune
to drop D" and the guitar would be tuned? oh, I see that feature creep is
occuring... :(

rob

----- Original Message -----
From: Jason Wharton <jwharton@...>
To: <IB-Architect@onelist.com>
Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2000 12:13 PM
Subject: Re: [IB-Architect] Interbase Culture and Open Source


> From: "Jason Wharton" <jwharton@...>
>
> >An intelligent system does not have to be inflexible. And "throwing"
> >features at a product does not make it intelligent...
>
> Did I say otherwise?
>
> >Seems like Jim is saying he wants InterBase to be software that solves
the
> >problems at hand rather than creates jobs for DBAs.
>
> That's the premise I agree with wholeheartedly. It's an ideal. BUT, this
is
> a real world with lots of flavors and evolutions of problems to solve.
And,
> unfortunately, we can't seem to get computers to the state where they
solve
> problems as dynamically, with forsight, etc. as intelligent, reasoning
> humans can.
>
> Problem solving requires a certain amount of creativity and computers
don't
> inherantly have a speck of it. They are great for repeating operations
that
> need to always be done a certain way with assurity, i.e. tools to apply
> fixed given rules repeatedly.
>
> This whole subject touches upon the balance we as developers maintain in
our
> careers. If Jim is to succeed in his ideals (which I personally would love
> to see) you and I will most likely be out of a job even designing and
> building a front-end interface for a database. It all requires creativity
> and if you find a way to automate creativity a lot of us are in for a real
> career shakeup.
>
> It's the ability to "tune" features that *enables* creativity. Think of a
> musician. What if a guitar only had a single string. What kind of music
> could you create with it? Where would the harmony come from? It's nice to
> have some tuning parameters because that gives the musician's creativity
> more room to grow into. It's a balance between creativity and complexity.
>
> I'm just saying that if there came a time where I couldn't get InterBase
to
> do something I needed it to do because its parameters were under the hood
> untouchable I would have to go with another database product. I really,
> really don't ever want to have to do that.
>
> So far things have gone very well and I have good reason to believe that
> things will remain sensible while ideals are being strived for... So, I'll
> rest my case in that trust.
>
> FWIW,
> Jason Wharton
> CPS - Mesa AZ
> http://www.ibobjects.com
>
> Developer's Search Site! http://developers.href.com
>
>
>
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