Atomic level of tolerance would be significantly higher fidelity than any digital system we presently have.
But the problem is the appropriate sampling rate. CDs are really just barely high enough to satisfy the average consumer who wants to be able to tell a country fiddle from a classical violin. Which is pretty good, really. But the recording accuracy doesn't just fall off a few dbs at between 16 and 20 KHz. It goes to square wave.
The playback electronics does some nice interpolation in modern CDs, but there's only so much interpolation you can do between samples without generating sound that wasn't there. Failing to interpolate also generates sound that wasn't there.
Just for a data point, in the electronics lab when I was eighteen, I tested my hearing with a sine wave generator and a cheap five-inch speaker. (And I'm not talking about the modern ones with rare-earth magnets.) On a good day, I could hear to 19K, even with that cheap setup.
Don't try to tell me CDs are better than vinyl. I know better.
DVD Audio at 192 KHz, I'm not going to argue a lot with, but CD is killing that market. I'D prefer at least 16 times the CD's 22KHz sampling rate, to reduce high frequency artifacts.
Actually, it was two or three months ago, getting on the train at Minoo station. A gal had an old portable record player on a strap over her shoulder and was listening to it. But that's not the kind of vinyl hi-fi we're talking about here.
Yeah, good digital is noise free in storage and transmission. But the sampling rate is not high enough on CDs, so you lose a little something. I don't know if I can still hear it at 40+, but I could hear it when I was a teenager.
I do like the lack of hiss on CDs, but, if I could afford to be choosy, I'd prefer significantly higher sampling rates. It would be nice if audio on DVD had caught on. And/or if the guy who invented the laser pickup for vinyl hadn't been so successful at destroying his own tech and market.
I was thinking that my collection of 112 or so was a pretty heavy investment. It stood at just over a hundred when I was 19.
But, no, CDs are nice in that they don't have hiss.
They aren't so nice in that they drop out completely right in the range that young ears can still pick up timbre and definition. It's not -3db or -6db, it's a sharp cut. Absolute, unrecoverable compression to the square and then nothing.
On the other hand, true high fidelity sound systems are addicting in ways that CDs are not. I can still remember sitting in the music store at eighteen, listening to Katy Lied. (And they say Fagan and Becker were unhappy with the recording quality on that album.) CDs, I can listen to and work at the same time.
Although, drives that you can't get to work at all, probably should be disassembled, and the recording surfaces physically destroyed. If there is a possibility of social security numbers or credit card numbers having been stored on the drives, you want to be sure you've at least made it so salvagers can't do something easy like moving the platters to a working drive and just finding stuff you didn't know was there.
I'm thinking a bulk tape eraser held close to a spinning exposed recording surface is not going to leave much readable without significant effort, so that might be something to do before sanding the surface a bit.
Wiping working drives --
Old Macs are useful for issuing low-level format commands of the sort that doesn't destroy the tracking information, if you have one with the right controller just sitting around. I probably would pull the cover anyway, just to watch the heads seeking to every cylinder, to make sure neither the OS nor the drive itself is short-circuiting the hard commands. If you have a dust-free environment, pulling the cover to watch the heads move isn't likely to do damage. And, because the salvagers will be taking a look at the drive in passing, you do want to give them less to see.
I might, even, after doing the physical format, write random data over the whole disk.
Linux and BSD systems have a good sources for random data, and random data is going to hide sensitive erased data better than/null.
You might then install an OS on the drive, just to make it a little less obvious that data has been erased, because some salvagers are a little overly ambitious after all.
But, yeah, I'm not a fan of either beer or bourbon.
I once saw a field of barley being burned in Takino because the farmer found out after the grain was ripe that his harvester couldn't be adjusted to harvest it. (He had grown it that year because regulations kept him from growing rice.)
I about cried.
Well, the smoke was pretty bad, too, but it's really hard to get whole wheat or barley here in Japan. I like rice, but sometimes I need some other grains in my diet.
No, wrapping them in religious text does not particularly encourage dogma. Perhaps you are doing the gulit-by-association thing. But people are plenty able and willing to invent and resort to dogma without the need for religion. The only reason that Atheism might seem to be free of dogma at this time is that the illogical concept of Atheism as a non-religion is a rather recent invention. If you go back to early versions of atheistic philosophy, you find plenty of dogma, then you move forward to find that there is plenty of dogma cleverly hidden in the currently fashionable version(s) of Atheism.
For instance...
Occam's Razor?
You have never considered that your definition of "simple" might be, well, dogma of your invention? That your assertion of "simpler without God" might be heavily dependent on your definition of God?
Not described in the Bible?
{sigh.}
Well, yeah, the "God" asserted by atheists as they attack the concept of God is not described in the Bible. There are reasons for that, not the least of which is that the atheists' versions of God are a figment of their reasoning -- a strawman, if you will.
There are also false concepts of God associated with the Bible. The debate has been muddled by famous philosophers such as, well, Aristotle, he of the perfect circles. Aristotle had some wrong ideas about God, too. So did, for example, Josephus, Theophilus, Luther, Kant, and just about every other philosopher who has ever philosophized on the subject, on whatever side of the coin. Being human makes one subject to false reasoning on occasion, so that's no surprise.
Favoritism?
All religions contain elements of truth. All contain false elements, especially if you include under the umbrella of religion various social constructs that are artifacts of the process of education and/or proselytizing, or of the support structures that tend to develop under umbrellas.
There is only one real God.
But if you postulate a being who could be the author of the peculiar balance which existed at the non-time of the big bang, and/or determine the exact point at which the big bang occurred, you necessarily postulate a being incapable of being described by any mortal person. Attempting to describe God completely involves the same sort of hubris that supposes one individual or any single race or group of races could ever explore the entire universe. That kind of hubris is not unique to those who claim religion, nor is it universal among those who claim religion.
I suppose I happen to be more familiar with the Bible and the Book of Mormon than with other religious writings, so my concepts tend to reflect those more than the writings of, for instance, Kukai. That means that my descriptions of God and religion are necessarily incomplete.
So, why show favoritism?
Well, God is not a respecter of persons, so it's probably not a good idea to play favorites. However, a person does have to work from where he is.
(You can't accomplish anything trying to work from where you aren't. You can plan ahead, maybe, but you can't actually get the work done until/unless you are where the work is. Or do you want to take the action-at-a-distance point of view?)
Unfortunately, it's impossible to complete de-bias oneself. Much more effective, except in cases of egregious error, to understand as much as possible about what you have and work from there, and let others work with what they have as much as possible. Sometimes other people will think you're being biased 'cause you don't run over to play their game with them, but if you could play everybody's game with everybody at once, you'd be God.
So, if you want to be extreme in your demand of lack of favoritism, you would be demanding that I become God.
I.e. a few rather useful rules of life, determined with the help of the same influence or being that created the universe and all truth, written down and illustrated with a bunch of somewhat edited histories of an ancient people that lived in a time of tribal violence?
How's that?
Hmm. I might be able to provide some comment on the following, as well.
If a bunch of life's rules-of-thumb existed independently, then what's the point? Preserve them, scrap the parts of our traditions and religion that we know to be false, and get on with a decent life.
Truth does exist independently of us. (So does the real God.) Truth (and the real God) is a lot bigger than any of us can really understand much of. The best we can do is try really hard to describe the aspects of truth (and God) with which we are familiar.
But I'm definitely with you if you mean to scrap false religion.
Look at the results on the build. iNTEL couldn't beat the OLPC.
Maintain? You send a conventional cheap laptop into small backwater villages without airconditioned classrooms and you expect it to survive six months? Should I show you the PC labs in junior high here in Japan? Normal, full price laptops in airconditioned labs. They die, and it isn't the HD that goes first.
Developers? The kids are the developers.
Yeah, there is no Visual Studio. So? Squeek is a lot easier for a kid to actually develop stuff on than VB, stuff that the kid actually enjoys both building and using. VB is part of the reason that management seems to have become so dreadfully unimaginative in the last decade, and is only getting worse. You can only build one-shot, throw-away tools with VB with any reasonable productivity, but then you force the users to keep using it because building the first one taught you that you don't want to spend the time and money again. Smalltalk is not the perfect answer to everything, but it doesn't force you to paint yourself into a corner. And it's far more suited to education.
The economist is written from the point of view of those managers who have been blinded by VB, and most of that article is contrary to reality -- bad analogies at best, mostly either outright lies or blindly repeating the lies that Microsoft's dirt crew fed them.
M$Windows isn't even an oval. It's a block that they can't seem to get rounded at all. They keep gouging out flat and concave sections, then gluing in squares and triangles to try to cover the damage. So, when the OLPC isn't the same shape as M$WindowsXXX, it's not a bad thing.
Go to market? There has not _been_ a market to go to here. Micro$oft has tried to find the market, but they couldn't because their product is so wrong for any market that only management desperate to do _anything_ other than appear to be standing still could buy their product.
The XO is the product that is going to make this market. You don't pioneer a market the same way you attack a mature market. (And you really shouldn't attack a mature market. That's being a vulture, and the world has too many of those already.)
The idea that the bureaucrat who "has to evaluate it" is a higher priority consumer than the child who might actually try to learn something using is is symptomatic of the ills of the current market.
Competitors? In their wildest dreams. Where are all the cries of "cheap plastic" that met the iMac? Every "competitor" in the list is going to have a half-life of three months or less in the physical environment XO targets.
Who is behaving as if they are being threatened? The author of the article can't even spell XO correctly?
Hubris? All I've seen is patience. Negroponte's brother suggested allowing iNTEL on board. When he heard how iNTEL performed, he recommended kicking them out more than three months ago. What they are calling hubris is actually, in this case, a willingness to stand by values.
But, yeah, calling having a backbone hubris is also symptomatic of a Micro$oft-dominated marketplace.
We _want_ the XO to spawn many other products. We _want_ them to be superior. The examples listed are anything _but_ superior.
And you are a kool-aid drinking troll who should be a little more worried about what the kool-aid is doing to your own half-life, because people's half-lives are variable (as opposed to radioactive elements) and depends on what you consume.
How is it that so many supposedly successful businesspersons seem to so readily forget that a little charity on a regular basis is necessary to keep the free market from imploding?
Shoot, the OLPC is just sitting there begging to be taken, and the licenses say go ahead. How hard can it be to put in a different CPU?
When your biggest, most powerful partner is Microsoft who has the power to kill you, it might be really hard to ship a Linux based system.
Yeah, but Otellini is at least publicly saying that they are not in Ballmer's hip pocket.
Unless iNTEL is so focused on high-end that it's going to take them months to build a real competitor in the ultra-low power range?
They don't have a cheap chip that fits the bill. They need to either sell a more expensive system, design a new chip, or subsidize the chips for that project. None are really good options.
No, they don't sell a more expensive option, they prototype one. Yes, they design a new chip, or they embarrass themselves. Yes, they patiently sit on the board of a project that they should eventually be able to sell processors to, even though some of their sales crew might be deathly afraid of Microsoft, because letting Microsoft (or the unreasoning fear of Microsoft) make them make dumb business decisions is a sure recipe for disaster.
When the phrase, "Business is war." goes beyond metaphor for too much of the market for too long, well, that's what really happened in 1929.
Shoot, the OLPC is just sitting there begging to be taken, and the licenses say go ahead. How hard can it be to put in a different CPU?
Unless iNTEL is so focused on high-end that it's going to take them months to build a real competitor in the ultra-low power range? In which case, there's no real PR loss if they admit it up front, start a project for the low-power product, and get a proof-of-concept out that, sure, takes too much power, but shows they are willing to do it.
(Part of the problem might be that, in order to produce a CPU that efficient at the low end in a reasonable time frame, they might have faced the decision between stealing AMDs engineers or going cap-in-hand to AMD for the tech again.)
Well, your point that evil occurs in lots of places is a point, I suppose.
But have you considered that what you're suggesting might be actually worse?
The guy at the top of iNTEL seems to be, actually, a pretty decent guy (at least, compared to either Gates or Ballmer). Negroponte actually said at one point that part of the problem is that Otellini doesn't seem to be able to control his own organization because it's too large.
Okay, so Otellini probably didn't send the memo down to crush OLPC. But you have loose cannons on the sales staff using iNTEL resources to go out and do what was done in Peru, India, Mongolia, Nigeria,... . Which probably means there were groups in the sales staff who got together at the nearest Starbucks after the official meetings and said, in a panic, "OH NOES! MY NEXT PAYCHECK MIGHT BE REDUCED 5%! SOMETHING MUST BE DONE ABOUT THIS!"
That kind of mutiny does not bode well for iNTEL's future.
It also points out to us where the ultimate blame for Micro$oft lies.
With us.
We bought the kool-aid, or we were too apathetic when our friends said, "Come on, you can't buck the trends. Use VB/C/S. Use MSWord. Use MSExcel. Everyone is doing it."
If you bought an XBox or use an MSWindwsCE PDA, you're still part of the problem.
If you buy a Dell with an iNTEL processor, you're part of the problem.
Until Apple starts using non-iNTEL processors again, you're part of the problem even if you buy Apple's current hardware. Not saying they have to do a bipolar switch again, just that there is no reason not to use CPUs from multiple vendors (even disparate CPUs, look at what is in iPhone) unless iNTEL is giving special, unmentioned price breaks for the deal.
No, this is not mixing politics with business, not in the sense in which it is bad to mix politics with business. This is long-term survival.
The reason it's stupid is that those "guarantees" of short term profit are generally more illusion than reality. It's a lot like you're average black-jack addict's guaranteed methods.
Way too much of modern business education is focused more on the gamble than on the ultimate stakes.
The problem is the unspoken secret, everybody is sharing everybody else's code, and the licenses aren't really about anything but a king-of-the-mountain game. This works (they think) as long as everybody is willing to give lip service to the known secret.
But the GPL requires everybody to own up. When the truth about how much code has been borrowed gets out in open court, no license except the GPL and the BSD-style license remains.
(I know BSD-style license is not an approved term, but BSD doesn't own the license I use when I use that kind of license.)
So it is precisely at 6 where they lose complete touch with reality. They can't see that the world can possibly survive the collapse of the licensing system.
Just like so many centuries ago, so many "big" people assumed that the collapse of patronage would mean the end of the world.
I should let it rest, but you seem to have asked some reasonable questions, and I assume you know the unreasonable answers I'll give, but, just in case:
I don't base my beliefs in the scriptures.
The scriptures (in my case, Bible, Book of Mormon, a book Mormons call the Pearl of Great Price, and a book we call the Doctrine and Covenants, plus a not-well-defined collection of "sermons" from the prophets) are more of a checkpoint for me. You could say I use them the way one scientist uses another's notes.
When I was young, I could not believe in a God that would make some of the silly rules I heard my Sunday school teachers telling us. My mother told me to work out what I would have done if I were God, and I found, as I did that, that the rules game is not as simple as it seemed.
On the one hand, the really silly rules, I could see from reading the scriptures, were interpretations of men and women.
On the other hand, I could see there were contexts in which even those silly rules weren't all that silly, even if those contexts didn't seem to apply to me at the time.
Somehow, I remembered from second grade (A public school teacher's words are another part of my scriptures.) that underneath all the math rules are axioms, and I was able to see that the same kinds of axioms underlay all scriptural understanding, except the axioms in the scriptures do not communicate as well as the axioms in math. I don't remember if it was the same public school teacher or another, or perhaps one of the Sunday school teachers at church, who convinced me that we should all consider ourselves capable of doing basic research into axioms, and that choosing our axioms was a personal responsibility.
Somewhere along the line, the scripture in Isaiah about God's thoughts being higher than mans, and a scripture in the Book of Mormon, which I can't place at the moment, either King Benjamin or King Mosiah telling his people to believe that God knows more than man does, and I realized that inerrancy is impossible for any mortal man, and for anything that man could do.
There are a couple of discussions of the impact of the inability of symbols to carry semantics by themselves in Mormon scripture, as well as encouragement for the individual to learn to communicate (commune, really) with God. There are some places where some specifics of distinguishing the sources of inspiration and revelation are discussed, as well.
But it's all patterns, not linear rules.
I'd tell you that it requires believing that there are things that are good, and that God could not be God without being true and good in the ultimate sense, even though that sense is only partially accessible to any mortal, except, that is an axiom that works for me. It may not work for you. I'd tell you that it's faith, repentance, baptism, and the Holy Ghost, but even that ultimate set of axioms cannot necessarily be communicated well. (Faith? In Jesus Christ, of course. But is faith a belief? a desire to believe? hope? a willingness to do certain things based on a hope? Etc.)
Anyway, I can't tell you directly what I base my beliefs in because I know that the ultimate source of faith in truth has to be sought for and found by each individual. The best I can offer is poor advice and a view of the road from where I'm at. But I can hope for your success in finding that source in your own way (smarmy as it might be to say so).
What are the scriptures? Extracts from the notes of successful experimenters would be one way to describe them, if it works for you.
Read your analysis in your journal. It sort of makes sense, if, as someone says below, you haven't bought fud about DRM being optional in one and not in the other, etc.
But we are geeks.
We know how to access the hardware.
We don't have to care that much about most of the movies coming out in high-def. We don't have to watch any one movie so many times that it's going to make the studios any money to prevent us from copying them, at least, not in high-def. We can make our own movies, and we can make drivers that access the raw stream from a drive with no intent to break DRM. We don't have to choose between one or the other.
But, no, no flying spaghetti monsters and no sandworms.
And, yeah there apparently has been some selective editing by parties interested in changing the meaning. Maybe also by some well-intentioned who simply thought God couldn't have meant it when He said women weren't chattel. The miracle is that it survived as well as it did.
The thing about going with your gut when you read the Bible is that you should first decide to give it a fair chance, to be looking for good things in it rather than looking for reasons to disbelieve it. I'm not even sure looking for reasons to believe is necessarily a good idea.
Especially if you think it is evil, it probably is not a good idea to look for reasons to believe it. But there's no particular reason to ignore anything good in it.
The Bible is the writings of mortal (and thus fallible) men inspired by God, filtered through several episodes of hand-copying and translation.
Some of us don't claim that you can draw every word in it out of context and have God's truth.
I can't explain about the killing the enemies, at least not entirely, but I'll give it a shot. Bear with me, because I've heard all the arguments before, and if you're busy thinking up clever replies, you won't see the possibility (slim though you apparently think it be) of reason.
But if the clever reply is more important, by all means, go ahead. Ignore reason.
The world was a different place back then. At times, it was kill-or-get-killed. (Okay, there are still such times and places now, depending on where you live and what you do and when.) From the ten commandments, we have a commandment not to kill. Then we have places where Israel, when at war, was commanded to kill. We can profitably read that as telling us not to kill for fun and profit, but that killing may be justified in self-defense. (Very traditional interpretation, I know, leave that saw alone.)
So, you wail, what about the married women and the male children? (Not to mention the men.)
The Midianites.
Moses' father-in-law was a Midianite.
This was not the entire nation of Midian, but a group with which the camp of Israel had stopped to have a celebration that got out of hand. If it had been genocide, you would not read of Midianites later attacking Israel and taking control of parts of their lands.
What's the problem with a celebration getting out of hand? The group of Midianites in question induced many of the Israelites to commit sexual sins with them. What's wrong with that? you ask?
STDs, among other things. Yes, it was extreme, but remember, in modern times, we have penicillin, so we don't have to worry so much about the spread of STDs. We also have jails and police, to help keep problem cases under control.
So, Israelites who had joined in the "fun" were also killed, which, of course, you will call barbaric. Perhaps you will say that there should have been no cleansing, that the offenders should have been left alive to seduce and/or rape (and thus infect) others.
Yeah, if Jethro Tull had been either a Midianite or an Israelite on this occasion, we can be pretty sure he'd have been one of those condemned.
But sex is fun, right? So even in a world where there are no regular police to run to when someone wants to give you more intimate attention than you want, and no penicillin if you get unlucky in the process, this should all just be tolerated, right?
We do not have to assume "having" means raping, nor do we have to assume the girls in question suffered any more by force than they had suffered with their own people. Taking the young women with them might have been better than killing them, was probably much better than leaving them to die.
JabeshGilead (and Benjamin).
I wonder why you don't find fault with the Bible for the fact that Israel almost did commit genocide against one of their own tribes (Benjamin)? Anyway, in this particular case, the Bible doesn't say that they were commanded to do either of those things, whether by God or by a prophet. One of the problems of the times, mentioned in the Bible itself, was that was no authority at all, and the local governments sometimes found themselves doing things that weren't right.
This is an unadorned record.
Near as I can tell, it was left in as an example of the ways Israel tended to mess up without a king.
Judges 5: 30?
Are you serious? Have you even read the whole chapter, much less the story about Sisera getting his in the previous chapter?
Verse 30 is an imagined quote of Sisera's mother, imagining why that particular enemy of Israel was so long in returning from the battle. It was Sisera's mother supposedly thinking that Sisera and his army must be just doing to Israel what you are accusing Israel's God of commanding
Sort of reminds girl I used to play Uno with. You'd give her a draw two, or reverse play just as it would have been her turn. Then you'd draw a wild draw four and she would scream (All in fun, of course.) Let me HELP you! while handing you your cards from the pool, instead of letting you draw them yourself.
Really fun girl to hang around with, not like Micro$oft at all. Just her Let me HELP you! comes back to mind whenever I try to be productive on Micro$oftware.
I mean, all the pro-iNTEL and anti-OLPC blather getting modded up and all the factual posts getting modded down (along with some pro-OLPC blather, as well, I supposed). So why isn't the parent AC modded up as well?
Is it so obviously a troll to mouth something about the qvadrivivm, et. al. being only available via the traditional teaching methods and tools?
And is it so obvious that a book^H^H^H^H^H^H a thousand books may not be easier to maintain than a few XOs and a server?
Slashdot Mirror
Atomic level of tolerance would be significantly higher fidelity than any digital system we presently have.
But the problem is the appropriate sampling rate. CDs are really just barely high enough to satisfy the average consumer who wants to be able to tell a country fiddle from a classical violin. Which is pretty good, really. But the recording accuracy doesn't just fall off a few dbs at between 16 and 20 KHz. It goes to square wave.
The playback electronics does some nice interpolation in modern CDs, but there's only so much interpolation you can do between samples without generating sound that wasn't there. Failing to interpolate also generates sound that wasn't there.
Just for a data point, in the electronics lab when I was eighteen, I tested my hearing with a sine wave generator and a cheap five-inch speaker. (And I'm not talking about the modern ones with rare-earth magnets.) On a good day, I could hear to 19K, even with that cheap setup.
Don't try to tell me CDs are better than vinyl. I know better.
DVD Audio at 192 KHz, I'm not going to argue a lot with, but CD is killing that market. I'D prefer at least 16 times the CD's 22KHz sampling rate, to reduce high frequency artifacts.
Actually, it was two or three months ago, getting on the train at Minoo station. A gal had an old portable record player on a strap over her shoulder and was listening to it. But that's not the kind of vinyl hi-fi we're talking about here.
I don't think it was Sony, either.
-3db?
-6db?
square wave?
Yeah, good digital is noise free in storage and transmission. But the sampling rate is not high enough on CDs, so you lose a little something. I don't know if I can still hear it at 40+, but I could hear it when I was a teenager.
I do like the lack of hiss on CDs, but, if I could afford to be choosy, I'd prefer significantly higher sampling rates. It would be nice if audio on DVD had caught on. And/or if the guy who invented the laser pickup for vinyl hadn't been so successful at destroying his own tech and market.
That's an expensive collection at 16.
I was thinking that my collection of 112 or so was a pretty heavy investment. It stood at just over a hundred when I was 19.
But, no, CDs are nice in that they don't have hiss.
They aren't so nice in that they drop out completely right in the range that young ears can still pick up timbre and definition. It's not -3db or -6db, it's a sharp cut. Absolute, unrecoverable compression to the square and then nothing.
On the other hand, true high fidelity sound systems are addicting in ways that CDs are not. I can still remember sitting in the music store at eighteen, listening to Katy Lied. (And they say Fagan and Becker were unhappy with the recording quality on that album.) CDs, I can listen to and work at the same time.
Although, drives that you can't get to work at all, probably should be disassembled, and the recording surfaces physically destroyed. If there is a possibility of social security numbers or credit card numbers having been stored on the drives, you want to be sure you've at least made it so salvagers can't do something easy like moving the platters to a working drive and just finding stuff you didn't know was there.
/null.
I'm thinking a bulk tape eraser held close to a spinning exposed recording surface is not going to leave much readable without significant effort, so that might be something to do before sanding the surface a bit.
Wiping working drives --
Old Macs are useful for issuing low-level format commands of the sort that doesn't destroy the tracking information, if you have one with the right controller just sitting around. I probably would pull the cover anyway, just to watch the heads seeking to every cylinder, to make sure neither the OS nor the drive itself is short-circuiting the hard commands. If you have a dust-free environment, pulling the cover to watch the heads move isn't likely to do damage. And, because the salvagers will be taking a look at the drive in passing, you do want to give them less to see.
I might, even, after doing the physical format, write random data over the whole disk.
Linux and BSD systems have a good sources for random data, and random data is going to hide sensitive erased data better than
You might then install an OS on the drive, just to make it a little less obvious that data has been erased, because some salvagers are a little overly ambitious after all.
is not a food use, I suppose.
But, yeah, I'm not a fan of either beer or bourbon.
I once saw a field of barley being burned in Takino because the farmer found out after the grain was ripe that his harvester couldn't be adjusted to harvest it. (He had grown it that year because regulations kept him from growing rice.)
I about cried.
Well, the smoke was pretty bad, too, but it's really hard to get whole wheat or barley here in Japan. I like rice, but sometimes I need some other grains in my diet.
Losing MSWindows compatibility could be seen as a win by some, ...
Which ones?
...
Let your conscience be your guide.
No, wrapping them in religious text does not particularly encourage dogma. Perhaps you are doing the gulit-by-association thing. But people are plenty able and willing to invent and resort to dogma without the need for religion. The only reason that Atheism might seem to be free of dogma at this time is that the illogical concept of Atheism as a non-religion is a rather recent invention. If you go back to early versions of atheistic philosophy, you find plenty of dogma, then you move forward to find that there is plenty of dogma cleverly hidden in the currently fashionable version(s) of Atheism.
For instance
Occam's Razor?
You have never considered that your definition of "simple" might be, well, dogma of your invention? That your assertion of "simpler without God" might be heavily dependent on your definition of God?
Not described in the Bible?
{sigh.}
Well, yeah, the "God" asserted by atheists as they attack the concept of God is not described in the Bible. There are reasons for that, not the least of which is that the atheists' versions of God are a figment of their reasoning -- a strawman, if you will.
There are also false concepts of God associated with the Bible. The debate has been muddled by famous philosophers such as, well, Aristotle, he of the perfect circles. Aristotle had some wrong ideas about God, too. So did, for example, Josephus, Theophilus, Luther, Kant, and just about every other philosopher who has ever philosophized on the subject, on whatever side of the coin. Being human makes one subject to false reasoning on occasion, so that's no surprise.
Favoritism?
All religions contain elements of truth. All contain false elements, especially if you include under the umbrella of religion various social constructs that are artifacts of the process of education and/or proselytizing, or of the support structures that tend to develop under umbrellas.
There is only one real God.
But if you postulate a being who could be the author of the peculiar balance which existed at the non-time of the big bang, and/or determine the exact point at which the big bang occurred, you necessarily postulate a being incapable of being described by any mortal person. Attempting to describe God completely involves the same sort of hubris that supposes one individual or any single race or group of races could ever explore the entire universe. That kind of hubris is not unique to those who claim religion, nor is it universal among those who claim religion.
I suppose I happen to be more familiar with the Bible and the Book of Mormon than with other religious writings, so my concepts tend to reflect those more than the writings of, for instance, Kukai. That means that my descriptions of God and religion are necessarily incomplete.
So, why show favoritism?
Well, God is not a respecter of persons, so it's probably not a good idea to play favorites. However, a person does have to work from where he is.
(You can't accomplish anything trying to work from where you aren't. You can plan ahead, maybe, but you can't actually get the work done until/unless you are where the work is. Or do you want to take the action-at-a-distance point of view?)
Unfortunately, it's impossible to complete de-bias oneself. Much more effective, except in cases of egregious error, to understand as much as possible about what you have and work from there, and let others work with what they have as much as possible. Sometimes other people will think you're being biased 'cause you don't run over to play their game with them, but if you could play everybody's game with everybody at once, you'd be God.
So, if you want to be extreme in your demand of lack of favoritism, you would be demanding that I become God.
joudanzuki
TFriendlyA mentions that the freebsd project uses it's own scanner, and the author of the article seems to think it's a variant of Prevent.
Looking up Prevent on wikipedia indicates that Prevent SQS was derived from the Stanford Checker.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity
Let me fix that for you:
I.e. a few rather useful rules of life, determined with the help of the same influence or being that created the universe and all truth, written down and illustrated with a bunch of somewhat edited histories of an ancient people that lived in a time of tribal violence?
How's that?
Hmm. I might be able to provide some comment on the following, as well.
If a bunch of life's rules-of-thumb existed independently, then what's the point? Preserve them, scrap the parts of our traditions and religion that we know to be false, and get on with a decent life.
Truth does exist independently of us. (So does the real God.) Truth (and the real God) is a lot bigger than any of us can really understand much of. The best we can do is try really hard to describe the aspects of truth (and God) with which we are familiar.
But I'm definitely with you if you mean to scrap false religion.
Clunky?
Tough.
Cheaper to build and maintain?
Look at the results on the build. iNTEL couldn't beat the OLPC.
Maintain? You send a conventional cheap laptop into small backwater villages without airconditioned classrooms and you expect it to survive six months? Should I show you the PC labs in junior high here in Japan? Normal, full price laptops in airconditioned labs. They die, and it isn't the HD that goes first.
Developers? The kids are the developers.
Yeah, there is no Visual Studio. So? Squeek is a lot easier for a kid to actually develop stuff on than VB, stuff that the kid actually enjoys both building and using. VB is part of the reason that management seems to have become so dreadfully unimaginative in the last decade, and is only getting worse. You can only build one-shot, throw-away tools with VB with any reasonable productivity, but then you force the users to keep using it because building the first one taught you that you don't want to spend the time and money again. Smalltalk is not the perfect answer to everything, but it doesn't force you to paint yourself into a corner. And it's far more suited to education.
The economist is written from the point of view of those managers who have been blinded by VB, and most of that article is contrary to reality -- bad analogies at best, mostly either outright lies or blindly repeating the lies that Microsoft's dirt crew fed them.
M$Windows isn't even an oval. It's a block that they can't seem to get rounded at all. They keep gouging out flat and concave sections, then gluing in squares and triangles to try to cover the damage. So, when the OLPC isn't the same shape as M$WindowsXXX, it's not a bad thing.
Go to market? There has not _been_ a market to go to here. Micro$oft has tried to find the market, but they couldn't because their product is so wrong for any market that only management desperate to do _anything_ other than appear to be standing still could buy their product.
The XO is the product that is going to make this market. You don't pioneer a market the same way you attack a mature market. (And you really shouldn't attack a mature market. That's being a vulture, and the world has too many of those already.)
The idea that the bureaucrat who "has to evaluate it" is a higher priority consumer than the child who might actually try to learn something using is is symptomatic of the ills of the current market.
Competitors? In their wildest dreams. Where are all the cries of "cheap plastic" that met the iMac? Every "competitor" in the list is going to have a half-life of three months or less in the physical environment XO targets.
Who is behaving as if they are being threatened? The author of the article can't even spell XO correctly?
Hubris? All I've seen is patience. Negroponte's brother suggested allowing iNTEL on board. When he heard how iNTEL performed, he recommended kicking them out more than three months ago. What they are calling hubris is actually, in this case, a willingness to stand by values.
But, yeah, calling having a backbone hubris is also symptomatic of a Micro$oft-dominated marketplace.
We _want_ the XO to spawn many other products. We _want_ them to be superior. The examples listed are anything _but_ superior.
And you are a kool-aid drinking troll who should be a little more worried about what the kool-aid is doing to your own half-life, because people's half-lives are variable (as opposed to radioactive elements) and depends on what you consume.
How is it that so many supposedly successful businesspersons seem to so readily forget that a little charity on a regular basis is necessary to keep the free market from imploding?
When your biggest, most powerful partner is Microsoft who has the power to kill you, it might be really hard to ship a Linux based system.
Yeah, but Otellini is at least publicly saying that they are not in Ballmer's hip pocket.
Unless iNTEL is so focused on high-end that it's going to take them months to build a real competitor in the ultra-low power range?They don't have a cheap chip that fits the bill. They need to either sell a more expensive system, design a new chip, or subsidize the chips for that project. None are really good options.
No, they don't sell a more expensive option, they prototype one. Yes, they design a new chip, or they embarrass themselves. Yes, they patiently sit on the board of a project that they should eventually be able to sell processors to, even though some of their sales crew might be deathly afraid of Microsoft, because letting Microsoft (or the unreasoning fear of Microsoft) make them make dumb business decisions is a sure recipe for disaster.
When the phrase, "Business is war." goes beyond metaphor for too much of the market for too long, well, that's what really happened in 1929.
In fact, you are a scared pessimist.
This world has been "one long tragedy" from the outset. People still seem to be able to find happiness in it if they try.
Read up on what the ancient Greeks called comedy and tragedy for a little perspective.
PS: You are a minority, too.
Either you are a unique individual with unique talents, which makes you, hey, unique, and thus a minority of one,
or you buy that us vs. them kool-aid, in which case, the "us" is always finding that there are more of "them" to be afraid of.
Kind of hard to steal this one.
Shoot, the OLPC is just sitting there begging to be taken, and the licenses say go ahead. How hard can it be to put in a different CPU?
Unless iNTEL is so focused on high-end that it's going to take them months to build a real competitor in the ultra-low power range? In which case, there's no real PR loss if they admit it up front, start a project for the low-power product, and get a proof-of-concept out that, sure, takes too much power, but shows they are willing to do it.
(Part of the problem might be that, in order to produce a CPU that efficient at the low end in a reasonable time frame, they might have faced the decision between stealing AMDs engineers or going cap-in-hand to AMD for the tech again.)
Well, your point that evil occurs in lots of places is a point, I suppose.
... . Which probably means there were groups in the sales staff who got together at the nearest Starbucks after the official meetings and said, in a panic, "OH NOES! MY NEXT PAYCHECK MIGHT BE REDUCED 5%! SOMETHING MUST BE DONE ABOUT THIS!"
But have you considered that what you're suggesting might be actually worse?
The guy at the top of iNTEL seems to be, actually, a pretty decent guy (at least, compared to either Gates or Ballmer). Negroponte actually said at one point that part of the problem is that Otellini doesn't seem to be able to control his own organization because it's too large.
Okay, so Otellini probably didn't send the memo down to crush OLPC. But you have loose cannons on the sales staff using iNTEL resources to go out and do what was done in Peru, India, Mongolia, Nigeria,
That kind of mutiny does not bode well for iNTEL's future.
It also points out to us where the ultimate blame for Micro$oft lies.
With us.
We bought the kool-aid, or we were too apathetic when our friends said, "Come on, you can't buck the trends. Use VB/C/S. Use MSWord. Use MSExcel. Everyone is doing it."
If you bought an XBox or use an MSWindwsCE PDA, you're still part of the problem.
If you buy a Dell with an iNTEL processor, you're part of the problem.
Until Apple starts using non-iNTEL processors again, you're part of the problem even if you buy Apple's current hardware. Not saying they have to do a bipolar switch again, just that there is no reason not to use CPUs from multiple vendors (even disparate CPUs, look at what is in iPhone) unless iNTEL is giving special, unmentioned price breaks for the deal.
No, this is not mixing politics with business, not in the sense in which it is bad to mix politics with business. This is long-term survival.
The reason it's stupid is that those "guarantees" of short term profit are generally more illusion than reality. It's a lot like you're average black-jack addict's guaranteed methods.
Way too much of modern business education is focused more on the gamble than on the ultimate stakes.
Well, all along.
The problem is the unspoken secret, everybody is sharing everybody else's code, and the licenses aren't really about anything but a king-of-the-mountain game. This works (they think) as long as everybody is willing to give lip service to the known secret.
But the GPL requires everybody to own up. When the truth about how much code has been borrowed gets out in open court, no license except the GPL and the BSD-style license remains.
(I know BSD-style license is not an approved term, but BSD doesn't own the license I use when I use that kind of license.)
So it is precisely at 6 where they lose complete touch with reality. They can't see that the world can possibly survive the collapse of the licensing system.
Just like so many centuries ago, so many "big" people assumed that the collapse of patronage would mean the end of the world.
I should let it rest, but you seem to have asked some reasonable questions, and I assume you know the unreasonable answers I'll give, but, just in case:
I don't base my beliefs in the scriptures.
The scriptures (in my case, Bible, Book of Mormon, a book Mormons call the Pearl of Great Price, and a book we call the Doctrine and Covenants, plus a not-well-defined collection of "sermons" from the prophets) are more of a checkpoint for me. You could say I use them the way one scientist uses another's notes.
When I was young, I could not believe in a God that would make some of the silly rules I heard my Sunday school teachers telling us. My mother told me to work out what I would have done if I were God, and I found, as I did that, that the rules game is not as simple as it seemed.
On the one hand, the really silly rules, I could see from reading the scriptures, were interpretations of men and women.
On the other hand, I could see there were contexts in which even those silly rules weren't all that silly, even if those contexts didn't seem to apply to me at the time.
Somehow, I remembered from second grade (A public school teacher's words are another part of my scriptures.) that underneath all the math rules are axioms, and I was able to see that the same kinds of axioms underlay all scriptural understanding, except the axioms in the scriptures do not communicate as well as the axioms in math. I don't remember if it was the same public school teacher or another, or perhaps one of the Sunday school teachers at church, who convinced me that we should all consider ourselves capable of doing basic research into axioms, and that choosing our axioms was a personal responsibility.
Somewhere along the line, the scripture in Isaiah about God's thoughts being higher than mans, and a scripture in the Book of Mormon, which I can't place at the moment, either King Benjamin or King Mosiah telling his people to believe that God knows more than man does, and I realized that inerrancy is impossible for any mortal man, and for anything that man could do.
There are a couple of discussions of the impact of the inability of symbols to carry semantics by themselves in Mormon scripture, as well as encouragement for the individual to learn to communicate (commune, really) with God. There are some places where some specifics of distinguishing the sources of inspiration and revelation are discussed, as well.
But it's all patterns, not linear rules.
I'd tell you that it requires believing that there are things that are good, and that God could not be God without being true and good in the ultimate sense, even though that sense is only partially accessible to any mortal, except, that is an axiom that works for me. It may not work for you. I'd tell you that it's faith, repentance, baptism, and the Holy Ghost, but even that ultimate set of axioms cannot necessarily be communicated well. (Faith? In Jesus Christ, of course. But is faith a belief? a desire to believe? hope? a willingness to do certain things based on a hope? Etc.)
Anyway, I can't tell you directly what I base my beliefs in because I know that the ultimate source of faith in truth has to be sought for and found by each individual. The best I can offer is poor advice and a view of the road from where I'm at. But I can hope for your success in finding that source in your own way (smarmy as it might be to say so).
What are the scriptures? Extracts from the notes of successful experimenters would be one way to describe them, if it works for you.
Read your analysis in your journal. It sort of makes sense, if, as someone says below, you haven't bought fud about DRM being optional in one and not in the other, etc.
But we are geeks.
We know how to access the hardware.
We don't have to care that much about most of the movies coming out in high-def. We don't have to watch any one movie so many times that it's going to make the studios any money to prevent us from copying them, at least, not in high-def. We can make our own movies, and we can make drivers that access the raw stream from a drive with no intent to break DRM. We don't have to choose between one or the other.
That illusion of two choices is the kool-aid.
Do you see what I'm saying?
Day in English can also mean epoch, by the way.
But, no, no flying spaghetti monsters and no sandworms.
And, yeah there apparently has been some selective editing by parties interested in changing the meaning. Maybe also by some well-intentioned who simply thought God couldn't have meant it when He said women weren't chattel. The miracle is that it survived as well as it did.
The thing about going with your gut when you read the Bible is that you should first decide to give it a fair chance, to be looking for good things in it rather than looking for reasons to disbelieve it. I'm not even sure looking for reasons to believe is necessarily a good idea.
Especially if you think it is evil, it probably is not a good idea to look for reasons to believe it. But there's no particular reason to ignore anything good in it.
The Bible is the writings of mortal (and thus fallible) men inspired by God, filtered through several episodes of hand-copying and translation.
Some of us don't claim that you can draw every word in it out of context and have God's truth.
I can't explain about the killing the enemies, at least not entirely, but I'll give it a shot. Bear with me, because I've heard all the arguments before, and if you're busy thinking up clever replies, you won't see the possibility (slim though you apparently think it be) of reason.
But if the clever reply is more important, by all means, go ahead. Ignore reason.
The world was a different place back then. At times, it was kill-or-get-killed. (Okay, there are still such times and places now, depending on where you live and what you do and when.) From the ten commandments, we have a commandment not to kill. Then we have places where Israel, when at war, was commanded to kill. We can profitably read that as telling us not to kill for fun and profit, but that killing may be justified in self-defense. (Very traditional interpretation, I know, leave that saw alone.)
So, you wail, what about the married women and the male children? (Not to mention the men.)
The Midianites.
Moses' father-in-law was a Midianite.
This was not the entire nation of Midian, but a group with which the camp of Israel had stopped to have a celebration that got out of hand. If it had been genocide, you would not read of Midianites later attacking Israel and taking control of parts of their lands.
What's the problem with a celebration getting out of hand? The group of Midianites in question induced many of the Israelites to commit sexual sins with them. What's wrong with that? you ask?
STDs, among other things. Yes, it was extreme, but remember, in modern times, we have penicillin, so we don't have to worry so much about the spread of STDs. We also have jails and police, to help keep problem cases under control.
So, Israelites who had joined in the "fun" were also killed, which, of course, you will call barbaric. Perhaps you will say that there should have been no cleansing, that the offenders should have been left alive to seduce and/or rape (and thus infect) others.
Yeah, if Jethro Tull had been either a Midianite or an Israelite on this occasion, we can be pretty sure he'd have been one of those condemned.
But sex is fun, right? So even in a world where there are no regular police to run to when someone wants to give you more intimate attention than you want, and no penicillin if you get unlucky in the process, this should all just be tolerated, right?
We do not have to assume "having" means raping, nor do we have to assume the girls in question suffered any more by force than they had suffered with their own people. Taking the young women with them might have been better than killing them, was probably much better than leaving them to die.
JabeshGilead (and Benjamin).
I wonder why you don't find fault with the Bible for the fact that Israel almost did commit genocide against one of their own tribes (Benjamin)? Anyway, in this particular case, the Bible doesn't say that they were commanded to do either of those things, whether by God or by a prophet. One of the problems of the times, mentioned in the Bible itself, was that was no authority at all, and the local governments sometimes found themselves doing things that weren't right.
This is an unadorned record.
Near as I can tell, it was left in as an example of the ways Israel tended to mess up without a king.
Judges 5: 30?
Are you serious? Have you even read the whole chapter, much less the story about Sisera getting his in the previous chapter?
Verse 30 is an imagined quote of Sisera's mother, imagining why that particular enemy of Israel was so long in returning from the battle. It was Sisera's mother supposedly thinking that Sisera and his army must be just doing to Israel what you are accusing Israel's God of commanding
Sort of reminds girl I used to play Uno with. You'd give her a draw two, or reverse play just as it would have been her turn. Then you'd draw a wild draw four and she would scream (All in fun, of course.) Let me HELP you! while handing you your cards from the pool, instead of letting you draw them yourself.
Really fun girl to hang around with, not like Micro$oft at all. Just her Let me HELP you! comes back to mind whenever I try to be productive on Micro$oftware.
I mean, all the pro-iNTEL and anti-OLPC blather getting modded up and all the factual posts getting modded down (along with some pro-OLPC blather, as well, I supposed). So why isn't the parent AC modded up as well?
Is it so obviously a troll to mouth something about the qvadrivivm, et. al. being only available via the traditional teaching methods and tools?
And is it so obvious that a book^H^H^H^H^H^H a thousand books may not be easier to maintain than a few XOs and a server?
and a little, according to Negroponte.
That's not $100 profit per unit sold, that's the cost of a second to donate somewhere and just barely enough margin to cover delivery of both. Maybe.
He himself said there wasn't going to be enough to demonstrate that the program could be self-sustaining through the G1G1 program.