That said, the current Blackberry software sucks. Whenever you upgrade or delete an app, the phone has to reboot. Acceptable for 2007. Insane for 2012.
There was a lot that sucked about the Blackberry OS, but Ive seen what the alternative is, and Im happy to accept those shortcomings for what I got in return.
If in some alternate reality a car maker in the 1890s was going out of business because everyone was raving over the new horse-and-buggy, I would be much happier that they stick to their "failing" model rather than removing their excellent product from the market. Thats basically how I feel now-- in the name of general purpose cellphones and youtube everywhere, we are giving up one of the most outstanding business comms form factors.
Physical keyboards disappearing-- whats not to love? Unless of course you have to type scads of emails every day on the go, of course.
If you have to write 50 emails a day from a mobile device, you have made a serious vocational error.
Theres this profession called "IT consulting". The more successful you are, the more emails youre writing, and quick access to them is pretty fundamental to getting things done efficiently.
Maybe part of the problem is hand-size. Ive got monstrous hands (Im 6'7 or so), and accurately hitting links or text locations in edit mode is phenomenally frustrating. With trackpad + physical keyboard, none of this was ever an issue. My perfect device would be the Bold you mentioned but with a touchscreen for those things touch is good for.
Its entirely possible that none of those users are too concerned with email / phone, and are more concerned with "other things" the phone can do. That being the case, a blackberry would be the polar opposite of what they wanted.
and our relatively generous policies.
One of the reasons BES's benefits arent that great for you. Most of the benefit on the admin side is the massive control you have.
Im not sure what the frustration your users might have experienced was, but Ill say that initially I was frustrated with my blackberry (4 or so years ago), because I wanted it to do things it wasnt good at. Once I got into the mindset "its for business comms, stupid", I loved it because whether or not I had Outlook up didnt matter; I was as efficient on my blackberry as I was on my desktop, to the point I would often type emails on my Blackberry while sitting at my desk. Android has been quite awful, and from all appearances the problem is once again that of mindset-- Im expecting a rock solid business phone, while android / iPhones want to be general purpose. (For the record, android is anything but rock solid).
Unsecured email access is how massively expensive leaks and intrusions occur. They tend to be a LOT less likely with remote wipe capability, built in device memory / storage encryption, and effectively (for all meaningful purposes) uncrackable transport security.
HTTPS is fine, as long as you are super confident in all of those trusted root authorities, or if youre not using a self-signed cert. Both of those are remarkably unsafe assumptions.
But consider: the difference between a BB phone and Android/iOS is that the BB doesn't phone home all your private information to Google or Apple.
My level of caring about that given the work I do is pretty minimal. What I have always cared about is being able to make calls without looking at the screen, having robust keyboard shortcuts, and having a keyboard that never, ever, ever fails to register a keystroke or register a hardware button.
My old blackberry bold hit all of those criteria; it may have occasionally stuttered (even while taking notes) but I could fly on that keyboard and it would keep up. I got a new "BlAndroid" (as I call it-- a Motorola Admiral that looks like a blackberry stretched out and stuck with android), which despite its fairly powerful processor manages to not register keyboard presses on occasion, making for an incredibly frustrating emailing process. The entire notion of "you can correct your typos by carefully pointing with your finger" is an exercise in frustration compared to the trackpad that has been Blackberry's trademark for so long.
There really isnt a comparison; blackberries have always been so focused on being efficient, killer business phones that the browser and apps were a distant second-- but that really didnt matter to those of us who wanted to rapidly move through an ever-changing work queue. The fact that I could get a pandora app was good enough, and was basically the extent of my desire for leisure on my blackberry. Android / iPhone catered wonderfully to the entertainment side while retaining basic business use, but no sane IT department would have ever said "hey, you know what will improve productivity? Mandating iPhones!"
The problem is that RIM is floundering and thrashing about trying to keep from sinking, and in the process is going to give up the only advantages that they had, and become "just another" consumption device maker. Slider keyboards are (IMO) an afterthought-- Ive NEVER seen one as good as a physical keyboard. But its not even just that-- having a flagship without a physical keyboard represents a shift in mentality. Why would we expect the robust keyboard shortcuts and responsiveness to remain when a keyboard isnt even on their flagship model? This is EXACTLY why the keyboards on android are terrible, because noone ever gets an android for the keyboard itself.
I found it: Windows server backup not exchange aware We have decided to develop and release a VSS-based plug-in for Windows Server Backup that will enable you to properly backup and restore Exchange 2007 with a built-in Windows 2008 backup application. While you will be able to backup and restore Exchange 2007 on Windows 2008, you should not expect feature parity with the Windows 2003 NTBackup experience.
The removal of NTBackup / its (known) inferior successor: (Reasons listed there roughly boil down to, 1) most people get third party software; 2) ntbackup was never meant to be an enterprise solution; 3) we think optical media is the future and that tape sucks)
There are lots and lots of other posts on this. More to the point, the features you mention are brand new as of R2-- they were not there in the original release: Windows Server Backup in Windows Server 2008 R2 includes the following improvements: More flexibility in what you can back up. Windows Server Backup enables you to back up selected files instead of full volumes. You can also exclude files based on file type and path.
That is, you simply couldnt do this prior to R2, which, along with no tape and no exchange support, made it utterly fall off of my (and many others') radars as utterly irrelevant. Basically all of the cool features you mention simply werent there in the initial release-- it was a straight dumb "image the whole box or nothing at all" program, except it wouldnt even work if you had stuff like Exchange or HyperV and no VSS plugin.
Not only that, but even if I had noticed that release-- which TBQH i did not-- NTBackup was already such a disaster that I would be hesitant even now to return to something like WSB.
It sounds like your experience is mostly with Win Server R2 and above, which is fine; if thats true, just keep in mind that there are a lot of us with horror stories of NTBackup, and that WinServer2008 was not always as polished as it is now.
Last time I looked at it was when Server 2008 was released. This isnt an issue of "didnt take the time to learn it"-- at that time, the official stance as given on the official Exchange team blog was "it was crippled it so that noone would make the mistake of using it for business". To reiterate-- this was the OFFICIAL exchange blog, ie microsoft employees.
Its entirely possible that in the time since they have corrected the issues I mentioned, or brought it back as something new-- but they definately DID cripple the built in backup on the release of 2008. Im not sure how possible it would be to find that article as it was a blog entry and it was 5 or so years ago, but Ill give it a shot and post it here if I do manage to find it.
Seems to me the issue you mentioned would skew it in favor of apache (it would over-estimate the number of apache installs), but honestly I disagree-- I think its reasonable to look at "number of webdomain instances" rather than fussing about the number of underlying OSes, which have become largely irrelevant in these days of "virtualize everything".
The entire reason I loved my blackberry was its keyboard-centeredness. Why the heck do I want a business phone that has a crappy touch keyboard? Theres android and iPhone for that.
I guess we still get the BES stuff, but which users are actually going to want a blackberry? If youre going to mandate a business phone, why mandate one that sucks at being a business phone?
I mean, I guess what they had wasnt selling phones, and their market share was shrinking-- seems logical to make a change, right? Except they just killed 80% of what made blackberry so popular to begin with. Being just another touch-device clone isnt really the way to claw your way back into the game.
When someone claims "Thoreau wrote this", they are making a claim that can be falsified. If they are doing literary interpretation it becomes trickier, but generally even there you can look at what Thoreau wrote and determine whether their interpretation fits with the genre, context, and writing style, as well as any tropes that he is wont to using.
It is much the same with theology. It is generally a historical fact that the Bible was recognized as the source of authority. Even in the RCC, as I understand it, church tradition is itself subordinate to the properly interpreted Bible (though I may be wrong on this). That being the case, there is no reason to treat it differently: someone makes a theological statement while claiming to be Christian, their claim can be evaluated by the Bible.
- it's one of the reasons I'm an admirer of Christ as a philosopher,
Im particularly fond of the way a few people have sumed up logical views of Christ: "Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He was Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine. There is no getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable." If not the Lord, then a liar; and if not a liar, then a lunatic. The only way out is to start throwing away those historical records which displease you. I suppose that would put you in the company of men we have considered great, of course.
even the most devout individual will forsake the advice of their religious texts for that of a doctor.
I am not aware of any place in the Bible that it suggests you should forego the use of a doctor, so this seems to be a bit of a non sequitur.
The very nature of its asserted belief system leads to division, rancor, and violence, because there is no way to reconcile opposing viewpoints through rigorous experimentation
You have a far higher view of humanity than I do if you think you can pin its violence on anything other than humanity itself. It seems to me for every instance of religiously motivated violence in the past century, I could come up with two that were not so motivated. People have no problems killing those who stand in their way, and are all too happy to latch on to whatever justification is most convenient.
Many people have postulated along those lines, and in the past century a few of them (to the horror of the surrounding world) have attained power. One would have hoped that under their iron reign that violence would cease, but alas it never does.
Please be very careful of any thought process which leads you down the path of "we could have utopia, if only we could get rid of that group of people", it does not lead to a world that you want to live in.
Think is a verb; verbs a gramatical subject, that is one who performs them. In this case, the subject is "I", who must necessarily exist in order perform the verb "think". You can doubt that you are in fact thinking, but doubting is just another kind of thinking.
To put it simply, the existence of thoughts requires a thinker.
If all they need is a file server and theyre happy with a workgroup, theres no reason to do with Windows Server at all-- there are many NASes out there that will fit the bill, or you could build your own and stick some distro on it (not like theres a shortage of SOHO fileserver distros out there).
Be able to integrate in a supported manner with 95% of business workstations out there? Be able to create an incredibly easy to manage LDAP system that integrates seamlessly with Exchange? Provides Exchange?
Wait, every single other client works, IOS doesnt, and your analysis is "Must be Microsoft's fault"? And you asked MS support for IOS details, and then wondered why they gave you the cold shoulder?
Seems to me youre better off bringing apple support in on this, or focusing on the "what is IOS doing wacky" rather than "what is IIS doing wacky".
The license granted to allow you to run Hyper-V is a fake license-- you cant re-use it if you use a different hypervisor. It can ONLY be used for a host that ONLY does Hyper-V, and nothing else.
We're doing this right now, and it rocks. Someone says "we need a new Windows server". No problem-- roll out the VMWare template, 15 minutes later the server pops on already joined to the domain and activated.
Its also not new. 2008 had this licensing clause. They also allow you to use a single Enterprise license ($2k) to cover up to 4 instances, though unless you really need the enterprise features it doesnt save you any money over the $500 license (though I believe it comes with more CALs).
Yet MS wonders why they have such a comparatively tiny market share of the server market...
According to this arstechnica article (2011), Microsoft had a 25% webserver market share (IIS) as of 2010, and 15% as of 2011. For standard servers, they accounted for 71% of all quarterly server shipments (original source, IDC). According to a survey in 2010 (the only one I could find on smtp market share, and was linked in Wikipedia), Exchange is the third most popular SMTP server (17%-- behind exim @ 34% and postfix @ 21%, and just ahead of sendmail).
You can call that many things, but "comparitively tiny" it isnt. Microsoft server is remarkably popular in SMB situations, and even in larger companies, and trying to write it off as irrelevant or whatever your angle was is silly.
Also silly is the comment about "code already there"-- EVERYONE does this, from RedHat to VMWare to Adobe any other company that sells multiple tiers of its software product.
The backup utility they crippled as of vista, so that it can no longer do a backup/restore of specific files? The one that was crippled so that it could no longer back up to tape?
For the record, it was an intentional crippling, because they really didnt want people using that, ever, as part of their backup strategy.
I cannot respond to most of your points in a way that would not repeat myself-- I think somehow there is a disconnect either between what I think you are arguing and what you really are, or vice versa.
The one thing I would clarify is your comment about my knowledge being personal. I know a great many people who I truly believe to be Christians, big C, sincere, etc. It is common for us to disagree on various finer points of theology-- the nature of will and whether it is truly free, the extent of the corruption of man's nature, etc. As things go, they tend to be small. On occasion, one will contend that I am in error, and will provide proof of such (generally scripture). Now, there are times that I believe that their interpretation is flawed, but there are others that their interpretation seems much more in line with the text and/or reality than what I had originally thought; in those cases I change my belief to what seems to be more correct.
All this is to say I do believe that there is an absolute truth here, Im not postmodernist, and I certainly do not believe that some things about God could be true for me but not for my brother's God. One of us is correct, and if my brother can provide a compelling case for why I am error, why then perhaps I will correct my error.
I appreciate the conversation and only wish more people could be as civil, clear, and levelheaded as you-- even if I still think you are wrong;)
As I understand it, he was questioning whether he existed, or alternatively douting his existence. But the way out of that little mind virus is thus: The very fact that he doubted, proved that he existed, for actions require an actioner, and certainly "to doubt" was an action. You could try to doubt your own doubt, but youre back where you started-- who is doing the doubting, if noone exists?
Your ending statement is practically a tautology: you cant get away from the problem by essentially saying "why should you think you think", because "thinking you dont think" involves yet more thinking.
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That said, the current Blackberry software sucks. Whenever you upgrade or delete an app, the phone has to reboot. Acceptable for 2007. Insane for 2012.
There was a lot that sucked about the Blackberry OS, but Ive seen what the alternative is, and Im happy to accept those shortcomings for what I got in return.
If in some alternate reality a car maker in the 1890s was going out of business because everyone was raving over the new horse-and-buggy, I would be much happier that they stick to their "failing" model rather than removing their excellent product from the market. Thats basically how I feel now-- in the name of general purpose cellphones and youtube everywhere, we are giving up one of the most outstanding business comms form factors.
Physical keyboards disappearing-- whats not to love? Unless of course you have to type scads of emails every day on the go, of course.
If you have to write 50 emails a day from a mobile device, you have made a serious vocational error.
Theres this profession called "IT consulting". The more successful you are, the more emails youre writing, and quick access to them is pretty fundamental to getting things done efficiently.
Maybe part of the problem is hand-size. Ive got monstrous hands (Im 6'7 or so), and accurately hitting links or text locations in edit mode is phenomenally frustrating. With trackpad + physical keyboard, none of this was ever an issue. My perfect device would be the Bold you mentioned but with a touchscreen for those things touch is good for.
Its entirely possible that none of those users are too concerned with email / phone, and are more concerned with "other things" the phone can do. That being the case, a blackberry would be the polar opposite of what they wanted.
and our relatively generous policies.
One of the reasons BES's benefits arent that great for you. Most of the benefit on the admin side is the massive control you have.
Im not sure what the frustration your users might have experienced was, but Ill say that initially I was frustrated with my blackberry (4 or so years ago), because I wanted it to do things it wasnt good at. Once I got into the mindset "its for business comms, stupid", I loved it because whether or not I had Outlook up didnt matter; I was as efficient on my blackberry as I was on my desktop, to the point I would often type emails on my Blackberry while sitting at my desk. Android has been quite awful, and from all appearances the problem is once again that of mindset-- Im expecting a rock solid business phone, while android / iPhones want to be general purpose. (For the record, android is anything but rock solid).
Unsecured email access is how massively expensive leaks and intrusions occur. They tend to be a LOT less likely with remote wipe capability, built in device memory / storage encryption, and effectively (for all meaningful purposes) uncrackable transport security.
HTTPS is fine, as long as you are super confident in all of those trusted root authorities, or if youre not using a self-signed cert. Both of those are remarkably unsafe assumptions.
But consider: the difference between a BB phone and Android/iOS is that the BB doesn't phone home all your private information to Google or Apple.
My level of caring about that given the work I do is pretty minimal. What I have always cared about is being able to make calls without looking at the screen, having robust keyboard shortcuts, and having a keyboard that never, ever, ever fails to register a keystroke or register a hardware button.
My old blackberry bold hit all of those criteria; it may have occasionally stuttered (even while taking notes) but I could fly on that keyboard and it would keep up. I got a new "BlAndroid" (as I call it-- a Motorola Admiral that looks like a blackberry stretched out and stuck with android), which despite its fairly powerful processor manages to not register keyboard presses on occasion, making for an incredibly frustrating emailing process. The entire notion of "you can correct your typos by carefully pointing with your finger" is an exercise in frustration compared to the trackpad that has been Blackberry's trademark for so long.
There really isnt a comparison; blackberries have always been so focused on being efficient, killer business phones that the browser and apps were a distant second-- but that really didnt matter to those of us who wanted to rapidly move through an ever-changing work queue. The fact that I could get a pandora app was good enough, and was basically the extent of my desire for leisure on my blackberry. Android / iPhone catered wonderfully to the entertainment side while retaining basic business use, but no sane IT department would have ever said "hey, you know what will improve productivity? Mandating iPhones!"
The problem is that RIM is floundering and thrashing about trying to keep from sinking, and in the process is going to give up the only advantages that they had, and become "just another" consumption device maker. Slider keyboards are (IMO) an afterthought-- Ive NEVER seen one as good as a physical keyboard. But its not even just that-- having a flagship without a physical keyboard represents a shift in mentality. Why would we expect the robust keyboard shortcuts and responsiveness to remain when a keyboard isnt even on their flagship model? This is EXACTLY why the keyboards on android are terrible, because noone ever gets an android for the keyboard itself.
*verbs require a subject
I found it:
Windows server backup not exchange aware
We have decided to develop and release a VSS-based plug-in for Windows Server Backup that will enable you to properly backup and restore Exchange 2007 with a built-in Windows 2008 backup application.
While you will be able to backup and restore Exchange 2007 on Windows 2008, you should not expect feature parity with the Windows 2003 NTBackup experience.
The removal of NTBackup / its (known) inferior successor:
(Reasons listed there roughly boil down to, 1) most people get third party software; 2) ntbackup was never meant to be an enterprise solution; 3) we think optical media is the future and that tape sucks)
There are lots and lots of other posts on this. More to the point, the features you mention are brand new as of R2-- they were not there in the original release:
Windows Server Backup in Windows Server 2008 R2 includes the following improvements:
More flexibility in what you can back up. Windows Server Backup enables you to back up selected files instead of full volumes. You can also exclude files based on file type and path.
That is, you simply couldnt do this prior to R2, which, along with no tape and no exchange support, made it utterly fall off of my (and many others') radars as utterly irrelevant. Basically all of the cool features you mention simply werent there in the initial release-- it was a straight dumb "image the whole box or nothing at all" program, except it wouldnt even work if you had stuff like Exchange or HyperV and no VSS plugin.
Not only that, but even if I had noticed that release-- which TBQH i did not-- NTBackup was already such a disaster that I would be hesitant even now to return to something like WSB.
It sounds like your experience is mostly with Win Server R2 and above, which is fine; if thats true, just keep in mind that there are a lot of us with horror stories of NTBackup, and that WinServer2008 was not always as polished as it is now.
Last time I looked at it was when Server 2008 was released. This isnt an issue of "didnt take the time to learn it"-- at that time, the official stance as given on the official Exchange team blog was "it was crippled it so that noone would make the mistake of using it for business". To reiterate-- this was the OFFICIAL exchange blog, ie microsoft employees.
Its entirely possible that in the time since they have corrected the issues I mentioned, or brought it back as something new-- but they definately DID cripple the built in backup on the release of 2008. Im not sure how possible it would be to find that article as it was a blog entry and it was 5 or so years ago, but Ill give it a shot and post it here if I do manage to find it.
Seems to me the issue you mentioned would skew it in favor of apache (it would over-estimate the number of apache installs), but honestly I disagree-- I think its reasonable to look at "number of webdomain instances" rather than fussing about the number of underlying OSes, which have become largely irrelevant in these days of "virtualize everything".
The entire reason I loved my blackberry was its keyboard-centeredness. Why the heck do I want a business phone that has a crappy touch keyboard? Theres android and iPhone for that.
I guess we still get the BES stuff, but which users are actually going to want a blackberry? If youre going to mandate a business phone, why mandate one that sucks at being a business phone?
I mean, I guess what they had wasnt selling phones, and their market share was shrinking-- seems logical to make a change, right? Except they just killed 80% of what made blackberry so popular to begin with. Being just another touch-device clone isnt really the way to claw your way back into the game.
When someone claims "Thoreau wrote this", they are making a claim that can be falsified. If they are doing literary interpretation it becomes trickier, but generally even there you can look at what Thoreau wrote and determine whether their interpretation fits with the genre, context, and writing style, as well as any tropes that he is wont to using.
It is much the same with theology. It is generally a historical fact that the Bible was recognized as the source of authority. Even in the RCC, as I understand it, church tradition is itself subordinate to the properly interpreted Bible (though I may be wrong on this). That being the case, there is no reason to treat it differently: someone makes a theological statement while claiming to be Christian, their claim can be evaluated by the Bible.
- it's one of the reasons I'm an admirer of Christ as a philosopher,
Im particularly fond of the way a few people have sumed up logical views of Christ:
"Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He was Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine. There is no getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable."
If not the Lord, then a liar; and if not a liar, then a lunatic. The only way out is to start throwing away those historical records which displease you. I suppose that would put you in the company of men we have considered great, of course.
even the most devout individual will forsake the advice of their religious texts for that of a doctor.
I am not aware of any place in the Bible that it suggests you should forego the use of a doctor, so this seems to be a bit of a non sequitur.
The very nature of its asserted belief system leads to division, rancor, and violence, because there is no way to reconcile opposing viewpoints through rigorous experimentation
You have a far higher view of humanity than I do if you think you can pin its violence on anything other than humanity itself. It seems to me for every instance of religiously motivated violence in the past century, I could come up with two that were not so motivated. People have no problems killing those who stand in their way, and are all too happy to latch on to whatever justification is most convenient.
Many people have postulated along those lines, and in the past century a few of them (to the horror of the surrounding world) have attained power. One would have hoped that under their iron reign that violence would cease, but alas it never does.
Please be very careful of any thought process which leads you down the path of "we could have utopia, if only we could get rid of that group of people", it does not lead to a world that you want to live in.
Think is a verb; verbs a gramatical subject, that is one who performs them. In this case, the subject is "I", who must necessarily exist in order perform the verb "think". You can doubt that you are in fact thinking, but doubting is just another kind of thinking.
To put it simply, the existence of thoughts requires a thinker.
If all they need is a file server and theyre happy with a workgroup, theres no reason to do with Windows Server at all-- there are many NASes out there that will fit the bill, or you could build your own and stick some distro on it (not like theres a shortage of SOHO fileserver distros out there).
Be able to integrate in a supported manner with 95% of business workstations out there? Be able to create an incredibly easy to manage LDAP system that integrates seamlessly with Exchange? Provides Exchange?
These arent exactly obscure features you know.
Wait, every single other client works, IOS doesnt, and your analysis is "Must be Microsoft's fault"? And you asked MS support for IOS details, and then wondered why they gave you the cold shoulder?
Seems to me youre better off bringing apple support in on this, or focusing on the "what is IOS doing wacky" rather than "what is IIS doing wacky".
You might be joking, but ive tried the RC. Some manager must have thought the same thing you did, and thought it was a wonderful idea.
My analysis of Server 2012: Some new features that are mildly interesting, and the worlds most infuriating and confusing UI ever conceived.
The license granted to allow you to run Hyper-V is a fake license-- you cant re-use it if you use a different hypervisor. It can ONLY be used for a host that ONLY does Hyper-V, and nothing else.
We're doing this right now, and it rocks. Someone says "we need a new Windows server". No problem-- roll out the VMWare template, 15 minutes later the server pops on already joined to the domain and activated.
Its also not new. 2008 had this licensing clause. They also allow you to use a single Enterprise license ($2k) to cover up to 4 instances, though unless you really need the enterprise features it doesnt save you any money over the $500 license (though I believe it comes with more CALs).
Yet MS wonders why they have such a comparatively tiny market share of the server market...
According to this arstechnica article (2011), Microsoft had a 25% webserver market share (IIS) as of 2010, and 15% as of 2011. For standard servers, they accounted for 71% of all quarterly server shipments (original source, IDC). According to a survey in 2010 (the only one I could find on smtp market share, and was linked in Wikipedia), Exchange is the third most popular SMTP server (17%-- behind exim @ 34% and postfix @ 21%, and just ahead of sendmail).
You can call that many things, but "comparitively tiny" it isnt. Microsoft server is remarkably popular in SMB situations, and even in larger companies, and trying to write it off as irrelevant or whatever your angle was is silly.
Also silly is the comment about "code already there"-- EVERYONE does this, from RedHat to VMWare to Adobe any other company that sells multiple tiers of its software product.
The backup utility they crippled as of vista, so that it can no longer do a backup/restore of specific files? The one that was crippled so that it could no longer back up to tape?
For the record, it was an intentional crippling, because they really didnt want people using that, ever, as part of their backup strategy.
I cannot respond to most of your points in a way that would not repeat myself-- I think somehow there is a disconnect either between what I think you are arguing and what you really are, or vice versa.
The one thing I would clarify is your comment about my knowledge being personal.
I know a great many people who I truly believe to be Christians, big C, sincere, etc. It is common for us to disagree on various finer points of theology-- the nature of will and whether it is truly free, the extent of the corruption of man's nature, etc. As things go, they tend to be small.
On occasion, one will contend that I am in error, and will provide proof of such (generally scripture). Now, there are times that I believe that their interpretation is flawed, but there are others that their interpretation seems much more in line with the text and/or reality than what I had originally thought; in those cases I change my belief to what seems to be more correct.
All this is to say I do believe that there is an absolute truth here, Im not postmodernist, and I certainly do not believe that some things about God could be true for me but not for my brother's God. One of us is correct, and if my brother can provide a compelling case for why I am error, why then perhaps I will correct my error.
I appreciate the conversation and only wish more people could be as civil, clear, and levelheaded as you-- even if I still think you are wrong ;)
As I understand it, he was questioning whether he existed, or alternatively douting his existence. But the way out of that little mind virus is thus: The very fact that he doubted, proved that he existed, for actions require an actioner, and certainly "to doubt" was an action. You could try to doubt your own doubt, but youre back where you started-- who is doing the doubting, if noone exists?
Your ending statement is practically a tautology: you cant get away from the problem by essentially saying "why should you think you think", because "thinking you dont think" involves yet more thinking.