No problem, I'm glad you use it for that. My work doesn't require diligent timekeeping and my addresses are sitting in a stack of business cards (in dead tree format).
Most people automatically assume that Palms are ONLY useful for timekeeping. The Tungsten does much more and that was the point of my article.
Ah...I think the phrasing you use make it sound like Palm is somehow not up to your timekeeping and addressbook needs.
Actually, the addressbook function gets used less and less for me...e-mail addresses are kept in Pine, phone numbers are more often called in my cellphone, so it's just the odd phone (from home) lookup that hasn't yet migrated.
Unless it's a strictly "business only" palm, or you have a very vacant social schedule, I'm surprised you don't find datebook intermitently useful. Of you have a great mind for dates.
I've written some useful apps in PocketC for Palm, a vaguely javascript-y (in being a fellow C-deriviative language) language that you can edit compile and run as byte code all on the Palm. Most recently a darts match results recorder, and I can then dump the results into a webapp for online recordkeeping.
ThinkDB is a very useful app, inspired me to make an online version. Basically, you can define simple one table db's and the forms to enter and edit data in.
The backlight is a notble lack. Cradle, eh. And for the marktet they're targetting, 2MB is plenty. 1 MB lasted me a long time, in fact, with a fairshare of apps as well as data.
I think one of the reason it sells so well is the packaging. The plastic see through case for hanging makes people think they're getting something more like a walkman than an expenseive piece of equipment, and Palm has always been friendly enough to cater to this same crowd.
Check out my journal entry on my Tungsten. Love the little guy, but not for doing addresses and timekeeping. I read newspapers, listen to OGG files and flip through databases at work.
Uh, do ever bother to explain why not for doing addresses and timekeeping? Palms have done an admirable job of that for me for 6 years now; every once in a while it's a kick to know what i was doing on this day 5 years ago. (Though admittedly my addressbook is getting a little full of obsolete entries...)
The only reason I could think of not to use Palm for that is if you were already using something that didn't have an easy way to synch with it.
Re:DVD-A and SACD aren't much better anyway
on
The Future of the CD
·
· Score: 1
The supposed quality improvements in SACD and DVD-A are likely not audible by the vast majority of people.
I respectfully disagree on this.
Listen to a recording of a regular symphonic orchestra on a normal Compact Disc and then listen to a recording of a symphonic orchestra with SACD or DVD Audio disc;
Yeah but on the other hand the "vast majority of people" aren't listening to symphonic orchestras! How different does pop culture music sound?
I think the best music still sounds good when played over a crappy tiny radio speaker.
I always thought that when saddled with a name like "Kirk Israel", it would at least be unqiue.
Nope.
And I'm not even jewish...I come from Germans who came to the USA (pre-world wars), wanted to dodge the German/Prussian draft, and changed their name and all the records they could find. And then chose something Semetic sounding, so they would be seen as less than desirable soldiers for Der Fatherland.
1. The panels are only usable in some applications due their overall effeciency (quoted as 11% for this stuff) that you can only use it in very sunny places.
Heh, you know, I just had a thought...if I had this on the roof of my Boston 'burb home, not might it be tough to get enough power in the winter because there's less sunlight, but what about what the damn thing gets covered in snow? Oy flaven.
And then there's the brigade against the windmills around Nantucket. NIMBY rules.
I guess I was thinking more of when you need to do something like ftp://anonymous@mysite.com/file.zip with the username there. (Incidentally, helpful hint: a lot of people don't realize that a simple drag and drop explorer like FTP thing is built into IE, just do ftp://yourusername@yoursite.com Sometimes easier to use than firing up WS-FTP or command line ftp.)
Whenever I see a list of FTP mirrors with one HTTP version, the HTTP version is faster and more reliable 9 times out of 10.
It's generally simpler to get to from a browser, which is where 95% of people's online life is anyway. Yeah, you can rig up a FTP URL, but it seems a bit kludgey and more prone to firewall issues.
Maybe you don't feel bad, but you should. Just because the games are old doesn't give you any more rights to the game than if you download whatever game came out yesterday. People always treat old games as abondonware. They have been saying for years that original NES games should be fair game for downloading since they aren't sold anymore. Well guess what...
You are right, Nintendo does still get value from its old ROMs...they love including them as pack-ins to "modern versions" of games to, from DK64 w/ Arcade DK, Excitebike 64 w/ Excitebike, and Metroid in a combo of Metroid Prime and Fusion.
Though I don't know if the third party games will get similar treatment...but I guess the point is you don't know.
(Of course emulators are probably more fun than this, adding in state save as well as the 'one stop shopping' approach.)
So people shouldn't feel totally free to ROM it up, though if they support efforts where the license holder is making money off the ROMs (like the recent Activision stuff for PS2, and Nintendo's games) maybe they don't have to feel all bad.
Well, thankgoodnes they took out these patents... otherwise we wouldn't have keyword searching or product categorization or anything in between! Online shopping would suck! Yay NCR.
Yeesh, where did our potential little flamefest go?
The God Makes Mistakes opinion is intriguing. I suppose it's pretty astounding how much of mainstream Christian belief is extra-biblical. I mean, it happens to most all religions to various degree, but for a post-reformation, back to the scriptures church, there's a lot of deeply ingrained belief (from what the devil is to visions of heaven and what not) that just comes outta nowhere. And on top of it all, is the vision of Omnipotent, Omniscient, and all loving God. Getting away from that view leads to some amazing speculation (heh, see "Dogma" that basically turns Catholic Cosmological history into a giant Marvel comics backstory...) and some of it will be harder to refute than the typical fundamentalist position, but that doesn't mean it's all that close to the truth...
Hrmm. Some of the philosophies of Unix and its revolutionary system of pipes tend to emphasize individual components, each doing its job well. (Though Perl as the swiss army chainsaw with sometimes surprisingly better performance has something to say on that...)
I'm probably living in a dreamland, but I really think small teams, where people can realistically have a hand in all and therefore knowledge of all parts of the system, can do almost any software project. It seems to me that "mythical man month" scaling problems really start to attack productivity, even with medium size teams.
But the moment that you call it "science", you had better hold yourself to the same standard of evidence that everyone else (and every other branch of science) is held to.
Of course it's not a scientific argument. And you gave me the exact reasons why I tend to trust science over faith...standards of evidence.
But "science" cannot tell us why the US bombed Hiroshima--the WHY. We have to take the word of those who were there if we want to answer WHY.
Of course science could take a stab at the why. It's not going to be very good at it, since it'll be devilishly hard to setup controlled repeatable experiments, but at least in principle you could set up a hypothesis, test it, and fish around for some peer review.
Heck, God never said "don't try and understand me." He may have said "don't waste your time--you won't figure it out"--but that's something else, and He's been wrong before.
God has been wrong before? Hrrm, you might have a more reasonable view of religion than most.
Since neither side is going to make a truly convincing case...as far as I can tell, the issue is did something intelligent but outside the system create the system on purpose. And is one of the religions more or less right. And why are the other ones so wrong, or even around at all. And how can we tell. And, in that 'right' religion, is an honest accounting, or are we just seeing the propaganda for one superpowered being. And is that diving being, in turn, part of an even larger system that we stand even less of a chance of explaining the existence of.
Testing the existance of God isn't just difficult--it's out and out impossible.
Heck, if you adopt the solistic stance, proving the existence of anything outside your own consciousness is out and out impossible. It becomes a matter of figuring what seems most likely, and convincing other people, preferably through repeatable and testable experiment.
Yeah, life force was one of my first games for the system...(along with Metroid, which is why I got the system, and Ikari Warriors 2).
I loved the leaping waves of flame in the fire level. Some of the big floating boss heads were pretty cool too.
A do-able game, so long as you used the good ol uuddlrlrba start... (my friend was trying to convince me the code goes baba not just ba...is that right?)
I think here's my main one: If the universe were in a steady state or in a cycle. This doesn't prove there's no God, of course, but it takes away the whole "How did we get here" problem: the universe has always existed, and always will.
Eh, I don't see the steady state vs. big bang theory changing the basic question: "why is there something rather than nothing".
If there were found to be life on many planets, in many very diverse conditions,
Haven't we found microbes that seem to hitch ride on commets? Hanging out around undersea vents that we thought could never support life?
and in many different stages of evolution. If we observed bacteria in our laboratories evolve into multi-cellular organisms and thence to sexual beings; if we could breed a dog into a cat; if we observed life come from nothing on a regular basis.
All these things take TIME and the equivalent of Massively Parralel Processing on a scale we just don't have.
If animals developed religion and art, at appropraite degrees of development.
And who's to say tht the dog doesn't sense a bit of the divine in our ability to secure food? Or that the whistles and clicks of Dolphins playing have at least one level of meaning we can't fathom?
If scientists had never come up with the "Anthropic principle". If there were relatively few physical constants, or if there were a wide range of values for which the universe as we know it, or a universe of similar complexity, could exist.
Like I've admitted, I don't think Science has done a brilliant job in this area because it's very difficult work, but I tend to have the most hope for the multiple universes kind of thinking, we're something outside our system and frame of reference is somehow generating universes, and every once in a great great while one emerges that isn't an undifferentiated puddle of plasma, and once in an even greater while things work out and life emerges (and life can be pretty damn tenacious) and even less frequent than that, the life evolves to the point of intelligence.
If all I had was a dusy book and a bunch of arguments about science and all that, I don't think my faith would be very lasting.
I'm still convinced that a LOT of faith springs from a sense of "wow, the world is unfair, that doesn't seem right to me" and "I don't want to die".
So, OK -- now it's your turn. What kind of cosmic evidence would make you prone to believe in a creator?
"If only god would give me a sign... like making a large deposit in my name to a swiss bank account."... or maybe someone who could regularly perform what would commonly be held to be miracles through prayer that could withstand a few months of investigations by the Amazing Randi and/or Penn & Teller and maybe some others. At least then I'd be interested in what he or she had to say about the issue.
If I proposed a scientific theory that stated, essentially, that you were born from the family dog and not your mother, you'd be pretty upset too. Especially if my standard of evidence was "look at these scratch marks from the time of your birth" and not "look, you're a dog!"
(Two can play at this game.) No, clearly you're made of special god goo. I mean heck, that god goo must be the crucial difference between you and the chimp that looks a lot like you and shares a lot of your DNA.
Science isn't supposed to tell us WHY. It's just supposed to tells us WHAT or HOW. Religion tells us WHY.
Semantics....the WHY of the big bang is just another form of WHAT was there "before" the big bang and HOW did the big bang "happen".
Religion just says "here's the border of what you can hope to understand, don't even bother thinking you're way around it, that's God's turf". Hence the "Great Cosmic Force That Sits Outside Of Creation". Admittedly testing theories at these levels is difficult, but I don't think it's sporting to just give up because "God says pay no attention to the man behind the curtain".
Well, no... you're still thinking of philosophy. The questions most people really have are the ones that matter on a day-to-day basis: How am I to live? What does God want me to do?
If you're going to be that cynical about how people limit their speculation, than why not go the full monty: How do I avoid burning in hell? How can I get God to use some divine power to help me out right here and now?
Science is the search for knowledge about the observable universe. Faith is a belief in an entity that is beyond the knowable universe. While Science can prove faith, it cannot disprove faith, because the boundary of the unknown keeps moving--and any one of the faith structures I have ever encountered easily can move as the boundary of the unknown moves.
By "faith structures", we can say "religions" for the most part, right?
I think many faith structures are much more rigid than you suppose. There's a strong unwillingness to change in fundamentalist Christianity, which is why, amazingly, there are attempts to make the fundamentals of Evolution look like a matter of continuing dispute.
And if it keeps moving, what's the point?
Yeah, I've come to the conclusion that science hasn't done a terrific job at explaining the why of the big bang. I think the question then becomes, whatever that cause is...is it likely to look as proscribed by one of hundreds of religions? To get into that question, you have to dive pretty deeply into the apologetics of one particular belief system.
Only a few fanatics really cared how God worked. It has always been enough for the bulk of us to say "God works", and not to worry about how.
Are you KIDDING? The canonical kid question about religion is "ok, everything came from god...but where did god come from?" That is a natural question, and is a huge part of "how does God work".
Of course, there is that whole God thing too. Maybe God just made the big bang. It's a theory with at least as much scientific support as "baby universes". What kind of cosmic evidence would it take for "science" to conclude that the universe was created?
I dunno, what kind of cosmic evidence would it take for "faith" to conclude that the universe just happened? (Certainly non-lunatic believers have had to expand their view of how god works from a straightforward reading of holy scriptures to "god just set it up to unfold the way science is demonstrating that it did")
Might as well start learning to love Windows, then. Sun's success in conflating "J2EE" and "Unix" means that Unix will likely go down with J2EE.
I don't think J2EE is down by any stretch, as people see the benefit of J2EE that shuns EJB.
On the other hand...I wouldn't mind picking up a bit more.Net knowledge if it helps me keep more options open. I've never been a huge Microsoft is Evil advocate.
Gee! Is it April 1st, already? You guys really fell for this one:-D
Can you say, "hoax"? (Read the "memo")
Yeah, I did read it. And even with a skeptical eye...I didn't see anything that really screamed hoax, and enough plausible sounding details that it's not a casual hoax, at least.
So, something like GNU gcj, which requires recompilation for each target platform, may well be the better choice than Sun's bloated JRE: while you don't get universal byte code deployment, which you don't need, gcj binaries start up much faster and consume less resources, which may be more important on your server.
Heh...but given the swollen bloaty crapfest that is EJBs, a 500lb hammer for your nail, that probably outweights the whole JRE/gcj kind of thing. Just a guess.
Slashdot Mirror
No problem, I'm glad you use it for that. My work doesn't require diligent timekeeping and my addresses are sitting in a stack of business cards (in dead tree format).
Most people automatically assume that Palms are ONLY useful for timekeeping. The Tungsten does much more and that was the point of my article.
Ah...I think the phrasing you use make it sound like Palm is somehow not up to your timekeeping and addressbook needs.
Actually, the addressbook function gets used less and less for me...e-mail addresses are kept in Pine, phone numbers are more often called in my cellphone, so it's just the odd phone (from home) lookup that hasn't yet migrated.
Unless it's a strictly "business only" palm, or you have a very vacant social schedule, I'm surprised you don't find datebook intermitently useful. Of you have a great mind for dates.
I've written some useful apps in PocketC for Palm, a vaguely javascript-y (in being a fellow C-deriviative language) language that you can edit compile and run as byte code all on the Palm. Most recently a darts match results recorder, and I can then dump the results into a webapp for online recordkeeping.
ThinkDB is a very useful app, inspired me to make an online version. Basically, you can define simple one table db's and the forms to enter and edit data in.
The backlight is a notble lack. Cradle, eh. And for the marktet they're targetting, 2MB is plenty. 1 MB lasted me a long time, in fact, with a fairshare of apps as well as data.
I think one of the reason it sells so well is the packaging. The plastic see through case for hanging makes people think they're getting something more like a walkman than an expenseive piece of equipment, and Palm has always been friendly enough to cater to this same crowd.
Check out my journal entry on my Tungsten. Love the little guy, but not for doing addresses and timekeeping. I read newspapers, listen to OGG files and flip through databases at work.
Uh, do ever bother to explain why not for doing addresses and timekeeping? Palms have done an admirable job of that for me for 6 years now; every once in a while it's a kick to know what i was doing on this day 5 years ago. (Though admittedly my addressbook is getting a little full of obsolete entries...)
The only reason I could think of not to use Palm for that is if you were already using something that didn't have an easy way to synch with it.
Listen to a recording of a regular symphonic orchestra on a normal Compact Disc and then listen to a recording of a symphonic orchestra with SACD or DVD Audio disc;
Yeah but on the other hand the "vast majority of people" aren't listening to symphonic orchestras! How different does pop culture music sound?
I think the best music still sounds good when played over a crappy tiny radio speaker.
You aware of fanatics in any other camp?
I gotta read more carefuly. I saw this and thought, good god, there's Linux and Apple Fanfic??
Programming is not a spectator sport. I would get board watching myself do it
In a similar vein, ever see video of someone playing a video game or watching tv? Man, do people look dumb.
I always thought that when saddled with a name like "Kirk Israel", it would at least be unqiue.
Nope.
And I'm not even jewish...I come from Germans who came to the USA (pre-world wars), wanted to dodge the German/Prussian draft, and changed their name and all the records they could find. And then chose something Semetic sounding, so they would be seen as less than desirable soldiers for Der Fatherland.
1. The panels are only usable in some applications due their overall effeciency (quoted as 11% for this stuff) that you can only use it in very sunny places.
Heh, you know, I just had a thought...if I had this on the roof of my Boston 'burb home, not might it be tough to get enough power in the winter because there's less sunlight, but what about what the damn thing gets covered in snow? Oy flaven.
And then there's the brigade against the windmills around Nantucket. NIMBY rules.
ftp://www.mysite.com/file.zip
How is that cludgey?
I guess I was thinking more of when you need to do something like ftp://anonymous@mysite.com/file.zip
with the username there.
(Incidentally, helpful hint: a lot of people don't realize that a simple drag and drop explorer like FTP thing is built into IE, just do ftp://yourusername@yoursite.com Sometimes easier to use than firing up WS-FTP or command line ftp.)
Whenever I see a list of FTP mirrors with one HTTP version, the HTTP version is faster and more reliable 9 times out of 10.
It's generally simpler to get to from a browser, which is where 95% of people's online life is anyway. Yeah, you can rig up a FTP URL, but it seems a bit kludgey and more prone to firewall issues.
Maybe you don't feel bad, but you should. Just because the games are old doesn't give you any more rights to the game than if you download whatever game came out yesterday. People always treat old games as abondonware. They have been saying for years that original NES games should be fair game for downloading since they aren't sold anymore. Well guess what...
You are right, Nintendo does still get value from its old ROMs...they love including them as pack-ins to "modern versions" of games to, from DK64 w/ Arcade DK, Excitebike 64 w/ Excitebike, and Metroid in a combo of Metroid Prime and Fusion.
Though I don't know if the third party games will get similar treatment...but I guess the point is you don't know.
(Of course emulators are probably more fun than this, adding in state save as well as the 'one stop shopping' approach.)
So people shouldn't feel totally free to ROM it up, though if they support efforts where the license holder is making money off the ROMs (like the recent Activision stuff for PS2, and Nintendo's games) maybe they don't have to feel all bad.
Well, thankgoodnes they took out these patents... otherwise we wouldn't have keyword searching or product categorization or anything in between! Online shopping would suck! Yay NCR.
Yeesh, where did our potential little flamefest go?
The God Makes Mistakes opinion is intriguing. I suppose it's pretty astounding how much of mainstream Christian belief is extra-biblical. I mean, it happens to most all religions to various degree, but for a post-reformation, back to the scriptures church, there's a lot of deeply ingrained belief (from what the devil is to visions of heaven and what not) that just comes outta nowhere. And on top of it all, is the vision of Omnipotent, Omniscient, and all loving God. Getting away from that view leads to some amazing speculation (heh, see "Dogma" that basically turns Catholic Cosmological history into a giant Marvel comics backstory...) and some of it will be harder to refute than the typical fundamentalist position, but that doesn't mean it's all that close to the truth...
Hrmm. Some of the philosophies of Unix and its revolutionary system of pipes tend to emphasize individual components, each doing its job well. (Though Perl as the swiss army chainsaw with sometimes surprisingly better performance has something to say on that...)
I'm probably living in a dreamland, but I really think small teams, where people can realistically have a hand in all and therefore knowledge of all parts of the system, can do almost any software project. It seems to me that "mythical man month" scaling problems really start to attack productivity, even with medium size teams.
But the moment that you call it "science", you had better hold yourself to the same standard of evidence that everyone else (and every other branch of science) is held to.
Of course it's not a scientific argument. And you gave me the exact reasons why I tend to trust science over faith...standards of evidence.
But "science" cannot tell us why the US bombed Hiroshima--the WHY. We have to take the word of those who were there if we want to answer WHY.
Of course science could take a stab at the why. It's not going to be very good at it, since it'll be devilishly hard to setup controlled repeatable experiments, but at least in principle you could set up a hypothesis, test it, and fish around for some peer review.
Heck, God never said "don't try and understand me." He may have said "don't waste your time--you won't figure it out"--but that's something else, and He's been wrong before.
God has been wrong before? Hrrm, you might have a more reasonable view of religion than most.
Since neither side is going to make a truly convincing case...as far as I can tell, the issue is did something intelligent but outside the system create the system on purpose. And is one of the religions more or less right. And why are the other ones so wrong, or even around at all. And how can we tell. And, in that 'right' religion, is an honest accounting, or are we just seeing the propaganda for one superpowered being. And is that diving being, in turn, part of an even larger system that we stand even less of a chance of explaining the existence of.
Testing the existance of God isn't just difficult--it's out and out impossible.
Heck, if you adopt the solistic stance, proving the existence of anything outside your own consciousness is out and out impossible. It becomes a matter of figuring what seems most likely, and convincing other people, preferably through repeatable and testable experiment.
Yeah, life force was one of my first games for the system...(along with Metroid, which is why I got the system, and Ikari Warriors 2).
I loved the leaping waves of flame in the fire level. Some of the big floating boss heads were pretty cool too.
A do-able game, so long as you used the good ol uuddlrlrba start...
(my friend was trying to convince me the code goes baba not just ba...is that right?)
I think here's my main one: If the universe were in a steady state or in a cycle. This doesn't prove there's no God, of course, but it takes away the whole "How did we get here" problem: the universe has always existed, and always will.
... or maybe someone who could regularly perform what would commonly be held to be miracles through prayer that could withstand a few months of investigations by the Amazing Randi and/or Penn & Teller and maybe some others. At least then I'd be interested in what he or she had to say about the issue.
Eh, I don't see the steady state vs. big bang theory changing the basic question: "why is there something rather than nothing".
If there were found to be life on many planets, in many very diverse conditions,
Haven't we found microbes that seem to hitch ride on commets? Hanging out around undersea vents that we thought could never support life?
and in many different stages of evolution. If we observed bacteria in our laboratories evolve into multi-cellular organisms and thence to sexual beings; if we could breed a dog into a cat; if we observed life come from nothing on a regular basis.
All these things take TIME and the equivalent of Massively Parralel Processing on a scale we just don't have.
If animals developed religion and art, at appropraite degrees of development.
And who's to say tht the dog doesn't sense a bit of the divine in our ability to secure food? Or that the whistles and clicks of Dolphins playing have at least one level of meaning we can't fathom?
If scientists had never come up with the "Anthropic principle". If there were relatively few physical constants, or if there were a wide range of values for which the universe as we know it, or a universe of similar complexity, could exist.
Like I've admitted, I don't think Science has done a brilliant job in this area because it's very difficult work, but I tend to have the most hope for the multiple universes kind of thinking, we're something outside our system and frame of reference is somehow generating universes, and every once in a great great while one emerges that isn't an undifferentiated puddle of plasma, and once in an even greater while things work out and life emerges (and life can be pretty damn tenacious) and even less frequent than that, the life evolves to the point of intelligence.
If all I had was a dusy book and a bunch of arguments about science and all that, I don't think my faith would be very lasting.
I'm still convinced that a LOT of faith springs from a sense of "wow, the world is unfair, that doesn't seem right to me" and "I don't want to die".
So, OK -- now it's your turn. What kind of cosmic evidence would make you prone to believe in a creator?
"If only god would give me a sign... like making a large deposit in my name to a swiss bank account."
If I proposed a scientific theory that stated, essentially, that you were born from the family dog and not your mother, you'd be pretty upset too. Especially if my standard of evidence was "look at these scratch marks from the time of your birth" and not "look, you're a dog!"
(Two can play at this game.) No, clearly you're made of special god goo. I mean heck, that god goo must be the crucial difference between you and the chimp that looks a lot like you and shares a lot of your DNA.
Science isn't supposed to tell us WHY. It's just supposed to tells us WHAT or HOW. Religion tells us WHY.
Semantics....the WHY of the big bang is just another form of WHAT was there "before" the big bang and HOW did the big bang "happen".
Religion just says "here's the border of what you can hope to understand, don't even bother thinking you're way around it, that's God's turf". Hence the "Great Cosmic Force That Sits Outside Of Creation". Admittedly testing theories at these levels is difficult, but I don't think it's sporting to just give up because "God says pay no attention to the man behind the curtain".
Well, no... you're still thinking of philosophy. The questions most people really have are the ones that matter on a day-to-day basis: How am I to live? What does God want me to do?
If you're going to be that cynical about how people limit their speculation, than why not go the full monty: How do I avoid burning in hell? How can I get God to use some divine power to help me out right here and now?
Science is the search for knowledge about the observable universe.
Faith is a belief in an entity that is beyond the knowable universe.
While Science can prove faith, it cannot disprove faith, because the boundary of the unknown keeps moving--and any one of the faith structures I have ever encountered easily can move as the boundary of the unknown moves.
By "faith structures", we can say "religions" for the most part, right?
I think many faith structures are much more rigid than you suppose. There's a strong unwillingness to change in fundamentalist Christianity, which is why, amazingly, there are attempts to make the fundamentals of Evolution look like a matter of continuing dispute.
And if it keeps moving, what's the point?
Yeah, I've come to the conclusion that science hasn't done a terrific job at explaining the why of the big bang. I think the question then becomes, whatever that cause is...is it likely to look as proscribed by one of hundreds of religions? To get into that question, you have to dive pretty deeply into the apologetics of one particular belief system.
Only a few fanatics really cared how God worked. It has always been enough for the bulk of us to say "God works", and not to worry about how.
Are you KIDDING? The canonical kid question about religion is "ok, everything came from god...but where did god come from?" That is a natural question, and is a huge part of "how does God work".
Of course, there is that whole God thing too. Maybe God just made the big bang. It's a theory with at least as much scientific support as "baby universes". What kind of cosmic evidence would it take for "science" to conclude that the universe was created?
I dunno, what kind of cosmic evidence would it take for "faith" to conclude that the universe just happened? (Certainly non-lunatic believers have had to expand their view of how god works from a straightforward reading of holy scriptures to "god just set it up to unfold the way science is demonstrating that it did")
Did you read the article? Java is not at fault; Solaris and its version of the JRE are what the memo slams.
And yeah, the memo, while certainly chock full of interesting tidbits, seems addressed to the wrong people. Looks like a possible hoax?
Both could be true, but it's not going to be given such a deep reading by people out to slam Java on the server.
Might as well start learning to love Windows, then. Sun's success in conflating "J2EE" and "Unix" means that Unix will likely go down with J2EE.
.Net knowledge if it helps me keep more options open. I've never been a huge Microsoft is Evil advocate.
I don't think J2EE is down by any stretch, as people see the benefit of J2EE that shuns EJB.
On the other hand...I wouldn't mind picking up a bit more
Gee! Is it April 1st, already? You guys really fell for this one :-D
Can you say, "hoax"? (Read the "memo")
Yeah, I did read it. And even with a skeptical eye...I didn't see anything that really screamed hoax, and enough plausible sounding details that it's not a casual hoax, at least.
So, something like GNU gcj, which requires recompilation for each target platform, may well be the better choice than Sun's bloated JRE: while you don't get universal byte code deployment, which you don't need, gcj binaries start up much faster and consume less resources, which may be more important on your server.
Heh...but given the swollen bloaty crapfest that is EJBs, a 500lb hammer for your nail, that probably outweights the whole JRE/gcj kind of thing. Just a guess.