This is the most ridiculous idea ever. Ive done IT consulting for over 7 years now, and I have dealt with hundreds of tiny companies with bizarre and obscure names who host Exchange on Windows SBS; somehow their emails manage not to get blocked.
Perhaps filtering outbound mail and taking action when your public IP starts sourcing spam has something to do with it. Perhaps making sure that the sent mail was legitimate also contributed.
What you suggest would mean that gmail and yahoo would be completely useless for a lot of small businesses (a HUGE part of business traffic, since larger companies are going to email more internally and less externally).
Summary: Once again, Bennet Haselton gets blocked from sending out automated email detailing how to bypass school and corporate IT policies, and wonders where he went wrong.
Here are a few protips, Bennett:
* Offering services to get around various kinds filtering will eventually cause you problems on the internet, especially when said activities will make you an "undesirable" for IT stafff in general.
* Sending out automated emails with automatically generated content likely to be on filters will cause you problems.
* And biggest of all, you do noone any favors by teaching kids how to violate their school's computer-use agreement. If someone is a "victim" of filtering that they cannot simply uninstall, chances are 99% of the time they have no implicit / irrevocable right to the network / computer resources. Being a guest on the network means you play by their rules.
Bluescreens since about XP SP2 have generally always been one of the following:
* You have a nasty rootkit, and it just broke (at least now you know!)
* Your hardware is broken (memory is going bad, or your capacitors are popping)
* Your drivers are broken (Im looking at you, Logitech Webcam drivers)
* You have disk corruption
Honest to goodness OS bug-induced crashes? Not sure Ive ever seen one.
Quantum properties before reality existed? Does not compute. And the whole thing assumes that particles truly "pop" in out of nothing, rather than coming in and out of "somewhere else", which really cant be proven.
and I believed it all fervently for a couple of decades, but now I don't.
That does not make someone unintelligent for believing it, as Im sure you yourself can attest to.
I see you don't subscribe to a human-like god, and I consider that reasonable
The parent in question was not me, and I dont think I would make that statement in that particular way. I believe in a God whom we are like in certain respects, and not like in other respects.
As you pointed out though, there are certain things that we can rule out, like a visible god
I dont believe I said that.
I have no problem with the concept of the Universe collapsing and re-banging, the rules changing each time,
As far as I can fathom that just moves the problem up one level. What on earth makes them keep doing so? If theyve been at it for an eternity already, why has the mechanism driving them not run out of juice? This is the fundamental problem of something that is in perpetual change being eternal: you dont just have the eternity-to-come to cope with, you have the eternity-gone-by.
but I find specifically the Abramic notions of a god with human traits that has always existed and is unchanging (that's what the bible claims) rather absurd.
But perhaps less absurd than something that has always existed and is constantly changing without running out of juice?
but it's patently obvious that at least 99.99999% of the stories we make up have no bearing on what really happened
I would agree that 99.99999% of ideas that contradict are wrong; that doesnt mean they all are.
but to simply say that we can't exist without a god is making a massive recursive assumption - you then have to explain how that god can exist without another god.
Not so-- unlike the universe, God is not in a state of perpetual change, so doesnt run into that problem of "why hasnt he reached a terminal state yet". And the whole point of being eternal is that it requires no source nor creator.
At the end of the day, we all have to either believe in SOMETHING eternal, or that somehow reality manifested itself out of unreality (which seems stranger still). And an eternal universe has a LOT more problems against it than an eternal deity.
Unless the recent argument that the universe can't be eternal is shown to be sound.
If the universe is eternal and entropy exists we would not be standing here in differently ordered piles of molecules; we'd all be one homogenous puddle of lukewarm neutrons.
My intent is not to mock anyone. That said, I do not hold all ideas with equal respect-- for example, the idea that truth is something specific to each person's views is not an idea I hold in high regard.
Im just trying to point out that it seems strange to me that people will insist that because we have no satisfactory observations of a deity, one cannot exist; but then on the flip side we are willing to go with all sorts of unobservable theories about the universe's origins which throw all rules of logic, reason, and physics by the wayside because they somehow dont need to apply during the birth of the universe.
Your categorical approach has the same flaw again: it hinges on the assumption that you've thought of every possible answer.
If there is a possibility that I have not thought of, then it can neither be convincing to me nor can I categorize it. When I become aware of it, I can create a new category for it; but as of now I cannot fathom how something could avoid fitting into one of those categories. If something exists, it necessarily:
1) Was created and is (created), or
2) Was not created and is (eternal), or
3) Was not created and is not (illusionary)
4) Was created and is not (illusionary)
I break the second category down into self-created and other-created since that is most germane to the topic of creation, and AFAIK there is no other option-- if something was created, EITHER it created itself OR something else created it. I also combine the third and forth option, because they both imply that we do not currently exist and generally are not worth discussing (if someone believes this, I would ask what the point of two figments arguing about it would be; simpler for both of us to just continue being figments in peace).
Of course the universe is intelligible to us. We're part of it!
Is the universe intelligible to the Ebola virus? You might point out that a virus has no nervous system (nor, actually, many of the things that make something alive), but I would point out that our brains are "simply" collections of molecules; where sentience and intelligence comes from remains AFAIK a mystery and not something that one would assume.
Order doesn't require intelligence; a system with rules will inherently lead to localized order (that's what rules are, after all), and a system without rules wouldn't be enough of a universe to produce people to argue about it.
This simply establishes that we DO have intelligence; Im not seeing why those rules you state are "requirements" for existence. After all, I thought much of the argument was that the rules could be thrown out.
And here is the true argument. I have no problem accepting that some things just are.
That is indeed where the argument is. Every bit of my reason-- and it would seem everything in science itself-- demands an explanation for things that occur. I can accept a timeless entity that undergoes no change, and I can accept something that does not exist and was not created; but I cannot accept timeless things that undergo perpetual change, nor things that happen with no cause. It seems a basic rule that if something happens, it was caused.
yet a creator with no traditional physical properties would, in essence, be made of nothing.
We accept the existence of many things that have no physical substance (rules, ideas, gases (sort of)), so in that sense I can see how it could be. To be clear I do not believe in a gaseous deity, nor one that is only a rule or idea; I dont know how to categorize the substance of God, I just can see how something can exist with no "physical substance".
If youre willing to throw away everything that we have the least bit of evidence for in order-- including all observable laws of physics and reason-- to get around the apparent necessity of a deity, then Im not really clear how that puts you in a more defensible position than mine.
At some point I might also bring in Occam's razor and ask whether it might not be simpler to NOT throw everything we know about everything in the garbage in the course of hypothesizing on our origins.
I was referring to the added costs of shipping two separate packages-- one trial, and one full-- with different distribution sources, different upgrade paths, and of course the additional work to test and repackage the thing.
As for how the universe could come into existence. there are several consistent answers, and we can't yet choose between them.
Please be specific: what is the most compelling alternative you can think of? You can use categories and I dont need all of the nitty gritty, just: are you talking about self creation, or some semblance of multiverses, or what?
You're putting a lot of stock in the notion of "possible".
Im simply pointing out that if you are aware of two possibilities, and you establish that one is possible and the other is not, the first is a LOT more likely than the second. I maintain that it is not rationally possible (or at least not rationally justifiable) to have an eternal universe, nor to have a self creating universe. The other options Im aware of are "existence of a creator" and "nothing exists, this is an illusion". Im gonna go with "creator", since I have no time for meta-speculative nonsense.
And this is why you're not playing fair: you invoke lawlessness for your single hand-picked explanation out of an infinite set of "possibles"
Possible is a tricky word, but generally I am aware of 4 categorizations for "possible origins of universe":
* Self-creation
* Created by other
* Eternal
* Illusionary
Rather than looking at the infinite set of possibilities, I would rather rule out by reason the categories that cannot be, and then when presented with a possibility, categorize it. Self-creation is nonsensical (violates non-contradiction and all reason); eternal brings out the problems I mentioned in my earlier post; and illusionary could be except that the mere act of contemplating the theory invalidates it as something must be in order to contemplate. That leaves one category as far as I am concerned.
Something else you've entangled with your argument: why do you assume your creator is sentient, or even intelligent?
I have other reasons for that, but I dont believe anywhere in my argument laid that as a necessity in the basic categorization. I believe that necessity for sentience comes when you look at the apparent order (that the universe is intelligible and that we are intelligent) of it all, however.
We take "matter cannot be created" for granted, but maybe that just didn't apply in the pre-bang void, and the universe truly did emerge from nothing.
An effect without a cause leaves those cosmic accountants truly perturbed; such a thing cannot be.
Well, sorta. It turns out that right after the big bang, as in less then a second, the temperatures (or energy-density if that floats you boat) were so high that the rules of physics as we know them fundamentally change. Molecules and atoms simply don't exist as we know them
You cannot possibly know, nor prove, nor even deduce that. The only "provable" way to show that would be through observation / measurement using tools that would be undermined by that very scenario. How can you POSSIBLY use observation to gather info about an event where no known rules of physics apply?
What you suggest is akin to establishing that a witness is a chronic liar, delusional, and hallucinating to boot, and then trying to figure out whether you can pick out the parts of his testimony that are true.
Since the universe is the universe, it has to play by the rules of the universe. Since God is not the universe, he does not. God being eternal and unchanging in essence is possible; for the universe it is not (because it very obviously undergoes change, and must have undergone change for there to have been a big bang).
You cant make the two situations equal, because theyre not, and thats kind of the point Im making.
And let's not even get into why this god would have to be your god in particular, and not some malevolent jerk who made a universe just to screw with its inhabitants.
I dont believe I brought anything quite that specific into it; having established the existence of God, I have other reasons for why I believe in certain specifics.
The lack of an explanation doesn't automatically lend credence to a supernatural one, any more than the Romans' inability to explain lightning somehow made Zeus more legitimate
It seems to me that if I can establish the "heres how it COULD be" for something, it makes it substantially more plausible than if I cannot. Its not simply a lack of active explanation, its the apparent impossibility by the laws of reason to reconcile the existence of the universe with a hypothetical lack of a creator. Thats not a problem you solve by gathering more evidence, as in the case of the Romans and Jupiter (not Zeus:P ).
For starters: Kudos for keeping it civil; that seems to be a rarity in any discussion of this sort.
Okay, then to your point: the big bang wasn't the start of reality, reality simply always was, and there happened to be a big bang.
Fair enough, but we still have a ball of stuff from whence everything came, and the cosmic accountants demand an explanation.
At the end of the day (as Baloroth noted above) we're dealing with a scenario for which neither of us can furnish what would be considered "definitive proof". But I would assert that I could show how a God COULD exist as a creator, while you could not show how the universe could either be eternal or self creating. Heres why...
If you say that the laws of the universe preceed the big bang (ie, that they are inherent in reality), you immediately run into the problem of that ball of stuff just appearing (which violates a number of laws). If you say that those laws came in with the Big Bang, you must acknowledge that the laws may in fact be dynamic, and all science which relies on the assumption that they are static (ie, viewing distant stars with the assumption that speed of light=c) gets thrown into question; and you still havent accounted for the ball of stuff. If you say that the ball of stuff is eternal along with reality, then you run into the question of how a stable ball of stuff could have exploded, and further how, if an eternity has already passed (by definition), we have not already spun down into an entropic cloud of chaos.
The only explanations I have ever heard are that of the multiverse from whence we came (which sounds a bit like what youre saying, and only regresses the problem one level up), and that of multiple "dimensions" (every possibility having happened in at least one of the dimensions; new ones formed as new possibilities are resolved-- which avoids a lot of the problems but is speculative at best).
I would be interested to hear how you can resolve those issues.
Getting steam on linux doesnt get the games to magically work on linux. "Just porting" might be kind of a big expense for the return theyre likely to get.
I would qualify myself as an amateur-- my "programming" consists of powershell and batch most of the time, except a few times a year when I break off to use AutoIt for some more complicated stuff. Remembering my CS classes, I have always tried to throw together the core program first, and as it starts to form I start breaking things off into functions. I think I often go too far, trying to functionize things that simply arent good candidates; and others I leave things as part of the main program flow that should really be functions.
Ive also noticed that doing either of those two things will, as you say, negatively affect any attempt to rework your code in any significant way.
4) Despite my glib comment earlier, there are also cases where blindly retrying a step is the cleanest solution. One example I've seen recently is where a database connection would reveal a timed-out disconnection only upon actually executing statements.
Disclaimer, Im no programmer.
But wouldnt it be a lot more sensical to have the exception check to see if the connection is now available, and simply call the parent function() again? Pasting the entire block of code that was used earlier seems to break a number of (good) programming conventions, like, i dont know, never using copy / paste coding methods. Functions are there for a reason, and your exception code has the unique opportunity to check and see if it makes sense to try again before doing so, and has the benefit of (in your example) allowing the try / catch block to work in the event of multiple consecutive timeouts. Your exception block could even get fancy and set a watchdog counter to make sure we arent stuck in an infinite loop...
It also cost a small fraction of the cost of the Voyager's computers, sooooo....
I mean, for some folks (NASA) it may make sense to spend ~1,000,000 x as much for parts that last 50 years, but for most people spending a fraction of a percent of the cost for 10% of the life span is a net win.
Your product would therefore be illegal to sell in the US, courtesy of the DMCA (at least AFAIK). Good luck securing funding for a project that cannot legally be sold in the biggest market, and probably a good number of the smaller markets.
pay attention 007: we're aiming for mid-2013, not yesterday
Im not sure if youre aware what Intel's operating budget is, but you dont measure it in millions, you measure it in billions. And last I checked, their chip designs take YEARS to materialize.
So forgive us if we're skeptical that with $10mil youre going to hit record performance/watt with a 6 month timeline.
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This is the most ridiculous idea ever. Ive done IT consulting for over 7 years now, and I have dealt with hundreds of tiny companies with bizarre and obscure names who host Exchange on Windows SBS; somehow their emails manage not to get blocked.
Perhaps filtering outbound mail and taking action when your public IP starts sourcing spam has something to do with it. Perhaps making sure that the sent mail was legitimate also contributed.
What you suggest would mean that gmail and yahoo would be completely useless for a lot of small businesses (a HUGE part of business traffic, since larger companies are going to email more internally and less externally).
Summary: Once again, Bennet Haselton gets blocked from sending out automated email detailing how to bypass school and corporate IT policies, and wonders where he went wrong.
Here are a few protips, Bennett:
* Offering services to get around various kinds filtering will eventually cause you problems on the internet, especially when said activities will make you an "undesirable" for IT stafff in general.
* Sending out automated emails with automatically generated content likely to be on filters will cause you problems.
* And biggest of all, you do noone any favors by teaching kids how to violate their school's computer-use agreement. If someone is a "victim" of filtering that they cannot simply uninstall, chances are 99% of the time they have no implicit / irrevocable right to the network / computer resources. Being a guest on the network means you play by their rules.
Its a CompTIA A+ induced superstition. I believe that response is still considered correct on many certs.
Bluescreens since about XP SP2 have generally always been one of the following:
* You have a nasty rootkit, and it just broke (at least now you know!)
* Your hardware is broken (memory is going bad, or your capacitors are popping)
* Your drivers are broken (Im looking at you, Logitech Webcam drivers)
* You have disk corruption
Honest to goodness OS bug-induced crashes? Not sure Ive ever seen one.
Strawman alert.
Quantum properties before reality existed? Does not compute. And the whole thing assumes that particles truly "pop" in out of nothing, rather than coming in and out of "somewhere else", which really cant be proven.
and I believed it all fervently for a couple of decades, but now I don't.
That does not make someone unintelligent for believing it, as Im sure you yourself can attest to.
I see you don't subscribe to a human-like god, and I consider that reasonable
The parent in question was not me, and I dont think I would make that statement in that particular way. I believe in a God whom we are like in certain respects, and not like in other respects.
As you pointed out though, there are certain things that we can rule out, like a visible god
I dont believe I said that.
I have no problem with the concept of the Universe collapsing and re-banging, the rules changing each time,
As far as I can fathom that just moves the problem up one level. What on earth makes them keep doing so? If theyve been at it for an eternity already, why has the mechanism driving them not run out of juice? This is the fundamental problem of something that is in perpetual change being eternal: you dont just have the eternity-to-come to cope with, you have the eternity-gone-by.
but I find specifically the Abramic notions of a god with human traits that has always existed and is unchanging (that's what the bible claims) rather absurd.
But perhaps less absurd than something that has always existed and is constantly changing without running out of juice?
but it's patently obvious that at least 99.99999% of the stories we make up have no bearing on what really happened
I would agree that 99.99999% of ideas that contradict are wrong; that doesnt mean they all are.
but to simply say that we can't exist without a god is making a massive recursive assumption - you then have to explain how that god can exist without another god.
Not so-- unlike the universe, God is not in a state of perpetual change, so doesnt run into that problem of "why hasnt he reached a terminal state yet". And the whole point of being eternal is that it requires no source nor creator.
At the end of the day, we all have to either believe in SOMETHING eternal, or that somehow reality manifested itself out of unreality (which seems stranger still). And an eternal universe has a LOT more problems against it than an eternal deity.
Unless the recent argument that the universe can't be eternal is shown to be sound.
If the universe is eternal and entropy exists we would not be standing here in differently ordered piles of molecules; we'd all be one homogenous puddle of lukewarm neutrons.
My intent is not to mock anyone. That said, I do not hold all ideas with equal respect-- for example, the idea that truth is something specific to each person's views is not an idea I hold in high regard.
Im just trying to point out that it seems strange to me that people will insist that because we have no satisfactory observations of a deity, one cannot exist; but then on the flip side we are willing to go with all sorts of unobservable theories about the universe's origins which throw all rules of logic, reason, and physics by the wayside because they somehow dont need to apply during the birth of the universe.
Your categorical approach has the same flaw again: it hinges on the assumption that you've thought of every possible answer.
If there is a possibility that I have not thought of, then it can neither be convincing to me nor can I categorize it. When I become aware of it, I can create a new category for it; but as of now I cannot fathom how something could avoid fitting into one of those categories. If something exists, it necessarily:
1) Was created and is (created), or
2) Was not created and is (eternal), or
3) Was not created and is not (illusionary)
4) Was created and is not (illusionary)
I break the second category down into self-created and other-created since that is most germane to the topic of creation, and AFAIK there is no other option-- if something was created, EITHER it created itself OR something else created it. I also combine the third and forth option, because they both imply that we do not currently exist and generally are not worth discussing (if someone believes this, I would ask what the point of two figments arguing about it would be; simpler for both of us to just continue being figments in peace).
Of course the universe is intelligible to us. We're part of it!
Is the universe intelligible to the Ebola virus? You might point out that a virus has no nervous system (nor, actually, many of the things that make something alive), but I would point out that our brains are "simply" collections of molecules; where sentience and intelligence comes from remains AFAIK a mystery and not something that one would assume.
Order doesn't require intelligence; a system with rules will inherently lead to localized order (that's what rules are, after all), and a system without rules wouldn't be enough of a universe to produce people to argue about it.
This simply establishes that we DO have intelligence; Im not seeing why those rules you state are "requirements" for existence. After all, I thought much of the argument was that the rules could be thrown out.
And here is the true argument. I have no problem accepting that some things just are.
That is indeed where the argument is. Every bit of my reason-- and it would seem everything in science itself-- demands an explanation for things that occur. I can accept a timeless entity that undergoes no change, and I can accept something that does not exist and was not created; but I cannot accept timeless things that undergo perpetual change, nor things that happen with no cause. It seems a basic rule that if something happens, it was caused.
yet a creator with no traditional physical properties would, in essence, be made of nothing.
We accept the existence of many things that have no physical substance (rules, ideas, gases (sort of)), so in that sense I can see how it could be. To be clear I do not believe in a gaseous deity, nor one that is only a rule or idea; I dont know how to categorize the substance of God, I just can see how something can exist with no "physical substance".
If youre willing to throw away everything that we have the least bit of evidence for in order-- including all observable laws of physics and reason-- to get around the apparent necessity of a deity, then Im not really clear how that puts you in a more defensible position than mine.
At some point I might also bring in Occam's razor and ask whether it might not be simpler to NOT throw everything we know about everything in the garbage in the course of hypothesizing on our origins.
I was referring to the added costs of shipping two separate packages-- one trial, and one full-- with different distribution sources, different upgrade paths, and of course the additional work to test and repackage the thing.
As for how the universe could come into existence. there are several consistent answers, and we can't yet choose between them.
Please be specific: what is the most compelling alternative you can think of? You can use categories and I dont need all of the nitty gritty, just: are you talking about self creation, or some semblance of multiverses, or what?
You're putting a lot of stock in the notion of "possible".
Im simply pointing out that if you are aware of two possibilities, and you establish that one is possible and the other is not, the first is a LOT more likely than the second. I maintain that it is not rationally possible (or at least not rationally justifiable) to have an eternal universe, nor to have a self creating universe. The other options Im aware of are "existence of a creator" and "nothing exists, this is an illusion". Im gonna go with "creator", since I have no time for meta-speculative nonsense.
And this is why you're not playing fair: you invoke lawlessness for your single hand-picked explanation out of an infinite set of "possibles"
Possible is a tricky word, but generally I am aware of 4 categorizations for "possible origins of universe":
* Self-creation
* Created by other
* Eternal
* Illusionary
Rather than looking at the infinite set of possibilities, I would rather rule out by reason the categories that cannot be, and then when presented with a possibility, categorize it. Self-creation is nonsensical (violates non-contradiction and all reason); eternal brings out the problems I mentioned in my earlier post; and illusionary could be except that the mere act of contemplating the theory invalidates it as something must be in order to contemplate. That leaves one category as far as I am concerned.
Something else you've entangled with your argument: why do you assume your creator is sentient, or even intelligent?
I have other reasons for that, but I dont believe anywhere in my argument laid that as a necessity in the basic categorization. I believe that necessity for sentience comes when you look at the apparent order (that the universe is intelligible and that we are intelligent) of it all, however.
We take "matter cannot be created" for granted, but maybe that just didn't apply in the pre-bang void, and the universe truly did emerge from nothing.
An effect without a cause leaves those cosmic accountants truly perturbed; such a thing cannot be.
Well, sorta. It turns out that right after the big bang, as in less then a second, the temperatures (or energy-density if that floats you boat) were so high that the rules of physics as we know them fundamentally change. Molecules and atoms simply don't exist as we know them
You cannot possibly know, nor prove, nor even deduce that. The only "provable" way to show that would be through observation / measurement using tools that would be undermined by that very scenario. How can you POSSIBLY use observation to gather info about an event where no known rules of physics apply?
What you suggest is akin to establishing that a witness is a chronic liar, delusional, and hallucinating to boot, and then trying to figure out whether you can pick out the parts of his testimony that are true.
Since the universe is the universe, it has to play by the rules of the universe. Since God is not the universe, he does not. God being eternal and unchanging in essence is possible; for the universe it is not (because it very obviously undergoes change, and must have undergone change for there to have been a big bang).
You cant make the two situations equal, because theyre not, and thats kind of the point Im making.
And let's not even get into why this god would have to be your god in particular, and not some malevolent jerk who made a universe just to screw with its inhabitants.
I dont believe I brought anything quite that specific into it; having established the existence of God, I have other reasons for why I believe in certain specifics.
The lack of an explanation doesn't automatically lend credence to a supernatural one, any more than the Romans' inability to explain lightning somehow made Zeus more legitimate
It seems to me that if I can establish the "heres how it COULD be" for something, it makes it substantially more plausible than if I cannot. Its not simply a lack of active explanation, its the apparent impossibility by the laws of reason to reconcile the existence of the universe with a hypothetical lack of a creator. Thats not a problem you solve by gathering more evidence, as in the case of the Romans and Jupiter (not Zeus :P ).
For starters: Kudos for keeping it civil; that seems to be a rarity in any discussion of this sort.
Okay, then to your point: the big bang wasn't the start of reality, reality simply always was, and there happened to be a big bang.
Fair enough, but we still have a ball of stuff from whence everything came, and the cosmic accountants demand an explanation.
At the end of the day (as Baloroth noted above) we're dealing with a scenario for which neither of us can furnish what would be considered "definitive proof". But I would assert that I could show how a God COULD exist as a creator, while you could not show how the universe could either be eternal or self creating. Heres why...
If you say that the laws of the universe preceed the big bang (ie, that they are inherent in reality), you immediately run into the problem of that ball of stuff just appearing (which violates a number of laws).
If you say that those laws came in with the Big Bang, you must acknowledge that the laws may in fact be dynamic, and all science which relies on the assumption that they are static (ie, viewing distant stars with the assumption that speed of light=c) gets thrown into question; and you still havent accounted for the ball of stuff.
If you say that the ball of stuff is eternal along with reality, then you run into the question of how a stable ball of stuff could have exploded, and further how, if an eternity has already passed (by definition), we have not already spun down into an entropic cloud of chaos.
The only explanations I have ever heard are that of the multiverse from whence we came (which sounds a bit like what youre saying, and only regresses the problem one level up), and that of multiple "dimensions" (every possibility having happened in at least one of the dimensions; new ones formed as new possibilities are resolved-- which avoids a lot of the problems but is speculative at best).
I would be interested to hear how you can resolve those issues.
If you just want to offer a trial, don't give us the entire app maybe?
So costs go up for everyone, just because some people have an entitlement complex. Way to refute parent.
Getting steam on linux doesnt get the games to magically work on linux. "Just porting" might be kind of a big expense for the return theyre likely to get.
I would qualify myself as an amateur-- my "programming" consists of powershell and batch most of the time, except a few times a year when I break off to use AutoIt for some more complicated stuff. Remembering my CS classes, I have always tried to throw together the core program first, and as it starts to form I start breaking things off into functions. I think I often go too far, trying to functionize things that simply arent good candidates; and others I leave things as part of the main program flow that should really be functions.
Ive also noticed that doing either of those two things will, as you say, negatively affect any attempt to rework your code in any significant way.
And of course Linux just says "oops" and tries to continue...
4) Despite my glib comment earlier, there are also cases where blindly retrying a step is the cleanest solution. One example I've seen recently is where a database connection would reveal a timed-out disconnection only upon actually executing statements.
Disclaimer, Im no programmer.
But wouldnt it be a lot more sensical to have the exception check to see if the connection is now available, and simply call the parent function() again? Pasting the entire block of code that was used earlier seems to break a number of (good) programming conventions, like, i dont know, never using copy / paste coding methods. Functions are there for a reason, and your exception code has the unique opportunity to check and see if it makes sense to try again before doing so, and has the benefit of (in your example) allowing the try / catch block to work in the event of multiple consecutive timeouts. Your exception block could even get fancy and set a watchdog counter to make sure we arent stuck in an infinite loop...
It also cost a small fraction of the cost of the Voyager's computers, sooooo....
I mean, for some folks (NASA) it may make sense to spend ~1,000,000 x as much for parts that last 50 years, but for most people spending a fraction of a percent of the cost for 10% of the life span is a net win.
Much depends on the manner of freezing and thawing.
Your product would therefore be illegal to sell in the US, courtesy of the DMCA (at least AFAIK). Good luck securing funding for a project that cannot legally be sold in the biggest market, and probably a good number of the smaller markets.
pay attention 007: we're aiming for mid-2013, not yesterday
Im not sure if youre aware what Intel's operating budget is, but you dont measure it in millions, you measure it in billions. And last I checked, their chip designs take YEARS to materialize.
So forgive us if we're skeptical that with $10mil youre going to hit record performance/watt with a 6 month timeline.