leaving Windows as a memory as the ReactOS community take the best parts of OSS development and apply it to making my very expensive Windows software run.
I honestly don't understand how anybody could think Windows is expensive.
I wasn't referring to Windows being terribly expensive. I was referring to ~$5,000/seat AutoCAD licenses, $1,500 Adobe Production Studio licenses (Pre-CC; some of us actually paid a hefty sum for the plastic-disc version), $7,000 Waves VST plug-ins, and the like. Alternatively, you have things like software drivers for some very specialized printers, e.g. Designjet units that print on rolls of paper four feet wide, or sign-making cutters that cut glass into shapes based on EPS files. $150 for a copy of Windows is indeed chicken feed by comparison. Giving up Windows gets very, very expensive when it means getting rid of a four-figure piece of software or a five figure glass cutter.
"but I'm not sure what problem ReactOS solves." In an ideal world, I'd like to run Windows applications on an operating system besides Microsoft Windows. ReactOS, in its ideal form, solves this problem. Presently, it does not.
"Folks who are enamored with being able to customize their OS already have Linux and several other open-source choices." My ideal computer runs KDE as its desktop environment, as a launcher for Adobe Premiere, Serato, Mediashout, and Mass Effect just as naturally as it will load Konqueror and Konversation. There's a kludgy implementation of KDE on Windows that is in progress, but it does, obviously, require Windows to work. Similarly, "customizable" and "able to run Ableton Live" are mutually exclusive at present.
Now before I say anything, do know that I GREATLY applaud the efforts of the ReactOS platform. I am incredibly impressed by the huge undertaking the ReactOS team has decided to pursue. Programming an open source, binary-compatible alternative to Windows is, in my opinion, the most difficult OSS project to ever make happen - after all, Microsoft can't exactly do it right when they have the actual source code, a lot more software developers, and a LOT more money. I do one day hope to be able to use it as a primary operating system that will work with my existing hardware and software as seamlessly as it presently does with Windows, leaving Windows as a memory as the ReactOS community take the best parts of OSS development and apply it to making my very expensive Windows software run.
One day.
I really don't mean to be a jerk to the devs, because I know that I have no skill, talent, or ability to write an operating system. I know that they have to hit a constantly moving target, while making plenty of rough decisions along the way: two pieces of software exist. One doesn't work past Windows XP. One works only on Vista/7/8. Which do you make compatible? Microsoft clearly has their way of going ("forward", i.e. Win8 apps), but ReactOS could easily spur adoption by catering to people who have $5,000 pieces of hardware that are no longer made, perfectly fill their needs, and don't have drivers for >WinXP. This is a tough question to answer, and one I do not envy or posit a response.
Based on their demos, it seems that they're going the 'Open Source XP' method, as can be deduced based on their demos of Office 2003 and Photoshop CS2, the former being four revisions out of date, and the latter being five (assuming we count 'CC' as a single version). If the/only/ thing it will run is old software that is not being updated, I understand that - it's no longer a moving target, after all. However, constantly playing catch-up with Microsoft, though inherently a consequence of the nature of the project, is all but impossible to truly consider a replacement.
Perhaps I need to read up on their website or do some Google searching, but are they planning to start eyeballing Win7 at all? What about more recent iterations of DirectX? I'd love to be independently wealthy enough to dump a few million at the project, and yes, next payday I plan on sending $20 or somesuch to the cause. That doesn't mean that the devs will be able to achieve critical mass effectively.
Having said all of that, if they could get an OSS flavor of Windows ThinPC up and running (i.e. completely iron out hardware compatibility and a remote desktop client), and charge even some nominal amount for it so that companies could use it instead of ThinPC (which is stupidly licensed), that'd be a great way to start making inroads.
1.) Figure out a folder structure that makes sure that everyone's data will be put somewhere and won't accidentally be overwritten by someone else's. 2.) Install BitTorrent Sync on something with a hard drive to hold it. Windows box with a USB hard drive? There's a client. OSX? Client. Ubuntu box? Client. DIY FreeNAS with a RAID-1 in a small case? There's a client. Synology or QNAP box? There's a client, albeit with a little command shell necessary. Hell, those $199 Western Digital Personal Cloud drives can run it. 3.) Create those folders on everyone else's machine, e-mailing around the BT Sync folder keys. 4.) Wait for replication of everyone else's data to your drive, and vice versa - everyone will help everyone else get a copy of the data they don't have. 5.) Profit.
Literally every question answered: How would you go about implementing such a family-oriented, distributed cloud platform? See above.
What hardware? Whatever hardware you have lying around, as long as it has the storage capacity you're looking for, and can permanently stay on. A few suggestions are above, but I'm a bit of a FreeNAS guy myself, especially since you can build a half-decent one with a 2TB RAID-1 for about $400 these days. The WD Cloud Drives are about the cheapest and self-contained route to go, so they may be worth considering if you need more than 3 or 4 of them.
What applications, beyond simply the preservation and sharing of family data, (grandkids' photos, home videos, and more) would be good to leverage such a platform? Security Cameras? HTPC? VoIP? Home Automation? Well this is the rather perplexing part, because on the one hand you're asking for decentralized storage, and then you ask why you'd use it (VoIP + decentralized storage?!? wtf??). If you need decentralized storage, one should safely be able to assume that that there's already a reason. Having said that, photos would be my first use case, with disaster recovery being the second - Acronis True Image supports backup to FTP/SMB locations, so as long as you can back up to one of them that way, the rest will distribute.
Primary requirements are Cheap, Secure, Reliable." Cheap? BT Sync is free; you'd need storage regardless. There's 10,001 topics on Slashdot where "the most reliable form of storage" comes up. "How much do you want to spend" is inherently the question, and "Cheap" indicates "not much"...it also doesn't answer exactly how much storage you'll need. Are you undertaking a massive photo album archiving project, or capturing the last 20 years of home videos? a 2TB drive just might cut it, or not. Are you backing up everyone's laptops? 6TB, MAYBE, and single-drive solutions won't cover it anymore...but are you prepared to start forking over $600 a box, along with a weekend of your time (at least) to the cause? Are you doing a roll-your-own Netflix where everyone will add their own CD/DVD rips to the units and then let Plex Media Server work its magic?
Okay, so I lied...one of the underlying questions have been answered: how to get files to the geographically disparate places in the easiest way possible. BT Sync, at the low, low cost of 'free', resolves this. The questions regarding hardware, and how much storage you will need, and what protocols it will need to support, are wholly dependent on how much data will, in total, have to sit on each device. Answer that question, along with the follow-up of "how safe do you really, REALLY need to be?"and then you can start figuring out numbers to go along with it.
I hope you realize that this is the main reason that creationism is not regarded as science.
If you read the initial post, I explicitly state that Creationists don't agree on a 6,000 year old earth. Whether it's considered scientific or not isn't in question here.
You start from a premise: the earth is only 6000 years old.
I start from assuming a particular premise, not necessarily that I, personally, agree with said premise.
And if any observation contradicts this premise you resort to the most fantastic and impossible explanations in order to 'salvage' your point of view.
I don't think it's necessarily any impossible that "God created light in transit", any more than it's impossible that God created the stars themselves. I'm simply avoiding limiting God to a specific method that aligns to a particular conclusion. The Biblical account of Adam's creation indicates that he was formed a fully grown man, and was of that physical maturity when he was only two days old. The conclusion that God "must" have created Adam as a newborn would have its own messy implications regarding how he managed to survive without a mother to feed him.
Additionally, there are similar questions involved with things like radioactive dating. Even without creationism in play, when I was in earth science solving word problems like "a 100g sample contains 25g of Uranium-235 and 75g of Lead-207. How old is the sample?" Well, the textbook answer is 'approximiately 1.4 billion years', since it's of the assumption that the sample started as 100g of uranium. If that sample, by sheer happenstance, started out as a 50/50 mix, then the sample is 700 million years younger and the math is only wrong because it's founded on a false assumption. Now I'm not disputing the validity of radioactive dating, but I am saying that asking the question of "a candle 15 centimeters long burns at one centimeter per hour; how long has it been burning" cannot be answered, regardless of how old the earth truly is.
A scientist cannot do that he/she has to find an explanation that matches ALL observations. And assuming somehow whole stars and planets appeared out of nowhere but in a state that suggest actually they were there for billions of years etc. is actually ignoring the observation. It's not explainging the observation but dismissing it.
It's saying "we don't know". I bought a custom pair of Technics 1200s last year. I have a purchase receipt telling me that they're a year old. They have been retrofitted with cables that are dated from two years ago. They have Dicer controllers installed, whose manufacture initially started in 2010 (but didn't 'catch on' in the DJ scene until a year or two later). The gentleman I purchased them from said that he acquired them a year before selling them to me. Based on that information, one could technically assume that the turntables were likely manufactured in 2011 or 2010. That can't possibly be true, because Technics stopped *making* T12's in 2010! Odds are pretty good that the decks I have were originally manufactured in the mid 1990's or late 1980's; one day I'll be un-lazy enough to try to figure it out based upon the serial number or some of the other minor characteristics that would enable me to better date them. It's entirely possible the the two turntables I have are actually several years apart in age. I don't know. However, a 'scientific observation' of their initial appearance would cause a particular conclusion to be drawn that is both scientific and wrong. We have only seen things start at the beginning. Human and animal births are an obvious example, but one can very easily point to the various nebulae where we've observed stars and planets in their very early stages of formation. I dare not suggest that, as far as we are concerned, life - organic, stellar, or otherwise - has observable stages through which it passes. However, Betelgeuse didn't 'start' its li
I pose that christianity throughout time has been all about the personal theist god that interacts with the world.
One can, with relative certainty, assume that God believes in Himself:-P However, I'm of the persuasion that God can, and does, still interact with the physical world. However, that doesn't mean that God didn't set up plenty of shell scripts to run the whole thing as opposed to Him needing to recreate the sun every morning...
This view is plain to dismiss in the wake of scientific discovery - as well as the origin of man.
Perhaps.
I think what you explain (pertaining to "an individual who believes that there is a Supreme Deity in charge of causing the universe to exist") is only a fallback position in the face of modern knowledge, where it is increasingly futile to persist with the traditional religious claims.
We agree on this one, but for presumably different reasons. See, before we had electron microscopes and the Aracebo radio telescope to better understand the cosmos, religion was essentially the only thing we had to describe a whole lot of things. Yes, scientific discoveries do enlighten how things came into existence, but it doesn't require the believe in a Creator to go away. "The Matrix" was a good movie. They had their signature "freeze time and move the camera" shot that was a thing for a while, but was relatively new when the movie came out (15 years ago...I'm legit getting old...). On the DVD release, they showed exactly how they did it - green screen, 40-or-so heavily-timed cameras, and pristine lighting placement. Just because those watching the bonus features of the DVD know how it was done, doesn't mean that the scene is any less impressive, or that we now no longer need the movie producers because we can do it ourselves (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3evWKYX0n00).
Evolution -> bye bye Adam & Eve -> bye bye bible -> bye bye christianity. It is known that man was not created, and from there everything else crumbles.
Abiogenesis would mean that. There's no Biblical issue with microevolution, or even some limited macroevolution. However, I'll fully admit that the concept of a Creator does find itself with a solid parallel to "The Conspiracy Dilemma" - if a conspiracy theorist conclusively proves the conspiracy, he's right. If they are disproven, it just means that the conspiracy goes deeper, as is the nature of held beliefs. Similarly, a Creationist world view takes scientific discoveries as methods of implementation, and how 'the Creator did it', not as evidence as the absence of a creator.
Because this could explain why the Adobe software I used in the 90s and early 2000s (e.g. Premiere) was such a crash-ridden heap of bugs.
As a Premiere user since 6.1 (and not switching from 6.5 until PPro 2.0), I too am grateful that the requirement of setting auto-save to every five minutes is, for the most part, behind us. However, as much as Adobe gets to shoulder plenty of the blame, consider the state of computers during that era...
My church bought a turnkey video editing system for about $7,000 back in 1998. It had a 733MHz P3 processor and 192MBytes of RAM. Those are essentially rounding errors by today's standards. Since IDE drives maxed out at MAYBE 20GB on the high end, and they didn't spin fast enough to capture video in real-time, we had all the fun of getting a quartet of 18.6GB SCSI drives and RAID-5'ing them for a whopping 50GB of storage space. This, of course, involving an Adaptec SCSI card and Windows 98SE, and the drivers to get the two of them to talk to each other. Since NTFS was, at the time, only supported by NT 4.0 (which, IIRC, was NOT supported by Premiere itself), that pesky 4GB file size limit kept rearing its head in the most obnoxious of situations. Rendering on that 733MHz processor was no picnic, especially if you were rendering to MPEG-2 on top of it - you'd literally be there all night waiting for a render to happen. To help with that, there were some people at Canopus, Matrox, and a few others, who made hardware acceleration cards, and those were half-awesome. By "half-awesome", I mean that machines of that vintage were able to have multiple 3D video effects on a single clip, working in real-time, on processors that ancient. The not-so-awesome part involved the fact that the hardware - and their associated plug-ins - had a tendency of crashing. A LOT. I lost countless hours to a Matrox plug-in that just decided to throw up and cause the last hour of editing to go into the trash can.
Ultimately, I'm not giving Adobe a completely free pass on not getting their act together. I will, however, give them at least some leeway based on the fact that no one/else/ was able to make a stable video editing application on Windows 9x, either...especially when one considers that the hardware required for video editing on the PC platform at that time was a lot more exotic (and ten times more expensive) than it is now.
I'm still a bit confused on those speeds. Can someone convert them to coincide with the viscosity of tar pitch or the rate by which bills get passed through congress?
First off, there is a lot of confusion about what "creationists" actually believe.
If you tried believing only in what there is evidence to support there would be a lot less confusion.
How does one conclusively prove "there was a Creator", any more than one can conclusively prove "All matter existed as pure energy before the energy existed as energy"? Again, internally, creationists debate implementation and methodology, but saying that you can deduce that there was a Creator based upon following what previous iterations until you get to Creation itself...makes very little sense any more than you can take Mass Effect lore and follow its origins all the way back to a hard drive at Bioware. Yes, I am saying that there's faith involved, and I am saying that creationism doesn't, at the face value of the Genesis account, explain the existence of gravity and subatomic forces and antimatter and mathematics. However, I personally have yet to see a solid explanation to the problem of how the 'ingredients' of the Big Bang. Space is expanding, and is expanding from a central point. I can roll with this, but the only examples of those things that I've seen have been things like balloons, where the balloon can expand because it is pushing the air on the outside out of the way. Is there something outside the universe that is being pushed out of the way (what is it?) or not (so then, space is continuing to get 'created'?). From where did all the original energy come from? I've heard of the oscillating universe theory, in which case the heat death of the universe will cause the universe to once again contract into a singularity, but to me that sounds like "turtles all the way down". The 'spontaneous' transition from energy to matter-and-energy - what was its cause? Were there Newtonian/Einsteinian/Quantum physical laws that caused it? Was there 'time' when that happened? These are just a handful of questions that I've yet to find solid answers for in a model of the universe that precludes a Creator, some of which start to stretch the definition of being scientific themselves because they, by definition, are very difficult to observe, measure, or repeat.
From a Christian standpoint, we've got two parts - primary doctrine, and secondary doctrine.
See, you've got this entirely backwards here. If creation is fact, you should be able to infer the Christian doctrine from observations made in the real world. Forget about what's in the book, and just look at the world. Do your observations lead you to the same conclusion the book does?
Pursuant to the list of assorted questions above, the answer is 'no, because we haven't gotten that far scientifically yet'. Again, it's like saying that if you traced the source code of Mass Effect back far enough, you could come up with the concepts to the scripts, hand-drawn artboards, and casting meetings for the audio recordings. My observations bring me to the point of saying, "yes, God used systems. God works in systems. There are observable correlations between how things work, mathematically quantifiable laws that define how the physical universe interacts with itself, and an order that regulates it all." I've got no problem discussing or debating the implementation; I read one particularly interesting piece that interpreted the first three days of Creation as God performing creation at a subatomic level, which was particularly fascinating. However, every science textbook, journal article, and non-elitist blog post I've read on the topic all lead me back to those questions above (and others) still leave those questions lingering, and thus, the concept of a Creator has not yet been nullified, at least for me.
Everything else, regarding God's implementation, and the methods He used to actually perform the act of creation...that's secondary doctrine, and in any room of ten creationists, you'll have a dozen answers.
A few answers here, starting with the foundational ones...
First off, there is a lot of confusion about what "creationists" actually believe. We have our fundies like everybody else, but the fact of the matter is that even the more rational creationists will disagree about creationism. From a Christian standpoint, we've got two parts - primary doctrine, and secondary doctrine. Genesis 1:1 is primary doctrine: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth". This is agreed upon by basically everyone in the creationist camp - that everything in the known universe was created by God.
Everything else, regarding God's implementation, and the methods He used to actually perform the act of creation...that's secondary doctrine, and in any room of ten creationists, you'll have a dozen answers. This is an important distinction to make, because, if I may get on my soapbox for a quick moment, Slashdot seems to correlate "creationist" with "6000 years, fossils-meant-to-test-us, God gives 'Murica the right to bear arms" fundies, as opposed to "an individual who believes that there is a Supreme Deity in charge of causing the universe to exist". Simply because Biblical creationists don't have every single answer regarding God's implementation as to how He constructed the universe, and because we don't all 100% agree on the possible ways that God could have done it...doesn't mean that everyone who believes Genesis 1:1 is a completely irrational fundie...okay I'll get back off my soap box and actually get on with answering the question...
Biblical creationism based on Genesis 1 leaves a few avenues of possibility. First, the word "day" is frequently pointed to as being suspect in the first, second, and third "days" of the creation account...because the earth didn't exist until the fourth day. The argument that the term 'day' is not a literal 24 hour period is substantiated by the fact that the original Hebrew language used for the first day doesn't use the term "first day", but "day one", indicating that it was not compared to the other days in those terms. It's entirely possible that the first three days were entirely different units of time. Additional questions raised in this regard is the fact that the Bible repeatedly refers to God as an Entity that is not bound by time, and thus time itself being a creation...yet 'time' is not listed as one of the things that God created, nor gravity, magnetism, or the forces of Newtonian physics, or quantum physics. Since we understand that all of these laws manipulate time given sufficient amounts of these forces, there's plenty of reasons to believe that the notion of a 'day' was not a 24 hour period. Those on the 6-literal-day side of the debate point to the fact that the word 'day', even in the Hebrew, is used solely for the 24-hour time span, and never for an 'age' or any other indiscriminate span of time, so the authors of the Bible could have used the word 'age' if so directed by God, but did not. Whether human error, 'poetic license', or because God builds universes in a week...is amongst the points of secondary doctrine about which Ken Ham and Kent Hovind have gone back and forth about repeatedly.
With regards to the question about the ~6,000 light-year range of light we'd expect to see, the best answers I can personally give is two fold: 1. If we're assuming that 24 hour days are correct, then one could argue that it's no more difficult for God to make photons-in-transit from stars than it would be for Him to create the stars themselves. For bonus points, consider that 'light' was the very first thing created. To answer the question of "why would He do that", all I can say is "I'm trying to figure out the whole lice thing myself..." 2. If we're assuming 6 'ages' of significant time, then one could argue that there would be plenty of time between the formation of the stars and the creation of mankind, so the light-in-transit could easily have a few million year head start to work with.
A key problem for Facebook: they don't have a phone.
I beg to differ. This was tried at least twice that I'm aware of, once with the HTC Status (it had a dedicated Facebook button and a hardware keyboard; the Salsa was the touch-only variant), and again with the HTC First. Both of these phones failed. HARD.
Facebook doesn't need a phone, because choosing the Facebook phone means not having the latest Galaxy unit or the latest iPhone. I would dare attribute a part of Facebook's earlier success to the fact that they didn't have a phone...but they made it a point to be EVERYWHERE. It was possible to text a status from a dumbphone. They've had amongst the best mobile sites for a very long time. They integrated with Windows Mobile 6.5. They have apps for WP7, WP8, W8. They have Blackberry apps, both old-style and new-style, and they of course have iOS and Android flavors...and, again, a well-designed mobile browser interface.On Android specifically, they ask for literally every permission available (except root, I believe), so they can spy on users just as efficiently as Google can.
It's foolish to compete with the other vendors, when you can simply ensure that you're present on their devices. Remember the immortal adage: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
...but I thought that the Canadian RIAA had a tax tacked onto blank storage media that was supposed to help pay for the pirated tracks. Did that disappear?
Is heat a factor? If so, Apple should be able to tweak the cooling thresholds with a firmware update.
I'm not an engineer, but I don't think that that's going to truly solve the problem at this point.
Even if Apple did this tomorrow, you still have GPUs with over two years of heat wear involved. Similarly, depending on the situation, maxing out the fans at the first sign of a Youtube video may be nice and all, but depending on the situation, the solution would be to ratchet down the clock speed of the GPU, which will NOT make happy campers out of the people who want that GPU to run at full speed during render/transcode/gaming operations.
I would concur that Apple should do this in addition to replacing the affected GPUs (so that they have a fresh start), but in lieu of it seems to only be asking for trouble down the road.
I'm of the opinion now that notebooks just don't belong having high-end GPUs in them. Notebooks have always had a history of cooling issues because of a variety of issues from inadequate fans or other various issues.
I disagree. My Origin EON17 has been rocking for three years with a GeForce 460M without a problem at all. The issue isn't the GPU. The issue is trying to cram a half-decent GPU into anorexic laptops. Apple frequently trumpets their tech as being "thin", which to many people, is a selling point. I understand that. My laptop is, at its largest point, about 2 inches thick. Finding bags that fit it has been a challenge on many occasions. It weighs over ten pounds, and the power brick is another three.
The issue is that companies are trying to copy the super-thinness of a Mac, but still match them on specs. One of the things that Apple does do well as far as design is use the aluminum case as a part of the heatsink; laptops that use plastic can't do that (and, on the contrary, must account for the added insulation). If you want a desktop replacement, it's possible, but you WILL have the fattest, heaviest laptop in the Starbucks. That is the cost of the power. If you want something thin and light, then I agree - don't expect to be rendering 4K scenes in Maya with any meaningful amount of speed on that Intel integrated chipset.
I loved that player, too. In fact, you sparked a moment of nostalgia. If you have one as well, download here: http://www.glop.org/sonique/
It still works, even on Windows 8 x64. Now I will say that it doesn't work WELL...and by that, I mean that you have to run the installer in compatibility mode for Win95, and batch-adding songs into a playlist is an excercise in patience. Also, the default visualization plug-ins don't look so hot on modern displays since they don't scale much past 640x480 I don't think...but they get stupid fast framerates. All of that said, I'm pleasantly surprised that a program designed to work on Windows 95 was coded sufficiently well to still work on Windows 8; there are relatively few that do.
As for why it did poorly (answering one of the other responses), I think that my nostalgia trip answers that, too: The program was originally designed in an era where a 200MHz processor and 32MB of RAM was a generous complement of hardware. The program, on a 3.2GHz Core i7 with 12GB of RAM *still* took nearly ten seconds to start. You don't win people's hearts when a music player takes as much time to load as Photoshop, especially when Winamp was able to be up and running in 3 seconds or less on similar hardware.
I was, however, a huge fan of Lightmagick and a few other plug-ins, and the skin gallery was most definitely the DeviantArt of its day, much more so than Winamp, whose skin library during the 2.x days was much more formulaic.
First, Apple made the App Store paradigm on mobile. This indicated that people were willing to pay a company to 'nanny' their software installation experience.
Then, Apple made a mint on it, presumably selling more iOS apps in any given quarter than desktop apps. This means that Apple users have more iOS apps than OSX apps.
Then, Apple introduce the Mac App Store as an optional download for OSX. This enabled users who wanted a consistent location for software downloads to have Apple sort things out for them, whilst Apple got a 30% cut of higher grossing apps.
Then, Apple bundled the Mac App Store by default.
Then, Apple gave you warning messages if you didn't download from the Mac App Store, though they did make it possible for you to turn them off.
Then, Apple sealed up their hardware, both the laptop and desktop flavors, making it more difficult to buy upgraded hardware for it that didn't connect through a Thunderbolt port.
I see a general trend toward Apple being more controlling, not less. Now the problem is that, to many, MANY people, this is a FEATURE. Their laptop breaks, they get a newer, shinier one for three years. They don't have to worry about getting a toolbar they didn't want. They've never opened a terminal window, and they were never going to double their RAM later on or fill their PCI-Express slots anyway. "Thinner", "Lighter", and "Faster" are more understandable upgrade terms than "twice the RAM", "four dedicated PCI-Express lanes", or "mSATA cache drive".
There are/just/ enough people using Apple hardware that need applications like Adobe Creative Cloud (never gonna be in the App Store) or Serato (low level CoreAudio drivers for SL2/3/4 hardware won't happen in a sandboxed environment) to keep Apple from sealing off the third party software installation methods entirely. I'm still betting that by 2016, Apple desktop/laptop products won't allow third party program installations - by then, Apple will have made some sort of deal with the biggest stragglers like the aforementioned Adobe and Serato to get them into the App Store on special terms, and then so few people will be principally opposed to not having "Ma Apple" control their installations and updates that the loss in business will have been long-since eclipsed by the 30% they make on the copies of Waves plugin bundles ($7,000) or the $50/month Creative Cloud subscriptions that Apple will no longer have to care. And Apple loyalists will still be ravenously defending their flagrant disregard for the technologically inclined.
After Cisco acquired Linksys what was there available for the home market - that didn't suck... D-Link?
D-Link has been hit-or-miss. I've been rather happy with Tenda at the low end, yes they're obviously Chinese and unabashedly so, but I've gotten dual-band N routers with gigabit ports for $40 at Microcenter, on no particular sale day, and have never had to touch them since.
The next step up would be Buffalo, who, for quite some time, have been running DD-WRT as their stock firmware. Slightly modified versions of them, sure, but never to the point of uselessness.
From there, you go to Asus. Nearly all of their routers have run alternative firmware for some time; my N56U has been shuffling packets at some pretty solid speeds for years, even when it was a VPN endpoint, FTP server, DLNA server, and running Transmission, all at the same time. The next tier down didn't do the faster speeds, only had 10/100 ethernet ports, and no USB host (so no torrent/FTP/DLNA functions), but they hovered around $50 and ran most of the same firmware releases. Also, Asus' first party firmware has been updated regularly for the past few years, far longer than I've seen any other router manufacturer write firmware.
Finally, I've been pretty happy with the Western Digital router I bought one of my clients. I wasn't looking for them specifically, but what they brought to the table was a router that has seven gigabit ethernet ports, for less money than it would have cost to get an N56U and a 5-port gigabit switch...then we didn't have to deal with multiple wall warts or congestion with the uplink or anything like that. Those Western Digital routers are quite snappy as well, they do DLNA, FTP, and SMB sharing, and I've never had to reboot it.
There have been great alternatives to Belkin, Linksys, Netgear, and D-Link for some time. They just don't sell them at Staples, Best Buy, or Wal-Mart.
Given those options I then ask, which seems more likely to arise spontaneously? A sophisticated and powerful mind capable of creating universes, or an undifferentiated hot spot?
The issue with answering is that a false dichotomy is made: either that the Creator is the result of creation, or that the universe, as we observe it, with evidence of the big bang, couldn't have been the result of the process used by the creator and only could have come out of a spontaneous series of events. Given that dichotomy, yes, it makes more sense for the observable universe to have been formed spontaneously, rather than a supreme entity being the first result of the big bang to then guide the rest.
The article linked above may interest you to this end; it discusses the possibility that the Genesis account of creation was God explaining the process of creation, using terminology understandable to goat herders and fishermen, to describe the formation of energy, mass, and subatomic particles.
To address the underlying question here, my point is more that plenty of people - creationists and noncreationists alike - get hung up on proving or disproving the Genesis account of creation based on the method being described. The point I was trying to make earlier is that, if we believe in a God who caused the observable universe to exist, then by definition God would not be bound by the rules of creation itself any more than a programmer is bound by the rules of the programs he writes, or an architect by the buildings he designs. Thus, also by definition, understanding how God came into existence is inherently an impossible question to answer, for the rules He created do not apply to Him.
that is such as sad post, i do feel sorry for people believing creationism. they are missing such beauty in the natural world
I don't see how the two are unable to coexist. Because we believe in a divine entity, we are incapable of appreciating beauty in the natural world? It would seem that the opposite would be true; a person believing in the deity of a supreme creator would be more apt to attribute a beautiful sunset or a gazelle running through the wilderness or heat waves rising off the desert sand as a level of beauty that points to the glory of God.
I'm an atheist, but it's completely possible to believe in God and evolution. Not everyone who is a christian believes the bible is literal.
Sure. But what the hell do they actually believe in and why are they not embarrassed?
I was speaking to my great uncle, who happens to be a practicing Catholic priest and somehow the creation story came up. He flatly said it is simply a story and in no way actually happened.
Ok. But so WTF does he actually believe in? Evolution + personal god? That's a contradiction, you know? The seven day creationists are at least consistent (whacky to the bone).
Christian and creationist here. Yes, there are a handful of us on Slashdot, and there is, in fact, a bit of a gradient between "Atheist" and "Westboro Baptist Nutjob". I'm generally a moderate, and I believe that God (the Deity), the church (an establishment), and "Christian Culture" (how Christians interact with each other) are three different, distinct concepts, which means that there are 100,001 different subtleties between the beliefs of any one Christian. Therefore, answering the question in terms of the "they" that you referenced is extremely difficult. Here is how I, Voyager529, will answer this question...
Genesis 1:1 is the part that I take literally - in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. I do believe that Yahweh God, a Being whose existence I will never be able to fully comprehend, caused the universe as we observe it to exist. Was there something before the current universe? I don't know. Are there parallel dimensions? I don't know. How did God come into existence? Couldn't tell you. What I do know is that I personally have an easier time believing that a Being I can never understand undertook a process that I will never understand, as opposed to many of the foundational questions whose implications make the original parts of the Big Bang a bit of a challenge - a few quick ones that come to mind are the laws of physics (were they "always there" and 'existed' before the Big Bang [thus enabling the Big Bang to take place], or were they a byproduct of the Big Bang [so then what caused the Big Bang?]), abiogenesis (how did DNA become a working blueprint for everything, that has consistently worked since the earliest known fossils?), and the difficult-to-fathom volumes of random chance involved (earliest humans having distinct male and female reproductive systems, able to work correctly together, throughout all the gradual changes while still maintaining 'backward compatibility', in the same geographical region...or were they sudden, in which case, the same problems arise). I'm not saying that it's impossible for these questions to have an answer that doesn't involve God, but I'm saying that based on my understanding of things as I presently understand them, a Creator makes a bit more sense to me.
The next bit, specifically, the parts involving the sequence of creation (light, sky/water, vegetation, celestial objects, animals, people, rest)...there is minimal weight put upon this part. What I get from this part is the following: First, God spent time designing each of these things, therefore, they are all valuable to Him. Second, is that there was a duration of time involved - whether it's 144 hours or 144 trillion years is irrelevant, since time is itself a creation. However, the fact that God used time as a part of the process indicates that God also places a value on time. Finally, the fact that there is a sequence involved means that God places value on things being done in order, and adhering to a procedure.
These are the underlying concepts that I find in the first parts of Genesis that I find important, because really, they're the parts that are demonstrated. I've heard 101 arguments as to/how/ creation happened, though this one I found to be particularly fascinating. Wh
Absolutely not, unless you know someone who can give you the hardware for your FreeNAS box. If you have an extra computer laying around, chances are it doesn't have what you'd need for one. I recently looked into what would be required to setup a FreeNAS box, but I don't have the available funds to build a decent one. I have an old computer using rsync to avoid catastrophic hdd failure, but the hardware is all too old for FreeNAS.
A set of fair points. Allow me to clarify:
1.) The BitTorrent Sync software is freeware; I pay neither for a license nor any monthly fee. While you're obviously correct with the hardware aspect of it (more on that in a bit), the nice part is that the client is available for plenty of different operating systems, so the odds of it running on/something/ that's around is helpful. For example, the 'Old XP desktop" that is still lying around can be used for this purpose in conjunction with an external hard disk that would have been purchased for backup purposes anyway. I'm not necessarily saying that having a FreeNAS is the correct solution for everyone, but BT Sync works as a solution for everyone that has a second computer that can act as a storage hub, regardless of OS.
2.) On the heels of point 1, the hardware lying around can do the syncing, which was more what I was getting at. A FreeNAS is the hardware that I personally "have lying around", which clearly isn't everyone's situation. However, though Black Friday deals and an AMD CPU and DVD drive I had lying around, I built a FreeNAS with all the other required parts (PSU, MOBO, 16GB of ECC RAM, 5x3TB HDD's, case, assorted cables, cheap GPU) for $950 that gives me 8TBytes of storage on a RAID-6. Is it at the level of an Equalogic or EMC solution? Certainly not. Is it affordable for someone who needs 8 real-world terabytes of storage? I've had a rough time finding something less expensive; the price can be brought down even more if less space was needed or if more parts could be re-used.
3.) FreeNAS itself is getting a bit big, I'll admit. ZFS has always been worse than Windows and Adobe combined in its ability to very effectively eat up whatever RAM is availed to it. Nas4Free (the more-open-source fork of FreeNAS after iXsystems bought them) is a bit better at hardware usage efficiency, but if you're using older hardware, you may find yourself better off not using ZFS. Conversely, the (1GB RAM)/(1TB Storage) rule isn't atrocious to hit if you're doing, say, a simple 3TB RAID-1 with a pair of drives and a motherboard that can support DDR2 RAM. Nas4Free uses about the same amount of RAM because it's also using ZFS, but it's going to give you slightly better throughput rates for older hardware. Similarly, a less powerful CPU is perfectly fine if you're okay with leaving compression off; I used a $35 Sempron processor in my old one flawlessly, albeit with ~55MBytes/sec over a gigabit LAN because I had compression on and was pegging the CPU during transfers.
4.) If you're doing a simple rsync on your exising setup, BT Sync runs on both Linux and BSD, and it uses a CLI/json config file / web GUI, so you can run it on your system even if it's a CLI-only box. Richard Stallman probably wouldn't because it's not FLOSS, but that's a matter of ideology, not what's technologically possible.
The difference between Live Mesh and BT Sync is that Sync is decentralized; stuff isn't stored on a hard disk that isn't yours. I find the performance hit to be difficult to measure, unless you intentionally tell it to do so (you can force it to high disk priority, which is helpful for the first sync on a LAN).
As far as conflicts go, I tend to use it in a somewhat conservative way - I always make the initial sync involve a blank folder; I've never synced two folders that are both pre-populated for the very reason you specify. To me, it's always made more sense to manually weed out the differences, since it will be more likely that I will be able to deduce the 'correct' version than not. Additionally, BT Sync gives both a read-only folder key and a read/write. By giving my NAS the read-only key, I'll never be wrong. Finally, BT Sync has a special folder where deleted files go, so 'oops' moments can be restored somewhat easily on either end.
Augh! A mirrored folder to the cloud is _not_ backup!
Well, it sorta depends. Some variants do versioning; Acronis does this, and I think Carbonite does, too.
This is the same story as RAID drives. That's adding redundancy/resiliency. In the event of a failure of your local drive, yes, there's a second copy elsewhere. But in the event of "oops, I accidentally deleted a file I wanted to keep" you're out of luck.
This is also true. However, the underlying point here is that there are different means of accounting for different kinds of failures. A RAID-1 means that you're screwed if you hit the 'delete' button, but a disk failure won't bit-bucket everything on the drive. Cloud syncing with a provider that enables versioning means that you can go back and fix an 'oops', but very few of them are going to give enough storage to do a multiversion backup of even a healthy-sized My Pictures folder without being expensive to the point that it's more cost effective to buy a Western Digital My Book World Edition or similar.
Personally, I use BitTorrent Sync to go to my FreeNAS box, which has 30 days worth of snapshots on the dataset containing the folders I sync, itself on a RAID-6. It's great, it's simple, it's free, it's fast on my LAN, it stores in real-time, and the storage on the NAS dwarfs that of my laptop.
If you have an iPhone/iPad/iPod, Apple. If you have an Android phone/tablet, Google, and likely Samsung/HTC/Hawei/LG. If you have a Windows Phone/tablet, Microsoft, and likely Nokia/HTC/Samsung. If you watch movies on your phone, the MPAA. If you play music on your phone, the RIAA. If you have a data plan on your device, then AT&T/Verizon/Sprint/T-Mobile, or your regional MVNO.
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leaving Windows as a memory as the ReactOS community take the best parts of OSS development and apply it to making my very expensive Windows software run.
I honestly don't understand how anybody could think Windows is expensive.
I wasn't referring to Windows being terribly expensive. I was referring to ~$5,000/seat AutoCAD licenses, $1,500 Adobe Production Studio licenses (Pre-CC; some of us actually paid a hefty sum for the plastic-disc version), $7,000 Waves VST plug-ins, and the like. Alternatively, you have things like software drivers for some very specialized printers, e.g. Designjet units that print on rolls of paper four feet wide, or sign-making cutters that cut glass into shapes based on EPS files. $150 for a copy of Windows is indeed chicken feed by comparison. Giving up Windows gets very, very expensive when it means getting rid of a four-figure piece of software or a five figure glass cutter.
"but I'm not sure what problem ReactOS solves."
In an ideal world, I'd like to run Windows applications on an operating system besides Microsoft Windows. ReactOS, in its ideal form, solves this problem. Presently, it does not.
"Folks who are enamored with being able to customize their OS already have Linux and several other open-source choices."
My ideal computer runs KDE as its desktop environment, as a launcher for Adobe Premiere, Serato, Mediashout, and Mass Effect just as naturally as it will load Konqueror and Konversation. There's a kludgy implementation of KDE on Windows that is in progress, but it does, obviously, require Windows to work. Similarly, "customizable" and "able to run Ableton Live" are mutually exclusive at present.
Now before I say anything, do know that I GREATLY applaud the efforts of the ReactOS platform. I am incredibly impressed by the huge undertaking the ReactOS team has decided to pursue. Programming an open source, binary-compatible alternative to Windows is, in my opinion, the most difficult OSS project to ever make happen - after all, Microsoft can't exactly do it right when they have the actual source code, a lot more software developers, and a LOT more money. I do one day hope to be able to use it as a primary operating system that will work with my existing hardware and software as seamlessly as it presently does with Windows, leaving Windows as a memory as the ReactOS community take the best parts of OSS development and apply it to making my very expensive Windows software run.
One day.
I really don't mean to be a jerk to the devs, because I know that I have no skill, talent, or ability to write an operating system. I know that they have to hit a constantly moving target, while making plenty of rough decisions along the way: two pieces of software exist. One doesn't work past Windows XP. One works only on Vista/7/8. Which do you make compatible? Microsoft clearly has their way of going ("forward", i.e. Win8 apps), but ReactOS could easily spur adoption by catering to people who have $5,000 pieces of hardware that are no longer made, perfectly fill their needs, and don't have drivers for >WinXP. This is a tough question to answer, and one I do not envy or posit a response.
Based on their demos, it seems that they're going the 'Open Source XP' method, as can be deduced based on their demos of Office 2003 and Photoshop CS2, the former being four revisions out of date, and the latter being five (assuming we count 'CC' as a single version). If the /only/ thing it will run is old software that is not being updated, I understand that - it's no longer a moving target, after all. However, constantly playing catch-up with Microsoft, though inherently a consequence of the nature of the project, is all but impossible to truly consider a replacement.
Perhaps I need to read up on their website or do some Google searching, but are they planning to start eyeballing Win7 at all? What about more recent iterations of DirectX? I'd love to be independently wealthy enough to dump a few million at the project, and yes, next payday I plan on sending $20 or somesuch to the cause. That doesn't mean that the devs will be able to achieve critical mass effectively.
Having said all of that, if they could get an OSS flavor of Windows ThinPC up and running (i.e. completely iron out hardware compatibility and a remote desktop client), and charge even some nominal amount for it so that companies could use it instead of ThinPC (which is stupidly licensed), that'd be a great way to start making inroads.
Everyone's fairly tech savvy, right?
1.) Figure out a folder structure that makes sure that everyone's data will be put somewhere and won't accidentally be overwritten by someone else's.
2.) Install BitTorrent Sync on something with a hard drive to hold it. Windows box with a USB hard drive? There's a client. OSX? Client. Ubuntu box? Client. DIY FreeNAS with a RAID-1 in a small case? There's a client. Synology or QNAP box? There's a client, albeit with a little command shell necessary. Hell, those $199 Western Digital Personal Cloud drives can run it.
3.) Create those folders on everyone else's machine, e-mailing around the BT Sync folder keys.
4.) Wait for replication of everyone else's data to your drive, and vice versa - everyone will help everyone else get a copy of the data they don't have.
5.) Profit.
Literally every question answered:
How would you go about implementing such a family-oriented, distributed cloud platform?
See above.
What hardware?
Whatever hardware you have lying around, as long as it has the storage capacity you're looking for, and can permanently stay on. A few suggestions are above, but I'm a bit of a FreeNAS guy myself, especially since you can build a half-decent one with a 2TB RAID-1 for about $400 these days. The WD Cloud Drives are about the cheapest and self-contained route to go, so they may be worth considering if you need more than 3 or 4 of them.
What applications, beyond simply the preservation and sharing of family data, (grandkids' photos, home videos, and more) would be good to leverage such a platform? Security Cameras? HTPC? VoIP? Home Automation?
Well this is the rather perplexing part, because on the one hand you're asking for decentralized storage, and then you ask why you'd use it (VoIP + decentralized storage?!? wtf??). If you need decentralized storage, one should safely be able to assume that that there's already a reason. Having said that, photos would be my first use case, with disaster recovery being the second - Acronis True Image supports backup to FTP/SMB locations, so as long as you can back up to one of them that way, the rest will distribute.
Primary requirements are Cheap, Secure, Reliable."
Cheap? BT Sync is free; you'd need storage regardless. There's 10,001 topics on Slashdot where "the most reliable form of storage" comes up. "How much do you want to spend" is inherently the question, and "Cheap" indicates "not much"...it also doesn't answer exactly how much storage you'll need. Are you undertaking a massive photo album archiving project, or capturing the last 20 years of home videos? a 2TB drive just might cut it, or not. Are you backing up everyone's laptops? 6TB, MAYBE, and single-drive solutions won't cover it anymore...but are you prepared to start forking over $600 a box, along with a weekend of your time (at least) to the cause? Are you doing a roll-your-own Netflix where everyone will add their own CD/DVD rips to the units and then let Plex Media Server work its magic?
Okay, so I lied...one of the underlying questions have been answered: how to get files to the geographically disparate places in the easiest way possible. BT Sync, at the low, low cost of 'free', resolves this. The questions regarding hardware, and how much storage you will need, and what protocols it will need to support, are wholly dependent on how much data will, in total, have to sit on each device. Answer that question, along with the follow-up of "how safe do you really, REALLY need to be?"and then you can start figuring out numbers to go along with it.
I hope you realize that this is the main reason that creationism is not regarded as science.
If you read the initial post, I explicitly state that Creationists don't agree on a 6,000 year old earth. Whether it's considered scientific or not isn't in question here.
You start from a premise: the earth is only 6000 years old.
I start from assuming a particular premise, not necessarily that I, personally, agree with said premise.
And if any observation contradicts this premise you resort to the most fantastic and impossible explanations in order to 'salvage' your point of view.
I don't think it's necessarily any impossible that "God created light in transit", any more than it's impossible that God created the stars themselves. I'm simply avoiding limiting God to a specific method that aligns to a particular conclusion. The Biblical account of Adam's creation indicates that he was formed a fully grown man, and was of that physical maturity when he was only two days old. The conclusion that God "must" have created Adam as a newborn would have its own messy implications regarding how he managed to survive without a mother to feed him.
Additionally, there are similar questions involved with things like radioactive dating. Even without creationism in play, when I was in earth science solving word problems like "a 100g sample contains 25g of Uranium-235 and 75g of Lead-207. How old is the sample?" Well, the textbook answer is 'approximiately 1.4 billion years', since it's of the assumption that the sample started as 100g of uranium. If that sample, by sheer happenstance, started out as a 50/50 mix, then the sample is 700 million years younger and the math is only wrong because it's founded on a false assumption. Now I'm not disputing the validity of radioactive dating, but I am saying that asking the question of "a candle 15 centimeters long burns at one centimeter per hour; how long has it been burning" cannot be answered, regardless of how old the earth truly is.
A scientist cannot do that he/she has to find an explanation that matches ALL observations. And assuming somehow whole stars and planets appeared out of nowhere but in a state that suggest actually they were there for billions of years etc. is actually ignoring the observation.
It's not explainging the observation but dismissing it.
It's saying "we don't know". I bought a custom pair of Technics 1200s last year. I have a purchase receipt telling me that they're a year old. They have been retrofitted with cables that are dated from two years ago. They have Dicer controllers installed, whose manufacture initially started in 2010 (but didn't 'catch on' in the DJ scene until a year or two later). The gentleman I purchased them from said that he acquired them a year before selling them to me. Based on that information, one could technically assume that the turntables were likely manufactured in 2011 or 2010. That can't possibly be true, because Technics stopped *making* T12's in 2010! Odds are pretty good that the decks I have were originally manufactured in the mid 1990's or late 1980's; one day I'll be un-lazy enough to try to figure it out based upon the serial number or some of the other minor characteristics that would enable me to better date them. It's entirely possible the the two turntables I have are actually several years apart in age. I don't know. However, a 'scientific observation' of their initial appearance would cause a particular conclusion to be drawn that is both scientific and wrong.
We have only seen things start at the beginning. Human and animal births are an obvious example, but one can very easily point to the various nebulae where we've observed stars and planets in their very early stages of formation. I dare not suggest that, as far as we are concerned, life - organic, stellar, or otherwise - has observable stages through which it passes. However, Betelgeuse didn't 'start' its li
I pose that christianity throughout time has been all about the personal theist god that interacts with the world.
One can, with relative certainty, assume that God believes in Himself :-P
However, I'm of the persuasion that God can, and does, still interact with the physical world. However, that doesn't mean that God didn't set up plenty of shell scripts to run the whole thing as opposed to Him needing to recreate the sun every morning...
This view is plain to dismiss in the wake of scientific discovery - as well as the origin of man.
Perhaps.
I think what you explain (pertaining to "an individual who believes that there is a Supreme Deity in charge of causing the universe to exist") is only a fallback position in the face of modern knowledge, where it is increasingly futile to persist with the traditional religious claims.
We agree on this one, but for presumably different reasons. See, before we had electron microscopes and the Aracebo radio telescope to better understand the cosmos, religion was essentially the only thing we had to describe a whole lot of things. Yes, scientific discoveries do enlighten how things came into existence, but it doesn't require the believe in a Creator to go away. "The Matrix" was a good movie. They had their signature "freeze time and move the camera" shot that was a thing for a while, but was relatively new when the movie came out (15 years ago...I'm legit getting old...). On the DVD release, they showed exactly how they did it - green screen, 40-or-so heavily-timed cameras, and pristine lighting placement. Just because those watching the bonus features of the DVD know how it was done, doesn't mean that the scene is any less impressive, or that we now no longer need the movie producers because we can do it ourselves (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3evWKYX0n00).
Evolution -> bye bye Adam & Eve -> bye bye bible -> bye bye christianity. It is known that man was not created, and from there everything else crumbles.
Abiogenesis would mean that. There's no Biblical issue with microevolution, or even some limited macroevolution. However, I'll fully admit that the concept of a Creator does find itself with a solid parallel to "The Conspiracy Dilemma" - if a conspiracy theorist conclusively proves the conspiracy, he's right. If they are disproven, it just means that the conspiracy goes deeper, as is the nature of held beliefs. Similarly, a Creationist world view takes scientific discoveries as methods of implementation, and how 'the Creator did it', not as evidence as the absence of a creator.
Because this could explain why the Adobe software I used in the 90s and early 2000s (e.g. Premiere) was such a crash-ridden heap of bugs.
As a Premiere user since 6.1 (and not switching from 6.5 until PPro 2.0), I too am grateful that the requirement of setting auto-save to every five minutes is, for the most part, behind us. However, as much as Adobe gets to shoulder plenty of the blame, consider the state of computers during that era...
My church bought a turnkey video editing system for about $7,000 back in 1998. It had a 733MHz P3 processor and 192MBytes of RAM. Those are essentially rounding errors by today's standards. Since IDE drives maxed out at MAYBE 20GB on the high end, and they didn't spin fast enough to capture video in real-time, we had all the fun of getting a quartet of 18.6GB SCSI drives and RAID-5'ing them for a whopping 50GB of storage space. This, of course, involving an Adaptec SCSI card and Windows 98SE, and the drivers to get the two of them to talk to each other. Since NTFS was, at the time, only supported by NT 4.0 (which, IIRC, was NOT supported by Premiere itself), that pesky 4GB file size limit kept rearing its head in the most obnoxious of situations. Rendering on that 733MHz processor was no picnic, especially if you were rendering to MPEG-2 on top of it - you'd literally be there all night waiting for a render to happen. To help with that, there were some people at Canopus, Matrox, and a few others, who made hardware acceleration cards, and those were half-awesome. By "half-awesome", I mean that machines of that vintage were able to have multiple 3D video effects on a single clip, working in real-time, on processors that ancient. The not-so-awesome part involved the fact that the hardware - and their associated plug-ins - had a tendency of crashing. A LOT. I lost countless hours to a Matrox plug-in that just decided to throw up and cause the last hour of editing to go into the trash can.
Ultimately, I'm not giving Adobe a completely free pass on not getting their act together. I will, however, give them at least some leeway based on the fact that no one /else/ was able to make a stable video editing application on Windows 9x, either...especially when one considers that the hardware required for video editing on the PC platform at that time was a lot more exotic (and ten times more expensive) than it is now.
I'm still a bit confused on those speeds. Can someone convert them to coincide with the viscosity of tar pitch or the rate by which bills get passed through congress?
First off, there is a lot of confusion about what "creationists" actually believe.
If you tried believing only in what there is evidence to support there would be a lot less confusion.
How does one conclusively prove "there was a Creator", any more than one can conclusively prove "All matter existed as pure energy before the energy existed as energy"? Again, internally, creationists debate implementation and methodology, but saying that you can deduce that there was a Creator based upon following what previous iterations until you get to Creation itself...makes very little sense any more than you can take Mass Effect lore and follow its origins all the way back to a hard drive at Bioware. Yes, I am saying that there's faith involved, and I am saying that creationism doesn't, at the face value of the Genesis account, explain the existence of gravity and subatomic forces and antimatter and mathematics. However, I personally have yet to see a solid explanation to the problem of how the 'ingredients' of the Big Bang. Space is expanding, and is expanding from a central point. I can roll with this, but the only examples of those things that I've seen have been things like balloons, where the balloon can expand because it is pushing the air on the outside out of the way. Is there something outside the universe that is being pushed out of the way (what is it?) or not (so then, space is continuing to get 'created'?). From where did all the original energy come from? I've heard of the oscillating universe theory, in which case the heat death of the universe will cause the universe to once again contract into a singularity, but to me that sounds like "turtles all the way down". The 'spontaneous' transition from energy to matter-and-energy - what was its cause? Were there Newtonian/Einsteinian/Quantum physical laws that caused it? Was there 'time' when that happened? These are just a handful of questions that I've yet to find solid answers for in a model of the universe that precludes a Creator, some of which start to stretch the definition of being scientific themselves because they, by definition, are very difficult to observe, measure, or repeat.
From a Christian standpoint, we've got two parts - primary doctrine, and secondary doctrine.
See, you've got this entirely backwards here. If creation is fact, you should be able to infer the Christian doctrine from observations made in the real world. Forget about what's in the book, and just look at the world. Do your observations lead you to the same conclusion the book does?
Pursuant to the list of assorted questions above, the answer is 'no, because we haven't gotten that far scientifically yet'. Again, it's like saying that if you traced the source code of Mass Effect back far enough, you could come up with the concepts to the scripts, hand-drawn artboards, and casting meetings for the audio recordings. My observations bring me to the point of saying, "yes, God used systems. God works in systems. There are observable correlations between how things work, mathematically quantifiable laws that define how the physical universe interacts with itself, and an order that regulates it all." I've got no problem discussing or debating the implementation; I read one particularly interesting piece that interpreted the first three days of Creation as God performing creation at a subatomic level, which was particularly fascinating. However, every science textbook, journal article, and non-elitist blog post I've read on the topic all lead me back to those questions above (and others) still leave those questions lingering, and thus, the concept of a Creator has not yet been nullified, at least for me.
Everything else, regarding God's implementation, and the methods He used to actually perform the act of creation...that's secondary doctrine, and in any room of ten creationists, you'll have a dozen answers.
That's because they're all making it up.
A few answers here, starting with the foundational ones...
First off, there is a lot of confusion about what "creationists" actually believe. We have our fundies like everybody else, but the fact of the matter is that even the more rational creationists will disagree about creationism. From a Christian standpoint, we've got two parts - primary doctrine, and secondary doctrine. Genesis 1:1 is primary doctrine: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth". This is agreed upon by basically everyone in the creationist camp - that everything in the known universe was created by God.
Everything else, regarding God's implementation, and the methods He used to actually perform the act of creation...that's secondary doctrine, and in any room of ten creationists, you'll have a dozen answers. This is an important distinction to make, because, if I may get on my soapbox for a quick moment, Slashdot seems to correlate "creationist" with "6000 years, fossils-meant-to-test-us, God gives 'Murica the right to bear arms" fundies, as opposed to "an individual who believes that there is a Supreme Deity in charge of causing the universe to exist". Simply because Biblical creationists don't have every single answer regarding God's implementation as to how He constructed the universe, and because we don't all 100% agree on the possible ways that God could have done it...doesn't mean that everyone who believes Genesis 1:1 is a completely irrational fundie...okay I'll get back off my soap box and actually get on with answering the question...
Biblical creationism based on Genesis 1 leaves a few avenues of possibility. First, the word "day" is frequently pointed to as being suspect in the first, second, and third "days" of the creation account...because the earth didn't exist until the fourth day. The argument that the term 'day' is not a literal 24 hour period is substantiated by the fact that the original Hebrew language used for the first day doesn't use the term "first day", but "day one", indicating that it was not compared to the other days in those terms. It's entirely possible that the first three days were entirely different units of time. Additional questions raised in this regard is the fact that the Bible repeatedly refers to God as an Entity that is not bound by time, and thus time itself being a creation...yet 'time' is not listed as one of the things that God created, nor gravity, magnetism, or the forces of Newtonian physics, or quantum physics. Since we understand that all of these laws manipulate time given sufficient amounts of these forces, there's plenty of reasons to believe that the notion of a 'day' was not a 24 hour period. Those on the 6-literal-day side of the debate point to the fact that the word 'day', even in the Hebrew, is used solely for the 24-hour time span, and never for an 'age' or any other indiscriminate span of time, so the authors of the Bible could have used the word 'age' if so directed by God, but did not. Whether human error, 'poetic license', or because God builds universes in a week...is amongst the points of secondary doctrine about which Ken Ham and Kent Hovind have gone back and forth about repeatedly.
With regards to the question about the ~6,000 light-year range of light we'd expect to see, the best answers I can personally give is two fold:
1. If we're assuming that 24 hour days are correct, then one could argue that it's no more difficult for God to make photons-in-transit from stars than it would be for Him to create the stars themselves. For bonus points, consider that 'light' was the very first thing created. To answer the question of "why would He do that", all I can say is "I'm trying to figure out the whole lice thing myself..."
2. If we're assuming 6 'ages' of significant time, then one could argue that there would be plenty of time between the formation of the stars and the creation of mankind, so the light-in-transit could easily have a few million year head start to work with.
The "why" is still my personal speculation
A key problem for Facebook: they don't have a phone.
I beg to differ. This was tried at least twice that I'm aware of, once with the HTC Status (it had a dedicated Facebook button and a hardware keyboard; the Salsa was the touch-only variant), and again with the HTC First. Both of these phones failed. HARD.
Facebook doesn't need a phone, because choosing the Facebook phone means not having the latest Galaxy unit or the latest iPhone. I would dare attribute a part of Facebook's earlier success to the fact that they didn't have a phone...but they made it a point to be EVERYWHERE. It was possible to text a status from a dumbphone. They've had amongst the best mobile sites for a very long time. They integrated with Windows Mobile 6.5. They have apps for WP7, WP8, W8. They have Blackberry apps, both old-style and new-style, and they of course have iOS and Android flavors...and, again, a well-designed mobile browser interface.On Android specifically, they ask for literally every permission available (except root, I believe), so they can spy on users just as efficiently as Google can.
It's foolish to compete with the other vendors, when you can simply ensure that you're present on their devices. Remember the immortal adage: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
...but I thought that the Canadian RIAA had a tax tacked onto blank storage media that was supposed to help pay for the pirated tracks. Did that disappear?
Is heat a factor? If so, Apple should be able to tweak the cooling thresholds with a firmware update.
I'm not an engineer, but I don't think that that's going to truly solve the problem at this point.
Even if Apple did this tomorrow, you still have GPUs with over two years of heat wear involved. Similarly, depending on the situation, maxing out the fans at the first sign of a Youtube video may be nice and all, but depending on the situation, the solution would be to ratchet down the clock speed of the GPU, which will NOT make happy campers out of the people who want that GPU to run at full speed during render/transcode/gaming operations.
I would concur that Apple should do this in addition to replacing the affected GPUs (so that they have a fresh start), but in lieu of it seems to only be asking for trouble down the road.
I'm of the opinion now that notebooks just don't belong having high-end GPUs in them. Notebooks have always had a history of cooling issues because of a variety of issues from inadequate fans or other various issues.
I disagree. My Origin EON17 has been rocking for three years with a GeForce 460M without a problem at all. The issue isn't the GPU. The issue is trying to cram a half-decent GPU into anorexic laptops. Apple frequently trumpets their tech as being "thin", which to many people, is a selling point. I understand that. My laptop is, at its largest point, about 2 inches thick. Finding bags that fit it has been a challenge on many occasions. It weighs over ten pounds, and the power brick is another three.
The issue is that companies are trying to copy the super-thinness of a Mac, but still match them on specs. One of the things that Apple does do well as far as design is use the aluminum case as a part of the heatsink; laptops that use plastic can't do that (and, on the contrary, must account for the added insulation). If you want a desktop replacement, it's possible, but you WILL have the fattest, heaviest laptop in the Starbucks. That is the cost of the power. If you want something thin and light, then I agree - don't expect to be rendering 4K scenes in Maya with any meaningful amount of speed on that Intel integrated chipset.
I loved that player, too. In fact, you sparked a moment of nostalgia. If you have one as well, download here: http://www.glop.org/sonique/
It still works, even on Windows 8 x64. Now I will say that it doesn't work WELL...and by that, I mean that you have to run the installer in compatibility mode for Win95, and batch-adding songs into a playlist is an excercise in patience. Also, the default visualization plug-ins don't look so hot on modern displays since they don't scale much past 640x480 I don't think...but they get stupid fast framerates. All of that said, I'm pleasantly surprised that a program designed to work on Windows 95 was coded sufficiently well to still work on Windows 8; there are relatively few that do.
As for why it did poorly (answering one of the other responses), I think that my nostalgia trip answers that, too: The program was originally designed in an era where a 200MHz processor and 32MB of RAM was a generous complement of hardware. The program, on a 3.2GHz Core i7 with 12GB of RAM *still* took nearly ten seconds to start. You don't win people's hearts when a music player takes as much time to load as Photoshop, especially when Winamp was able to be up and running in 3 seconds or less on similar hardware.
I was, however, a huge fan of Lightmagick and a few other plug-ins, and the skin gallery was most definitely the DeviantArt of its day, much more so than Winamp, whose skin library during the 2.x days was much more formulaic.
So where's the walled garden?
In my opinion, it's coming...
First, Apple made the App Store paradigm on mobile. This indicated that people were willing to pay a company to 'nanny' their software installation experience.
Then, Apple made a mint on it, presumably selling more iOS apps in any given quarter than desktop apps. This means that Apple users have more iOS apps than OSX apps.
Then, Apple introduce the Mac App Store as an optional download for OSX. This enabled users who wanted a consistent location for software downloads to have Apple sort things out for them, whilst Apple got a 30% cut of higher grossing apps.
Then, Apple bundled the Mac App Store by default.
Then, Apple gave you warning messages if you didn't download from the Mac App Store, though they did make it possible for you to turn them off.
Then, Apple sealed up their hardware, both the laptop and desktop flavors, making it more difficult to buy upgraded hardware for it that didn't connect through a Thunderbolt port.
I see a general trend toward Apple being more controlling, not less. Now the problem is that, to many, MANY people, this is a FEATURE. Their laptop breaks, they get a newer, shinier one for three years. They don't have to worry about getting a toolbar they didn't want. They've never opened a terminal window, and they were never going to double their RAM later on or fill their PCI-Express slots anyway. "Thinner", "Lighter", and "Faster" are more understandable upgrade terms than "twice the RAM", "four dedicated PCI-Express lanes", or "mSATA cache drive".
There are /just/ enough people using Apple hardware that need applications like Adobe Creative Cloud (never gonna be in the App Store) or Serato (low level CoreAudio drivers for SL2/3/4 hardware won't happen in a sandboxed environment) to keep Apple from sealing off the third party software installation methods entirely. I'm still betting that by 2016, Apple desktop/laptop products won't allow third party program installations - by then, Apple will have made some sort of deal with the biggest stragglers like the aforementioned Adobe and Serato to get them into the App Store on special terms, and then so few people will be principally opposed to not having "Ma Apple" control their installations and updates that the loss in business will have been long-since eclipsed by the 30% they make on the copies of Waves plugin bundles ($7,000) or the $50/month Creative Cloud subscriptions that Apple will no longer have to care. And Apple loyalists will still be ravenously defending their flagrant disregard for the technologically inclined.
Also, notice how all the "anchors" are pretty MILFs with short skirts and hooker/stripper heels?
All of the women on Fox News look like strippers.
I sense that the viewership of Fox News by the Slashdot demographic is headed for an increase.
After Cisco acquired Linksys what was there available for the home market - that didn't suck... D-Link?
D-Link has been hit-or-miss. I've been rather happy with Tenda at the low end, yes they're obviously Chinese and unabashedly so, but I've gotten dual-band N routers with gigabit ports for $40 at Microcenter, on no particular sale day, and have never had to touch them since.
The next step up would be Buffalo, who, for quite some time, have been running DD-WRT as their stock firmware. Slightly modified versions of them, sure, but never to the point of uselessness.
From there, you go to Asus. Nearly all of their routers have run alternative firmware for some time; my N56U has been shuffling packets at some pretty solid speeds for years, even when it was a VPN endpoint, FTP server, DLNA server, and running Transmission, all at the same time. The next tier down didn't do the faster speeds, only had 10/100 ethernet ports, and no USB host (so no torrent/FTP/DLNA functions), but they hovered around $50 and ran most of the same firmware releases. Also, Asus' first party firmware has been updated regularly for the past few years, far longer than I've seen any other router manufacturer write firmware.
Finally, I've been pretty happy with the Western Digital router I bought one of my clients. I wasn't looking for them specifically, but what they brought to the table was a router that has seven gigabit ethernet ports, for less money than it would have cost to get an N56U and a 5-port gigabit switch...then we didn't have to deal with multiple wall warts or congestion with the uplink or anything like that. Those Western Digital routers are quite snappy as well, they do DLNA, FTP, and SMB sharing, and I've never had to reboot it.
There have been great alternatives to Belkin, Linksys, Netgear, and D-Link for some time. They just don't sell them at Staples, Best Buy, or Wal-Mart.
Given those options I then ask, which seems more likely to arise spontaneously? A sophisticated and powerful mind capable of creating universes, or an undifferentiated hot spot?
The issue with answering is that a false dichotomy is made: either that the Creator is the result of creation, or that the universe, as we observe it, with evidence of the big bang, couldn't have been the result of the process used by the creator and only could have come out of a spontaneous series of events. Given that dichotomy, yes, it makes more sense for the observable universe to have been formed spontaneously, rather than a supreme entity being the first result of the big bang to then guide the rest.
The article linked above may interest you to this end; it discusses the possibility that the Genesis account of creation was God explaining the process of creation, using terminology understandable to goat herders and fishermen, to describe the formation of energy, mass, and subatomic particles.
To address the underlying question here, my point is more that plenty of people - creationists and noncreationists alike - get hung up on proving or disproving the Genesis account of creation based on the method being described. The point I was trying to make earlier is that, if we believe in a God who caused the observable universe to exist, then by definition God would not be bound by the rules of creation itself any more than a programmer is bound by the rules of the programs he writes, or an architect by the buildings he designs. Thus, also by definition, understanding how God came into existence is inherently an impossible question to answer, for the rules He created do not apply to Him.
that is such as sad post, i do feel sorry for people believing creationism. they are missing such beauty in the natural world
I don't see how the two are unable to coexist. Because we believe in a divine entity, we are incapable of appreciating beauty in the natural world? It would seem that the opposite would be true; a person believing in the deity of a supreme creator would be more apt to attribute a beautiful sunset or a gazelle running through the wilderness or heat waves rising off the desert sand as a level of beauty that points to the glory of God.
Sure. But what the hell do they actually believe in and why are they not embarrassed?
Ok. But so WTF does he actually believe in? Evolution + personal god? That's a contradiction, you know? The seven day creationists are at least consistent (whacky to the bone).
Christian and creationist here. Yes, there are a handful of us on Slashdot, and there is, in fact, a bit of a gradient between "Atheist" and "Westboro Baptist Nutjob". I'm generally a moderate, and I believe that God (the Deity), the church (an establishment), and "Christian Culture" (how Christians interact with each other) are three different, distinct concepts, which means that there are 100,001 different subtleties between the beliefs of any one Christian. Therefore, answering the question in terms of the "they" that you referenced is extremely difficult. Here is how I, Voyager529, will answer this question...
Genesis 1:1 is the part that I take literally - in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. I do believe that Yahweh God, a Being whose existence I will never be able to fully comprehend, caused the universe as we observe it to exist. Was there something before the current universe? I don't know. Are there parallel dimensions? I don't know. How did God come into existence? Couldn't tell you. What I do know is that I personally have an easier time believing that a Being I can never understand undertook a process that I will never understand, as opposed to many of the foundational questions whose implications make the original parts of the Big Bang a bit of a challenge - a few quick ones that come to mind are the laws of physics (were they "always there" and 'existed' before the Big Bang [thus enabling the Big Bang to take place], or were they a byproduct of the Big Bang [so then what caused the Big Bang?]), abiogenesis (how did DNA become a working blueprint for everything, that has consistently worked since the earliest known fossils?), and the difficult-to-fathom volumes of random chance involved (earliest humans having distinct male and female reproductive systems, able to work correctly together, throughout all the gradual changes while still maintaining 'backward compatibility', in the same geographical region...or were they sudden, in which case, the same problems arise). I'm not saying that it's impossible for these questions to have an answer that doesn't involve God, but I'm saying that based on my understanding of things as I presently understand them, a Creator makes a bit more sense to me.
The next bit, specifically, the parts involving the sequence of creation (light, sky/water, vegetation, celestial objects, animals, people, rest)...there is minimal weight put upon this part. What I get from this part is the following: First, God spent time designing each of these things, therefore, they are all valuable to Him. Second, is that there was a duration of time involved - whether it's 144 hours or 144 trillion years is irrelevant, since time is itself a creation. However, the fact that God used time as a part of the process indicates that God also places a value on time. Finally, the fact that there is a sequence involved means that God places value on things being done in order, and adhering to a procedure.
These are the underlying concepts that I find in the first parts of Genesis that I find important, because really, they're the parts that are demonstrated. I've heard 101 arguments as to /how/ creation happened, though this one I found to be particularly fascinating. Wh
it's free
Absolutely not, unless you know someone who can give you the hardware for your FreeNAS box. If you have an extra computer laying around, chances are it doesn't have what you'd need for one. I recently looked into what would be required to setup a FreeNAS box, but I don't have the available funds to build a decent one. I have an old computer using rsync to avoid catastrophic hdd failure, but the hardware is all too old for FreeNAS.
A set of fair points. Allow me to clarify:
1.) The BitTorrent Sync software is freeware; I pay neither for a license nor any monthly fee. While you're obviously correct with the hardware aspect of it (more on that in a bit), the nice part is that the client is available for plenty of different operating systems, so the odds of it running on /something/ that's around is helpful. For example, the 'Old XP desktop" that is still lying around can be used for this purpose in conjunction with an external hard disk that would have been purchased for backup purposes anyway. I'm not necessarily saying that having a FreeNAS is the correct solution for everyone, but BT Sync works as a solution for everyone that has a second computer that can act as a storage hub, regardless of OS.
2.) On the heels of point 1, the hardware lying around can do the syncing, which was more what I was getting at. A FreeNAS is the hardware that I personally "have lying around", which clearly isn't everyone's situation. However, though Black Friday deals and an AMD CPU and DVD drive I had lying around, I built a FreeNAS with all the other required parts (PSU, MOBO, 16GB of ECC RAM, 5x3TB HDD's, case, assorted cables, cheap GPU) for $950 that gives me 8TBytes of storage on a RAID-6. Is it at the level of an Equalogic or EMC solution? Certainly not. Is it affordable for someone who needs 8 real-world terabytes of storage? I've had a rough time finding something less expensive; the price can be brought down even more if less space was needed or if more parts could be re-used.
3.) FreeNAS itself is getting a bit big, I'll admit. ZFS has always been worse than Windows and Adobe combined in its ability to very effectively eat up whatever RAM is availed to it. Nas4Free (the more-open-source fork of FreeNAS after iXsystems bought them) is a bit better at hardware usage efficiency, but if you're using older hardware, you may find yourself better off not using ZFS. Conversely, the (1GB RAM)/(1TB Storage) rule isn't atrocious to hit if you're doing, say, a simple 3TB RAID-1 with a pair of drives and a motherboard that can support DDR2 RAM. Nas4Free uses about the same amount of RAM because it's also using ZFS, but it's going to give you slightly better throughput rates for older hardware. Similarly, a less powerful CPU is perfectly fine if you're okay with leaving compression off; I used a $35 Sempron processor in my old one flawlessly, albeit with ~55MBytes/sec over a gigabit LAN because I had compression on and was pegging the CPU during transfers.
4.) If you're doing a simple rsync on your exising setup, BT Sync runs on both Linux and BSD, and it uses a CLI/json config file / web GUI, so you can run it on your system even if it's a CLI-only box. Richard Stallman probably wouldn't because it's not FLOSS, but that's a matter of ideology, not what's technologically possible.
The difference between Live Mesh and BT Sync is that Sync is decentralized; stuff isn't stored on a hard disk that isn't yours. I find the performance hit to be difficult to measure, unless you intentionally tell it to do so (you can force it to high disk priority, which is helpful for the first sync on a LAN).
As far as conflicts go, I tend to use it in a somewhat conservative way - I always make the initial sync involve a blank folder; I've never synced two folders that are both pre-populated for the very reason you specify. To me, it's always made more sense to manually weed out the differences, since it will be more likely that I will be able to deduce the 'correct' version than not. Additionally, BT Sync gives both a read-only folder key and a read/write. By giving my NAS the read-only key, I'll never be wrong. Finally, BT Sync has a special folder where deleted files go, so 'oops' moments can be restored somewhat easily on either end.
So what is the default solution for free (or paid) AV software these days?
Microsoft Security Essentials for the free stuff - I'd like AVG or Avast or Avira more if they weren't the Overly Attached Girlfriend of software.
ESET's NOD32 for the paid variety. It doesn't nag, it doesn't go nuts on your CPU or RAM, and it's very accurate.
Augh! A mirrored folder to the cloud is _not_ backup!
Well, it sorta depends. Some variants do versioning; Acronis does this, and I think Carbonite does, too.
This is the same story as RAID drives. That's adding redundancy/resiliency. In the event of a failure of your local drive, yes, there's a second copy elsewhere. But in the event of "oops, I accidentally deleted a file I wanted to keep" you're out of luck.
This is also true. However, the underlying point here is that there are different means of accounting for different kinds of failures. A RAID-1 means that you're screwed if you hit the 'delete' button, but a disk failure won't bit-bucket everything on the drive. Cloud syncing with a provider that enables versioning means that you can go back and fix an 'oops', but very few of them are going to give enough storage to do a multiversion backup of even a healthy-sized My Pictures folder without being expensive to the point that it's more cost effective to buy a Western Digital My Book World Edition or similar.
Personally, I use BitTorrent Sync to go to my FreeNAS box, which has 30 days worth of snapshots on the dataset containing the folders I sync, itself on a RAID-6. It's great, it's simple, it's free, it's fast on my LAN, it stores in real-time, and the storage on the NAS dwarfs that of my laptop.
so who else owns my electronic toys?
If you have an iPhone/iPad/iPod, Apple.
If you have an Android phone/tablet, Google, and likely Samsung/HTC/Hawei/LG.
If you have a Windows Phone/tablet, Microsoft, and likely Nokia/HTC/Samsung.
If you watch movies on your phone, the MPAA.
If you play music on your phone, the RIAA.
If you have a data plan on your device, then AT&T/Verizon/Sprint/T-Mobile, or your regional MVNO.