For some reason, it *really* annoys me when people link to their own blog instead of the link to the story. At the very least it ought to be obvious that it's a personal link rather than doing it on the sly.
There is this concept called the 'key-repeat time'. Go to the control panel, click on 'Keyboard and Mouse', and alter to suit.
If, for some reason, you want a faster repeat-time than the dialogue provides, you'll have to get someone with more insider-knowledge than I to tell you how to do it, but the speed of response to key presses is nowhere near an adequate benchmark for CPU comparison.
A dual 2-GHz G5 could process tens of thousands of keys being pressed every second without breaking sweat. As could a 2.2GHz AMD (or Intel) box.
The nonesense(sic) of the HFS+ permissions isn't clear to me. It seems to use unix-style permissions with ACL's, that seem perfectly adequate for every other unix box. I'm not sure what the problem is...
Well, that's ok:-) It'd be a boring world if we *always* agreed.
I think the policy of shooting suspected suicide bombers was imported from somewhere - I remember reading that the chief constable said "we've been advised this is the best way, blah, blah, blah". I think it was somewhere in the middle-east (where it's a far more common occurrence, granted, but that does give them more experience too).
As for the 'chicken-switch'. I doubt many suicide bombers would use them - if you stumbled and fell, your hands go out to stop your fall, and *boom*. You're dead in a park with no-one around. I could see them using one when they were in-place, centre of attention, and giving a speech or in the last few minutes, but not when being pursued.
I'm *not* actually happy that a man is dead instead of (as someone else pointed out) being charged, (and in this case presumably released/deported). I'm not defending that. I don't think it was xenophobic though, or murder for that matter. I'm sure a native would have suffered the same fate (especially since all our bombers were home-grown) as a foreigner under the same circumstances, and I'm not sure it *can* be murder when it's a sanctioned policy...
Well, as opposed (to pluck an example out of the air) to fabricating evidence and using it to start a war to strengthen the grip on strategic oil reserves, resulting in the death of tens of thousands, I think the brits were reasonably restrained...
A bloke who runs away from armed police, wearing odd-for-the-weather clothing with wires hanging out is fair game, IMHO. If they'd been right, and he'd been a terrorist, everyone would have been praising their actions. Unfortunately the officers don't get the benefits of eagle-eye hindsight until afterwards, when the more-despicable of those they were trying to protect turn and savage their actions...
Personally I don't like the fact that a man died needlessly, but given the above circumstances, and the fact that there *is* a well-known official shoot-to-kill policy for suspected terrorists escaping, he shouldn't have run. Not that that's justification, but it was foolish.
The point is that if your problem doesn't have the headroom to make a good programmer shine, then you don't need a good programmer. Any old joe will do. If, however, your problem is somehow "hard", then having the best pays off.
His point, I think, is that a lot of the good software out there *does* have the headroom to make a good programmer shine, but in fact it's still "joe's" who are being hired (see the AOL argument).
Personally I think it's because programming is a junction point between art and science - there's a lot of science and rigour in programming, but there's also elegance (in the mathematical sense) in most good solutions. Appreciation and production of elegance is a good definition of art.
My understanding is that scalability refers to the performance, and to improve scalability you look for bottlenecks that are causing slowness. Frequently these bottlenecks are helped by scaling up (buying a bigger, faster server) or scaling out (building a load-balanced cluster)
I don't disagree with anything above, but I think that when you have scaled out, and built your larger cluster, you want some software that can take maximum advantage of the parallelism you now have.
All I was saying is that with some of the enterprise software available, you *can* do things that you can't with PHP - restart a transaction (transaction as in user-experience loading a page, not just SQL) transparently to the user, which you struggle to do just in PHP.
The original article was about the advantages/disadvantages of different languages. I think PHP is excellent - I've long been an advocate, but it does have some limitations (which may not be relevant to most people) that make it fall short of other environments. On the other hand, due to the lack of these things, it's simple to learn and efficient at what it does. Roundabouts and swings...
It's probably worth pointing out that I already use the database to store sessions. All that is passed between server and client is a cookie/URL variable indicating the current session id. I've been using databases with PHP on commercial websites for a long time now (I wrote the PHP Illustra module, back in '97).
My point-of-failure argument was in fact the out-of-resource or memory-failure event when halfway through processing a page's script - I've made the same point above, so I won't repeat it.
I sort of resent being labelled a hobbyist... I wrote the first Illustra database module for PHP back in 1997. I'd been coding PHP professionally for a while then, and ever since...
Perhaps the sites you mention don't care about the sort of scalability that I'm talking about - it tends to be an issue for financial people, not for websites. If a transaction (read: complex script with multiple DB accesses or other interactions, NOT just a SQL transaction) is underway, and the HTTP process crashes, the user's browser will reflect that. I don't think there's much the developer can do to prevent that. You may be able to write an Apache module that wraps PHP as a submodule or something... In any event, it's outside the language. As far as I know, even the Exception class requires a valid interpreter...
Using WebObjects or (insert random enterprise system), the currently failing process will be adopted by another server and processed to completion. That was the sort of scalability I was saying was missing - not the ability to throw servers into a pool and cope if a machine dies - if you read my post, I'm already planning on doing that!
Ok, so you're halfway through a PHP script, and you get a memory fault, or you run out of a resource (sockets, memory limit, processes, any hard limit) - what do you do when the http process crashes ? How do you recover *that transaction* without loss ?
This isn't a jibe - if there are ways to get PHP to do it I'd like to know - I'm always open to things I've missed.
It's not my company, I'm just the webservice provider. It's a large(ish) publishing house in the financial sector, and until they tell me they're happy for me to advertise that I do all their work, I'm going to let it lie.
No offence meant, but a regular income is worth more than proving my statement on/.:-) If you doubt me, take a look at my posting history and see if you think I lie on this site - I assure you I do not.
People will say that it doesn't scale but they base this opinion on a preset prejudice or on the scalability of the underlying architecture.
What people mean by 'it doesn't scale' is that it doesn't scale. Not that it doesn't run fast enough or have enough functionality for pretty much anything at the small-to-medium sized website...
I have a set of 200 or so websites all running though a self-built PHP template-based content-management system (hey, this was 8 years ago, they were rare then!:-) that has stood the test of time admirably. It's only got a few million pages in it's CMS, but it's pretty cool:
Typical page-creation is ~0.01 secs for complex pages
Copes with (currently) several million users
Handles email list management (opt-in only, don't flame me:-)
Separates the content from the formatting. Formatting is by recursive template instantiation.
Can embed run-at-page-delivery-time PHP modules as CMS elements
Has an Ad-server (flash, DHTML or images) which guarantees ad-placement in slots at a pre-paid rate
Copes well with binary data (PDFs, images, movies, etc.)
Handles image galleries from both user/admin perspective
Has sections where extranet companies can "own" part of the sites
Complete messageboard system, any number of boards, skinnable.
Manages products, shopping basket etc. and integrates with online purchasing providers
Provides newsfeeds in a variety of formats (RSS, XML via FTP, etc.)
Provides a *fast* fulltext search that uses phrases, booleans, etc.
Layers facilities on top of search (eg: site-editor can embed results of a search into an email (s)he composes. Preview, then deliver to opt-in list.)
And will all those features it's still not scaleable. I can't split the system over multiple webservers and begin a transaction on one webserver, have a hardware failure, and have it complete on a different webserver...
I server about a million page-impressions a day (less at weekends) so I'm hardly "big iron", but at the moment it's all serving from a single machine(*) with a manual backup ready-to-go. We're (probably) about to triple our daily throughput (time to splash some cash:-), so scalability has become more important, and I'm looking into the best way of doing this.
I can't have the above level of scalability but I can divide up the work over (say) 4 cloned webservers, and use round-robin DNS (low TTL) or transparent-proxy load-balancing to share the load. Then at least if one of the machines goes down (not the proxy;-), I can have it automatically react and recover.
We're probably going to have 2 database servers as well - one in slave mode, one in master mode (all writes to the master, because we use MySQL). The single point of failure then becomes the proxy gateway (because RR DNS is a bit of a pain), so we can have a spare standing by - the configuration of a load-balancing proxy is pretty trivial, and doesn't depend on anything else, so it can be sitting ready to run and swapping ethernet patch cables ought to be all that is necessary.
And that's about as "scalable" as I can make it - not very. All I'm doing is duplicating hardware for speed and reliability. I can have robustness against a machine dying, but that's about as far as I can go. True scalability allows the operation the machine was doing when it died to complete successfully, and PHP ain't there (yet). I guess you could implement it in s/w using lots of state tables, and perhaps get 80% of the way there, but it's an add-on not a built-in, and not a complete solution. Better to go with something that works if you need it...
Unjustified rhetoric will only take you so far: "the plausibility of the impossible", "This view is spookily godlike" etc. etc. Yes, the net has now got some useful services and some cool ideas have become almost mundane - searching for papers used to be a day-long job at the university library, now it's a google away...
The problem with saying, we've come this far this fast is that (as insurance agents say) past performance is no guarantee of future performance. The key word is guarantee. Any "vision" statement is necessarily an extrapolation of the current state, not an interpolation, and the two have wildly different error-bars associated with their predictions...
As for the rise of the machines (which seems to be the postulate), there is a theory that intelligence is a sort of "heat" effect - a result of interconnectivity rather than a creator of it.First, however, you need state at every node, control transmissions between nodes, and *meaning* to be understood by the nodes. The first tentative step towards this could be the semantic web that people have been trying to get work for years now - without significant success...
Suns slogan may be "the network is the computer", but that doesn't mean every network is a computer! It doesn't "process" emails, it's a transport for them. It doesn't "process" web-searches, again it's a transport. The computation is done at the nodes, not within the network.
I suppose you could make the argument that these are micro-ops compared to the macro-results, if you consider the internet a computer, but I still don't think it stands up. In fact, I think (apart from the history lesson) the whole piece is just page-filler.
It says that in businesses with >250 employees, 17% of the employees used macs. So if the business did have 250 employees, 42 of them would be using macs (17% of 250). Likewise for the 21% figure.
It doesn't say that 17% of all the companies who were polled exclusively use macs, at least that's not how I read it...
... so who "sponsored" (either with advertising, money, partner-deals, whatever) each of the reports.
If the one that says Google is increasing is sponsored by Google in any way, shape, or form, it has zero useful information content. Similarly, if the other is sponsored by any of Google's competitors, it has zero useful information content. At least, IMHO.
The point of the water is that you'll die of thirst a long time before you die of hunger. Someone would have pulled me up on it.
I thought of fire, but your average human will get a fire going eventually just by rubbing sticks into kindling. Hell, if 6-year old boyscouts can do it...
As for walking away, well, you're just avoiding the question:-) I'm not going to come up with a bulletproof scenario that forces a decision in 5 minutes... you're supposed to work with what you get...
Hmm. Possibly I worded that badly. When I said 'basic behaviour', I meant behaviour of the body itself, not any choice you make with your brain. You can *choose* to do anything you like (as can any creature, though most tend to go with their instincts [grin]), but that doesn't alter the fact that you're an omnivore, it just means you're restricting yourself to a subset of the foods that your body can digest. That's a personal choice, not an evolved difference.
The lamb argument is designed to point out the very issue you mention. You have to place a value on the lamb's life - is it as worthy of living as yourself, or not ? If it is, (and assuming you're occupying the moral high ground here) you won't kill it, and will die instead. I think that would be foolish. Dedicated, but foolish.
If, on the other hand, you decide to kill it because you want to eat it, you have just valued it as less important than yourself. I was pointing out that once *that* decision has been made you have placed an arbitrary marker on some scale - you have said "given this scenario, I will kill the lamb". Anyone who eats meat (and I know some people who are virtual carnivores!) is just moving your 'scenario' marker down the scale to something like 'if the sun rises today'... ie: always.
My point was that since that decision is based on personal prejudice (ranging from "all life is sacrosanct" down to "it's my goddam right to eat what I like"), all the various positions on this imaginary scale are equally valid. Personal prejudice is no way to make a ruling.
If you stuck to your principles and died rather than eat the lamb, I would say you had a case for a moral argument. Unfortunately, you're dead at this point [grin] (or, perhaps [phew], given my prediliction for bacon sandwiches:-)
"Charlie" (A mongrel border-collie about 1.5x normal size) used to regularly beat the crap out of a couple of bull-mastiffs living a few doors down. Give the mastiffs credit, they kept on coming back, but never once did I see them win.
This dog knew no fear - he went for a bull once because it came too close. If you've ever seen David & Goliath.... He came off somewhat second-best, but it didn't daunt him next time, he stalked past, growling for all he was worth and straining at the leash for another go...
And no, "Blackie" died a natural death of old age and too many carrots. Devastated me at the time, though:-)
Assuming you're not willing to die for your non-meat-eating convictions, it's a personal choice whether to eat it or not, and no choice is more valid than any other, because of the first point!
I don't think I mentioned killing for amusement... The point was about meat-eaters vs vegetarians. There's a built-in assumption that the animal is being killed to be eaten in everything I've said.
You may not be saying that non-vegetarians are monsters, but it's a pretty common meme. "Don't hurt the cute fluffy animals", mainly espoused by city-dwellers who wouldn't recognise an ocelot from a tabby-cat. Not that I'm suggesting we all start eating house-cats...
Of course I mind if you kill and eat a pet of mine - I have an emotional attachment to the animal - it's a PET!
Do I mind if you kill and eat a scorpion in the desert ? No. Knock yourself out.
It's the emotional attachment that's important - not the animal. As a child, I had a pet rabbit. If you'd tried to kill and eat it, I'd set the dog on you! I couldn't care less if you go out into the foothills and kill and eat a rabbit. I dare say there are (vegetable) farmers who would actively encourage you...
... to think that you are so advanced you can change your basic behaviour and instincts.
Face it, you're an omnivore, like it or not. Whether you choose to eat meat or not is irrelevant - you have evolved to eat a variety of foods, including meat. Humankind is the most general of species on this planet - we survive in extreme heat, extreme cold, and everywhere in-between precisely because we can adapt to changing circumstance. Eating meat is a part of this general behaviour. I see no reason to be ashamed of what we do when it's in our nature to do it.
It may even be (given that it's generally the meat-eaters predatorial requirements for advanced tactics that drive this) that you *had* to eat meat for thousands of years before you'd evolve to the state where it was optional...
Frankly, those who espouse that we shouldn't eat other animals are mainly hypocrites. Humourous note: while checking the spelling of that, I typed "hypocr" into OSX's dashboard dictionary and it guessed at 'hypocretin'. Although it's not applicable (it's a hormone!), I'd love to adopt it instead of hypocrite. It just fits so well:-)
Put a tethered lamb in front of a cave with fresh running water and see if the human would rather die than kill and eat the lamb. If you kill the lamb, if you'd rather die, then well and good - I respect your principles whilst simultaneously denouncing you as a fool. If you kill and eat the lamb, everything comes down to a matter of degree - when is it acceptable to eat meat and when is it not? That's an arbitrary decision made by an individual based on his/her preconceptions. No one decision is any more "right" than any other since the decision is a personal one. So stop telling me I can't have a bacon sandwich at the weekend!
Given that the "console" that MS was showing was in fact a plastic box with no power, and that everything you saw at E3 was running on a few Apple G5's, whereas Sony showed demos running on real hardware, I think you are mistaken!
Well, the connections are actually ion channels within glial cells, via a synapse from the neuron. The strength of the firing is quite variable, even when you'd expect it to be constant - it's not a 1|0 output, it's inherently analogue.
A full-on signal may be X number of chemical messengers across the synaptic gap at one time, and Y at another, with the difference between X and Y being much wider than a standard deviation. What I'm trying to say is that it appears to be a far more analogue system than a digital one.
The idea is the same, and we've used it ourselves - original computer memory used pulses travelling around a waveguide as a storage mechanism. It's all very easy when there's a synchronisation you can use to read back the signal, but the brain seems to be able to pick out the patterns without the synch.
Consider that with all our signal processing techniques, a computer can't easily (despite what "CSI" says:-) pick out what one person is saying in a recorded group conversation. Humans do it as naturally as breathing.
Some people look on the destructive power of the elements or the vastness of space as humbling, but the intricate complexity of the brain is just as impressive, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
For some reason, it *really* annoys me when people link to their own blog instead of the link to the story. At the very least it ought to be obvious that it's a personal link rather than doing it on the sly.
Simon
Indeed, it looks very nice (different, but nice) next to my G5. It's a lot louder though :-(
Simon
Dear God, I hope you really are 'onlyjoking'...
There is this concept called the 'key-repeat time'. Go to the control panel, click on 'Keyboard and Mouse', and alter to suit.
If, for some reason, you want a faster repeat-time than the dialogue provides, you'll have to get someone with more insider-knowledge than I to tell you how to do it, but the speed of response to key presses is nowhere near an adequate benchmark for CPU comparison.
A dual 2-GHz G5 could process tens of thousands of keys being pressed every second without breaking sweat. As could a 2.2GHz AMD (or Intel) box.
The nonesense(sic) of the HFS+ permissions isn't clear to me. It seems to use unix-style permissions with ACL's, that seem perfectly adequate for every other unix box. I'm not sure what the problem is...
Simon
Well, that's ok :-) It'd be a boring world if we *always* agreed.
I think the policy of shooting suspected suicide bombers was imported from somewhere - I remember reading that the chief constable said "we've been advised this is the best way, blah, blah, blah". I think it was somewhere in the middle-east (where it's a far more common occurrence, granted, but that does give them more experience too).
As for the 'chicken-switch'. I doubt many suicide bombers would use them - if you stumbled and fell, your hands go out to stop your fall, and *boom*. You're dead in a park with no-one around. I could see them using one when they were in-place, centre of attention, and giving a speech or in the last few minutes, but not when being pursued.
I'm *not* actually happy that a man is dead instead of (as someone else pointed out) being charged, (and in this case presumably released/deported). I'm not defending that. I don't think it was xenophobic though, or murder for that matter. I'm sure a native would have suffered the same fate (especially since all our bombers were home-grown) as a foreigner under the same circumstances, and I'm not sure it *can* be murder when it's a sanctioned policy...
Simon
Well, as opposed (to pluck an example out of the air) to fabricating evidence and using it to start a war to strengthen the grip on strategic oil reserves, resulting in the death of tens of thousands, I think the brits were reasonably restrained ...
A bloke who runs away from armed police, wearing odd-for-the-weather clothing with wires hanging out is fair game, IMHO. If they'd been right, and he'd been a terrorist, everyone would have been praising their actions. Unfortunately the officers don't get the benefits of eagle-eye hindsight until afterwards, when the more-despicable of those they were trying to protect turn and savage their actions...
Personally I don't like the fact that a man died needlessly, but given the above circumstances, and the fact that there *is* a well-known official shoot-to-kill policy for suspected terrorists escaping, he shouldn't have run. Not that that's justification, but it was foolish.
Simon.
The point is that if your problem doesn't have the headroom to make a good programmer shine, then you don't need a good programmer. Any old joe will do. If, however, your problem is somehow "hard", then having the best pays off.
His point, I think, is that a lot of the good software out there *does* have the headroom to make a good programmer shine, but in fact it's still "joe's" who are being hired (see the AOL argument).
Personally I think it's because programming is a junction point between art and science - there's a lot of science and rigour in programming, but there's also elegance (in the mathematical sense) in most good solutions. Appreciation and production of elegance is a good definition of art.
Simon
I don't disagree with anything above, but I think that when you have scaled out, and built your larger cluster, you want some software that can take maximum advantage of the parallelism you now have.
All I was saying is that with some of the enterprise software available, you *can* do things that you can't with PHP - restart a transaction (transaction as in user-experience loading a page, not just SQL) transparently to the user, which you struggle to do just in PHP.
The original article was about the advantages/disadvantages of different languages. I think PHP is excellent - I've long been an advocate, but it does have some limitations (which may not be relevant to most people) that make it fall short of other environments. On the other hand, due to the lack of these things, it's simple to learn and efficient at what it does. Roundabouts and swings...
Simon
It's probably worth pointing out that I already use the database to store sessions. All that is passed between server and client is a cookie/URL variable indicating the current session id. I've been using databases with PHP on commercial websites for a long time now (I wrote the PHP Illustra module, back in '97).
My point-of-failure argument was in fact the out-of-resource or memory-failure event when halfway through processing a page's script - I've made the same point above, so I won't repeat it.
Simon.
I sort of resent being labelled a hobbyist... I wrote the first Illustra database module for PHP back in 1997. I'd been coding PHP professionally for a while then, and ever since...
Perhaps the sites you mention don't care about the sort of scalability that I'm talking about - it tends to be an issue for financial people, not for websites. If a transaction (read: complex script with multiple DB accesses or other interactions, NOT just a SQL transaction) is underway, and the HTTP process crashes, the user's browser will reflect that. I don't think there's much the developer can do to prevent that. You may be able to write an Apache module that wraps PHP as a submodule or something... In any event, it's outside the language. As far as I know, even the Exception class requires a valid interpreter...
Using WebObjects or (insert random enterprise system), the currently failing process will be adopted by another server and processed to completion. That was the sort of scalability I was saying was missing - not the ability to throw servers into a pool and cope if a machine dies - if you read my post, I'm already planning on doing that!
Simon
Ok, so you're halfway through a PHP script, and you get a memory fault, or you run out of a resource (sockets, memory limit, processes, any hard limit) - what do you do when the http process crashes ? How do you recover *that transaction* without loss ?
This isn't a jibe - if there are ways to get PHP to do it I'd like to know - I'm always open to things I've missed.
Simon
It's not my company, I'm just the webservice provider. It's a large(ish) publishing house in the financial sector, and until they tell me they're happy for me to advertise that I do all their work, I'm going to let it lie.
/. :-) If you doubt me, take a look at my posting history and see if you think I lie on this site - I assure you I do not.
No offence meant, but a regular income is worth more than proving my statement on
Simon.
What people mean by 'it doesn't scale' is that it doesn't scale. Not that it doesn't run fast enough or have enough functionality for pretty much anything at the small-to-medium sized website...
I have a set of 200 or so websites all running though a self-built PHP template-based content-management system (hey, this was 8 years ago, they were rare then!
And will all those features it's still not scaleable. I can't split the system over multiple webservers and begin a transaction on one webserver, have a hardware failure, and have it complete on a different webserver.
I server about a million page-impressions a day (less at weekends) so I'm hardly "big iron", but at the moment it's all serving from a single machine(*) with a manual backup ready-to-go. We're (probably) about to triple our daily throughput (time to splash some cash
I can't have the above level of scalability but I can divide up the work over (say) 4 cloned webservers, and use round-robin DNS (low TTL) or transparent-proxy load-balancing to share the load. Then at least if one of the machines goes down (not the proxy
We're probably going to have 2 database servers as well - one in slave mode, one in master mode (all writes to the master, because we use MySQL). The single point of failure then becomes the proxy gateway (because RR DNS is a bit of a pain), so we can have a spare standing by - the configuration of a load-balancing proxy is pretty trivial, and doesn't depend on anything else, so it can be sitting ready to run and swapping ethernet patch cables ought to be all that is necessary.
And that's about as "scalable" as I can make it - not very. All I'm doing is duplicating hardware for speed and reliability. I can have robustness against a machine dying, but that's about as far as I can go. True scalability allows the operation the machine was doing when it died to complete successfully, and PHP ain't there (yet). I guess you could implement it in s/w using lots of state tables, and perhaps get 80% of the way there, but it's an add-on not a built-in, and not a complete solution. Better to go with something that works if you need it...
Just MHO.
Simon
(*) It is a bit of a beast of a machine though
Unjustified rhetoric will only take you so far: "the plausibility of the impossible", "This view is spookily godlike" etc. etc. Yes, the net has now got some useful services and some cool ideas have become almost mundane - searching for papers used to be a day-long job at the university library, now it's a google away...
The problem with saying, we've come this far this fast is that (as insurance agents say) past performance is no guarantee of future performance. The key word is guarantee. Any "vision" statement is necessarily an extrapolation of the current state, not an interpolation, and the two have wildly different error-bars associated with their predictions...
As for the rise of the machines (which seems to be the postulate), there is a theory that intelligence is a sort of "heat" effect - a result of interconnectivity rather than a creator of it.First, however, you need state at every node, control transmissions between nodes, and *meaning* to be understood by the nodes. The first tentative step towards this could be the semantic web that people have been trying to get work for years now - without significant success...
Suns slogan may be "the network is the computer", but that doesn't mean every network is a computer! It doesn't "process" emails, it's a transport for them. It doesn't "process" web-searches, again it's a transport. The computation is done at the nodes, not within the network.
I suppose you could make the argument that these are micro-ops compared to the macro-results, if you consider the internet a computer, but I still don't think it stands up. In fact, I think (apart from the history lesson) the whole piece is just page-filler.
Simon
It says that in businesses with >250 employees, 17% of the employees used macs. So if the business did have 250 employees, 42 of them would be using macs (17% of 250). Likewise for the 21% figure.
It doesn't say that 17% of all the companies who were polled exclusively use macs, at least that's not how I read it...
Simon
... so who "sponsored" (either with advertising, money, partner-deals, whatever) each of the reports.
If the one that says Google is increasing is sponsored by Google in any way, shape, or form, it has zero useful information content. Similarly, if the other is sponsored by any of Google's competitors, it has zero useful information content. At least, IMHO.
Simon
The point of the water is that you'll die of thirst a long time before you die of hunger. Someone would have pulled me up on it.
:-) I'm not going to come up with a bulletproof scenario that forces a decision in 5 minutes ... you're supposed to work with what you get...
I thought of fire, but your average human will get a fire going eventually just by rubbing sticks into kindling. Hell, if 6-year old boyscouts can do it...
As for walking away, well, you're just avoiding the question
Simon.
Hmm. Possibly I worded that badly. When I said 'basic behaviour', I meant behaviour of the body itself, not any choice you make with your brain. You can *choose* to do anything you like (as can any creature, though most tend to go with their instincts [grin]), but that doesn't alter the fact that you're an omnivore, it just means you're restricting yourself to a subset of the foods that your body can digest. That's a personal choice, not an evolved difference.
:-)
The lamb argument is designed to point out the very issue you mention. You have to place a value on the lamb's life - is it as worthy of living as yourself, or not ? If it is, (and assuming you're occupying the moral high ground here) you won't kill it, and will die instead. I think that would be foolish. Dedicated, but foolish.
If, on the other hand, you decide to kill it because you want to eat it, you have just valued it as less important than yourself. I was pointing out that once *that* decision has been made you have placed an arbitrary marker on some scale - you have said "given this scenario, I will kill the lamb". Anyone who eats meat (and I know some people who are virtual carnivores!) is just moving your 'scenario' marker down the scale to something like 'if the sun rises today'... ie: always.
My point was that since that decision is based on personal prejudice (ranging from "all life is sacrosanct" down to "it's my goddam right to eat what I like"), all the various positions on this imaginary scale are equally valid. Personal prejudice is no way to make a ruling.
If you stuck to your principles and died rather than eat the lamb, I would say you had a case for a moral argument. Unfortunately, you're dead at this point [grin] (or, perhaps [phew], given my prediliction for bacon sandwiches
Simon
[grin] I'd like to see you try :-)
:-)
"Charlie" (A mongrel border-collie about 1.5x normal size) used to regularly beat the crap out of a couple of bull-mastiffs living a few doors down. Give the mastiffs credit, they kept on coming back, but never once did I see them win.
This dog knew no fear - he went for a bull once because it came too close. If you've ever seen David & Goliath.... He came off somewhat second-best, but it didn't daunt him next time, he stalked past, growling for all he was worth and straining at the leash for another go...
And no, "Blackie" died a natural death of old age and too many carrots. Devastated me at the time, though
Simon
If you read the post, the points are:
I don't think I mentioned killing for amusement... The point was about meat-eaters vs vegetarians. There's a built-in assumption that the animal is being killed to be eaten in everything I've said.
You may not be saying that non-vegetarians are monsters, but it's a pretty common meme. "Don't hurt the cute fluffy animals", mainly espoused by city-dwellers who wouldn't recognise an ocelot from a tabby-cat. Not that I'm suggesting we all start eating house-cats...
Simon
Of course I mind if you kill and eat a pet of mine - I have an emotional attachment to the animal - it's a PET!
Do I mind if you kill and eat a scorpion in the desert ? No. Knock yourself out.
It's the emotional attachment that's important - not the animal. As a child, I had a pet rabbit. If you'd tried to kill and eat it, I'd set the dog on you! I couldn't care less if you go out into the foothills and kill and eat a rabbit. I dare say there are (vegetable) farmers who would actively encourage you...
Simon
... to think that you are so advanced you can change your basic behaviour and instincts.
:-)
Face it, you're an omnivore, like it or not. Whether you choose to eat meat or not is irrelevant - you have evolved to eat a variety of foods, including meat. Humankind is the most general of species on this planet - we survive in extreme heat, extreme cold, and everywhere in-between precisely because we can adapt to changing circumstance. Eating meat is a part of this general behaviour. I see no reason to be ashamed of what we do when it's in our nature to do it.
It may even be (given that it's generally the meat-eaters predatorial requirements for advanced tactics that drive this) that you *had* to eat meat for thousands of years before you'd evolve to the state where it was optional...
Frankly, those who espouse that we shouldn't eat other animals are mainly hypocrites. Humourous note: while checking the spelling of that, I typed "hypocr" into OSX's dashboard dictionary and it guessed at 'hypocretin'. Although it's not applicable (it's a hormone!), I'd love to adopt it instead of hypocrite. It just fits so well
Put a tethered lamb in front of a cave with fresh running water and see if the human would rather die than kill and eat the lamb. If you kill the lamb, if you'd rather die, then well and good - I respect your principles whilst simultaneously denouncing you as a fool. If you kill and eat the lamb, everything comes down to a matter of degree - when is it acceptable to eat meat and when is it not? That's an arbitrary decision made by an individual based on his/her preconceptions. No one decision is any more "right" than any other since the decision is a personal one. So stop telling me I can't have a bacon sandwich at the weekend!
Simon.
Yes, for them, it is. Let's make it not so.
It's about time that companies were brought to book for being criminally stupid (not used in the legal sense, although I'd guess it's a grey area...)
Simon.
Given that the "console" that MS was showing was in fact a plastic box with no power, and that everything you saw at E3 was running on a few Apple G5's, whereas Sony showed demos running on real hardware, I think you are mistaken!
Simon
Well, the connections are actually ion channels within glial cells, via a synapse from the neuron. The strength of the firing is quite variable, even when you'd expect it to be constant - it's not a 1|0 output, it's inherently analogue.
A full-on signal may be X number of chemical messengers across the synaptic gap at one time, and Y at another, with the difference between X and Y being much wider than a standard deviation. What I'm trying to say is that it appears to be a far more analogue system than a digital one.
Simon.
The idea is the same, and we've used it ourselves - original computer memory used pulses travelling around a waveguide as a storage mechanism. It's all very easy when there's a synchronisation you can use to read back the signal, but the brain seems to be able to pick out the patterns without the synch.
:-) pick out what one person is saying in a recorded group conversation. Humans do it as naturally as breathing.
Consider that with all our signal processing techniques, a computer can't easily (despite what "CSI" says
Some people look on the destructive power of the elements or the vastness of space as humbling, but the intricate complexity of the brain is just as impressive, IMHO.
Simon.