I understand that the UK is having its problems with the nutjobs, too -- I remember reading in the Guardian a little while back about some multizillionaire car dealer who has opened a charter school with the intent of teaching a religiously-based curriculum, including creationism, and has applied for the public funds to which such schools are (allegedly) entitled. IOW, something very much like you'd expect to happen in the US. (Can't remember any more of the details, sorry.) I don't think the problem is nearly as widespread as it is here, but it does exist.
Did they help pay for the existing infrastructure that they get to take advantage of?
If you grew up in the US, then that means that for the first 18-22 years of your life (at least) you weren't helping to pay for the infrastructure you took advantage of, either -- and, since you probably went to public school, you were taking much more advantage of it than they are.
I remember, not too long after 9/11, reading an interview with a kid (19 years old, something like that) who was arrested as part of a mob that vandalized a mosque. The reporter asked him why he did it, and he replied, "I'm a real American. I hate Arabs and I always have."
What was striking about this was that the kid's last name was "Mc" something. Apparently his family never bothered to tell him the stories about the reception his ancestors got when they first stepped off the boat...
SP2 has caused more havoc with more people's networking than, I suspect, any other OS release ever put out by any company. I know too many people, personally, who have been fUx0r3d by it to believe the "a few specialized apps" line.
As for 10.3, see what I said to another poster in the thread.
I'm sure I'll get modded down for this...
I've always believed that anyone who qualifies their statements with that line deserves to be modded into oblivion, just on principle. If you've got something to say that you believe will be unpopular, just say it -- don't try to impress us with how tough and brave you are putting your karma on the line. Or whatever.
That's why I specifically said "point release" -- maybe I should have been more specific; I was talking about the downloadable updates rather than the major releases.
IIRC, there was only one OS X point update -- I think it was 10.2.3 or 10.2.4? -- that caused real problems. And within a couple of days of its release, they'd pulled it and released a fixed version. So my policy is to wait a week to install the updates; if there are any killer bugs, Apple will probably find and fix them in that time. Much, much, much better than, say, the situation with the infamous XP SP2.
There is a good reason to despise Crichton: over the years he's degenerated from a moderately talented SF/thriller writer into a Luddite ideologue whose "novels" are thinly disguised political screeds -- and in the process, he's stopped doing his homework, which for a writer in his genre (especially one with his education) is unforgivable. His later novels, including Prey, have replaced storytelling with pseudoscientific hysteria.
Damn right. Someone who looks that good shouldn't be studying math all day.
Apparently she has quite a diverse life outside of her studies -- which tends to be true of really good mathematicians in general, actually. (People like Erdos are the exception, not the rule.) Don't fall prey to the stereotypes.
yeah, we all remember that before MS the computing market was entirely lead by nice companies with nothing but users interest in mind - and with very cheap, very accessible and very open non-proprietary software and os'es. And with no money and marketing budgets or sales forces. Those where the days.
[sigh] Nice straw man. I never said that the various other companies competing for market share in the PC and application space were nice guys. But the fact that there was competition forced them to maintain certain standards. Microsoft held pretty much unchallenged power for long enough (roughly a decade) that they could get away with making lousy products and treating users like shit and still make lots of money, and on the occasions that someone else (and it was always someone else, never Microsoft that I can recall) did something genuinely innovative and/or high-quality, Microsoft's response was to put out an inferior ripoff, use the power of their name to crush the competing company, and continue business as usual. This is all Microsoft has ever done, all it does, and probably all it will ever do.
Arguably Bill did more for personal computers than most anyone else out there.
Very arguably. Personally I can't see a damn thing Gates has done for PC's (in the generic sense) -- Microsoft's entire strategy, from the very beginning, has been to hijack existing markets rather than pioneering new ones.
A lot of people on/. may be too young to remember this, but there used to be lots of different choices for PC's -- and by "different" I mean genuinely different, not just the rather trivial difference between companies that build "Made for Microsoft Windows(tm)" boxes with "Intel Inside(r)". And in those days, Microsoft was just some company that wrote a lousy OS for IBM.
And then, a while later, there were lots of choices among word processors, spreadsheets, etc., and Microsoft's products were considered inferior knockoffs. But they were the people who wrote that lousy OS for IBM, so the suits bought their products, and... well, you probably know the rest.
The Net, and especially the Web, were the killer app for PC's, what finally made them as much a part of Joe Sixpack's home as a refrigerator and a TV. Once again, Microsoft had nothing to do with the development -- but they did have enough money to jump in with both feet once the market was established. No innovation, no research, nothing of value to anyone except Microsoft itself.
We are finally, slowly, thanks to Apple's mild resurgence and (probably more important in the long run) the growth of Linux, getting to the point where there is real competition in the PC world. But Bill G. has been its enemy at every turn.
I'd say Back to the Future is about as reliable as the Christian Science Monitor for finding science facts.
The CSM is actually a very respectable news source, and not especially influenced by CS ideology. It's no more about CS than The Economist is strictly about economics, or the New York Times is just about things that happen in New York.
To clarify: sequencing != mapping. We have the human genome, and the chicken genome, and a few others, sequenced; a sequence is often compared to a map without any labels. "Mapping" the genome involves putting labels on the things on the map. A map without labels isn't really all that useful by itself, but it's a place to start.
The Crichton canard gets pulled out every time global warming is mentioned. There are so many things wrong with it that it's hard to know where to start tearing it apart, but I'll point out one of the obvious ones right away: Michael Crichton, himself, has almost surely never done the experiments to show that E=mc^2, or that the sun is 93 million miles away, or that malnutrition causes pellagra. So why does he believe these things?
I target only Linux, and refuse all other jobs. This will be your failure. I'm happy your business is growing and may soon support you without the need for a seperate full time job. However, please remember the number one rule of consulting... Always use the right tool for the job. Do NOT try to shoe horn the job into your chosen tool of choice. Doing so will eventually lead to failure.
Ehhh, there's also the matter of different levels of resource allocation. If doing a given thing for a single platform takes x effort, then for a one-programmer shop, doing it for n platforms takes damn near nx effort. If GP poster is happy working only on Linux, and the services he provides have a wide enough market, there's probably enough room for expansion without him having to target other platforms. Now, if he were running a larger consulting firm, I'd agree with you that he's foolishly limiting himself, but it doesn't sound like that's the situation here.
[shrug] I'm a looong way from retirement, but I'm enjoying my life right now. Surely most people don't expect that they'll only get to "enjoy the finer things in life" for the last few years before they die!
Sure, if I didn't have to work to make a living, I wouldn't do it. But (since I don't work for Microsoft) the important parts of my life happen away from work, and (since I don't work for EA) I spend more time away from work than at it. If I had to keep putting in a regular workweek for the next few centuries to be able to maintain this state of affairs... well, I'd still prefer that to dying, thanks.
[sigh] You know, I really like both Poul Anderson and Anne Rice, but can we please stop projecting fictional ideas of lonely immortals onto technology that (if it's possible at all) will be equally available to everybody? If you have a decent chance of living for a millennium, then so do your family and friends; so indeed does your society, with all the comforts of home.
Your.sig goes a long way toward answering your question, I think. It's absurd for people to fight wars over whose Big Daddy In The Sky told whom to do what -- but they do fight such wars, and in the times between wars, they make laws based on their interpretations of Big Daddy's orders. Ridiculous? Yeah, but it's reality. We do have to pay attention to people's sincerely held beliefs, for practical reasons if no other.
That being said, it's worth noting that every major advance in medical technology has been met with howls of religious outrage, and within a generation or so, even the most devout usually get over their objections and start making use of the technology, because it works. There are exceptions, like the Jehovah's Witnesses' prohibition against blood transfusions, but those tend to be views held by a very small minority, and they're generally smart enough not to try to impose such restrictions on the rest of us.
Are you bored now? And if so, why not just kill yourself and be done with it?
One lifetime is not enough to do all the things to do. Not nearly. Just sitting here at my desk, I can think of enough stuff to fill up a couple of centuries. And I'm sure if I had a couple of centuries to play with, I'd think of plenty more -- at least enough for a millennium. I strongly suspect that no matter how much time I get, it won't ever be enough.
Re:Yeah, because the old way just wasn't effective
on
Live to be 1000 Years Old?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
You know, I really suspect that when Og the caveman first figured out how to light a fire, his buddy Thag bitched about this dangerous new technology because he was afraid Og's fire would burn up his prized collection of mammoth hides. Meanwhile, the rest of the tribe said, "Hey, now we can keep our caves warm!"
Every technological advance brings with it the potential for danger and social change. There are real, hard questions which must be answered. But for myself, I'd rather have the opportunity to answer those questions with some real-world experience...
Well, I am going to bet that a large part ofmy position is because I am an able-bodied 18 year old male,
Bingo.
but I see older people with all their problems and I can't stand the thought of relying on pills to keep me alive.
And yet people do take pills to stay alive; obviously, for them, living with the infirmities of age is better than not living at all.
Nobody is talking about forcing people to stay alive against their will. If you depend on a pill to stay alive, you can always stop taking it -- and generally, if you really want to die, you can always find a way to do so. (Yes, even if you're bedridden or quadriplegic; there are a lot of medically assisted suicides going on, all the time, no matter what the law says about it.) But most people want all the time they can possibly get, and I suspect you will too.
Biophysics isn't quite the right comparison, since biophysicists tend to deal with problems that are computationally hard. (And I mean "hard" in the strict CS-y sense, not in the "I'm having trouble coding this particular function" sense.) Genomics, while there is plenty of core algorithm work to be done, is much computationally much easier -- there are well-known polynomial-time sequence comparison and reconstruction algorithms, for instance.
No shit. I'd like to see an amendment to the effect that "Congress shall make no law the name of which is an acronym." Hell, have their staffers check them to make sure they're not acronyms. We don't need this kind of grandstanding. "FACT" should be titled, "A Law To Require Consumer Access to Credit Reports," and USA-PATRIOT should be titled, "The Final Solution" or something...
Slashdot Mirror
I understand that the UK is having its problems with the nutjobs, too -- I remember reading in the Guardian a little while back about some multizillionaire car dealer who has opened a charter school with the intent of teaching a religiously-based curriculum, including creationism, and has applied for the public funds to which such schools are (allegedly) entitled. IOW, something very much like you'd expect to happen in the US. (Can't remember any more of the details, sorry.) I don't think the problem is nearly as widespread as it is here, but it does exist.
Did they help pay for the existing infrastructure that they get to take advantage of?
If you grew up in the US, then that means that for the first 18-22 years of your life (at least) you weren't helping to pay for the infrastructure you took advantage of, either -- and, since you probably went to public school, you were taking much more advantage of it than they are.
Yep.
...
I remember, not too long after 9/11, reading an interview with a kid (19 years old, something like that) who was arrested as part of a mob that vandalized a mosque. The reporter asked him why he did it, and he replied, "I'm a real American. I hate Arabs and I always have."
What was striking about this was that the kid's last name was "Mc" something. Apparently his family never bothered to tell him the stories about the reception his ancestors got when they first stepped off the boat
SP2 has caused more havoc with more people's networking than, I suspect, any other OS release ever put out by any company. I know too many people, personally, who have been fUx0r3d by it to believe the "a few specialized apps" line.
...
As for 10.3, see what I said to another poster in the thread.
I'm sure I'll get modded down for this
I've always believed that anyone who qualifies their statements with that line deserves to be modded into oblivion, just on principle. If you've got something to say that you believe will be unpopular, just say it -- don't try to impress us with how tough and brave you are putting your karma on the line. Or whatever.
That's why I specifically said "point release" -- maybe I should have been more specific; I was talking about the downloadable updates rather than the major releases.
IIRC, there was only one OS X point update -- I think it was 10.2.3 or 10.2.4? -- that caused real problems. And within a couple of days of its release, they'd pulled it and released a fixed version. So my policy is to wait a week to install the updates; if there are any killer bugs, Apple will probably find and fix them in that time. Much, much, much better than, say, the situation with the infamous XP SP2.
There is a good reason to despise Crichton: over the years he's degenerated from a moderately talented SF/thriller writer into a Luddite ideologue whose "novels" are thinly disguised political screeds -- and in the process, he's stopped doing his homework, which for a writer in his genre (especially one with his education) is unforgivable. His later novels, including Prey, have replaced storytelling with pseudoscientific hysteria.
Damn right. Someone who looks that good shouldn't be studying math all day.
Apparently she has quite a diverse life outside of her studies -- which tends to be true of really good mathematicians in general, actually. (People like Erdos are the exception, not the rule.) Don't fall prey to the stereotypes.
yeah, we all remember that before MS the computing market was entirely lead by nice companies with nothing but users interest in mind - and with very cheap, very accessible and very open non-proprietary software and os'es. And with no money and marketing budgets or sales forces. Those where the days.
[sigh] Nice straw man. I never said that the various other companies competing for market share in the PC and application space were nice guys. But the fact that there was competition forced them to maintain certain standards. Microsoft held pretty much unchallenged power for long enough (roughly a decade) that they could get away with making lousy products and treating users like shit and still make lots of money, and on the occasions that someone else (and it was always someone else, never Microsoft that I can recall) did something genuinely innovative and/or high-quality, Microsoft's response was to put out an inferior ripoff, use the power of their name to crush the competing company, and continue business as usual. This is all Microsoft has ever done, all it does, and probably all it will ever do.
Arguably Bill did more for personal computers than most anyone else out there.
/. may be too young to remember this, but there used to be lots of different choices for PC's -- and by "different" I mean genuinely different, not just the rather trivial difference between companies that build "Made for Microsoft Windows(tm)" boxes with "Intel Inside(r)". And in those days, Microsoft was just some company that wrote a lousy OS for IBM.
... well, you probably know the rest.
Very arguably. Personally I can't see a damn thing Gates has done for PC's (in the generic sense) -- Microsoft's entire strategy, from the very beginning, has been to hijack existing markets rather than pioneering new ones.
A lot of people on
And then, a while later, there were lots of choices among word processors, spreadsheets, etc., and Microsoft's products were considered inferior knockoffs. But they were the people who wrote that lousy OS for IBM, so the suits bought their products, and
The Net, and especially the Web, were the killer app for PC's, what finally made them as much a part of Joe Sixpack's home as a refrigerator and a TV. Once again, Microsoft had nothing to do with the development -- but they did have enough money to jump in with both feet once the market was established. No innovation, no research, nothing of value to anyone except Microsoft itself.
We are finally, slowly, thanks to Apple's mild resurgence and (probably more important in the long run) the growth of Linux, getting to the point where there is real competition in the PC world. But Bill G. has been its enemy at every turn.
And people wonder, "Why are environmentalists written off as a bunch of kooks by mainstream America?"
And people wonder, "Where do rightwing asswipes get off defining for themselves what 'mainstream America' is?"
I'd say Back to the Future is about as reliable as the Christian Science Monitor for finding science facts.
The CSM is actually a very respectable news source, and not especially influenced by CS ideology. It's no more about CS than The Economist is strictly about economics, or the New York Times is just about things that happen in New York.
To clarify: sequencing != mapping. We have the human genome, and the chicken genome, and a few others, sequenced; a sequence is often compared to a map without any labels. "Mapping" the genome involves putting labels on the things on the map. A map without labels isn't really all that useful by itself, but it's a place to start.
The Crichton canard gets pulled out every time global warming is mentioned. There are so many things wrong with it that it's hard to know where to start tearing it apart, but I'll point out one of the obvious ones right away: Michael Crichton, himself, has almost surely never done the experiments to show that E=mc^2, or that the sun is 93 million miles away, or that malnutrition causes pellagra. So why does he believe these things?
(wait for it)
Because that's what the consensus tells him.
I target only Linux, and refuse all other jobs. This will be your failure. I'm happy your business is growing and may soon support you without the need for a seperate full time job. However, please remember the number one rule of consulting... Always use the right tool for the job. Do NOT try to shoe horn the job into your chosen tool of choice. Doing so will eventually lead to failure.
Ehhh, there's also the matter of different levels of resource allocation. If doing a given thing for a single platform takes x effort, then for a one-programmer shop, doing it for n platforms takes damn near nx effort. If GP poster is happy working only on Linux, and the services he provides have a wide enough market, there's probably enough room for expansion without him having to target other platforms. Now, if he were running a larger consulting firm, I'd agree with you that he's foolishly limiting himself, but it doesn't sound like that's the situation here.
[shrug] I'm a looong way from retirement, but I'm enjoying my life right now. Surely most people don't expect that they'll only get to "enjoy the finer things in life" for the last few years before they die!
... well, I'd still prefer that to dying, thanks.
Sure, if I didn't have to work to make a living, I wouldn't do it. But (since I don't work for Microsoft) the important parts of my life happen away from work, and (since I don't work for EA) I spend more time away from work than at it. If I had to keep putting in a regular workweek for the next few centuries to be able to maintain this state of affairs
Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. But if they hadn't gone ahead and built the fires, nobody would ever have known.
;)
Of course, based on your username, are you speaking from experience?
[sigh] You know, I really like both Poul Anderson and Anne Rice, but can we please stop projecting fictional ideas of lonely immortals onto technology that (if it's possible at all) will be equally available to everybody? If you have a decent chance of living for a millennium, then so do your family and friends; so indeed does your society, with all the comforts of home.
Your .sig goes a long way toward answering your question, I think. It's absurd for people to fight wars over whose Big Daddy In The Sky told whom to do what -- but they do fight such wars, and in the times between wars, they make laws based on their interpretations of Big Daddy's orders. Ridiculous? Yeah, but it's reality. We do have to pay attention to people's sincerely held beliefs, for practical reasons if no other.
That being said, it's worth noting that every major advance in medical technology has been met with howls of religious outrage, and within a generation or so, even the most devout usually get over their objections and start making use of the technology, because it works. There are exceptions, like the Jehovah's Witnesses' prohibition against blood transfusions, but those tend to be views held by a very small minority, and they're generally smart enough not to try to impose such restrictions on the rest of us.
Are you bored now? And if so, why not just kill yourself and be done with it?
One lifetime is not enough to do all the things to do. Not nearly. Just sitting here at my desk, I can think of enough stuff to fill up a couple of centuries. And I'm sure if I had a couple of centuries to play with, I'd think of plenty more -- at least enough for a millennium. I strongly suspect that no matter how much time I get, it won't ever be enough.
You know, I really suspect that when Og the caveman first figured out how to light a fire, his buddy Thag bitched about this dangerous new technology because he was afraid Og's fire would burn up his prized collection of mammoth hides. Meanwhile, the rest of the tribe said, "Hey, now we can keep our caves warm!"
...
Every technological advance brings with it the potential for danger and social change. There are real, hard questions which must be answered. But for myself, I'd rather have the opportunity to answer those questions with some real-world experience
Well, I am going to bet that a large part ofmy position is because I am an able-bodied 18 year old male,
Bingo.
but I see older people with all their problems and I can't stand the thought of relying on pills to keep me alive.
And yet people do take pills to stay alive; obviously, for them, living with the infirmities of age is better than not living at all.
Nobody is talking about forcing people to stay alive against their will. If you depend on a pill to stay alive, you can always stop taking it -- and generally, if you really want to die, you can always find a way to do so. (Yes, even if you're bedridden or quadriplegic; there are a lot of medically assisted suicides going on, all the time, no matter what the law says about it.) But most people want all the time they can possibly get, and I suspect you will too.
Biophysics isn't quite the right comparison, since biophysicists tend to deal with problems that are computationally hard. (And I mean "hard" in the strict CS-y sense, not in the "I'm having trouble coding this particular function" sense.) Genomics, while there is plenty of core algorithm work to be done, is much computationally much easier -- there are well-known polynomial-time sequence comparison and reconstruction algorithms, for instance.
No shit. I'd like to see an amendment to the effect that "Congress shall make no law the name of which is an acronym." Hell, have their staffers check them to make sure they're not acronyms. We don't need this kind of grandstanding. "FACT" should be titled, "A Law To Require Consumer Access to Credit Reports," and USA-PATRIOT should be titled, "The Final Solution" or something ...
:) Thank you.