Australia may be as big as the US, but what about population density? If 90% of it's people live in 10% of the area in one country while 90% are spread out over a much larger percentage in the other, that makes a big difference in what it takes to provide good infrastructure. How many miles of power lines, bridges, highway, sewers, railway is needed per capita in each country?
Science journalists William Broad and Nicholas Wade were writing about this back in 1982. See their book, Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science. Science is a human enterprise. We have always trusted it more than we should. Better that our romantic notions about the objective standards of science be exposed for what they are than to continue believing them.
What a bullshit excuse. If a business can manage to keep track of their assets, their accounts receivable and payable, and so forth, then they can manage keep track of their software licenses.
If they can't pass a BSA audit, they probably can't pass an accounting audit either. Game over.
Yes, but the point was that ensuring license compliance, just like having to keep track of these other assets, costs money! License compliance for use of FOSS, costs nothing.
... could a purely analytical thinker possibly belief in, besides him or her self?
What if that's not the real God?
Analytical thinking is helpful for some truth and knowledge, but not all. Those who think it's all sufficient have made their own religion out of it.
Consider that/. is largely populated by analytical thinkers (computer people tend to be that way or else they'd do something else for a living) and that religion, regardless of what flavor, is predicated on the abandonment of analytical thought at least where one particular idea is concerned.
Just like the guy this article is about, in a group of analytical thinkers, anti-analytical thinking is bound to be suspect.
I find this sort of thinking very "anti-analytical" and simplistic. The problem, rather, is that/. is largely populated by people who are undereducated when it comes to religion and who think that doesn't matter because they know so much about technology and computers. As if their competence in one area makes them good judges of the other. So they often do fall into the trap of "judging a belief solely on the merits of the stupidest people who believe in it" because they really don't know any more about religion than those people do and their own beliefs are predicated on the abandonment of analytical thought at least where religion is concerned.
"We must know where to doubt, where to feel
certain, where to submit. He who does not
do so, understands not the force of reason."
-- Pascal
“The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!"
An interesting parallel.
Those rats must be pretty smart to have thought of all that. Now if they can only figure out how to avoid traps deliberately set for them after seeing their fellow rats caught in them beforehand.
"Actually, it is a bit more complex than that - atheism was often not an integral part of the belief system for Marxist movements outside Russia...." Or, Cambodia and China. Good point about Marxism not being inherently atheistic. Yet it seems that where religion has been excluded, Marxist regimes are most repressive. As for Hitler, he appropriated a distorted Christianity for his own purposes. It wasn't like the Christian Church has any religious freedom or influence in Nazi Germany. Pastors who dissented were either killed or had to flee the country.
People have a right to support their own values in public no matter what they are based on. Organized religion does not manipulate government. It may manipulate people (voters), but so what? Voters are manipulated by all kinds of ideology. You have no more of a right that the government be influenced by your anti-religious values than others do for their religious ones. What sort of representation in government would you grant organized religion in return for taxing it? Separation of church and state works both ways. Many religious institutions do a better job of providing social services than the government and there are stipulations on how the funding is used, of course. This saves tax payers lots of money. More people have been murdered by atheist regimes (and in modern times) than by all religious ones put together. The influence of religion has given humanity far more in terms of hospitals, universities and other institutions that benefit society. We'd be far worse of without it than we are with it.
allows it to release groundbreaking products that are actually impossible to duplicate
Just because the design of an Apple product is distinctive doesn't mean that the product is automatically groundbreaking.
True. But the statement you quoted doesn't say that unique products are necessarily groundbreaking. If they are groundbreaking, making them also impossible to duplicate does mean quite a lot.
"It's not that I can't figure it out. It's that I don't *care*."
You should care. I once took a course in JBoss administration that included a section on tuning garbage collection. It convinced me that GC is a bad idea. It may make it easier for programmers but it shifts the burden for efficient memory management into a domain where it doesn't belong. Effective memory management is very sensitive to the design of the application. Shifting it to a generalized facility that runs garbage collection based on the short, medium or long duration of objects is an administrative nightmare. Someone writes an app that goes against the rules configured into the GC and the performance of the whole server suffers. So now we have training classes for Java programmers on how the GC works so they can write more efficient applications. How is that different from teaching C++ programmers a few simple code design disciplines (encapsulation, proper use of smart pointers, etc.) to minimize memory management problems in their code?
Rob Pike worked at AT&T Bell Labs in 1982. I remember watching his demonstration of the Blit. I was using a production version in my work 10 years later. (I was not an early adopter. I got one when every one else seemed to already have them.) I guess this is another example of the way AT&T "stifled innovation".:-)
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/11/03/29/1437239/Ma-Bell-Stifled-Innovation-ATampT-May-Do-the-Same
I used to work for AT&T Bell Labs. There was plenty of good research, development and innovation going on then. Yes, it took a lot of money because real innovation is not cheap and more competition only guarantees cheap products and services, not (necessarily) innovation. Yes, they were heavily regulated (even after 1984). Anyone who says Ma Bell stifled innovation did work there.
Today's at&t is a result of the merger of some of the Regional Bell Operating Company's (RBOCs) that were spun off when the U.S. government broke up AT&T in 1984 (so are Verizon and Qwest). All their innovation came from what is now long gone and/or sold to Alcatel. There hasn't been much innovation for at&t to stifle, so the argument against the acquisition is really only about its effect on the cost to the consumer.
This is a very good point. The point about training users to use OpenOffice seems moot when you consider that it might be easier for people to switch to it from Office 03 to Office 2010. You have training overhead either way.
Not only this but Go OpenOffice (http://go-oo.org/) and soon LibreOffice claim to offer better spreadsheet compatibility with MS Office. Plans to eliminate Java may help performance issues. If things continue to improve we might soon reach a tipping point where switching to LibreOffice from MS Office will be worth the cost savings and more and more companies will be doing it.
But is MS SQL Server any better? I heard a MySQL rep from Sun comment shortly after the Oracle deal to acquire Sun was announced that it might be Oracle's intent to use MySQL to compete with SQL Server. I don't see any less reason to believe his statements than yours above on the face of it.
Innobase, the developer of the InnoDB transactional storage engine for MySQL, was acquired by Oracle some time before Oracle acquired Sun. Maybe Oracle has a higher opinion of MySQL than you do.
Slashdot Mirror
Australia may be as big as the US, but what about population density? If 90% of it's people live in 10% of the area in one country while 90% are spread out over a much larger percentage in the other, that makes a big difference in what it takes to provide good infrastructure. How many miles of power lines, bridges, highway, sewers, railway is needed per capita in each country?
Science journalists William Broad and Nicholas Wade were writing about this back in 1982. See their book, Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science . Science is a human enterprise. We have always trusted it more than we should. Better that our romantic notions about the objective standards of science be exposed for what they are than to continue believing them.
What a bullshit excuse. If a business can manage to keep track of their assets, their accounts receivable and payable, and so forth, then they can manage keep track of their software licenses.
If they can't pass a BSA audit, they probably can't pass an accounting audit either. Game over.
Yes, but the point was that ensuring license compliance, just like having to keep track of these other assets, costs money! License compliance for use of FOSS, costs nothing.
... could a purely analytical thinker possibly belief in, besides him or her self? What if that's not the real God? Analytical thinking is helpful for some truth and knowledge, but not all. Those who think it's all sufficient have made their own religion out of it.
Hitchens was right, religeon poisons everything.
I wouldn't say that religion poisons everything but rather that inflexible certitude poisons everything.
Very true. That includes making a religion out of science (scientism).
You mean that you don't know the difference between God and Santa Clause? Even in concept?
Hitchens was right, religeon poisons everything.
Hitchens was wrong, ask his brother. http://www.amazon.com/The-Rage-Against-God-Atheism/dp/0310335094/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331675960&sr=1-1
Consider that /. is largely populated by analytical thinkers (computer people tend to be that way or else they'd do something else for a living) and that religion, regardless of what flavor, is predicated on the abandonment of analytical thought at least where one particular idea is concerned.
Just like the guy this article is about, in a group of analytical thinkers, anti-analytical thinking is bound to be suspect.
I find this sort of thinking very "anti-analytical" and simplistic. The problem, rather, is that /. is largely populated by people who are undereducated when it comes to religion and who think that doesn't matter because they know so much about technology and computers. As if their competence in one area makes them good judges of the other. So they often do fall into the trap of "judging a belief solely on the merits of the stupidest people who believe in it" because they really don't know any more about religion than those people do and their own beliefs are predicated on the abandonment of analytical thought at least where religion is concerned.
"We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit. He who does not do so, understands not the force of reason." -- Pascal
C with classes is a derogatory term used to describe programmers and code which wraps C-style code and various bad practices with classes. ...
"C with classes" was the name given to the language before it was named C++.
“The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!" An interesting parallel.
We're all chauvinists when it comes to intelligence and civilization, aren't we?
Those rats must be pretty smart to have thought of all that. Now if they can only figure out how to avoid traps deliberately set for them after seeing their fellow rats caught in them beforehand.
I'm sure the C spec will eventually add some better parallelism.
You are right. C doesn't need to be replaced, just updated.
http://www.informit.com/guides/content.aspx?g=cplusplus&seqNum=551&WT.mc_id=IT_NL_CPlusPlus_2011_8_30
http://www.informit.com/guides/content.aspx?g=cplusplus&seqNum=552&WT.mc_id=IT_NL_CPlusPlus_2011_8_30
"Actually, it is a bit more complex than that - atheism was often not an integral part of the belief system for Marxist movements outside Russia. ..." Or, Cambodia and China. Good point about Marxism not being inherently atheistic. Yet it seems that where religion has been excluded, Marxist regimes are most repressive. As for Hitler, he appropriated a distorted Christianity for his own purposes. It wasn't like the Christian Church has any religious freedom or influence in Nazi Germany. Pastors who dissented were either killed or had to flee the country.
People have a right to support their own values in public no matter what they are based on. Organized religion does not manipulate government. It may manipulate people (voters), but so what? Voters are manipulated by all kinds of ideology. You have no more of a right that the government be influenced by your anti-religious values than others do for their religious ones. What sort of representation in government would you grant organized religion in return for taxing it? Separation of church and state works both ways. Many religious institutions do a better job of providing social services than the government and there are stipulations on how the funding is used, of course. This saves tax payers lots of money. More people have been murdered by atheist regimes (and in modern times) than by all religious ones put together. The influence of religion has given humanity far more in terms of hospitals, universities and other institutions that benefit society. We'd be far worse of without it than we are with it.
For decades Jane Elliott has made a business out of doing this sort of thing to/for people and she's still doing it today. http://www.janeelliott.com/
allows it to release groundbreaking products that are actually impossible to duplicate
Just because the design of an Apple product is distinctive doesn't mean that the product is automatically groundbreaking.
True. But the statement you quoted doesn't say that unique products are necessarily groundbreaking. If they are groundbreaking, making them also impossible to duplicate does mean quite a lot.
... eventually; often when its too late to do anything quick, easy or cheap to make it better.
"It's not that I can't figure it out. It's that I don't *care*." You should care. I once took a course in JBoss administration that included a section on tuning garbage collection. It convinced me that GC is a bad idea. It may make it easier for programmers but it shifts the burden for efficient memory management into a domain where it doesn't belong. Effective memory management is very sensitive to the design of the application. Shifting it to a generalized facility that runs garbage collection based on the short, medium or long duration of objects is an administrative nightmare. Someone writes an app that goes against the rules configured into the GC and the performance of the whole server suffers. So now we have training classes for Java programmers on how the GC works so they can write more efficient applications. How is that different from teaching C++ programmers a few simple code design disciplines (encapsulation, proper use of smart pointers, etc.) to minimize memory management problems in their code?
"Adult stem cells aren't pluripotent." Don't bet the family jewels on it. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v456/n7220/full/nature07404.html
Rob Pike worked at AT&T Bell Labs in 1982. I remember watching his demonstration of the Blit. I was using a production version in my work 10 years later. (I was not an early adopter. I got one when every one else seemed to already have them.) I guess this is another example of the way AT&T "stifled innovation". :-)
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/11/03/29/1437239/Ma-Bell-Stifled-Innovation-ATampT-May-Do-the-Same
Anyone who says Ma Bell stifled innovation didn't work there. (Of course ;-)
I used to work for AT&T Bell Labs. There was plenty of good research, development and innovation going on then. Yes, it took a lot of money because real innovation is not cheap and more competition only guarantees cheap products and services, not (necessarily) innovation. Yes, they were heavily regulated (even after 1984). Anyone who says Ma Bell stifled innovation did work there. Today's at&t is a result of the merger of some of the Regional Bell Operating Company's (RBOCs) that were spun off when the U.S. government broke up AT&T in 1984 (so are Verizon and Qwest). All their innovation came from what is now long gone and/or sold to Alcatel. There hasn't been much innovation for at&t to stifle, so the argument against the acquisition is really only about its effect on the cost to the consumer.
This is a very good point. The point about training users to use OpenOffice seems moot when you consider that it might be easier for people to switch to it from Office 03 to Office 2010. You have training overhead either way. Not only this but Go OpenOffice (http://go-oo.org/) and soon LibreOffice claim to offer better spreadsheet compatibility with MS Office. Plans to eliminate Java may help performance issues. If things continue to improve we might soon reach a tipping point where switching to LibreOffice from MS Office will be worth the cost savings and more and more companies will be doing it.
MySQL is a joke, always has been...
But is MS SQL Server any better? I heard a MySQL rep from Sun comment shortly after the Oracle deal to acquire Sun was announced that it might be Oracle's intent to use MySQL to compete with SQL Server. I don't see any less reason to believe his statements than yours above on the face of it. Innobase, the developer of the InnoDB transactional storage engine for MySQL, was acquired by Oracle some time before Oracle acquired Sun. Maybe Oracle has a higher opinion of MySQL than you do.