The site says that it will be releasing a beta in "a few months" and that it is "extremely unstable". So I guess it depends on your definition of "almost". I'd put my money on Reiserfs before XFS, but that's just me.
As the site says, "A beta release is planned in a few months and at that time we will release an xfs rpm". Now maybe I'm presuming too much in saying that 2.4 will probably be out in a few months... But even if it wasn't, that's for a *BETA* release of XFS, not something likely to be included in the official stable Linux kernel.
Instead of one solid stable journaling fs, we now have three unstable unusable ones. Reiserfs seems to be the furthest along, but it's still not good enough to ship, and LKML is saying it won't be put into the official tree until 2.5 (ditto ext3, and according to this article, probably XFS too). Isn't open source supposed to be about cooperation and reuse of code? There's no especially compelling technical reason to have three different jfs for Linux, and there's certainly no reason to work on three when we don't even have one yet. Personally I would be much happier if the SGI people would spend their effort on ext3, which seems to be aiming for some of the same goals. But I guess I'm utopian like that;)
Man, you have really missed the point. If Microsoft is a monopoly, then what is bad for Microsoft is good for competition (as a general rule), and therefore good for the consumer. If Microsoft is not a monopoly, then what is bad for Microsoft is bad for the consumer (again, as a general rule).
No longer hamstrung by its reliance on legacy apps and a single operating system, developers would be free to push the MSXML DOM, for example, onto multiple platforms; it would put IE onto Linux; it would port Office apps to Linux and elsewhere.
Think about what you're saying! If MS had no monopoly, then it wouldn't be able to leverage Office to force MSXML DOM on OEMs and corporate contracts; MSXML and the rest of Windows would have to compete on its own merits. If IE and Office were on Linux, then how could MSXML succeed? MS OS's would have to compete ON THEIR MERITS with Linux and others, as opposed to ON THEIR APPLICATION COMPATIBILITY. I can't believe you're suggesting that Office for Linux would be a negative! Office, MS Media Player, IE, Outlook, etc, on other platforms would increase competition between platforms enormously. Good for MS very possibly, but more to the point good for the consumer.
Sure, it's unlikely people are going to make a free RDBMS on their spare time; it's admittedly not the kind of project that lends itself to that. Then again, it *is* possible that a *company* will make one, or that an existing one will be released under a free license (like Interbase, though I'm not sure it qualifies as "enterprise", or perhaps RedHat or another commercial distro). I can especially see this is free software starts taking off in enterprise OS and becomes a demand of customers -- then the hardware vendors will have a serious incentive to release free solutions that run on their hardware. "100% free software" may not mean much now, but who knows, it may be the "Intel inside" sticker of the future (Yeah I know, "Intel inside" isn't exactly a positive in the most high-end markets, but you get the idea).
We knew we would be charged for one month of service. All we had to do was to cancel as soon as we received the box and there would be no more charges thereafter. It's still a good deal.
It's clearly stated in the article, and was also my experience, that originally (i.e. the first two or three days after the original story hit slashdot) you didn't have to pay the first month's service. Now, it's true that this is only $22, not really a big deal -- but it's still fraudulent on their part. *MY* order form said $140, *NOT* $162, and so did this fellow's. It was only AFTER he (and I) had already purchased the IO that the first month of service was required.
As he stated in the article, "3/11 I called netpliance to verify that I could order the unit on my card, without service, and that my brother could subsequently sign up for services on his card. they said sure, no problem."
...is the gnome print architecture, which is already in Debian Potato and possibly others (I know RPM's exist). (Not that it does much good until apps use it -- but it *is* working. I believe Gnumeric uses it).
You seem to think I'm making an argument for Christianity or the existence of God. I'm not. I'm simply trying to correct some of the gross slanders that are commonly directed against Christians and people of faith.
I know you aren't. I'm just trying to get you to support your previous claim, that your decision was rational and based on evidence. I guess in a sense it was based on evidence, but you also seem to be ignoring a good deal of very relevant evidence (evidence that suggests a much more plausible explanation for the evidence that you base your claim on). If we all took the evidence we liked and ignored the rest, then we could decide anything and call it rational.
My exact point is that he may, or may not answer prayers. [...] As some people have put it, every prayer is answered, but sometimes the answer is "no".
As some people have replied: of course, the same could be said about the rain god, Bob.
The point is that God answers prayers in the same frequency even if they're done to a different god, or to Satan, or not done at all. I'm not saying God needs to answer all prayers -- I never indicated as much and implied the opposite (indeed, where did you get the idea that I thought otherwise?). What I said was that God has to do better than Bob. God doesn't have to be perfect, but it has to beat the control.
Scientific depends on reproducibility -- which is why the scientific method doesn't seem to have done very well when it comes to the "human sciences".
That's ridiculous. Our current knowlege of human psychology is vastly superior in predictive power than the previous model (demon possession). And I don't see how your offhand rejection of drugs for kids can be justified. It's a step forward if it does good, and it isn't otherwise. Same as with vaccination.
The thing is that people and personalities are generally not entirely reliable. People can react differently to different stimuli, depending on many things which are not immediately apparent. It's called free will. And I happen to think (not believe) that this is the way in which humans are most like God: he has free will, which means that he may respond to exactly the same stimuli in different ways according to principles that are not immediately apparent.
Yeah, like the weather has free will. But anyway...
However, let me respond to you this way: if you pray for something... for help when things seem hopeless, for a glimmer of light at the end of tunnel. And you can always see a way in which that prayer was answered, would you believe in God?
Again, how do you know that the way is not selective memory or selective perception (or plain old delusion)? I would need a control. I would need praying to different gods to provide different results. I would need not praying at all to provide different results. But since none of those thing seem to happen, I must conclude that prayers get answered like placebo cures headaches.
If you were on the verge of suicide from the despair of your life, if you were making $4.35 an hour, and hadn't been on a date in 5 years... And you came, in a flash of realization, after years of exploring eastern mysticism, including being a Hindu monk for 2 years, to realize that "Jesus is the answer"... and, after making a decision to abandon your friends, abandon your idea systems to start over, swallow your pride and join the Christians you had mocked in following this Jesus... And, after all this, watched your life in a matter of less than a year be transformed (Married to a wonderful woman, working as a Senior UNIX geek, out of the parents house)... In short: healed. Would you then believe in God?
Are you asking me that if I "join[ed] the Christians [...] in following this Jesus" would I believe in god? Well, yes, isn't that part of the premise of the question? Or are you suggesting that the fact that you were a depressed Hindu monk for two years grants some credibility to your belief in Christianity!? (I'd much sooner see your apparent gullibility as a reason not to trust your judgment, not to mention your vulnerability). Really, lots of people have similar experiences with other religions. Which am I to trust? It seems to me that the fact that there are religious experiences in all the different religions points to the fact that truth in religion isn't really the cause of them. (And trusting whichever, if any, happens to me is just as arbitrary. There is a much more plausible explanation, i.e. that the cause of my delusion is the same as the cause of that Islamic fellow's.)
Besides being equally applicable to all religions, the problem with your argument is that it leads right to the atheological arguments from evil and disbelief. Why has god failed so many others? And if god always answers prayers, why would anyone ever stop being a Christian? And why are there so many non-Christians? The evidence you cite, were it to exist, WOULD be available to all. Unless god only answers your prayers and not others'?
Speaking of evil, without a decent theodicy don't you find it a little more than coincidental that believers in god always seem to think it's good (or even "benevolent")?? But now I'm off on a tangent...
and you still haven't answered the question. What distinguishes your Christian experience from similar ones involving different religions? You do agree that people have experiences of other religions, and that these people must be in some way deluded or mistaken, right? We do agree that the majority of religious believers are deluded, right? What makes you different?
I doubt that a single scientist would agree with the "rationalist" view of Hume-as-presented-by-you. Rationalism does not require the rejection of indirect evidence. And rationalism wasn't even the original topic of discussion, but instead science. I probably should have just pointed that out in the first place...
Anyway, I'm still interested in hearing a response to my earlier post regarding evidence "not objectively available". You claim to accept Christianity on a scientific basis, so I ask you: how do you rule out the possibility of delusion (wishful thinking, etc) as the source of "not objectively available" evidence?
And then what's to stop, say Linux International, or the FSF from placing a 'Linux tax' on every purchase made through one of these devices?
US contract law. FSF has no legal right to stop the copying or use of GPL'd products that they own the copyright to, because they've already agreed to the license terms of the GPL.
I know this wasn't meant seriously (at least I hope not!), but I don't want people walking away thinking this. I know some people do. And someone actually modded this up as "interesting" (where clearly "funny" if anything is most appropriate).
I wonder how well a starcraft port to Linux could do, considering this. It'd have to be people who didn't own it yet, and how many of those are there left who would want to get it now?
Of course it is. Linux is no doubt sufficient, but it has no real advantages. Other than, I suppose, the price. But you don't see a lot of these places using NetBSD, even though it's just as free. It's all about the buzzwords, because the buzzwords bring in the daytraders ("daytrader", ironically, something of a buzzword itself).
When did I ever "hold Christians responsible for every flu bug passed on by every Christian since Irenaus"? In this entire discussion, the only Christian to whom I have referred is Tertullion, and I did *NOT* to suggest he was representative of Christianity -- I only suggested that faith (defined as belief without reason) had existed prior to the 20th century. And that wasn't even in this thread. So what the hell are you talking about? Your accusation is totally unfounded.
Maybe you're confusing me with some other poster? A complete list of my recent posts is here, of course.
Actually, no they aren't. I believe in Christianity because the best evidence I have available suggests to me that it is true. Now, granted some of this evidence isn't objectively observable. but that does not mean it's not there.
Well, that's ridiculous. "Not objectively observable", eh? Sounds like delusion to me -- and the evidence suggests as much. Why hasn't there been any "not objectively available" evidence of Christianity in any place where Christians have not been? Why weren't there at least a few Christians in America before the Europeans came over? And why are there Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Islamic, etc revelations as well? What distinguishes Christian ones, other than that yours felt real? How would you answer a Muslim who had experienced something similar?
Minds are like parachutes -- they function best when open. But it's amazing how many people who quote that saying in fact have very closed minds vis a vis certain subjects such as religion.
To quote the cliche response, let's not keep our minds so open that our brains fall out. If believing that people can't come back to life three days after dying is having a "closed mind", then closed minds are underrated.
The problem with rationalism (as defined, for example, by David Hume) is that you can only accept that which is part of your "ordinary experience". You run a profound risk of being placed in the position of the hick, who, upon being offered the chance to ride an elephant, said "there ain't no sich animal".
That's an absurd straw man. The rationalist position would not be to assume "there ain't no sich animal", but to take no position at all, to suspend judgment (unless some other evidence were available; of course the fact that a person with no reason to lie and capable of intelligent judgment states that the elephant exists *is* evidence, but for the sake of argument, we'll ignore that evidence). Offer to allow me to ride a unicorn, and I'll call you crazy, but not based on the fact that *I've* never seen one -- rather that, if there were such a thing, *someone* would have seen one, and I would have heard about it. The hick bases his judgment on not having ever seen an elephant, which is by all means irrational. It doesn't logically follow from [I've never seen x] that [x does not exist]. It DOES logically follow from [I have a general understanding of the world, and this understanding suggests that nobody has ever seen x, but instead that x's are fictional creatures of fairy tales] that [x probably does not exist].
dictionary.com isn't the author of any dictionary: it displays entries from various other dictionaries which (one assumes) it licenses from their respective authors. The definition cited was actually taken from "The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition", of which I'm sure you've heard.
What was it that Tertullion said? "It is impossible therefore it is certain"? (In reference to the resurrection) Whatever the word "faith" meant, belief without reason has existed in religion since the beginning of its history. The word for belief without reason in our current language is "faith", but even if you call it something else, it is still not compatible with science.
That's absurd. There are many among us who use science as a tool for truth, not because they enjoy science -- indeed, they may even despise it, though that is no doubt rare -- but because they need truth for some other reason, like designing a CPU or airplane.
When a definition is "exceedingly common", that's exactly what makes it true.
But whatever the "biblical meaning", religious beliefs are supposed to be (or must be) taken without justification, which makes them entirely incompatible with science, no matter what word you use.
You're calling me pedantic? Obviously none of those definitions apply in context. The first is the closest; it works a lot better if you remove "especially". I have "faith" in the above mentioned in the same sense that I have "faith" that two and two make four, which is a distinctly different thing than religious faith.
Thirdly, yes, religion WILL have a bigger impact on the future. Science has no power in the moral and ethical realms. It may never have. It was never built to. But morals and ethics ARE essential for a society to function. Without those, you have no laws, you have no structure, you have nothing. We'd all wind up back in the Stone Age, pronto, with no way out, because with nothing to build on, there'd be no means of progressing.
OF COURSE! Without religion there could be no morality. We'd all be baby-eating communist Nazis!! Indeed, even if religion is false, it is necessary to maintain order. There's no reason to question the TRUTH of religion, because the world is better off believing in it, true or not.
For Christ's sake, look at any atheist! You'll never meet a single one that doesn't:
rape children
shoplift
eat the dead
have pre-marital homosexual sodomy
pray to Satan
(Once in a while will you find an atheist that hasn't been caught doing one or all of the above... YET. But can KNOW that he DOES. He has on reason not to.)
Slashdot Mirror
The site says that it will be releasing a beta in "a few months" and that it is "extremely unstable". So I guess it depends on your definition of "almost". I'd put my money on Reiserfs before XFS, but that's just me.
And being able to pick the best out of three bad fs in a year isn't as good as being forced to use the single good fs in six months... Ahh well.
As the site says, "A beta release is planned in a few months and at that time we will release an xfs rpm". Now maybe I'm presuming too much in saying that 2.4 will probably be out in a few months... But even if it wasn't, that's for a *BETA* release of XFS, not something likely to be included in the official stable Linux kernel.
Instead of one solid stable journaling fs, we now have three unstable unusable ones. Reiserfs seems to be the furthest along, but it's still not good enough to ship, and LKML is saying it won't be put into the official tree until 2.5 (ditto ext3, and according to this article, probably XFS too). Isn't open source supposed to be about cooperation and reuse of code? There's no especially compelling technical reason to have three different jfs for Linux, and there's certainly no reason to work on three when we don't even have one yet. Personally I would be much happier if the SGI people would spend their effort on ext3, which seems to be aiming for some of the same goals. But I guess I'm utopian like that ;)
Sure, it's unlikely people are going to make a free RDBMS on their spare time; it's admittedly not the kind of project that lends itself to that. Then again, it *is* possible that a *company* will make one, or that an existing one will be released under a free license (like Interbase, though I'm not sure it qualifies as "enterprise", or perhaps RedHat or another commercial distro). I can especially see this is free software starts taking off in enterprise OS and becomes a demand of customers -- then the hardware vendors will have a serious incentive to release free solutions that run on their hardware. "100% free software" may not mean much now, but who knows, it may be the "Intel inside" sticker of the future (Yeah I know, "Intel inside" isn't exactly a positive in the most high-end markets, but you get the idea).
As he stated in the article, "3/11 I called netpliance to verify that I could order the unit on my card, without service, and that my brother could subsequently sign up for services on his card. they said sure, no problem."
...is the gnome print architecture, which is already in Debian Potato and possibly others (I know RPM's exist). (Not that it does much good until apps use it -- but it *is* working. I believe Gnumeric uses it).
The point is that God answers prayers in the same frequency even if they're done to a different god, or to Satan, or not done at all. I'm not saying God needs to answer all prayers -- I never indicated as much and implied the opposite (indeed, where did you get the idea that I thought otherwise?). What I said was that God has to do better than Bob. God doesn't have to be perfect, but it has to beat the control.
Besides being equally applicable to all religions, the problem with your argument is that it leads right to the atheological arguments from evil and disbelief. Why has god failed so many others? And if god always answers prayers, why would anyone ever stop being a Christian? And why are there so many non-Christians? The evidence you cite, were it to exist, WOULD be available to all. Unless god only answers your prayers and not others'?
Speaking of evil, without a decent theodicy don't you find it a little more than coincidental that believers in god always seem to think it's good (or even "benevolent")?? But now I'm off on a tangent...
and you still haven't answered the question. What distinguishes your Christian experience from similar ones involving different religions? You do agree that people have experiences of other religions, and that these people must be in some way deluded or mistaken, right? We do agree that the majority of religious believers are deluded, right? What makes you different?
Anyway, I'm still interested in hearing a response to my earlier post regarding evidence "not objectively available". You claim to accept Christianity on a scientific basis, so I ask you: how do you rule out the possibility of delusion (wishful thinking, etc) as the source of "not objectively available" evidence?
I know this wasn't meant seriously (at least I hope not!), but I don't want people walking away thinking this. I know some people do. And someone actually modded this up as "interesting" (where clearly "funny" if anything is most appropriate).
Of course it is. Linux is no doubt sufficient, but it has no real advantages. Other than, I suppose, the price. But you don't see a lot of these places using NetBSD, even though it's just as free. It's all about the buzzwords, because the buzzwords bring in the daytraders ("daytrader", ironically, something of a buzzword itself).
it would be no excuse for you doing it. That I might use a fallacy doesn't make it any less fallacious when you use it. Tu quoquo, they call that.
Maybe you're confusing me with some other poster? A complete list of my recent posts is here, of course.
Hume speaks only for himself.
dictionary.com isn't the author of any dictionary: it displays entries from various other dictionaries which (one assumes) it licenses from their respective authors. The definition cited was actually taken from "The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition", of which I'm sure you've heard.
What was it that Tertullion said? "It is impossible therefore it is certain"? (In reference to the resurrection) Whatever the word "faith" meant, belief without reason has existed in religion since the beginning of its history. The word for belief without reason in our current language is "faith", but even if you call it something else, it is still not compatible with science.
That's absurd. There are many among us who use science as a tool for truth, not because they enjoy science -- indeed, they may even despise it, though that is no doubt rare -- but because they need truth for some other reason, like designing a CPU or airplane.
But whatever the "biblical meaning", religious beliefs are supposed to be (or must be) taken without justification, which makes them entirely incompatible with science, no matter what word you use.
You're calling me pedantic? Obviously none of those definitions apply in context. The first is the closest; it works a lot better if you remove "especially". I have "faith" in the above mentioned in the same sense that I have "faith" that two and two make four, which is a distinctly different thing than religious faith.
For Christ's sake, look at any atheist! You'll never meet a single one that doesn't:
- rape children
- shoplift
- eat the dead
- have pre-marital homosexual sodomy
- pray to Satan
(Once in a while will you find an atheist that hasn't been caught doing one or all of the above... YET. But can KNOW that he DOES. He has on reason not to.)